In the classic American tradition, Hillary Rodham was born to a family of strivers – parents who, with pluck and luck, hurdled obstacles to rise above their own family’s history and achieve success. They showed her the way to her own even more remarkable ascent.
In her mother’s case, the handicaps were harrowing. Dorothy Howell was born in 1919 to Chicago firefighter Edwin Howell, Jr., and his wife Della Murray. Neither one had any talent or desire to raise children. When Dorothy was three, Della began leaving her for days at a time in the family’s fifth-floor walkup. The child sustained herself with meal tickets at a restaurant down the street. Edwin was a heavy drinker. When her parents defied working-class ideas of morality by divorcing, they sent Dorothy and her sister Isabelle to live with Edwin’s parents in Alhambra, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Dorothy was just eight; her sister was three. The girls traveled by themselves on the four-day train journey, with Dorothy in nominal charge of her sister.
Life was not any easier in Los Angeles. The girls’ grandmother, Emma Howell, demanded obedience. She discouraged Dorothy’s social life and enforced strict rules with draconian punishment. Once, Hillary wrote, “when she caught my mother trick-or-treating with school friends, Emma decided to confine her to her room for an entire year, except for the hours she was in school.” Dorothy wasn’t allowed to linger in the front yard on her way to or from class or even to eat at the family table. Months later, Emma’s visiting sister managed to end the sentence.
Dorothy took refuge in a world of books and became a good student. At fourteen, she escaped her grandmother’s house by taking a job as a live-in nanny for a family with two young children. She earned $3 a week, as well as room and board. She also got her first glimpse of a functioning family: Her employers were good parents who gave their children love, care, and a sense of values. Somehow, she took in the example.
But Dorothy’s mother betrayed her again. Dorothy was set to graduate from Alhambra High School and hoped to go on to one of California’s public colleges. For the first time in ten years, Della wrote her. She asked Dorothy to come back to Chicago to live with her and her new husband, who would pay for Dorothy’s education. Dorothy went – because, she once told Hillary, “I’d hoped so hard that my mother would love me that I had to take the chance and find out.” It was soon clear that Della wanted her daughter as a housekeeper, and there would be no money for schooling. Angry and heartbroken, Dorothy moved into a small apartment of her own. She found the first of a series of office jobs that finally led to her meeting and marrying a traveling salesman named Hugh Rodham.
Hugh’s father, Hugh Sr., had been born into a large family of Welsh-descended miners and laborers in the industrial city of Scranton, Pennsylvania. He started work as a boy at the Scranton Lace Company and worked his way up to supervisor. He was a gentle, easy-going man who doted on his energetic, independent-minded wife, Hannah. She started her own business, buying houses on credit and renting them out, and used all three of her names: Hannah Jones Rodham.
Hugh Jr. lacked the intellectual bent of his brothers Willard and Russell. Willard grew up to become an engineer; Russell, a doctor. Hugh was a mischievous boy who got in trouble for such stunts as roller-skating up the aisle of the Methodist church during evening prayers. When he graduated from Central High School, he followed his father into the lace factory. But his best friend had been recruited for the Penn State football team and talked the coach into taking Hugh on as well. Hugh played with the Nittany Lions, cultivated a knack for making bathtub gin, and graduated in 1935. He had a degree in physical education, which he discovered was worthless in the depths of the Great Depression.
Eager to make his own life, Hugh hopped a freight train to Chicago and found a job as a traveling salesman. He peddled drapery fabrics to retailers across the Midwest. Hannah didn’t want him to take the job, but Hugh’s father argued that work was hard to find. The family could use his paycheck. Hugh Jr. signed up – and drove back to Scranton most weekends to share his wages with his parents.
