Carly Fiorina with her father, Joseph Tyree Sneed III, an esteemed conservative law professor, in 2006. CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
The 1969 Stanford Law School yearbook notified readers that Joseph Tyree Sneed III, a top professor with Harvard, Yale and Cornell on his résumé, would be taking leave from the California university to teach for a year in London and Ghana.
Joining him would be his wife, Madelon, who “paints and plays tennis,” and his three children, including his middle daughter, Cara, a burgeoning pianist who went by her middle name, Carleton. Today, Carleton is better known asCarly Fiorina, the presidential candidate who courts Republican voters with the story of her against-all-odds rise from the secretarial pool to chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, or, as she was introduced in Beaufort, S.C., one Friday last month, from the “reception desk to the boardroom.”
At the event, Mrs. Fiorina talked about learning conservatism as a little girl “literally at my dad’s knee” and then said, “fast-forward, and I would start my career in the middle of a deep recession, typing and filing” as a secretary getting “my introduction to business, literally.”Photo
Carly Fiorina's high school yearbook picture from 1972, when she went by her middle name, Carleton.Creditvia Durham County Library
But Mrs. Fiorina’s father was not just any Republican. He was one of the country’s most esteemed conservative law professors, a Duke Law School dean whom President Richard M. Nixon appointed as a deputy attorney general and then a federal judge. His opinions on issues like California’s so-calledthree strikes law for repeat offenders influenced the Supreme Court, and his advocacy for a brilliant student named Kenneth Starr influenced American history.
And in those “fast-forward” years, she got to perform Shakespeare at a school in London with the future head of the English department at King’s College, Cambridge, and woke to the sounds of Muslims praying in Ghana as she followed her father on his teaching appointments.
That family pedigree and worldly past is politically inconvenient in a campaign climate that prizes anti-establishment outsiders and a strong dose of nativism. It also took a toll on her as a young woman moving from school to school around the country and the world, as the future marketer had to learn how to quickly make, if not keep, friends.
“It gives you a worldview,” Mrs. Fiorina said when asked in a brief exchange about her upbringing after another event in South Carolina. She otherwise declined to talk about it other than to portray her travels as an education in American exceptionalism. “I saw at a young age, as well as all of the other decades where I’ve traveled, that things are possible here that really aren’t possible anywhere else in the world.”
In her memoir “Tough Choices,” Mrs. Fiorina writes about herself as a young and insecure woman intent on pleasing her father, himself the child of a prominent Texas rancher. With a congenital defect that permanently bent his neck and with a droll, Bill Buckley manner, Mr. Sneed was a “marvelous teacher,” according to Raymond Fisher, a former law student of Mr. Sneed’s who ultimately served with him on the liberal-leaning United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. “He did not come across as a conservative ideologue.”
Mrs. Fiorina said he taught her to stick up for her principles without being “objectionable all the time.” In her memoir, she also called him a “true intellectual” who was unsympathetic to “insecurity or self-doubt.”
After attending elementary schools in New York, Connecticut and California, she followed her father as he took a visiting professorship at the University of London. There, she said, she attended London’s Channing School for Select Young Ladies, a Unitarian school with the motto “cras ingens iterabimus aequor,” or “tomorrow we shall journey across a vast sea.”
“It was very old fashioned,” said Harriet Sergeant, an author who appears along with Mrs. Fiorina in a list of “distinguished Old Girls” in a 125th anniversary book on the school. (“We popped her in there,” the editor, Carolyn Postgate, said of Mrs. Fiorina.)
Girls in brown berets and jackets rebelled by rolling up the waistbands of their hated Harris tweed brown skirts and were rewarded for good posture with badges. Some classmates recalled Mrs. Fiorina’s name more than anything she said or did.
“We had never heard of anyone called Carleton before,” said Claudia Mayer. “Sneeeed. It’s almost Dickensian in a way.”
But Mrs. Fiorina’s father was not just any Republican. He was one of the country’s most esteemed conservative law professors, a Duke Law School dean whom President Richard M. Nixon appointed as a deputy attorney general and then a federal judge. His opinions on issues like California’s so-calledthree strikes law for repeat offenders influenced the Supreme Court, and his advocacy for a brilliant student named Kenneth Starr influenced American history.
And in those “fast-forward” years, she got to perform Shakespeare at a school in London with the future head of the English department at King’s College, Cambridge, and woke to the sounds of Muslims praying in Ghana as she followed her father on his teaching appointments.
That family pedigree and worldly past is politically inconvenient in a campaign climate that prizes anti-establishment outsiders and a strong dose of nativism. It also took a toll on her as a young woman moving from school to school around the country and the world, as the future marketer had to learn how to quickly make, if not keep, friends.
“It gives you a worldview,” Mrs. Fiorina said when asked in a brief exchange about her upbringing after another event in South Carolina. She otherwise declined to talk about it other than to portray her travels as an education in American exceptionalism. “I saw at a young age, as well as all of the other decades where I’ve traveled, that things are possible here that really aren’t possible anywhere else in the world.”
In her memoir “Tough Choices,” Mrs. Fiorina writes about herself as a young and insecure woman intent on pleasing her father, himself the child of a prominent Texas rancher. With a congenital defect that permanently bent his neck and with a droll, Bill Buckley manner, Mr. Sneed was a “marvelous teacher,” according to Raymond Fisher, a former law student of Mr. Sneed’s who ultimately served with him on the liberal-leaning United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. “He did not come across as a conservative ideologue.”
Mrs. Fiorina said he taught her to stick up for her principles without being “objectionable all the time.” In her memoir, she also called him a “true intellectual” who was unsympathetic to “insecurity or self-doubt.”
