A Woman in Charge Read online

  Rosenberg agreed to back Hugh in his parking lot venture, counseling him to run for alderman and, if elected, initiate a change in the zoning laws favorable to their investment.

  PERHAPS AS A RESULT of her own grim childhood without a real home, being a competent homemaker was important to Dorothy. At the cabin in Pennsylvania, she assembled a collection of stained glass. Other small collections materialized, which Hugh Rodham grudgingly—and gradually—agreed to let her purchase. She took pride in her visual sense through paint colors and choices of inexpensive department store furniture for the house on Wisner Street. Though Hugh told endless stories about his boyhood and family in Pennsylvania, Dorothy rarely spoke of early life. “I realized that there was a sadness about Dorothy,” said Betsy Ebeling. “I don’t know if ‘beaten down’ is the term—isolated sometimes. She lived through her children a lot. It was very important to her that her children be happy. I don’t think she thought she could be happy, though she could laugh a lot.” Some visitors to the Rodham home noted a certain fear in Dorothy—fear of being left alone.

  Dorothy made her own uneasy peace with her husband (“Mr. Difficult,” she called him) and, when the children were still young, had decided to stay in the marriage. Keeping the family together was more important than pursuing independent aspirations or escaping her husband’s indignities, though she had to witness much harshness toward the children. “Maybe that’s why she’s such an accepting person,” Dorothy said of Hillary. “She had to put up with him.”

  The same, obviously, could be said of Dorothy.

  She did not believe in divorce except under the most dire of circumstances, as she first told Hillary in the 1980s. “It was drummed into me by Dorothy that nobody in this family gets divorced,” said Nicole Boxer, who was married to Hillary’s brother Tony from 1994 to 1998—when they divorced. “From Dorothy—and Tony—I heard divorce is not an option. She’d say, ‘You can work it out.’ She said, ‘You have to talk to him on a level he can understand. Don’t give up on him. You do not leave the marriage.’ *4 She was supportive of us going to counseling, which we did.”

  Hillary, after considering whether to divorce Governor Bill Clinton in Arkansas, wrote several years later that “children without fathers, or whose parents float in and out of their lives after divorce, are precarious little boats in the most turbulent seas.” Her mother would agree. Given the hardships of her mother’s childhood and Hillary’s own experiences growing up, her decision to devote so much of her professional life to defending and asserting the legal rights of children seems like a natural choice.

  Hillary and Bill’s difficult but enduring marriage is perhaps more easily explained in the context of her childhood and the marriage of her parents, dominated by the humiliating, withholding figure of her father, whom she managed nonetheless to idolize and (later) to idealize, while rationalizing his cruelty and indifference to the pain he caused his family. “I grew up in a family that looked like it was straight out of Father Knows Best,” Hillary said in It Takes a Village, and also referred to “the stability of family life that I knew growing up.” Hillary’s first boyfriend in college, upon visiting the Rodham house, wondered almost immediately why Dorothy had not walked out of the marriage, and how Hillary had endured her father’s petulance. But Hillary somehow found a way in difficult times to either withdraw or focus on what her father was able to give her, not what was denied. Hillary knew she was loved, or so she said.

  As a child, Hillary had tried every way she knew to please him and win his approval, and then spent years seething at his treatment of her. The pattern seemed to repeat itself in her marriage. Both Hugh and Bill Clinton, who came to like and respect each other, were outsized personalities whose presence inevitably dwarfed others around them. In Clinton’s case, this dominance was seductive, mesmerizing, fascinating. Rodham’s effect on people, especially outside his immediate family, was usually the opposite—alienating, forbidding, unpleasant. As she later did with her husband, Hillary eventually took an almost biblical view in her forgiveness and rationalization of her father’s actions: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” The lesson came directly from Hugh Rodham: “He used to say all the time, ‘I will always love you but I won’t always like what you do,’” said Hillary (which cynics might regard as understated shorthand for how Hillary came to view her husband). “And, you know, as a child I would come up with nine-hundred hypotheses. It would always end with something like, ‘Well, you mean, if I murdered somebody and was in jail and you came to see me, you would still love me?’

