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evenings over her math homework; told her tales of his childhood (including one about a blind mule that worked in the mines and walked outside to find his sight restored, and others about the freight trains he’d supposedly hopped); and exempted her from some of the heavier tasks assigned to her brothers. When he offered praise—in very pointed fashion—it was eagerly accepted because it was so rare.
    It was expected that she excel at school, of course. Education was the bedrock of both Hugh’s and Dorothy’s divergent philosophies of parenting, and of their aspirations for their children. “Learning for earning’s sake,” said Hugh. “Learning for learning’s sake,” said Dorothy, or so their children recalled many years later.
    Dorothy, said Hillary, also often told her, “Do you want to be the lead actor in your life, or a minor player who simply reacts to what others think you should say or do?” She remembers her father, on the other hand, focusing on her problems, often asking her how she would dig herself out of them—which she said always brought to mind a shovel.
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    D OROTHY H OWELL R ODHAM had been abandoned by her own parents at age eight. Hillary and her brothers knew little of this history while they were growing up; Dorothy revealed the full story only when Hillary interviewed her for her first book, written during the White House years,
It Takes a Village.
The Rodhams were a family of secrets (first from one another, then from prying journalists), just as Bill Clinton’s family was. Complicated feelings of hurt and confusion were never matters for family discussion in the Rodham house.
    Dorothy’s mother, Della Murray Howell, one of nine children, was only fifteen when Dorothy was born, in Chicago. Her father, Edwin Howell, a fireman, was seventeen. The young couple divorced when Dorothy was eight and her sister, Isabelle, three. Both girls were put on a train and sent without escort to live with their father’s parents in Alhambra, California. In their new home, Dorothy told Hillary, they were constantly criticized, ridiculed, and severely punished by their grandmother, while their grandfather seemed totally removed from their lives. At one point, Dorothy said, her grandmother had ordered her confined to her room for a year during nonworking hours.
    At fourteen, she left and became a babysitter in the home of a close-knit family who treated her well, sent her to high school, and encouraged her to read widely. Without this experience of living with a strong family, Dorothy told Hillary, she would not have known how to manage her own household or take care of her children.
    After graduation from high school, Dorothy returned to Chicago because of the marriage of her mother to Max Rosenberg, four or five years her senior. He was well-to-do, owned several Chicago apartment buildings, as well as property in Florida, and was involved in the hotel business. According to members of the Rodham family, Rosenberg had persuaded Della—who could hardly read and write—to send for her children and to try to make amends for the past. It was the first time in ten years that Dorothy had been contacted by her mother, wrote Hillary. “I’d hoped so hard that my mother would love me that I had to take a chance and find out,” Dorothy told her.
    When Dorothy and Isabelle returned to Chicago, Rosenberg offered to send Dorothy to secretarial or vocational school—but not college, as she had expected. Della, meanwhile, intended Dorothy to be her housemaid. Dorothy refused to stay with her mother and stepfather and found a job and room of her own; Isabelle moved in with the Rosenbergs.
    â€œMy [step]grandfather, Max, for sure wanted her to have an education—I’m sure he promised her some form of education, but she was anticipating a whole lot more,” said Hillary’s first cousin Oscar Dowdy, Isabelle’s son. “I