The Truth About Hillary (8 page)

“The next time I saw her,” Penny continued, “was on televi- sion as a guest on
The Irv Kupcinet Show
. She looked like a hippy with big glasses, shapeless clothes, and hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed in a month. Kupcinet patted her on the head in praise. My recollection is that she was yelling about a univer- sity strike over a rent increase on student housing.”
1

The transformation of Hillary Rodham—from a neatly groomed Goldwater Girl to a scruffy left-wing radical—began in earnest in the backseat of her father’s Cadillac. Throughout the long journey across America, Hillary rarely took her nose out of the books and magazines she had brought along. One of her favorite publications was
motive
, whose logo was spelled with a lowercase
m.
The magazine was destined to have a profound influence on her way of thinking.

The Reverend Don Jones, Hillary’s youth minister at the Park Ridge United Methodist Church, had given her a subscrip- tion to
motive
as a high school graduation present. It was easy to see why Jones—who would soon be fired by his congregation for advocating “socialist” views—thought so highly of
motive
. The Division of Higher Education of the United Methodist Church had published the magazine since 1941, and its original editorial mission was to help Methodist college students keep in touch with their church’s principles of “piety and service.” But by 1965, the year of Hillary’s high school graduation, the magazine was trumpeting a very different tune.

It would come to resemble such New Left underground publications as the
East Village Other
and the
Berkeley Barb.
In- deed,
motive
was gleefully vulgar; it editorialized that words like

58 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

fuck, bitch,
and
shit
should be printed “in tact.” Photo features in- cluded a birthday card for Ho Chi Minh and a picture of a pretty coed with an LSD tablet on her tongue.

Marxist writers were featured in the pages of
motive
. Rene- gade priest Daniel Berrigan contributed anti–Vietnam War poems. Nat Hentoff defended student militancy. Convicted cop killer Huey Newton was lauded as a victim and a visionary. Ad- vice was dispensed on draft dodging, desertion, and flight to Canada and Sweden.

According to the Methodist Church’s archives, during the 1960s and early 1970s
motive
espoused “highly politicized, left- wing ideology, which favored Cuba, socialism, the Black Pan- thers, SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] . . . obscene and vulgar language, and anti-American ideology.” As the archives pointed out,
motive
’s stance “did not win it popularity among the Methodist faithful.”
2

In 1972, the last year of its publication,
motive
devoted an entire issue to a radical lesbian/feminist theme, which empha- sized the need to destroy “our sexist, racist, capitalist, imperialist system.”
3
Two of the editors of the issue were Rita Mae Brown, author of the lesbian novel
Ruby Fruit Jungle
, and Charlotte Bunch, a lesbian militant.

“At this time,” the editors wrote, “we are separatists who do not work with men, straight or gay, because men are not work- ing to end male supremacy. Only a complete destruction of the whole male supremacist system can free women.”
4

Brown and Bunch defined lesbianism as a political faith, and they made it clear that even a woman who did not choose to par- ticipate in sex with another woman could still live philosophi- cally under the rubric of political lesbianism.

“Male society,” they wrote, “defines lesbianism as a sexual act, which reflects men’s limited view of women: they think of us only in terms of sex.”
5

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59

In a 1994 interview with
Newsweek
—more than two decades after
motive
folded—Hillary proudly stated: “I still have every is- sue they sent me.”
6

Hillary had read her copies of
MOTIVE
cover to cover by the time Hugh Rodham got off at exit 14 of the Massachusetts Turnpike and headed toward the Wellesley College campus— five hundred acres of woodlands, hills, meadows, and ponds, and miles of footpaths and trails that bordered Lake Waban. The beautiful campus was virtually unchanged from the day it opened to its first female students almost one hundred years before.

