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

  To those in the neighborhood, Hugh was a dour, unsociable-to-the-point-of-rude character who never answered the front door or even bothered to acknowledge the presence of visitors to his home. Hillary would always remember the day her long-suffering mother took out a carpenter’s level and used it to give her some pointers on how to remain centered. Dorothy told her daughter to imagine that the carpenter’s level was inside her, and then she tipped it so that the bubble went to one end, then the other. “You try,” she said, “to keep the bubble in the center.”

  The advice paid off for Hillary, who was a model student at Eugene Field Elementary School—she spent her after-class hours covering her Girl Scout sash with the most merit badges of any girl in her troop—and then at Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High. Hillary’s peers weren’t sure what to make of her. According to classmate Betsy Johnson, the “other girls would say, ‘Oh, she’s so conceited.’ And I think it wasn’t until we were in high school that we realized what they took for conceit in Hillary probably was this sense of self-confidence that she’d always had. Always.”

  Park Ridge nurtured overachievers like Hillary. “It was a very conservative town,” recalled one neighbor whose father, like so many residents of Park Ridge, was a member of the right-wing John Birch Society. “Kids tried to please their parents back then, and nobody tried harder than Hillary Rodham.”

  Not that she had much choice. Her grumbling, grousing father brooked no disagreement, especially when it came to politics. Mom sat silently while her husband railed against FDR, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and the Kennedys, and when she accompanied him to the voting booth, he assumed she was following his lead and voting for Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy. She wasn’t. Mrs. Rodham may have urged her daughter to stand up for herself, but Dorothy’s sole act of defiance was to become a secret Democrat.

  Hillary kept trying to earn her father’s approval at Maine Township public high school, performing in school musicals and plays, winning class offices, working on the school paper, joining clubs (the pep club, the debating team, the brotherhood society), and racking up scholastic awards. She was a National Merit Scholar—one of only eleven at her school of 1,400 students. “She was ambitious as hell,” said one classmate, who said Hillary talked constantly about what would “look good on my résumé.” Another student, Arthur Curtis, agreed: “Hillary was very competitive at everything.” Curtis was taken aback when Hillary told him, “I’m smarter than you.” He was not alone. Where other children were told that it was not nice to brag, Hillary routinely informed her classmates that she was the smartest student at Main Township High. “Hillary was taught to fight,” Curtis said, “but she was never taught manners.”

  None of it seemed to matter much to Hugh Rodham, who only grudgingly agreed to buy her a dress for the junior prom because Dorothy was going to be a chaperone and she didn’t want to be embarrassed. Dorothy was, in fact, concerned about Hillary’s appearance—Hillary irked her mother by refusing to wear makeup—and her apparent lack of interest in boys. When the school newspaper predicted that the humorless, compulsive overachiever would wind up in a convent as “Sister Frigidaire,” Hillary paid little mind. “She thought it was all superficial and silly,” Dorothy said. “She didn’t have time for it.”

  Indeed, as a teenager Hillary seemed hell-bent on filling every spare moment with fresh ideas and eye-opening experiences. Through her church, First United Methodist, she volunteered to babysit the children of migrant farmworkers brought in each year to work the fields not far from Park Ridge. The Reverend Don Jones, a social reformer whose own guiding philosophy was anathema to Hugh Rodham, took Hillary and other members of his University of Life youth group to visit black and Hispanic inner-city churches.

  In April of 1962, Jones told Hillary and her church that they were going to Orchestra Hall to hear Martin Luther King deliver a speech called “Sleeping Through the Revolution.” Many of the other students were forbidden to go; in Republican Park Ridge, King was viewed as a rabble-rouser. But with a little gentle prodding from Dorothy, Hugh grudgingly signed the permission slip. After the lecture, Jones took Hillary and the others backstage to meet Reverend King—a moment that would be indelibly etched in Hillary’s memory.

