WASHINGTON — As a young lawyer for the Watergate committee in the 1970s, Hillary Rodham caught a ride home one night with her boss, Bernard Nussbaum. Sitting in the car before going inside, she told him she wanted to introduce him to her boyfriend. “Bernie,” she said, “he’s going to be president of the United States.”
Mr. Nussbaum, stressed by the pressure of that tumultuous period, blew up at her audacious naïveté. “Hillary, that’s the most idiotic” thing, he screamed. She screamed back. “You don’t know a goddamn thing you’re talking about!” she said, and then called him a curse word. “God, she started bawling me out,” he recalled. “She walks out and slammed the door on me, and she storms into the building.”
It turned out she was right and he was wrong. Ms. Rodham, who later married that ambitious boyfriend, Bill Clinton, believed even then that life would take her to the White House and now may seek to return not as a spouse and partner, but on her own terms.
In recent months, as Mrs. Clinton has prepared for a likely 2016 presidential campaign, she has often framed those White House years as a period when, like many working mothers, she juggled the demands of raising a young daughter and having a career. She talks about championing women’s rights globally, supporting her husband during years of robust economic growth, and finding inspiration in Eleanor Roosevelt to stay resolute in the midst of personal attacks.