The New York Times reads Hillary's old letters for us.
There are lots like her.
By Mark Kilmer Posted in 2008 — Comments (22) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Look against whom our candidate will be running, should Obama and Richardson and John-Boy not pan out: It's Hillary. The NY Times got an old chum of Hillary's to give them some letters she had written to him when the two, who had attended the same Illinois High School, had gone east to school. Thirty letters, '65 to '69.
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 senator 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 “So far, I’ve used alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.”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.”
I knew her at school. In fact, I knew several of her.
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She hated her conservative father but joined the young Republicans, whom she described as "inept." She plotted to take over the organization, then when she couldn't, she gave up and started campaigning for the peacenik Eugene McCarthy.
But to the NYT, it's oh so much more profound, oh so much more deep.
Knee deep.
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?”
My gawd, she hasn't changed a whit. I wonder if the seven or so Hillarys I knew at PSU are still busy confusing themselves.
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.”
Yet she surpassed – nay, transcended! – the mundane unctuousity so prevalent in – nay, necessary to! – a young mind destined to be shaped by the forces of nature, history, and fate into greatness that overcomes greatness. Or something.
“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.
Indeed, Hillary had finally surpassed, transcended, and overcome the fettering bounds which so confine the rest of us – the "great mass of neutral intellect," to use Keats's phrase – to the walls of the mortal prison to which Hillary has shown us she always possessed the key.
Read the Times piece or don't read it. It will not matter, and you shouldn't care.
Hillary, if you're reading this, thanks for the memories.
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The New York Times reads Hillary's old letters for us. 22 Comments (0 topical, 22 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
A child.
John
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Why would God invent something like whiskey? To keep the Irish from ruling the world of course
Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you. Washington Elected Elite
Besides, some ROTC jerk probably made fun of her in the school cafeteria because the inner thighs of her bellbottoms were so badly scorched.
Sounds like this is where she learned to steal furniture...that lesson sure came in handy in the White House,didn't it...judging from the banal,vapid,self absorbed nature of her writings,that seems to be just about all she learned there...I also worked in the '64 Goldwater campaign as a Junior in HS in Tennessee....and when I went off to college 2 yrs later (USAFA & Ole Miss),amidst all the brewing turmoil and campus political chaos and lefty insurgence,it only served to reinforce my conservative beliefs....it didn't change me into some generic lefty save-the-world-from-the-evil-capitalists crybaby like it did Rodham...what soul she MIGHT have had up until that time was completely buried or extinguished upon her arrival at Wellesly....from then through her entire adult political life,there is no hint or evidence that her course and beliefs and actions were even remotely based on anything that might reasonably called the Judeo-Christian ethic that most of us find to be the well spring of our belief system.....hers were entirely based and referenced on contemporary radical secularist writers who were at bottom sheer materialists,like Rodham has proven to be....now we must pay close attention to her upcoming attempts to redefine herself as some sort of caring compassionate 'Christian' in an attempt to disguise what a cold blooded power hungry harridan she really is....she may wear the white rose of York,but the blossom hath a canker and its scent doth offend the nostrils mightily
Her core chilhood memory is a wish to be able to make everyone go away while she dances in the sunbeams like they were cameras from heaven focussed down on her (to paraphrase her). If that isnt narcissism at a young age I dont know what is and if you read the excerpts it reappears over and over along with a touch of sociopathy with her disdain for normal folks mixed with her opportunism as she leaps from one political belief and persona to the next. Two things beyond the narcissism that strcuk me were that the letters really arent to someone else they are letters to herself that she mailed to this guy she frankly didnt know all that well. He must have been a nerdy but good listener and she mistook that for him being impressed with her, he was probably just a bit hot for her which explains why he kept the letters. In the end though the letters are all very "dear diary" and you can see how impressed she is by herself. The other bit of weirdness is how the NYT wraps each excerpt in cotton and explains it to us in the context of a young person at college evolving yada yada as if we cant puzzle that out ourselves. The writer of the article serves as on-board apologist and obviously these are the more flattering excerpts I am sure the really dark machiavellian ones didnt make the article.
Hillary committed that mortal sin of being a young person. Thank god nobody else in the presidential race was so presumptuous.
This whole story is fluff, which is why I wonder, front page? Why?
-jb
a peak into her soul even as it was being formed from the primordial sludge.
Nothing wrong in what she wrote, from my perspective; actually, it was more banal, ordinary -- even vapid -- than anything else we could call it.
S-A-T-U-R, D-A-Y. Night!
I suppose it continues re-formation from contemporary sludge.
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Vista really sucks!
Resorting to digging through someone's college letters in some sort of attempt to embarrass or belittle a candidate, then pretending that it is a "glimpse into her soul."
By they way, what was George Bush doing when he was in his early 20's? Would HIS behavior give you a glimpse into his soul?
trying to embarrass her. The New York Times did the digging and the exposing, and they should be embarrassed. Remember, they told us that it was a glimpse into her soul.
Don't shoot the messenger if you find out too late, Teemn.
