God and Hillary Clinton (3 page)

Morris says that rather than weighty discussions among intellectual equals, these talks between Hillary and Jones were more akin to “tentative discoveries…the first fitful awakenings of critical intellect and sensibility in a spiritually minded young woman.” He says that Jones estimated that Hillary was, at heart, a cautious, contained, “self-protective girl” whose judgments about herself and her world were still forming, and as such she required constant intellectual direction. When he gave her a copy of J. D. Salinger's
Catcher in the Rye
, Hillary originally balked at the book, feeling that it was too
heavy for her to understand.
²⁶
“I thought it was a little too advanced for me,” she later wrote to Jones during her sophomore year in college, when she was assigned the book in an English class and was able to better comprehend it the second time around.
²⁷
His reading list offered spiritual comfort as well, as his students did discuss the Bible, and, apart from Salinger and Niebuhr, Jones was prone to leave pupils like Hillary with small Methodist devotionals—books with inspiring Methodist interpretations of Scripture—to carry for sustenance.

Morris adds that Jones was not only intellectually exciting to Hillary but nurturing, approving, accepting, and embracing. He was the “world beyond” the “growling Hugh Rodham.”
²⁸
By this point, Hillary was conflicted, stuck in a political purgatory between the politics of Don Jones and those of her father. “I wonder if it's possible to be a mental conservative and a heart liberal?” she wrote at the time, a kind of early tug toward what George W. Bush later coined “compassionate conservatism”—a phrase that probably would have had tremendous appeal to her at the time.
²⁹

Overall, Jones must have been pleased by this progress in his star pupil. In Jones's mind, these were exactly the types of questions he wanted to hear from Hillary, and he understood that this “deeply religious” girl was still growing into herself. She was “so nonfrivolous it's unbelievable,” he said. “Hillary was curious and wide open to everything—not that she liked everything and accepted everything at face value.”
³⁰
A third party, Rick Ricketts, a fellow student of the University of Life sessions, remembers how Hillary became Jones's chosen disciple: “She seemed to be on a quest for transcendence,” said Ricketts. Even after they went their separate ways, Hillary would continue to see Jones as a mentor, evident in the long, earnest, sometimes painful letters she wrote to him during high school and college, which were often filled with celestial navigations about life and philosophy and contemplation of her quest to express her faith through social action.
³¹

Jones Moves On

Eventually, Jones's waves proved to be too big for the congregation. Disturbed by him and his activities, they forced him to leave the Park Ridge community two or three years short of the typical stay for a youth minister. Though he was popular with the youth, the majority of the adults viewed his tenure as harmful.
³²
Authors Peter Flaherty and Timothy Flaherty quote Bob Williams, a lifelong Park Ridge resident and church member, who remembered Jones's stint as “extremely disruptive.” He said people of the town sarcastically referred to Jones as the “Marvel from North Dakota.” “He looked like an All-American, blond hair and tanned,” said Williams. “He used to drive around town in a convertible—the girls salivated.”

Williams was “amazed” when he learned years later that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton considered Jones one of her mentors: “I understand that Don went on and did some other things, but from what I knew of him then, if you were picking mentors—he's one you would not pick. People were leaving the church because of his teachings.”
³³

Flaherty and Flaherty also quote Leon Osgood, who knew Jones well:

Osgood wrote a recommendation for Jones after he was pushed out. He felt it was “the least I could do for the guy…. I was glad to see him get that other job.”
³⁵

In 1964, Jones was assigned to another church after little more than four years in Park Ridge, and before Hillary finished high school. Now Hillary had a new youth minister, one who faced a new Hillary, the Don Jones version, quite different from the Hillary of four years earlier. She wrote of the new minister in a letter to Jones: “He thinks I'm a radical.”
³⁶
Jones must have grinned.

While Jones's stay in Park Ridge had been brief, it had been quite influential. It would be unfair and disrespectful to suggest, as some have, that Jones was a “guru” to Hillary Rodham.
³⁷
After all, he did not instruct her in trendy New Age ideas, nor preach some New School of Social Thought sophistry. Rather, he was, plainly, a very influential person in her life, who—to the extent that a sympathetic, religious-minded observer would search for signs of the hand of Providence—seemed to be placed in her life at just the right time. The fact that Jones came to her during those critical high school years, those years of teen angst and development, proved immeasurably timely, since if he had come just two years later, he might have encountered a more uphill battle when dealing with Hillary.

