Hillary Clinton’s childhood was not the idyll suggested by the front porch and
gently sloping lawn of what was once the family home at 235 Wisner Street,
Park Ridge, on the fringes of Chicago.
In this leafy environment, hers was distinctly a family of odd ducks, isolated
from their neighbours by the difficult character of her father, Hugh Rodham.
He was a sour, unfulfilled man whose three children suffered his sarcasm and
parsimony and silently accepted his humiliation of their mother.
Hugh and his wife Dorothy were polar opposites — intellectually and
emotionally. He was a 16-stone former naval physical education instructor
who recreated the barracks experience in his own home. She was a resilient
woman whose childhood had been a horror of abandonment and cruelty.
When Hillary’s first boyfriend in college, Geoff Shields, visited the Rodham
house, he wondered why Dorothy had not walked out. But she had made her own
uneasy peace with her husband and, when the children were still young, had
decided to stay in the marriage.
Keeping the family together was more important than 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 once said of
Hillary. “She had to put up with him.”
Hillary’s own difficult but enduring marriage is perhaps more easily explained
in the context of her childhood and the marriage of her parents.
As a child, she tried every way she knew to please her father 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 who dwarfed others around them. In Clinton’s case,
this dominance was seductive. Rodham’s effect on people, especially outside
his immediate family, was usually unpleasant.
As she later did with her husband, Hillary eventually took an almost biblical
view in her forgiveness and rationalisation of her father’s actions: “Love
the sinner, hate the sin.”
One of Bill’s and Hillary’s principal aides was sceptical.
Hillary, said the aide, “hates the fact that Bill Clinton cheats on her, and
that he doesn’t need her as much as she wants. 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.”
Hillary, said the aide, evolved into “kind of the classic bitchy wife . . .
not quite putting her hand on her hip and finger-wagging at him, but
practically. Nah-nah-nah . . . 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 observed, characterised the way Dorothy Rodham sometimes
responded to her husband’s failings.
AS harsh, provocative, and abusive as Rodham was, he and Dorothy imparted to
their children a pervasive sense of family.
They were assertive parents who believed that with discipline, hard work,
encouragement (often delivered in an unconventional manner) and enough
education at home, school and church, a child could pursue almost any dream.
In the case of Hillary, born on October 26, 1947, this would pay enormous
dividends, sending her into the world beyond Park Ridge with a steadiness
and sense of purpose that eluded her two younger brothers.
But it came at a price: Hugh imposed a patriarchal unpleasantness and ritual
authoritarianism on his household, mitigated only by the distinctly modern
notion that Hillary would not be limited by the fact that she was a girl.
He presided over life in the Rodham household like a belittling,
impossible-to-satisfy drill instructor. A former college football player, he
was broad shouldered and 6ft 2in tall, the same height as Bill Clinton. But
he had an injured knee and he issued his commands from his living room chair
(which he rarely left, except for dinner), barking orders, denigrating,
minimising achievements, ignoring accomplishments, raising the bar
constantly for his frustrated children. “Character building,” he called it.
Nurture and praise were left largely to his wife, whose gentler nature he
often trampled.
“Don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass on your way out,” he frequently
said at the dinner table when she’d get angry and threaten to leave.
Confronted with resistance, he turned fierce. If Hillary or one of her
brothers had left the cap off a toothpaste tube, he threw it out the
bathroom window and told the offending child to fetch it, even in snow. At
dinner he growled his opinions, indulged few challenges to his provocations,
and rarely acknowledged the possibility of being proved wrong. Still,
Hillary would argue back if the subject was substantive and she thought she
was right.
Decades later, Hillary and her brothers suggested that their father’s
confrontational style was part of a grander scheme to ensure that his
children were “competitive, scrappy fighters”, to “empower” them, to foster
“pragmatic competitiveness”. But there is little to suggest that she or her
brothers interpreted it so benignly at the time.
In high school, Hillary realised she was by no means the cleverest member of
her class and that to compete at the top level she would have to work harder
than others. She was an honour roll student by force of will, intense
preparation and dutiful study.
Even with such extraordinary effort, her grade average was too low to be among
the top 10 students in her class. But in classroom debates, her prodigious
memory and preparation made her formidable.
When she came home with all As except for one B on her report card, however,
her father suggested that her school was too easy.
Unleashed, his rage was frightening. Betsy Ebeling, Hillary’s closest
childhood friend, could see that life with Hugh Rodham was painfully
demeaning for her mother.
Sometimes his tirades would begin in the kitchen and continue into the
parents’ bedroom while Hillary put her hands over her ears.
“I could go home to two parents who adored everything I did,”
said Betsy. “Hillary had a different kind of love; you had to earn it.”
Hugh had worked in lace-making and embroidering since childhood, as had his
Welsh immigrant father. He manufactured shades and curtains that he sold to
hotels, offices, cinemas and airlines — printing, cutting and sewing the
fabric himself.
He invested wisely and saved prodigiously.
Every summer the family took a two-week holiday at a cabin he and his father
had built in the rolling Pennsylvania hills. It had no heating, bath or
shower.