Even though I am no fan of Hillary. I just think the whole affair is silly, and I don't think anything can be gained from this little exercise, let alone a "glimpse into her soul."
remind me so much of myself when I was a college freshman although Hillary's vocabulary and spelling are so much better! Were we ever this young? My mother saved my letters home and I feel so different from that youngster, but I kind of admire and miss that self who cared so much. She was called "goodie two-shoes"
even by the guy she finally married!
Alas,I know if I ever became truly humble, I would be proud of it. -Benjamin Franklin
"She hated her father", well tis said habits form at an early age and she since has cast her net wide hasn't she.
"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville
is that her conservative father was a positive force in her life. Maybe I'm reading too much into it but remember her griping because he was strict and wouldn't let her go on a trip? Perhaps he ingrained in her the discipline required to refrain from the very popular drug culture then and serves her so well today. Now that's the kind of father that is required (Sorry Rosie)these days. It's a shame he couldn't stop the brainwashing.
The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us - Voltaire
That's not to say he didn't have some kind or measure of good effect on her life but the evidence is not in the article and it assuredly is not in her life.
We may guess, wonder, or surmise, but everything she says in the letters about home and father is negative or derogatory.
What roars out at a reader is the unrelenting hostility and bitterness, the pure and pervasive alienation from people. The patient and forbearing Mr Peavoy is a sounding board, an outlet for her narcissism, the submergence of herself in her self, and if precocious, a precocious aimless anger and estrangement.
This series of letters, if I may make so bold, could and perhaps do, serve as a road map to the liberal mind.
Why the gaseous effusions about public service that riddle her driven life? Is it to much to suggest that in public service an outlet as well as offset is found for the cold anger, a counter balance to the conflict and turmoil within?
The pure nonsense about ascribing virtue to one's self for what government does, a perverse kind of alter ego transfer, offers a too easy reconciliation within one, the needed assurance of one's goodness despite how one views others.
Hillary certainly needed it.
"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville
After reading these over, I find it rather ironic that the first sentence of Hillary Rodham Clinton's book, "It Takes A Village" states:
" CHILDREN are not rugged individualists "
teen I have ever known. I'm afraid I have to agree with the libs who claim this is a non-story.
I am much more frightened by the things that The Hildarybeast™ says today than the things she said as a self-absorbed teen.
Someone asked: "What kind of a..."
Me. I sounded like that 12 years ago after I became a misanthropic male-feminist lefty and gave up my degree at [insert prestigious University] to move to Chicago and support my -ex through graduate school. Because, you see, I was a Privileged White Male and I believed that it was my Duty for Social Justice. That mistake only cost me a quarter of a million dollars and about 10 years of my life.
It's embarrassing to say that she reminds me a little of myself (sans cleavage, and nobody will *ever* read my old letters) when I was big on Morrissey and the Smiths, right down to the Oscar Wilde references and the fascination with radical leftists like Saul Alinsky (an original copy of Rules for Radicals still sits on my lower bookshelf: I bought it in Baltimore, about a month after I rented Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" on video from a video store that was immortalized by John Waters.)
Fortunately for me, I had an epiphany and woke up after hanging out with a bunch of liberal/lefty law school professors in Chicago for far too long, learning from the inside how the sausage really gets made. Hillary Clinton kept going and is now running for President. She'll never grow up, she'll just get meaner. Trust me on this. There's nothing she thinks government can't solve, and she'll only get more determined to prove that the older she gets. Either you break it off in your early 30s or you're lost forever, in my book.
All my friends from that time, BTW, think my brain died, and started hanging up on me around 2002 for becoming a Republican. Enough of it was still alive that I got the hint and stopped trying to call them, especially the ones now living in San Francisco.
That's what happens when you are/were serious but switch parties. Hillary ain't switching, and that's why she has so many friends.
And better ones.
And you can't fault a gal for how she's wired. It's all a part of the human epic. A tragedy.
"Oh, Manchester. So much to answer for. ..."
And I didn't mean to say that I didn't -- not now. I know, after a long time in the Wood of Error, who my friends are and you can be absolutely positive that I won't forget that.
:)
Can we at least all agree that John Peavoy (the college correspondent that turned over all of the letters to the NY Times) committed a serious breach of etiquette by inviting the public to peruse a private correspondence? I don't blame the press for wanting to get access to the letters. I don't blame the public being interested in their contents - after all, it's a chance for some insight into the young mind of a woman who is probably the odds on favorite to be President of this country in 2009. Still, unless the letters revealed that Hillary was a sleeper agent for some member of the Axis of evil, Peavoy was absolutely wrong to reveal the letters and should be scorned for it. Just because you become a public person doesn't mean that every private moment should be offered up to the Washington press corp. to be pawed over and analyzed. It's shocking breach of trust and, in my opinion, it makes Peavoy look very small and pathetic. I'm no fan of Hillary's, but I felt more sympathy for her when I read about this than I have for a long, long time. Mr. Peavoy, shame on you, sir.
What kind of loon writes like that? What a freak.
Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you. Washington Elected Elite