Review
"With firsthand knowledge and first-rate reporting, Gail Sheehy meticulously peels back the layers of this woman we have so barely understood: revered and reviled First Lady, vulnerable First Victim, flawed tactician, inspired candidate. You cannot know Hillary Rodham Clinton without reading this book." --Lynn Sherr, ABC News
"Gail Sheehy is a master at defining the personal as political and the political as personal. Hillary's Choice is a compelling portrait of a marriage." --Richard Reeves, author of President Kennedy: Profile of Power
From the Inside Flap
story of a woman and a marriage, both so famous the world over, we think we know everything there is to know. But Hillary's Choice renders America's First Lady fully human for the first time.
Gail Sheehy uncovers the lifelong imprint of Hillary's drillmaster father and the frustrated mother who taught her to bottle up her emotions and who took subversive pleasure in teaching her only daughter how to fight like a man. We listen in as Hillary describes, in letters to a college pen pal, her dreams of becoming a star and her depression when trying to choose an identity. And we meet her first love, the handsome Georgetown man who melted her midwestern puritanism but lost her to the more ambitious Bill Clinton.
We see the arc of Hillary's life through her headstrong choices: as a Yale Law School graduate who chooses to marry an Arkansas boy, thinking she will get him elected
From the Back Cover
"With firsthand knowledge and first-rate reporting, Gail Sheehy meticulously peels back the layers of this woman we have so barely understood: revered and reviled First Lady, vulnerable First Victim, flawed tactician, inspired candidate. You cannot know Hillary Rodham Clinton without reading this book."--Lynn Sherr, ABC News
"Gail Sheehy is a master at defining the personal as political and the political as personal. Hillary's Choice is a compelling portrait of a marriage."
--Richard Reeves, author of President Kennedy: Profile of Power
About the Author
Millions of readers defined their lives through Gail Sheehy's landmark work, Passages, and have followed her continuing examination of the stages of adult life in her bestsellers The Silent Passage, New Passages, and Understanding Men's Passages. As a political journalist and contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Ms. Sheehy has written character studies of national and world figures, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bob and Elizabeth Dole, George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Saddam Hussein, Newt Gingrich, and Gary Hart. The mother of two daughters, she divides her time between New York and California, where she lives with her husband, editor and educator Clay Felker.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From Chapter 1
Anyone who has known Hillary Clinton, née Rodham, since her budding days remarks on her iron willpower, her desperate ambition to get the best grades, take on the boys, win the competition whatever it may be. What is the source of this inner core of steel?
Hillary was born an adult, according to her mother, Dorothy Rodham. While that is surely an exaggeration, Dorothy's daughter never seemed to lack discipline or drive. Once she settled on a track, she stuck to it like the wheels of an express train. Her favorite lines from the Dr. Seuss books, she has said, read like an internalized motto: "You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose."
It was the best of times, 1950, in the best of countries, America victorious, when two offspring of Welsh immigrants moved their little family out of the city of Chicago to the suburb where the white people lived, Park Ridge. It was the right place to bring up their daughter, their pride, their Hillary. She was three years old, and the first of her two brothers was on the way. Hugh Rodham, her driven father, wanted the finest house he could afford, although he was too scarred by the Depression to take out a mortgage. Even if he had to work fourteen hours a day--and he did--he was determined to live on Elm Street in a fine two-story stone house and keep a Cadillac parked conspicuously in his driveway. His daughter would have her own bedroom with a sundeck.
Hillary did not want to grow up.
In her shoes, who would? Her world was as rarefied and protective as the elm trees that canopied the streets of her neighborhood. It was nice to look out in spring at those good gray guardians: solid, old stock, rising straight up before spreading their fanlike leaves. By summer, a million of those little green fans lapped at the warm air up and down streets of staid English Tudor-style homes. Only gentle shafts of sunlight were admitted to dapple the grass.
Hillary would spend hours dancing and spinning in the sun. She saw herself as the only person in the whole world and imagined that if she whirled around, everyone else would vanish. But the best part was pretending that the sunlight was intended for her, beamed down by God, and that there were "heavenly movie cameras watching my every move."
She always saw herself as a star.
The Rodhams' world was a suburban incubator of upward mobility, flush with GI Bill checks that bought up the land and paid the taxes for first-class public schools. The original buildings of this English-style village were 150 years old, and some still stood proudly, their white stucco fronts top-hatted with stiffly pointed gables. This quaint base was carefully overlaid by the neat, conformist homes of a middle-class community that would serve as a bedroom for workadaddies who commuted the forty-five minutes to Chicago.
"Back then, moms stayed home" is the wistful recollection of Hillary's old history teacher Paul Carlson, who was born and bred and remains insulated in Park Ridge. "Dads could make enough money to support the family. Mothers did what mothers are supposed to do, provide a gentle climate for the children and the husbands." The mothers shopped and gave coffee klatches and had lunch ready when their kids biked home from school and waited for the crunch of gravel to signal the homecoming of the head of household. The mothers of Park Ridge were always waiting for life to happen.
