힐러리 클린턴 미국 국무장관 모친 로댐여사(92세) 별세

 

                        Dorothy Rodham with granddaughter Chelsea Clinton, daughter Hillary Clinton and son-in-law Bill Clinton in 2007 in Washington.

힐러리 클린턴 미국 국무장관의 모친인 도로시 하월 로댐 여사가 1일 새벽(현지시간) 별세했다. 향년 92세. 로댐 여사의 가족들은 성명을 통해 로댐 여사가 이날 0시를 조금 넘긴 시간에 가족들이 지켜보는 가운데 숨졌다고 밝혔다.

   로댐 여사는 클린턴 국무장관의 모친이자 빌 클린턴 전 미 대통령의 장모이다

 

클린턴 장관은 자신의 모친이 어린시절 고난과 역경을 극복하며 자신에게 영감을 불러일으켜 줬다고 말해 왔다.  실제 1919년 6월 소방수의 딸로 시카고에서 태어난 고인은 어린 시절 온갖 역경과 외로움의 큰 상처를 겪었다.

   고인의 부모는 로댐 여사가 8세 때 이혼했고, 이후 캘리포니아에 있는 조부모 밑에서 자랐다. 로댐 여사는 이후 14세가 되던 때 가정부 자리를 얻어 자립했다. 고인은 고등학교를 졸업한 뒤 대학 교육을 받는데 도움을 주겠다는 모친의 약속에 따라 다시 시카고로 돌아왔다. 하지만 이 약속은 지켜지지 않았고 로댐 여사는 다시 한 사무실에서 일자리를 얻어 스스로 생활했다.
고인은 시카고에서 여행판촉 일을 하던 휴 로댐을 만나 1942년 결혼했다. 두 사람 사이에는 클린턴 장관과 휴, 토니 두 아들이 있다.

   클린턴 장관은 자서전 `살아있는 역사(Living History)'에서 자신의 모친이 어린 시절 외롭고 사랑없이 자랐다고 묘사한 바 있다. 클린턴 장관은 "어떻게 나의 모친이 그런 외로운 어린 시절에서 성장해 그렇게 다정하고 분별력있는 여성이 되었는지 여전히 놀라고 있다"고 말하기도 했다.

   로댐 여사 가족들은 이날 발표한 성명에서 "고인의 얘기는 정말 미국인들의 얘기"라면서 "고인은 어린 소녀로서 역경과 포기를 극복하고 놀랄만한 여성이 됐다"고 추모했다.
로댐 여사는 그동안 대중 앞에는 잘 나타나지 않았고 언론과 특별한 인터뷰도 하지 않았다.
하지만 고인은 딸인 클린턴 장관이 지난 2008년 대선을 앞두고 민주당 후보 경선 과정에서 버락 오바마 현 대통령과 치열한 경쟁을 벌일 당시 경선후보 행사장에 딸과 함께 모습을 드러내고 자신의 딸을 응원했다.

                                                               Hillary Rodham Clinton with her mother, Dorothy Rodham, in 2007(photo)
   당시 클린턴 장관은 모친에 대해 "우리가 해야 할 필요가 있는 일들에 대해 엄청난 멋진 아이디어를 항상 갖고 있는 분"이라고 말했다.

   로댐 여사의 가족들은 고인의 장례식을 사적으로 진행할 계획이라고 전했다. 또 고인을 위해 조화를 헌정하는 대신 고인이 마지막 생을 보냈던 조지워싱턴대 병원이나 자선단체 등에 기부해 줄 것을 요청했다.

   이에 앞서 클린턴 장관은 모친의 병세가 심각해 지자 이날부터로 예정됐던 영국과 터키 방문을 취소했다.

Dorothy Rodham, Mother and Mentor Of Hillary Clinton, Is Dead at 92

Dorothy Rodham, who overcame years of struggle to become a powerful influence on the life and career of her daughter, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first lady, senator from New York, presidential candidate and now secretary of state, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 92.

Her family announced her death. Mrs. Clinton canceled a trip to London and Istanbul to be at her mother’s side.

