The rituals of a century of Ivy League life were very much part of the Wellesley experience: train rides to New Haven and Manhattan; football on weekends; concerts and museum exhibitions, and walks on the Common in Boston. Hillary and her classmates relied largely on being formally introduced to undergraduate men, usually from the New England Ivy schools, during weekend mixers that might lead to more serious dating. On Friday and Saturday nights, Route 9 out of Boston was jammed with traffic to Wellesley, Smith, and Mount Holyoke as young women hurried back to their dorms to beat 1 A.M. curfews. Men were allowed in the women’s dorm rooms only on Sundays at Wellesley, from 2 to 5:30 P.M., with the door open. The “two feet rule” was in effect, or so legend had it: two feet out of four had to be on the floor throughout visits from men. Guests had to check in at the reception desk in the lobby of the women’s dorm and were identified by bells and announcements. Women were “visitors.” Men were “callers.”
In her freshman year, Hillary met Shields on a double date at a Harvard party. Many years later he said he thought “she was attractive, interesting to talk to, and she was a good dancer.” Shields, who was planning on becoming a lawyer (and did), was good-looking, interesting, politically aware, a jock—he had been an all-state football star—and more worldly than she. Her letters to him at Harvard reveal her to be soft, thoughtful, alive with the possibilities of youth, dreamy, romantic, passionate.
“The best place to start any adventure is in a daffodil field when the sun has come up. Did you ever see the field—the one behind the formal gardens? We were going to visit after canoeing but we never got there….” She had gone back Sunday, “to sit in a congregation of yellow and white,” and found herself mesmerized by the “attentive” flowers, their petals drawn to the sun and swaying in unison “to the preaching of the wind.” She imagined the daffodil field to be a cathedral, its altar delineated by a roadway where a “choir” of flowers sang amen. “After the service, I walked out through the daffodil field” to the lake, just to watch, though lakes—essentially motionless—ordinarily did not interest her “as does the ocean or a fire…. A fire is always changing and the ocean—I will not even attempt to articulate how I feel about it.”
Throughout her years as a public person there has been sexual innuendo about Hillary, implying that somewhere along her way—in the rumor it is usually at Wellesley—she experimented with lesbianism. (One wonders if a malleable male politician, say Bill Clinton, a former overweight band boy, would be accused of having “experimented” with being gay at Georgetown University, in the same manner as “tough, inflexible” Hillary at Wellesley.) When not whispered sotto voce, such innuendo about her reached its most incendiary and unsupportable in 2005 with Edward Klein’s supposed biography, The Truth About Hillary, an ideological screed, which contains barely smidgens—and no context—about what its title promises. Little could be more contradictory to what is known about Hillary’s actual character and history—and her manner, with, respectively, men and women who are her friends—than the notion of her as a lesbian. Her most deeply held personal values are conservative, and no letters to a woman such as she wrote to Geoff Shields have come to light. No woman has come forward to claim a sexual relationship with Hillary. Her (and her husband’s, for that matter) belief in, and commitment to, gay rights, and approval of gay lifestyles as a matter of individual choice, are hardly an indication of sexual preference. At Wellesley, her experimentation is known to have been with men. And to this day, she is playful, even flirtatious in an innocent manner with men she likes, and less likely to physically embrace female friends or be “touchy” with them or look deeply into their eyes in conversation, as she does with men.
Until she arrived on the Wellesley campus, men her age hadn’t appeared all that important to her, unless it was in some unstated, unrequited longing, which Betsy Ebeling indicates was a part of Hillary’s situation—rather typical for a suburban teenage girl of the period who was hardly regarded as among the prettiest or most popular in high school, not to mention one with a fearsome father.
Hillary and Shields dated for almost three years and remained friends afterward. Theirs was a full relationship—intellectual, social, sexual. They spent time together with each other’s families during summers. It seems apparent from her correspondence with Shields that for a part of their time together Hillary thought herself in love. As with the other men she is known to have been romantically or sexually involved with before Bill Clinton, Hillary has never discussed publicly or written about her relationship with Shields, which, according to him, “was healthy,” and “normal in every respect.”
They saw each other almost every weekend of Hillary’s freshman and sophomore years and into her junior year. Their relationship seemed to be moving toward a platonic friendship in the summer of 1968 when she met a dashing Georgetown University undergraduate, David Rupert, in Washington, D.C., whom she dated for the next three years—including a brief period during which she was also seeing Bill Clinton at Yale Law School. Rupert, who had attended a liberal Catholic prep school, the Christian Brothers Academy in Syracuse, became a conscientious objector after his graduation from Georgetown and performed his alternative government service in Vermont, where Hillary often visited him on weekends. Following a friend’s wedding in the Midwest, she introduced Rupert—as she had Shields—to her parents as “my boyfriend” during a detour to Park Ridge on the way back to Wellesley.
Hillary and Rupert had “an intense love affair,” according to Nancy “Peach” Pietrafesa, who shared a weekend house with them. “Hillary was always attracted to arrogant, sneering, hard-to-please men, like her father,” she believed, and judged Rupert an example. Pietrafesa described Hillary during the Wellesley years as “a kick: fun-loving, full of mischief, spunky, good-natured…a wonderfully warm and thoughtful friend,” even though the two women later had a falling-out. (Her husband was fired from Bill Clinton’s gubernatorial staff.)