It was a dry town, literally as well as symbolically: no liquor and no dissenting views to heat things up. All white, almost all white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, its mostly English and German population belonged to the New Class of postwar Americans who invented the suburban dream. Republicanism was as solidly planted in Park Ridge as the American elms. When someone wanted to vote Democrat, there would be a flurry of activity trying to find a ballot for the oddball.
The Arcadian portrait of her girlhood invariably offered by Hillary and her designated friends glosses over important social realities. In status-conscious Park Ridge, most of the fathers wore business suits and were considered professionals. Hugh Rodham commuted to Chicago, the same as his neighbors, and drove home at dusk, the same as his neighbors, but he was not a professional. None of Hillary's playmates or classmates knew exactly what Mr. Rodham did for a living. "I just assumed he was a professional," most will tell you. In fact, Mr. Rodham was a tradesman. His wife had barely finished high school. Their desperate ambition to better themselves was injected repeatedly into their children. It had been ever thus with the Rodhams, a scrappy clan of Welshmen and their long-suffering wives.
Hugh's grandmother Isabella, alone with her eight children, had endured the horrors of a steerage-class crossing from Wales in 1882, to begin life anew in Scranton, Pennsylvania, joining a husband who worked in the blackened pits of the "anthracite capital of the world." The immigrant coal miner had told his sons, "It doesn't always have to be like this. You can be whatever you want to be." Their son Hugh went to work in a Scranton lace mill at the age of thirteen and stayed for the next half century, becoming a pillar of Republican respectability and the father of three sons. His namesake, Hillary's father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, managed to go through Penn State University on a football scholarship, studying physical education. But he graduated in the Depression and went to work in the mines, later joining his father at the Scranton Lace Company. Big and burly and bursting with ambition, Hugh Jr. escaped the dreary mining town and literally rode the rails, jumping on and off passing freight trains until he got himself to Chicago and found a better job selling curtains at the Columbia Lace Company.
Hillary tellingly describes her father as "a self-sufficient, tough-minded, small businessman." Indeed, he did eventually become his own boss and the sole employee of a little business. He made draperies for hotels and banks and offices. He took the orders, bought the material, cut and stenciled and sewed the curtains, delivered and hung them. Hugh Rodham was a one-man band. (Except when he put his sons to work helping him on a Saturday.)
The Rodhams emphasized self-reliance: no hands, no help, except perhaps from God or Goldwater. Pop-Pop, as the children called the authoritarian drillmaster at the head of the family, neither offered nor asked for nurturing. Matters of the heart were a fickle distraction in the Rodham household. Life was seen as combat. Hillary's father prided himself on having trained young recruits for combat during World War II. Mr. Rodham did serve as a chief petty officer in the navy, although he himself never saw combat or left the States. Notwithstanding, he gave a good imitation of General Patton in raising his children.
"Well, Hillary," he would demand, "how are you going to dig yourself out of this one?"
In her first book Hillary depicts a deeply religious family: "We talked with God, walked with God, ate, studied and argued with God. Each night we knelt by our beds to pray." Her father did come from a long line of Methodists, but he let his wife and daughter do most of the churchgoing to the First United Methodist Church of Park Ridge. The patrician manners and mores of the New Class were not something to which Hugh Rodham aspired. He swore. He chewed tobacco. He was gruff and intolerant and also famously tightfisted: he shut off the heat in the house every night and turned a deaf ear to his children's complaints that they woke up freezing in the morning. Toughen up was the message. In the Rodham code any emotional display signaled weakness.
"Maybe that's why she's such an accepting person," Dorothy has said of her daughter. "She had to put up with him."
[From Chapter 14]
One of Hillary's favorite homilies seemed to her more applicable than ever that year:
As I was standing in the street as quiet as could be,
A great big ugly man came up and tied his horse to me.
The man was, of course, Kenneth Starr. The "I" was the way Hillary saw herself: working behind the scenes on issues and principles and selflessly helping her husband to regain the reins of a presidency run amok. Why, then, was this zealot chasing her down and trying to tie his subpoena to her? It was an infuriating distraction from her efforts to use the power of her husband's office to change things for the better for Americans and for women and children around the world.
One day in April, Hillary was the headliner at the Mother of the Year awards. A few days later, a paternal Bill Clinton had to reassure a shocked nation after a homegrown act of terrorism--the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in which 158 people were killed. Only a few days after that, the father figure of the country and the mother of the year faced their first deposition with Kenneth Starr. An eight-foot table had been moved into the President's study for the unique occasion. Clinton went first. He took a seat at the south end of the table. Already in place was a lineup of three prosecutors and a court reporter. At the opposite end Kenneth Starr faced the President. He wanted to take this deposition himself. Overeager to the point of carelessness, he was three or four questions into the deposition when he noticed the President's attorneys, Jane Sherburne and Abner Mikva, smirking. One of Starr's deputies passed him a note. The top prosecutor had forgotten to swear in the witness.
The contrast between Bill and Hillary's personalities was strikingly on display. The President, who believes that if he can connect with somebody he can always persuade him, couldn't have been more polite and helpful. He tried to put Starr at ease. After the formalities, he chatted with Starr and his deputies about the Oklahoma City bombing and then guided them...
