A Woman in Charge (4 page)

 

D
OROTHY
H
OWELL
R
ODHAM
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 close-knit 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-in-law 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.

After Dorothy and Hugh's marriage in 1942, and Hugh's discharge from the Navy in 1945, he and Dorothy moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a building owned by Rosenberg—probably rent-free, according to Oscar Dowdy and others. Isabelle and her husband also lived in the building. Hillary and Oscar played together as children.
^*3

Hillary described Della as “weak and self-indulgent,” addicted to soap operas, and “disengaged from reality.” She could occasionally “be enchanting.” When Hillary visited her she would be taken to amusement parks and the movies. She died in 1960, unhappy and still “a mystery,” according to Hillary.

Dorothy Rodham never took kindly to Max Rosenberg, but Hugh Rodham apparently did, accepting his offer of an apartment, and of advice in financial matters. “They were both hustlers,” said Oscar Dowdy. “They understood each other. And I think Max admired Hugh. Max realized that Hugh was trying to do something with his life, and Hugh would listen to Max and take Max's advice…. Over the years, Maxhelped Hugh with financial matters and gave him business advice and probably loaned him money.”

Rosenberg agreed to back Hugh in his parking lot venture, counseling him to run for alderman and, if elected, initiate a change in the zoning laws favorable to their investment.

 

P
ERHAPS AS A RESULT
of her own grim childhood without a real home, being a competent homemaker was important to Dorothy. At the cabin in Pennsylvania, she assembled a collection of stained glass. Other small collections materialized, which Hugh Rodham grudgingly—and gradually—agreed to let her purchase. She took pride in her visual sense through paint colors and choices of inexpensive department store furniture for the house on Wisner Street. Though Hugh told endless stories about his boyhood and family in Pennsylvania, Dorothy rarely spoke of early life. “I realized that there was a sadness about Dorothy,” said Betsy Ebeling. “I don't know if ‘beaten down' is the term—isolated sometimes. She lived through her children a lot. It was very important to her that her children be happy. I don't think she thought she could be happy, though she could laugh a lot.” Some visitors to the Rodham home noted a certain fear in Dorothy—fear of being left alone.

Dorothy made her own uneasy peace with her husband (“Mr. Difficult,” she called him) and, when the children were still young, had decided to stay in the marriage. Keeping the family together was more important than pursuing independent aspirations or escaping her husband's indignities, though she had to witness much harshness toward the children. “Maybe that's why she's such an accepting person,” Dorothy said of Hillary. “She had to put up with
him.
”

The same, obviously, could be said of Dorothy.

She did not believe in divorce except under the most dire of circumstances, as she first told Hillary in the 1980s. “It was drummed into me by Dorothy that nobody in this family gets divorced,” said Nicole Boxer, who was married to Hillary's brother Tony from 1994 to 1998—when they divorced. “From Dorothy—and Tony—I heard divorce is not an option. She'd say, ‘You can work it out.' She said, ‘You have to talk to him on a level he can understand. Don't give up on him.
You do not leave the marriage.
'
^*4
She was supportive of us going to counseling, which we did.”

Hillary, after considering whether to divorce Governor Bill Clinton in Arkansas, wrote several years later that “children without fathers, or whose parents float in and out of their lives after divorce, are precarious little boats in the most turbulent seas.” Her mother would agree. Given the hardships of her mother's childhood and Hillary's own experiences growing up, her decision to devote so much of her professional life to defending and asserting the legal rights of children seems like a natural choice.

Hillary and Bill's difficult but enduring marriage is perhaps more easily explained in the context of her childhood and the marriage of her parents, dominated by the humiliating, withholding figure of her father, whom she managed nonetheless to idolize and (later) to idealize, while rationalizing his cruelty and indifference to the pain he caused his family. “I grew up in a family that looked like it was straight out of
Father Knows Best,
” Hillary said in
It Takes a Village,
and also referred to “the stability of family life that I knew growing up.” Hillary's first boyfriend in college, upon visiting the Rodham house, wondered almost immediately why Dorothy had not walked out of the marriage, and how Hillary had endured her father's petulance. But Hillary somehow found a way in difficult times to either withdraw or focus on what her father was able to give her, not what was denied. Hillary knew she was loved, or so she said.

