A Woman in Charge (6 page)

“[He] put her on the skateboard, and down she went,” Ebeling said. “And she made it to the bottom of the hill and didn't wipe out. So, she was the date.”

Hillary's next problem was her hair (which she has struggled with ever since). It was as strong-willed as she was. Betsy, who regularly had the difficult task of trying to tame her friend's mane, described it as having a mind of its own. The most famous model of the day, Suzy Parker, fashioned her hair with a curl over her forehead, but Hillary could not achieve that effect no matter how hard she tried. The afternoon of the senior prom proved no exception. Hillary, who almost never paid attention to (or had the money for) brand-name goods, had a favorite mock tortoiseshell Revlon comb. She grabbed it angrily from Ebeling and cracked it. This was as riled as Betsy had ever seen her, and she was near tears. Finally, her mother came into Hillary's room, pulled her daughter's hair back, and put a blue bow in it and the three agreed it looked wonderful.

The prom crisis reflected Hillary's developing perfectionism, which revealed itself in many different ways. If she couldn't get something right, she felt surprisingly exposed and vulnerable. If men were involved, she could be especially sensitive to even implied criticism. Her face would become flushed or she would get angry and turn away. She didn't like to be questioned, leading one of her friends to observe, perhaps too simply, “She didn't like not to have the upper hand with men.” It reminded her of the way her father treated her, said the friend. Gradually, the conflicts over money and boys, and Hillary's chagrin at her father's prevailing demeanor and attitudes, led to an almost complete breakdown of their relationship. The rupture carried over to her college years and to matters far removed from his refusal to buy (or allow her to buy) the clothes she thought she needed. She and her father could hardly agree on the most elemental of questions, not to mention political ones, and his tone with her became increasingly intolerant.

After Hillary's father died in 1993, she wrote that during this period she hardly knew what to say to him, and often argued with him over issues of the day, like feminism, the war in Vietnam, or the counterculture. “I also understood that even when he erupted at me, he admired my independence and accomplishments and loved me with all his heart.”

 

I
N
1961, while Hillary was in tenth grade and the conflict with her father became more tense, there arrived in a red Chevy Impala convertible a dashing, transforming figure who, until she met Bill Clinton, would become the most important teacher in Hillary's life. He was a Methodist youth minister, the Reverend Don Jones, twenty-six, who had completed four years in the Navy and had just graduated from the Drew University seminary in New Jersey. Hillary had never met anyone like him. Jones became something between a father figure, adored brother, and knight-errant. He had an ally in Dorothy Rodham, who regarded him as a kindred sprit.

Lissa Muscatine, Hillary's chief White House speechwriter, who helped her work on
Living History,
once said of Hillary: “She's a prude, she's hokey, she's a fifties person who grew up Methodist in the Chicago suburbs.” It wasn't quite as simple as that.

Hillary had been confirmed at the First United Methodist Church of Park Ridge in the sixth grade. (Hugh Rodham's parents claimed that John Wesley himself had converted members of the Rodham family to Methodism in the coal-mining district near Newcastle in the north of England.) Dorothy taught Sunday school at United Methodist. Hillary attended Bible classes and was a member of the Altar Guild. “[My family] talked with God, walked with God, ate, studied and argued with God,” Hillary said.

But until Jones showed up, Hillary's sense of politics and her sense of religion existed on two different planes. Now they began to meld into one as he promoted what he called the “University of Life” two evenings a week at the church. Jones brought a message of “faith in action,” based on the teachings of Wesley and twentieth-century theologians, including Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who believed that the Christian's role was essentially a moral one: balancing human nature, in all its splendor and baseness, with a passion for justice and social reform. He assigned Hillary and other members of the Methodist Youth Fellowship in Park Ridge readings from T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings; showed them copies of Picasso's paintings, which he sometimes explained in theological and geopolitical terms; discussed the significance of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor in
The Brothers Karamazov;
played “A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall” from Bob Dylan's new LP, and on weekends shepherded the privileged Protestant children of Park Ridge to black and Hispanic churches in Chicago as part of exchanges with their youth groups. On one visit, Jones had brought with them a big reproduction of Picasso's
Guernica,
which he set up in front of the Park Ridge teenagers and members of a Chicago teenage gang. Picasso's masterpiece portrays the horror of the Spanish Civil War in all its agony and misery. According to Jones, the ostensibly less-educated and less-sophisticated children from the city's streets were far more articulate and candid in relating to the work than those from Park Ridge.

