Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | LP 921 CLINTON | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Carl Bernstein' s stunning portrait of Hillary Rodham Clinton shows us, as nothing else has, the true trajectory of her life and career with its zigzag bursts of risks taken and safety sought. Marshaling all the skills and energy that propelled his history-making Pulitzer Prize reporting on Watergate, Bernstein gives us the most detailed, sophisticated, comprehensive, and revealing account we have had of the complex human being and political meteor who has already helped define one presidency and may well become, herself, the woman in charge of another. We see the shaping of Hillary as a self-described " mind conservative and heart liberal" -- her ostensibly idyllic Midwestern girlhood (her mother a nurturer, but her father a disciplinarian, harsher than she has acknowledged); her early development of deep religious feelings; her curiosity fueled by dedicated teachers, by exposure to Martin Luther King Jr., by the ferment of the sixties, and, above all, by a desire to change the world. At Wellesley, we watch Hillary, a Republican turned Democrat, thriving in the new sky' s-the-limit freedom for women, already perceived as a spokeswoman for her generation, her commencement speech celebrated in "Life "magazine. And the book takes us to Yale Law School as Hillary meets and falls in love with Bill Clinton and cancels her dream to go her own way, to New York or Washington, tying her fortune, instead, to his in Arkansas. Bernstein clarifies the often amazing dynamic of their marriage, shows us the extent to which Hillary has been instrumental in the triumphs and troubles of Bill Clinton' s governorship and presidency, and sheds light on her ownpolitical brilliance and her blind spots-- especially her suspicion and mishandling of the press and her overt hostility to the opposition that clouded her entry into the capital. He untangles her relationship to Whitewater, Troopergate, and Travelgate. He leads us to understand the failure of her health care initiative. In the emotional and political chaos of the Lewinsky affair we see Hillary, despite her immense hurt and anger, standing by her husband-- evoking a rising wave of sympathy from a public previously cool to her. It helps carry her into the Senate, where she applies the political lessons she has learned. It is now "her "time. As she decides to run for president, her husband now "her "valued aide, she has one more chance to fulfill her ambition for herself-- to change the world. In his preparation for "A Woman in Charge, "Bernstein reexamined everything pertinent written about and by Hillary Clinton. He interviewed some two hundred of her colleagues, friends, and enemies and was allowed unique access to the candid record of the 1992 presidential campaign kept by Hillary' s best friend, Diane Blair. He has given us a book that enables us, at last, to address the questions Americans are insistently-- even obsessively-- asking about Hillary Clinton: What is her character? What is her political philosophy? Who is she? What can we expect of her?
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Which Hillary Clinton will prevail in this sprawling, muddled biography? Is she a "messianic" idealist or a ruthless pragmatist given to negative ad campaigns and vilifying opponents? A liberal feminist firebrand or a closet traditionalist and Washington prayer-group fixture? A Lady Macbeth, a First Soul-mate, or a stand-by-your-man marital martyr? Bernstein (All the President?s Men) gives us all these Hillary's, foggily uniting them by reference to her "extraordinary capability for change and evolutionary development." (Then again, the Senate candidate who "told voters largely what they wanted to hear" seems much the same species as the Wellesley student-body president who "was more interested in...achieving victory than in taking a philosophical position.") Bernstein?s ill-balanced treatment puts "the Journey"-Hillary?s mystic term for her politico-conjugal relationship with Bill Clinton-at the center of the story, particularly her dominant, sometimes disastrous role in Bill?s scandal-plagued administration. Ever the investigative reporter, the author serves up chapters of eye-glazing Whitewater arcana and probes Hillary?s emotional turmoil as she defends Bill from bimbo eruptions, but flits through her entire post-impeachment career as a high-profile senator and leader of the Democratic party in a scant 19 pages. Bernstein provides a densely detailed road-map of Hillary?s life, but we get little sense of where the Journey has taken her. Photos. (June 5) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
New York Review of Books Review
