First In His Class (48 page)

There were no black or Asian families in Park Ridge at that time. Hispanics were seen only during the harvest season when migrant workers picked vegetable fields on the edge of town. The lone black student was a foster child. There were no Jewish residents either, though a few miles east along Dempster Street stood the kosher delicatessens of heavily Jewish Skokie. Park Ridge was an enclave of Methodists and Catholics. Divorces were virtually unheard of:
when one
marriage disintegrated in the Rodhams' neighborhood, it was the talk of the town. All communities have secrets and contradictions, and Park Ridge was no different. The town remained dry through the decades, but in name only. White panel trucks full of liquor would roll in on Saturday mornings and make backalley deliveries. But for the most part the children of Park Ridge did not see this, just as they paid little attention to the fact that their town was segregated. They saw life being lived one way, remembered Rick Ricketts, “and we thought everyone else was like us.”

The Rodhams voted Republican, as did most of the citizens of Park Ridge, many of whom had escaped the Democratic machine politics of Chicago. Hugh Rodham, who drove a Cadillac and railed against labor unions, instructed his children to watch the Republican national conventions on television every four years, but when the Democrats convened, the television was turned off. He taught his children how to read the stock market tables in the
Chicago Tribune
. Hillary once described the Park Ridge of her youth as “
conservative but
not paranoid,” with “a strong support for education and a tolerant attitude about people.” Dorothy Rodham held “
a much
more intellectual view than most moms in that neighborhood,” according to Sherry Heiden, one of Hillary's friends. She had “a real love of beauty,” recalled another friend, Betsy Johnson, and would return home from their annual summer trip to Pennsylvania with stained-glass windows, jeweled fobs, and other antiques she collected. Both parents encouraged Hillary to read and study world events and compete as an equal with boys. The basket on her bicycle was often filled with books. Even in grade school, she would talk about politics. “We'
d get
our
Weekly Reader
and discuss what was in it,” recalled Rick Ricketts. “We'd talk about lots of things that you wouldn't expect fourth or fifth graders to think about.” On summer afternoons, they sometimes sat on a low wooden fence at the corner of Wisner and Elm and solved all the world's problems.

When she was fourteen, entering the ninth grade, Hillary joined a Methodist church group for teenagers run by Don Jones, her congregation's youth minister. Jones sought to expose his students to the human condition outside their comfortable suburban world.
He considered
himself a liberal realist and called his class “The University of Life.” “The name kind of fit what I was trying to do,” Jones later recalled. “I felt knowing the human self, the limitations and the possibilities, was one of
the most
important concepts for any of us to grasp.” His church group used secular art forms. They read the poetry of Wallace Stevens and e.e. cummings. On a retreat they watched one of Jones's favorite movies,
Requiem for a Heavyweight
, featuring Anthony Quinn as a burned-out fighter. Jones talked to his students about two characters in the heavyweight's entourage. One, played by Mickey Rooney, keeps trying to build up the fighter's esteem. The other, played by Jackie Gleason, seems less admirable because he knows the fighter is washed up and tells him so. But Jones offered a different perspective. The Rooney character, he said, was living an illusion. Deep down in the no of the Gleason character, on the other hand, was a theological yes. Before human beings can reach their potential, they have to get a realistic grasp of who they are. “In the midst of life, tragedy comes and it strips away our illusions,” Jones told his students. “Those moments are times to realize our potential, our possibilities.”

Rodham and her friends rode the old church bus to new worlds Jones wanted them to encounter. One Sunday night in April 1962 he took them to Orchestra Hall on Michigan Avenue for a lecture by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., entitled “Sleeping Through the Revolution.” Jones arranged for them to go back stage after the speech and introduced each of them to King by name. Hillary Rodham's handshake with King was not as important in her life as young Clinton's handshake with Kennedy was in his, but there is a symmetry to the two events, one evoking a transference of politics, the other of social action. Jones also took his students to a recreation center on the South Side where they met with teenagers from the inner city. He used art to “level the playing field” between the kids from Park Ridge, who were better educated, and those from the city, who had tougher life experiences. Once he placed a print of Picasso's
Guernica
on a chair and asked them to describe what it meant. The Park Ridge students could speak of it only in abstract terms, while those from Chicago said that it reminded them of seeing people killed in their neighborhoods.

