A Woman in Charge Read online

  His business acumen was also considerable, and he became quite successful as an entrepreneur. He manufactured drapes, window shades, and lace curtains that he sold to hotels, offices, movie theaters, and airlines—printing and cutting and sewing the fabric himself. His only employee was a black man he’d found drunk on the doorstep in 1958 and offered a part-time job. His wife served as his bookkeeper at the start. The shop, near the Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago, was stifling hot in summer, and the workroom gave off a whiff of tobacco. There was also a showroom. He invested wisely and saved prodigiously. He was fascinated with the how-to’s of making money—how money makes money, and how he could keep it.

  When Hillary was three years old, he bought the mock-Georgian house in Park Ridge, moving from the one-bedroom apartment in downtown Chicago where he and Dorothy had lived since their wedding. The house at 235 Wisner was purchased for $35,000, all cash. Hugh did not believe in borrowing.

  Most days, he was back home by 3 or 4 P.M. When the children were growing up, he could usually be found after work sitting in his easy chair with his bad leg stretched out on an ottoman or low table, complaining about something or silently drinking a beer as he watched television, preferably a sports event. He rarely rose from the chair to greet guests or even uttered a welcome, but his presence dominated the room.

  When the boys returned from school, he issued their orders for the rest of the day—chores, studying, then lights out early, the same that had been expected of him as a boy in Scranton. Rather than hire tradesmen for regular upkeep of the house, Tony and Hughie were conscripted to patch and paint as required. As a result, the house gradually sank into structural disrepair and headed toward deterioration, so much so that it was described as “a wreck” by the real estate saleswoman who eventually handled its sale—for about $200,000—when Dorothy and Hugh moved to Little Rock. At the time, it still had antiquated sixty-amp electrical wiring.

  Hugh Rodham did not pay his children on those weekends when they came downtown to “help work on a big order.” Often he’d drive them through Chicago’s aggregation of skid row neighborhoods to remind them of how fortunate they were. He freely expressed prejudices against blacks in the most denigrating terms. He never had a credit card, taught Hillary and her brothers to read the stock tables in the Chicago Tribune, and counseled the wisdom of thrift. The bitterness never left, despite the accoutrements of prosperity and his children’s devotion.

  Rodham had chosen to settle his family in a tranquil neighborhood of two-story, brick-and-frame houses painted in subtle hues, with copses of maples and elms shading the macadam, and small gardens and grassy curbsides lovingly tended. The house was on a corner, its front and side yards seeded green, its sizable front porch directly under the second-floor bedroom-and-sundeck that was Hillary’s.

  The house was not large. Downstairs there was a living room; a dining room with space sufficient for a table and eight chairs; a cramped kitchen with a breakfast nook; a TV den perhaps fifteen feet square; and a tiny powder room. Upstairs were three bedrooms—none large. The basement was unfinished and used for storage. Across the backyard was a garage, only slightly wider than Hugh’s Cadillac but with room for a few bicycles.

  In “town,” a single stoplight hung like a pendant from wires over the intersection of Main Street and South Prospect Avenue, Park Ridge’s commercial center—candy store, art deco theater, public library, wedding photography studio, pharmacy, coffee shop. Nearby, planes bound for new O’Hare Airport descended like buzzing drones in the twilight. Park Ridge, then as now, was an altogether different type of suburb from the communities along Chicago’s exclusive North Shore, the houses newer, built mostly in the 1930s and 1940s, without pretension of the grand manner. The breadwinners of Park Ridge in the 1950s and 1960s were mainly first-generation professionals or successful merchant-tradesmen like Hillary’s father. They were disposed to exhibiting the ripe fruits of their good fortune and hard work, which had lifted their generational climb from working-class wages: Cadillacs, golf handicaps, gadgets, leisure wear, and leisure time. Many had moved their families from Chicago to escape the incursion of Negroes from the South whose numbers were tipping the city school system. The high school Hillary would attend through eleventh grade, Maine East, was the largest all-white high school in the nation.