Hillary soon discovered that the college’s rules and regula- tions hadn’t changed much, either. She was assigned to a suite of rooms with four other girls in Stone-Davis Hall. The imposing neogothic dormitory had recently undergone a renovation. The first thing Hillary noticed when she entered the building was a bell desk, whose distinctive chimes announced whether a visitor was male or female. An upperclassman, who offered to give Hil- lary and her parents a tour of Stone-Davis, pointed out two glass-walled “fishbowl” date rooms, where girls met boys under the wary eye of housemothers—middle-aged, nonfaculty college employees, who lived in the dorm and enforced 10:00 p.m. week- day and 1:00 a.m. weekend curfews.

It did not take Hillary long to decide that Wellesley was stuck in a Victorian time warp. Out of an incoming class of 420 women, only five were African Americans. Jewish students were housed with other Jews, Catholics with Catholics. Bible classes were mandatory.

In one of the college’s most degrading traditions, freshmen were required to strip to their underwear, have reflective stick- ers attached to their spines, and then be photographed to de- termine what areas of their posture—such as overly prominent

60 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

buttocks—needed improvement.
7
The girls were told: “The buttocks [should be] neither unduly prominent nor having that ‘about to be spanked’ look.”
8

The freshmen were warned they must adhere to Wellesley’s long-established parietal regulations, which forbade boys from entering the living quarters of the dorms except on Sunday afternoon, and then only when doors remained wide open. The rules also prohibited the girls from having a car on campus, and from wearing pants.
9

Much of the Wellesley curriculum was finishing-school ma- terial that was designed to educate a woman to be a skilled wife and homemaker. There was mandatory instruction on serving tea, how to walk in high heels, and the proper way of getting out of a car in a skirt. The marriage lectures taught the young women how to talk to their husband’s boss, and how to maintain a slender figure so that their husband did not lose his interest in them. The few married students who lived on campus were offi- cially put on notice that they were not to share the “secrets of married life” with single girls.
10

In the highly charged atmosphere of the
1960
s, Wellesley was ripe for change. Toward the end of her freshman year, Hillary was elected sophomore senate representative on a plat- form that promised to reform Wellesley’s course requirements. Her inflammatory rhetoric brought her some unexpected noto- riety. The conservative
Boston Herald
wrote that Hillary and her Wellesley College allies resembled “the Bolshevik women’s aux- iliary, in their fur caps and high boots. . . .”
11

“Theirs was a generation that imagined it would reinvent the world,” wrote Miriam Horn in
Rebels in White Gloves
, an exhaus- tive study of Hillary’s 1969 graduating class at Wellesley. “Self- conscious iconoclasts and pioneers, the women of ’69 would experiment boldly with sex and work and family and religion and

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61

politics. . . . The feminist insight that ‘the personal is political’ meant that . . . all sorts of seemingly intimate choices—what kind of underwear one wore, whether and how and with whom one had sex—were political as well as personal, a way of con- fronting social rules as to how a lady behaved and of interrogat- ing the complicated relationship between power and sexual consent. . . .”
12

Hillary’s chief lieutenant at Wellesley College was Eleanor Acheson, the granddaughter of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. “Eldie” had the easy nonchalance that went with in- herited wealth, and at first she was contemptuous of Hillary’s de- sire to achieve power, influence, and access. Yet eventually, a strong bond developed between the two young women.

While Hillary was still in the early stages of exploring her sexual nature, Eldie was already sexually reckless and bawdy. When she and Alison “Snowy” Campbell, another girl with a patrician background, designed the Class of 1969 yearbook, they decided to make a brazen reference to the sexual position 69. They illustrated the cover of the book with a sexy shot of Mae West, right side up; on the back cover, Mae West was shown up- side down. The title page of the yearbook was illustrated with a picture of the bare behinds of Eldie, Snowy, and two other girls.
13

Penny McPhee, who was editor-in-chief of the
Wellesley News
, recalled: “I wasn’t surprised that they did it, by any means. Around the same time, I posed in a bikini made out of news- paper, which we ran in the
News
. So that kind of thing was defi- nitely in the air. But I would have been shocked if they had gotten it in the yearbook.”
14

They didn’t. The president of the college, Ruth Adams, put her sensible heels down, and the offending yearbook pages were left blank.