What Jones sought to accomplish in the trips to Chicago had nothing to do with a benevolent suburban church assisting the economically disadvantaged. Just the opposite: He was using the city as he used literature and film and art—as a means of prying open the minds of his comfortable students and introducing them to the pain, complexity, and alienation of the modern world. In a sense he was preparing them for the sixties.

After two years at Park Ridge, Jones left to teach in New Jersey, where he eventually became a theology professor at Drew University. He corresponded through the years with several of his former students, including Hillary. He had a powerful early influence on her social consciousness, yet he believed that in one sense his efforts to shock and disturb the children of Park Ridge had little effect on her. “I don't think my undersided stuff worked with Hillary. She was so secure in all of this. In part it had to do with her family. And in part the Methodist Church. Except for my brief interlude, Methodists there carried an almost sentimental belief in progress and a belief in people. They believed that if only we loved everyone, the world would be a better place. Hillary lived in this comfortable cocoon. And she had so many successes in her life. She withstood the sixties without losing hope.”

T
HE
high school experience in Park Ridge in the early 1960s “wasn't exactly
Happy Days
, but it was close,” thought Sherry Heiden. There were greasers and jocks, some drinking, virtually no drug use. Girls wore skirts and dresses to school. Apathy and cynicism were not as prevalent as they would become later. Hillary and her classmates in Park Ridge, much like
Clinton and his peers in Hot Springs, Arkansas, were regarded as the chosen ones. There was little their parents would not do for their educational benefit. The baby boom was exploding in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Hillary's class at Maine Township High bulged with fourteen hundred students out of a total enrollment of nearly five thousand. To accommodate the boom, a new school, Maine South, opened in her senior year. She was sent there along with half of her classmates, but it was a sterile new place with no traditions yet. Though Hillary's class would graduate from South, they would always think of their alma mater as the massive old three-story school at the corner of Dempster and Dee, with its green Art Nouveau designs inlaid in orange-tan brick topped by a red tile roof.

Hillary was perpetual motion in high school. Her picture pops up everywhere in the yearbooks: posing on the stairwell inside old Maine with the staff of
Ghost Writer
, the sophomore newspaper; seated in the auditorium as student council representative; at her classroom desk with the cultural values committee; standing under the flagpole as junior class vice president; on the end of the third row of the brotherhood society; among eight members of Maine South's “It's Academic” quiz show team; kneeling demurely in long checkered skirt and sleeveless black shirt as one of eleven National Merit Scholarship finalists. The picture that reveals the most about young Hillary Rodham shows her in the middle of seventy-two senior girls seated in the bleachers in their gym uniforms. Her face leaps from the anonymous mass of the photograph. Her straight dark-blond hair covers her right eye, giving her an almost piratical appearance; but even more than that, the lift of her jaw, the angle of her pose, the barely detectable smile, all add to a portrait of fire and self-confidence in an otherwise docile and awkward scene.

For the most part, the girls of Park Ridge felt discrimination in subtle ways. The most overt case for Hillary came long distance when she wrote to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration seeking guidance on how to become an astronaut. It was her childhood dream; she and her little brother Hughie would often go down to their basement and pretend they were flying a spaceship to Mars, with Hillary at the controls. But NASA tried to squash that dream. She received a letter back discouraging females from applying. Although she was not a gold medal candidate, she was a competent athlete who might have been on a varsity squad, but there were no girls' sports teams then. Her gender did not hold her back in school politics, which she loved. (She once invited Rick Ricketts to a girls' choice prom and “talked politics all through the dance.”) She won more elections than she lost, and her only defeat was to another girl. At one point she decided that the school administration was not enthusiastic enough about student government. As chair of the committee in charge of elections, she
drafted an elaborate proposal based on a mock national political convention—with nominating speeches, seconding speeches, candidate speeches, and floor demonstrations—and took it to the principal, who felt he had no choice but to let her implement it.

