sometimes trailing the slow-moving town trucks that sprayed a fog of DDT at dusk in the summer months. Nobody thought about pesticides as toxic then. We just thought it was fun to pedal through the haze, breathing in the sweet and acrid smells of cut grass and hot asphalt as we squeezed a few more minutes of play out of the dwindling light.

  We sometimes ice-skated on the Des Plaines River while our fathers warmed themselves over a fire and talked about how the spread of communism was threatening our way of life, and how the Russians had the bomb and, because of Sputnik, we were losing the space race. But the Cold War was an abstraction to me, and my immediate world seemed safe and stable. I didn’t know a child whose parents were divorced, and until I went to high school, I didn’t know anybody who died of anything except old age. I recognize that this benign cocoon was an illusion, but it is one I would wish for every child.

  I grew up in a cautious, conformist era in American history. But in the midst of our Father Knows Best upbringing, I was taught to resist peer pressure. My mother never wanted to hear about what my friends were wearing or what they thought about me or anything else. “You’re unique,” she would say. “You can think for yourself. I don’t care if everybody’s doing it. We’re not everybody. You’re not everybody.”

  This was fine with me, because I usually felt the same way. Of course, I did make some effort to fit in. I had enough adolescent vanity that I sometimes refused to wear the thick glasses I had needed since I was nine to correct my terrible eyesight. My friend starting in sixth grade, Betsy Johnson, led me around town like a Seeing Eye dog. Sometimes I encountered classmates and failed to acknowledge them―not because I was stuck-up, but because I didn’t recognize anyone. I was in my thirties before I learned to wear soft contact lenses strong enough to correct my vision.

  Betsy and I were allowed to go to the Pickwick Theater by ourselves on Saturday afternoons.

  One day, we watched Lover Come Back with Doris Day and Rock Hudson twice. Afterwards, we went to a restaurant for a Coke and fries. We thought we had invented dipping the french fries into ketchup when the waitress at Robin Hood’s told us she never saw anybody do that before. I didn’t know what a fastfood meal was until my family started going to McDonald’s around 1960. The first McDonald’s opened in the nearby town of Des Plaines in 1955, but my family didn’t discover the chain until one opened closer to us in Niles. Even then, we went only for special occasions. I still remember seeing the number of burgers sold change on the Golden Arches sign from thousands to millions.

  I loved school, and I was lucky enough to have some great teachers at Eugene Field School, Ralph Waldo Emerson junior High and Maine Township High Schools East and South. Years later, when I chaired the Arkansas Education Standards Committee, I realized how fortunate I had been to attend fully equipped schools with highly trained teachers and a full range of academic and extracurricular offerings. It’s funny what I remember now: Miss Taylor reading to my first-grade class from Winnie-the-Pooh every morning.

  Miss Cappuccio, my second-grade teacher, challenging us to write from one to one thousand, a task that little hands holding fat pencils took forever to finish. The exercise helped teach me what it meant to start and finish a big project. Miss Cappuccio later invited our class to her wedding, where she became Mrs. O’Laughlin. That was such a kind gesture, and for seven-year-old girls, seeing their teacher as a beautiful bride was a highlight of the year.

  I was considered a tomboy all through elementary school. My fifth-grade class had the school’s most incorrigible boys, and when Mrs. Krause left the room, she would ask me or one of the other girls to “be in charge.” As soon as the door closed behind her, the boys would start acting up and causing trouble, mostly because they wanted to aggravate the girls. I got a reputation for being able to stand up to them, which may be why I was elected co-captain of the safety patrol for the next year. This was a big deal in our school.

  My new status provided me my first lesson in the strange ways some people respond to electoral politics. One of the girls in my class, Barbara, invited me home for lunch. When we got there, her mother was vacuuming and casually told her daughter and me to go fix ourselves peanut butter sandwiches, which we did. I did not think anything of it until we got ready to go back to school and were saying goodbye to her mother.

