Free A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein

expressing how alienated she felt from “the entire unreality of middle-class America,” in which she included her family, who, because of her difficult first semester, had insisted she cancel plans to meet Peavoy in New York City over the Christmas holiday. The following winter break, she told her parents nothing of her holiday plans and headed for Dartmouth College and a round of parties where she stayed overnight after meeting a young man.
    The most important man in her life during the Wellesley years, despite the distance between them, was Don Jones. By mail, he became her counselor, correspondent, confessor, partner in Socratic debate, and spiritual adviser. When depression struck, she turned to him, as she would for the next three decades, including the year of her husband’s impeachment. He focused her on theologian Paul Tillich’s sermon “You Are Accepted,” in which he says that sin and grace coexist. “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness,” said Tillich. “It happens; or it does not happen.” Hillary was convinced there would be grace in her life and meanwhile she would just carry on.
    For the rest of her life, spiritual and quasi-spiritual axioms (some imbued with New Age jargon, others profound) would serve as soothing balms in painful times, and provide answers to questions and situations that seemed otherwise confounding. These comforting postulations would also be used by Hillary to justify, often publicly, her or her husband’s less palatable actions or aspects of character.

    W HEN H ILLARY ENROLLED at Wellesley, the campus was edging toward great changes, pushed by the women’s movement and pulled by the politics of the 1960s. Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
had been published in 1963. Its thesis, based largely on the experience of Friedan’s fellow alumnae from the Smith College class of 1942, held that women were victims of a pervasive system of delusions and false values that urged them to find their fulfillment and identity vicariously, through their husbands and children. More radical feminists preached open hostility toward males. Hillary was in her freshman year when Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), dedicated to achieving equality of opportunity for women.
    Until the mid-1960s, a visitor to the Wellesley campus might have concluded that the goal of a Wellesley woman was to find the brightest Harvard or Yale graduate, marry him and hitch her wagon to his politics or stardom, raise bright children, and become the person who could, at dinner parties, jump in to cleverly point out similarities between the opposing positions of guests fighting at the table. (The description is borrowed from an alumna of that period.) The Latin motto of the college was
non Ministrari sed Ministrare,
a New Testament exhortation to minister service, not receive it; invariably, it was interpreted by generations of Wellesley women as “not to be ministers but to be ministers’ wives.”
    The most important aspect of Wellesley for Hillary and for thousands of others who had gone there before her was that it was an all-women’s school. (“You don’t have the thing where women don’t put their hands up because someone might not take you out because you know the answer and they don’t,” noted a fellow graduate.) In
Living History,
Hillary agreed with that assessment and said that “psychic space” was created without men on campus. Throughout her four years there, she lived in Stone-Davis, an imposing mock-gothic pile that served both as a dormitory and a hub of sisterly conversation, activity, and purpose. The nexus of Stone-Davis was its glass-enclosed dining hall, where a community of women convened, socialized, and formed friendships. Risk-taking was easier in an all-female environment.
    Though Hillary was the beneficiary of the “women’s liberation”