  So, too, was the day when a teacher burst into Hillary’s high school geometry class to announce that President Kennedy had been gunned down in Dallas. “Probably some John Bircher,” her geometry teacher muttered before instructing everyone to file into the auditorium and wait to be sent home. When Hillary arrived, Dorothy, sitting spellbound before the family television set, admitted for the first time that she had voted for JFK.

  These eye-opening events notwithstanding, Hillary would admit that she continued to parrot Hugh Rodham’s beliefs. Hillary devoured Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative and wrote her term paper on the American conservative movement. Already an active member of the Young Republican Club, she went a step further and signed on to campaign for the Republican presidential candidate as a “Goldwater Girl”—right down, she would later admit, to the cowgirl getup and the hat bearing the slogan AuH2O.

  Around this time, Hillary decided to make her first run for “The Presidency,” as she solemnly referred to it—of her senior class. She had already served as vice president of her junior class and was eager to take on the top job. But the two boys she was running against made it clear they did not take the idea of a female candidate seriously. “One of the boys told me,” she later said, “ ‘You’re really stupid if you think a girl can be elected president.’ ” Hillary was soundly defeated on the first ballot—“which didn’t surprise me but still hurt,” she would recall forty years later.

  It was not the first time she had been thwarted by sexism; when she wrote NASA saying she wanted to be an astronaut, she received a letter from the agency coolly informing her that there were no plans to train women for careers in space. But the race for senior class president did expose Hillary for the first time to what, even then, she referred to as “dirty politics.” She called up Reverend Jones to complain bitterly of her opponents’ “mud-slinging”—and vowed never to take the high road again if it meant losing an election. “It was a bitter pill for her,” he said. “She was deeply hurt—and angry. Hillary hated to lose.”

  She couldn’t be senior class president, but Hillary was determined to be a highly visible presence on campus. In addition to campaigning as a Goldwater Girl, Hillary proposed holding a mock political convention in the school gym. The teacher who oversaw the “convention” knew that Hillary was campaigning for Goldwater, just as he knew Hillary’s friend Ellen Press was a supporter of incumbent Lyndon Johnson. To make things more interesting, Press was given the task of representing Goldwater while Hillary played LBJ. “I resented every minute of it,” she recalled.

  Hillary was voted Most Likely to Succeed when she graduated from Maine Township High in 1965. That fall Dorothy and Hugh made the grueling eight-hundred-mile drive to Wellesley for the first time—somehow managing to get lost in Boston and ending up in Harvard Square. Harvard was teeming with shaggy-maned radicals and scruffy potheads—or at least that’s the way it looked to Hugh Rodham. He threatened to turn back. But when the Rodhams finally did find their way to Wellesley, Hillary’s father was relieved at what he saw. There were no bearded hippies; in fact, with the exception of the stray tweed-jacketed faculty member, there were no men at all.

  A collection of brick-and-stone neo-Gothic buildings sprinkled across five hundred wooded acres, Wellesley was regarded by many as the country’s most beautiful college campus. The sylvan setting was an important part of Wellesley’s genteel image. Since its founding in 1875, Wellesley (like the other Seven Sisters—Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, and Vassar) catered to the pampered daughters of America’s privileged elite.

  The college’s unsurpassed academic reputation, the manicured grounds, the status, the contacts, the sense of tradition—the most famous of these involved rolling h
oops into Lake Waban to see which Wellesley grad would be the first to marry—all were factors in Hillary’s decision to attend Wellesley. One reason eclipsed all the others: Hillary had chosen Wellesley precisely because it was so far away from her autocratic father.

  Nevertheless, as she watched her parents drive away, Hillary felt “lonely, overwhelmed, and out of place.” Most of her classmates had gone to boarding schools, vacationed every year in places like Palm Beach and the Côte d’Azur, and spoke several languages. They also seemed to have the edge academically. Hillary excelled in what would become her major, political science, but faltered in geology, math, and French. After a month, she placed a collect call to Park Ridge and told her parents, “I’m not smart enough to be here.”

