CLINTON: I get it that some people just don't know what to make of me.

(UNKNOWN): Mr. Trump, you're not a nice person.

TRUMP: I think I am a nice person. People that know me like me.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

MARTIN: Over the course of this hour you'll hear from some of the people who have worked closely with them. Here's British TV journalist Piers Morgan.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

MORGAN: I've interviewed him 30 times. I spent maybe 200 hours doing Celebrity Apprentice in his company, and you underestimate this guy at your peril.

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MARTIN: And we'll hear from some who know them best. This is Chelsea Clinton.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

CHELSEA CLINTON: Growing up and really kind of watching my mom in the arena, I've — I don't remember a time when she wasn't attacked.

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MARTIN: We will take you back to their childhoods to explore their most formative experiences. And we'll try to understand some of the character traits that push voters away. For Clinton, it's the way she seems to protect her privacy at all costs.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON: The server contains personal communications from my husband and me. And I believe I have met all of my responsibilities, and the server will remain private.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

MARTIN: For Trump, it's how he seems to crave public attention and says anything to get it.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

TRUMP: They say I have the most loyal people. Did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's like incredible.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

MARTIN: But before we get to the now, we're going to spend some time in the wayback, because as young people Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stood out from their peers. We'll start with Donald Trump, who even as a young kid was the center of attention. He was known for goofing off, and sometimes he broke the rules. Gwenda Blair wrote a book about the Trump family.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

BLAIR: He and his best friend liked to sneak over to Manhattan on the subway. And once when they went there they got some jackknives which — or actually switchblades, not just jackknives — which evidently they thought were pretty cool since they had just seen West Side Story.

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MARTIN: His parents didn't think it was so cool and they sent him to military school. NPR's Ailsa Chang talked to some people who knew Donald Trump back then.

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CHANG: What Donald Trump was famous for before military school was breaking the rules. This kind of stuff was embarrassing for Trump's well-to-do parents in Jamaica Estates, Queens. So before eighth grade, his father sent him literally up the river to New York Military Academy in the Hudson Valley. Col. Ted Dobias remembers the tall, lanky kid who showed up at this dormitory.

DOBIAS: He didn't know how to make a bed. He didn't know how to shine his shoes. He had a — he had a problem, you know, with being a cadet. You know, being a cadet you got to take care of yourself.

CHANG: But instead of recoiling from the discipline, Trump thrived under it. Mike Kabealo, a classmate, says in the confines of these rigid rules Trump wanted to be a standout.

KABEALO: Cocksure, positive and anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better kind of stuff, you know. He was very competitive.

CHANG: And friends say Trump channeled that competitiveness into everything at military school. When he was in charge of the rifle rack, he cleaned the rifles obsessively. He was meticulous about his uniform. When it was his turn to do inspections in the barracks, he whipped other cadets into shape. Ted Levine was Trump's roommate.

LEVINE: My bed wasn't really made right and he ripped it.

CHANG: Trump tore Levine's sheets right off. His bed hadn't passed muster.

LEVINE: Then I lost it. I totally lost it. So I think I hit him with a broomstick and he came back at me and, no, with his hands. He was bigger than me and it took three people to get him off me.

CHANG: Levine was 4 foot 11, Trump 6 foot 2. In the pecking order of young boys that size gave him authority. Trump became captain of the baseball team and Col. Dobias was his coach.

DOBIAS: He was very coachable, yes. If I told him, "Do this," he'll do it. He accepted criticism. He wanted to be best, not better.

CHANG: And then there were the girls, so many girls visiting on Sundays. Classmate George White still cannot forget them.

WHITE: There were so many, it was a revolving door.

CHANG: Trump was voted "Ladies' Man" in his senior yearbook. His friends say he cared about his hair even then, growing it to the maximum length regulations would allow so it would look fuller. And Trump had this way of laughing when others spoke. It used to get on White's nerves.

WHITE: It made you feel like he was separating himself from you. It made you feel like there was an air of superiority, just enough of a signal that he was laughing at you.

CHANG: As his roommate Levine says, maybe it was that quality that made it difficult to get close to Trump.

LEVINE: I don't think he had a handful of loyalists, you know, because he was so competitive that everybody who could come close to him he had to destroy.

CHANG: But now, 50 years later Levine says he and the other guys still kind of admire Trump. Today Levine's office is littered with Donald Trump knickknacks like this talking doll. Sometimes, Levine says, that Donald gives him guidance about how to run his packaging business.

[to Levine] Wait, wait, wait, so you really squeeze this doll for advice?

LEVINE: Once in a while, yes. It's reinforcement, positive reinforcement of true values that are very important for businessmen.

TRUMP: Never give up. Under any circumstances, never give up.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

MARTIN: So that's what Donald Trump was like as a young competitor.

A young Hillary Rodham had the same kind of drive, but instead of sports, she was into politics. She was on the student council at her high school in Park Ridge, Ill. And she decided to run for class president even though it was a risky move. Her high school friend Judy Price describes it this way.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

PRICE: The president was always a boy and the secretary was always a girl.

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MARTIN: But Hillary Rodham thought she could win. Her friend Betsy Ebeling explains.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

EBELING: I was her campaign manager so I advised her that probably. That one didn't turn out so well.

