Living History (5 page)

Because of Don’s “University,” I first read e. e. cummings and T S. Eliot; experienced Picasso’s paintings, especially Guernica, and debated the meaning of the “Grand Inquisitor”

in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. I came home bursting with excitement and shared what I had learned with my mother, who quickly came to find in Don a kindred spirit. But the University of Life was not just about art and literature. We visited black and Hispanic churches in Chicago’s inner city for exchanges with their youth groups. In the discussions we had sitting around church basements, I learned that, despite the obvious differences in our environments, these kids were more like me than I ever could have imagined. They also knew more about what was happening in the civil rights movement in the South. I had only vaguely heard of Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, but these discussions sparked my interest.

So, when Don announced one week that he would take us to hear Dr. King speak at Orchestra Hall, I was excited. My parents gave me permission, but some of my friends’

parents refused to let them go hear such a “rabble-rouser.”

Dr. King’s speech was entitled, “Remaining Awake Through a Revolution.” Until then, I had been dimly aware of the social revolution occurring in our country, but Dr.

King’s words illuminated the struggle taking place and challenged our indifference: “We now stand on the border of the Promised Land of integration. The old order is passing away and a new one is coming in. We should all accept this order and learn to live together as brothers in a world society, or we will all perish together.”

Though my eyes were opening, I still mostly parroted the conventional wisdom of Park Ridge’s and my father’s politics. While Don Jones threw me into “liberalizing” experiences, Paul Carlson introduced me to refugees from the Soviet Union who told haunting tales of cruelty under the Communists, which reinforced my already strong anti-Communist views. Don once remarked that he and Mr. Carlson were locked in a battle for my mind and soul. Their conflict was broader than that, however, and came to a head in our church, where Paul was also a member. Paul disagreed with Don’s priorities, including the University of Life curriculum, and pushed for Don’s removal from the church. After numerous confrontations, Don decided to leave First Methodist after only two years for a teaching position at Drew University, where he recently retired as Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics. We stayed in close touch over the years, and Don and his wife, Karen, were frequent visitors at the White House. He assisted at my brother Tony’s wedding in the Rose Garden on May 28, 1994

I now see the conflict between Don Jones and Paul Carlson as an early indication of the cultural, political, and religious fault lines that developed across America in the last forty years. I liked them both personally and did not see their beliefs as diametrically opposed then or now.

At the end of my junior year at Maine East, our class was split in two, and half of us became the first senior class at Maine Township High School South, built to keep up with the baby boomers. I ran for student government President against several boys and lost, which did not surprise me but still hurt, especially because one of my opponents told me I was “really stupid if I thought a girl could be elected President.” As soon as the election was over, the winner asked me to head the Organizations Committee, which as far as I could tell was expected to do most of the work. I agreed.

That actually turned out to be fan because, as the first graduating class, we were starting all the high school traditions like homecoming parades and dances, student council elections, pep rallies and proms. We staged a mock presidential debate for the 1964 election.

A young government teacher, Jerry Baker, was in charge. He knew I was actively supporting Goldwater. I had even persuaded my dad to drive Betsy and me to hear Goldwater speak when he came on a campaign swing by train through the Chicago suburbs.

One of my friends, Ellen Press, was the only Democrat I knew in my class, and she was a vocal supporter of President Johnson. Mr. Baker, in an act of counterintuitive brilliance―

or perversity―assigned me to play President Johnson and Ellen to represent Senator Goldwater. We were both insulted and protested, but Mr. Baker said this would force each of us to learn about issues from the other side. So I immersed myself―for the first time―in President Johnson’s Democratic positions on civil rights, health care, poverty and foreign policy. I resented every hour spent in the library reading the Democrats’

platform and White House statements. But as I prepared for the debate, I found myself arguing with more than dramatic fervor. Ellen must have had the same experience. By the time we graduated from college, each of us had changed our political affiliations. Mr.

Baker later left teaching for Washington, D.C., where he has served for many years as Legislative Counsel for the Air Line Pilots Association, a position that puts to good use his ability to understand both Democratic and Republican perspectives.

