Dorothy Rodham (1919-2011)

Dorothy Rodham, flanked by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, at the latter's wedding on July 31, 2010.

It has been such a gift to witness three generations of Rodham women over the last two decades of American life. Just a little over a year after watching her granddaughter get married, on the heels of Hillary turning 64 years young, and after a week of rumors that Chelsea Clinton may be thinking of a congressional run of her own, Dorothy Rodham has passed away at the age of 92.

Here are some excerpts from her NYT obit–  Dorothy Rodham, Mother and Mentor of Hillary Clinton, Is Dead at 92:

As her daughter rose to prominence, Mrs. Rodham stayed mostly in the background, appearing only occasionally in public and rarely giving interviews. But Mrs. Clinton credited her mother with giving her a love of the higher learning that Mrs. Rodham never had, a curiosity about a larger world that Mrs. Rodham had not seen, and a will to persevere — about which Mrs. Rodham knew a great deal.

Her childhood had been Dickensian. She was abandoned by dysfunctional, divorced parents at the age of 8 in Chicago, sent unsupervised on a cross-country train with a younger sister to live with unwelcoming grandparents in California and, at 14, escaped into the adult world of the Depression as a $3-a-week nanny.

On her own, she attended high school and became a good student, though her job left little time for other activities. Her employers were kind to her, however, and she had two influential teachers. College proved to be out of the question, but she got a job as a secretary in Chicago, and after years of lonely toil she married a gruff traveling salesman and settled into a life of cooking, cleaning and raising three children.

In her autobiography, “Living History” (2003), Mrs. Clinton recalled her mother’s hardships. “I thought often of my own mother’s neglect and mistreatment at the hands of her parents and grandparents, and how other caring adults filled the emotional void to help her,” she wrote.

Mrs. Clinton portrayed her mother as a caring beacon of strength in the family, offering intellectual stimulation and teaching her children to be calm and resolute. “I’m still amazed at how my mother emerged from her lonely early life as such an affectionate and levelheaded woman,” she wrote.

These paragraphs give mention to Rodham’s sporadic appearances in public life:

In 1996, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Mrs. Rodham was featured in a film shown before Mr. Clinton made his acceptance speech as he began his bid for re-election. “Everybody knows,” she said, “there is only one person in the world who can really tell the truth about a man, and that’s his mother-in-law.”

Mrs. Rodham, who had done little traveling abroad, accompanied Chelsea on a trip to Jodhpur, India, in 2000. After Mrs. Clinton joined the Senate in 2001, Mrs. Rodham spent time at her Washington home. The Clintons bought her a condominium near their home in Chappaqua, N.Y., in 2003. After 2006, she lived mostly at Mrs. Clinton’s home in Washington.

She was in the Senate gallery when Mrs. Clinton took the oath for her second term in January 2007, and appeared in Iowa and New Hampshire early in Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. And when she quit the race in June 2008, Mrs. Clinton stood with her mother and her daughter at the National Building Museum in Washington, their hands raised together in a memorable three-generation tableau.

The story of Dorothy Rodham is the story of the ordinary American heroine. Rest in peace.

Chelsea, Hillary, and Dorothy in Pennsylvania 2008.