A THOUGHT experiment: What would Hillary Rodham Clinton have been like if she hadn't decided to be a political spouse - or lead a public life? Would she have been the kind of gal who invited other women into her office for a late-night Scotch, regaled them with a dead-on impersonation of the firm's managing partner (though she'd probably be the managing partner) and actually complained about her husband? If you're an admirer, this vision seems entirely plausible. If you aren't, your ideas about the private Hillary are probably a good deal more baroque (sharpened knives, purloined files, etc.). And that's the problem, isn't it? After 16 years on the national stage, Hillary Clinton is still a bafflement - a formidable building that appears, no matter how many times you circle it, to have no door. This impenetrability doubtless accounts for the wide range of feelings she generates (absent knowing what's inside, voters can ascribe motivations both good and evil). And it's this impenetrability that doubtless explains why so many journalists can't stop writing about her, even though she's a biographical subject who appears, at both first and 50th blush, to offer few rewards. In the last month and a half, three extremely well-respected journalists have come out with two books that attempt to divine who the real Hillary might be. One, Carl Bernstein's "Woman in Charge," is plainly sympathetic, while the other, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.'s "Her Way," is more severe. (If there's any doubt as to which is which, just consult the two book covers - Gerth and Van Natta's shows Hillary in, quite literally, a much harsher light.) Both go off the rails at the moments their grand unified theories can't quite accommodate the facts, and both practically narcotize readers when they descend into rote recapitulations of the Clinton scandals. But it's Bernstein who ultimately makes the sharper, more lasting impression, despite the soft-focus portrait of the junior senator from New York on his cover. While he plows some of the same emotional terrain as previous Hillary biographers - notably Gail Sheehy in "Hillary's Choice" - his book holds together as a piece of writing, and he keeps the psychobabble to a merciful minimum. He also attempts to write a genuine biography, describing and interpreting the life Hillary has led and the varieties of forces that shaped her. Gerth and Van Natta are more apt to treat the former first lady as a supercomputer - unfeeling and cool to the touch, mutely calculating in binary code. Bernstein opens "A Woman in Charge" by taking a close and ultimately useful look at her father, Hugh Rodham, "a sour, unfulfilled man" who made regular sport of humiliating not only his children but also his wife, Dorothy. Like Hillary, Dorothy Howell waited years to marry her husband, suspecting he was involved with another woman, and like Hillary, she soberly tolerated her husband's excesses, prompting not a few people to wonder why on earth she stuck by him. "By the time Hillary had reached her teens," Bernstein writes, "her father seemed defined by his mean edges - he had almost no recognizable enthusiasms or pretense to lightness as he descended into continuous bullying, ill humor, complaint and dejection." Much has been made of Hillary's marital stoicism over the years. It's one of the reasons people distrust her. But it's possible she comes by it honestly. Bernstein is best known for his coverage of Watergate with Bob Woodward six administrations ago. But his book suggests that it isn't his executive-scandal bona fides that make him a qualified Hillary biographer; it's his bona fides as a lousy husband. Like Bill Clinton, Bernstein carried on a very public affair while married to a formidable, high-profile woman (see Nora Ephron's "Heartburn" for further details), and one of the perverse strengths of his book is his intuitive understanding - a sinner's lament, really - of what happens to a proud woman when she's intimately betrayed and publicly humiliated. The blockbuster news item to come out of Bernstein's book was that Hillary contemplated running for governor of Arkansas in 1989, when she discovered her husband was thinking about abandoning his post and his family for another woman. (Here, the priceless quotation from the long-suffering Clinton aide Betsey Wright: "Bill, you're crazy if you think everybody in this office is oblivious to the fact that you're having an affair. You're acting like an idiot.") But the impulse to run for governor didn't occur to Hillary in a vacuum. It was the clear product of years of pent-up frustrations, thwarted ambitions, sacrifice and injured pride. From the moment Hillary arrived at Yale Law School in 1969, she was a campus celebrity: her graduation speech at Wellesley College had earned her a photograph in Life magazine; she was fielding invitations to speak before the League of Women Voters and to appear on national TV. Everyone assumed she had a bright future in politics. Yet Hillary Rodham always knew that tying her fate to Bill Clinton was a risky proposition. It's what gives her story the whiff of Greek tragedy (and bathos). Certainly she was smitten with him for all the reasons we know - his like-minded political vision, his charisma, his enthusiasm in the face of her own force - but she also knew he had an ungovernable tomcatting problem and a mystical attachment to Arkansas, a backwater for career women. For years, he asked her to marry him, and for years, with tons of job options before her, she wavered. Only after her work on the Nixon impeachment committee ended and she failed the Washington bar exam did Hillary pack up and head down to Fayetteville, where Bill was running for Congress. When she arrived, Bill was carrying on with a student volunteer. After he lost, he threw a "payback chicken dinner" for supporters, and the men retreated to the back of the room to talk politics. When an old law school friend, Nancy Bekavac, tried to join them, Hillary stopped her, instructing her to stay with the women through dessert and coffee. "Bekavac told Hillary she couldn't believe she was in modern America," Bernstein writes. '"This is Australia in 1956,' she said. 