American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power Read online

  But on this occasion emotions ran high as Hillary moved down the line thanking everyone, from the kitchen staff to the grounds-keepers to the maids, for “taking such wonderful care of us each and every day.”

  The President enveloped each staff member, male and female, in a crushing bear hug—“more of a body-slam, really,” observed one breathless recipient of Bill’s affection. “I’m really going to miss you,” chimed in one of the stewards, “but I hear the next people go to bed at nine.” Hillary laughed, then gave White House butler Buddy Carter a lingering embrace that morphed into a waltz. Bill cut in, and the First Couple twirled down the hallway toward the Blue Room. (Still, a number of household staffers would throw their own “good riddance” party to celebrate the Clintons’ departure.)

  When George and Laura Bush arrived, their predecessors greeted them warmly. “Bush really connects,” Bill would later say of this meeting. “It’s a mistake to underestimate him.” Hillary was not about to make that mistake, now that she would be dealing with Bush from her own position of power on the Hill. At one point, W spotted Chelsea across the crowded room, trying hard not to be noticed as she wiped a tear from her eye. He sidled over to the Clintons’ only child and wrapped a reassuring arm around her shoulders. Chelsea beamed and quickly regained her composure. What kept her from breaking down entirely, Chelsea later told a fellow student at Oxford University, was the conviction that her mother would recapture the White House for the Clintons.

  As the two first families headed toward the door, they passed a member of the Marine Band seated at a piano in the Grand Foyer. Bill stopped, slid onto the bench next to the musician, and swayed dreamily to the wistful strains of “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” Hillary looked at her husband, her features hardening for one fleeting moment, then walked on.

  Her collar turned up against the cold, Hillary squinted into the sun and shivered as George W. Bush took the oath of office. Even as a twenty-one-gun salute thundered across the National Mall, workers swarmed over the Oval Office, giving it the “thorough scrubbing” Bush had promised it would get in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

  No longer President and First Lady, Bill and Hillary headed for Andrews Air Force Base, where Buddy the presidential dog waited for them at the top of the stairs of Presidential Air Mission 28000. A crowd of supporters had gathered inside a hangar to give Hillary and Bill a proper send-off. “I left the White House,” Bill told them, “but I’m still here.” The hangar erupted in cheers when he turned to Hillary and announced, “You’ve got a senator over here who will be a voice for you. I’m very proud of her, and I’m very, very proud of Chelsea.

  “So we’re going on to New York and spend the weekend and then Hillary will show up promptly,” Bill said, again gesturing to his wife the senator, “so as not to miss any votes….”

  Embodied in this moment was the ritual passing of the torch from one Clinton to another—and the fulfillment of an understanding that had sustained their relationship for three tumultuous decades. Yet behind her familiar toothy smile, Hillary worried that her husband, now left to his own devices, might self-destruct as he had so many times before.

  She was not alone. One of Bill’s most trusted advisers predicted that his former boss’s ego would be crushed and that he’d “definitely go off the deep end.” Friends recalled what happened when he lost the Arkansas governor’s race in 1980, for example, and was out of office for two years. “Bill basically went crazy sexually,” said a close family friend. “We’re all terribly afraid it’ll happen again.”

  It had been arranged for the Clintons to leave on a DC-9, but Hillary, ever mindful of appearances, wanted Bill to hold out for one of the two fully outfitted 747s that serve as Air Force One. It was important that the senator’s New York constituents be treated to the full presidential spectacle.

  When the plane that had been loaned to them was returned to its hangar at Andrews later that day, the maintenance crew was shocked to see that the interior had been stripped bare. The silverware and china bearing the presidential seal, the glassware, condiments, blankets, pillows, candies—even toiletries like toothpaste and mouthwash—were gone. “Thank God,” said one dumb-founded crew member, “the seats were bolted down.”

