Rebels in White Gloves (11 page)

That a young woman would contradict a man of authority was also,
in 1969, front-page news.
SENATOR BROOKE UPSTAGED AT WELLESLEY COMMENCEMENT
read the
Boston Globe
the next day, adding that Dean Acheson was sufficiently impressed that he had sent Hillary a note requesting a copy of her speech, an excerpt of which was published in
Life
magazine. A handful of parents were equally cheered: Jesse Branson, whose daughter, Johanna, was Hillary’s roommate at Wellesley and an attendant at her wedding and remains one of her closest friends, “thought what Hillary was saying was great. I didn’t want to stop her; I was unhappy with Brooke myself. We were just startled that she had the courage.” Vern Branson remembers that Hugh Rodham—who had come alone to graduation in the family Cadillac while his wife, Dorothy, stayed home with Hillary’s brothers—was altogether unfazed, talking that evening with great enthusiasm about “blue onions,” his best-selling textile design.

“I will never forget it,” Marge Wanderer told
Frontline
, “because Nancy said to me at the end of graduation, ‘Take a good look at her. She will probably be the president of the United States someday.’ And that shook me up.… It kind of frightened me, the whole group frightened me, because this was the beginning of a whole new era, and these women were going to go out and take over the world. Not my daughter, because my daughter was very safely married. I thought she was going to be home sweeping the floor and taking care of the babies, so I wasn’t going to worry about her. But I worried about the other ones, because they were so sure, they were so sure of themselves, and that is something that Wellesley instills in these women. I just hope that they are all successful and happy. No, I’m going to restate that. I just hope that they’re happy.”

In the pursuit of happiness, few of these women would in fact ever reject so entirely Marge’s dreams; many more have swept floors and taken care of babies than have taken over the world. But from the vantage of a smart, ambitious girl in 1969, the fifties did not look anything like the wholesome paradise of 1990s political memory. To the degree these women allied themselves with their generation and against their parents, it was not out of a desire to destroy traditional American values but because those values seemed to them to have been betrayed—by “faceless bureaucrats” drained of a sense of personal responsibility for their political actions, by a suburban existence that the
Christian Century
described
as a “handkerchief soaked in chloroform on the mind and spirit,” by a willful blindness to immense social injustices. “My country right or wrong” seemed less noble to most than what Senator Fulbright called “a higher form of patriotism,” the insistence that their country, and each one of them as a citizen, live up to its ideals. There was hubris in this generation, certainly, in the notion that they would utterly remake home and family and politics, that their morality was unlike the shabby stuff of most men and women. But there was no nihilism. “Men with dreams” had shaped their consciousness, Hillary said in her speech, “men in the space program, the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps.” Earlier that year, she had given her boyfriend, Jeff Shields, a copy of Thoreau’s
Walden
, one of the earliest American testaments to the idea that a person’s political integrity is measured by how he lives each day in his own home and by whether he dissents when his government fails to honor its stated principles. “There’s a strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left collegiate protests that I find intriguing, because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues,” Hillary said in her speech. “We feel that our prevailing acquisitive and competitive corporate life is not the way of life for us.” These women’s political convictions and personal aspirations began, before all else, in an immensely ambivalent rejection of their girlhood world.

CHAPTER TWO
 
 
Mothers and Daughters

W
hat Nancy Wanderer loved best were the car trips each summer from Pittsburgh to her father’s childhood home in Illinois farm country. Stretched out in the Chrysler’s big backseat with her small blond head nestled in her mother’s lap, Nancy would close her eyes and listen contentedly for hours as Marge recounted stories Nancy had heard a thousand times. Marge told of her own visits as a girl to her grandmother’s house in the “Germantown” of St. Louis, with “Aunt Elsie and the whole family, those first-generation immigrant women who weighed three hundred pounds, babies running around, everyone out on their porches on hot summer nights with big, foaming pitchers of root beer.” Hearing her mother’s strong, exuberant voice, feeling her link to all the women in her past, Nancy says, “I felt very well loved.”

New Kensington, just outside of Pittsburgh, was a slightly down-at-the-heels, gritty mill town. But dads were securely employed at Alcoa Aluminum, moms were always home, front doors were open, and grandmas and big brothers were nearby. No one ever had a baby-sitter. The kids clambered over fences and front porches, went in and out of one another’s houses, raided refrigerators, played in the woods over the hill with never a thought of danger. “All my best friends lived on my street. My mother knew that any place I was, somebody’s mom would be around. Even our dads seemed close by. When we walked home from school for lunch every day, in our kneesocks and letter sweaters, we’d stop to salute as the Alcoa trucks went by.” Nancy and her big brother and her mom and dad always sat down together for breakfast and dinner; Mrs. Wanderer would set out a spaghetti casserole with Velveeta cheese, or pot roast and potatoes, then take off her apron and smooth
her skirt before joining her husband and children at the table. She did her cooking and cleaning in a dress and heels, her hair just done at the beauty parlor. On weekends, Nancy’s dad would putter about the house or cut the grass, and then they’d all go to a potluck dinner with friends.

Nancy and Marge were rarely separated. A pillar of the church and president of the PTA, Marge became a Girl Scout leader when Nancy was in the third grade, and every one of the twenty-two girls in Nancy’s class joined the troop. They met Thursday evenings for knitting competitions and learned to bake chicken potpies and put on spirited performances: A picture of a twelve-year-old Nancy playing Curly in
Oklahoma!
, in a red plaid shirt and cowboy hat, with her freckled snub nose and mop of blond curls and jubilant grin, is pure sweet-corn Americana.