Dorothy Howell met Hugh at a textile company where she was applying for a job. She was attracted his dark good looks, self-assurance, and sense of humor. But given her parents’ history, she was wary of marriage. In time, Hugh won her over. They married in early 1942. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had launched the United States into World War II, and Hugh enlisted in the Navy. He became a chief petty officer at the Great Lakes Naval Station and trained thousands of young recruits for sea duty. After the war, he opened his own wholesale fabric business in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart and later set up a plant for silk-screen printing of fabrics.
Hugh and Dorothy were living in a small apartment in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood when Hillary, their firstborn, arrived on October 24, 1947. When Hillary was about three, they moved to the first house she remembers. It was a two-story brick home with two sundecks, a screened porch, and a fenced yard in the comfortable middle-class suburb of Park Ridge, fifteen miles northwest of the downtown Loop. Hugh Rodham, a strict conservative who didn’t believe in borrowing, paid cash for the house. He ran his business the same way, never going into debt. Hugh, Jr., was born in 1950, and Tony followed in 1954. They were raised in the style of the fifties. They had a stay-at-home mother who fed them soup and bologna sandwiches, kept the home tidy, and gave them unstinting care and attention.
Hillary’s mother favored reading over television. Card games and board games furnished supplementary lessons in arithmetic, the discipline of rules, and the importance of playing well with others. Children had the run of their neighborhoods in those days, and there were plenty of them, part of the postwar bumper crop that became the boomer generation. Hillary’s family spent every August at the rustic cabin Grandfather Rodham had built on Lake Winola in the Pocono Mountains northwest of Scranton. There, she and her brothers explored the woods and the surrounding countryside, boated and fished on the lake and the Susquehanna River, and learned first-hand about rural poverty. The Rodham cottage lacked a bathtub or shower and had no source of heat except the wood-burning stove in the kitchen.
Hugh Rodham’s conservatism carried over into his politics. He was a straight-ticket Republican who detested communists, dishonest businessmen, crooked politicians, and any government nose in his business. He abhorred waste and pinched every nickel. His children did chores but got no allowance for small purchases. “I feed you, don’t I?” Hugh would demand if anyone raised the subject. His wife, however, had learned compassion and empathy from her own difficult childhood. She tempered his views with her own style of moderate liberalism. Since neither of them hesitated to speak out, there were often lively and sometimes heated discussions around the dinner table. Hillary learned that there was room for opposing opinions and that disagreeing didn’t make someone evil or your enemy.
Park Ridge had good schools staffed by good teachers. (Hillary never entirely appreciated this fact until, years later, she became chairman of the Education Standards Commission in Arkansas.) At her mother’s insistence, she learned to resist peer pressures and stand up to bullies. She became co-captain of the safety patrol and a Girl Scout. And she took the lead in organizing activities for the children in her neighborhood. An old clipping from the Park Ridge Advocate shows twelve-year-old Hillary and her friends handing a United Way official a paper bag of money, raised from an Olympic competition they had staged. She got her first summer job at thirteen, working for the parks department supervising a small park a few miles from her home. Hillary towed a wagon filled with jump ropes, bats, balls, and other paraphernalia back and forth every day.
Hillary followed her father’s taste in politics and shared his outrage when John F. Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election. Kennedy only won, Hugh said, because Chicago’s Mayor Richard
J. Daley had cooked the vote count. Local Republicans called for volunteers to compare the lists of registered voters with actual residences. Thirteen-year-old Hillary and her friend Betsy Johnson jumped at the chance. They went without their parents’ permission since they knew it would be refused, and wound up surveying neighborhoods in the tough South Side of town. Hillary found a vacant lot that had been listed as the address for a dozen voters and a bar where a few more fictionally lived. She was happy to have proved her father right. But when she confessed what she had done, she wrote, “he went nuts” at the risk she had taken. It was all for nothing, he told her; “Kennedy was going to be president whether we liked it or not.” Later, Hillary would turn out for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, becoming a Goldwater Girl complete with cowgirl uniform and a straw hat with an “AuH2O” hatband.