  Hugh Rodham had never praised his daughter for getting into the exclusive college and would just as soon have paid for Hillary to attend a cheaper school somewhere in the Midwest. He told her to come home. Dorothy, however, insisted she stay. “Don’t be a quitter,” she said. “We’re not quitters.”

  Hillary remained at Wellesley, focusing on her own ambitious scheme to restructure Illinois’s state Republican organization so that by the time she graduated she could make a serious run for office. Hillary also threw herself into her studies and class activities, taking over the Young Republicans and winning a seat in the student senate.

  Hillary had a room to herself in the Stone-Davis dormitory, a neo-Gothic structure perched on a hill with breathtaking views of Lake Waban. She would remain at Stone-Davis for all four of her years at Wellesley, dining each day with her friends in a flower-filled, glass-walled gazebo. Already adept at networking, Hillary quickly determined who was important to know on campus—and who might be of use to her in the future. Among the friends she would make during this period: Teddy Roosevelt’s great-granddaughter Susan Roosevelt, who would go on to marry future Massachusetts Governor William Weld, and Eleanor “Eldie” Acheson, granddaughter of Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson.

  With no men on campus to impress during the week, the women of Wellesley paid little attention to their appearance—and Hillary was no exception. Her dyed-blond hair had dulled to a lifeless brown, and she pulled it back in a ponytail or schoolmarmish bun. Hillary still eschewed cosmetics, and her bottle-bottom glasses were thicker than ever. Her wardrobe was pure sixties—tie-dyed shirts, frayed jeans, beads, and sandals.

  Hillary and her classmates did make more of an effort to look presentable on weekends, when they took the train to Cambridge to go out on dates with Harvard boys. Since Wellesley had a 1 A.M. curfew on weekends, Hillary would later remember that Route 9 between Cambridge and Wellesley was “like a Grand Prix racetrack…as our dates raced madly back to campus so we wouldn’t get in trouble.”

  Hillary soon began dating Geoffrey Shields, a prelaw student at Harvard who hailed from another upscale Chicago suburb, Lake Forest. Hillary went with Shields on hiking trips and to the occasional football game, but Hillary never seemed more fully engaged than when they were seated with friends on the floor of Shields’s Harvard dorm debating the issues of the day: poverty, civil rights, the Vietnam War. “That,” said Shields, “is when Hillary really came alive.”

  In the beginning, Hillary defended the presence of U.S. troops in Vietnam. But as a sophomore, she underwent a change of heart. Realizing that her beliefs “were no longer in sync with the Republican party,” she resigned as president of the Young Republicans. Not that she could be remotely described as a radical. Determined to bring about change by working within the system, Hillary pressed for greater minority enrollment—Wellesley counted only ten blacks among its students at the time—as well as an end to curfews.

  As confident as she was as an advocate, Hillary harbored doubts about the course her own life should take. Long before her future husband proclaimed, “That depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” Hillary asked, “I wonder who is me?” Writing to John Peavoy, a high school classmate now attending Princeton, Hillary mulled over which identity was right for her: that of “educational and social reformer, alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, or compassionate misanthrope.”

  Peavoy viewed Hillary’s soul-searching as “typical of the time, and also typical of the age. With the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in full swing, there was no way you could not be involved. We were still adolescents, really. So it was not so much ‘These are tumultuous times’ as it was ‘How does all of the this affect me?’ ”

  Ultimately, Hillary did not choose reformer, academic, pseudo-hippie, or misanthrope. Instead she settled on a fifth option: politician. “From the very beginning,” Peavoy recalled, “there was never any doubt that she was going to be the leader, at the head of something big.”

  Although she wrote to Peavoy saying that she did not regard herself as one of the “faceless masses,” Hillary felt it was her duty as a committed Methodist to lead her fellow citizens down the right path. With the pain of her high school election defeat still fresh, Hillary nonetheless decided to run for Wellesley student government president. To her amazement, she won.

  Hillary set out immediately to push her own agenda, lobbying hard for an end to Wellesley’s mandatory curriculum—a loosening of academic requirements that, years later as the parent of a college student, she would come to regret. She also campaigned successfully to end college rules barring men from setting foot in Wellesley dorm rooms.

