Growing Up Rodham

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.

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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.

"It's not only a true story, but a good metaphor," she says.

When the boys ran football routes though the elm trees, Hillary did, too. "I learned the give-and-take of competition, and winning and losing, and that you couldn't take it so personally," she says. "You just had to get up the next day and come back and do it better."

Every August, the family went to a cabin with no plumbing or heat built by Hugh and his father on Lake Winola in the Poconos north of Scranton. Hugh taught his daughter to shoot a gun, and to play pinochle with the Rodham men and their friends, guys with names like Old Hank, who would stomp up the steps and say: "Is that black-haired bastard home? I want to play cards." When they lost, they would cuss and upend the table.

But the most competitive sport in the Rodham household was political discussion. The kitchen table was roiled by debate, sparked by Hugh's declarations about commies, corporations and political crooks. Years later, Bill Clinton got a taste of it and remarked: "Lord, they loved to argue. Each one tried to rewrite history to put the proper spin on it."