Marge’s family had been hit badly by the Depression; her memories of poverty left her determined that her tomboy daughter would learn the proper feminine graces and marry well. She sent Nancy to get “polished up” at a private high school, scrimping money out of the household budget and going back to work in the classroom she’d left when she got married. “Sometimes I was a bit embarrassed by her,” says Nancy. “She had a big, loud laugh, and always a funny story to tell. But she has a kind of inner class; there is nothing money could buy that she didn’t already have. In my eyes she was the ideal woman—really out there, getting people excited. I wanted to be just like her, a leader. She is like the sun; she has such warmth and energy. That’s why when she turned her back on me later it was so cold.”

An honors student and class president at every school she ever went to, Nancy remembers being in trouble just once. Climbing to hang like a bat in the rafters of a half-built house, she left behind a jacket, which gave her crime away: It had, of course, a name tag sewn in. More unsettling to her conscience was an attempt, hiding behind a garage door with her friend Michelle, to light a match. She’d been told not to play with matches and was thoroughly tormented by her misdeed. As she walked home in the snow, she decided she deserved no Christmas presents that year. Most of the time, she kept busy with her civic activities, among them founding and serving as president of a neighborhood dog club. “I’m still a club starter. It all feels like the dog club to me, so I’m amazed when someone sees the way I live now as antisocial. I don’t think I’ve done an antisocial thing in my life.”

Nancy’s rigorous sense of honesty came from her father, a company man with unwavering standards of rectitude and sobriety. When Nancy golfed with her dad, he insisted that if she missed a swing or the ball moved a quarter inch, she had to count that stroke. When for her older brother’s twenty-first birthday Nancy’s mother impulsively bought a celebratory bottle of champagne, her father refused to permit it in his car. Marge ended up walking home from the store with it while he drove alongside hollering, “We don’t need this, Marge.” “He would have had a dumb life but for her,” says Nancy. “He was always at a slight remove from the family, going to get the car or standing behind the camera taking home movies. But he thought she was too loud and ate too much. She was squelched by him, but she did it all anyway. That’s really been my guide, that back-and-forth—my father, ramrod-straight, serious, and diligent, my mother, warm and enthusiastic. I learned so much from my parents: Be yourself, be honest, don’t lord it over anyone—things I live by that now drive them crazy.”

Innocent of danger, snug in a deep-rooted family and safe community with a big, stern dad employed for life and a soft, warm mom wholly dedicated to her children’s well-being: How precious it must have seemed for the parents of the class of ’69 to be able to provide their children a safe and predictable world, a small, separate peace, after knowing in their own youth the fear and deprivation of the Depression and a world war.

For a fortunate few in the class, childhood was so sweet: scented with new-mown grass and cinnamon toast, as shiny as a red bicycle and freshly whitewashed picket fences. In such a cheerful palette has Hillary Clinton’s youth been painted: Like pages of a Norman Rockwell calendar, here is Hillary home from school to have lunch with her mom, here playing Parcheesi with her family, here baking chocolate chip cookies on Christmas Eve, here at Ted and Pearl’s Happy House for Cokes, here sewing yet another merit badge on her Girl Scout uniform as she dreams of marrying a senator and decorating her Georgetown home.

For many in the class, however, such Arcadian childhood portraits concealed deeper discontent. “Hers was not the life I wanted.” There is for these women no more common refrain. Most saw mothers who were not happy homemakers but were frustrated and suffocating: Barely girls
themselves when they had their babies, isolated from the world by the geography of suburbia and from each other by the need to “keep up appearances,” they spent their days playing bridge and shopping and vacuuming, sipping pale coffee and opening boxes of macaroni and cheese as they waited for the sound of crunching gravel in the drive. The Wellesley graduates remember their fathers as often distant from their families: organization men overburdened with the demands of breadwinning or salesmen forever on the road—and sometimes seeking a comfort there they no longer found at home. Flipping through their childhood memories, these women tell of drawn curtains, bottles of Valium, and cold silences. “The smell of home,” one says, “was the smell of gin and tonic.” A few tell a third story, one neither rosy nor unremittingly bleak but also largely erased from present renderings of the postwar years—of parents who set themselves against the conformist pressures of the time, instilling in their daughters radical aspirations, or daring dissent at a time when it could be deemed criminal disloyalty.

“My mother was dressed in a dress, baking cookies and unhappy,” says Kathy Smith Ruckman, a suburban mother who stayed home to raise her four kids. “I don’t think my mother could have named her unhappiness—that generation wasn’t terribly introspective. But she was miserably bored and unable to see other choices. She never had the self-confidence to go into the community, even as a volunteer. She felt she had nothing to offer.” Though Mrs. Smith had earned straight A’s in high school, she had not attended college; her father would pay only for his son’s education. Married young to Kathy’s father, she raised three daughters in Wilmington, Delaware, on the modest income Mr. Smith earned as a DuPont engineer. “My father was wonderful, but not bright or ambitious. He worked so we could eat; his goal every day was to get home and be with us. If they could have made their choices, my mother would have worked and my father would have stayed home. He was the more maternal figure, much more willing to change diapers or take care of the house. It bothered us as kids—we thought it was weird. And in those days, for a woman to work made the man look as if he couldn’t provide; it was an insult to her husband.” Unable to afford a second car,
Kathy’s mom was quite literally trapped in her suburban home. “It was an awful life to be stranded at home with kids and no car for someone like her, someone by nature not at all close or nurturing. She was home all the time, watching the soaps all day long. To this day, when I hear that theme music, it makes me feel sick.”