'This is like mind Jell-O.'" Roughly a year later, in 1975, Hillary at last decided to marry Bill, but she made it clear she wasn't going to be a typical Southern bride or spouse. She refused an engagement ring and announced she wasn't changing her name; at the wedding of her closest friend, she wore a tux. (Turns out Rudy Giuliani isn't the only 2008 front-runner to have appeared publicly in drag.) But once Bill became governor, Arkansans grew wary of her independence and policy role. Over time, Hillary was forced to attend the quaint ladies' lunches she once avoided; she even changed her name. And all the while, she endured rumors about Clinton's extramarital affairs. (In 1987, Wright compiled a list of potential problem women and concluded there were so many it was impossible for him to run for president: "I was horrified because I thought I knew everybody," she tells Bernstein.) By 1989, when Hillary contemplated running for governor herself, Dick Morris took a poll and discovered she'd reined herself in so completely that most respondents didn't think she had an identity of her own. "It seems wildly tragic that we know she could have been president if she had just not even married him," a Wellesley alumna says. "Her way of moving toward electoral politics was to marry someone who was going to run." Considering these charged circumstances of risk, humiliation and sacrifice, one can see how Hillary Clinton would become only more invested in her marriage - and the choices she'd made - rather than less, especially when coupled with the stronger and more difficult aspects of her character, which Bernstein documents in unvarnished detail: perfectionism, toughness, secrecy, oversensitivity, a sanctimony born of intelligence and boomerdom and Methodist dogooder conviction. Another woman with less at stake both emotionally and intellectually might have left, but she, teeth gnashed and head high, stuck it out. "She doesn't look at her life as a series of crises but rather a series of battles," an unnamed former aide tells Bernstein. Bob Boorstin, another former aide, puts it less flatteringly: "I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I've ever known in my life." One can also see how these compromised circumstances made Hillary that much more anxious to cling to the only kind of power she had - behind-the-scenes - and how Bill allowed it. Not only did he genuinely rely on her judgment, but he also clearly felt he owed her after years of serial humiliations. (After The American Spectator ran its "Troopergate" article, David Gergen says, "I cannot recall him publicly confronting her on any health care issue.") The trouble is that Hillary didn't always know how to wield power gracefully. Her tin-eared staffing decisions led to early mini-scandals like the firings at the White House travel office, and her secretive, uncompromising attitude toward health care contributed heavily to the first upending of the Democratic majority in the House in 40 years. On a retreat with Senate Democrats, she rebuffed Bill Bradley's request for a more realistic bill, declaring the White House would "demonize" anyone who stood in its way. "That was it for me," Bradley tells Bernstein, "in terms of Hillary Clinton." At the outset of the book, Bernstein says, "The most essential and yet elusive dynamic of the Clinton presidency came to be the relationship between the two of them - the sand in the gears in bad times, the grease that moved the machinery in good ones." By the book's end, this seems incontrovertibly true, as does his more damning observation that "with the notable exception of her husband's libidinous carelessness, the most egregious errors, strategic and tactical, of the Bill Clinton presidency, particularly in its infancy, were traceable to Hillary." Less persuasive is Bernstein's secondary thesis: that over the years, Hillary has demonstrated "extraordinary capability for change and evolutionary development," evinced in everything from her fashion makeovers to her decision to become a senator. (Just as often, Bernstein discusses her rigidity and her tendency to repeat mistakes.) A stronger thesis - one that the facts in Bernstein's book support - is that Hillary found her better self only when she had a sovereign, independent power base from which to operate. As first lady, alone on a trip to China, she gave a speech on women's rights that earned her the most positive press coverage of her tenure; on her solitary trips to Africa and