High school was a shock at first. There were 5,000 students, all of them seeming to Hillary more grown-up than she was. Her confidence wasn’t helped when she went to change her hairstyle. The barber chopped off a huge hank of her hair by mistake, then “evened it up” by cutting off the other side. To restore the style she was used to, Hillary bought a fake ponytail at the dime store and fastened it to the back of her head. But then a passing friend gave it his usual friendly tug and yanked it off. It was, she said, the worst moment of her young life.
Nevertheless, Hillary thrived. She did well in her studies, joined the sixties’ hysteria over the Beatles, and grieved at the news of Kennedy’s assassination. Her first sense of feminist outrage came when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration replied to her application to become an astronaut. NASA explained that, as a girl, she wasn’t eligible. She never dated anyone seriously and determined early on not to give up a college education or a career to get married, as some of her friends were ready to do. “One of my smartest girlfriends dropped out of the accelerated courses because her boyfriend wasn’t in them,” she wrote, and another didn’t want her grades posted because they would be higher than her boyfriend’s. Hillary Rodham wasn’t afraid to be smart.
Her family had always been Methodists. Hillary’s faith was reinforced by a youth minister, Donald Jones, who has remained a friend ever since. From its founding by John Wesley, Methodism has always focused on pragmatic works more than matters of doctrine or salvation. Wesley’s key instruction was to “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the places you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” Jones, a recent graduate of Drew University, bolstered this credo with the teachings of Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Both were primarily concerned with justice, social reform, and human development. In his twice-weekly evening classes, Jones also exposed Hillary and her group to the paintings of Picasso, the poems of T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings, and the moral and ethical puzzles of Dostoyevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” passage. More traditional pastors in the church objected to his broader teachings, and Jones left his youth ministry after only two years to become a professor.
Not surprisingly, her teachers doted on her. When class and ethnic tensions led to fights among rival cliques at her nearly all-white school, the administration set up a Cultural Values Committee to promote tolerance and respect. The principal asked Hillary to be a member of the committee, and she was one of those interviewed by a local television station about their recommendations.
Her overcrowded school was split in half to populate a newly built high school. And Hillary became one of the new school’s first seniors. She ran for head of the student government. She lost to a boy, who told her she was “really stupid” if she “thought a girl could be elected president.” But she agreed to serve as head of his Organizations Committee, “which as far as I could tell was expected to do most of the work,” and she had fun doing it. During the 1964 presidential election, the school held a mock debate. Hillary was ready to defend Goldwater, and her friend Ellen Press backed Lyndon Johnson. Then their teacher, Jerry Baker, ordered the girls to switch roles. They protested but studied hard for the debate, paying attention to their opponents’ arguments. Hillary found herself defending Johnson on his foreign policy, poverty, healthcare, and civil rights record. Ellen grew just as passionate about Goldwater. “By the time we graduated from college,” Hillary wrote, “each of us had changed our political affiliations.”
An equally lasting contribution to Hillary’s education came from two of her advisers, graduate students at Northwestern who were teaching at the new high school. Karin Fahlstrom was a graduate of Smith College, and Janet Altman had gone to Wellesley. Each of them urged Hillary to apply to her alma mater. Hillary, who had never considered leaving the Midwest, began thinking about it. Her father ruled out Radcliffe, which he had heard was full of liberals, but had no objections to Smith or Wellesley, which he had never heard of. In those days, it wasn’t the fashion to visit colleges before applying to them. When both schools accepted her, Hillary chose Wellesley because the photos of its campus that she had seen included its small Lake Waban. It reminded her of her summers at Lake Winola.
Wellesley was a challenge. At first, Hillary’s classmates overwhelmed her with their sophistication and advanced-placement credentials. She wrestled with math and geology, and her French instructor told her flatly, “Mademoiselle, your talents lie elsewhere.” After a month, she called home and told her parents she couldn’t make it. But her mother said not to be a quitter. She stayed, gradually figuring out the courses and concluding that she could do it. She had an epiphany of sorts one snowy night when the college president, Margaret Clapp, turned up at her dorm. Clapp was recruiting volunteers to tramp through the foot-deep drifts gently shaking snow off the branches of evergreen trees to prevent them from breaking. “I decided that night that I had found the place where I belonged,” Hillary wrote.
