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together was more important than pursuing independent aspirations or escaping her husband’s indignities, though she had to witness much harshness toward the children. “Maybe that’s why she’s such an accepting person,” Dorothy said of Hillary. “She had to put up with
him.
”
    The same, obviously, could be said of Dorothy.
    She did not believe in divorce except under the most dire of circumstances, as she first told Hillary in the 1980s. “It was drummed into me by Dorothy that nobody in this family gets divorced,” said Nicole Boxer, who was married to Hillary’s brother Tony from 1994 to 1998—when they divorced. “From Dorothy—and Tony—I heard divorce is not an option. She’d say, ‘You can work it out.’ She said, ‘You have to talk to him on a level he can understand. Don’t give up on him.
You do not leave the marriage.
’ *4 She was supportive of us going to counseling, which we did.”
    Hillary, after considering whether to divorce Governor Bill Clinton in Arkansas, wrote several years later that “children without fathers, or whose parents float in and out of their lives after divorce, are precarious little boats in the most turbulent seas.” Her mother would agree. Given the hardships of her mother’s childhood and Hillary’s own experiences growing up, her decision to devote so much of her professional life to defending and asserting the legal rights of children seems like a natural choice.
    Hillary and Bill’s difficult but enduring marriage is perhaps more easily explained in the context of her childhood and the marriage of her parents, dominated by the humiliating, withholding figure of her father, whom she managed nonetheless to idolize and (later) to idealize, while rationalizing his cruelty and indifference to the pain he caused his family. “I grew up in a family that looked like it was straight out of
Father Knows Best,
” Hillary said in
It Takes a Village,
and also referred to “the stability of family life that I knew growing up.” Hillary’s first boyfriend in college, upon visiting the Rodham house, wondered almost immediately why Dorothy had not walked out of the marriage, and how Hillary had endured her father’s petulance. But Hillary somehow found a way in difficult times to either withdraw or focus on what her father was able to give her, not what was denied. Hillary knew she was loved, or so she said.
    As a child, Hillary had tried every way she knew to please him and win his approval, and then spent years seething at his treatment of her. The pattern seemed to repeat itself in her marriage. Both Hugh and Bill Clinton, who came to like and respect each other, were outsized personalities whose presence inevitably dwarfed others around them. In Clinton’s case, this dominance was seductive, mesmerizing, fascinating. Rodham’s effect on people, especially outside his immediate family, was usually the opposite—alienating, forbidding, unpleasant. As she later did with her husband, Hillary eventually took an almost biblical view in her forgiveness and rationalization of her father’s actions: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” The lesson came directly from Hugh Rodham: “He used to say all the time, ‘I will always love you but I won’t always like what you do,’” said Hillary (which cynics might regard as understated shorthand for how Hillary came to view her husband). “And, you know, as a child I would come up with nine-hundred hypotheses. It would always end with something like, ‘Well, you mean, if I murdered somebody and was in jail and you came to see me, you would still love me?’
    â€œAnd he would say: ‘Absolutely! I will always love you, but I would be deeply disappointed and I would not like what you did because it would have been wrong.’”
    One of Bill and Hillary’s principal aides