A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  After Hillary decided to stay at Wellesley, she seemed to regain some of her old confidence and began making friends who would figure in the rest of her life. But even as she steadied her footing, there were stumbles and persistent signs of melancholy. In the winter of 1967, her junior year, she again experienced what she described in a letter as her recurring “February depression.” Despite earning As, dating a Harvard man regarded as a good catch, and working off-campus with disadvantaged children (including a seven-year-old Negro girl she tutored and had formed a close bond with), she sometimes overslept, nodded off in her classes, and became concerned that her teachers regarded her as a washout. “Why am I so afraid?” she wrote to her high school friend John Peavoy. “Or why am I not afraid? Am I really not unique after all? Will I have a clichéd life? Is life merely absurd?” (Hillary now sounded like a character in The Catcher in the Rye.) She now called herself an “agnostic intellectual liberal” and an “emotional conservative.” During Christmas break that year, she wrote to Peavoy again, expressing how alienated she felt from “the entire unreality of middle-class America,” in which she included her family, who, because of her difficult first semester, had insisted she cancel plans to meet Peavoy in New York City over the Christmas holiday. The following winter break, she told her parents nothing of her holiday plans and headed for Dartmouth College and a round of parties where she stayed overnight after meeting a young man.

  The most important man in her life during the Wellesley years, despite the distance between them, was Don Jones. By mail, he became her counselor, correspondent, confessor, partner in Socratic debate, and spiritual adviser. When depression struck, she turned to him, as she would for the next three decades, including the year of her husband’s impeachment. He focused her on theologian Paul Tillich’s sermon “You Are Accepted,” in which he says that sin and grace coexist. “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness,” said Tillich. “It happens; or it does not happen.” Hillary was convinced there would be grace in her life and meanwhile she would just carry on.

  For the rest of her life, spiritual and quasi-spiritual axioms (some imbued with New Age jargon, others profound) would serve as soothing balms in painful times, and provide answers to questions and situations that seemed otherwise confounding. These comforting postulations would also be used by Hillary to justify, often publicly, her or her husband’s less palatable actions or aspects of character.

  WHEN HILLARY ENROLLED at Wellesley, the campus was edging toward great changes, pushed by the women’s movement and pulled by the politics of the 1960s. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had been published in 1963. Its thesis, based largely on the experience of Friedan’s fellow alumnae from the Smith College class of 1942, held that women were victims of a pervasive system of delusions and false values that urged them to find their fulfillment and identity vicariously, through their husbands and children. More radical feminists preached open hostility toward males. Hillary was in her freshman year when Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), dedicated to achieving equality of opportunity for women.

  Until the mid-1960s, a visitor to the Wellesley campus might have concluded that the goal of a Wellesley woman was to find the brightest Harvard or Yale graduate, marry him and hitch her wagon to his politics or stardom, raise bright children, and become the person who could, at dinner parties, jump in to cleverly point out similarities between the opposing positions of guests fighting at the table. (The description is borrowed from an alumna of that period.) The Latin motto of the college was non Ministrari sed Ministrare, a New Testament exhortation to minister service, not receive it; invariably, it was interpreted by generations of Wellesley women as “not to be ministers but to be ministers’ wives.”

  The most important aspect of Wellesley for Hillary and for thousands of others who had gone there before her was that it was an all-women’s school. (“You don’t have the thing where women don’t put their hands up because someone might not take you out because you know the answer and they don’t,” noted a fellow graduate.) In Living History, Hillary agreed with that assessment and said that “psychic space” was created without men on campus. Throughout her four years there, she lived in Stone-Davis, an imposing mock-gothic pile that served both as a dormitory and a hub of sisterly conversation, activity, and purpose. The nexus of Stone-Davis was its glass-enclosed dining hall, where a community of women convened, socialized, and formed friendships. Risk-taking was easier in an all-female environment.

  Though Hillary was the beneficiary of the “women’s liberation” movement (as it was then known), she was hardly one of its pioneers or even a firebrand of its second wave. By the time of her graduation, she still reflected the traditions of her upbringing, but also had been hugely influenced by the movement’s accomplishments, so visible on the two coasts of America especially. Moreover, what was happening in America in regard to women—literally liberating them in a fundamental sense—was consistent with her mother’s ambitious aspirations for her daughter. Who better than Hillary Rodham to be the exemplar of Wellesley’s transition? She could toe the line with one foot and drag the institution forward with the other.

  Aspects of Wellesley seemed stultified for the age: incoming freshmen were forced to wear beanies; room assignments were made on the basis of race and religion—not just Jewish students with Jewish students, but Episcopalians with Episcopalians, and Catholics with Catholics. Wellesley wasn’t nearly as politically engaged as many other schools in the era. “There was a teacher who used to rage at the class because they were so timid,” recalled a graduate of only a few years before. “It was just a group of young women who didn’t want to take a stand on anything, including, Is it a major chord or a minor chord?”