After attending elementary schools in New York, Connecticut and California, she followed her father as he took a visiting professorship at the University of London. There, she said, she attended London’s Channing School for Select Young Ladies, a Unitarian school with the motto “cras ingens iterabimus aequor,” or “tomorrow we shall journey across a vast sea.”
“It was very old fashioned,” said Harriet Sergeant, an author who appears along with Mrs. Fiorina in a list of “distinguished Old Girls” in a 125th anniversary book on the school. (“We popped her in there,” the editor, Carolyn Postgate, said of Mrs. Fiorina.)
Girls in brown berets and jackets rebelled by rolling up the waistbands of their hated Harris tweed brown skirts and were rewarded for good posture with badges. Some classmates recalled Mrs. Fiorina’s name more than anything she said or did.
“We had never heard of anyone called Carleton before,” said Claudia Mayer. “Sneeeed. It’s almost Dickensian in a way.”
While some girls took embroidery to learn how to make their own wedding dresses, Mrs. Fiorina put on a British accent to play the role of Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet” under the watchful direction of Frances MacRae, a domineering teacher who flew airplanes in her spare time.Philippa Berry, who played Romeo, and who later wrote feminist works such as “Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies,” was not aware until reached by a reporter that her star-crossed co-star was running for president.
“It has come as quite a surprise to discover that I acted opposite Carly Fiorina,” she said.
After only a few months, Mrs. Fiorina’s father took the family to Accra where he taught the new Ghanaian Constitution to law students. Mrs. Fiorina enrolled at the Ghana International School, whose chairman mentioned her last month as a distinguished alumna at the school’s 60th anniversary event.
Mrs. Fiorina reflects in her memoir about “being the only white person in a room” and how it prompted her to think about “how the few blacks I knew back home must feel.” She also recalls finding comfort in the cadences of Muslim prayer and “grew to love” waking up to a Muslim man praying beneath her bedroom window.
She returned to California, but soon after, in 1971, her father landed a job as the dean of the law school at Duke University. The family moved to a stately Tudor home in Hope Valley, a country club community in Durham, N.C., which her fellow students at Charles E. Jordan High School called “high rent.”
She wrote that she cried a lot at the prospect of starting over again, but that her parents responded that the move did not excuse her from good grades and piano lessons.
As Mr. Sneed discovered a bright young law student in Mr. Starr — he later had a role in Mr. Starr’s appointment as the special prosecutor investigating President Bill Clinton — his daughter settled into a school still grappling with desegregation and the war in Vietnam. Farm kids and rich kids, “long hairs” and “straights” formed separate cliques.
“She was more of the laid-back smart kids,” said William Nichols, a classmate who said she stayed away from social issues.
“I wanted desperately to fit in,” Mrs. Fiorina wrote, adding that she learned how to be a hostess from her mother. Her friends remember getting together to do physics experiments that turned into parties, with the radio playing, and dancing in a small apartment over the garage.Continue reading the main story
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There, Mrs. Fiorina talked with Mary Thompson Skinner about attending law school and their excitement at being the first crop of 18-year-olds to vote.
Mary Livingstone Farrell recalled being brought to one of Mrs. Fiorina’s many parties by a date.
“It was almost like the parents were absent,” she said. At the party and at school, she said, Mrs. Fiorina made it clear “she thought she was way smarter than we were.”
One staple at Mrs. Fiorina’s parties was Max Turner, who, like many others, recalled her fondly as an extrovert who fit easily into any social setting and belonged to the “more affluent” group. Like several other members of the football team, Mr. Turner took exception to a passage in Mrs. Fiorina’s memoir in which she wrote that she tutored the school’s illiterate football players. “They were about to graduate high school, were stars on the football team, but they literally couldn’t read.”
“I have never heard anyone say that there were kids at that school at that time who couldn’t read,” said Mr. Turner, himself a standout student.
Henry Hinson Jr., another football player, pointed out that the parents of African-American students like himself sent their children to Jordan because “it was a highly academic school,” though a social caste existed. “We were never invited to parties over in Hope Valley,” he said.
After graduation, Nixon appointed Mrs. Fiorina’s father deputy attorney general, and she majored in medieval history at Stanford.
Jay Pittard, a high school friend, visited Mrs. Fiorina in the family’s “absolutely gorgeous” musical observatory where a baby grand piano overlooked San Francisco Bay. She was going as Carly now, she told him, because she had grown tired of explaining to the draft board that Carleton, a traditional Sneed family name, was a girl’s name.
Mrs. Fiorina graduated, and following in her father’s footsteps, enrolled in law school. But she dropped out after a semester and, apparently against her father’s advice, married a man named Todd Bartlem. “A little bit of rebellion,” Mr. Bartlem said of their 1977 marriage, and their immediate move overseas to Italy, where he was a graduate student in Bologna.
Mr. Bartlem, who split from Mrs. Fiorina in 1984, said they lived off his student loans because “her parents wouldn’t give us a penny.” Still, he described it as a sweet time in their lives, living in a tiny apartment on San Petronio Vecchio and going to class as his young bride passed the hours learning Italian and studying for business school entrance exams.
In her memoir, Mrs. Fiorina said she became interested in business when the Italian executives she tutored in English asked her how business worked in America.
But Mr. Bartlem said she brought her business school entrance exam study guides with her to Italy. “It was always her plan,” he said.
When the couple moved to the Washington area, Mr. Sneed sent his daughter the baby grand piano. Mr. Bartlem said she rarely played it and left it behind when she moved out.
New York Times
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