His interpretation of the Gospels, inevitably, ran afoul of Hillary's high school history teacher, Paul Carlson (she was his favorite student), who shared Hugh Rodham's unwavering belief in the coming of the Red Menace. In Hillary's class, Carlson played excerpts of Douglas MacArthur's farewell speech to the Congress (“Old soldiers never die…”) and introduced students to refugees from communism who told of the horrors of the Soviet system. Carlson took it upon himself to warn the parishioners of United Methodist that the minds of their children were being poisoned by the new youth minister in the red Chevy convertible.

Jones had taken up his assignment in Park Ridge in 1961, during the summer of the Freedom Rides in Mississippi and elsewhere in the Deep South. That fall, when Martin Luther King Jr. again came to preach in Chicago, Jones took Hillary and other members of his youth group to Orchestra Hall to hear him.

Some parents had refused to let their children go, believing that King was a “rabble-rouser,” a view held by Hugh Rodham. Dorothy had granted Hillary her permission. After the program Jones took his awed students backstage to meet Dr. King. King's sermon, “Sleeping Through the Revolution,” had woven the message of God with the politics of conscience: “Vanity asks the question Is it Popular? Conscience asks the question Is it Right?” He also cited Jesus' parable about the man condemned to hell because he ignored his fellows in need.

Jones became not only the most important teacher in young Hillary's life, but also a counselor over the decades whose ministrations would show her ways to cope with adversity, and to “give service of herself” at the most difficult moments: to “salve [her] troubled soul” through the doing of good works. At almost every juncture of pain or humiliation for the rest of her life, she would return—in her fashion—to this lesson. For more than twenty years she would maintain a fascinating correspondence with Jones in which they discussed the requirements of faith and the vagaries of human nature. During the Clintons' White House years, Jones and his wife were frequent visitors there.

Aside from her family, Hillary's Methodism is perhaps the most important foundation of her character. As one of her aides said during the winter's night of the Lewinsky epoch, “Hillary's faith is
the link….
It explains the missionary zeal with which she attacks her issues and goes after them, and why she's done it for thirty years. And, it also explains the really extraordinary self-discipline and focus and ability to rely on her spirituality to get through all this…. She's a woman of tremendous faith. Again, not advertised. She's not one of those people who's out there doing the holy roller stuff. But that's how she gets through it: some people go to shrinks, she does it by being a Methodist.”

Other members of the White House staff believed she used her religiosity as a cover for her faults. Some saw it as a mask in her relationship with her husband. “She elevates her staying with [Bill] to a moral level of biblical proportion,” said a presidential deputy. “I am stronger than he is. I am better than he is. Therefore, I can stay with him because it's my biblical duty to love the sinner, and to help to try to overcome his defects of character. His sins are of weakness not of malice.”

After two years, Paul Carlson convinced the congregation of United Methodist that Don Jones's teachings were too “freethinking,” and he was forced out. “We were fighting for [Hillary's] soul and her mind,” Jones was to say years later.

Before he left, Jones gave Hillary a copy of J. D. Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye
to read. She did not like it. Holden Caulfield reminded her too much of her brother Hughie. Salinger's coming-of-age novel seemed to stir up all kinds of difficult questions and feelings about family and family traits, including her own tendency toward aloofness and detachment. Over the decades some of Hillary's greatest admirers came to question whether she genuinely liked people, at least in the aggregate, or whether she merely preferred the company of a few and embraced the multitudes as part of her sense of Christian responsibility and political commitment.

