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

obvious soon after her parents had left her on the campus and had headed back home (her mother crying much of the way) that she had won admission to, and chosen to attend, a school in which more glamorous and accomplished young women—debutantes, many of them—were on the fast track. If she were to compete, it would have to be on her own terms. In this, she would be helped immensely by the country’s changing mood, culture, politics, and philosophies of gender during her undergraduate years. There would be no need, as it turned out, for the girl with Coke-bottle glasses and complicated political notions to hold to the old model of a Seven Sisters perfectly mannered woman.
    Robert Reich, who would become President Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, met Hillary when she was a Wellesley freshman wearing bell-bottoms, board-straight blond hair, and no makeup. “She and I were self-styled student ‘reformers’ then,” said Reich, “years before the radicals took over administration buildings and shut down the campuses. We marched for civil rights and demanded the admission of more black students to our schools. Even then we talked of bringing the nation together. We were naive about how much we could accomplish.”
    In fact, the last thing on Hillary’s mind at Wellesley seemed to be adherence to the old paradigms, either political or gender-based.
    Hillary’s mother had taught her that, above all else, she could do anything, aspire to anything, that there was no reason for a daughter to aim for less than her brothers. Hillary would later describe herself as a “transitional figure” in regard to the women’s movement, caught between two epochs—pre-feminist and post-feminist—and the demands and opportunities of each. However, as one less-conflicted Wellesley graduate observed, Hillary might not have considered or understood another possibility: that “it is
not
hard to have it all; but it’s hard to have it both ways.”
    Hillary’s time at Wellesley was not made easier by whatever tendency toward depression she had either inherited or developed—a tendency that surfaced again in the White House. Periodically at Wellesley she fell into debilitating, self-doubting funks. During the early weeks of her freshman semester, she was so deflated that she called home and confessed failure and an inability to cope. She had never been away from home—even for a weekend—on her own before. She missed the comfortable precincts of Park Ridge, and insisted she was incapable of adjusting to the Wellesley milieu. Whatever her anger at her father, she briefly seemed to miss him. He said she could come back to Illinois, but Dorothy said she didn’t want her daughter to be a quitter. Her mother prevailed.
    After Hillary decided to stay at Wellesley, she seemed to regain some of her old confidence and began making friends who would figure in the rest of her life. But even as she steadied her footing, there were stumbles and persistent signs of melancholy. In the winter of 1967, her junior year, she again experienced what she described in a letter as her recurring “February depression.” Despite earning As, dating a Harvard man regarded as a good catch, and working off-campus with disadvantaged children (including a seven-year-old Negro girl she tutored and had formed a close bond with), she sometimes overslept, nodded off in her classes, and became concerned that her teachers regarded her as a washout. “Why am I so afraid?” she wrote to her high school friend John Peavoy. “Or why am I not afraid? Am I really not unique after all? Will I have a clichéd life? Is life merely absurd?” (Hillary now sounded like a character in
The Catcher in the Rye.
) She now called herself an “agnostic intellectual liberal” and an “emotional conservative.” During Christmas break that year, she wrote to Peavoy again,