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Growing up Rodham

BY SALLY JENKINS | Washington Post

December 9, 2007

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."

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Park Ridge was a village-style enclave outside Chicago, where there were no blacks, Hispanics, divorces or Democrats. Except for Hillary's mother, who kept it a secret. Men went to work in dark suits, and women wore white gloves to shop at Marshall Field's.

"Everybody's father rode the train, and at rush hour the men would all be wearing hats, all smoking cigarettes, and they all had their newspapers," says neighbor Ernie "Ricky" Ricketts. "They'd be walking home like 'Dawn of the Dead' or one of those zombie movies."

Hugh Rodham purchased his family's brown-brick mock Georgian in 1950 for $35,000 in cash, the carefully saved profit from his drapery business. He worked 14-hour days and kept a Cadillac -- which he paid cash for as well -- in the driveway. Hugh didn't believe in debt, big government, the capital gains tax, or public assistance for anything other than roads and schools.

"My father really was an old-fashioned conservative with a small 'c,' " Clinton says. "He believed in hard work, and that everyone had to do their part and be willing to take responsibility."

Hillary Diane Rodham, center, as she appeared in a 1957 grammar school photo. (Field School Yearbook Photo) The Rodhams bought their first television set in 1951, and over the next decade American life poured forth from it. Dwight Eisenhower warned of the Soviet menace and "the new language of atomic warfare." Sputnik was launched, and Eisenhower told American children to study more science. Hillary discussed the matter with Ricky, sitting on a fence, and decided that "our president and our country needed us to do that," she recalled in her book "It Takes a Village."

Besides the television, not many luxuries made it into the Rodham household. Hugh was constricted by a lifelong "fear of poverty," according to his daughter. He came from a family of Welsh laborers who immigrated via steerage to Scranton, Pa., where he was reared amid textile mills, coal mines and train yards. Hugh escaped by playing football at Penn State, and he graduated in 1935, amid the Great Depression. He hopped a freight train to Chicago and worked as a traveling salesman across the Midwest until the war, during which he was a drill instructor at Naval Station Great Lakes.

Hugh never shed his working-class roots, or his "tightfistedness." He turned off the heat at night, and he refused to buy anything on credit. "Do you want us to end up in the poorhouse?" he'd ask Hillary and her two younger brothers, Hugh Jr. and Tony. Hillary never got an allowance. "I feed you, don't I?" her father replied when she asked for one.

When Dorothy urged the children to learn for learning's sake, he interjected, "Learn for earning's sake." To demonstrate what a life of comparative ease they led, he drove to skid row, pointing out the vagrants. He wanted his children "to see what became of people who, as he saw it, lacked the self-discipline and motivation to keep their lives on track," Clinton wrote.

Clinton has described her father as "hardheaded and often gruff," and she acknowledges that he was a mass of prejudices. Hugh was 6-foot-2 and 230 pounds, with a head of thick black hair. He doled out corporal punishment liberally.

"You get in trouble at school, you get in trouble at home," he warned. When he was displeased, he stared and said, "Hillary, how are you going to dig yourself out of this one?" It made her think of backhoes.

"The message I heard loud and clear was 'You have a lot going for you -- you'd better not screw it up,' " she wrote.

He had a booming laugh and a softness for his daughter, but he didn't express love easily. The chief way he showed it was to tease. When she brought home straight A's, he said, " 'Well, Hillary, that must be an easy school you go to."

There was another way Hugh showed love: He refused to curb her ambitions or to force her into a traditional female role. By age 10, Hillary was a tomboy obsessed with baseball, especially the switch-hitting Mickey Mantle. She played ball in the street with Ricky Ricketts and other neighbor boys using sewer covers as bases. "Usually I was the only girl on the team," she says.

When she announced that she wanted to learn how to hit a curveball, Hugh just said, "Okay." For the next several weekends, "we drilled for countless hours," she says. He showed her the backspin of a fastball and the ducking topspin of a curve, and he trained her to be patient, to wait for pitches over the center of the plate and judge the break of the ball before swinging.