Asia, she similarly dazzled leaders and civilians alike. And in public office, she embodies the very quality she could never show when someone else held the reins: the ability to compromise. In her story lies a parable: Sanctimony and rigidity are the desperate weapons of the minority party. Had she embraced her inner executive from the start, she might never have become her own worst enemy. Jeff Gerth is no stranger to executive-branch scandals either. He covered Whitewater when he was a reporter for The New York Times, and his co-author, Don Van Natta Jr., is an investigative journalist for The Times who did no shortage of Lewinsky reporting himself. These experiences have heavily informed the sensibilities of "Her Way." (Cynics might add that Gerth's wife is a top foreign policy aide to Christopher Dodd, another Democratic presidential hopeful, but Gerth's Whitewater reporting seems far more influential in forming the book's biases.) While Bernstein can barely conceal his skepticism about Whitewater - you call this a scandal? I put the "gate" in -gate! - Gerth and Van Natta describe in detail what this and other Arkansas business deals were made of, including Hillary's brief and lucrative adventure in commodities futures. Based on their lucid reporting, it's clear there was indeed something alternately naïve and inappropriate about these ventures, and that Hillary was less than forthright about her legal work for a savings and loan whose business was regulated by the State of Arkansas. However, they also flatly declare that "Hillary was unaware" - not claimed to be unaware, but actually was - of Jim McDougal's unlawful Whitewater transactions and the ways her brokerage firm played fast and loose with the rules. They also say, "Her likely indiscretions were altogether modest." If that's the case, these matters hardly deserved the reams of coverage they got at the time, and Bernstein is right to make the determination that they certainly don't deserve to be revisited now. Gerth and Van Natta do point out in their introduction that Hillary's stubborn refusals to admit she might have made a mistake repeatedly get her into trouble. Her world seems a lot like Bushworld in this way, they shrewdly note, right down to the secretive loyal coterie of advisers. But their initial explanation for Hillary's secrecy and defensiveness - "She feared that admitting a mistake would arm her enemies and undermine her carefully cultivated image as an extremely bright person who yearns only to do good for her fellow citizens" - never evolves into something more nuanced. On Page 8, she doesn't admit to her mistake in voting for the Iraq war because it would "undermine her image as the brainiest senator in Washington"; on Page 111, we're told she wouldn't admit to misspeaking on the campaign trail because of "her own idealized view of herself"; on Page 163, we're told she can't admit to farming out work at the Rose Law Firm "because it would undermine her public image as a top-notch corporate lawyer." After a while, this hypothesis seems awfully crude. Doesn't it cry out for a more layered explanation, some illuminating testimony from friends and foes? Indeed, isn't that what a biography is for? "Her Way" is quite short on insight into Hillary's character, which may reflect the authors' inability to get the same kind of access to friends and insiders that Bernstein did. When describing her childhood in Park Ridge, Ill., the authors simply call it "a happy one," deferring almost entirely to Hillary's autobiography for details, and her decision to follow Bill to Arkansas gets a similarly perfunctory treatment. One suspects if they'd gone any deeper, what they might have found would have interfered with their thesis: that Bill and Hillary Clinton hatched a plan more than 30 years ago to revolutionize the Democratic Party and occupy the White House. "Once their '20-year project' was realized," the authors write, "their plan became even more ambitious: eight years as president for him, then eight years for her. Their audacious pact has remained a secret until now." Actually, one version or another of this "pact of ambition" has floated around for quite some time, but if this particular iteration has remained a secret for so long, perhaps it's because there's little evidence to substantiate it. The authors initially support this claim not with a quotation but with a footnote, simply citing interviews with the author and former Times reporter Ann Crittenden and her husband, John Henry. Only on Page 129 do we discover that Crittenden and Henry heard about this his-and-hers White House plan from the Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch, a friend of the Clintons, who issued a statement on May 31 that said: "I never heard either Clinton talk about a 'plan' for them both to become president. Late in his second term, she and I did have a few glancing conversations about whether she might run for the Senate." In the last third of the book, "Her Way" attempts to be current, analyzing Hillary's time in the Senate. But it often focuses on small-bore stuff, like her failure to notify the Ethics Committee