  She asked her daughter why we were leaving so early, and Barbara told her, “Because Hillary’s a patrol captain and has to be there before the other kids.”

  “Oh, if I’d known that,” she said, “I’d have fixed you a nice lunch.”

  My sixth-grade teacher, Elisabeth King, drilled us in grammar, but she also encouraged us to think and write creatively, and challenged us to try new forms of expression. If we were sluggish in responding to her questions, she said, “You’re slower than molasses running uphill in winter.” She often paraphrased the verse from Matthew: “Don’t put your lamp under a bushel basket, but use it to light up the world.” She pushed me, Betsy Johnson, Gayle Elliot, Carol Farley and Joan Throop to write and produce a play about five girls taking an imaginary trip to Europe. It was an assignment from Mrs. King that led me to write my first autobiography. I rediscovered it in a box of old papers after I left the White House, and reading it pulled me back to those tentative years on the brink of adolescence. I was still very much a child at that age, and mostly concerned with family, school and sports. But grade school was ending, and it was time to enter a more complicated world than the one I had known.

  UNIVERSITY OF LIFE

  “What you don’t learn from your mother, you learn from the world” is a saying I once heard from the Masai tribe in Kenya. By the fall of 1960, my world was expanding and so were my political sensibilities. John E Kennedy won the presidential election, to my father’s consternation. He supported Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and my eighthgrade social studies teacher, Mr. Kenvin, did too. Mr. Kenvin came to school the day after the election and showed us bruises he claimed he had gotten when he tried to question the activities of the Democratic machine’s poll watchers at his voting precinct in Chicago on Election Day. Betsy Johnson and I were outraged by his stories, which reinforced my father’s belief that Mayor Richard J. Daley’s creative vote counting had won the election for President-Elect Kennedy. During our lunch period we went to the pay phone outside the cafeteria and tried calling Mayor Daley’s office to complain. We reached a very nice woman who told us she would be sure to pass on the message to the Mayor.

  A few days later, Betsy heard about a group of Republicans asking for volunteers to check voter lists against addresses to uncover vote fraud. The ad called for volunteers to gather at a downtown hotel at 9 A.M. on a Saturday morning. Betsy and I decided to participate.

  We knew our parents would never give us permission, so we didn’t ask. We took the bus downtown, walked to the hotel and were directed into a small ballroom. We went up to an information table and told the people we were there to help. The turnout must have been less than expected. We were each handed a stack of voter registration lists and assigned to different teams who, we were told, would drive us to our destinations, drop us off and pick us up a few hours later.

  Betsy and I separated and went off with total strangers. I ended up with a couple who drove me to the South Side, dropped me off in a poor neighborhood and told me to knock on doors and ask people their names so I could compare them with registration lists to find evidence to overturn the election. Off I went, fearless and stupid. I did find a vacant lot that was listed as the address for about a dozen alleged voters. I woke up a lot of people who stumbled to the door or yelled at me to go away. And I walked into a bar where men were drinking to ask if certain people on my list actually lived there. The men were so shocked to see me they stood silent while I asked my few questions, until the bartender told me I would have to come back later because the owner wasn’t there.

  When I finished, I stood on the corner waiting to be picked up, happy that I’d ferreted out proof of my father’s contention that “Daley stole the election for Kennedy.”

  Of course, when I returned home and told my father where I had been, he went nuts. It was bad enough to go downtown without an adult, but to go to the South Side alone sent him into a yelling fit. And besides, he said, Kennedy was going to be President whether we liked it or not.

  My freshman year at Maine East was a culture shock. The baby boomers pushed enrollment near five thousand white kids from different ethnic and economic groups. I remember walking out of my home room the first day of class and hugging the walls to avoid the crush of students, all of whom looked bigger and more mature than me. It didn’t help that I had decided the week before to get a more “grown-up” hairdo to begin my high school years. Thus began my lifelong hair struggles.