In the end, Jones's emphasis on social duty as the bedrock of faith provided a spark in Hillary's budding relationship with God, successfully eroding some of Hugh Rodham's most influential and deeply rooted teachings about responsibility to oneself and the world at large. But although she was strongly affected by Jones and moved by his litany of causes and ideas, it was still too soon for a complete revolution. Instead, it was time for a different sort of change. It was time to go east.

Despite his influence, Don Jones could not in four years completely dislodge from Hillary a decade and a half of Hugh Rodham's Republicanism. In the fall of 1964, the high school senior soaked up Barry Goldwater's
Conscience of a Conservative
and devoted her term paper to the then-fledgling American conservative movement, which, after an initial boost with the founding of a young William F. Buckley Jr.'s
National Review
magazine in 1955, now had its first ideologically pure presidential candidate in Goldwater. Already an active member of the local chapter of the Young Republicans, she signed on to campaign for the Arizona senator and Republican presidential candidate as a “Goldwater Girl.” To the delight of her father, she went all over, canvassing solidly Republican neighborhoods, organizing classmates for Republican events, and even, as she would sheepishly admit later, donning the corny cowgirl getup and hat with the symbol
AuH
₂
O
.
¹

But this devotion to the cause of conservative Republicanism was fleeting. On that, a number of Hillary's high school friends state that the supposed political-philosophical sea change about to befall
Hillary Rodham has been exaggerated. Her friends say that the early Goldwater support and her Park Ridge Young Republicanism was merely the prototype of a young person following her parents' example, and that Hillary was never an actual conservative.
²

This interpretation appears at least partly correct. She thought about the issues, but did so without a lot of interaction or testing from the outside. Hers was never a tried-and-true conservatism; very few sixteen-year-olds have had the experiences and time to thoroughly think through the political philosophy that they will carry with them the rest of their lives.

“I don't think that Hillary was ever really conservative except in a fiscal sense,” says Dorothy Rodham. “Her father was extremely conservative in that area.” Even as a fiscally conservative Republican, says Dorothy, Hillary was driven by a desire for social justice.
³

She was disappointed when Goldwater lost, but she quickly turned her attention to another horizon: college. She applied to Radcliffe, Vassar, and Smith, and according to her mother, Hillary was admitted to all of them.
⁴
She was attracted to the merits of single-sex education. She opted for Wellesley College in part because one of her favorite high school teachers had gone there. In June 1965, Hillary left high school, where she had excelled academically. At graduation, she was called to the stage several times to receive various academic awards, from National Merit Scholar finalist to National Honor Society. Dorothy and even Hugh couldn't help but blush.
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1965–1969: The Wellesley Girl

In the fall of 1965, Hillary Rodham left Park Ridge for Wellesley in Massachusetts, where she enrolled with roughly four hundred other freshmen at the all-women's school. The good little Goldwater Girl was forewarned by her high school government teacher, Gerald Baker: “You're going to go to Wellesley, and you're going to become a lib
eral and a Democrat.” Hillary objected: “I'm smart. I know where I stand on the issues. And I'm not going to change.”
⁶

Though colleges of the 1950s and early 1960s were traditional, staid, tweedy, laden with rules and curfews, this did not mean that the classrooms were politically conservative. On the contrary, Wellesley, like many other centers of higher learning, found itself to be at the center of the cultural revolution that Jones had spoken of so frequently. The faculties at these colleges were by and large liberal, and the occasional professor who was a Republican was a Rockefeller Republican, as were many of the parents who sent their boys and girls to these colleges—with the exception of Hugh Rodham.

While the Wellesley of Hillary's time was relatively open to the practice of religion, it was hardly a conservative Christian college. And like many God-fearing Republican parents, Hugh Rodham naively handed over his Goldwater Girl to a faculty whose priorities were not in line with those that Hugh had outlined during the formative years of Hillary's life. At Wellesley, the changing times were prominently on display, and it was a rolling tide that Hugh could do nothing to halt. In this milieu, after four years of Don Jones, the stage was set to complete Hillary's transformation from a street-canvassing Republican who believed entirely in her father's doctrine of self-reliance and faith in the Lord, to the woman who would one day seek to socialize American health care.