  To reach Park Ridge, you drove or took the Northwest Rail train past the synagogues of Skokie or the tract houses and little apartments in Niles and then, before you got to O’Hare, you turned and skirted some vegetable farms just outside town. Park Ridge had no Jews (at least none that Hillary knew of ), blacks, or Asians, or legal liquor sales, or, so far as Hillary was aware, divorce. Dorothy Rodham was one of the few women in the community who didn’t stay home all day, who could be found in the library’s reading room, or downtown at a museum. Almost all the Rodhams’ neighbors were Methodist, Catholic, or Lutheran, and voted Republican.

  After each of Hugh’s children was born, he drove the family back to Scranton for a baptism at Court Street Methodist Church, where he had been baptized in 1911, and his brothers before and after him. Every summer the Rodhams drove across the Alleghenys for a two-week vacation at a cabin he and his father, with their own hands, had built on Lake Winola, near Scranton, in the rolling Pennsylvania hills. The cabin had no heat, bath, or shower. It was a far different environment than the luxurious vacation cottages of many Park Ridge children on the shores of Lake Michigan or the Wisconsin dells.

  Hugh meant the vacation to connect his children to a past not as privileged as the one they knew in Park Ridge, as well as to maintain a strong sense of family. On one of their summer vacations, he insisted they visit a coal mine in the anthracite fields nearby. Whatever her discomfort with such gestures at the time, Hillary’s later political identification with working-class values and the struggles of average wage-earners was not something acquired at Wellesley or Yale as part of a 1960s countercultural ethos.

  As Hillary and her mother increasingly expressed mixed feelings about the prospect of another Lake Winola vacation, their objections were met with Hugh’s promises of a shopping spree somewhere on the return trip, where they could spend money on clothes and personal items. After one summer holiday in Pennsylvania, Hugh drove to Fifth Avenue in New York and told Dorothy and Hillary they could buy whatever they wanted before the stores closed at five o’clock. Mother and daughter had only twenty-five minutes so they took off their shoes and ran.

  While their Park Ridge schoolmates dressed according to the current fashions, the Rodham children rarely got new clothes until they’d outgrown or worn out the old ones; Tony was occasionally dressed in his brother’s hand-me-downs. Neither Hillary nor her mother had much success in persuading Hugh that girls sometimes needed to consider more than the practical in matters of dress. Dorothy herself dressed indifferently.

  During summers, the Rodham children were paid pennies for plucking dandelions from the grass. The fact that other kids in the neighborhood received regular allowances failed to impress their father. “They eat and sleep for free. We’re not going to pay them for it as well,” he told Dorothy. He seemed to have an aphorism for every means of denying his wife and children the smaller, store-bought pleasures of their neighbors. Under her breath, Dorothy had epithets for her husband, like “cheapskate” and “the SOB.” Hillary began earning money as a babysitter for neighbors and at a day care center, and later as a salesgirl in a store on Main Street.

  As Hugh Rodham increasingly came to be regarded as an oddity in Park Ridge, he seemed to go to extra lengths to put distance between himself and his neighbors. He almost never showed up at a community barbecue or a PTA meeting. He did not join the local country club or participate in civic enterprises. When Hugh Jr. was quarterback of his high school football team, his father would sit by himself on the sidelines during games, following the action close-up rather than joining the other parents, students, and fans in the stands. Characteristically, when his son had his best day as
quarterback, completing ten of eleven passes and throwing several touchdowns, Hugh told him only that he “should have completed the other one.”

  Usually the children could recognize when their father was serious and when he was just being cantankerous. But it was a fine line, especially hard to distinguish because he could not bring himself to be demonstrative in an obviously loving way, and because of his violent streak. According to Hillary, “Occasionally, he got carried away when disciplining us, yelling louder or using more physical punishment, especially with my brothers, than I thought was fair or necessary. But even when he was angry, I never doubted that he loved me.” Her father was “not one to spare the rod,” *2 she wrote.

  The Rodham brothers as adults described their father as “critical” and “pretty tough,” but also as “kindhearted.” Certainly Hugh Rodham was proud of the accomplishments of his children, but if his methodology was intended to convey tough love in an era before the term became fashionable, the results were mixed at best.

