How Hillary Clinton Got Her Name
CHRISTOPHER Hitchens notes how Hillary Clinton got her name. Why are we interested? Because, if true, it says something about the way she operates:
Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy “experience”—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim “worked” well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton’s memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.
Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking.
And the Clinton part of her name is proving useful, too…
January 15th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
We fib about our ages, I am 35
January 16th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Senator Clinton has said this was a story (a tale) passed to her by her mother. So what if Mrs. Rodham made it up after the fact to have something cool to pass on to her daughter? Big deal. Families do this all the time. Y’know sometimes people tell things that they wish had been and they become part of family lore. Give her a break. What has Hillary Clinton done with her life from her years at the Children’s Defense Fund to her years as in Arkansas, Washington, and the Senate?