Life in the Rodham household resembled a kind of boot camp, presided over by a belittling, impossible-to-satisfy drill instructor. During World War II, as a chief petty officer in the Navy, Rodham had trained young recruits in the U.S. military’s Gene Tunney Program, a rigorous phys-ed regime based on the champion boxer’s training and self-defense techniques, and on the traditional skills of a drill sergeant.  After the war, in which Hugh had been spared overseas duty and was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Station because of a bad knee, he replicated the barracks experience in his own home, commanding loudly from his living room lounge chair (from which he rarely rose, except for dinner), barking orders, denigrating, minimizing achievements, ignoring accomplishments, raising the bar constantly for his frustrated children — “character building,” he called it.

His control over the household was meant to be absolute; confronted with resistance, he turned fierce. If Hillary or one of her brothers had left the cap off a toothpaste tube, he threw it out the bathroom window and told the offending child to fetch it from the front yard evergreens, even in snow. Regardless of how windy and cold the Chicago winter night, he insisted when the family went to bed that the heat be turned off until morning. At dinner, he growled his opinions, indulged few challenges to his provocations, and rarely acknowledged the possibility of being proved wrong. Still, Hillary would argue back if the subject was substantive and she thought she was right. If Dorothy attempted to bring a conflicting set of facts into the discussion, she was typically ridiculed by her husband: “How would you know?” “Where did you ever come up with such a stupid idea?” “Miss Smarty Pants.”

“My father was confrontational, completely and utterly so,” Hugh Jr.  said. Decades later, Hillary and her brothers suggested this was part of a grander scheme to ensure that his children were “competitive, scrappy fighters,” to “empower” them, to foster “pragmatic competitiveness” without putting them down, to induce elements of “realism” into the privileged lifestyle of Park Ridge. Her father would tepidly acknowledge her good work, but tell her she could do better, Hillary said. But there is little to suggest that she or her brothers interpreted such encouragement so benignly at the time. When Hillary came home with all As except for one B on her report card, her father suggested that perhaps her school was too easy, and wondered half-seriously why she hadn’t gotten straight As. Hillary tried mightily to extract some unequivocal declaration of approval from her father, but he had tremendous difficulty in expressing pride or affection.

At the dinner table, Betsy Ebeling recalled, “Hillary’s mom would have cooked something good, and her dad would throw out a conversation topic, almost like a glove on the table, and he would always say something the opposite of what I thought he really believed — because it was so completely provocative and outrageous. It was just his way. He was opinionated, and he could be loud, and what better place to [be that way] than in his own home?”

Unleashed, his rage was frightening, and the household sometimes seemed on the verge of imploding. Betsy and the few other girlfriends whom Hillary brought home could see that life with Hugh Rodham was painfully demeaning for her mother, and that Hillary winced at her father’s distemper and chafed under his miserliness. Money was always a contentious issue, ultimately the way in which he could exercise undisputed control, especially in response to Hillary’s and Dorothy’s instinctive rebelliousness and the wicked sense of humor they shared.  Sometimes his tirades would begin in the kitchen and continue into her parents’ bedroom. Hillary would put her hands over her ears. But the experience of standing up to her father also prepared her for the intellectual rough-and-tumble that honed Hillary and Bill Clinton’s marital partnership, and helped inure her in the arena of political combat.  “I could go home to two parents who adored everything I did,” said Betsy. “Hillary had a different kind of love; you had to earn it.” As a child, Hillary was affected by her parents’ often-conflicting values, and her politics borrowed from both, she said later. Dorothy was basically a Democrat, although she never told Hugh or anyone else in Park Ridge, according to Hillary.

Hugh Rodham was a self-described rock-ribbed conservative Republican of the Taft-Goldwater school who despised labor unions, opposed most government aid programs, and fulminated against high taxes. He had tried his hand briefly in politics in 1947 when, as a Democraticleaning independent, he ran for alderman in Chicago. He had wanted to ingratiate himself with, or even become part of, the fabled Democratic machine then being assembled by the young Richard Daley, and be in a position to exploit an investment he’d made in a downtown parking lot.  He was swamped in the election by the candidate on the regular Democratic line. Some members of his extended family believe the experience contributed to his strident disdain of Democrats. Every four years, during the Republican National Convention, he would instruct his children to watch the proceedings on television; when the Democrats convened, he ordered the set turned off.

To a child, Hugh seemed an unusually big character — loud, broadshouldered, dominating psychologically as well as physically (he was six foot two, the same height as Bill Clinton, and weighed more than 230 pounds), a former varsity football player and physical education major at Penn State whose hopes of turning pro, he said, had been wiped out by a knee injury that was further aggravated in the Navy.  In all likelihood, though, he had never been a first-stringer at Penn State or a serious professional prospect. He was often described in news stories during the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign as a standout high school quarterback who had been awarded a college football scholarship.  However, there were no football scholarships awarded at Penn State during his years there (1931–1935), and he played third-string tight end, according to university newspaper records. Evidence of his exaggerations in regard to his curriculum vitae is extensive. “He was a bullshit artist,” said one member of the Rodham family who eventually became alienated from him. In high school, he was known as a braggart; in college, he developed a reputation for embellishing tales about himself.  His only conspicuously humble traits were his origins in Scranton, a tough town of factories, mills, coal dust, prostitution, and political corruption.  His father was a loom operator in the big Scranton Lace Works on the Lackawanna River, one of eleven brothers and sisters, almost all of whom had worked on the floor of the factory. His mother, Hannah Jones Rodham — she used all three names — was “hard-headed, often gruff,” Hillary remembered, and dominated the life of her family. Hugh was afflicted by self-doubt while growing up.

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