A Woman in Charge (7 page)

Detachment from politics was not the Wellesley way. Polite participation was. During Hillary's freshman year, she eased into the leadership of the Wellesley Young Republicans club, and by the end of the second semester was elected its president. Meanwhile she had begun questioning her party's policies on civil rights and the war in Vietnam. Barry Goldwater had been defeated for president in her last year of high school. Now she found herself moving toward the distinctly liberal (and minority wing) of the party. Her alienation from her father seemed exacerbated in their few discussions and letters, as he became typically dismissive and antagonistic to her increasingly feminist, egalitarian, and antiwar assertions. She had also begun reading—and citing—the
New York Times,
much to his consternation.

As a high school graduation present, Hillary's church in Park Ridge had given each of its senior class members a subscription to
motive
magazine, the official publication of the Methodist Student Movement. Its views were far different from her customary sources of information. The magazine echoed the call of John Wesley and his disciples to faith-rooted social activism, but also contained provocative articles by New Left theoreticians including Carl Oglesby, who later became head of the radical Students for a Democratic Society. Meanwhile, her ideas, old and new, were subjected to unfamiliar scrutiny as she came under the influence of professors whose outlooks were much less parochial than those of her teachers in Park Ridge, whether left or right, conservative or liberal. After a while, she would write later, her views were not Republican ones.

Peter Edelman, who knew Hillary before she met his wife-to-be, Marian Wright Edelman, thought Hillary's politics “reflected what you would expect in a certain kind of young person at the time…sort of on the liberal side. She was opposed to the war in Vietnam and she had a very instinctive interest in children's issues that had already manifested itself” before she graduated from Wellesley. She had caused a slight stir on the campus when she brought a black classmate—one of only ten at the college—with her to church services in town, a week after classes began during her freshman year. “I was testing me as much as I was testing the church,” Hillary wrote to Don Jones. She appeared interested in her own motives, which was not something she often expressed curiosity about. For a person so focused on religion and spiritual notions, Hillary seemed to many acquaintances to be surprisingly devoid of introspective instinct, and when things went wrong, she habitually looked elsewhere for the reasons. It was only after she became a candidate for the Senate that she meaningfully acknowledged personal responsibility for the failure to reform health care during the Clinton presidency. She told Jones that, had she seen someone else make the same gesture a year earlier of taking a black classmate to an all-white church, she might have thought, “Look how liberal that girl is trying to be going to church with a Negro.”

Once she had recovered her emotional equilibrium at Wellesley, fellow students, even those uncomfortable with her politics, were drawn to Hillary's natural warmth, humor, and obvious ability to get the job done. There was something both generous and gracious about her character that made people like being around her. She possessed a seemingly unselfish ability to praise others, recognize their personal concerns, remember meaningful details about their lives. These elements figured in the willingness of many of Wellesley's overprivileged young women to see Hillary as their leader, instead of other students whose prep school backgrounds they shared.

She was also notably direct in almost everything she did. This could be either an asset or intimidating. Her undisguised ambition for recognition and praise also figured in the equation, and she cultivated relationships unabashedly with well-connected students, influential members of the faculty, and administrators. “She already knew the value of networking, of starting a Rolodex, even back then,” a Wellesley contemporary observed, not too admiringly. “While she was respected across the board, and she had her circle of friends, I would not say she was popular.” (Others would dispute the latter assertion.) Some found her “not always easy to deal with if you were disagreeing with her,” noted Wellesley's president at the time, Ruth Adams. “She could be very insistent.” She also could be impatient and aloof. Yet she became a figure of almost unique stature on the campus: a leader, socially concerned, personable, articulate, hardworking, hard-studying, fun-loving. But she revealed little of her interior life to those around her. As in the White House years and beyond, some spoke of her in almost reverential fashion. Hillary seemed aware of this mystique, but even then she was never known to address it in discussion with others. She
carried
the notion as part of herself.

