The Truth About Hillary (7 page)

Hillary’s mom, Dorothy Howell Rodham, was the product of a grim childhood. At the age of eight, she was abandoned by her teenage mother and sent on a cross-country train ride with her three-year-old sister to Alhambra, California, where her grand- parents lived. Her grandparents abused Dorothy until she finally ran away from home. Years later, after she married Hugh Rod- ham Sr. and moved to the suburbs, she retained the attitude of a tough tomboy.

“If Suzy hits you,” Dorothy told little Hillary, “you have my permission to hit her back. You have to stand up for yourself. There’s no room in this house for cowards.”
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This story, which was legendary among the children in Park Ridge, and would eventually become part of Hillary’s hagiogra- phy, ended with Suzy on the business end of Hillary’s fist, and the two girls becoming fast friends.

But Hillary’s career as a pugilist was just getting started.

Her first steady boyfriend, Jim Yrigoyen, now a high school guidance counselor in Lake Zurich, Illinois, remembered being

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ordered by Hillary to guard a warren of baby rabbits, and not give any of them away to neighborhood boys, no matter how much they begged. Jim readily agreed, but when Hillary’s next- door neighbor asked for just one rabbit, Jim couldn’t refuse.

“Hillary immediately counted the rabbits,” Jim recalled. “She knew exactly how many she had. She looked at me with disdain and said, ‘Did you do this?’ When I admitted I did, she became pretty enraged. She yelled, ‘Jim, I trusted you! You big jerk!’ Then, she hauled off and punched me in the nose. I was stunned. I reached up and found my nose was bleeding a lot. She had really hurt me.

“Not only was it extraordinary for a girl to punch a boy,” Jim went on, “but fighting even among boys was very much frowned upon in Park Ridge. I had transferred from an inner-city Chicago school, where you practically had to fight your way through the school day. When I came to Park Ridge I had one dustup and was promptly told that fighting would not be toler- ated. So it was pretty much of a shock that Hillary, the teacher’s pet and best all-around student, so quickly let her temper flare into violence like that.”
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*

Despite Hillary’s combative nature, she and Jim Yrigoyen continued to go steady. After school, they tramped over to Hil- lary’s yellow-brick, Federal-style house at the corner of Wisner and Elm streets, where they did their homework together.

As the eldest of three siblings, Hillary occupied a choice bed- room with a large veranda overlooking the yard. Her parents

*The quick and easy violence Hillary practiced as a child would come to characterize her relationship with Bill Clinton. There is at least one account of Hillary beating Bill with her fists in the face, and clawing him in the jaw, leaving a prominent mark. Close Clinton friend Linda Bloodworth-Thomason told author Gail Sheehy that it was great that Hillary had “smacked [Bill] upside the head.”
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had a similar bedroom on the other end of the house. Hillary’s younger siblings, Hugh Jr. and Tony, shared a room.

Hillary’s father ran the household like a boot camp, which was to be expected from a one-time Penn State football scholar- ship student who majored in physical education and served in World War II as a navy drill instructor. He idolized Gene Tun- ney, the former world heavyweight boxing champion, who had been in charge of the U.S. Navy’s wartime physical fitness pro- gram, and he lost no opportunity to apply the “Tunney Method” to toughen up Hillary for the hard knocks of life that lay ahead.
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Like his idol Gene Tunney, Hugh Rodham Sr. made a reli- gion of physical fitness. He believed that body-contact sports such as boxing and wrestling did more than build muscle; they built self-confidence, self-reliance, self-discipline, and poise. He encouraged Hillary to be mentally tough and physically aggres-

sive, and to fear no one.

Some visitors to the Rodham home recalled Hugh Sr. as a scary figure—a barrel-chested man with a booming voice, who was always criticizing Hillary’s posture and telling her: “Head up, chin in, chest out, stomach in!” An acquaintance once de- scribed him as “rougher than a corn cob, as gruff as could be.”
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Hillary received no special consideration from her father be- cause she was a girl. He expected her to compete with boys in sports, feats of physical strength, and academics. When Hillary came home with straight A’s on her report card, her perfectionist father’s only comment was: “That must be an easy school you go to.”
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Some biographers believed that the hyper-macho Hugh Sr. was responsible for Hillary’s mistrust of men—an attitude so no- ticeable later in high school that she was compared by her class- mates to a sexually frigid nun, and nicknamed “Sister Frigidaire.”
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“Among both relatives and friends,” wrote Roger Morris in
Partners in Power
, “many thought Hugh Rodham’s treatment of

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his daughter and sons amounted to the kind of psychological abuse that might have crushed some children.”
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But that was a misreading of Hillary’s relationship with her father.

“For all his grouchiness,” wrote Joyce Milton in her biogra- phy of Hillary,
The First Partner
, “Hugh was devoted to his family. . . . He taught Hillary to read the stock tables; and when she fretted about her low batting average in school softball games, he took her out to the park and threw her one pitch after another until she learned to connect with a curveball.

“Hillary and her father often seemed to be involved in a con- test of wills,” Milton continued. “She did everything he asked, and he would respond by raising the bar a few inches higher. Hillary’s brothers had no doubt that she was their father’s fa- vorite, a daddy’s girl who could do no wrong in his eyes. . . . In later years . . . Hillary would insist that her father’s behavior was ‘empowering.’ ”
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In short, Hillary did not feel abused by her father. She did not construe his demands as criticism of her. On the contrary, those demands, which were supported by her mother, only rein- forced Hillary’s feeling that she was special—and that she was slated to become a champion.