  I wore my long straight hair in a ponytail or held back by a headband, and whenever my mother or I needed a permanent or trim we visited her dear friend Amalia Toland, who had once been a beautician. Amalia would take care of us in her kitchen while she and my mother talked. But I wanted to show up at high school with a shoulder-length pageboy or flip like those of the older girls I admired, and I begged my mother to take me to a real beauty parlor. A neighbor recommended a man who had his shop in a small windowless room in the back of a nearby grocery store. When I got there, I handed him a photo of what I wanted and waited to be transformed. Wielding scissors, he began to cut, all the time talking to my mother, often turning around to make a point. I watched in horror as he cut a huge hunk of hair out of the right side of my head. I shrieked. When he finally looked at where I was pointing, he said, “Oh, my scissors must have slipped, I’ll have to even up the other side.” Shocked, I watched the rest of my hair disappear, leaving me―in my eyes, at least―looking like an artichoke. My poor mother tried to reassure me, but I knew better: My life was ruined.

  I refused to leave the house for days, until I decided that if I bought a ponytail of fake hair at Ben Franklin’s Five and Dime Store, I could pin it to the top of my head, put a ribbon around it and pretend the slipped scissors disaster never happened. So that’s what I did, which saved me from feeling selfconscious and embarrassed that first day―until I was walking down the grand central staircase in between classes. Coming up the stairs was Ernest Ricketts, known as “Ricky,” who had been my friend since the day we first walked to kindergarten together. He said hello, waited until he passed me, and then, as he had done dozens of times before, reached back to pull my ponytail―but this time it came off in his hand. The reason we are still friends today is that he did not add to my mortification; instead, he handed my “hair” back to me, said he was sorry he scalped me and went on without drawing any more attention to the worst moment―until then, at least―of my life.

  It’s a cliché now, but my high school in the early 1960s resembled the movie Grease or the television show Happy Days. I became President of the local fan club for Fabian, a teen idol, which consisted of me and two other girls. We watched The Ed Sullivan Show every Sunday night with our families, except the night he showcased the Beatles on February 9, 1964, which had to be a group experience. Paul McCartney was my favorite Beatle, which led to debates about each one’s respective merits, especially with Betsy, who always championed George Harrison. I got tickets to the Rolling Stones concert in Chicago’s McCormick Place in 1965. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” became a catchall anthem for adolescent angst of all varieties. Years later, when I met icons from my youth, like Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Mick Jagger, I didn’t know whether to shake hands or jump up and down squealing.

  Despite the developing “youth culture,” defined mostly by television and music, there were distinct groups in our school that determined one’s social position: athletes and cheerleaders; student council types and brains; greasers and hoods. There were hallways I didn’t dare walk down because, I was told, the “shop” guys would confront people. Cafeteria seating was dictated by invisible borders we all recognized. In my junior year, the underlying tensions broke out with fights between groups in the parking lot after school and at football and basketball games.

  The administration moved quickly to intervene and established a student group called the Cultural Values Committee consisting of representative students from different groups.

  The principal, Dr. Clyde Watson, asked me to be on the committee, giving me the chance to meet and talk with kids whom I did not know and previously would have avoided. Our committee came up with specific recommendations to promote tolerance and decrease tension. Several of us were asked to appear on a local television show to discuss what our committee had done. This was both my first appearance on television and my first experience with an organized effort to stress American values of pluralism, mutual respect and understanding. Those values needed tending, even in my suburban Chicago high school. Although the student body was predominantly white and Christian, we still found ways to isolate and demonize one another. The committee gave me the opportunity to make new and different friends. A few years later, when I was at a dance at a local YMCA and some guys started hassling me, one of the former committee members, a socalled greaser, intervened, telling the others to leave me alone because I was “okay.”

