Bernstein on Hillary Clinton’s ambition

Hugh meant the vacation to connect his children to a past not as privileged as the one they knew in Park Ridge, as well as to maintain a strong sense of family. On one of their summer vacations, he insisted they visit a coal mine in the anthracite fields nearby. Whatever her discomfort with such gestures at the time, Hillary’s later political identification with working-class values and the struggles of average wage-earners was not something acquired at Wellesley or Yale as part of a 1960s countercultural ethos.

As Hillary and her mother increasingly expressed mixed feelings about the prospect of another Lake Winola vacation, their objections were met with Hugh’s promises of a shopping spree somewhere on the return trip, where they could spend money on clothes and personal items. After one summer holiday in Pennsylvania, Hugh drove to Fifth Avenue in New York and told Dorothy and Hillary they could buy whatever they wanted before the stores closed at five o’clock. Mother and daughter had only twenty-five minutes so they took off their shoes and ran.

While their Park Ridge schoolmates dressed according to the current fashions, the Rodham children rarely got new clothes until they’d outgrown or worn out the old ones; Tony was occasionally dressed in his brother’s hand-me-downs. Neither Hillary nor her mother had much success in persuading Hugh that girls sometimes needed to consider more than the practical in matters of dress. Dorothy herself dressed indifferently.

During summers, the Rodham children were paid pennies for plucking dandelions from the grass. The fact that other kids in the neighborhood received regular allowances failed to impress their father. “They eat and sleep for free. We’re not going to pay them for it as well,” he told Dorothy. He seemed to have an aphorism for every means of denying his wife and children the smaller, store-bought pleasures of their neighbors.  Under her breath, Dorothy had epithets for her husband, like “cheapskate” and “the SOB.” Hillary began earning money as a babysitter for neighbors and at a day care center, and later as a salesgirl in a store on Main Street.

As Hugh Rodham increasingly came to be regarded as an oddity in Park Ridge, he seemed to go to extra lengths to put distance between himself and his neighbors. He almost never showed up at a community barbecue or a PTA meeting. He did not join the local country club or participate in civic enterprises. When Hugh Jr. was quarterback of his high school football team, his father would sit by himself on the sidelines during games, following the action close-up rather than joining the other parents, students, and fans in the stands. Characteristically, when his son had his best day as quarterback, completing ten of eleven passes and throwing several touchdowns, Hugh told him only that he “should have completed the other one.”

Usually the children could recognize when their father was serious and when he was just being cantankerous. But it was a fine line, especially hard to distinguish because he could not bring himself to be demonstrative in an obviously loving way, and because of his violent streak. According to Hillary, “Occasionally, he got carried away when disciplining us, yelling louder or using more physical punishment, especially with my brothers, than I thought was fair or necessary. But even when he was angry, I never doubted that he loved me.” Her father was “not one to spare the rod,”* she wrote. (*How severely Hugh Rodham beat his children has never been directly addressed publicly by Hillary, her brothers, or her mother.)

The Rodham brothers as adults described their father as “critical” and “pretty tough,” but also as “kindhearted.” Certainly Hugh Rodham was proud of the accomplishments of his children, but if his methodology was intended to convey tough love in an era before the term became fashionable, the results were mixed at best.

His constant pushing of Hillary’s brothers to follow his example — so they, too, might be successful and respected in business — did not always take. Hillary, alone among the Rodham children, seemed to possess his self-discipline.

Tony seemed to adjust to his father’s difficult philosophy of parenting better than Hugh Jr., who responded by trying endlessly to please his dad, an impossible task. The more he pandered to his father, the more his father seemed to push him away.

“Hugh was toughest on Hughie because he’s his first-born son — and he was very tough on him,” said a member of the Rodham family. “I don’t think he approved of everything he did. But Hughie always wanted that approval, and very much tried to follow in the footsteps of his father. He went to Penn State like his father. He played football like his father.” Yet there was always the feeling that he didn’t measure up. “Tony, on the other hand, didn’t care. Tony just did what he wanted to do, and got Hugh’s respect very early on as a younger child.”

At age nine, Tony was diagnosed with rheumatic fever and spent an entire school year bedridden, during which Dorothy nursed and tended to him. Even as adults, Tony and Hughie would seek solace from their mother during difficult times. Though sometimes dour, she was regarded by the children as the heart and soul of the Rodham household. For the most part unflappable in the company of others, she served as referee between the children and her husband, intervening when Hugh became unusually callous or hurtful in his remarks or demands, or too physical.  “They got ridden, treated like men from the time they were three years old,” said a relative. Hillary “was the girl in the house with two crazy little boys,” Betsy Ebeling said. “The first time I walked into that house, Hughie was seven and Tony was four. Hughie threw Tony over the balcony onto the curb and Tony bounced and came up with a smile.  They’re street scrappers, which Hugh loved. They were just physical.

They smashed things in the house playing. And Hugh loved that.”

Dorothy didn’t.

Hugh Jr. and Tony were also the beneficiaries of their sister’s protection.  Even in her teens (as in her years in the White House) she came to their aid when they got into scrapes that required some artful intervention — whether to mollify their father or, later, to quiet a nosy press corps. Though grateful for her intercession, they were also terrified of her, especially of her disapprobation.