  The next day, Hillary stayed behind closed doors at their new house in the Westchester County village of Chappaqua, unpacking some of the merchandise they had taken from the White House. Bill, meanwhile, donned a fleece pullover and, with Hillary’s brother Hugh following in his SUV, headed out to a local deli. Outside Lange’s Little Store, a small group of startled townsfolk who had stopped to gawk began chanting “eight more years.” Inside, Bill shook hands with customers while he waited for his order—an egg salad sandwich for himself and a French vanilla/ regular coffee for his wife the senator. When Kathleen McAvoy’s daughter Siobhan balked at getting Clinton’s autograph, McAvoy asked, “Don’t you want a President’s signature?”

  “He’s not a President,” the little girl responded. Bill, smiling wanly, left with his egg salad sandwich and Hillary’s coffee.

  On that first Monday following the Clintons’ departure from the White House, a station wagon emblazoned with THE MAIDS—AMERICA’S MAID SERVICE pulled up to the Dutch colonial on Chappaqua’s Old House Lane and disgorged three women loaded down with carpet sweepers, dust mops, and vacuums. As the maids entered the house, Hillary and Bill, both clad in jeans and parkas, emerged to take the dog for a walk—and satisfy cameramen who had been waiting hours for a photo op. Bill held Buddy’s leash with one hand and Hillary’s hand with the other, beaming for the cameras and insisting that he was having “a good time unpacking.” Hillary made a point of telling reporters that she had gotten up early and conferred with her Washington staff by phone.

  As they turned to walk back inside, someone shouted, “Hey, move!” And another, “Get the fuck out!” Bill and Hillary spun around to see that the crowd was cursing at one of their own—a photographer who was blocking their shot. “I thought you were talking to us,” cracked Hillary, raising her voice so that it was audible over the din of traffic from nearby Route 117. “How soon they forget.” As they ambled up the driveway, Bill threw his arm around Hillary’s neck. “You know we are going back,” he murmured in her ear, wrongly assuming they could not be overheard. Hillary turned and looked up into his eyes.

  “We?” she whispered in reply.

  2

  Hillary was destined to run the show from the very beginning.

  —John Peavoy, longtime confidant

  There was always the perfectionist, the drive, always the ambition.

  —David Rupert, Hillary’s first love

  When I look at what’s available in the man department, I’m surprised more women aren’t gay.

  —Hillary

  Shit, I can’t even get her to use my last name.

  —Bill

  Intent on witnessing his daughter’s graduation, Hugh Rodham left his home in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge the night before, flew to Boston, checked into a motel near the airport, and then boarded the first train to Wellesley. It was important that someone from the family be there; Dorothy Rodham, who had been put on blood thinners and advised by her doctor not to travel, stayed behind in Park Ridge to care for Hillary’s younger brothers. Now Hugh watched proudly as Hillary, in her capacity as Wellesley Student Body President, strode purposefully to the microphone.

  Chosen to represent the Class of 1969, Hillary was following the day’s main commencement speaker, Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke. Only two years before, Hillary had campaigned for Brooke, a liberal Republican and an African-American, as president of Wellesley’s Young Republicans.

  But Hillary had changed. Dropping her prepared text, she wasted no time lambasting her predecessor at the podium. “Senator Brooke,” she began, “part of the problem for empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do anything.” What her generation wanted now, she said, was action. She ended with a classmate’s po
em that damned “The Hollow Men of anger and bitterness.”

  Brooke, obviously singled out as one of the “Hollow Men,” was stunned, hurt—and convinced that this was no extemporaneous speech. “As far as I could tell, she was not responding to anything I was saying,” he later observed. “She came that day with an agenda, pure and simple.”

  But Hillary claimed she was reacting viscerally to what Brooke had said. He had mentioned the Vietnam War and growing racial tensions only obliquely; for the most part, Hillary said, his was just another “onward-and-upward” graduation speech. But what really rankled Hillary was her perception that the senator’s remarks were somehow pro–Richard Nixon—a call to arms for any self-respecting campus activist in the 1960s.

  In response, Hillary offered nothing more than the muddled, sophomoric peace-and-love dogma that was so prevalent on campuses at the time. And, predictably, when it was over, Hillary’s mesmerized classmates leaped up to their feet and cheered.

