Swinging ’60s: When Hillary poured her heart out

“Since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three-and-a-half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me,” Rodham wrote to Peavoy in April 1967. “So far, I’ve used alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.”

Befitting college students of any era, the letters are also self-absorbed and revelatory, missives from an unformed and vulnerable striver who had, in her own words, “not yet reconciled myself to the fate of not being the star.”

In other letters, she would convey a mounting exasperation with her rigid conservative father and disdain for both “debutante” dormmates and an acid-dropping friend. She would issue a blanket condemnation of the “boys” she had met and also tell of an encounter she had with “a Dartmouth boy” the previous weekend. She joked that she planned to keep his letters and “make a million” when he became famous.

Of course, it was Hillary Rodham Clinton who became famous while Peavoy has lived out his life in contented obscurity as an English professor.

The letters were written during a period when the future Mrs. Clinton was undergoing a period of profound political transformation, from the “Goldwater girl” who shared her father’s conservative outlook to a liberal anti-war activist.

In her early letters, Rodham refers to her involvement with the Young Republicans, a legacy of her upbringing. In October of her freshman year, she dismisses the local chapter as “so inept,” which she says, she might be able to leverage to her own benefit.

Still, the letters reveal a fast-eroding allegiance to the party of her childhood. She ridicules a trip she had taken to a Young Republicans convention as “a farce that would have done Oscar Wilde credit.” By the summer of 1967, Rodham begins referring to Republicans as “they” rather than “we.”

In many ways her letters are more revealing about her search for her own sense of self. “Can you be a misanthrope and still love or enjoy some individuals?” Rodham wrote in an April 1967 letter. “How about a compassionate misanthrope?”

Peavoy’s letters to Rodham are lost to posterity, unless she happened to keep them, which he doubts. He said he wished he had kept copies himself. “They are windows into a time and a place and a journey of self-discovery,” he said in an interview. “This was what college students did before Facebook.”

The letters are Peavoy’s only link to his former pen pal. They never visited or exchanged a single phone call during their four years of college. They lost touch entirely after graduation, except for the 30-year reunion of the Maine South High School class of 1965, held in Washington to accommodate the class’ most famous graduate, whose husband was then serving his first term in the White House.