Shortly after Jones left Park Ridge, Hillary seemed to raise the question herself, in a letter: “Can you be a misanthrope and still love or enjoy some individuals?” she wondered. She added, “How about a
compassionate
misanthrope?”

B
Y THE TIME
seventeen-year-old Hillary Rodham left Park Ridge, Illinois, for Wellesley College, almost all the essential elements—and contradictions—of her adult character could be glimpsed: the keen intelligence and ability to stretch it, the ambition and anger, the idealism and acceptance of humiliation, the messianism and sense of entitlement, the attraction to charismatic men and indifference to conventional feminine fashion, the seriousness of purpose and quickness to judgment, the puritan sensibility and surprising vulnerability, the chronic impatience and aversion to personal confrontation, the insistence on financial independence and belief in public service, the tenacious attempts at absolute control and, perhaps above all, the balm, beacon, and refuge of religion.

2

A Young Woman on Her Own

Nineteen sixty-eight was a watershed year for the country, and for my own personal and political evolution.

—Living History

H
ILLARY
D
IANE
R
ODHAM
arrived at Wellesley College in the fall of 1965 a Barry Goldwater conservative, her well-worn copy of his famous book
The Conscience of a Conservative
in her suitcase. A relatively sheltered, suburban Midwest teenager, she was suddenly in the company of formidable young women who had gone to private boarding schools, summered in Europe, spoke foreign languages with ease, and possessed sophistication of a sort that had long defined the Wellesley aura. That she had been in the top 5 percent of her class at Maine South meant little. Hillary was no longer considered brighter than most of her classmates. In fact, admission to Wellesley, even more than the other Seven Sisters colleges in the Northeast, was predicated on the assumption that, upon matriculation, you were demonstrably brilliant. Most of her fellow students had been in the top 1 or 2 percent of their high school graduating class. In 1965, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, and the other traditional Ivy League universities were still all-male bastions. Thus Wellesley had its pick of almost any girl in the country who aspired to the best possible education (and could afford it or win a scholarship).

In this rarefied environment, Hillary felt intimidated and lonely at the start, a foreigner in a strange place she had seen only in pictures. Her decision to go east to a women's college had been inspired by a high school teacher who had attended Wellesley; Hillary gave it preference over the other Seven Sisters schools partly on the basis of photographs of the campus: bucolic acres of rolling green, wooded horse trails, and crystal-clear ponds. Pictures of Wellesley's Lake Waban reminded her of Lake Winola, where she had summered in the Poconos. To this postcard scene, Hillary brought her suitcases packed full with Peter Pan blouses, box-pleat skirts, penny loafers, and knee socks. It became obvious soon after her parents had left her on the campus and had headed back home (her mother crying much of the way) that she had won admission to, and chosen to attend, a school in which more glamorous and accomplished young women—debutantes, many of them—were on the fast track. If she were to compete, it would have to be on her own terms. In this, she would be helped immensely by the country's changing mood, culture, politics, and philosophies of gender during her undergraduate years. There would be no need, as it turned out, for the girl with Coke-bottle glasses and complicated political notions to hold to the old model of a Seven Sisters perfectly mannered woman.

Robert Reich, who would become President Bill Clinton's secretary of labor, met Hillary when she was a Wellesley freshman wearing bell-bottoms, board-straight blond hair, and no makeup. “She and I were self-styled student ‘reformers' then,” said Reich, “years before the radicals took over administration buildings and shut down the campuses. We marched for civil rights and demanded the admission of more black students to our schools. Even then we talked of bringing the nation together. We were naive about how much we could accomplish.”

In fact, the last thing on Hillary's mind at Wellesley seemed to be adherence to the old paradigms, either political or gender-based.