  Hillary appeared to come late to embrace real solidarity with women as a class. Other women who encountered her over the next two decades, including some of her close friends, felt she could be oblivious to the obstacles impeding her gender, because her own experience was so singular. “She was neither intimidated nor inhibited by any barrier or stereotype—so much so that any weakness she might have is a lack of empathy for others, for whom those barriers have been more difficult. Hillary barged through with such force that she didn’t even seem to take note,” said Betsey Wright, one of the women with whom she was closest from the time of her law school graduation through her husband’s governorship.

  The evolution of Hillary’s politics during her years at Wellesley—1965 to 1969—was characteristic of millions of her generation, especially Midwesterners from conservative families who went off to college in the East and found themselves moving toward (and sometimes beyond) liberalism as they grappled with the three great issues of the day: civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and the role of women. Some were radicalized (incongruously, many of the leaders of the Weathermen, for instance, were Midwesterners), but Hillary’s progression was predictably even-keeled.

  No doubt Hillary was a product of her time, an era in which many young people chose to protest violently, and others “turned on, tuned in, and dropped out,” as Timothy Leary had put it. But she always followed a sensible course. Hillary’s methodology and goals in terms of politics were reform, not radical change. A faculty adviser said, “I would argue that everything that Hillary has done in her adult life…strikes me as a classic Wellesley kind of graduate concern: families, children, and social reform.”

  Greg Craig, who knew Hillary well during her law school years and would become White House counsel to Bill Clinton a generation later, said, on the basis of his conversations with her, “It seemed that the 1960s had passed relatively by” at Wellesley. Hundreds upon hundreds of students from Harvard, Yale, Vassar, and Columbia mobilized and went south to participate in the Freedom Rides and voting drives of the so-called Mississippi Summer. But Wellesley’s women were much more removed, and Craig concluded that, far from committing herself to such direct activism, “Hillary was in learning mode then and listening mod
e.” He discerned little of the hardness that characterized so many later portraits of her. “I had no sense of the toughness, of the intensity. I didn’t see it, I really didn’t. And I was, I think, close enough to her to have seen it.”

  Detachment from politics was not the Wellesley way. Polite participation was. During Hillary’s freshman year, she eased into the leadership of the Wellesley Young Republicans club, and by the end of the second semester was elected its president. Meanwhile she had begun questioning her party’s policies on civil rights and the war in Vietnam. Barry Goldwater had been defeated for president in her last year of high school. Now she found herself moving toward the distinctly liberal (and minority wing) of the party. Her alienation from her father seemed exacerbated in their few discussions and letters, as he became typically dismissive and antagonistic to her increasingly feminist, egalitarian, and antiwar assertions. She had also begun reading—and citing—the New York Times, much to his consternation.

  As a high school graduation present, Hillary’s church in Park Ridge had given each of its senior class members a subscription to motive magazine, the official publication of the Methodist Student Movement. Its views were far different from her customary sources of information. The magazine echoed the call of John Wesley and his disciples to faith-rooted social activism, but also contained provocative articles by New Left theoreticians including Carl Oglesby, who later became head of the radical Students for a Democratic Society. Meanwhile, her ideas, old and new, were subjected to unfamiliar scrutiny as she came under the influence of professors whose outlooks were much less parochial than those of her teachers in Park Ridge, whether left or right, conservative or liberal. After a while, she would write later, her views were not Republican ones.

  Peter Edelman, who knew Hillary before she met his wife-to-be, Marian Wright Edelman, thought Hillary’s politics “reflected what you would expect in a certain kind of young person at the time…sort of on the liberal side. She was opposed to the war in Vietnam and she had a very instinctive interest in children’s issues that had already manifested itself” before she graduated from Wellesley. She had caused a slight stir on the campus when she brought a black classmate—one of only ten at the college—with her to church services in town, a week after classes began during her freshman year. “I was testing me as much as I was testing the church,” Hillary wrote to Don Jones. She appeared interested in her own motives, which was not something she often expressed curiosity about. For a person so focused on religion and spiritual notions, Hillary seemed to many acquaintances to be surprisingly devoid of introspective instinct, and when things went wrong, she habitually looked elsewhere for the reasons. It was only after she became a candidate for the Senate that she meaningfully acknowledged personal responsibility for the failure to reform health care during the Clinton presidency. She told Jones that, had she seen someone else make the same gesture a year earlier of taking a black classmate to an all-white church, she might have thought, “Look how liberal that girl is trying to be going to church with a Negro.”

  Once she had recovered her emotional equilibrium at Wellesley, fellow students, even those uncomfortable with her politics, were drawn to Hillary’s natural warmth, humor, and obvious ability to get the job done. There was something both generous and gracious about her character that made people like being around her. She possessed a seemingly unselfish ability to praise others, recognize their personal concerns, remember meaningful details about their lives. These elements figured in the willingness of many of Wellesley’s overprivileged young women to see Hillary as their leader, instead of other students whose prep school backgrounds they shared.

