The mother of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton died Tuesday in Washington, her family announced this morning. Dorothy Rodham was 92. In Clinton’s autobiography, she credited her mom with teaching her to stand up for herself, recalling the time she challenged a bully at her mother’s insistence: “You have to face things and show them you’re not afraid,” she told her daughter. When Clinton considered dropping out of college, her mother pushed her again and said, “You can’t quit. You’ve got to see through what you’ve started.” And during Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign, Rodham vouched for him: In a video at the 1996 Democratic National convention she joked, “Everybody knows there is only one person in the world who can really tell the truth about a man, and that’s his mother-in-law.”