about Senate fellows who overstayed their four-week limit. Even when the authors report on something far more momentous - that Hillary most likely never read the classified intelligence reports about Iraq - they are forced to concede that only six senators, according to news reports, did (and some of them, it should be noted, still voted for the war, including the Democrats Jay Rockefeller, Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein). They are right to assail Hillary for repeating the idea that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; they are even more right to expose the spectacular disingenuousness of her claim that she thought she was authorizing additional diplomacy, not a war; and they give Hillary's late-breaking attempt to board the climate-change bandwagon the hard, skeptical eye it deserves. But this is the stuff, ultimately, of magazine and news articles, not a 438-page biography. From these observations, we can't get a more enlightened sense of what kind of president Hillary might be. Bernstein's book gives us a better clue. She may live among loyalists, just like Bush. But you get the sense that she'd be almost the reverse of W. in 2000: polarizing at election time, but consensus-seeking once she got into office. One suspects she wouldn't need to cling to bad policies to prove she's different from the previous occupant of the White House who shared her name. She's already thrown off the yoke. It's not Bernstein's executive-scandal bona fides that make him a qualified Hillary biographer; it's his bona fides as a lousy husband. Hillarys world seems a lot like Bushworld, Gerth and Van Natta note, right down to the secretive loyal coterie of advisers. Jennifer Senior, a contributing editor at New York magazine, writes about politics.
Kirkus Review
A layered, thoughtful, critical biography of the woman who, at this writing, seems poised to become the 44th president of the United States. Hillary Clinton, to read between of-Watergate-fame Bernstein's (Loyalties: A Son's Memoir, 1991, etc.) lines, is a political cyborg, clinically devoted to remaking her image in order to appear to best political advantage, quick to shed ideology for expedience. Many of those who knew her in the White House, as first lady, consider her intellectually outclassed by her foxy husband, himself no stranger to image-remaking and self-serving expedience; her strengths there lay in organization and hard work, not in dazzling displays of dialectic. Bernstein lays many of her husband's failures, but not failings, at her door, "not just her botched handling of their health care agenda, or the ethical cloud hovering like a pall over their administration, but so many of the stumbles and falls responsible for sweeping in the Congress led by Newt Gingrich in 1994 and ending the ambitious phase of their presidency." A vast right-wing conspiracy faces Hillary, to be sure. It always has, beginning with her father, hypercritical and oppressive; happily, Bernstein resists the temptation to practice psychobiography without a license, but the influence on her adult life seems fairly clear even without such commentary. (Welfare reform? Tell it to a father who refused to give her an allowance because she already ate and slept for free.) Bernstein attributes to Clinton, too, a rather grim ethic of salvation through work, and he well documents her essential conservatism and humorlessness; the spice in all that is the thought that it is her job to save her husband from himself, despising his weakness all the while, even as the two formed "a single, intertwined governmental and martial power," one that may continue after a Bush interregnum. And as to Vince Foster, and Whitewater, and rumors of Sapphic revels, and vengeful calculation, and overweening ambition? Never fear: They're all to be found in Bernstein's revealing, admiring, often surprising book. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One: Formation I adored [my father] when I was a little girl. I would eagerly watch for him from a window and run down the street to meet him on his way home after work. With his encouragement and coaching, I played baseball, football and basketball. I tried to bring home good grades to win his approval. -Living History Hillary Rodham's childhood was not the suburban idyll suggested by the shaded front porch and gently sloping lawn of what was once the family home at 235 Wisner Street in Park Ridge, Illinois. In this leafy environment of postwar promise and prosperity, the Rodhams were distinctly a family of odd ducks, isolated from their neighbors by the difficult character of her father, Hugh Rodham, a sour, unfulfilled man whose children suffered his relentless, demeaning sarcasm and misanthropic inclination, endured his embarrassing parsimony, and silently accepted his humiliation and verbal abuse of their mother. Yet as harsh, provocative, and abusive as Rodham was, he and his wife, the former Dorothy Howell, imparted to their children a pervasive sense of family and love for one another that in Hillary's case is of singular importance. When Bill Clinton and Hillary honeymooned in Acapulco in 