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MARTIN: She lost. She was still a student leader, though, putting together the homecoming dance, prom and pep rallies. Hillary Rodham headed to college as a Republican and in her freshman year at Wellesley she was elected president of the Young Republicans Club. She was a Democrat by the time she graduated.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

CLINTON: The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago.

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MARTIN: That is the voice of a young Hillary Rodham. It was 1969 and she was giving her college commencement address.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

CLINTON: We arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap and it didn't turn us, you know, into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

MARTIN: This speech put Hillary Rodham on the national stage for the first time and it came during a tumultuous chapter in American history. Here's NPR's Tamara Keith.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

KEITH: The class of '69 had been through a lot together. By the time they were set to graduate, the Vietnam War and protest against it were in full swing. College campuses had become centers of activism and conflict. And both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated.

Hillary Clinton wrote in her book Living History about fretting over the speech. Alan Schechter was her professor and college government adviser.

SCHECHTER: Hillary had read the speech to me beforehand and I thought it was a perfect example of youthful idealism at the time.

KEITH: But the speech Rodham read to Schechter is only part of what she delivered at the commencement ceremony. And it's the part that wasn't planned that drew all the attention. The special guest speaker that day was Sen. Edward Brooke, a moderate Republican from Massachusetts and the first African-American popularly elected to the U.S. Senate. His speech celebrated incremental progress and spent a lot of time arguing against protest. He said, quote, "Coercive protest is wrong, and one reason it is wrong is because it is unnecessary."

When she stepped to the lectern, Rodham didn't go directly to her prepared remarks.

CLINTON: I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable element of criticizing and constructive protest.

KEITH: She was reacting to Sen. Brooke's speech.

CLINTON: This is just — it has to be very quick because, you know, I do have a little speech to give. But part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy. We've had lots of sympathy. But we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.

KEITH: And when it was over, she got a standing ovation, from her classmates at least. Schechter says not everyone was so pleased with Rodham's performance.

SCHECHTER: The administration was not happy afterwards or at least some people were not happy, because they felt it was inappropriate for a student to criticize the commencement speaker.

KEITH: It made papers across the country. The Chicago Tribune wrote, quote, "Miss Rodham's discourtesy to Senator Brooke was unjustified." And this all led to Rodham's inclusion in a spread in Life magazine about the class of '69.

Time, which owns the Life magazine archives, dug up some notes from the photographer and reporter who worked on the story. Rodham said press accounts of the speech weren't accurate and she was, quote, "quite concerned that it be made clear she was not attacking Sen. Brooke personally." It would seem Hillary Clinton's first moment in the limelight was also the beginning of her difficult relationship with the press.

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MARTIN: After this break, we'll explore how Hillary Clinton has struggled with the public nature of her political life. And later Donald Trump's affinity for the spotlight and his unwavering faith in his own instincts.

Hi. I'm Rachel Martin and we're back with a special broadcast from NPR News on character in this year's presidential campaign.

We just heard about what set Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump apart from their peers when they were young. Coming up, we'll look more closely at Donald Trump and his desire for public attention. For now, we're going to focus on Hillary Clinton and signature moments that came to define her in the eyes of the nation. And you can't start to understand who Hillary Clinton is as a public figure without examining her role as Bill Clinton's wife.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

CLINTON: The famous encounter occurred in the law school library.

CLINTON: The law library, at this long table studying and ...

CLINTON: I don't know. You know those moments, you know, sort of like click.

CLINTON: And I was studying, doing something...

(END AUDIO CLIP)

MARTIN: The Clintons have told this story time and again over the course of their political life.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

CLINTON: She just put down the books she was reading and walked the entire length of the long library walked up to me and she said ...

CLINTON: If you're going to keep looking at me and I'm going to keep looking back, we at least ought to know each other, and I'm Hillary Rodham.

CLINTON: And what's your name? I couldn't remember my name.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

MARTIN: And it's an appropriate starting off point in examining Hillary Clinton's past because after she met and fell in love with Bill Clinton her career, her aspirations and public persona were inextricably linked to his. David Maraniss of the Washington Post has been reporting and writing about the Clintons for decades.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

MARANISS: From the time they met I would say that they saw that they could get places together that they couldn't get to apart, that their talents matched in an interesting way. And she was the harder worker, the more of the pragmatist, and he had this raw preternatural political talent that she lacked. But they shared an interest in books and policy and ideas and in a notion that together they could change the world.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

MARTIN: They started in Arkansas and in 1979, Bill Clinton became one of the youngest people ever to be elected the governor of a state. And as his wife, Hillary Rodham was under a whole new level of scrutiny.

Here she was, this product of Northeastern liberal universities, a woman who didn't use her husband's name trying to fit in as the first lady of a conservative Southern state. This was part of an interview she did in 1979 on Arkansas public television.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

(UNKNOWN): Does it bother you that because you don't use your husband's name that people think you're too liberal and, after all, this is not a state known for liberalism?

(END AUDIO CLIP)

MARTIN: A 30-something-year-old Hillary Rodham essentially says:

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

CLINTON: Too bad. Some people may think I'm, you know, too this or too that. But I think that's another one of the dangers about being in public life. One cannot live one's life based on what somebody else's image of you might be. All one can do is live the life that God gave you and, you know, you just do the best that you can. And if somebody likes you or doesn't like you, that's really, in many ways, something you have no control over.