Wellesley in 1965 was a remarkably homogeneous place, with its population essentially at 99 percent white female. There were only six African American students in Hillary's class, whom many of her classmates referred to as “Negroes,” and there were no black faculty members.
⁷

In this unbalanced setting, Hillary immediately sought out the black students and continued her interest in civil rights that she had cultivated under Don Jones's guidance. Not long after her arrival at Wellesley, Hillary began attending services at a nearby Methodist church, but it did not take long for her unique brand of Jones's faith
to make an appearance within her church's walls. About a month into her first semester, Hillary invited a black classmate to attend Sunday church services with her at the Methodist church, a move that raised eyebrows—even in a place as progressive as Massachusetts. Afterward, she telephoned some Park Ridgers to boast of her bold stroke; some of them were alarmed, and expressed misgivings. She wrote to Don Jones about the experience, including the reaction at their old church. Jones later recalled that the Park Ridge Methodist folks were bothered because Hillary seemed to make the move “not out of goodwill” but simply to shock a “lily-white church.”
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To this, she happily pleaded guilty, admitting to Jones that she was “testing the church.”
⁹

This is not to say that her gesture was not heartfelt. She told Jones that she was testing herself as well. She was genuinely interested in her minority classmates, and today, African American schoolmates like Karen Williamson speak warmly of Hillary and how she treated them: “She was just a friend. And as a black woman going to Wellesley at the time friends were very welcome. She was warm, a regular person. All the black students in our class felt we had a very close friendship in Hillary.” They also sensed something more: “A lot of us thought Hillary would be the first woman president,” said Williamson later. “I thought if ever in my lifetime there is a woman president it would be her.”
¹⁰

Hillary's interest in civil rights was not limited to the Wellesley campus. Despite the rigors of a packed college schedule, Hillary found the time to volunteer to teach reading to underprivileged black children in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, continuing on and pursuing her personal ministry of social duty.
¹¹
She was loving her neighbor as herself, and by doing so she was staying true to her Methodist faith.

From her first days on campus, she ran for office, a fact that prompted observers and later biographers to be suspicious of her motives when she did and said nice or popular things—a trait even more prominent in the decades ahead. Her friends at Wellesley talk
of how “recognition was important to her.”
¹²
She had been elected president of the Wellesley Young Republicans in her freshman year. By her sophomore year, however, she had begun rapidly moving left. To cite just one example, she was thrilled with the election of liberal Republican John V. Lindsay as mayor of New York. She shared her excitement over Lindsay in a letter to Don Jones, underscoring how she was “leaning left”—“See how liberal I'm becoming!”
¹³

Despite the left-leaning advances that she seemed to be making on her own, it was Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination that produced one of the most dramatic shifts in her college behavior. One April day in 1968, Hillary's roommate, Johanna Branson, was in her suite when the door was suddenly thrown open and a distraught Hillary threw her green book bag across the room. She yelled, “I can't stand it anymore. I can't take it!” Hillary quickly called Karen Williamson, who headed the black student organization, to express her sorrow.
¹⁴

Hillary was angry—very angry. The trauma of that bullet seemed to catalyze Hillary's politics. Nevertheless, her classmates insist she was never a “radical,” perhaps because unlike more militant activists of the time, Hillary was more willing to work within the system to change things, using the proper channels and procedures, and putting together coalitions through student government, rather than tearing down the administration or calling for the dean's and provost's resignations.
¹⁵

Only weeks after the King assassination, however, Hillary helped lead students in a two-day strike on campus—a “teach-in” in which students did not attend class for two days and instead participated in seminars on race and the Vietnam War. When Professor Marshall Goldman, the famous Russia scholar and one of the best-known faculty members at Wellesley, suggested to Hillary and an assembly of students that they make a real sacrifice and give up their weekend for the teach-in, Hillary snapped back: “I'll give up my date Saturday night, Mr. Goldman, but I don't think that's the point. Individual consciences are fine, but individual consciences have to be made
manifest.” For some reason, emotional students erupted in applause at this unclear statement, perhaps impressed by her use of words like “consciences” and “manifest.”
¹⁶

