WP: THE FRONT-RUNNERS: Understanding the leading Presidential candidates
HOW SHE GOT HERE
Growing Up Rodham
By Sally Jenkins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 9, 2007; Page A22
Back then, chicken a la cheese won recipe contests, and an Amana Free-o-Frost was the answer to every woman's problems. Hugh Rodham woke up each morning in his thick-walled suburban dream home in Park Ridge, Ill., bellowing the songs of Mitch Miller and the Gang (Singalong favorites! "Ain't We Got Fun"!), and sat down each night to dinner served exactly at 6 p.m., over which he issued loud pronouncements about American self-reliance, as opposed to communists and deadbeats seeking handouts. That's when the argument would start. "Now, wait a minute," his wife, Dorothy Rodham, would suggest, voice soft as a housedress. "Sometimes things happen to people that they have no control over." Their daughter, Hillary, would follow the conversation, alternately agreeing with each, until Hugh had the last word. Fathers were the ultimate authority then. Fathers, and presidents.
It's safe to say that the dinner debate at 235 Wisner St. was never resolved for Hillary Rodham Clinton. "I think it was part of the balance I created in my own life, it became a balancing of all my different influences and values," she says, describing in a recent interview the way her father's conservatism shaped her. "A lot was worth admiring in the sense of rugged individualism. But it didn't explain enough for me about the world, or the world as I would want it to be."
It's a self-analysis that won't satisfy critics who accuse her of being a political chameleon, with views calculated and never quite fixed. Nevertheless, there was an original Hillary, before she was so heavily coated by perception: a girl reared in a conventional postwar middle-class hamlet who, according to her youth pastor, Don Jones, was "controlled and circumspect" even then. She was the conciliator of the "push and tug" of her parents' differences, and she clung to centrism even during the '60s as her teachers in Park Ridge engaged in a conservative-vs.-liberal duel for her "mind and soul," she writes in her memoir, "Living History."
"It's that Midwestern thing, cheesy or all-encompassing as that sounds," says her oldest friend, Betsy Ebeling. "You can't remove it from her fabric. . . . She's triangulated, if you will."...
***
All that was before the United States was ripped in half, before screaming protesters told people to "throw your bodies on the machine," and you didn't need drugs to feel narcotized because there was a cataclysmic sensation of things being torn down and upended. At Wellesley College -- Hugh said he would pay for his daughter to go anywhere but west or to that hippie den Radcliffe -- Hillary continued to be pulled both ways. She was president of the Young Republicans as a freshman in 1965, only to inch left in increments, first toward Nelson Rockefeller and later to antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy. "I moved slowly but surely," she says....She lost her grip on her emotions just slightly in the anguish of 1968. King's assassination caused her to wail aloud and fling her books against a wall, and her relationship with Hugh deteriorated as they fought over bra-burnings and Bohemians. But she recovered her composure, and it was her signature as president of the Wellesley student government. "She's anchored by it," says Alan Schechter, her college adviser. "She was the sort of person who thought the way to win goals at a place like Wellesley was to go to people who held power and reason with them."...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/08/AR2007120801526_pf.html
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