* * *

62 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Hillary’s years at Wellesley left an indelible imprint on her personality and character. Her role models were the strong- willed, ideologically passionate, sexually adventurous feminists who rejected dependence on men and despised the old-fashioned feminine wiles typically used by women to attract the opposite sex. Her feminist classmates refused to wear pretty dresses, style their hair, use coy remarks, or deploy any of the trappings that might make them appear subordinate to men. As a result, they sometimes appeared mannish.

There was a long tradition of lesbianism at Wellesley, though it had not always been called by that name. In the late nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries, Wellesley girls who had lesbian relationships called them “smashes,” “mashes,” “crushes,” and “spoons.” Men were not permitted to attend college dances; instead, upper-class women donned tuxedos and black ties, and brought gowned freshmen and sophomores as their “dates.”
15

In those early days of the college, Wellesley women who loved other Wellesley women did not consider themselves strange, since the relationships they formed were the norm rather than the exception. So many of the college’s female professors lived together in lesbian relationships that a union between two women came to be known as a “Wellesley marriage” or “Boston marriage.” By the turn of the century, when 90 percent of the adult women in America were married, more than half of Welles- ley graduates remained single, and only one female faculty mem- ber out of fifty-three was married.
16

In Hillary’s day, the young women at Wellesley were just as determined as their predecessors to change the college, society, and themselves. At least two women who were close to Hillary— Eldie Acheson and Nancy Wanderer—would become out-of- the-closet lesbians who felt that it was important to break their bonds of “imprisonment” to male sexuality.

“The notion of a woman being a lesbian was fascinating to

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Hillary,” said one of her Wellesley classmates. “But she was much more interested in lesbianism as a political statement than a sexual practice. . . .

“A lesbian was suddenly not the eccentric old maid of Victo- rian literature, but a dynamic young woman who had thrown off the shackles of male dominance,” this person continued. “Hil- lary talked about it a lot, read lesbian literature, and embraced it as a revolutionary concept.”
17

To be a lesbian, it was not necessary for a woman to have a physical relationship with other women. Such a relationship could be romantic
and
asexual. Forty years before Bill Clinton tried to redefine the meaning of sex by saying, “That all depends on what your definition of
is
is,”
18
Hillary and her Wellesley classmates confronted the same question: what is sex?

“This question has the potential to be tremendously impor- tant in defining a lesbian relationship,” Esther D. Rothblum and Kathleen A. Brehony wrote in
Boston Marriages
.
19

And the feminist Naomi McCormick added: “Female bisex- uality and lesbianism may be more a matter of loving other women than of achieving orgasm through genital contact. . . . The absence of genital juxtaposition hardly drains a relationship of passion or importance.”
20

At Wellesley, while many of her classmates were falling in and out of love with men—or other women—Hillary did not seem to be interested in either gender for the purpose of having “genital juxtaposition.”

During her last three years at Wellesley, Hillary dated a boy by the name of David Rupert, who, as Hillary would eventually discover, was a classmate of Bill Clinton’s at Georgetown Uni- versity in Washington. Hillary’s attraction to David Rupert seemed more political than sexual: they marched against the Vietnam War, talked endlessly about changing society, smoked pot, and eventually—in her senior year—briefly slept together.
21

64 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

But their relationship began to sputter when Rupert insisted that Hillary spend weekends at his shack in Bennington, Ver- mont, where he loved to ski both cross-country and downhill. Hillary refused to ski, and Rupert, finding a chink in her armor, teased her about her fear of appearing vulnerable and out of control.

Their testy discussions about skiing—which might have been a substitute for an honest discussion about Hillary’s sexual frigidity— often ended with Hillary retreating into an icy silence. She re- fused to let Rupert—or any man, for that matter—get the upper hand. Their relationship abruptly ended the week Hillary met Bill Clinton at Yale Law School.