POLITICS

Story of Hillary Clinton’s Mother Forms Emotional Core of Campaign

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Hillary Rodham Clinton and her mother, Dorothy Rodham, at a hotel in New York in 1992. Ron Frehm/Associated Press
Dorothy Howell was 8 years old when her parents sent her away. It was 1927. Her mother and father, who fought violently in the Chicago boardinghouse where the family lived, divorced. Neither was willing to take care of Dorothy or her little sister.
So they put the girls on a train to California to live with their grandparents. It did not go well. Her grandmother favored black Victorian dresses and punished the girls for inexplicable infractions, like playing in the yard. (Dorothy was not allowed to leave her room for a year, other than for school, after she went trick-or-treating one Halloween.)
Unable to bear it, Dorothy left her grandparents’ home at 14, and became a housekeeper for $3 a week, always hoping to return to Chicago and reconnect with her mother. But when she finally did, a few years later, her mother spurned her again.
It took a long time for Hillary Rodham Clinton to fully understand the story of her mother’s devastating childhood. But now, four years after her death, Dorothy’s story is forming the emotional foundation of her daughter’s campaign for president, and will be a central theme in her big kickoff speech on Saturday.
Sharing that story is a shift for Mrs. Clinton, who in her 2008 campaign was fiercely protective of her mother’s privacy and eager to project an image of strength as she sought to become the first female commander in chief. And in this campaign, her mother’s story may help address one of Mrs. Clinton’s central challenges: convincing voters who feel they already know everything about her that there is, indeed, more to know, and that she is motivated by more than ambition.
“I think for Hillary it’s about learning, and her mother’s story is just one of the big motivators of who she is,” said Ann Lewis, a former senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton. “She couldn’t go back and do more for her mother, but she could do more for other children who need protection or who need a better chance.”
At the rally on Saturday on Roosevelt Island in New York City, the biggest public event so far of her 2016 campaign, Mrs. Clinton will explain how her mother’s experience shaped her life and inspired her to be an advocate for children and families at the Children’s Defense Fund, and as a first lady, senator and secretary of state.
Mrs. Rodham with Hillary in the 1950s.via Hillary Clinton campaign
Given the closeness of their relationship, it is striking that Mrs. Rodham has been such a limited part of Mrs. Clinton’s biography.
Dorothy Rodham and her husband, Hugh, moved to Little Rock, Ark., in 1987 to help Mrs. Clinton take care of Chelsea when she was working full time as a lawyer at Rose Law Firm. After Mr. Rodham died in 1993, Mrs. Rodham spent more time at the White House, accompanying the first lady and Chelsea on trips to India, China, Paris and Hawaii. She avoided the spotlight but enjoyed her time in Washington, with movie nights, trips to the zoo and margaritas at the Cactus Cantina.
At the 1996 convention, Mrs. Rodham vouched for her son-in-law, saying in a brief video, “Everybody knows there is only one person in the world who can really tell the truth about a man, and that’s his mother-in-law.”
But she also berated Mr. Clinton in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and encouraged Mrs. Clinton to forge her own political career, said several people who worked in the White House at the time.
After Mrs. Clinton was elected to the Senate from New York in 2000, Mrs. Rodham moved to Washington to be closer to her daughter. At one point, mother and daughter shared a two-bedroom apartment while the Clintons’ townhouse in Northwest Washington was being renovated to make a larger, private space to accommodate Mrs. Rodham. “Hillary would get home after a long day in the Senate and they’d just sit there and talk about their days,” said Patti Solis Doyle, who worked for Mrs. Clinton from 1991 until 2008 and was campaign manager for much of her first presidential run.
When she was secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton would return from a trip and plop down on the couch with her mom to hear about the latest twist in “Dancing With the Stars,” her mother’s favorite television show.
Mrs. Rodham in the 1940s.via Hillary Clinton campaign
Mrs. Clinton plans to spend time talking about her mother in a series of campaign events in early nominating states next week. She wants to highlight not only her mother’s background, but also the people, like teachers, who were kind to Dorothy as a child as a way to pivot to Mrs. Clinton’s philosophy that government and communities need to do their part to lift the middle class.
In her 2014 book, “Hard Choices,” Mrs. Clinton described how one teacher in elementary school, realizing that Dorothy was too poor to buy milk at lunchtime, would buy two cartons herself every day and then say, “Dorothy, I can’t drink this other carton of milk. Would you like it?’ ” The woman who hired her as a teenage housekeeper took an interest in her, urging her to finish high school and giving her clothes. Mrs. Clinton has said these seemingly small gestures showed her mother the presence of goodness in the world, and later made her a caring mother and grandmother.
Talking so extensively about Mrs. Rodham signals an evolution for Mrs. Clinton, from a deeply private, reluctant politician to a 67-year-old candidate who, according to her friends and aides, is running the campaign she wants to run. Mrs. Clinton has spent weeks writing Saturday’s speech, with the help of Dan Schwerin, a longtime aide and director of speechwriting for the campaign.

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A sympathetic tale of her mother’s struggles could help Mrs. Clinton convince a struggling middle class that she understands their problems, aides said. A CNN poll released on June 2 showed that 47 percent of voters thought that Mrs. Clinton “cares about people like you,” down from 53 percent last July. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign aides have publicly shrugged off such polls as evidence that voters distrust Washington and politics in general, but privately they are strategizing about how to reframe the conversation.
The idea of incorporating Mrs. Rodham’s story was floated during the 2008 Democratic primaries, when Mrs. Clinton’s advisers tested how Dorothy Rodham resonated with focus groups in Iowa; the response was overwhelmingly positive. But Mrs. Clinton was uneasy.
“It would be uncomfortable for any of us to talk about the struggles of any of our family members in such a public way, especially when your family members are living,” Ms. Doyle said. “And Dorothy was a very private person.”
Mrs. Clinton with her mother and her daughter, Chelsea, in Iowa in 2008.Doug Mills/The New York Times
Mrs. Clinton was also fiercely private. When her husband first ran for president in 1992, Mrs. Clinton vehemently shielded Chelsea and her parents from the spotlight.
She lost her temper when aides proposed a video of Chelsea, to show that Bill Clinton was a good family man, to be broadcast at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.
Mrs. Rodham died in 2011 at the age of 92. Her daughter has said that one of her mother’s heartbreaks was that she was never able to attend college.
After she graduated from high school in California, her mother lured her back to Chicago with a promise that her new husband would pay for tuition.
Dorothy dreamed of attending Northwestern University. But it turned out that her mother had lied, and actually wanted her back in Chicago only as a housekeeper. Eventually she found secretarial work.
“I’d hoped so hard that my mother would love me that I had to take the chance and find out,” Mrs. Rodham once said. “When she didn’t, I had nowhere else to go.”