Hillary’s class of 1969 was deeply affected by the upheavals shaking the country in the sixties, beginning with the musical and sexual rebellion and subsequently revolving around the war in Vietnam. The war inspired endless dormitory debates over its necessity, its morality, and the question confronting the students’ boyfriends: to serve in the military or resist, even by fleeing to Canada. By her junior year, Hillary had resigned as president of the college’s Young Republicans and supported the anti-war presidential campaign of Minnesota’s Senator Eugene McCarthy. She traveled to New Hampshire with friends to stuff envelopes and canvass precincts for his primary race there. The tumultuous events of 1968 – Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run again, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, the riots that tore through America’s cities – electrified Hillary and her friends.
She went to Washington that summer on an internship, assigned to work at the House Republican Conference. She got to know such powerful congressmen as Michigan’s Gerald Ford, Wisconsin’s Melvin Laird, and New York’s Charles Goodell. Goodell invited her to the GOP convention in Miami to help Governor Nelson Rockefeller in a last-minute but ultimately unsuccessful drive to win the presidential nomination from Richard Nixon. Hillary went home to Chicago in time for the Democratic convention there. With her friend Betsy Johnson, she watched the police attack demonstrators in Grant Park, a horrific scene that shocked both of them. She returned to Wellesley fearing for the future of America, but still persuaded that democratic activism was the better way to bring change – even though, she wrote, “I did not imagine then that I would ever run for office.”
She had already won office as head of Wellesley’s student government. In her senior year, she led a successful drive to persuade the college to eliminate its list of courses required for graduation. Hillary was also chosen by her class to be Wellesley’s first student speaker at graduation. College president Ruth Adams consented against her better judgment. Hillary responded with a striking meditation on her generation’s rite of passage through social and political turmoil. She defended the “indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest.” The challenge, s
he said, was to reach goals that seemed to be impossible. “Fear is always with us,” she concluded, “but we just don’t have time for it. Not now.” The speech won a standing ovation and national attention, with her photo in Life, television interviews, and an invitation to address the national convention of the League of Women Voters. But President Adams was not pleased. She spotted Hillary taking a farewell swim in Lake Waban next day and ordered a security guard to confiscate the clothes she had left on the shore.
Hillary decided to go to law school. She was accepted at both Harvard and Yale. The choice was cemented for her at a cocktail party for prospective Harvard recruits, when a friend asked a well-known professor to tell her why she shouldn’t “sign up with our closest competitor.” The great man looked down his nose at Hillary and said, “Well, first of all, we don’t have any close competitors. Secondly, we don’t need any more women at Harvard.”
At Yale, Hillary found twenty-six fellow female students in a first-year class of 235. It was a small percentage, but it was a breakthrough number, the end of women as token law students. Hillary devoted her time and attention to the turmoil of those years – the expansion of the war to Cambodia, the National Guard’s killing of four students at Kent State University in Ohio, the New Haven murder trial of eight Black Panthers – and political actions in response to all of them. During a speech at the League of Women Voters in Washington, Hillary met Marian Wright Edelman, the black civil rights activist who had founded the Children’s Defense Fund. That led to a long friendship with Marian and her husband, Peter Edelman, and also to a summer job researching the education and health of migrant children. Back in law school, Hillary decided to concentrate on law as it affects children. She grew interested in the work of the Yale Child Study Center. Contact there led to a job as a research assistant for a book by two of its faculty in partnership with the noted psychiatrist Anna Freud. Hillary wrote her first scholarly article, “Children Under the Law,” published in 1974 in the Harvard Educational Review.
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