  All, however, was not okay during my high school years. I was sitting in geometry class on November 22, 1963, puzzling over one of Mr. Craddock’s problems, when another teacher came to tell us President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Mr. Craddock, one of my favorite teachers and our class sponsor, cried, “What? That can’t be,” and ran out into the hall. When he returned, he confirmed that someone had shot the President and that it was probably some “John Bircher,” a reference to a rightwing organization bitterly opposed to President Kennedy. He told us to go to the auditorium to await further information. The halls were silent as thousands of students walked in disbelief and denial to the school auditorium. Finally, our principal came in and said we would be dismissed early.

  When I got home, I found my mother in front of the television set watching Walter Cronkite. Cronkite announced that President Kennedy had died at 1 P.M. CST. She confessed that she had voted for Kennedy and felt so sorry for his wife and children. So did I.

  I also felt sorry for our country and I wanted to help in some way, although I had no idea how.

  I clearly expected to work for a living, and I did not feel limited in my choices. I was lucky to have parents who never tried to mold me into any category or career. They simply encouraged me to excel and be happy. In fact, I don’t remember a friend’s parent or a teacher ever telling me or my friends that “girls can’t do this” or “girls shouldn’t do that.”

  Sometimes, though, the message got through in other ways.

  The author Jane O’Reilly, who came of age in the 1950s, wrote a famous essay for Ms. magazine in 1972 recounting the moments in her life when she realized she was being devalued because she was female. She described the instant of revelation as a click!―like the mechanism that triggers a flashbulb. It could be as blatant as the mhelpwanted ads that, until the mid-sixties, were divided into separate columns for men and women, or as subtle as an impulse to surrender the front section of the newspaper to any man in the vicinity―click!―contenting yourself with the women’s pages until he finishes reading the serious news.

  There were a few moments when I felt that click! I had always been fascinated by exploration and space travel, maybe in part because my dad was so concerned about America lagging behind Russia. President Kennedy’s vow to put men on the moon excited me, and I wrote to NASA to volunteer for astronaut training. I received a letter back informing me that they were not accepting girls in the program. It was the first time I had hit an obstacle I couldn’t overcome with hard work and determination, and I was outraged.

  Of course, my poor eyesight and mediocre physical abilities would have disqualified me anyway, regardless of gender. Still, the blanket rejection hurt and made me more sympathetic later to anyone confronted with discrimination of any kind.

  In high school, one of my smartest girlfriends dropped out of the accelerated courses because her boyfriend wasn’t in them. Another didn’t want to have her grades posted because she knew she would get higher marks than the boy she was dating. These girls had picked up the subtle and not-so-subtle cultural signals urging them to conform to sexist stereotypes, to diminish their own accomplishments in order not to outperform the boys around them. I was interested in boys in high school, but I never dated anyone seriously. I simply could not imagine giving up a college education or a career to get married, as some of my girlfriends were planning to do.

  I was interested in politics from an early age, and I loved to hone my debating skills with my friends. I would press poor Ricky Ricketts into daily debates about world peace, baseball scores, whatever topic came to mind. I successfully ran for student council and junior class Vice President. I was also an active Young Republican and, later, a Goldwater girl, right down to my cowgirl outfit and straw cowboy hat emblazoned with the slogan “AuH,O.”

  My ninth-grade history teacher, Paul Carlson, was, and still is, a dedicated educator and a very conservative Republican. Mr. Carlson encouraged me to read Senator Barry Goldwater’s recently published book, The Conscience of a Conservative. That inspired me to write my term paper on the American conservative movement, which I dedicated “To my parents, who have always taught me to be an individual.” I liked Senator Goldwater because he was a rugged individualist who swam against the political tide. Years later, I admired his outspoken support of individual rights, which he considered consistent with his old-fashioned conservative principles: “Don’t raise hell about the gays, the blacks and the Mexicans. Free people have a right to do as they damn please.” When Goldwater learned I had supported him in 1964, he sent the White House a case of barbecue fixings and hot sauces and invited me to come see him. I went to his home in Phoenix in 1996 and spent a wonderful hour talking to him and his dynamic wife, Susan.