Hillary's mother had taught her that, above all else, she could do anything, aspire to anything, that there was no reason for a daughter to aim for less than her brothers. Hillary would later describe herself as a “transitional figure” in regard to the women's movement, caught between two epochs—pre-feminist and post-feminist—and the demands and opportunities of each. However, as one less-conflicted Wellesley graduate observed, Hillary might not have considered or understood another possibility: that “it is
not
hard to have it all; but it's hard to have it both ways.”

Hillary's time at Wellesley was not made easier by whatever tendency toward depression she had either inherited or developed—a tendency that surfaced again in the White House. Periodically at Wellesley she fell into debilitating, self-doubting funks. During the early weeks of her freshman semester, she was so deflated that she called home and confessed failure and an inability to cope. She had never been away from home—even for a weekend—on her own before. She missed the comfortable precincts of Park Ridge, and insisted she was incapable of adjusting to the Wellesley milieu. Whatever her anger at her father, she briefly seemed to miss him. He said she could come back to Illinois, but Dorothy said she didn't want her daughter to be a quitter. Her mother prevailed.

After Hillary decided to stay at Wellesley, she seemed to regain some of her old confidence and began making friends who would figure in the rest of her life. But even as she steadied her footing, there were stumbles and persistent signs of melancholy. In the winter of 1967, her junior year, she again experienced what she described in a letter as her recurring “February depression.” Despite earning As, dating a Harvard man regarded as a good catch, and working off-campus with disadvantaged children (including a seven-year-old Negro girl she tutored and had formed a close bond with), she sometimes overslept, nodded off in her classes, and became concerned that her teachers regarded her as a washout. “Why am I so afraid?” she wrote to her high school friend John Peavoy. “Or why am I not afraid? Am I really not unique after all? Will I have a clichéd life? Is life merely absurd?” (Hillary now sounded like a character in
The Catcher in the Rye.
) She now called herself an “agnostic intellectual liberal” and an “emotional conservative.” During Christmas break that year, she wrote to Peavoy again, expressing how alienated she felt from “the entire unreality of middle-class America,” in which she included her family, who, because of her difficult first semester, had insisted she cancel plans to meet Peavoy in New York City over the Christmas holiday. The following winter break, she told her parents nothing of her holiday plans and headed for Dartmouth College and a round of parties where she stayed overnight after meeting a young man.

The most important man in her life during the Wellesley years, despite the distance between them, was Don Jones. By mail, he became her counselor, correspondent, confessor, partner in Socratic debate, and spiritual adviser. When depression struck, she turned to him, as she would for the next three decades, including the year of her husband's impeachment. He focused her on theologian Paul Tillich's sermon “You Are Accepted,” in which he says that sin and grace coexist. “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness,” said Tillich. “It happens; or it does not happen.” Hillary was convinced there would be grace in her life and meanwhile she would just carry on.

For the rest of her life, spiritual and quasi-spiritual axioms (some imbued with New Age jargon, others profound) would serve as soothing balms in painful times, and provide answers to questions and situations that seemed otherwise confounding. These comforting postulations would also be used by Hillary to justify, often publicly, her or her husband's less palatable actions or aspects of character.

W
HEN
H
ILLARY ENROLLED
at Wellesley, the campus was edging toward great changes, pushed by the women's movement and pulled by the politics of the 1960s. Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique
had been published in 1963. Its thesis, based largely on the experience of Friedan's fellow alumnae from the Smith College class of 1942, held that women were victims of a pervasive system of delusions and false values that urged them to find their fulfillment and identity vicariously, through their husbands and children. More radical feminists preached open hostility toward males. Hillary was in her freshman year when Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), dedicated to achieving equality of opportunity for women.

Until the mid-1960s, a visitor to the Wellesley campus might have concluded that the goal of a Wellesley woman was to find the brightest Harvard or Yale graduate, marry him and hitch her wagon to his politics or stardom, raise bright children, and become the person who could, at dinner parties, jump in to cleverly point out similarities between the opposing positions of guests fighting at the table. (The description is borrowed from an alumna of that period.) The Latin motto of the college was
non Ministrari sed Ministrare,
a New Testament exhortation to minister service, not receive it; invariably, it was interpreted by generations of Wellesley women as “not to be ministers but to be ministers' wives.”