When Hillary and her mother became reluctant to go, Hugh promised a shopping
spree on the return trip. He drove to Fifth Avenue in New York and told them
they could buy whatever they wanted before the stores closed at 5pm. Mother
and daughter had only 25 minutes; they took off their shoes and ran.
Certainly Hugh Rodham was proud of the accomplishments of his children, but if
his methodology was intended to convey tough love the results were mixed at
best.
His constant pushing of Hillary’s brothers — “They got ridden, treated like
men from the time they were three years old,” said a relative — did not
always take. Hillary alone seemed to possess his self-discipline. Toward her
he was capable of a modicum of tenderness. He taught her baseball; fished
with her; lingered over her maths homework; told her tales of his childhood;
and exempted her from some of the tasks assigned to her brothers.
Hillary found a way in difficult times either to withdraw or to focus on what
her father was able to give her, not what was denied. She knew she was
loved, or so she said.
Their relationship deteriorated as she reached her teens, however.
He refused to allow her to take ballroom dancing lessons.
He did not want her dancing with boys, did not want her in the dating game.
Some boys didn’t think she was attractive, said one of her male classmates.
They liked girls who were “girlish”
. Hillary was “womanish”. Her ankles were thick. She had a reputation for
being bossy. Though she displayed an easy humour with girls, boys often
perceived her as too earnest and aloof and, by implication, uninterested in
sex.
Other boys, usually older ones, were attracted by her seeming self-possession.
She did not go out on dates often, but it wasn’t for lack of invitations.
Partly it was because she was more interested in other pursuits, and partly
because she seemed anything but confident about herself with the opposite
sex.
Hillary was convinced that her father’s penurious attitudes and his tendency
to overrule her mother in decisions affecting her as a young woman forced
her to dress unattractively.
Betsy and others at school believed his attitude undermined Hillary’s sense of
femininity.
GRADUALLY, the conflicts over money and boys, and Hillary’s chagrin at her
father’s prevailing demeanour, led to an almost complete breakdown of their
relationship.
As this chasm broadened, Hillary and her mother drew closer.
Dorothy had been abandoned by her own parents at the age of eight and raised
by a cruel grandmother until another family took pity on her.
She was determined that Hillary would experience no hesitancy in speaking her
mind or pursuing her goals. If someone tried to muzzle Hillary or get in the
way, Dorothy counselled, “don’t let it happen”.
“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, who is among Hillary’s closest long-standing friends.
Matters are hardly so simple.
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.
There was another influence. In 1961 there arrived in a red Chevy Impala
convertible a transforming figure who, until she met Bill Clinton, would
become the most important teacher in Hillary’s life. He was a Methodist
youth minister, the Reverend Don Jones, 26.
Hillary had never met anyone like him. Jones became something between a father
figure, adored brother and knight-errant.
Hillary had been confirmed at the Methodist church in Park Ridge, but until
Jones showed up there her sense of politics and her sense of religion
existed on two different planes. Now they began to meld into one as he
promoted what he called the “University of Life” two evenings a week at the
church.
He assigned Hillary readings from TS Eliot and EE Cummings; showed them copies
of Picasso’s paintings; discussed Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov;
played Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall; and shepherded the privileged
children of Park Ridge to black and Hispanic churches in Chicago.
After two years, Jones was forced out by members of the congregation for being
too “freethinking”. But he remained a counsellor over the decades, showing
her ways to cope with adversity and to “salve [her] troubled soul” through
the doing of good works.
During the Clintons’ White House years, Jones and his wife were frequent
visitors there.
Aside from her family, Hillary’s Methodism is perhaps the most important
foundation of her character. As one of her aides said during the Lewinsky
epoch, “Hillary’s faith is the link . . . It explains the missionary zeal
with which she attacks her issues and goes after them, and why she’s done it
for 30 years. And it also explains the really extraordinary self-discipline
and focus and ability to rely on her spirituality to get through all this .
. .
“She’s a woman of tremendous faith. Again, not advertised. She’s not one of
those people who’s out there doing the holy roller stuff. But that’s how she
gets through it: some people go to shrinks, she does it by being a
Methodist.”
Other members of the White House staff believed, however, that she used her
religiosity as a cover for her faults. Some saw it as a mask in her
relationship with her husband.
“She elevates her staying with [Clinton] to a moral level of biblical
proportion,” said a presidential deputy. “I am stronger than he is. I am
better than he is. Therefore, I can stay with him because it’s my biblical
duty to love the sinner and to help to try to overcome his defects of
character.”
Her father shut his business and retired at only 54, broken in spirit and
withdrawn after the deaths of his parents and brothers.
Depression seemed to haunt the Rodham men. Both of Hillary’s brothers, to
varying degrees, seemed to push through adulthood in a fog of melancholia.
Hillary herself fell into debilitating, self-doubting funks at college. And
whatever tendency toward depression she had either inherited or developed
would surface again in the White House.
There was, however, a reconciliation with her father, and when he lay dying
after a stroke in 1993 she rarely left his bedside.
Her mother fulfilled a lifelong goal of attending college in her late sixties
(majoring in psychology). She lives with Hillary in Washington.
The other two members of thee family, Hugh Jr and Tony, were the beneficiaries
of their sister’s protection. In her teens and 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.
© Carl Bernstein 2007
