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History ,Hillary strongly suggested that her father was a sadist who humiliated her mother and beat her brothers.
    The presence of a warm, loving mother might have assuaged the pain inflicted on Hillary by her father. But Hillary’s mom, Dorothy Howell Rodham, was of little help in that regard.
    Dorothy had been abandoned at the age of eight by her own mother and sent on a cross-country train ride with her three-year-old sister to Alhambra, California, where her grandparents lived. There, Dorothy was so cruelly abused by her grandparents that she ran away from home.
    Scrappy and competitive, Dorothy believed that the world was a dog-eat-dog place. She taught Hillary that she had to act as though she were brave even when she felt sad or fearful.
    â€œIf Suzy hits you,” Dorothy told four-year-old Hillary about a neighborhood bully, “you have my permission to hit her back.You have to stand up for yourself. There’s no room in this house for cowards.”
    The need to project an image of power at the expense of one’s true feelings is characteristic of narcissistic personalities. And the home of Hugh and Dorothy Rodham was the perfect breeding ground for a narcissist like Hillary, who grew up feeling entitled to get away with things that others could not.
    In all cases of narcissism, noted Doctor Otto F. Kernberg, a leading expert on the subject of borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology, there is “a parental figure, usually the mother or mother surrogate, who functions well on the surface in a superficially well-organized home, but with a degree of callousness, indifference, and nonverbalized spiteful aggression. . . . Sometimes it was . . . the cold hostile mother’s narcissistic use of the child which made [her] ‘special,’ set [her] off on the road in search of compensatory admiration and greatness.”

    Hillary had been traveling that road all her life. She chose a career in politics, despite the fact that in most essential respects she was unsuited for the life of a politician.
    When she was nineteen years old and a student at Wellesley College, she wrote a friend and confessed that she was a misanthrope who disliked people and avoided their company.
    â€œCan you be a misanthrope and still love some individuals?” she asked in her letter. “How about a compassionate misanthrope?”
    â€œWhen the stress of college life became too much, she would fantasize about living a life of ‘withdrawn simplicity,’ preferably in some quiet place where she could devote herself to helping others and reading books,” Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta wrote in Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton . “But Hillary knew such work required a love of being with people and profound patience, and she was not a natural at either.”
    Hillary never cured herself of her misanthropy. In that regard, she resembled other famous liberal misanthropes, such as her heroine Eleanor Roosevelt and the Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi.
    The British historian Andrew Roberts once described the Mahatma as“the archetypal . . . progressive intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals.”
    That was as good a description of Hillary as anyone had come up with yet.

    There was no need to feel sorry for Hillary; many people suffered far worse childhoods than hers. But Hillary’s upbringing did provide a clue to why she turned out to be so unlikeable.
    â€œYou can argue that there is a repetition compulsion in Hillary’s relationship with her husband,” Doctor Robert Cancro, the former chairman of the Psychiatry Department of New York University Langone Medical Center, told the author of this book. “Her marriage to Bill Clinton is a kind of microcosm of herrelationship with her father, who was also a domineering, narcissistic kind of guy.”
    â€œIn her