God and Hillary Clinton (4 page)

In 1972,
Motive
made its exit with a special theme issue on lesbianism and feminism and the gay-male sexual experience, the former theme being demanded by the lesbian Methodists on staff, who insisted on equal time in the name of women's equality. The issue was so offensive that it was pulled from the press by executives in the Methodist Church's Board of Education.
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Vietnam

By the late 1960s,
Motive
magazine was not the only influential force working to encourage Hillary's budding liberalism; the Wellesley faculty also began playing a role that further hardened her against Republicanism and the ongoing war in Vietnam. As a sophomore,
Hillary worked as a researcher/babysitter for a Wellesley professor who was writing a book on the Vietnam War.
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The book and interaction with the professor must have made a difference, as it was during this time that Hillary became an increasingly vociferous opponent of the conflict and was on her way to permanent leave from the GOP. After a summer with the professor, she returned to Wellesley in the fall of 1967 and began campaigning for the liberal antiwar candidate Democrat Eugene McCarthy.

Not surprisingly, Hugh supported the war, and the two had a few sharp discussions on the subject that caused some rancorous dinner-table talk. Hillary's abandonment of the Republican Party caused distress to Hugh, who was now reaping the consequences of sending his daughter to a liberal college.

Still, the fact was that despite all her turns and the continued intertwining of her spiritual and her political life, she had not completely forsaken the GOP, so long as the Republicans put forth a more liberal candidate. When Eugene McCarthy left the race, Ms. Rodham volunteered for Nelson Rockefeller, the preference of many liberal Republicans as the best remaining antiwar candidate once McCarthy was gone. She went to the Republican convention in Miami to support Rockefeller. Hillary could tolerate a Rockefeller or a Lindsay, who were anathema to conservatives, but would not dare favor Richard Nixon.

That summer of 1968, she interned as a researcher for the House Republican Conference, chaired by Melvin Laird, who would become President Nixon's secretary of defense. She was assigned to the Republican House member from Park Ridge, meaning that Hillary spent her summer studying the dismal economics of revenue sharing, and oddly enough, her intern supervisor was a young man named Edwin Feulner, who soon launched the enormously successful conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation.
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In the end, that summer was the final thread holding her to Hugh's
party. The more she was pulled away from conservative Republicanism, the more she connected with secular liberalism. As the sixties had progressed, Don Jones ceased to play the decisive role in her life that he once had, and without Don Jones as a rudder, she was beginning to find herself in the lonely camp of many liberal Christians—among a sea of secular Democrats who searched for salvation in politics rather than religion.

A serious boyfriend of hers from Harvard, Geoffrey Shields, whom she dated for two years, speaks of Hillary's intense interest in politics during this time, discussing issues up and down, “lighting up” when certain topics were raised, and especially driven by race, civil liberties, and the war.
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Politics dominated her interests, increasingly at the expense of her Christianity, though Shields recalls some philosophical conversation, such as debate over “whether there was an absolute or only a relative morality.”
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Her answer, however, was not that of a fundamentalist: “I believe there are some absolute truths,” she wrote, absolutely, to a friend named John Peavoy. She said that she was unsure as to whether such truths were within man's grasp, though she was certain they existed, and suggested to Peavoy that he read John Stuart Mill's
On Liberty
.
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At the same time, Hillary's faith—or perhaps her personality or seriousness generally—must have been a contributing factor to her staying on the straight and narrow. She called herself “an ethical Christian,” physically aloof from the counterculture. Her college friends do not recall her smoking dope, dropping acid, drinking to excess, or tearing off her clothes during rock concerts. She did not imbibe the hedonism and drug culture of the period; she did not drop out.
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She at one time painted a flower on her arm and wore tie-dye clothes, and as surviving photos attest, looked like a girl of the sixties, but was no Janis Joplin.
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By 1969, her senior year, Hillary's evolution from Republican to Democrat was complete. She was president of the graduating class,
a fact soon made public around the country, as she prepared for a memorable good-bye at Wellesley that May. The commencement speaker that year was Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass.), who in 1966 became the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction—later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. Brooke came to extend his congratulations to the 401 women, but did so to the dissatisfaction of Hillary Rodham, who judged that the good senator had missed the paramount issues driving the times. That was an opinion she did not keep to herself, as the Wellesley brass soon learned to their horror.

