A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein Page B

men were involved, she could be especially sensitive to even implied criticism. Her face would become flushed or she would get angry and turn away. She didn’t like to be questioned, leading one of her friends to observe, perhaps too simply, “She didn’t like not to have the upper hand with men.” It reminded her of the way her father treated her, said the friend. Gradually, the conflicts over money and boys, and Hillary’s chagrin at her father’s prevailing demeanor and attitudes, led to an almost complete breakdown of their relationship. The rupture carried over to her college years and to matters far removed from his refusal to buy (or allow her to buy) the clothes she thought she needed. She and her father could hardly agree on the most elemental of questions, not to mention political ones, and his tone with her became increasingly intolerant.
    After Hillary’s father died in 1993, she wrote that during this period she hardly knew what to say to him, and often argued with him over issues of the day, like feminism, the war in Vietnam, or the counterculture. “I also understood that even when he erupted at me, he admired my independence and accomplishments and loved me with all his heart.”
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    I N 1961, while Hillary was in tenth grade and the conflict with her father became more tense, there arrived in a red Chevy Impala convertible a dashing, transforming figure who, until she met Bill Clinton, would become the most important teacher in Hillary’s life. He was a Methodist youth minister, the Reverend Don Jones, twenty-six, who had completed four years in the Navy and had just graduated from the Drew University seminary in New Jersey. Hillary had never met anyone like him. Jones became something between a father figure, adored brother, and knight-errant. He had an ally in Dorothy Rodham, who regarded him as a kindred sprit.
    Lissa Muscatine, Hillary’s chief White House speechwriter, who helped her work on
Living History,
once said of Hillary: “She’s a prude, she’s hokey, she’s a fifties person who grew up Methodist in the Chicago suburbs.” It wasn’t quite as simple as that.
    Hillary had been confirmed at the First United Methodist Church of Park Ridge in the sixth grade. (Hugh Rodham’s parents claimed that John Wesley himself had converted members of the Rodham family to Methodism in the coal-mining district near Newcastle in the north of England.) Dorothy taught Sunday school at United Methodist. Hillary attended Bible classes and was a member of the Altar Guild. “[My family] talked with God, walked with God, ate, studied and argued with God,” Hillary said.
    But until Jones showed up, Hillary’s sense of politics and her sense of religion existed on two different planes. Now they began to meld into one as he promoted what he called the “University of Life” two evenings a week at the church. Jones brought a message of “faith in action,” based on the teachings of Wesley and twentieth-century theologians, including Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who believed that the Christian’s role was essentially a moral one: balancing human nature, in all its splendor and baseness, with a passion for justice and social reform. He assigned Hillary and other members of the Methodist Youth Fellowship in Park Ridge readings from T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings; showed them copies of Picasso’s paintings, which he sometimes explained in theological and geopolitical terms; discussed the significance of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in
The Brothers Karamazov;
played “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” from Bob Dylan’s new LP, and on weekends shepherded the privileged Protestant children of Park Ridge to black and Hispanic churches in Chicago as part of exchanges with their youth groups. On one visit, Jones had brought with them a big reproduction of Picasso’s
Guernica,
which he set up