American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power Read Online Free PDF Page A

seemed to matter much to Hugh Rodham, who only grudgingly agreed to buy her a dress for the junior prom because Dorothy was going to be a chaperone and she didn’t want to be embarrassed. Dorothy was, in fact, concerned about Hillary’s appearance—Hillary irked her mother by refusing to wear makeup—and her apparent lack of interest in boys. When the school newspaper predicted that the humorless, compulsive overachiever would wind up in a convent as “Sister Frigidaire,” Hillary paid little mind. “She thought it was all superficial and silly,” Dorothy said. “She didn’t have time for it.”
    Indeed, as a teenager Hillary seemed hell-bent on filling every spare moment with fresh ideas and eye-opening experiences.Through her church, First United Methodist, she volunteered to babysit the children of migrant farmworkers brought in each year to work the fields not far from Park Ridge. The Reverend Don Jones, a social reformer whose own guiding philosophy was anathema to Hugh Rodham, took Hillary and other members of his University of Life youth group to visit black and Hispanic inner-city churches.
    In April of 1962, Jones told Hillary and her church that they were going to Orchestra Hall to hear Martin Luther King deliver a speech called “Sleeping Through the Revolution.” Many of the other students were forbidden to go; in Republican Park Ridge, King was viewed as a rabble-rouser. But with a little gentle prodding from Dorothy, Hugh grudgingly signed the permission slip. After the lecture, Jones took Hillary and the others backstage to meet Reverend King—a moment that would be indelibly etched in Hillary’s memory.
    So, too, was the day when a teacher burst into Hillary’s high school geometry class to announce that President Kennedy had been gunned down in Dallas. “Probably some John Bircher,” her geometry teacher muttered before instructing everyone to file into the auditorium and wait to be sent home. When Hillary arrived, Dorothy, sitting spellbound before the family television set, admitted for the first time that she had voted for JFK.
    These eye-opening events notwithstanding, Hillary would admit that she continued to parrot Hugh Rodham’s beliefs. Hillary devoured Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative and wrote her term paper on the American conservative movement. Already an active member of the Young Republican Club, she went a step further and signed on to campaign for the Republican presidential candidate as a “Goldwater Girl”—right down, she would later admit, to the cowgirl getup and the hat bearing the slogan AuH 2 O .
    Around this time, Hillary decided to make her first run for “The Presidency,” as she solemnly referred to it—of her seniorclass. She had already served as vice president of her junior class and was eager to take on the top job. But the two boys she was running against made it clear they did not take the idea of a female candidate seriously. “One of the boys told me,” she later said, “ ‘You’re really stupid if you think a girl can be elected president.’ ” Hillary was soundly defeated on the first ballot—“which didn’t surprise me but still hurt,” she would recall forty years later.
    It was not the first time she had been thwarted by sexism; when she wrote NASA saying she wanted to be an astronaut, she received a letter from the agency coolly informing her that there were no plans to train women for careers in space. But the race for senior class president did expose Hillary for the first time to what, even then, she referred to as “dirty politics.” She called up Reverend Jones to complain bitterly of her opponents’ “mud-slinging”—and vowed never to take the high road again if it meant losing an election. “It was a bitter pill for her,” he said. “She was deeply hurt—and angry. Hillary hated to lose.”
    She couldn’t be senior class president, but Hillary was determined to be a highly visible presence on campus.