The powers-that-be at the college had decided that this year would be the first in which a graduating senior was permitted to speak at commencement. Hillary ensured that the administration would regret its decision.

Though she had spent weeks preparing her text, Hillary tossed aside the script as she approached the platform. She then launched into a stern point-by-point rebuttal of the senator's remarks, with all the moral certainty and righteousness of a preacher. “We feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible,” lectured Ms. Rodham. “And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.” She spoke of her and her sisters' struggles with an “inauthentic reality,” a “prevailing acquisitive and competitive corporate life,” and yearning for “a more penetrating…existence.”

She continued her stern—it has been called “scathing”—rebuttal of Senator Brooke, one that got national press, with an excerpt published in
Life
magazine and a front-page article in the
Boston Globe
the next day, the latter of which reported that she had “upstaged” Brooke.

While many of the parents were appalled, Hillary's band of sisters was thrilled. Despite her often clumsy use of ten-cent words and
meandering messages, they responded with a standing ovation, or, as more than one source has put it, “enveloping her in a thunderous, seven-minute standing ovation.”
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To Hillary, the roar of the crowd signaled approval of much more than a brash response to authority; this was a send-off, a commencement all right, a beginning of grander things from a honed Hillary Rodham, ready to take her slice out of history.

After graduation from Wellesley, Hillary had a variety of opportunities in front of her, but it remained to be seen whether she would pursue higher education or enter the rapidly changing workforce. It was during this ambiguous time that Hillary became reacquainted with an old friend by the name of Saul Alinsky.

In the years since Don Jones had introduced Hillary to Alinsky, the veteran radical had relocated to Carmel, California, and was working in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Oakland. It was there, in his new habitat, that he invited Hillary to come work for him as an organizer during the spring of 1969. The two began a correspondence, but it quickly became clear that though Hillary had closely studied Alinsky's organizing tactics during college, she remained conflicted, if not torn, over joining his cause.

At the time that Hillary and Alinsky were writing to each other, Alinsky was in the process of putting the final touches on his crowning work,
Rules for Radicals
, which would be published in 1971, and which he was committing to paper and a lecture or two as he was
corresponding with Hillary. In the book, Alinsky laid out his “revolutionary” ideas, including the development of a new “Trinity” based on class distinctions, by which he perceived mankind as divided into three groups: “the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.”
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It is not clear if Hillary received any spiritual direction from Alinsky during this time, but given the extreme nature of his beliefs, it seems doubtful. While Alinsky may have served as a mentor and an example for Hillary in some ways, his beliefs were most likely—or at least hopefully—too much for the Park Ridge Methodist. Consider the feature quote—literally Alinsky's first words—at the start of
Rules for Radicals
: “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.”
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Alinsky actually commenced his masterpiece with an acknowledgment to Satan. Nonetheless, Hillary admired Alinsky as much as ever and did take his job offer seriously. Ultimately she turned him down and decided instead to attend law school at Yale. “Well, that's no way to change anything,” said Alinsky of the young lady's bourgeois notion of higher education. She replied, “Well, I see it differently than you.” She told Alinsky that she saw a “real opportunity” at Yale.
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The levelheaded young lady sensed there was something at Yale that would change her life—that would help her make a difference someday. It turned out that there were many things waiting for her there, not to mention a certain someone.

When Wellesley's class president arrived at Yale Law in the fall of 1969, she continued to study as diligently as ever, and eventually settled in. One day while studying in the library, she spotted a rubeish but oddly charming Southern boy looking her way. Never lacking for self-esteem, Ms. Rodham stepped over to the young man and said,
“If you're going to keep looking at me and I'm going to keep looking back, we at least ought to know each other.” He blushed. In no time, they were dating.

The Boy from Hot Springs

William Jefferson Blythe III was born on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas. He was certainly his mother's son. His mother, Virginia, was the daughter of the town iceman and a nurse. After high school, she had followed in her own mother's footsteps and studied nursing in Shreveport, Louisiana, where she met William Jefferson Blythe Jr., whom she wed in a civil ceremony on September 3, 1943, just before he shipped off for war duty in Italy. Upon completion of her nurse training, she moved back to Hope, where she dreamed about building a home with her husband upon his return and raising a child.