The most important aspect of Wellesley for Hillary and for thousands of others who had gone there before her was that it was an all-women's school. (“You don't have the thing where women don't put their hands up because someone might not take you out because you know the answer and they don't,” noted a fellow graduate.) In
Living History,
Hillary agreed with that assessment and said that “psychic space” was created without men on campus. Throughout her four years there, she lived in Stone-Davis, an imposing mock-gothic pile that served both as a dormitory and a hub of sisterly conversation, activity, and purpose. The nexus of Stone-Davis was its glass-enclosed dining hall, where a community of women convened, socialized, and formed friendships. Risk-taking was easier in an all-female environment.

Though Hillary was the beneficiary of the “women's liberation” movement (as it was then known), she was hardly one of its pioneers or even a firebrand of its second wave. By the time of her graduation, she still reflected the traditions of her upbringing, but also had been hugely influenced by the movement's accomplishments, so visible on the two coasts of America especially. Moreover, what was happening in America in regard to women—literally liberating them in a fundamental sense—was consistent with her mother's ambitious aspirations for her daughter. Who better than Hillary Rodham to be the exemplar of Wellesley's transition? She could toe the line with one foot and drag the institution forward with the other.

Aspects of Wellesley seemed stultified for the age: incoming freshmen were forced to wear beanies; room assignments were made on the basis of race and religion—not just Jewish students with Jewish students, but Episcopalians with Episcopalians, and Catholics with Catholics. Wellesley wasn't nearly as politically engaged as many other schools in the era. “There was a teacher who used to rage at the class because they were so timid,” recalled a graduate of only a few years before. “It was just a group of young women who didn't want to take a stand on anything, including, Is it a major chord or a minor chord?”

Hillary appeared to come late to embrace real solidarity with women as a class. Other women who encountered her over the next two decades, including some of her close friends, felt she could be oblivious to the obstacles impeding her gender, because her own experience was so singular. “She was neither intimidated nor inhibited by any barrier or stereotype—so much so that any weakness she might have is a lack of empathy for others, for whom those barriers have been more difficult. Hillary barged through with such force that she didn't even seem to take note,” said Betsey Wright, one of the women with whom she was closest from the time of her law school graduation through her husband's governorship.

The evolution of Hillary's politics during her years at Wellesley—1965 to 1969—was characteristic of millions of her generation, especially Midwesterners from conservative families who went off to college in the East and found themselves moving toward (and sometimes beyond) liberalism as they grappled with the three great issues of the day: civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and the role of women. Some were radicalized (incongruously, many of the leaders of the Weathermen, for instance, were Midwesterners), but Hillary's progression was predictably even-keeled.

No doubt Hillary was a product of her time, an era in which many young people chose to protest violently, and others “turned on, tuned in, and dropped out,” as Timothy Leary had put it. But she always followed a sensible course. Hillary's methodology and goals in terms of politics were reform, not radical change. A faculty adviser said, “I would argue that everything that Hillary has done in her adult life…strikes me as a classic Wellesley kind of graduate concern: families, children, and social reform.”

Greg Craig, who knew Hillary well during her law school years and would become White House counsel to Bill Clinton a generation later, said, on the basis of his conversations with her, “It seemed that the 1960s had passed relatively by” at Wellesley. Hundreds upon hundreds of students from Harvard, Yale, Vassar, and Columbia mobilized and went south to participate in the Freedom Rides and voting drives of the so-called Mississippi Summer. But Wellesley's women were much more removed, and Craig concluded that, far from committing herself to such direct activism, “Hillary was in learning mode then and listening mode.” He discerned little of the hardness that characterized so many later portraits of her. “I had no sense of the toughness, of the intensity. I didn't see it, I really didn't. And I was, I think, close enough to her to have seen it.”