  At twenty, Hillary was already being criticized for using her office to reward cronies with assignments to key school committees—a charge that would be leveled against her and her future husband repeatedly over the coming years. “The habit of appointing friends and members of the in-group should be halted immediately,” demanded the Wellesley News, “in order that knowing people in power does not become a prerequisite to office holding.”

  Politically, Hillary’s metamorphosis from Goldwater Girl to student activist was continuing apace. By the time she was a junior, Hillary was waving placards at antiwar rallies and chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” In March 1968 she drove up to Manchester, New Hampshire, to campaign for Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar Minnesota senator who was challenging LBJ in the Democratic presidential primaries.

  Hillary was buoyed by McCarthy’s strong showing in New Hampshire, and by the subsequent entry of Robert F. Kennedy into the race. But perhaps the single most pivotal event in Hillary’s political transformation was the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. Upon hearing the news, Hillary became hysterical. Once she regained her composure, she called her black friends at Wellesley to commiserate, then organized a small group to march with demonstrators at Post Office Square in Boston. Later Hillary, frustrated by Wellesley’s business-as-usual atmosphere, organized a two-day campus strike.

  Bobby Kennedy’s assassination just two months later intensified Hillary’s growing sense of despair and bewilderment. Yet she went ahead with plans that summer to intern in Washington, even though it meant reporting to the House Republican Conference. The group was then headed by Minority Leader Gerald Ford, and Hillary found herself working closely with New York Congressman Charles Goodell and Melvin Laird of Wisconsin. Hillary grew especially fond of Mel Laird, who would later serve as President Nixon’s defense secretary. Although they disagreed about the conduct of the Vietnam War, Laird took Hillary and the other interns seriously and actively sought out their opinions. (In stark contrast to a President whose exploitation of White House interns would lead to impeachment, she would later recall that Laird and the other congressmen she encountered treated women as equals. “I have pretty good antennae,” Hillary said the day before the Lewinsky scandal erupted, “for people who are chauvinist or sexist or patronizing toward women.”)

  At the end of her internship, Hillary was asked by Goodell to go to the Republican convention in Miami and work on behalf of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s eleventh-hour campaign to snatch the GOP nomination from Richard Nixon. Hil
lary would later say this first look into “big-time politics” was “unreal and unsettling”—for reasons that went beyond the power struggle between Nixon and Rockefeller.

  For starters, it marked the first time that Hillary, whose tightfisted father would never spring for something so extravagant, actually stayed at a hotel—Miami’s fabled Fontainebleau—and ordered room service. During the convention, Hillary also got to meet Nixon supporters Frank Sinatra and John Wayne, both of whom “feigned interest” in meeting her.

  Hillary’s contact with another intern, David Rupert, was less fleeting. The intense, argumentative, darkly handsome Georgetown University government major was working for Congressman Goodell, and he and the girl from Park Ridge hit it off instantly. Within a matter of weeks they were lovers. Hillary could be surprisingly spontaneous when it came to sex, Rupert recalled, but she was never one to risk an unwanted pregnancy in the heat of passion. Hillary always insisted on using birth control whenever they slept together.

  “It was an intense love affair,” Hillary’s friend Nancy Pietrefesa said. “Hillary was always attracted to arrogant, sneering, hard-to-please men, like her father.” Hillary’s highly charged relationship with Rupert, which she hid from some of the most important people in her life, would last for three years. It included parties at which Hillary presumably did her fair share of inhaling.

  Nixon’s nomination by the Miami convention hardly surprised Hillary; it had been all but a foregone conclusion. The Democratic convention in Chicago was another matter. When Hillary saw news reports of protesters flooding the streets of the city, she and a friend, Betsy Johnson, were determined to be part of the action. Telling their parents they were off to the movies, the two young women jumped in the Johnson family station wagon and headed for Grant Park, the center of the protests.