Until her teenage years, Hillary could get away with many of the minor infractions for which they were penalized. Often the Rodham children engaged in pranks around the house, engineered by Hillary, but it would be the boys who were punished more severely. “ ‘Little Hillary’ could do no wrong,” said Tony. “She was Daddy’s girl, there’s no doubt about it.” Her brothers called Hugh “Old Man,” but Hillary called him Pop-Pop (as would Chelsea Clinton, who also could do no wrong in her grandfather’s eyes). Toward their sister, at least, their father was capable of a modicum of tenderness. He taught her to play baseball, making her swing at his pitches until she connected with the ball solidly; fished with her at the lake; showed her (like her brothers) how to play pinochle; lingered some evenings over her math homework; told her tales of his childhood (including one about a blind mule that worked in the mines and walked outside to find his sight restored, and others about the freight trains he’d supposedly hopped); and exempted her from some of the heavier tasks assigned to her brothers. When he offered praise—in very pointed fashion — it was eagerly accepted because it was so rare.  It was expected that she excel at school, of course. Education was the bedrock of both Hugh’s and Dorothy’s divergent philosophies of parenting, and of their aspirations for their children. “Learning for earning’s sake,” said Hugh. “Learning for learning’s sake,” said Dorothy, or so their children recalled many years later.

Dorothy, said Hillary, also often told her, “Do you want to be the lead actor in your life, or a minor player who simply reacts to what others think you should say or do?” She remembers her father, on the other hand, focusing on her problems, often asking her how she would dig herself out of them—which she said always brought to mind a shovel.  Dorothy Howell Rodham had been abandoned by her own parents at age eight. Hillary and her brothers knew little of this history while they were growing up; Dorothy revealed the full story only when Hillary interviewed her for her first book, written during the White House years, It Takes a Village. The Rodhams were a family of secrets (first from one another, then from prying journalists), just as Bill Clinton’s family was.  Complicated feelings of hurt and confusion were never matters for family discussion in the Rodham house.

Dorothy’s mother, Della Murray Howell, one of nine children, was only fifteen when Dorothy was born, in Chicago. Her father, Edwin Howell, a fireman, was seventeen. The young couple divorced when Dorothy was eight and her sister, Isabelle, three. Both girls were put on a train and sent without escort to live with their father’s parents in Alhambra, California. In their new home, Dorothy told Hillary, they were constantly criticized, ridiculed, and severely punished by their grandmother, while their grandfather seemed totally removed from their lives. At one point, Dorothy said, her grandmother had ordered her confined to her room for a year during nonworking hours.

At fourteen, she left and became a babysitter in the home of a closeknit family who treated her well, sent her to high school, and encouraged her to read widely. Without this experience of living with a strong family, Dorothy told Hillary, she would not have known how to manage her own household or take care of her children.

After graduation from high school, Dorothy returned to Chicago because of the marriage of her mother to Max Rosenberg, four or five years her senior. He was well-to-do, owned several Chicago apartment buildings, as well as property in Florida, and was involved in the hotel business. According to members of the Rodham family, Rosenberg had persuaded Della — who could hardly read and write — to send for her children and to try to make amends for the past. It was the first time in ten years that Dorothy had been contacted by her mother, wrote Hillary. “I’d hoped so hard that my mother would love me that I had to take a chance and find out,” Dorothy told her.

When Dorothy and Isabelle returned to Chicago, Rosenberg offered to send Dorothy to secretarial or vocational school — but not college, as she had expected. Della, meanwhile, intended Dorothy to be her housemaid.  Dorothy refused to stay with her mother and stepfather and found a job and room of her own; Isabelle moved in with the Rosenbergs.  “My [step]grandfather, Max, for sure wanted her to have an education — I’m sure he promised her some form of education, but she was anticipating a whole lot more,” said Hillary’s first cousin Oscar Dowdy, Isabelle’s son. “I think Dorothy felt she was deceived, but probably more by her mother.”

Today a rift remains in the Rodham family related to these events, and only a few facts are indisputable. The role of Rosenberg in the life of Hillary and her family has always been clouded. The first time Hillary mentioned her stepgrandfather publicly was in 1999, during her Senate campaign in New York, after his existence was disclosed by the Forward, a secular Jewish weekly. (She did not include the information in her first book.) “I have nothing but fond memories of Max Rosenberg,” Hillary said in response to the Forward’s story, and recalled family get-togethers at the home of Della and Max. In Living History she wrote only a single sentence about him, simply acknowledging he was Jewish.  Dorothy supported herself by doing office work. When she met Hugh Rodham, she was eighteen, he was twenty-six. Hillary claimed her mother was attracted by his gruff personality, however unlikely that seems.

In the last years of his life, Hugh would tell one of his daughters-inlaw that, at first sight, he thought Dorothy was absolutely beautiful. Tony Rodham was amazed when he heard what his father had said; he had never known him to openly express such affection for his wife. She also seemed strong and intelligent to Hugh, qualities that he sometimes seemed unsure of in himself.

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