  “And he would say: ‘Absolutely! I will always love you, but I would be deeply disappointed and I would not like what you did because it would have been wrong.’”

  One of Bill and Hillary’s principal aides came to a less theological interpretation after years of watching (and listening to) the Clintons—and the Rodhams, who often stayed at the White House. Hillary, said the aide, devolved into “kind of the classic bitchy wife…not quite putting her hand on her hip and finger-wagging at him, but practically. Nah-nahnah…. She has a derisive tone that is very similar to the way she sometimes sounds publicly—a sing-songy tone, like, ‘I guess I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had cheese.’ That tone only more so…. It’s very much directed at him, his faults, his shortcomings; that he’s let her down again.”

  The same tone, others have observed, characterized the way Dorothy Rodham sometimes responded to her husband’s failings.

  “Hillary hates the fact that Bill Clinton cheats on her, and that he doesn’t need her as much as she wants,” said the aide. “And he’s weak. She’s a very judgmental Methodist from the Midwest. As much as they talk about loving the sinner, they actually also despise a part of the sinner. They hate the weakness. They hate the part of the person who can’t toe the puritan line.”

  Dorothy and Hugh were polar opposites—temperamentally, intellectually, emotionally—and their children could see that each grew increasingly exasperated with the other’s evident ambivalence, antipathy, and obvious resentment. The more Hugh Rodham disparaged and heaped scorn on his wife, the more she resolved to stay out of his way and ignore his provocation. And the more she spurned him, keeping to her own projects and agenda and interposing herself as a buffer between him and the children, the more resentful he became.

  As the chasm between Hillary and her father broadened during adolescence, Hillary and her mother drew closer. “Dorothy is the person who shaped Hillary more than any other, and there is no way to see Dorothy and not see how she fashioned her daughter,” said Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the Hollywood producer who is among Hillary’s closest long-standing friends. But matters are hardly so simple. Hillary could, in fact, “be either her father or mother at different times, in different situations,” said Betsy Ebeling. Hillary’s cousin Oscar Dowdy, who regularly visited the Rodham home as a youngster, concluded more succinctly that Hillary had inherited her mother’s orderly mind and her father’s bluster.

  DOROTHY WANTED to name her daughter Hillary because to her it sounded exotic and unusual, and she liked the fact that “Hillary” sounded like a family name. That could be considered daring in 1947, especially in the Midwest. Hillary was born at Edgewater Hospital on Chicago’s North Side. She weighed more than eight pounds. “Very mature upon birth,” Dorothy liked to say. Hillary, meanwhile, insisted illogically into the White House years that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest. (Sir Edmund did not make his ascent until 1953, and until then he was hardly known beyond his native New Zealand, where he lived in relative obscurity as a beekeeper in Auckland.)

  Dorothy was determined that her daughter would have none of the disadvantages of her own childhood nor experience hesitancy in speaking her mind or pursuing her goals. If someone tried to muzzle Hillary or get in the way, Dorothy counseled, “don’t let it happen.” When four-year-old Hillary was getting pushed around by a bigger girl known as a bully in the neighborhood, her mother
supposedly told her, “There’s no room in this house for cowards.” Though Hillary was scared, Dorothy instructed her to strike back the next time. Hillary encountered the bully soon afterward, hit her in the face in front of several boys, ran back to her mother, and proclaimed, “I can play with the boys now.” The story is basically true, Dorothy insisted.

  Characteristically, she urged Hillary to set lofty objectives, and suggested she might become the first female Supreme Court justice. (Hillary preferred the idea of being an astronaut, and wrote to NASA at age fourteen to volunteer; she was told no women need apply.) Dorothy also wanted her children to be able to maintain their equilibrium, however great the chaos. To make her point, she showed Hillary how the bubble in a carpenter’s level moved to dead center. “Imagine having this carpenter’s level inside you,” she said. “You try to keep that bubble in the center. Sometimes it will go way up there”—she tipped the level so the bubble drifted—“and then you have to bring it back.” She straightened the level.