Near the end of her junior year, she wrote a long
letter to
her former youth minister detailing her many accomplishments. She had become a National Merit Scholar and had been invited to talk on a local television show about youth problems. She had been chosen chair of the organizations committee and was rewriting the student government constitution and reorganizing the committee. Student politics could get rough, she told Jones. In her last election, the opposition campaign manager started “slinging mud” at her, but she decided to respond with a “let's-keep-it-clean, flag, motherhood and apple pie campaign.” And it worked. The spring prom was approaching, Hillary wrote, and her parents would serve as chaperones. She seemed embarrassed about the dress that her father let her buy. “Looking at it, I think everyone else next to me will think they are overdressed, it is so modest.”

Hugh Rodham
did not spoil his children. He taught them that rewards came only through hard work. His daughter earned her spending money as a baby-sitter. And if the scholastic rewards seemed to be coming too readily, he questioned whether the work was too easy. When she came home with perfect test scores or top grades, he would receive the news with a half-serious grunt that her school must not be very challenging. It was not that he was not proud of his daughter, just that he was not demonstrative. When guests came to the house, if he was at the television watching a sports event and drinking a beer, it was rare that he would budge from the chair or even grunt in acknowledgment.

Hillary Rodham was more talkative. In the rare instances when she got in trouble at school, it was because of that. She talked in class. Ricketts, her neighborhood pal, sat in front of her in a history class taught by Paul Carlson.
Hillary kept
up a running commentary during Carlson's lectures. “She would say something I had to respond to, so I would turn around, and Carlson would get mad at me,” Ricketts recalled later. “One time Carlson was playing a recording of General MacArthur's Old Soldiers Never Die' speech and we both started laughing. Mr. Carlson took us out to the hall and read us the riot act.”

In her politics, Hillary resembled her conservative father. She devoured Barry Goldwater's
The Conscience of a Conservative
and volunteered as a “Goldwater Girl” during the presidential campaign in the fall of 1964, her senior year. But starting with Don Jones's liberal realism, she felt the tug of other points of view. Most of her favorite teachers were young and socially conscious, including two women who persuaded her to apply to eastern women's colleges.

·  ·  ·

R
ODHAM
finished high school in the top 5 percent of her class and was voted most likely to succeed. In the fall of 1965. she left suburban Chicago without looking back. Her mother, after dropping her off at Wellesley College on the edge of Boston, cried in the Cadillac all the way home as her unemotional husband drove silently along the turnpikes and toll roads back to the Midwest. Perhaps the mother realized that her daughter would never live in Park Ridge again save for a few weeks at a time during holidays and summer breaks. Though Rodham entered adulthood determined to forge a career in politics or social action, she felt no sentimental tug or practical reason to go home to do it. Bill Clinton always talked about heading back to Arkansas. No one heard Hillary Rodham speak the same way about Illinois.

Her politics changed semester by semester at Wellesley, which is to say that the college years from 1965 to 1969 transformed her as they did millions of other members of her generation. In the autumn of her first semester, she met Geoffrey Shields, a Harvard student who came from another Chicago suburb, Lake Forest, a wealthy community along Lake Michigan, where he had been a high school leader and all-state football player. They dated for three years and underwent similar evolutions from midwestern high school conservatives to northeastern campus liberals. Rodham was active in student government and Young Republicans in her first year, but Shields thought of her as largely nonideological, likening her mind to “
a clean
slate.” She seemed “very interested in exploring political ideas, interested in the process as opposed to the ideology of politics.” Her major focus was campus reform: making curriculum requirements more flexible and dormitory policies less restrictive.