History Forum / General / British History / July 2007

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In the ’60s, a Future Candidate Poured Her Heart Out in Letters

By MARK LEIBOVICH
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, July 28 — They were high school friends from Park Ridge, Ill.,
both high achievers headed East to college. John Peavoy was a bookish film
buff bound for Princeton, Hillary Rodham a driven, civic-minded Republican
going off to Wellesley. They were not especially close, but they found each
other smart and “interesting” and said they would try to keep in touch.

Which they did, prodigiously, exchanging dozens of letters between the late
summer of 1965 and the spring of 1969. Ms. Rodham’s 30 dispatches are by
turns angst-ridden and prosaic, glib and brooding, anguished and ebullient —
a rare unfiltered look into the head and heart of a future first lady and
would-be president. Their private expressiveness stands in sharp contrast to
the ever-disciplined political persona she presents to the public now.

“Since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three and a half metamorphoses and
am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities
spread before me,” Ms. Rodham wrote to Mr. Peavoy in April 1967. “So far, I’ve
used alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social
reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.”

Befitting college students of any era, the letters are also self-absorbed
and revelatory, missives from an unformed and vulnerable striver who had, in
her own words, “not yet reconciled myself to the fate of not being the
star.”

“Sunday was lethargic from the beginning as I wallowed in a morass of
general and specific dislike and pity for most people but me especially,”
Ms. Rodham reported in a letter postmarked Oct. 3, 1967.

In other letters, she would convey a mounting exasperation with her rigid
conservative father and disdain for both “debutante” dormmates and an
acid-dropping friend. She would issue a blanket condemnation of the “boys”
she had met (“who know a lot about ‘self’ and nothing about ‘man’ ”) and
also tell of an encounter she had with “a Dartmouth boy” the previous
weekend.

“It always seems as though I write you when I’ve been thinking too much
again,” Ms. Rodham wrote in one of her first notes to Mr. Peavoy, postmarked
Nov. 15, 1965. She later joked that she planned to keep his letters and
“make a million” when he became famous. “Don’t begrudge me my mercenary
interest,” she wrote.

Of course, it was Hillary Rodham Clinton who became famous while Mr. Peavoy
has lived out his life in contented obscurity as an English professor at
Scripps College, a small woman’s school in Southern California where he has
taught since 1977. Every bit the wild-haired academic, with big silver
glasses tucked behind bushy gray sideburns, he lives with his wife, Frances
McConnel, and their cat, Lulu, in a one-story house cluttered with movies,
books and boxes — one of which contains a trove of letters from an old
friend who has since become one of the most cautious and analyzed
politicians in America.

When contacted about the letters, Mr. Peavoy allowed The New York Times to
read and copy them.

The Clinton campaign declined to comment.

The letters were written during a period when the future Mrs. Clinton was
undergoing a period of profound political transformation, from the
“Goldwater girl” who shared her father’s conservative outlook to a liberal
antiwar activist.

In her early letters, Ms. Rodham refers to her involvement with the Young
Republicans, a legacy of her upbringing. In October of her freshman year,
she dismisses the local chapter as “so inept,” which she says, audaciously,
she might be able to leverage to her own benefit. “I figure that I may be
able to work things my own way by the time I’m a junior so I’m going to
stick it out,” she writes.

Still, the letters reveal a fast-eroding allegiance to the party of her
childhood. She ridicules a trip she had taken to a Young Republicans
convention as “a farce that would have done Oscar Wilde credit.” By the
summer of 1967, Ms. Rodham — writing from her parents’ vacation home in Lake
Winola, Pa. — begins referring to Republicans as “they” rather than “we.”

“That’s no Freudian slip,” she adds. A few months later, she would be
volunteering on Senator Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar presidential campaign in
New Hampshire. By the time she delivered her commencement address at
Wellesley in 1969, she was citing her generation’s “indispensable task of
criticizing and constructive protest.”

But in many ways her letters are more revealing about her search for her own
sense of self.