As a child, Hillary had tried every way she knew to please him and win his approval, and then spent years seething at his treatment of her. The pattern seemed to repeat itself in her marriage. Both Hugh and Bill Clinton, who came to like and respect each other, were outsized personalities whose presence inevitably dwarfed others around them. In Clinton's case, this dominance was seductive, mesmerizing, fascinating. Rodham's effect on people, especially outside his immediate family, was usually the opposite—alienating, forbidding, unpleasant. As she later did with her husband, Hillary eventually took an almost biblical view in her forgiveness and rationalization of her father's actions: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” The lesson came directly from Hugh Rodham: “He used to say all the time, ‘I will always love you but I won't always like what you do,'” said Hillary (which cynics might regard as understated shorthand for how Hillary came to view her husband). “And, you know, as a child I would come up with nine-hundred hypotheses. It would always end with something like, ‘Well, you mean, if I murdered somebody and was in jail and you came to see me, you would still love me?'

“And he would say: ‘Absolutely! I will always love you, but I would be deeply disappointed and I would not like what you did because it would have been wrong.'”

One of Bill and Hillary's principal aides came to a less theological interpretation after years of watching (and listening to) the Clintons—and the Rodhams, who often stayed at the White House. Hillary, said the aide, devolved into “kind of the classic bitchy wife…not quite putting her hand on her hip and finger-wagging at him, but practically.
Nah-nahnah….
She has a derisive tone that is very similar to the way she sometimes sounds publicly—a sing-songy tone, like, ‘I guess I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had cheese.' That tone only more so…. It's very much directed at him, his faults, his shortcomings; that he's let her down again.”

The same tone, others have observed, characterized the way Dorothy Rodham sometimes responded to her husband's failings.

“Hillary hates the fact that Bill Clinton cheats on her, and that he doesn't need her as much as she wants,” said the aide. “And he's weak. She's a very judgmental Methodist from the Midwest. As much as they talk about loving the sinner, they actually also despise a part of the sinner. They hate the weakness. They hate the part of the person who can't toe the puritan line.”

Dorothy and Hugh were polar opposites—temperamentally, intellectually, emotionally—and their children could see that each grew increasingly exasperated with the other's evident ambivalence, antipathy, and obvious resentment. The more Hugh Rodham disparaged and heaped scorn on his wife, the more she resolved to stay out of his way and ignore his provocation. And the more she spurned him, keeping to her own projects and agenda and interposing herself as a buffer between him and the children, the more resentful he became.

As the chasm between Hillary and her father broadened during adolescence, Hillary and her mother drew closer. “Dorothy is the person who shaped Hillary more than any other, and there is no way to see Dorothy and not see how she fashioned her daughter,” said Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the Hollywood producer who is among Hillary's closest long-standing friends. But matters are hardly so simple. Hillary could, in fact, “be either her father or mother at different times, in different situations,” said Betsy Ebeling. Hillary's cousin Oscar Dowdy, who regularly visited the Rodham home as a youngster, concluded more succinctly that Hillary had inherited her mother's orderly mind and her father's bluster.

D
OROTHY WANTED
to name her daughter Hillary because to her it sounded exotic and unusual, and she liked the fact that “Hillary” sounded like a family name. That could be considered daring in 1947, especially in the Midwest. Hillary was born at Edgewater Hospital on Chicago's North Side. She weighed more than eight pounds. “Very mature upon birth,” Dorothy liked to say. Hillary, meanwhile, insisted illogically into the White House years that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest. (Sir Edmund did not make his ascent until 1953, and until then he was hardly known beyond his native New Zealand, where he lived in relative obscurity as a beekeeper in Auckland.)