Read Online A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein - Free Book Online

in front of the Park Ridge teenagers and members of a Chicago teenage gang. Picasso’s masterpiece portrays the horror of the Spanish Civil War in all its agony and misery. According to Jones, the ostensibly less-educated and less-sophisticated children from the city’s streets were far more articulate and candid in relating to the work than those from Park Ridge.
    His interpretation of the Gospels, inevitably, ran afoul of Hillary’s high school history teacher, Paul Carlson (she was his favorite student), who shared Hugh Rodham’s unwavering belief in the coming of the Red Menace. In Hillary’s class, Carlson played excerpts of Douglas MacArthur’s farewell speech to the Congress (“Old soldiers never die…”) and introduced students to refugees from communism who told of the horrors of the Soviet system. Carlson took it upon himself to warn the parishioners of United Methodist that the minds of their children were being poisoned by the new youth minister in the red Chevy convertible.
    Jones had taken up his assignment in Park Ridge in 1961, during the summer of the Freedom Rides in Mississippi and elsewhere in the Deep South. That fall, when Martin Luther King Jr. again came to preach in Chicago, Jones took Hillary and other members of his youth group to Orchestra Hall to hear him.
    Some parents had refused to let their children go, believing that King was a “rabble-rouser,” a view held by Hugh Rodham. Dorothy had granted Hillary her permission. After the program Jones took his awed students backstage to meet Dr. King. King’s sermon, “Sleeping Through the Revolution,” had woven the message of God with the politics of conscience: “Vanity asks the question Is it Popular? Conscience asks the question Is it Right?” He also cited Jesus’ parable about the man condemned to hell because he ignored his fellows in need.
    Jones became not only the most important teacher in young Hillary’s life, but also a counselor over the decades whose ministrations would show her ways to cope with adversity, and to “give service of herself” at the most difficult moments: to “salve [her] troubled soul” through the doing of good works. At almost every juncture of pain or humiliation for the rest of her life, she would return—in her fashion—to this lesson. For more than twenty years she would maintain a fascinating correspondence with Jones in which they discussed the requirements of faith and the vagaries of human nature. During the Clintons’ White House years, Jones and his wife were frequent visitors there.
    Aside from her family, Hillary’s Methodism is perhaps the most important foundation of her character. As one of her aides said during the winter’s night of the Lewinsky epoch, “Hillary’s faith is
the link….
It explains the missionary zeal with which she attacks her issues and goes after them, and why she’s done it for thirty years. And, it also explains the really extraordinary self-discipline and focus and ability to rely on her spirituality to get through all this…. She’s a woman of tremendous faith. Again, not advertised. She’s not one of those people who’s out there doing the holy roller stuff. But that’s how she gets through it: some people go to shrinks, she does it by being a Methodist.”
    Other members of the White House staff believed she used her religiosity as a cover for her faults. Some saw it as a mask in her relationship with her husband. “She elevates her staying with [Bill] to a moral level of biblical proportion,” said a presidential deputy. “I am stronger than he is. I am better than he is. Therefore, I can stay with him because it’s my biblical duty to love the sinner, and to help to try to overcome his defects of character. His sins are of weakness not of malice.”
    After two years, Paul Carlson convinced the congregation of