Both Rupert and Shields indicated that Hillary had a physically passionate side, and Rupert later volunteered that “we always used birth control.” Hillary came of age at a time in America when the sexuality of women, especially young women, was undergoing a profound change, in large measure because of the easy availability of “the Pill.”
Geoff Shields, from the beginning of his romance with Hillary, was aware both of Hillary’s desire for “responsible” sexual exploration and her extraordinary seriousness of purpose, discipline, and focus. That she was “personally very conservative” was obvious from the beginning of their relationship, which flowered through the height of late 1960s abandonment. (The Sgt. Pepper album, the Beatles’ ode to psychedelic ecstasy, was released in the spring of 1967; the ensuing summer became known in the counterculture as the Summer of Love.) Shields never knew her to smoke marijuana (though the smell of pot wafted through the Stone-Davis hallways), never saw her drink to excess, and she was hardly promiscuous. Yet she was definitely not one of those Wellesley women who were considered “grinds.” She enjoyed parties; dancing to Elvis, the Beatles, and the Supremes; cheering for the Harvard football squad; playing catch with a Frisbee or football; being on the water in a boat or a canoe and diving over the edge to swim. Hillary and Shields took frequent hiking trips to Cape Cod and Vermont. They and their friends engaged in long hours of political discussion. One of Geoff’s roommates was black and active in civil rights campaigns; Hillary’s solidarity was evident and enthusiastic, even excessively expressed. Being able to discuss intimately with a black friend the realities of black life and struggle in America represented “for both Hillary and I…a time of awakening,” said Shields. When she expressed her views—and they tended to be firmly held—they were well argued and informed, whatever the issue: dorm rules, the feminist revolution, campus dress codes, the war in Vietnam, student power, racism. The time she seemed to light up the most was when there was a sharp, heated debate about the issues. She showed little interest in more abstract or philosophic concerns or e
ven literature. One exception made an impression on Shields: a discussion about whether there was an absolute or only a relative morality. “She was very much into debating the basis of moral decisions,” and more than a few Wellesley women and Ivy League men believed she had a self-righteous streak, though it was hardly the overwhelming aspect of her character.
Her correspondence with Shields, particularly, is full of desire for exploration—cultural, personal, professional, political, social. With Reverend Jones, it was more philosophical and reportorial.
When she sometimes found herself “adopting a kind of party mode,” as she called it in a letter to Jones, she claimed herself capable of getting “outrageous…as outrageous as a moral Methodist can get.” She defined herself at the time as “a progressive, an ethical Christian and a political activist.”
One of Jones’s letters to Hillary at Wellesley alluded to Edmund Burke’s emphasis on personal responsibility and raised the question of “whether someone can be a Burkean realist about history and human nature and at the same time have liberal sentiments and visions.” In her response, Hillary mused, “It is an interesting question you posed—can one be a mind conservative and a heart liberal?”
NO DESCRIPTION of the adult Hillary Clinton—a mind conservative and a heart liberal—has so succinctly defined her as this premonitory observation at age eighteen. She believed it was possible, though difficult, to be both. The question Jones asked was in the context of the civil rights movement, which Jones had first introduced her to. The travail and experience of black people in America touched something fundamental in Hillary Rodham, before she knew Bill Clinton. “Some people think you can’t be critical of the black power movement and still be for civil rights,” she wrote Jones. She supported Martin Luther King’s nonviolent philosophy, but she was dubious about the increasing radicalism of Stokely Carmichael’s SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was moving away from nonviolence in its embrace of Black Power. Her disinclination to go along with every aspect of movement dogma did not mean that she was in any way hostile to the movement itself.
“She was more interested in the process of achieving victory than in taking a philosophical position that could not lead anywhere,” Shields said. “If challenged philosophically, she proclaimed, ‘You can’t accomplish anything in government unless you win!’” He described her as “very interested in exploring the process as opposed to the ideology of politics.” When he met her, he judged her mind a clean slate ideologically, and compared her political transformation during the Wellesley years to his own, as she moved from rote membership in the Young Republicans to pronouncing New York a “saved city” with the election of liberal Republican John Lindsay as mayor (“See how liberal I’m becoming,” she wrote to another friend), to supporting Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar campaign for the presidency in 1968.
Even as early as eighteen or twenty, Hillary got tremendous gratification “from ideas and campaigns in the sense of getting something done in a way that was unusual with most women,” Shields said. He described a “social intensity” that was weighted toward talking about ideas, going to serious movies, and serious conversation about issues. “Even then she had a real driving desire.” Her method was to set goals for herself, whether personal or to advance a cause.
Recognition was important to her, and the most obvious outlet for her ambition at Wellesley was student government. All her myriad and frenetic campus activities seemed part of her preparation for becoming president of the student body, the ultimate sign of recognition. As a sophomore, she was a class representative to the student senate. The next year, she was not only selected a “Vil Junior,” a particularly prestigious honor—Vil Juniors were chosen for their maturity and dependability and served as counselors to freshmen—but the campus chairman of all Vil Juniors.
