A Woman in Charge (5 page)

Dorothy was determined that her daughter would have none of the disadvantages of her own childhood nor experience hesitancy in speaking her mind or pursuing her goals. If someone tried to muzzle Hillary or get in the way, Dorothy counseled, “don't let it happen.” When four-year-old Hillary was getting pushed around by a bigger girl known as a bully in the neighborhood, her mother supposedly told her, “There's no room in this house for cowards.” Though Hillary was scared, Dorothy instructed her to strike back the next time. Hillary encountered the bully soon afterward, hit her in the face in front of several boys, ran back to her mother, and proclaimed, “I can play with the boys now.” The story is basically true, Dorothy insisted.

Characteristically, she urged Hillary to set lofty objectives, and suggested she might become the first female Supreme Court justice. (Hillary preferred the idea of being an astronaut, and wrote to NASA at age fourteen to volunteer; she was told no women need apply.) Dorothy also wanted her children to be able to maintain their equilibrium, however great the chaos. To make her point, she showed Hillary how the bubble in a carpenter's level moved to dead center. “Imagine having this carpenter's level inside you,” she said. “You try to keep that bubble in the center. Sometimes it will go way up there”—she tipped the level so the bubble drifted—“and then you have to bring it back.” She straightened the level.

Hillary took easily to school from the start, bringing home almost straight As from Eugene Field Elementary School. She was also nearsighted in the extreme, and thick glasses were prescribed for her at age nine—a defining experience for a young girl growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. Hillary's spectacles, usually with red or purple frames, remained an essential part of her appearance until she got her first pair of contact lenses at age thirty-three. Sometimes she was vain enough to leave her glasses at home and needed someone to help her get around, “like a seeing-eye dog,” wrote Hillary. (At a school reunion many years afterward, she asked Betsy, repeatedly, “Who is this person? Do I know him? Who's that one?” Betsy would remind her and Hillary would reply, “Oh, I never knew what they looked like.”)

By her own account and those of her schoolmates, she was a tomboy in grade school. Though she could sometimes be a clumsy athlete, her father's instruction in baseball and football, and repeated practice sessions with her mother, gave her enough skill to at least stay in the game with the boys. She was also a strong swimmer. Her mother batted tennis balls at her regularly on the public courts of Park Ridge, but her game remained underdeveloped. One playmate, Jim Yrigoyen, was fond enough of her to give her his dog tags to wear briefly.

Hillary's capacity for making deep friendships, especially with girls and, later, women (though hardly to the exclusion of boys or men) was already evident in elementary school. In sixth grade, Betsy Ebeling transferred to Eugene Field and she and Hillary became the closest of friends. They took piano lessons from the same teacher (after Hugh Rodham relented and paid for an upright that sat in the living room), passed their lifesaving swimming tests together, helped each other with homework, and treated each other's homes almost as their own. During the summer, the girls and their mothers would put on white gloves and go into the city to have lunch at Marshall Field's, spend the afternoon at the Art Institute, and then return to suburbia on the train. Gloves were an essential part of feminine apparel and both Hillary and Betsy had fully stocked glove drawers in their bedroom vanities.

In elementary school, Hillary became known as a teacher's pet, because of her desire to please, her willingness to work hard, and her ability to stay alert. By eighth grade, classmate Art Curtis said, he and Hillary were the two biggest overachievers in the class. The first time they met, Art and Hillary stood outside her house on the corner and talked about Barry Goldwater. Her father's politics still held considerable sway in Hillary's schema—as they would until after she reached college. “I was immediately taken with her,” Art recalled. He liked her competitiveness. While most girls talked about makeup and boys, Hillary was “absolutely political” at a stage when “politics wasn't cool.”

Even in adolescence, her self-confidence was evident. Hillary was definitely not a worker bee; she was disposed to running things, whether it was in her Girl Scout troop or the neighborhood carnival. Her assemblage of merit badges was formidable, and she looked forward to wearing her uniform to school on the days when her Scout troop met. But the combination of being teacher's pet, self-assurance, and the occasional inability to recognize classmates because she wasn't wearing glasses led some students to regard her as conceited. She was aware of this view of her. Few assertions could be as hurtful, but she was never known to complain.

By the time she reached Maine East High School, John F. Kennedy was president, the population of the Chicago suburbs was bulging from the baby boom, and
American Bandstand
was on TV. Though some students at Maine East smoked and occasionally drank, Hillary and Betsy and their crowd were not among them. Both girls moved in the more popular circles of the school and were generally well liked. Hillary seemed to be involved in almost every extracurricular activity featured in the Maine East yearbook: student government, school newspaper, cultural values committee, the Brotherhood Society, prom committee, member of the
It's Academic
quiz show team that competed on local television. She also became one of the school's eleven finalists for a National Merit Scholarship. She wanted to be a doctor, an ambition she retained through her early Wellesley semesters, when she recognized that her discomfort at the sight of blood would make such a career impossible.

By tenth grade, Hillary had realized she was by no means the smartest member of her class, and that to compete at the top level of academic achievement she would have to work harder than others. She was an honor roll student by force of will, intense preparation, and dutiful study. Even with such extraordinary effort, her grade point average was too low to be among the top ten students in her class. But the term “well-rounded,” an important accolade of the era, understated her achievement. In classroom debates, her prodigious memory and preparation made her formidable. Her competitive sense was highly developed, to say the least, both on the athletic field and in student government. She rewrote the student assembly constitution and, in eleventh grade, became class vice president. In her senior year of high school, she ran for what she called “the presidency.” In a letter to the youth minister of her church, she wrote that her opponent's campaign manager had begun “slinging mud” at her, but that “we did not retaliate. We took the high road and talked about motherhood and apple pie.” She was overwhelmingly defeated on the first ballot. She now understood how rough student politics could be. In another letter, she noted that she had run “against several boys and lost, which did not surprise me but still hurt, especially because one of my opponents told me I was ‘really stupid if I thought a girl could be elected president.'” One of her heroes was Margaret Chase Smith, then a senator from Maine, the first woman to be elected to both houses of Congress and the first woman to be placed in nomination for president by a major party (the Republicans).