“Can you be a misanthrope and still love or enjoy some individuals?” Ms.
Rodham wrote in an April 1967 letter. “How about a compassionate
misanthrope?”

Mr. Peavoy’s letters to Ms. Rodham are lost to posterity, unless she
happened to keep them, which he doubts. He said he wished he had kept copies
himself. “They are windows into a time and a place and a journey of
self-discovery,” he said in an interview. “This was what college students
did before Facebook.”

The letters are Mr. Peavoy’s only link to his former pen pal. They never
visited or exchanged a single phone call during their four years of college.
They lost touch entirely after graduation, except for the 30-year reunion of
the Maine South High School class of 1965, held in Washington to accommodate
the class’s most famous graduate, whose husband was then serving his first
term in the White House.

“I was on the White House Christmas card list for a while,” Mr. Peavoy said.
Besides a quick receiving-line greeting from Mrs. Clinton at the reunion,
Mr. Peavoy has had just one direct contact with her in 38 years. It was,
fittingly, by letter, only this time her words were more businesslike.

In the late 1990s, Mr. Peavoy was contacted by the author Gail Sheehy, who
was researching a book on the first lady. He agreed to let Ms. Sheehy see
the letters, from which she would quote snippets in her 1999 biography,
“Hillary’s Choice.” When Mrs. Clinton heard that Mr. Peavoy had kept her old
letters, she wrote him asking for copies, which he obliged. He has not heard
from her since.

“For all I know she’s mad at me for keeping the letters,” said Mr. Peavoy, a
pack rat who says he has kept volumes of letters from friends over the
years. A Democrat, he said he was undecided between supporting Mrs. Clinton
and Senator Barack Obama.

Ms. Rodham’s letters are written in a tight, flowing script with
near-impeccable spelling and punctuation. Ever the pleaser, she frequently
begins them with an apology that it had taken her so long to respond. She
praises Mr. Peavoy’s missives while disparaging her own (“my usual drivel”)
and signs off with a simple “Hillary,” except for the occasional “H” or
“Me.”

As one would expect of letters written during college, Ms. Rodham’s letters
display an evolution in sophistication, viewpoint and intellectual focus.
One existential theme that recurs throughout is that Ms. Rodham views
herself as an “actor,” meaning a student activist committed to a life of
civic action, which she contrasts with Mr. Peavoy, who, in her view, is more
of an outside critic, or “reactor.”

“Are you satisfied with the part you have cast yourself in?” she asks Mr.
Peavoy in April 1966. “It seems that you have decided to become a reactor
rather than actor — everything around will determine your life.”

She is mildly patronizing if not scornful, as she encourages her friend to
“try-out” for life. She quotes from “Doctor Zhivago,” “Man is born to live,
not prepare for life,” and signs the letter “Me” (“the world’s saddest
word,” she adds parenthetically).

Ms. Rodham becomes expansive and wistful when discussing the nature of
leadership and public service, and how the validation of serving others can
be a substitute for self-directed wisdom. “If people react to you in the
role of answer bestower then quite possibly you are,” she writes in a letter
postmarked Nov. 15, 1967, and continues in this vein for another page before
changing the subject to what Mr. Peavoy plans to do the following weekend.

Ms. Rodham’s dispatches indicate a steady separation from Park Ridge, her
old friends and her family, notably her strict father. She seethes at her
parents’ refusal to let her spend a weekend in New York (“Their reasons —
money, fear of the city, they think I’ve been running around too much,
etc. — are ridiculous”) and fantasizes about spending the summer between her
sophomore and junior years in Africa, only to dismiss the notion,
envisioning “the scene with my father.”

While home on a break in February of her junior year, Ms. Rodham bemoans
“the communication chasm” that has opened within her family. “I feel like I’m
losing the top of my head,” she complains, describing an argument raging in
the next room between — “for a change” — her father and one of her brothers.

“God, I feel so divorced from Park Ridge, parents, home, the entire
unreality of middle class America,” she says. “This all sounds so
predictable, but it’s true.”

