Now, as they drove south, Ehrman was trying to talk her friend out of a decision that contradicted all that: Hillary wanted to join Bill in Arkansas, where he was a law professor with lofty ambitions of his own. Ehrman agreed to drive her because it gave Ehrman time to talk Hillary out of it. “Are you crazy?” she asked during one of their stops, telling her friend that she was throwing her future away. Hillary's determination, Ehrman learned, also came with a frustrating side.

They arrived in Fayetteville, Hillary taking her first steps toward a new life that would eventually make her one of the most powerful — and most controversial — women in the world. Ehrman, still certain her friend was making a terrible mistake, sat in her car and cried.

Hillary married Bill in 1975 but refused to take on Clinton’s last name, raising eyebrows in conservative Arkansas. When Bill ran for governor in 1978, advisers urged her to rethink such a trivial matter, but the fact was, this wasn’t trivial to her. Hillary, who would go on to be the first female partner at Rose Law Firm, wouldn’t be talked out of flying to New York a month before Chelsea was born to make a presentation alongside board members of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital — and she wouldn’t be talked out of this.

“I was still me,” she wrote in “Living History.”

“She has always done what she thinks is the right thing,” says Sheila Bronfman, a longtime friend from Arkansas. “And she lives with her choices.”

Then Bill, seeking a second term as governor, lost to a Republican challenger named Frank White, and advisers put some of the blame on Hillary’s refusal to be a genteel Southern wife. When Bill announced he would seek the office again in 1982, his wife began calling herself Hillary Rodham Clinton — a notable compromise.

Winning, she realized, was more important. A few months later, Bill retook the Governor’s Mansion in a landslide.

[section headline="" description="" caption="Hillary Clinton leaves a campaign event at a bookstore in Exeter, N.H., in May. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post) " credit="" src="http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2015/06/hillaryweb4.jpg" link="" align="full" ]

She stood alone sometimes looking out a White House window, watching as the tourists strolled by. Years of fighting had helped Bill Clinton become America’s 42nd president, but it had left Hillary with more enemies than allies.

She spent her first two years in Washington in the center of bare-knuckle exchanges: with media organizations, with Republicans, within her husband’s administration — no battle too small.

“I’m used to winning, and I intend to win on my own terms,” she once said to Diane Blair, one of her closest friends, according to a collection of Blair’s notes archived at the University of Arkansas.

Hillary had demanded her own 20-person staff and West Wing offices, unprecedented for a first lady, and was charged with running point on a task force to reform the country’s health-care system. She conducted many of the initial proceedings in secret, eventually leading to a lawsuit. The initiative died a painful death; she was lampooned and attacked, and she found herself unable to ignore barbs that grew increasingly personal.

During the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, no topic was off limits. The Clintons’ marriage was dissected as a union not of love but of shared ambitions; she was depicted as a ruthless woman who craved power. Her approval rating dipped to 44 percent, and at a 1994 tobacco rally in Kentucky, a Hillary effigy was burned.

When she felt bullied, as she had been so many years earlier in Park Ridge, she wanted to punch back. “As always,” Blair once wrote in her journal, “she thinks the only answer to anything is to go on the offensive.”

But more often she found herself in a defensive crouch, walling herself off from her attackers, always seeking control.

Blair suggested she could spare herself headaches by being friendlier to the press and dabbling in fewer political decisions.