1975, her parents and her two brothers, Hughie (Hugh Jr.) and Tony, stayed in the same hotel as the bride and groom. Dorothy and Hugh Rodham, despite the debilitating pathology and undertow of tension in their marriage (discerned readily by visitors to their home), were assertive parents who, at mid-century, intended to convey to their children an inheritance secured by old-fashioned values and verities. They believed (and preached, in their different traditions) 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 their only daughter, Hillary Diane, born 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 in opportunity or skills by the fact that she was a girl. Hugh Rodham, the son of Welsh immigrants, was sullen, tight-fisted, contrarian, and given to exaggeration about his own accomplishments. Appearances of a sort were important to him: he always drove a new Lincoln or Cadillac. But he wouldn't hesitate to spit tobacco juice through an open window. He chewed his cud habitually, voted a straight Republican ticket, and was infuriatingly slow to praise his children. "He was rougher than a corncob and gruff as could be," an acquaintance once said. Nurturance and praise were left largely to his wife, whose intelligence and abilities he mocked and 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. She never left, but some friends and relatives were perplexed at Dorothy's decision to stay married when her husband's abuse seemed so unbearable. "She would never say, That's it. I've had it," said Betsy Ebeling,* Hillary's closest childhood friend, who witnessed many contentious scenes at the Rodham dinner table. Sometimes the doorknob remark would break the tension and everybody would laugh. But not always. By the time Hillary had reached her teens, her father seemed defined by his mean edges-he had almost no recognizable enthusiasms or pretense to lightness as he descended into continuous bullying, ill-humor, complaint, and dejection. In fact, depression seemed to haunt the Rodham men. Hugh's younger brother, Russell, a physician, was the "golden boy" of the three children of Hannah and Hugh Rodham Sr. of Scranton, Pennsylvania. When Russell sank into depression in 1948, his parents asked Hugh to return to Scranton to help. Only hours after his arrival, Russell tried to hang himself in the attic, and Hugh had to cut him down. Afterward, Russell went to Chicago to stay with Hugh, Dorothy, and their baby daughter in their already overcrowded one-bedroom apartment. For months, Russell received psychiatric treatment at the local Veterans Administration hospital. Eventually he moved to a dilapidated walk-up in downtown Chicago, worked as a bartender, and declined into alcoholism and deeper depression until he died, in 1962, in a fire that was caused by a lit cigarette. Hillary deeply felt her father's pain over the tragedy, she wrote. Hugh's older brother, Willard, regarded as the most gregarious and fun-loving of the three, never left home or married, and was employed in a patronage job for the Scranton public works department. He resolved after his mother's death to take care of his father. He dedicated himself completely to the task for the next thirteen years, and when his father died at age eighty-six in 1965, Willard was overwhelmed by despair. He died five weeks later of a coronary thrombosis, according to the coroner's report, though Hillary's brother Tony said, "He died of loneliness. When my grandfather died, Uncle Willard was lost." Hugh Rodham, himself broken of spirit, his brothers and parents dead, soon thereafter shut his business and retired. Not yet fifty-five, he continued to withdraw. Later, both of Hillary's brothers, to varying degrees, seemed to push through adulthood in a fog of melancholia. In 1993, after Hillary's law partner, close friend, and deputy White House counsel Vince Foster committed suicide, she approached William Styron, who had chronicled his own struggles with depression in his acclaimed book Darkness Visible. The conversation was not only about Foster's suicide, but also touched on the depression that seemed to afflict members of Hillary's family. Hillary's mother, a resilient woman whose early childhood was a horror of abandonment and cruelty, was able to overcome adversity, as would her daughter. Dorothy persevered through five years of dating Hugh Rodham-during which time she worked as his secretary and suspected he was continuing a relationship with another woman-before she agreed to marry him, according to family members. She and Hugh waited another five years to have their first child. (Chelsea Clinton, too, was born in the fifth year of her parents' marriage.) As intellectually broad-minded as her husband was incurious and uninterested, as inclined to reflection as he was to outburst, she fulfilled her lifelong goal of attending college in her late sixties (majoring in psychology), after she and her husband moved to Little Rock in 1987 to be near their daughter and grandchild. Constantly evolving and changing (like her daughter), she managed almost invariably to find a focus for her energy and satisfaction despite the dissonance of a difficult