Because of overcrowding at all-white Maine East, Hillary and her classmates from Park Ridge were transferred in their senior year to Maine South, a racially mixed and ethnically diverse school. Until then, their school lives had been relatively untouched by urban reality. Hillary and other students from her neighborhood had never had a black teacher or minister or close black friends. As Betsy Ebeling said, “We were ignorant…until we went into the city and saw that people did not live in houses like ours.” Betsy's mother, who had grown up on Lakeshore Drive, told her that she had never seen a Negro shopping in Marshall Field's until after World War II.

In 1961, unbeknownst to Hillary's parents, Betsy's grandfather, who described his politics as “progressive,” took her and Hillary to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak at the Chicago Sunday Evening Club. King talked about racial segregation in the North as well as the South. It was the first time Hillary, then fourteen, grasped the notion of Negro children being the country's poorest and most vulnerable.

If there is a single defining thread of Hillary's political, religious, and social development, it is her belief and determination, from her teenage years onward, that the tragedy of race in America must be made right. What in part first attracted her to Bill Clinton was her perception that he was an unusual, enlightened Southerner who wanted to go into politics and help right the country's greatest wrong. And even more than her husband, Hillary formed many of her closest friendships with blacks; her mentor as a professional was a black woman, Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund, for whom she went to work as a legal advocate for neglected and impoverished children; later, in the White House, Hillary chose several African Americans as senior aides, including her chief of staff. (Hillary and her subordinates on the first lady's staff frequently referred to the president and his aides, half-jokingly, as “the white males in the West Wing.”)

In Hillary's junior year in high school, she and Betsy both became Goldwater Girls, assigned by local campaign aides to check for voter registration fraud in minority neighborhoods in Chicago. Hillary's father raised no objection to his daughter knocking on doors in the slums to find out the registration status of voters whom the Goldwater campaign might be able to disqualify. Hillary's territory included the new (and later infamous) Robert Taylor Homes housing project, bulldozed into oblivion as a symbol of poverty and racism eight presidencies later. She was a privileged suburban teenager seeing, close up, how thousands of poor black people lived, and it made a transforming impression.

As Hillary's school life and expanding social concerns became sources of great personal satisfaction, her life at home—at least with her father—was deteriorating. He adamantly refused to allow her to take ballroom dancing lessons in seventh grade and eighth grade, despite the fact that most Park Ridge boys and girls of Hillary's age attended dance class every Friday night, and were encouraged to do so by their parents. Initially, her friends thought this was another example of his not wanting to spend money. But in fact money, for a change, wasn't the issue. Rather, Rodham didn't want his daughter dancing with boys, did not want his daughter in the dating game, though in Hillary's circle most of the kids had known one another since kindergarten, had traded dog tags, entertained preteen crushes on one another, and long enjoyed going to the movies together in groups on weekends.

By high school, boys seemed to have two different views about Hillary and her unusual kind of appeal. “Guys 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 humor with Betsy and some of the other girls, boys often perceived her as too earnest and aloof and, by implication, uninterested in sex. So much so that the Maine newspaper wrote “humorously” that she would become a nun, one day, with the name “Sister Frigidaire.” But some 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.

Some of the difficulty was the way she dressed. Her face, without her glasses, was unquestionably pretty, though she had something of an overbite. And when she dressed up, it was said she had a certain tasteful look of refinement and sophistication. But she didn't dress up often, and style did not come to her naturally. 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. “He didn't want to give her money to do things that she wanted to do,” said Betsy. “We were all clothes crazy and he didn't see that as a good reason for spending a lot of money or time.” Betsy and others at school believed his attitude undermined Hillary's sense of femininity, making it difficult for her to feel comfortable or popular with boys.

The essential rite of passage to young adulthood in suburban America of the 1950s and 1960s was getting a driver's license. Hugh Rodham forbade it. “You don't need to drive a car, you have a bike,” he insisted. Besides, Betsy, who did drive, picked Hillary up whenever they needed to get somewhere together.

Embarrassed to have to continue riding her bicycle while her classmates drove (and, in some instances, even owned) cars, Hillary took matters into her own hands. Lori Jo Hansen, a classmate, surreptitiously helped her get her driver's license. Hillary's father was incensed at first, but after some lobbying by her mother he finally agreed that she could sometimes drive his Cadillac. She turned out to be an awful driver.

As Hillary's senior prom approached, her anger and disillusionment with her father became almost uncontrollable (or as uncontrollable as Hillary could get). She and Betsy were to double-date, chaperoned by the Rodhams. Hillary was clearly embarrassed by the dress her father had permitted her to buy. “Looking at it, I think everyone else next to me will think they are overdressed, it is so modest,” she wrote to Don Jones, the former youth minister of her church.

Betsy fixed Hillary up with Jim Van Schoyck, whom Ebeling had once dated back in tenth grade. Van Schoyck balked at the idea initially, saying Hillary was a bit too nerdy for him. But he agreed to call her, and took her out on a “practice date” a couple of weeks before the prom. They went for a drive and Jim stopped the car at the top of the Lutheran General Hospital's winding driveway, brought out his skateboard, and asked Hillary whether she'd ever ridden on one. She hadn't, but not wanting to say no, Hillary said she could do it. Jim handed her the skateboard and Hillary stepped on.