It was incidents like this that probably prompted Ruth Adams, the Wellesley president, to reflect that Hillary was “not always” a pleasure to deal with if you disagreed with her. “She could be very insistent,” judged Adams. Agreed a classmate, Gale Lyon-Rosenberger, “She could be a little cutting.” Lyon-Rosenberger said that in class Hillary was often challenging, saying of her tone: “It sometimes had an edge to it.”
¹⁷

Liberal Motive

Though politics and current events continued to push Hillary away from her father's Republican brand of the Methodist faith, Hillary continued to attend church during her undergraduate years, even joining the interdenominational “chapel society.” In addition, she took a year of required Bible study, a class that was mandated by the Wellesley of the day, but that proved to be an experience for which Hillary was “very grateful.”
¹⁸

Throughout her time at Wellesley, Hillary kept in close contact with Don Jones, who continued to act as a spiritual and political mentor, turning her on to a now-defunct magazine for college-aged Methodists called
Motive
. Jones had given her a subscription to the magazine as a high school graduation gift, and Hillary subsequently devoured every issue.
¹⁹
(“I still have every issue they sent me,” she said in a 1994 interview.)
Motive
was not the typical, slightly left of center, Christian publication aimed at college kids. Instead it was an extremely progressive journal, founded in 1941 by Harold Ehrensperger, a pacifist committed to the social gospel tradition and a member of the far-left National Council of Churches. Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s,
Motive
crept further and further to the left,
eventually becoming a magazine for counterculture Christians, whose pages were filled with a kind of who's who of radical Protestants.
²⁰

The defining shift in
Motive
's push to the left came in the late 1960s, when the magazine was under the leadership of its fourth editor, B. J. Stiles. During this period, the magazine's special targets were the Vietnam War, anti-Communism, and American “economic imperialism,” especially alleged U.S. evildoings in Latin America.
²¹
Hillary particularly recalls an article by Methodist theologian Carl Oglesby, called “Change or Containment,” which had the important effect of pushing her further against U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. “It was the first thing I had ever read that challenged the Vietnam War,” she says.
²²
Oglesby's article was based on a book by the same name, which he coauthored with Richard Shaull in 1967. Oglesby's words in the book were a scathing blame-America-first indictment of U.S. foreign policy, at times thoughtful, informed, even eloquent, but more often rambling and filled with moral equivalency, failing to differentiate essential differences between American and Soviet goals in the Cold War. And, of course, it was dismissive of the seriousness of the Communist threat.
²³
The fact that Hillary was impressed by Oglesby's work is powerful evidence of how far to the left the former Goldwater Girl had moved.

Indeed, Oglesby was no run-of-the-mill Methodist pacifist. He was an early founder and eventual president of the radical SDS—Students for a Democratic Society. In the pages of
Motive
, Oglesby asked questions like, “What would be so wrong about a Vietnam run by Ho Chi Minh, a Cuba by Castro?”
²⁴
Oglesby also wrote for the radical magazine
Ramparts
, founded by then-Communists (now conservatives) David Horowitz and Peter Collier, as well as far-left magazines like
The Nation
.

Motive
magazine had drifted so far to the left, politically and religiously, that the left-leaning United Methodist leadership questioned
Motive
's motives, and would eventually strip it of funding. In other words, the
very years
that Hillary was most influenced by the
magazine—so impressed that she still owns every copy—the liberal Methodist leadership found
Motive
so irresponsible that its funding was cut..
²⁵

Indeed, the final gasps of the magazine took place from 1969 to 1972. An infamous edition was the “women's liberation issue” of early 1971, where the lead piece began, “Here she is, Miss America. Take her off the stage and f- her.”
²⁶
By this point in the life of the magazine, readers should not have been shocked: The often-profane Christian periodical had featured a photo of a pretty coed with an LSD tablet on her tongue, run a mock obituary of God, presented a birthday card to Ho Chi Minh, and regularly provided advice on draft dodging and desertion.
²⁷
Nonetheless, the women's liberation issue was too much and prompted the elders of the church to inform
Motive
that its days were numbered. Half the subscribers canceled, but Hillary was not one of them. This loss of funds was a substantial setback for the magazine that tarnished much of
Motive
's success during its early years within the Methodist church, such as fighting Southern Democrats on racial segregation.