  His constant pushing of Hillary’s brothers to follow his example—so they, too, might be successful and respected in business—did not always take. Hillary, alone among the Rodham children, seemed to possess his self-discipline.

  Tony seemed to adjust to his father’s difficult philosophy of parenting better than Hugh Jr., who responded by trying endlessly to please his dad, an impossible task. The more he pandered to his father, the more his father seemed to push him away.

  “Hugh was toughest on Hughie because he’s his first-born son—and he was very tough on him,” said a member of the Rodham family. “I don’t think he approved of everything he did. But Hughie always wanted that approval, and very much tried to follow in the footsteps of his father. He went to Penn State like his father. He played football like his father.” Yet there was always the feeling that he didn’t measure up. “Tony, on the other hand, didn’t care. Tony just did what he wanted to do, and got Hugh’s respect very early on as a younger child.”

  At age nine, Tony was diagnosed with rheumatic fever and spent an entire school year bedridden, during which Dorothy nursed and tended to him. Even as adults, Tony and Hughie would seek solace from their mother during difficult times. Though sometimes dour, she was regarded by the children as the heart and soul of the Rodham household. For the most part unflappable in the company of others, she served as referee between the children and her husband, intervening when Hugh became unusually callous or hurtful in his remarks or demands, or too physical.

  “They got ridden, treated like men from the time they were three years old,” said a relative. Hillary “was the girl in the house with two crazy little boys,” Betsy Ebeling said. “The first time I walked into that house, Hughie was seven and Tony was four. Hughie threw Tony over the balcony onto the curb and Tony bounced and came up with a smile. They’re street scrappers, which Hugh loved. They were just physical. They smashed things in the house playing. And Hugh loved that.” Dorothy didn’t.

  Hugh Jr. and Tony were also the beneficiaries of their sister’s protection. Even in her teens (as in her years in the White House) she came to their aid when they got into scrapes that required some artful intervention—whether to mollify their father or, later, to quiet a nosy press corps. Though grateful for her intercession, they were also terrified of her, especially of her disapprobation.

  Until her teenage years, Hillary could get away with many of the minor infractions for which they were penalized. Often the Rodham children engaged in pranks around the house, engineered by Hillary, but it would be the boys who were punished more severely. “‘Little Hillary’ could do no wrong,” said Tony. “She was Daddy’s girl, there’s no doubt about it.” Her brothers called Hugh “Old Man,” but Hillary called him Pop-Pop (as would Chelsea Clinton, who also could do no wrong in her grandfather’s eyes). Toward their sister, at least, their father was capable of a modicum of tenderness. He taught her to play baseball, making her swing at his pitches until she connected with the ball solidly; fished with her at the lake; showed her (like her brothers) how to play pinochle; lingered some evenings over her math homework; told her tales of his childhood (including one about a blind mule that worked in the mines and walked outside to find his sight restored, and others about the freight trains he’d supposedly hopped); and exempted her from some of the heavier tasks assigned to her brothers. When he offered praise—in very pointed fashion—it was eagerly accepted because it was so rare.

  It was expected that she excel at school, of course. Education was the bedrock of both Hugh’s and Dorothy’s divergent philosophies of parenting, and of their aspirations for their children. “Learning for earning’s sake,” said Hugh. “Learning for learning’s sake,” said Dorothy, or so their children recalled many years later.

  Dorothy, said Hillary, also often told her, “Do you want to be the lead actor in your life, or a minor player who simply reacts to what others think you should say or do?” She remembers her father, on the other hand, focusing on her problems, often asking her how she would dig herself out of them—which she said always brought to mind a shovel.

  DOROTHY HOWELL RODHAM had been abandoned by her own parents at age eight. Hillary and her brothers knew little of this history while they were growing up; Dorothy revealed the full story only when Hillary interviewed her for her first book, written during the White House years, It Takes a Village. The Rodhams were a family of secrets (first from one another, then from prying journalists), just as Bill Clinton’s family was. Complicated feelings of hurt and confusion were never matters for family discussion in the Rodham house.