But it was not meant to be; only two of the three had a future together. On a summer night in 1946, twenty-seven-year-old traveling salesman Billie Blythe was driving his Buick along Highway 60 outside of Sikeston, Missouri, heading back to Hope from Chicago. As his pregnant wife awaited him, Billie, for whatever reason, lost control and crashed headfirst into a drainage ditch, where he was knocked unconscious. Other drivers saw the accident and searched for the body but could not find it in the dark of night. That was a tragic shame, because Blythe had landed in shallow water, where he drowned. Had there been enough light to find him, he likely would have been rescued and survived.

The son, Bill, that he was leaving behind, who at that point was still in the comfort of his mother's womb, was the third child sired by William Jefferson Blythe Jr., who was notorious for riding around the South and cajoling women to hop into bed with him. His mar
riage to Virginia was his third in eight years; the first was to another woman named Virginia when he was eighteen and then to his first wife's sister Faye in 1940.

Bill Blythe Jr.'s death left little Bill to be raised by his twenty-three-year-old mother, Virginia, in a severely dysfunctional town and unhealthy home. Shortly after Bill's birth, his mother moved with him to Hot Springs, a small Southern version of Las Vegas, minus any glitz or glamour. Hot Springs was a sleazy place where prostitution, gambling, and vice ruled; to say it was a poor place to raise a child is to state the obvious. Conditions for poor Bill were deplorable, and unfortunately, they would only get worse.

In 1950, a few years after Bill had moved to Hot Springs with his mother, Virginia remarried, choosing forty-two-year-old Roger Clinton, a bootlegging car salesman, an alcoholic, and an abuser, as her groom. Much of Bill's early memories were shaped by interactions he had with his abusive stepfather. Biographer Roger Morris maintains that not only did Roger Clinton slap and punch his wife but that the abused wife could never bring herself to stop Roger from attacking her little boys. According to Morris, friends and medical sources in Hot Springs recalled that Billy and his little brother, Roger Jr., the biological son to Virginia and Roger, were themselves “beaten and brutalized far worse than anyone later admitted.” Morris says that the boys more than once had to go to their doctor's office and even the hospital for injuries. “A member of my family doctored them for some pretty bad stuff—stitches and all that,” a Hot Springs attorney told Morris, who adds that Virginia ensured that no records remained to embarrass them later.
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A later political friend of Bill remarked, “Now that I know what was really happening inside that [house], I'm blown away…. He covered up like a dog burying a bone real deep.”
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Bill Clinton learned from a very young age to compartmentalize his traumas. Biographers have noted that his mom taught him to simply take those troubles
and put them in an imaginary “box,” locking them up with a key and setting them aside.

In the midst of all this household turmoil and abuse, Bill found a place of refuge amid the rottenness of Hot Springs: a church.

By the mid–1950s, the only religious education that Bill Clinton had received came from two years in a Catholic grade school, a subject on which virtually nothing has been written. But starting in 1955, the nine-year-old began to wear a suit on Sunday mornings and walk alone to Park Place Baptist Church, about a half mile from his house. The pastor, Reverend Dexter Blevins, said that the boy was there “every time the door opened.” The boy sensed, maybe from observing the behavior of the two immature adults in his small universe, that it was important that he go to church in order “to try to be a good person.”
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His mother apparently agreed with her young son's decision to find God, encouraging him to go every week, even though she and her husband made it only on Christmas and Easter. Bill Clinton later recalled:

The effect of all of this was profound. The claim will shock his detractors today, but there were some who thought that the young Clinton would grow up to be a minister. His nanny, whom he called
simply “Mrs. Walters,” told the bright-eyed boy that someday he might make a good preaching man, like Billy Graham.
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Though some may find the comparison amusing, Graham actually played a pivotal role in Clinton's spiritual formation. In 1958, one of young Bill's Sunday school teachers offered to take a few of the boys to Little Rock to attend a Billy Graham crusade at the football stadium at the University of Arkansas. At that time, racial tensions were high. Authorities had just closed Little Rock's schools in a last-ditch effort to prevent integration. Segregationists from the White Citizens Council recommended that Reverend Graham restrict admission to whites only. The preacher said no, stating that Jesus loved all sinners, and all people of all ethnicities needed to hear the word of God.
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As Clinton remembers, Graham was “the living embodiment of Southern Baptist authority, the largest religious figure in the South, perhaps in the nation.” What he said carried enormous weight, and the segregationists backed down. “I wanted to hear him preach even more after he took the stand he did,” said Clinton, “and the Reverend Graham delivered a powerful message.” Added Clinton: “When he gave the invitation for people to come down onto the football field to become Christians or to rededicate their lives to Christ, hundreds of blacks and whites came down to the stadium aisles together, stood together, and prayed together. It was a powerful counterpoint to the racist politics sweeping across the South. I loved Billy Graham for doing that. For months after that I regularly sent part of my small allowance to support his ministry.”
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Despite the inner strength that Bill gained from his Baptist faith, it was not until 1960, when Bill was fourteen, that he was finally able to stand up to the adult terrorizing the house in drunken rages. As an unusually large high school freshman—six feet tall, more than two hundred pounds, and bigger than his stepfather—the teen one night decided to no longer compartmentalize. He burst into his parents' bedroom, breaking down the door. “Daddy, I've got something to say to you,” he warned the miserable bully. “I don't want you to lay
a hand on my mother in anger ever, ever again or you'll have to deal with me.” This time, Virginia finally stopped the violence—once the boys could at last protect themselves. She called the cops, and Roger spent a night in jail.
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While Bill's intervention put an end to the abuses at the time, soon after, in 1961, Virginia divorced Roger, only to remarry him a few months later. He succumbed to liver cancer in 1967. After Roger's death, Virginia said “I do” twice more to two more men—in all, five marriages to four different men, two of them to Roger. She was eventually Virginia Divine Cassidy Blythe Clinton Kelley.

Through this chaotic upbringing and the difficult years in a dysfunctional home, the Southern Baptist faith carried Bill. It was such a rock—mainly the only rock of reliability in his life—that Clinton at his high school graduation ceremony did something that would today shock his liberal supporters and conservative detractors: He prayed, providing no less than the benediction address. “I know that some nonreligious people may find this offensive or naïve,” Clinton said when discussing the prayer later on in life, “but I'm glad I was so idealistic back then, and I still believe every word I prayed.”
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The Partnership Begins

Yet even with the passionate Baptist beliefs of his formative years, Bill's faith would take a hiatus once he went to college in Washington, D.C., attending the Catholic institution Georgetown University.
¹³
Whether his decision to limit his open role in the Baptist church stemmed from a shift in his beliefs or the fact that the Jesuit institution he was attending had a much different orientation is not clear. Four years later, in 1968, Bill Clinton graduated from the prestigious college and then headed to Oxford University from 1968 to 1970 on a Rhodes scholarship. After Oxford, Bill went to New Haven, where he entered Yale Law School, and it was there that he met the bespec
tacled, bookish girl from Park Ridge. While their relationship began as a flirtation between two law students, both seemed to sense early on that they could benefit from each other and that together they shared a mutual ambition. It seemed as though they could survive whatever disagreements, inconveniences, troubles, and even disgraces and major transgressions, for a larger purpose of jointly transforming the world. The two influenced each other intellectually, with their experiences and their faiths rooted in such disparate pasts; together they were idealistic, but they were determined.

This is not to say that they were never in love. There is no question in the minds of those knew or observed them that Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham were serious about each other and quite in love. They dared to break unwritten but respected Yale Law School rules prohibiting interstudent relationships, and then also shattered the mores of Hugh Rodham and Park Ridge when they decided to live together during Hillary's third year at Yale, moving into a Victorian-style house off campus.
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Bill seemed sure that Hillary was the girl, his life partner. Virginia was said to have been underwhelmed by Hillary, recognizing right away that she was “one of them smart ones,” unlike the fun, easy girls that Bill usually nabbed for play. She was startled and not necessarily joyful when Bill told her during a visit back home during break, “Mother, I want you to pray for me that it's Hillary because if it isn't Hillary, it's nobody.”
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