American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (2 page)

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.

I
ntent 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 poem 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 was 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.

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.”