By then, her extraordinary ability to speak in full sentences and paragraphs moving toward well-reasoned conclusions was already evident, and contributed to her aura as a leader with attributes rarely seen in an undergraduate. Part of her skill was finding a careful middle ground that brought progress without engendering unnecessary enmity. The minutes of college government meetings in which she presided demonstrate her method: November 1968—“Miss Rodham questions if it would be politic to approach individual faculty members and discuss the matter of student participation with them.”
When she was elected by her fellows to be their president in February 1968, she did not disguise either her surprise or her exhilaration. Later, reporters would write about her husband’s endless campaign for the presidency, even after he had been elected. The phrase aptly fit Hillary’s activities at Wellesley. The formal campaign for student body president lasted three weeks, during which she made door-to-door appeals for votes in every dorm. But in the end, she won because of her tireless campaigning both before and during the allotted election period. On election day at Wellesley, she told a professor, “I can’t believe what just happened! I was just elected president of the government. Can you believe it? Can you believe that happened?”
Notably, an hour-long debate with her two opponents was not definitive. The Wellesley News wrote of the three candidates, “They each expressed a desire for greater student jurisdiction in social matters and a more responsible role in academic decision-making, but all three were equally vague as to exactly how they would implement that change in power structure to achieve the second objective.” It was the same kind of vagueness that would work to her advantage as a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
THE EVENTS OF 1968, of course, changed America and the world on a seismic scale. The very plates that had seemed to secure postwar Western democracy and American idealism appeared to shift with cataclysmic effect. Hillary Rodham, Bill Clinton, and Wellesley—like most American institutions of higher education and their students at the time—were shaken by the force of the concussion. The antiwar movement in the United States had, by 1968, become pervasive and angry, moving far beyond its student and leftist origins to become a mainstream cause that united millions of anguished working-class parents of draftees, students, intellectuals, and people of vastly differing political orientations. On March 31, Lyndon Johnson, already facing an unprecedented electoral challenge from within his own party to an incumbent president, announced he would not seek reelection. On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated by a bigot’s bullet in Memphis. For days wide swaths of Washington and other cities burned with fire and rage. In May, European cities were overwhelmed by student radicals who battled police and took to the streets demanding not only an end to America’s war in Vietnam, but insisting on unprecedented recognition of student power. American campuses were convulsed, many of them literally taken over by students who barricaded themselves in buildings in April and May in response to King’s assassination, the wave of anarchy in the streets of Europe, fury at the war and the draft, and disgust with a prevalent system of education that had placed authority in tenured professors and slothful administrators with little regard to the changing will of the young people they were charged with educating. Antiwar demonstrations became increasingly violent, especially in Washington, New York, the Bay Area, and on university campuses. Many colleges and universities suspended classes by mid-semester and canceled formal graduation exercises. Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy had entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, mobilizing antiwar and student sentiment and a sense of political power outside the traditional party structure; Hubert Humphrey, meanwhile, campaigned as Johnson’s loyal vice president, further inflaming the divisions in the party over the war. Then, on June 5, seemingly within reach of winning the nomination, Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
Even Wellesley, splendidly isolated by tradition and class from much of the radical student movement of 1968, did not escape being rocked by these events. The response of the women on campus to the explosions and turmoil outside was largely determined by the leadership of Hillary working with the c
ollege administration and her fellow students. While tens of thousands of young men and women within a hundred miles of Wellesley were yelling, “Fuck the pigs,” Hillary’s chosen means of protest and resistance were in the nonviolent, disciplined tradition of Dr. King, and reflected John Wesley’s insistence on obeying the law. An expanding “Christian left,” led by priests and ministers, was becoming an increasingly important element of the antiwar movement, helping to move organized opposition more and more into the mainstream of American politics and culture even as other elements became increasingly violent and radicalized. Hillary’s evolving political sensibility drew from the tenets of Reinhold Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Paul Tillich, all of whom regarded Christian values and ethics as essential elements in the exercise of political power; from this heritage, and her continuing tutelage under the Reverend Jones, Hillary had no doubt that those values demanded spiritually based intervention in the political system.
The single event that seemed to galvanize Hillary’s more militant instincts was the assassination of Dr. King. Hearing the news, she stormed into a dorm room, shaking and shouting. She threw her book bag against the wall. One witness said she screamed, “I can’t stand it anymore! I can’t take it!” King had been the embodiment of black America’s hope, and white America’s as well in many respects. King was perhaps the man she admired most in the country, if not the world. She had met him in 1962, shaken his hand, sat spellbound as he preached, twice; she had witnessed, on television, the hope and solidarity of the March on Washington in 1963, her sophomore year in high school. But since then she had watched that hope devolve into the fractious, violent confrontations of 1968, the failure of King’s Poor People’s Campaign in Washington the previous year, and his increasing isolation as a national moral leader as he tried, without success, to bring the civil rights and antiwar movements together. Now, it was clear, America would pay for King’s death.