  A sizable number of people in the audience were incensed—including short, sullen Hugh Rodham, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican who admitted that at that moment he wanted to “lie on the ground and crawl away.” Hillary’s father stiffened when he approached her after the ceremony. His reaction hardly surprised her. Even if she had not ambushed the distinguished senator from Massachusetts, Hillary knew her father—unlike the other dads at Wellesley that day—would never throw his arms around his daughter and tell her he was proud of her. Not even when, as a child, she proudly handed him her report card. “It must,” he would say, reading down the column of A’s, “be a very easy school you go to.”

  That graduation day at Wellesley, Hillary was embraced by her classmates and even some of her classmates’ parents—but not by her own father, whose approval she had always so desperately craved. Hillary would, in fact, always say that it was her self-made dad who spurred her on, simply by holding out the promise of his affection as a reward for high achievement. After four years at Wellesley carving out an identity of her own, however, it was dawning on Hillary that her father’s love might never be forthcoming. In a description fraught with Freudian overtones, she would later describe her father as a “self-sufficient, tough-minded small businessman.”

  No matter. Once her father departed for home, she ran to Wellesley’s Lake Waban, doffed her graduation gown to reveal a bathing suit underneath, and—in violation of the college’s strict rule against swimming in the lake—dived in. When she emerged, her clothes were gone. Wellesley’s president, Ruth Adams, had spotted Hillary swimming and, seething over the sneak attack on Senator Brooke, ordered security to confiscate them.

  Adams was not alone. Hugh Rodham fumed about his daughter’s impertinent remarks all the way back to Park Ridge. Sending his only daughter to Wellesley in hopes that she would receive a traditional finishing school education was, Rodham conceded only half-jokingly, “a great miscalculation!”

  If, by withholding his love, Hugh Rodham lit a fire under Hillary, it was Dorothy Howell Rodham who stoked that fire with affection and encouragement—and told Hillary from the age of seven that she should aim for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Dorothy’s own childhood had been anything but idyllic. Hillary’s Welsh-English grandfather was seventeen and an apprentice firefighter in the slums of South Chicago when Dorothy was born in 1919. Dorothy’s French-Scottish mother, Della Murray, was just fifteen—and illiterate.

  When she was eight years old and her sister only three, Dorothy Howell’s parents divorced. The two girls, terrified and alone, were put on a train bound for California—a harrowing three-day journey that Dorothy would never forget. Hillary would later say that every time her mother mentioned the cross-country train trip, she was “furious that any child could be treated like that.” Things only got worse when they settled in with their grandparents, British immigrants who were both physically and emotionally abusive to the little girls placed in their care.

  These Dickensian visions of small children being cast out to fend for themselves served as an object lesson for Hillary, who was taught from the cradle to believe that divorce was disaster. “Children without fathers,” she would later write, “or whose parents float in and out of their lives after divorce, are precarious little boats in the most turbulent seas.”

  Dorothy was fourteen when someone finally tossed her a lifeline, offering her a job as a live-in babysitter for a local family. Away from the poisonous atmosphere of her grandparents’ home, Dorothy flourished. At Alhambra High School, she joined several student organizations—the Spanish Club, the Scholastic Society, the Girls Athletic League—and excelled both academically and athletically. Graduating in 1937, she returned to Chicago and took a job as a secretary—“It’s what you did if you were a woman back then,” she later explained—at the Columbia Lace Company. Two years later, she met and began dating a young salesman named Hugh Rodham.

  Like Dorothy’s, Hugh’s childhood had been marred by ignorance and poverty. Hillary’s paternal grandparents were Welsh immigrants who, in an era before child labor laws, settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and went to work rather than attend school. Hugh landed a football scholarship to Penn State, and after graduating with a degree in physical education went to work unloading crate boxes at a warehouse. Later, Hugh struck out for Chicago—and a salesman’s job at the company where Dorothy Howell worked, Columbia Lace.