  Dorothy’s mother, Della Murray Howell, one of nine children, was only fifteen when Dorothy was born, in Chicago. Her father, Edwin Howell, a fireman, was seventeen. The young couple divorced when Dorothy was eight and her sister, Isabelle, three. Both girls were put on a train and sent without escort to live with their father’s parents in Alhambra, California. In their new home, Dorothy told Hillary, they were constantly criticized, ridiculed, and severely punished by their grandmother, while their grandfather seemed totally removed from their lives. At one point, Dorothy said, her grandmother had ordered her confined to her room for a year during nonworking hours.

  At fourteen, she left and became a babysitter in the home of a close-knit family who treated her well, sent her to high school, and encouraged her to read widely. Without this experience of living with a strong family, Dorothy told Hillary, she would not have known how to manage her own household or take care of her children.

  After graduation from high school, Dorothy returned to Chicago because of the marriage of her mother to Max Rosenberg, four or five years her senior. He was well-to-do, owned several Chicago apartment buildings, as well as property in Florida, and was involved in the hotel business. According to members of the Rodham family, Rosenberg had persuaded Della—who could hardly read and write—to send for her children and to try to make amends for the past. It was the first time in ten years that Dorothy had been contacted by her mother, wrote Hillary. “I’d hoped so hard that my mother would love me that I had to take a chance and find out,” Dorothy told her.

  When Dorothy and Isabelle returned to Chicago, Rosenberg offered to send Dorothy to secretarial or vocational school—but not college, as she had expected. Della, meanwhile, intended Dorothy to be her housemaid. Dorothy refused to stay with her mother and stepfather and found a job and room of her own; Isabelle moved in with the Rosenbergs.

  “My [step]grandfather, Max, for sure wanted her to have an education—I’m sure he promised her some form of education, but she was anticipating a whole lot more,” said Hillary’s first cousin Oscar Dowdy, Isabelle’s son. “I think Dorothy felt she was deceived, but probably more by her mother.”

  Today a rift remains in the Rodham family related to these events, and only a few facts are indisputable. The role of Rosenberg in the life of Hillary and her family has always been clouded. The first time Hillary mentioned her stepgrandfather publicly was in 1999, du
ring her Senate campaign in New York, after his existence was disclosed by the Forward, a secular Jewish weekly. (She did not include the information in her first book.) “I have nothing but fond memories of Max Rosenberg,” Hillary said in response to the Forward’s story, and recalled family get-togethers at the home of Della and Max. In Living History she wrote only a single sentence about him, simply acknowledging he was Jewish.

  Dorothy supported herself by doing office work. When she met Hugh Rodham, she was eighteen, he was twenty-six. Hillary claimed her mother was attracted by his gruff personality, however unlikely that seems.

  In the last years of his life, Hugh would tell one of his daughters-in-law that, at first sight, he thought Dorothy was absolutely beautiful. Tony Rodham was amazed when he heard what his father had said; he had never known him to openly express such affection for his wife. She also seemed strong and intelligent to Hugh, qualities that he sometimes seemed unsure of in himself.

  After Dorothy and Hugh’s marriage in 1942, and Hugh’s discharge from the Navy in 1945, he and Dorothy moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a building owned by Rosenberg—probably rent-free, according to Oscar Dowdy and others. Isabelle and her husband also lived in the building. Hillary and Oscar played together as children. *3

  Hillary described Della as “weak and self-indulgent,” addicted to soap operas, and “disengaged from reality.” She could occasionally “be enchanting.” When Hillary visited her she would be taken to amusement parks and the movies. She died in 1960, unhappy and still “a mystery,” according to Hillary.

  Dorothy Rodham never took kindly to Max Rosenberg, but Hugh Rodham apparently did, accepting his offer of an apartment, and of advice in financial matters. “They were both hustlers,” said Oscar Dowdy. “They understood each other. And I think Max admired Hugh. Max realized that Hugh was trying to do something with his life, and Hugh would listen to Max and take Max’s advice…. Over the years, Maxhelped Hugh with financial matters and gave him business advice and probably loaned him money.”