Being a high school senior also meant thinking about college. I knew I was going but did not have a clue about where. I went to see our overburdened and unprepared college counselor, who gave me a few brochures about Midwestern colleges but offered neither help nor advice. I got needed guidance from two recent college graduates who were studying for their master’s in teaching at Northwestern University and had been assigned to teach government classes at Maine South: Karin Fahlstrom, a graduate of Smith, and Janet Altman, a graduate of Wellesley. I remember Miss Fahlstrom telling our class she wanted us to read a daily newspaper other than Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune.

When I asked which one, she suggested The New York Times. “But that’s a tool of the Eastern Establishment!” I responded. Miss Fahlstrom, clearly surprised, said, “Well, then, read The Washington Post!” Up until then, I had never even seen either of those newspapers and didn’t know the Tribune wasn’t the gospel.

In mid-October, both Misses Fahlstrom and Altman asked if I knew where I wanted to go to college; I didn’t, and they recommended I apply to Smith and Wellesley, two of the Seven Sisters women’s colleges. They told me that if I went to a women’s college, I could concentrate on my studies during the week and have fun on the weekends. I had not even considered leaving the Midwest for college and had only visited Michigan State because its honors program invited Merit Scholar finalists to its campus. But once the idea was presented, I became interested. They invited me to attend events to meet alumnae and current students. The gathering for Smith was at a beautiful, large home in one of the wealthy suburbs along Lake Michigan, while Wellesley’s was in a penthouse apartment on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. I felt out of place at both. All the girls seemed not only richer but more worldly than I. One girl at the Wellesley event was smoking pastelcolored cigarettes and talking about her summer in Europe. That seemed a long way from Lake Winola and my life.

I told my two teacher mentors that I didn’t know about “going East” to school, but they insisted that I talk with my parents about applying. My mother thought I should go wherever I wanted. My father said I was free to do that, but he wouldn’t pay if I went west of the Mississippi or to Radcliffe, which he heard was full of beatniks. Smith and Wellesley, which he had never heard of, were acceptable. I never visited either campus, so when I was accepted, I decided on Wellesley based on the photographs of the campus, especially its small Lake Waban, which reminded me of Lake Winola. I have always been grateful to those two teachers.

I didn’t know anyone else going to Wellesley. Most of my friends were attending Midwestern colleges to be close to home. My parents drove me to college, and for some reason we got lost in Boston, ending up in Harvard Square, which only confirmed my father’s views about beatniks. However, there weren’t any in sight at Wellesley, and he seemed reassured. My mother has said that she cried the entire thousand-mile drive back from Massachusetts to Illinois. Now that I have had the experience of leaving my daughter at a distant university, I understand exactly how she felt. But back then, I was only looking ahead to my own future.

CLASS OF ‘69

In 1994, Frontline, the PBS television series, produced a documentary about the Wellesley class of 1969, “Hillary’s Class.” It was mine, to be sure, but it was much more than that. The producer, Rachel Dretzin, explained why Frontline decided to scrutinize our class twentyfive years after we graduated: “They’ve made a journey unlike any other generation, through a time of profound change and upheaval for women.”

Classmates of mine have said that Wellesley was a girls’ school when we started and a women’s college when we left. That sentiment probably said as much about us as it did the college.

I arrived at Wellesley carrying my father’s political beliefs and my mother’s dreams and left with the beginnings of my own. But on that first day, as my parents drove away, I felt lonely, overwhelmed and out of place. I met girls who had gone to private boarding schools, lived abroad, spoke other languages fluently and placed out of freshman courses because of their Advanced Placement test scores. I had been out of the country only once―to see the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. My only exposure to foreign languages was high school Latin.

I didn’t hit my stride as a Wellesley student right away. I was enrolled in courses that proved very challenging. My struggles with math and geology convinced me once and for all to give up on any idea of be coming a doctor or a scientist. My French professor gently told me, “Mademoiselle, your talents lie elsewhere.” A month after school started I called home collect and told my parents I didn’t think I was smart enough to be there. My father told me to come on home and my mother told me she didn’t want me to be a quitter.