life at home. As her husband descended, she even became something of a free spirit, at turns sentimental, analytical, spiritual, and adventurous. (Her favorite movies were not those of her childhood, but The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert- an Australian drag queen romp-and the bloody classic Pulp Fiction. ) Dorothy taught classes at Sunday school (as would her daughter); Hugh didn't go to church on Sundays, saying he'd rather pray at home. Life in the Rodham household resembled a kind of boot camp, presided over by a belittling, impossible-to-satisfy drill instructor. During World War II, as a chief petty officer in the Navy, Rodham had trained young recruits in the U.S. military's Gene Tunney Program, a rigorous phys-ed regime based on the champion boxer's training and self-defense techniques, and on the traditional skills of a drill sergeant. After the war, in which Hugh had been spared overseas duty and was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Station because of a bad knee, he replicated the barracks experience in his own home, commanding loudly from his living room lounge chair (from which he rarely rose, except for dinner), barking orders, denigrating, minimizing achievements, ignoring accomplishments, raising the bar constantly for his frustrated children-"character building," he called it. His control over the household was meant to be absolute; 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 from the front yard evergreens, even in snow. Regardless of how windy and cold the Chicago winter night, he insisted when the family went to bed that the heat be turned off until morning. 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. If Dorothy attempted to bring a conflicting set of facts into the discussion, she was typically ridiculed by her husband: "How would you know?" "Where did you ever come up with such a stupid idea?" "Miss Smarty Pants." "My father was confrontational, completely and utterly so," Hugh Jr. said. Decades later, Hillary and her brothers suggested this was part of a grander scheme to ensure that his children were "competitive, scrappy fighters," to "empower" them, to foster "pragmatic competitiveness" without putting them down, to induce elements of "realism" into the privileged lifestyle of Park Ridge. Her father would tepidly acknowledge her good work, but tell her she could do better, Hillary said. But there is little to suggest that she or her brothers interpreted such encouragement so benignly at the time. When Hillary came home with all As except for one B on her report card, her father suggested that perhaps her school was too easy, and wondered half-seriously why she hadn't gotten straight As. Hillary tried mightily to extract some unequivocal declaration of approval from her father, but he had tremendous difficulty in expressing pride or affection. At the dinner table, Betsy Ebeling recalled, "Hillary's mom would have cooked something good, and her dad would throw out a conversation topic, almost like a glove on the table, and he would always say something the opposite of what I thought he really believed-because it was so completely provocative and outrageous. It was just his way. He was opinionated, and he could be loud, and what better place to [be that way] than in his own home?" Unleashed, his rage was frightening, and the household sometimes seemed on the verge of imploding. Betsy and the few other girlfriends whom Hillary brought home could see that life with Hugh Rodham was painfully demeaning for her mother, and that Hillary winced at her father's distemper and chafed under his miserliness. Money was always a contentious issue, ultimately the way in which he could exercise undisputed control, especially in response to Hillary's and Dorothy's instinctive rebelliousness and the wicked sense of humor they shared. Sometimes his tirades would begin in the kitchen and continue into her parents' bedroom. Hillary would put her hands over her ears. But the experience of standing up to her father also prepared her for the intellectual rough-and-tumble that honed Hillary and Bill Clinton's marital partnership, and helped inure her in the arena of political combat. "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." * Ebeling is Betsy's married name. Her maiden name was Johnson. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Carl Bernstein All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Prologue | p. 9 |
1 Formation | p. 23 |
2 A Young Woman on Her Own | p. 66 |
3 Love and War at Yale | p. 104 |
4 Making Arkansas Home | p. 149 |
5 The Prize | p. 320 |
6 A Transitional Woman | p. 350 |
7 Inauguration | p. 380 |
8 Settling In | p. 406 |
9 Portrait of a First Lady | p. 442 |
10 A Downhill Path | p. 460 |
11 Health Care | p. 471 |
12 The Politics of Meaning...and Family | p. 489 |
13 The Cruel Season | p. 506 |
14 Not a Crook, Not a Degenerate | p. 576 |
15 Truth or Consequences | p. 622 |
16 Truth or Consequences (2) | p. 709 |
17 The Longest Season | p. 801 |
18 A Woman in Charge | p. 889 |
A Note on Sources | p. 917 |
Notes | p. 928 |
Bibliography | p. 1014 |
Acknowledgments | p. 1036 |