#hugh rodham

[red-phoenix26]

[itshillaryrodamn]

I’m not giving Hugh any excuses at all, but you know how some people have discovered that playing football can cause you to get CTE and it damages your brain? I’ve thought that maybe he had symptoms of that. I mean, look at other football players and how they’ve treated other people.... like OJ, for instance (that’s extreme) but it has definitely crossed my mind. Poor baby Hillary having to defend her helpless self against such a strong man... I just hope she knows it’s not her fault.

I have to say I haven’t ever thought about that connection. I suppose it’s possible that could have been a contributing factor, although I think personally I’d still be more inclined to lean towards it just being the way he was. The strictness, the impossibly high expectations, overly heavy handed punishments, I get the impression he saw it all as just the typical “tough love” approach which was more acceptable/common back then anyway. I really hope she knows that too though and on one level I’m sure she does, but these things tend to run pretty deep and from what she wrote in What Happened about whether her father would still be proud of her, I think she could well still have a bit of that “if only I had been better then it wouldn’t have happened” mentality lingering somewhere in her, which is heartbreaking.

[itshillaryrodamn]

what exactly did hugh do to hillary? like slap her? or beat her? what?

We don’t actually know anything specific like that, the only time she’s ever even directly touched upon it is in It Takes A Village where she wrote that he sometimes got “carried away” when disciplining her and her brothers, and used more physical punishment than she thought was fair or necessary. So I suppose that’s open to interpretation. My feeling would be that he could probably give a pretty sharp hit when he was angry. That certainly seems to me to be what she’s alluding to, but again we don’t know for sure that’s just been the impression I’ve always got. We know a bit more about the unrelenting high standards he placed upon her at least (bringing home all A grades and being told she must go to an easy school, forgetting to put the toothpaste cap back on the tube and throwing it out the window to send her out into the cold looking for it, etc.) Considering that treatment and combined with the little she has said about his choice of punishments, I don’t find it too much of a leap to draw the conclusion that she was unfortunately on the receiving end of some physical hits from him.

[itshillaryrodamn]

Hillary talking about her father in 1994

One of the excerpts of What Happened posted yesterday reminded me of this

[itshillaryrodamn]

Why Hillary's father is always portrayed as hateful and kinda awful dad on fanfics? I know he was strict but...was it really thaaaat bad?

Well, I guess a lot of it is interpretation from what little Hillary has said on the subject of her father. She doesn’t ever go into a huge amount of depth or detail but when she does brush over it there is a definite constant running theme of him being extremely overly critical of her and holding her to impossibly high standards which can have an incredibly crushing effect. There are a couple of examples in her autobiography and other books that reveal the extent of strictness, and I imagine there are plenty more stories never made public which are quite likely worse:

“If one of my brothers or I forgot to screw the cap back on the toothpaste tube, my father threw it out the bathroom window. We would have to go outside, even in the snow, to search for it in the evergreen bushes in front of the house.” - Living History

“And when Hillary brought home a report card filled with As, her father was unimpressed. “That must be an easy school you go to,” he would tell her.” - A Woman Living History

Then there’s this excerpt from It Takes A Village which I’ve always found pretty telling and it does very heavily imply that Hugh did hit his kids. Which although I know was much more common at the time, I still would regard it as inexcusable and an incredibly dangerous and damaging way to discipline children:

“My father, not one to spare the rod, articulated and emphasized his exceptions for us. He told us repeatedly that he would always love us but would not always like what we did. We used to test him by asking if he would still love us if we murdered someone. He would reply that he would never stop loving us but would be deeply disappointed and hurt by what we had done. Occasionally he got carried away when disciplining us, yelling louder or using more physical punishment, especially with my brothers, than I thought was fair or necessary. But even when he was angry, I never doubted that he loved me.” - It Takes A Village

It’s also a regular theme that whenever Hillary writes about her father she often adds the affirmation that he did still love her (“He was a tough taskmaster, but we knew he cared about us.” - Living History) and so it always seems to me that his treatment of her was severe enough that she felt the need to reaffirm that to herself and possibly even doubted it at times. Now I’m sure that he did in fact love her, and her brothers very much, but I do still believe they were subjected to some pretty awful treatment by him and no matter how well intended or “for their own good” it was supposed to be, that’s not something that just goes away.

[royaltyisshe64]

So, apparently, Hillary's parents moved to Arkansas either when Bill became Governor or after HRC got Chelsea: what do you think about it? Because I know they're very loving and Chelsea was their first grandchild, but didn't they maybe have friends in Illinois? And what did Hillary's brothers do? Do you think Dorothy and Hugh moved because they knew Billary were having marital troubles and they wanted to ease the pressure on them? Because they didn't move to Washington when Bill became prez.

