Do you recognize the presidential candidate in this photo? I'd never seen this. Answer here: http://t.co/qaRgeF2YCm pic.twitter.com/LXqcH809rF
— sree sreenivasan (@sree) July 21, 2015
I’ve long wondered if the defining tragedy of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s public life is that she was born in the last generation of women raised to believe that their highest political ambition must be to marry a President. Perhaps her father felt her gender to be a tragedy, too…
… Mrs. Clinton has made the struggles of her mother, Dorothy Rodham, a central part of her 2016 campaign’s message, and has repeatedly described Mrs. Rodham’s life story to crowds around the country. But her father, whom Mrs. Clinton rarely talks about publicly, exerted an equally powerful, if sometimes bruising, influence on the woman who wants to become the first female president.
The brusque son of an English immigrant and a coal miner’s daughter in Scranton, Pa., Mr. Rodham, for most of his life, harbored prejudices against blacks, Catholics and anyone else not like him. He hurled biting sarcasm at his wife and his only daughter and spanked, at times excessively, his three children to keep them in line, according to interviews with friends and a review of documents, Mrs. Clinton’s writings and former President Bill Clinton’s memoir…
He would hurl criticism at his wife around the kitchen table at 235 Wisner Street. When she encouraged Hillary to learn for learning’s sake, Mr. Rodham, who drove a Cadillac, would quip: “Learn for earning’s sake.” If his children asked for an allowance for their many household chores, he would reply bluntly: “I feed you, don’t I?”
The family was isolated from its neighbors because of Mr. Rodham’s sour, demeaning nature and his misanthropic tendencies, said Carl Bernstein, who wrote a 2007 biography of Hillary Clinton, “A Woman in Charge.”…
Mr. Rodham taught his only daughter that she could play sports and do anything the boys did. When she was racked with self-doubt at Wellesley and Yale, her father wrote her tough but tender letters telling her to buck up. “Even when he erupted at me, he admired my independence and accomplishments,” she later wrote…
That little girl’s smile kind of breaks my heart, right now.
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Apart from musing on the memories we can get away from and the ones we can’t, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up the week?