When her father told her, “You can do better,” Hillary inter- preted that to mean, “He wants the best for me, because he be- lieves I should be better than others.” She experienced her father’s demands as a loving challenge, and incorporated his per- fectionism as her own.

Hillary learned several life lessons from her father and mother.

Lesson No. 1: Never allow yourself to be a victim.

Lesson No. 2: If somebody hits you, hit him or her back harder. Lesson No. 3: Stay in control of your own destiny.

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As the daughter of two perfectionist parents, Hillary seemed to come unglued whenever anyone dared to criticize or cross her. One of her closest friends was a boy named Rick Ricketts. Like Hillary, he was also a superachiever and a class leader. But when he infuriated Hillary by carelessly bumping his bike into hers, she gave him a good punch in the face.
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And Jim Yrigoyen’s little romance with the future First Lady also ended on a note of violence.

“We were in a snowball fight with a bunch of other kids and I hit her a few good ones,” he recalled. “She got pretty angry, and came after me, punching and hitting me in the chest and face. I couldn’t punch her back, because she was a girl, so I tack- led her. Then I guess I got carried away and rubbed her face in the snow, way too hard. By punching me she had gotten me all wound up and things got out of control.

“That was the end of the relationship,” he continued. “The next day, when I got to school, my dog tags were on my desk, the knot undone. Hillary couldn’t have made it plainer.”
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The Great Debate

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hen she was sixteen years old, Hillary Rodham composed a bitter letter to her church’s youth min- ister, the Reverend Don Jones.

She had just been defeated for president of the senior class at Maine South High School. As she described it in the letter, she had lost as a result of “dirty campaigning” by chauvinist oppo- nents who were “slinging mud” at her.

“We did not retaliate,” she wrote the Reverend Jones, using the royal “we.” “We took the high road and talked about mother- hood and apple pie.”
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Four decades later, in her memoir
Living History
, Hillary re- called that moment. Still as bitter as ever, she accused one of her Maine South High School opponents of saying that “I was really stupid if I thought a girl could be elected president.”
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Timothy Sheldon, the boy who defeated Hillary, and who was now an Illinois circuit court judge, had a far different memory of events.

“It’s incredible that it still rankles her after all these years,”

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he said in an interview for this book. “There was nothing to sling mud about, because there were no issues, no debate.

“The so-called race was just a popularity contest,” he went on. “Normally, boys ran for president and girls for secretary. Rightly or wrongly, that was just the way it was done in those days. I remember it vividly: it was the first time a girl had run for student council president. The reason I won was I was the star running back on the football team. It was as simple as that.”
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But it wasn’t that simple for Hillary.

“The reason Hillary still makes excuses for her loss, suggest- ing dirty tricks were somehow played, is that she had then—and apparently continues to have—a sense of infallibility,” said a for- mer member of the Maine South student council. “It is not pos- sible that she could have lost even a high school election simply because she was not the most popular candidate. She was bitter and furious at the loss back then, and even in her own mind probably has convinced herself there was chicanery.”
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That same year, Hillary took part in a mock presidential debate. It was well known that her father was a conservative, and that Hillary was actively campaigning for the Republican can- didate, Barry Goldwater. However, she recalled that her gov- ernment teacher, Jerry Baker, “in an act of counter-intuitive brilliance—or perversity—assigned me to play President [Lyn- don] Johnson” in the debate.
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She said that Ellen Press, the only Democrat she knew in her class, was assigned to take the role of Barry Goldwater.

As she told the story, Hillary at first resented having to research Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society policies. Gradually, however, she came to find herself arguing the president’s liberal positions with “more than dramatic fervor.”
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She went on to suggest that it was a political turning point for her and Ellen Press.

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However, the October 30, 1964, edition of
Southwards
, the Maine South student newspaper, directly contradicted Hillary’s story about the debate. The paper mentioned no such switch of political affiliation on the part of Hillary and Ellen. Rather, it identified Hillary as a Goldwater Republican, not a Johnson Democrat as she later claimed.

In an interview with the author of this book, Jerry Baker, Hillary’s government teacher, who later went on to become the legislative counsel for the Airline Pilots Association, said that his recollection about the forty-year-old high school debate was a bit fuzzy.

“Hillary’s version of the debate makes a good story,” Baker said. “However, it may not have been the way she portrayed it.”
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The Radical

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ig Hugh Rodham swung his Cadillac out of the driveway and aimed its flying-wings hood ornament east, toward his daughter’s future.

During the thousand-mile journey—from Park Ridge, Illi- nois, through the rust belt of the upper Midwest, over the Appalachian cordillera, eastward across the rolling farms of Pennsylvania, north through the New Jersey wetlands, and east again across the abandoned mill towns of Massachusetts—Hugh worked on a wad of chewing tobacco, while his wife, Dorothy, kept up a constant patter to help him stay alert.

Hillary, their demure, well-scrubbed, neatly coifed seventeen- year-old daughter, seemed lost in the enormous backseat of the car. She kept the driver’s side back window shut to avoid getting splattered by her father’s flying tobacco spit.

“When Hillary left Park Ridge for Wellesley College, she was still a conservative Park Ridge girl,” said Penny Pullen, a high school classmate. “She chose an all-girls college that

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catered to the upper crust, but the seeds of a radical left-wing political philosophy had been planted by her Methodist youth group minister, Don Jones. And those seeds would be watered and fertilized at Wellesley College.