A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein

his politics as “progressive,” took her and Hillary to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak at the Chicago Sunday Evening Club. King talked about racial segregation in the North as well as the South. It was the first time Hillary, then fourteen, grasped the notion of Negro children being the country’s poorest and most vulnerable.
    If there is a single defining thread of Hillary’s political, religious, and social development, it is her belief and determination, from her teenage years onward, that the tragedy of race in America must be made right. What in part first attracted her to Bill Clinton was her perception that he was an unusual, enlightened Southerner who wanted to go into politics and help right the country’s greatest wrong. And even more than her husband, Hillary formed many of her closest friendships with blacks; her mentor as a professional was a black woman, Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, for whom she went to work as a legal advocate for neglected and impoverished children; later, in the White House, Hillary chose several African Americans as senior aides, including her chief of staff. (Hillary and her subordinates on the first lady’s staff frequently referred to the president and his aides, half-jokingly, as “the white males in the West Wing.”)
    In Hillary’s junior year in high school, she and Betsy both became Goldwater Girls, assigned by local campaign aides to check for voter registration fraud in minority neighborhoods in Chicago. Hillary’s father raised no objection to his daughter knocking on doors in the slums to find out the registration status of voters whom the Goldwater campaign might be able to disqualify. Hillary’s territory included the new (and later infamous) Robert Taylor Homes housing project, bulldozed into oblivion as a symbol of poverty and racism eight presidencies later. She was a privileged suburban teenager seeing, close up, how thousands of poor black people lived, and it made a transforming impression.
    As Hillary’s school life and expanding social concerns became sources of great personal satisfaction, her life at home—at least with her father—was deteriorating. He adamantly refused to allow her to take ballroom dancing lessons in seventh grade and eighth grade, despite the fact that most Park Ridge boys and girls of Hillary’s age attended dance class every Friday night, and were encouraged to do so by their parents. Initially, her friends thought this was another example of his not wanting to spend money. But in fact money, for a change, wasn’t the issue. Rather, Rodham didn’t want his daughter dancing with boys, did not want his daughter in the dating game, though in Hillary’s circle most of the kids had known one another since kindergarten, had traded dog tags, entertained preteen crushes on one another, and long enjoyed going to the movies together in groups on weekends.
    By high school, boys seemed to have two different views about Hillary and her unusual kind of appeal. “Guys didn’t think she was attractive,” said one of her male classmates. “They liked girls who were ‘girlish.’” Hillary was “womanish.” Her ankles were thick. She had a reputation for being bossy. Though she displayed an easy humor with Betsy and some of the other girls, boys often perceived her as too earnest and aloof and, by implication, uninterested in sex. So much so that the Maine newspaper wrote “humorously” that she would become a nun, one day, with the name “Sister Frigidaire.” But some boys, usually older ones, were attracted by her seeming self-possession. She did not go out on dates often, but it wasn’t for lack of invitations. Partly it was because she was more interested in other pursuits, and partly because she seemed anything but confident about herself with the opposite sex.
    Some of the difficulty was