  Hillary took easily to school from the start, bringing home almost straight As from Eugene Field Elementary School. She was also nearsighted in the extreme, and thick glasses were prescribed for her at age nine—a defining experience for a young girl growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. Hillary’s spectacles, usually with red or purple frames, remained an essential part of her appearance until she got her first pair of contact lenses at age thirty-three. Sometimes she was vain enough to leave her glasses at home and needed someone to help her get around, “like a seeing-eye dog,” wrote Hillary. (At a school reunion many years afterward, she asked Betsy, repeatedly, “Who is this person? Do I know him? Who’s that one?” Betsy would remind her and Hillary would reply, “Oh, I never knew what they looked like.”)

  By her own account and those of her schoolmates, she was a tomboy in grade school. Though she could sometimes be a clumsy athlete, her father’s instruction in baseball and football, and repeated practice sessions with her mother, gave her enough skill to at least stay in the game with the boys. She was also a strong swimmer. Her mother batted tennis balls at her regularly on the public courts of Park Ridge, but her game remained underdeveloped. One playmate, Jim Yrigoyen, was fond enough of her to give her his dog tags to wear briefly.

  Hillary’s capacity for making deep friendships, especially with girls and, later, women (though hardly to the exclusion of boys or men) was already evident in elementary school. In sixth grade, Betsy Ebeling transferred to Eugene Field and she and Hillary became the closest of friends. They took piano lessons from the same teacher (after Hugh Rodham relented and paid for an upright that sat in the living room), passed their lifesaving swimming tests together, helped each other with homework, and treated each other’s homes almost as their own. During the summer, the girls and their mothers would put on white gloves and go into the city to have lunch at Marshall Field’s, spend the afternoon at the Art Institute, and then return to suburbia on the train. Gloves were an essential part of feminine apparel and both Hillary and Betsy had fully stocked glove drawers in their bedroom vanities.

  In elementary school, Hillary became known as a teacher’s pet, because of her desire to please, her willingness to work hard, and her ability to stay alert. By eighth grade, classmate Art Curtis said, he and Hillary were the two biggest overachievers in the class. The first time they met, Art and Hillary stood outside her house on the corner and talked about Barry Goldwater. Her father’s politics still held considerable sway in Hillary’s schema—as they would until after she reached college. “I was immediately taken with her,” Art recalled. He liked her competitiveness. While most girls talked about makeup and boys, Hillary was “absolutely political” at a stage when “politics wasn’t cool.”

  Even in adolescence, her self-confidence was evident. Hillary was definitely not a worker bee; she was disposed to running things, whether it was in her Girl Scout troop or the neighborhood carnival. Her assemblage of merit badges was formidable, and she looked forward to wearing her uniform to school on the days when her Scout troop met. But the combination of being teacher’s pet, self-assurance, and the occasional inability to recognize classmates because she wasn’t wearing glasses led some students to regard her as conceited. She was aware of this view of her. Few assertions could be as hurtful, but she was never known to complain.

  By the time she reached Maine East High School, John F. Kennedy was president, the population of the Chicago suburbs was bulging from the baby boom, and American Bandstand was on TV. Though some students at Maine East smoked and occasionally drank, Hillary and Betsy and their crowd were not among them. Both girls moved in the more popular circles of the school and were generally well liked. Hillary seemed to be involved in almost every extracurricular activity featured in the Maine East yearbook: student government, school newspaper, cultural values committee, the Brotherhood Society, prom committee, member of the It’s Academic quiz show team that competed on local television. She also became one of the school’s eleven finalists for a National Merit Scholarship. She wanted to be a doctor, an ambition she retained through her early Wellesley semesters, when she recognized that her discomfort at the sight of blood would make such a career impossible.

