Letting Hillary Be Hillary

Her mother was uninterested in conformity. "You're unique," Dorothy Rodham would tell her daughter. "You can think for yourself. I don't care if everybody's doing it. We're not everybody. You're not everybody." At Maine Township High School South, Hillary ran for student-government president in an otherwise all-male field. In her memoir, "Living History," she says the loss "hurt," particularly when one of her opponents remarked that she was "really stupid if I thought a girl could be elected President." Inspired by JFK's vision of a moon landing, the teenage Hillary wrote to NASA to volunteer for astronaut training, only to be told that girls were not being considered for the program. "It was the first time I had hit an obstacle I couldn't overcome with hard work and determination," Clinton recalls in her memoir, "and I was outraged."

She heard different voices growing up. "The gender gap started in families like mine," she recalls, with her quietly Democratic mother and her overtly Republican father. Her ninth-grade history teacher liked to play recordings of Douglas MacArthur's farewell address to the Congress for his class, and he would offer his own peroration: "Better dead than red!" In April 1962, she went with her Methodist Youth Fellowship group to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak at Chicago's Orchestra Hall, where King delivered a speech titled "Remaining Awake Through a Revolution." (That was also the title of his final Sunday sermon, delivered at Washington's National Cathedral on March 31, 1968.) In 1964, she was supporting Goldwater (whom she went to see campaigning) and a classmate was backing LBJ; to mix things up in a mock debate, a teacher had Hillary make the case for Johnson and the LBJ fan was assigned the Goldwater cause. "So I immersed myself—for the first time—in President Johnson's Democratic positions on civil rights, health care, poverty and foreign policy," Clinton says in her book. "I resented every hour spent in the library reading the Democrats' platform and White House statements. But as I prepared for the debate, I found myself arguing with more than dramatic fervor."

Father and mother, MacArthur and King, Goldwater and Johnson: quite a chorus. John Wesley was an influential voice, too. The founder of Methodism, his creed was demanding but straightforward: "Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can." Her religion is not showy, but it is substantial. "In my family, we were Americans, we were Republicans and we were Methodists," Hillary says. "It all kind of combined in me to motivate me in my faith life, in love of my country, in my work in politics. 'Do all the good you can'—how do you do that? Well, I was raising money for the United Way when I was 10 years old. I was running little summer Olympics that kids would contribute a penny or a dime to so that we could give the money then to the poor people. And I was baby-sitting the children of migrant workers through my church—I mean, it was just who I was. It gave me a perspective at a young age, growing up in an all-white suburb, being given all of those advantages in that post-World War II era by that generation of my father's who bought those homes, and raised the kids and paid for public schools and all the rest. But it was constantly a reminder to me that this is not all there is to life. You can't get comfortable."

Hillary entered a larger, more diverse world at Wellesley College from 1965 to 1969. In her book, she recalls walking across campus with a new black friend, "self-conscious about my motives and hyperaware that I was moving away from my past." She worked for Eugene McCarthy against LBJ in the 1968 New Hampshire primary, and attended a march of mourning at Post Office Square in Boston when King was murdered in April of that year.

Now, 40 years on, she must bridge another uncomfortable divide—seeking to defeat a black man without antagonizing black voters. "I think it's going to be so interesting to see how the Clintons attempt to attack a black man when black people have been in their back pocket all these years," says the Rev. Al Sharpton. "As much as black people love them, they won't take too well to Bill or Hillary attacking another black person too strongly."

As always in politics, though, Obama has his own issues when it comes to dealing with traditional interest-group agendas. "In our talks, I've made it clear that more focus has to be on issues important to blacks," says Sharpton, who has spoken with both Michelle and Barack Obama. "I don't think there is a way around him addressing some of the issues blacks are interested in. Otherwise the Clintons can just stroll off with that vote."