THE MISANTHROPETHE MISANTHROPE
Betrayed and wronged in everything,
I’ll flee this bitter world where vice is king. . . .
—Moliere, The Misanthrope
Bill Clinton’s ambivalence about Hillary’s political future must have sent chills down her spine, for as the feminist author Camille Paglia pointed out, Hillary had never found a way to succeed “without her husband’s connections, advice, and intervention.”
In fact, it was debatable whether anyone would have heard of Hillary Rodham if it hadn’t been for William Jefferson Clinton.
Throughout her marriage, Bill had always been the leader, the brilliant and successful politician, and she had always been the follower and beneficiary of his power and influence:
• Hillary was asked to join Little Rock’s prestigious Rose Law Firm in the 1970s only after Bill ascended to the post of Arkansas attorney general, the chief legal officer who dealt on a daily basis with the state’s law firms.
• She was made a partner in the Rose Law Firm only after Bill was elected governor of the state, with all the patronage and influence that that office possessed.
• She was elected a U.S. senator thanks to the wave of sympathy created by Bill’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, which lent Hillary a much-needed aura of vulnerability as the wronged woman. She also profited from the votes Bill bought for her by granting pardons to crooked New York Hassidim and violent Puerto Rican nationalists.
• She was appointed secretary of state in large part because Barack Obama desperately wanted to sideline Bill Clinton and thwart his plots and intrigues.
• Even now, her chief political asset was not herself; it was Bill. No one ever had to give Bill Clinton lessons in likeability.
If Hillary’s career was defined by her connection to Bill Clinton, her character was shaped by her parents.
Her father, Hugh Rodham Sr., a former naval drill instructor, was abusive. As I wrote in The Truth about Hillary:
Some visitors to the Rodham home recalled Hugh Sr. as a scary figure—a barrel-chested man with a booming voice, who was always criticizing Hillary’s posture and telling her: “Head up, chin in, chest out, stomach in!” An acquaintance once described him as “tougher than a corn cob, as gruff as could be.”
“Among both relatives and friends,” wrote Roger Morris in Partners in Power, “many thought Hugh Rodham’s treatment of his daughter and sons amounted to the kind of psychological abuse that might have crushed some children.”
In her memoir Living 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.
“If 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.
“Can you be a misanthrope and still love some individuals?” she asked in her letter. “How about a compassionate misanthrope?”
“When 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.
“You 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 her relationship with her father, who was also a domineering, narcissistic kind of guy.”
“In her personal life, she’s always seemed like she had something to hide,” Bill Clinton’s former press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, said. “She had a difficult father, and she spent a lot of time trying to create an image of a functional family when she could have just said, ‘It’s my family.’ The burden of perfection was upon her, and she carried it into her marriage. There’s always this fear of letting people see what they already know.”
It was this fear of exposure and humiliation that led one of Hillary’s biographers, Carl Bernstein, to note that she indulged in “subterfuge and eliding.”
Put simply, it helped explain why she lied and always tried to cover up her lies.
And it also explained why all the likeability lessons in the world weren’t going to change her and put a stop to those lies.
“When she’s alone with a small group of friends she trusts, Hillary can be warm and pleasant,” one of her acquaintances told the author. “But when she has to stand up in front of an audience of strangers, her suspicion and mistrust of people kicks in and her facial expressions and her body language reflect a deep psychological turbulence.”
“She freely admits she’s always had anger issues,” another acquaintance said. “When she’s annoyed by people, which is often, it shows. She’s never suffered fools gladly. As far as she’s concerned, politics is all about sucking up to people she considers beneath her and unworthy of sharing her space.
“She looks at her critics as a handful of nuts,” this person continued. “Her outburst during the Senate committee hearing on Benghazi—‘What difference does it make?’—was in total keeping with her pattern of behavior. Something snaps when she’s under pressure and emotional stress. As much as anything else, Bill pushed the Spielberg likeability lessons on Hillary in order to avoid another meltdown like Benghazi when she hit the campaign trail.”