After a shaky start, the doubts faded, and I realized that I really couldn’t go home again, so I might as well make a go of it.

One snowy night during my freshman year, Margaret Clapp, then President of the college, arrived unexpectedly at my dorm, Stone-Davis, which perched on the shores above Lake Waban. She came into the dining room and asked for volunteers to help her gently shake the snow off the branches of the surrounding trees so that they wouldn’t break under the weight. We walked from tree to tree through knee-high snow under a clear sky filled with stars, led by a strong, intelligent woman alert to the surprises and vulnerabilities of nature. She guided and challenged both her students and her faculty with the same care. I decided that night that I had found the place where I belonged.

Madeleine Albright, who served as Ambassador to the United Nations and Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, started Wellesley ten years before me. I have talked with her often about the differences between her time and mine. She and her friends in the late fifties were more overtly committed to finding a husband and less buffeted by changes in the outside world. Yet they too benefited from Wellesley’s example and its high expectations of what women could accomplish if given the chance. In Madeleine’s day and in mine, Wellesley emphasized service. Its Latin motto is Non Ministrari sed Ministrare―“Not to be ministered unto, but to minister”―a phrase in line with my own Methodist upbringing. By the time I arrived, in the midst of an activist student era, many students viewed the motto as a call for women to become more engaged in shaping our lives and influencing the world around us.

What I valued most about Wellesley were the lifelong friends I made and the opportunity that a women’s college offered us to stretch our wings and minds in the ongoing journey toward self-definition and identity. We learned from the stories we told one another, sitting around in our dorm rooms or over long lunches in the all-glass dining room.

I stayed in the same dorm, Stone-Davis, all four years and ended up living on a corridor with five students who became lifelong friends. Johanna Branson, a tall dancer from Lawrence, Kansas, became an art history major and shared with me her love of paintings and film. Johanna explained on Frontline that from the first day at Wellesley, we were told we were “… the cream of the cream. That sounds really bratty and elitist now. But at the time, it was a wonderful thing to hear if you were a girl … you didn’t have to take second seat to anybody.”

Jinnet Fowles, from Connecticut and another art history student, posed hard-to-answer questions about what I thought could really be accomplished through student action. Jan Krigbaum, a free spirit from California, brought unflagging enthusiasm to every venture and helped establish a Latin American student exchange program. Connie Hoenk, a longhaired blonde from South Bend, Indiana, was a practical, down-to-earth girl whose opinions frequently reflected our common Midwestern roots. Suzy Salomon, a smart, hardworking girl from another Chicago suburb who laughed often and easily, was always ready to help anyone.

Two older students, Shelley Parry and Laura Grosch, became mentors. A junior in my dorm when I arrived as a freshman, Shelley had an unusual grace and bearing for a young person. She would look at me calmly with huge, intelligent eyes while I carried on about some real or perceived injustice in the world, and then she would gently probe for the source of my passion or the factual basis for my position. After graduation, she taught school in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa, where she met her Australian husband, and finally settled in Australia. Shelley’s roommate was the indomitable Laura Grosch, a young woman of large emotions and artistic talent. When I saw “Fooly Scare,” one of Laura’s paintings in her dorm room, I liked it so much that I bought it over a course of years of tiny payments. It hangs in our Chappaqua home today. All of these girls matured into women whose friendships have sustained and supported me over the years.

Our all-female college guaranteed a focus on academic achievement and extracurricular leadership we might have missed at a coed college. Women not only ran all the student activities―from student government to newspaper to clubs―but we also felt freer to take risks, make mistakes and even fail in front of one another. It was a given that the president of the class, the editor of the paper and top student in every field would be a woman. And it could be any of us. Unlike some of the smart girls in my high school, who felt pressure to forsake their own ambitions for more traditional lives, my Wellesley classmates wanted to be recognized for their ability, hard work and achievements. This may explain why there is a disproportionate number of women’s college graduates in professions in which women tend to be underrepresented.