Ms. Rodham has been described by people who knew her growing up as
precocious, and in the letters she is scathingly judgmental at times. She
spent the bulk of one letter on a withering assessment of dormmates.

“Next me,” Ms. Rodham says wryly. “Of course, I’m normal, if that is a
permissible adjective for a Wellesley girl.”

In other notes, she speaks of her own despair; in one, written in the winter
of her sophomore year, she describes a “February depression.” She catalogs a
long, paralyzed morning spent in bed, skipping classes, hating herself.
“Random thinking usually becomes a process of self-analysis with my ego
coming out on the short end,” she writes.

Another recurring theme of Ms. Rodham’s musings is the familiar
late-adolescent impulse not to grow up. “Such a drag,” she says, invoking
the Rolling Stones, a rare instance of her referring to pop culture.

Her letters at times betray a kind of innocent narcissism over “my lost
youth,” as she described it in a letter shortly after her 19th birthday. She
wrote of being a little girl and believing that she was the only person in
the universe. She had a sense that if she turned around quickly, “everyone
else would disappear.

“I’d play out in the patch of sunlight that broke the density of the elms in
front of our house and pretend there were heavenly movie cameras watching my
every move,” she says. She yearns for all the excitement and discoveries of
life without losing “the little girl in the sunlight.”

At which point, Ms. Rodham declares that she has spent too much time
wandering “aimlessly through a verbal morass” and writes that she is going
to bed.

“You’ll probably think I’m retreating from the world back to the sunlight in
an attempt to dream my child’s movie,” she says.

The letters contain no possibly damaging revelations of the proverbial
“youthful indiscretions,” and mention nothing glaringly outlandish or
irresponsible. Indeed, she tends toward the self-scolding: “I have been
enjoying myself too much, and spring and letter-writing are — to the
bourgeois mind — no excuses!”

She reports in one letter from October of her sophomore year that she spent
a “miserable weekend” arguing with a friend who believed that “acid is the
way and what did I have against expanding my conscience.”

In a previous letter from her freshman year, she divulges that a junior in
her dorm had been caught at her boyfriend’s apartment in Cambridge at 3:15
a.m. “I don’t condone her actions,” Ms. Rodham declares, “but I’ll defend to
expulsion her right to do as she pleases — an improvement on Voltaire.”

Ms. Rodham’s notes to Mr. Peavoy are revelatory, even intimate at times, but
if there is any romantic energy between the friends, they are not evident in
Ms. Rodham’s side of the conversation. “P.S. thanks for the Valentine’s
card,” she says at the end of one letter. “Good night.”

Her letters contain no mention of any romantic interest, except for one from
February 1967 in which Ms. Rodham divulges that she “met a boy from
Dartmouth and spent a Saturday night in Hanover.”

Ms. Rodham skates earnestly on the surface of life, raising more questions
than answers. “Last week I decided that even if life is absurd why couldn’t
I spend it absurdly happy?” she wrote in November of her junior year. “Then,
of course, the question naturally bellows operationally define ‘happiness’
Hillary Rodham, acknowledged agnostic intellectual liberal, emotional
conservative.”

From there, she deems the process of self-definition to be “too depressing”
and asserts that “the easiest way out is to stop any thought approaching
introspection and to advise others whenever possible.”

The letters to Mr. Peavoy taper off considerably after the first half of Ms.
Rodham’s junior year; there are just two from 1968 and one from 1969.

“I’m sitting here at a stolen table in a pair of dirty denim bell-bottoms, a
never-ironed work shirt and a beautiful purple felt hat with a purple
polka-dotted scarf streaming off it,” she writes in her final
correspondence, March 25, 1969. A senior bound for law school, she betrays
exhaustion with the times, a country at war and a culture in tumult. “I’m
really tired of people slamming doors and screaming obscenities at poor old
life,” she says, and describes the sound of chirping birds amid the
“soulless academia” that she will inhabit for just a few more weeks as an
undergraduate.