  She was also notably direct in almost everything she did. This could be either an asset or intimidating. Her undisguised ambition for recognition and praise also figured in the equation, and she cultivated relationships unabashedly with well-connected students, influential members of the faculty, and administrators. “She already knew the value of networking, of starting a Rolodex, even back then,” a Wellesley contemporary observed, not too admiringly. “While she was respected across the board, and she had her circle of friends, I would not say she was popular.” (Others would dispute the latter assertion.) Some found her “not always easy to deal with if you were disagreeing with her,” noted Wellesley’s president at the time, Ruth Adams. “She could be very insistent.” She also could be impatient and aloof. Yet she became a figure of almost unique stature on the campus: a leader, socially concerned, personable, articulate, hardworking, hard-studying, fun-loving. But she revealed little of her interior life to those around her. As in the White House years and beyond, some spoke of her in almost reverential fashion. Hillary seemed aware of this mystique, but even then she was never known to address it in discussion with others. She carried the notion as part of herself.

  Hillary continued to follow the student leader path she had trod at Maine East and South. At a time when many of her contemporaries at other colleges were directly challenging the authority of college administrators and of government structures, she carefully worked within the system, joining peaceful marches for civil rights and against the Vietnam War in Cambridge, New Haven, and New York. Rather than become a leader in larger protest movements off the campus and work to fuse her student constituency with them, she kept matters self-contained. She steered the antiwar movement at Wellesley—and student rage after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968—away from the kind of confrontation with civil authorities and school administrators that convulsed many other campuses.

  Still, Hillary and the members of her class were responsible for greater changes at Wellesley than any in its history. When her class arrived in the fall of 1965, men were not allowed in Wellesley’s dorms (except on Sundays), and students could not drive cars on campus or wear jeans or slacks in the dining hall or on trips into town. By the time she was chosen commencement speaker of 1969, the student body had become politicized as never before; Black Studies was added to the curriculum and, under pressure from the student government, the college had agreed to increase the number of black students and faculty members. The following fall, 104 blacks would be accepted and 57 would enroll. At Hillary’s insistence, a summer Upward Bound program for inner-city children was initiated on campus, antiwar activities were conducted in college facilities, the skirt rule had been rescinded, grades were given on a pass-fail basis, parietal rules were a thing of the past, interdisciplinary majors were permitted for the first time. One of Hillary’s strengths as a leader, still evident today, was her willingness to participate in the drudgery of government rather than simply direct policy from Olympian heights. She attended committee meetings, became involved in the minutiae (of finding a better system for the return of library books, for instance), and studied every aspect of the Wellesley curriculum in developing a successful plan to reduce the number of required courses.

  Her political transformation was incremental. She spent the summer of 1966 at a beach cottage on the Lake Michigan shore, babysitting and working as a researcher for an ex-Wellesley professor who was editing portions of a book about the war in Vietnam, The Realities of Vietnam: A Ripon Society Appraisal. The Ripon Society was a liberal Republican movement, founded in 1964, which took its name from Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party; its statement of purpose declared that the party’s future would be found “not in extremism, but in moderation,” a play on Barry Goldwater’s declaration that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The professor for whom Hillary worked had been asked to leave Wellesley, ostensibly because of his antiwar activism but perhaps because he was an unusually nonconformist figure on the campus. That summer, he gave Hillary books to read by Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong, both out-of-the-mainstream Catholics and revolutionary theorists in the field of media. The fact that they came from a Jesuitical tradition, with similarities to Hillary’s Wesleyan orientation, appealed to her.

&nb
sp; By summer’s end, her opposition to the war in Vietnam was adamant—though the antiwar movement was still in its infancy—and she now identified herself as a Rockefeller Republican, at the very left of the party, some of whose younger adherents gravitated to the Ripon Society.

  Her political interests were more expansive than the usual partisan agenda of either party, and reflected her idealism at the time. One day that summer, walking on the beachfront, she came upon hundreds of dead fish that had washed up on the polluted Lake Michigan shore. She buried them beneath the sand. That evening she wrote to her boyfriend, Geoff Shields: “It is really a shame that they are taking the beauty out of the beach and the fun out of the swimming. If I ever have any sort of influence I’m going to use a majority of it for human conservation and the rest for nature.”

  HILLARY’S EXPLORATION during her Wellesley years was focused just as intensely on men as it was on politics. She liked them. Geoff Shields, who had grown up in a much wealthier Chicago suburb, Lake Forest, on the North Shore, twenty minutes and light-years away from Park Ridge, was her first serious boyfriend (or, as Wellesley women were taught to say, beau). In high school, Hillary and members of her circle had usually socialized in groups of unpaired girls and boys who hung out together at the luncheonette on Main Street after school and went to the movies on weekends. Couples who “went steady” or were considered “in love” were exceptional, and tended to be sexually inexperienced, according to Betsy Ebeling. If Hillary had engaged even in heavy necking before she got to Wellesley, no one said so.