I know that both Hugh Jr. and Tony went to the University of Arkansas (although only the former got degrees), so it seems like everybody headed south more or less when Hillary did. Apart from being Hugh Sr. and Dorothy’s first grandchild, Chelsea was also the only grandchild for quite some time. The boys didn’t settle down until later on - and even then, Florida (where both of them ended up living) is significantly closer to Arkansas than it is to Chicago. When Hugh Jr. did get married, he and Maria didn’t, as far as I’m aware, end up having any children, so it was still just Chelsea until the mid-’90s. And, of course, when Bill got elected, Hugh Sr. was already not doing well health-wise. Why move to D.C. at that point and have all the resultant upheaval make a bad situation even worse? Afterwards, Dorothy did end up spending a lot of time with Hillary and Chelsea, including traveling to various far-flung places with Hillary, but I think she kind of enjoyed being a free agent for the first time in nearly fifty years and not necessarily being tied down to any one place in particular. Plus, Tony’s kids were starting to arrive around that point and Chelsea was in her teens. All of that makes total sense to me. An additional motive for the initial move down to Arkansas may have been a desire not to have Virginia be the dominant/only grandparent present. When there’s one grandkid between three such strong personalities, there can be a rivalry of sorts, however goodnatured. Dorothy might have wanted to give Hillary some backup and support in dealing with Virginia as well. All the infidelity and marital discord that followed didn’t start until after the Rodhams had already moved, to the best of my knowledge. It certainly must have helped Hillary to have her mother there and not be totally stuck with her mother-in-law under those circumstances, but I don’t believe there was a cause-and-effect relationship involved. A final point is that, Hugh Sr.’s difficult (and kinda abusive) nature aside, Hillary appears to have been the favorite of both her parents. Even if there had been further delay in her offspring’s arrival, it’s totally within the realm of possibility that Hillary’s parents still would have come down to live closer to her at some point. (And, again, the boys were already in the vicinity.) Hugh being Hugh, I don’t think they had a ton of friends - not really close ones, anyway - back in Park Ridge and Hillary probably would have outweighed that anyway. But the Rodhams are, as ever, inscrutable, so I may well be completely wrong about all of this!

[royaltyisshe64]

You know something that’s crossed my mind before? Hugh was a football player and likely had CTE. Many football players, even though this is extreme, like OJ Simpson have been pretty abusive to their female immediate family members. I am not equalizing Hugh and OJ’s behavior, as one of them is significantly worse, but do you think it’s possible that he may have had symptoms of CTE and therefore subjected Hillary and her mom to some pretty bad abuse?

Of course, it’s possible - the only way to know is postmortem testing on the brain. But I think it is also important to bear in mind a couple of things. First, by most accounts, Hugh Jr. and Tony, as the boys, got the worst of whatever physical harshness Hugh Sr. dished out. While our main concern is with Hillary and Dorothy, their experience shouldn’t be brushed aside. And, based on what I’ve read and inferred, Hugh was far more verbally and emotionally abusive than anything else. Not that he didn’t hit the kids (maybe Dorothy, although I can’t recall ever hearing that mentioned) and not that he didn’t go overboard in terms of punishment, but I don’t believe that the level of violence ever even approached what was going on in, say, Bill’s home growing up. My other concern in diagnosing Hugh with CTE is that, as far as I’m aware, he didn’t exhibit any of the other symptoms that should accompany that kind of degeneration. His cognitive function, for example, doesn’t appear to have been impaired (i.e. concentration, coordination), nor are there accounts of him suffering the dizziness, confusion/disorientation, and headaches that would have manifested in the disease’s early stages and its progression. In my view, Hugh was also in control of himself and his behavior, consciously and consistently punishing Dorothy and the kids - responding to specific stimuli with full awareness of what he was doing and the effects it would have on his target(s), rather than just “losing it”. Honestly, my opinion is that Hugh had a lot of anger and a tendency to be an extremely unpleasant, abusive asshole. TBI may have played some role in that; I’m not ruling that out by any means. But my gut tells me that… the majority of the explanation is that it’s just the way Hugh Rodham was.

[royaltyisshe64]

What do you think was the report between Hugh and Bill? Also, it would be so nice to have Dorothy have a one on one with Bill during the holidays. Although Hillary has said that Dorothy was shy, I don't think she would have let him off the hook so easily for hurting her daughter (and granddaughter) although I believe she had "quickly" forgiven him.

Hugh’s relationship with pretty much everybody, as far as I can tell, could best be characterized as “difficult” or “tense”. It seems like her father heightened Bill’s impulse to protect and take care of Hillary in a way that’s occasionally almost paternal itself. Without Hillary having to explain anything in explicit terms (which I don’t think she did, probably until they were undergoing therapy properly, as in my story), Bill probably got a rough idea of what growing up in the Rodham household was like, from his own experience, what observations he was able to make firsthand (he’s very emotionally aware and acute as far as picking up those sorts of signals), and, of course, whatever Hillary and/or her brothers let slip. Hugh Jr. and Tony seem the most likely culprits as far as flat-out saying something, but I imagine they underplayed or were unaware of the brunt of what Hillary went through. They certainly would have underestimated its impact on her emotionally/psychologically. Hugh Sr. doesn’t appear to have had any qualms about yelling at or belittling members of his family in front of witnesses - I even remember reading an anecdote somewhere, though I’ll be damned if I can track it down, about him flipping over a card table because Hillary beat him while on a family vacation - so Bill probably saw plenty. And, based on his inability to accept criticism of his wife from other sources, I can’t envision any of that sitting well with him. Or any ill treatment of Dorothy, for that matter. Again, especially considering what Bill grew up around. When I get there, Dorothy and Bill will totally have some kind of one-on-one interaction. Yet to be determined, hahaha. Sorting out the Rodhams is proving quite the challenge!