Hillary continued to follow the student leader path she had trod at Maine East and South. At a time when many of her contemporaries at other colleges were directly challenging the authority of college administrators and of government structures, she carefully worked within the system, joining peaceful marches for civil rights and against the Vietnam War in Cambridge, New Haven, and New York. Rather than become a leader in larger protest movements off the campus and work to fuse her student constituency with them, she kept matters self-contained. She steered the antiwar movement at Wellesley—and student rage after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968—away from the kind of confrontation with civil authorities and school administrators that convulsed many other campuses.

Still, Hillary and the members of her class were responsible for greater changes at Wellesley than any in its history. When her class arrived in the fall of 1965, men were not allowed in Wellesley's dorms (except on Sundays), and students could not drive cars on campus or wear jeans or slacks in the dining hall or on trips into town. By the time she was chosen commencement speaker of 1969, the student body had become politicized as never before; Black Studies was added to the curriculum and, under pressure from the student government, the college had agreed to increase the number of black students and faculty members. The following fall, 104 blacks would be accepted and 57 would enroll. At Hillary's insistence, a summer Upward Bound program for inner-city children was initiated on campus, antiwar activities were conducted in college facilities, the skirt rule had been rescinded, grades were given on a pass-fail basis, parietal rules were a thing of the past, interdisciplinary majors were permitted for the first time. One of Hillary's strengths as a leader, still evident today, was her willingness to participate in the drudgery of government rather than simply direct policy from Olympian heights. She attended committee meetings, became involved in the minutiae (of finding a better system for the return of library books, for instance), and studied every aspect of the Wellesley curriculum in developing a successful plan to reduce the number of required courses.

Her political transformation was incremental. She spent the summer of 1966 at a beach cottage on the Lake Michigan shore, babysitting and working as a researcher for an ex-Wellesley professor who was editing portions of a book about the war in Vietnam,
The Realities of Vietnam: A Ripon Society Appraisal.
The Ripon Society was a liberal Republican movement, founded in 1964, which took its name from Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party; its statement of purpose declared that the party's future would be found “not in extremism, but in moderation,” a play on Barry Goldwater's declaration that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The professor for whom Hillary worked had been asked to leave Wellesley, ostensibly because of his antiwar activism but perhaps because he was an unusually nonconformist figure on the campus. That summer, he gave Hillary books to read by Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong, both out-of-the-mainstream Catholics and revolutionary theorists in the field of media. The fact that they came from a Jesuitical tradition, with similarities to Hillary's Wesleyan orientation, appealed to her.

By summer's end, her opposition to the war in Vietnam was adamant—though the antiwar movement was still in its infancy—and she now identified herself as a Rockefeller Republican, at the very left of the party, some of whose younger adherents gravitated to the Ripon Society.

Her political interests were more expansive than the usual partisan agenda of either party, and reflected her idealism at the time. One day that summer, walking on the beachfront, she came upon hundreds of dead fish that had washed up on the polluted Lake Michigan shore. She buried them beneath the sand. That evening she wrote to her boyfriend, Geoff Shields: “It is really a shame that they are taking the beauty out of the beach and the fun out of the swimming. If I ever have any sort of influence I'm going to use a majority of it for human conservation and the rest for nature.”

 

H
ILLARY'S EXPLORATION
during her Wellesley years was focused just as intensely on men as it was on politics. She liked them. Geoff Shields, who had grown up in a much wealthier Chicago suburb, Lake Forest, on the North Shore, twenty minutes and light-years away from Park Ridge, was her first serious boyfriend (or, as Wellesley women were taught to say, beau). In high school, Hillary and members of her circle had usually socialized in groups of unpaired girls and boys who hung out together at the luncheonette on Main Street after school and went to the movies on weekends. Couples who “went steady” or were considered “in love” were exceptional, and tended to be sexually inexperienced, according to Betsy Ebeling. If Hillary had engaged even in heavy necking before she got to Wellesley, no one said so.

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.