Growing Up Rodham

All that was before the United States was ripped in half, before screaming protesters told people to "throw your bodies on the machine," and you didn't need drugs to feel narcotized because there was a cataclysmic sensation of things being torn down and upended.

At Wellesley College -- Hugh said he would pay for his daughter to go anywhere but west or to that hippie den Radcliffe -- Hillary continued to be pulled both ways. She was president of the Young Republicans as a freshman in 1965, only to inch left in increments, first toward Nelson Rockefeller and later to antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy. "I moved slowly but surely," she says.

Hillary stayed in touch with Jones, sending him single-spaced missives on pages torn out of spiral notebooks, carefully assessing her changing beliefs. She also wrote cerebral musings to Peavoy, later quoted by biographer Sheehy. "Emotion without thought . . . is pitiful."

She lost her grip on her emotions just slightly in the anguish of 1968. King's assassination caused her to wail aloud and fling her books against a wall, and her relationship with Hugh deteriorated as they fought over bra-burnings and Bohemians. But she recovered her composure, and it was her signature as president of the Wellesley student government. "She's anchored by it," says Alan Schechter, her college adviser. "She was the sort of person who thought the way to win goals at a place like Wellesley was to go to people who held power and reason with them."

Unlike some, she staved off cynicism and never lost confidence in orthodox politicking. Asked why, she replies: "I think I understood the give-and-take of history, the fact that oftentimes you can be so disillusioned and heartbroken, as we were, but I also believed that there was at root a resilience in this country. And you couldn't just stand on the sidelines if you believed we were capable of rebounding. . . . Yeah, there were moments of great despair and loss. But never to the extent that one just gave up and quit."

Typically, Hillary attended both political conventions that summer of 1968. She was an intern for Rockefeller at the Republican gathering in Miami, and weeks later viewed the Democratic chaos in the streets of Chicago. She and Betsy told their parents that they were going to a movie but drove instead to Grant Park, where they dodged rocks and police nightsticks and stared at the surreal sight of a toilet thrown out a window of the Conrad Hilton Hotel.

The experience only convinced her that the place to be was inside, where the power was. "With her, it wasn't a theoretical discussion. She really believed she could obtain power," Peavoy says. "A lot of us didn't. We believed we could protest, but the idea that we could get into the system, that seemed like a world we couldn't enter. It was like wanting to be a movie star. You could say you wanted to be one, but actually becoming one seemed impossible."

* * *

The Iowa that Hillary Clinton campaigns through is furrowed as far as the eye can see, an ocean of corduroyed yellow-stubble fields under a robin's-egg-blue winter sky. Her motorcade glides past clapboard farmhouses, listing barns and fat rolls of gray-yellow hay that sit in the harrowed fields like sluggish animals.

She is heading toward Correctionville.

"Prepare to Meet Your God," declares a sign posted in a vacant field brown as aged parchment.

At local halls and county fire stations, she invokes her conservative Midwestern past to people in workaday clothes sitting in folding metal chairs. With her buff-colored hair and narrow shoulders in a brown suit, she blends with the landscape. In a flat accent, she echoes all that she heard at the dinner table, talking about "American innovation" and "good jobs with a rising income!" She intends to "restore the habits of our parents and grandparents" and says, "Everything I've put forward, I've said how I would pay for it."

A breath later, she channels her mother, empathizing with those who aren't making it. "They're doing the best they can, working as hard as they know how, and sometimes life doesn't deal them a fair hand," she says.

Hugh Rodham died of a stroke in 1993, during the Clintons' first year in the White House. By then, father and daughter enjoyed a wry, fond connection, even though Hillary had fulfilled his worst fear. She not only became a Democrat but married one as well. In 1975, Hugh grudgingly handed over the bride. When the minister asked "Who will give away this woman?" everyone stared at Hugh, who wouldn't turn loose. Finally, the minister said, "You can step back now, Mr. Rodham."

The Rodhams moved to Little Rock to be closer to their daughter, and Hugh even campaigned for his son-in-law. At a party to celebrate William Jefferson Clinton becoming president, Hugh sipped a drink alone in a corner. According to the Associated Press, when an old friend from Scranton paused to congratulate him, he replied quietly, "My daughter is a real special girl."

President Clinton eulogized Hugh at a memorial service in Little Rock before he was carried home to the family plot in Scranton. He described a man "passionately involved" with his children, who never quit hoping that the capital gains tax would be repealed and who believed that family trumped differences.

"In 1974, when I made my first political race, I ran in a congressional district where there were a lot of Republicans from the Middle West," he said. "And my future father-in-law came down in a Cadillac with an Illinois license plate; never told a living soul I was in love with his daughter, just went up to people and said: 'I know that you're a Republican and so am I. I think Democrats are just one step short of communism. But this kid's all right.' "

Now Hillary Rodham Clinton is the candidate. It raises a question: Just what would Hugh Rodham, conservative with a small "c," have thought about a Democratic woman running for president? For a moment, Clinton isn't sure how to reply. Then an old lesson about curveballs comes back to her, and a smile enters her voice.

"If it was his daughter," she says, "he'd have been fine with it."