  Dorothy and Hugh were married after a five-year courtship, in 1942. Almost immediately, Rodham enlisted in the navy and discovered a unique opportunity to put his degree in physical education to good use. Rodham was assigned to whip raw recruits into shape using the Gene Tunny program, a regimen devised by the retired world heavyweight boxing champion.

  When he returned to Chicago after his discharge, Hugh declined an offer to return to his old job. Instead, recognizing that a postwar housing boom would mean a surge in demand for home furnishings, he launched his own custom drapery business. He and Dorothy were ensconced in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Chicago’s Lincoln Park district when, on October 26, 1947, Dorothy gave birth at nearby Edgewater Hospital to eight-and-a-half-pound Hillary Diane. Dorothy chose what she had always believed to be a man’s name, Hillary, because to her it sounded “exotic.”

  Even as a toddler, eager-to-please Hillary impressed her mother as being “very mature, very grown up.” When Hugh Jr. arrived three years later, the family relocated to suburban Park Ridge, an upscale, all-white Republican stronghold thirty-five miles northwest of Chicago.

  A tidy, two-story brick house encircled by shade trees at 236 Wisner Street—the corner of Wisner and Elm—would be the Rodham family home for the next thirty-seven years. For Dorothy, who had given up her own dream of attending college to fulfill the classic 1950s role of happy homemaker, the dignified-looking house with the arching windows and flagstone facade was also a prison.

  Hugh also played his role—that of the gruff, career-obsessed, tobacco-stained, crabgrass-battling dad—to perfection. But he went a step further. Although he indulged himself with a brand-new Cadillac every year, he was unsparing with his wife and children. Rodham paid Hillary and her two brothers (Tony arrived when she was eight) one penny for every weed they yanked out of the yard. Hillary woke up shivering every morning because her father turned off the heat at night. He swore “a blue streak,” as one neighbor put it, if things weren’t done just his way.

  Beneath the Leave It to Beaver veneer was the simmering domestic discontent familiar to many children of the 1950s. In the evenings, Hillary hid in her room while her parents hurled invective at each other over cocktails. Whatever the degree of her frustration, Dorothy, in keeping with the mores of the time, would never dream of airing her marital grievances in public. Yet she was also determined that “no daughter of mine was going to have to go through the agony of being afraid to say what she had on her mind. Just because she was a girl didn’t mean she should be limited.”

  No sooner had the Rodhams arrived in Park Ridge than four-year-old Hillary w
as confronted with someone hell-bent on “limiting” her options. A local girl named Suzy was the scourge of the neighborhood, routinely pummeling both boys and girls with unabashed glee. When Hillary came sobbing to her mother that she was afraid of Suzy, Dorothy Rodham offered no words of comfort. “There’s no room in this house for cowards,” she told her daughter in what would be a turning point in Hillary’s childhood. “The next time she hits you, I want you to hit her back.”

  Hillary marched back to Suzy’s house and, with an audience of boys on hand to witness her revenge, slugged the unsuspecting Suzy square in the face. Hillary, beaming with pride, dashed straight back home to tell her mother. “I can play with the boys now!” she proclaimed.

  “When she was old enough to play outdoors by herself,” Dorothy later recalled, “she could beat up on the neighbors’ children, but only if she had to. When she did, she’d go out, arms flailing, eyes closed—and whap! She’d get the better of them.” In a neighborhood where boys outnumbered girls two to one, Hillary had few female playmates. Still, whether the game was hide-and-seek, chase-and-run, or cops-and-robbers, Hillary invariably ran the show. “Boys responded well to Hillary,” Dorothy recalled. “She just took charge, and they let her.”

  Yet the one person whose approval Hillary craved the most “was never satisfied,” Dorothy later conceded. The Rodham children’s Norman Rockwell childhood of skinned knees, bike races, lost skate keys, and kiddie matinees was tainted by Dad’s forbidding presence. He made Hillary memorize stock quotes as well as baseball statistics, and when she couldn’t hit a curveball to his satisfaction, Rodham took her to Hinckley Park near their home and pitched balls at her for hours at a time until she could. On those rare occasions when she misbehaved, it was Dad the stern disciplinarian who threw her over his knee and spanked her.