  By tenth grade, Hillary had realized she was by no means the smartest member of her class, and that to compete at the top level of academic achievement she would have to work harder than others. She was an honor roll student by force of will, intense preparation, and dutiful study. Even with such extraordinary effort, her grade point average was too low to be among the top ten students in her class. But the term “well-rounded,” an important accolade of the era, understated her achievement. In classroom debates, her prodigious memory and preparation made her formidable. Her competitive sense was highly developed, to say the least, both on the athletic field and in student government. She rewrote the student assembly constitution and, in eleventh grade, became class vice president. In her senior year of high school, she ran for what she called “the presidency.” In a letter to the youth minister of her church, she wrote that her opponent’s campaign manager had begun “slinging mud” at her, but that “we did not retaliate. We took the high road and talked about motherhood and apple pie.” She was overwhelmingly defeated on the first ballot. She now understood how rough student politics could be. In another letter, she noted that she had run “against several boys and lost, which did not surprise me but still hurt, especially because one of my opponents told me I was ‘really stupid if I thought a girl could be elected president.’” One of her heroes was Margaret Chase Smith, then a senator from Maine, the first woman to be elected to both houses of Congress and the first woman to be placed in nomination for president by a major party (the Republicans).

  Because of overcrowding at all-white Maine East, Hillary and her classmates from Park Ridge were transferred in their senior year to Maine South, a racially mixed and ethnically diverse school. Until then, their school lives had been relatively untouched by urban reality. Hillary and other students from her neighborhood had never had a black teacher or minister or close black friends. As Betsy Ebeling said, “We were ignorant…until we went into the city and saw that people did not live in houses like ours.” Betsy’s mother, who had grown up on Lakeshore Drive, told her that she had never seen a Negro shopping in Marshall Field’s until after World War II.

  In 1961, unbeknownst to Hillary’s parents, Betsy’s grandfather, who described his politics as “progressive,” took her and Hillary to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak at the Chicago Sunday Evening Club. King talked about racial segregation in the North as well as the South. It was the first time Hillary, then fourteen, grasped the notion of Negro children being the country’s poorest and most vulnerable.

  If there is a single defining thread of Hillary’s political, religious, and social development, it is her belief and determination, from her teenage years onward, that the tragedy of race in America must be made right. What in part first attracted her to Bill Clinton was her percepti
on that he was an unusual, enlightened Southerner who wanted to go into politics and help right the country’s greatest wrong. And even more than her husband, Hillary formed many of her closest friendships with blacks; her mentor as a professional was a black woman, Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, for whom she went to work as a legal advocate for neglected and impoverished children; later, in the White House, Hillary chose several African Americans as senior aides, including her chief of staff. (Hillary and her subordinates on the first lady’s staff frequently referred to the president and his aides, half-jokingly, as “the white males in the West Wing.”)

  In Hillary’s junior year in high school, she and Betsy both became Goldwater Girls, assigned by local campaign aides to check for voter registration fraud in minority neighborhoods in Chicago. Hillary’s father raised no objection to his daughter knocking on doors in the slums to find out the registration status of voters whom the Goldwater campaign might be able to disqualify. Hillary’s territory included the new (and later infamous) Robert Taylor Homes housing project, bulldozed into oblivion as a symbol of poverty and racism eight presidencies later. She was a privileged suburban teenager seeing, close up, how thousands of poor black people lived, and it made a transforming impression.

  As Hillary’s school life and expanding social concerns became sources of great personal satisfaction, her life at home—at least with her father—was deteriorating. He adamantly refused to allow her to take ballroom dancing lessons in seventh grade and eighth grade, despite the fact that most Park Ridge boys and girls of Hillary’s age attended dance class every Friday night, and were encouraged to do so by their parents. Initially, her friends thought this was another example of his not wanting to spend money. But in fact money, for a change, wasn’t the issue. Rather, Rodham didn’t want his daughter dancing with boys, did not want his daughter in the dating game, though in Hillary’s circle most of the kids had known one another since kindergarten, had traded dog tags, entertained preteen crushes on one another, and long enjoyed going to the movies together in groups on weekends.