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.

Dorothy Emma Howell was born on June 4, 1919, in Chicago, the oldest of two children of Edwin John Howell Jr., a firefighter, and the former Della Murray. Her sister, Isabelle, was born in 1924. They lived as boarders in a house with four other families. The parents fought often and sometimes violently, according to Cook County records of the time.

Mr. Howell sued for divorce, accusing his wife of abandonment and abuse of the children. She did not show up in court; her sister, Frances Czeslawski, testified against her, and Mr. Howell was granted the divorce and custody of the children in 1927. But unwilling or unable to care for them, he put them on a train to Alhambra, Calif., where his parents, Edwin Sr. and Emma, lived.

The grandparents were ill-prepared to raise the girls. Mr. Howell, a laborer for the city, left the task to his wife, whom Mrs. Rodham recalled as a strict woman in black dresses who discouraged visitors and parties and berated and punished them for small infractions. When she discovered that Dorothy had gone trick-or-treating one Halloween, she ordered her confined to her room for a year, except to go to school.

In 1934 Dorothy moved out and became a housekeeper, cook and nanny for a family in San Gabriel. Her employers gave her a room, board and $3 a week and encouraged her to read and go to school. Dorothy enrolled at Alhambra High School, where she joined the Scholarship Club and the Spanish Club.

Years later, Mrs. Rodham recalled two teachers: Miss Drake, who taught speech and drama, and Miss Zellhoefer, who taught her to write. “She taught English and was very strict,” Mrs. Rodham wrote in a book marking the school’s centennial in 1998. “We came from her class with respect for her and a solid ground in English. What made her special was her desire that we develop critical thinking.”

After graduating in 1937, Dorothy returned to Chicago at the request of her mother, Della, who had remarried. The girl was told that her mother’s new husband had offered to help pay her college expenses, and Dorothy hoped to enroll at Northwestern University. But when she got to Chicago, she discovered that the offer had evaporated, and that her mother actually wanted her to work as her housekeeper.

“I’d hoped so hard that my mother would love me that I had to take the chance and find out,” Mrs. Rodham said long after that wrenching, sentimental journey. “When she didn’t, I had nowhere else to go.”

She found secretarial work in Chicago. In 1942 she married Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, eight years her senior, who became the owner of a small drapery-fabric business. They moved to suburban Park Ridge, where their children — Hillary, Hugh and Tony — were born and reared. They survive her, as do four grandchildren.

Mrs. Rodham pushed her children to stand up for themselves, Mrs. Clinton said. once, when she was 4, she went home in tears after a neighborhood girl had bullied her. “You have to face things and show them you’re not afraid,” her mother told her. If she was hit again, Mrs. Rodham advised, “hit her back.”

“She later told me she watched from behind the curtain as I squared my shoulders and marched across the street,” Mrs. Clinton wrote. “I returned a few minutes later, glowing with victory.”

As a freshman at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Hillary called home to express doubts about her ability to stay on and compete. “You can’t quit,” Mrs. Clinton quoted her mother as telling her. “You’ve got to see through what you’ve started.”

Mr. and Mrs. Rodham moved to Little Rock, Ark., in 1987, to be near Mrs. Clinton, whose husband, Bill, was then governor of Arkansas, and their granddaughter Chelsea. Mrs. Rodham took college courses in psychology and other subjects. She kept her home in Little Rock after Mr. Clinton became president. Mr. Rodham died in 1993.

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.

クリントン長官の実母が死去

クリントン米国務長官の実母のドロシー・ロダムさんが１日、ワシントン市内の病院で死去した。９２歳だった。長官の親族が声明を発表した。長官は１日にロンドンで開かれた国際サイバー会議、２日にはイスタンブールでのアフガニスタン情勢に関する国際会議に出席予定だったが、ロダムさんの病状を理由に取りやめていた。（ワシントン　犬塚陽介）

 

                      米アイオワ州デモインでの集会で、クリントン氏（左）の傍らに立つ母ドロシー・ロダムさん＝２００７年１２月（ロイター＝共同）