Hillary Clinton Tried to Join the Army (Or Was it the Marines?)
Bill Clinton says his wife, Hillary, tried to join the Army in the mid-1970s but was turned down.
ABC’s Jake Tapper:
“I remember when we were young, right out of law school, she went down and tried to join the Army and they said ‘Your eyes are so bad, nobody will take you,'” he said, after heralding her record on issues of concern to the military, such as body armor and access to health care.
I assume this is a version of the “Hillary Clinton tried to join the Marines” anecdote that then-First Lady Clinton told in 1994 that we wondered about since it’s a story she never seems to have told again.
The original story was that in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1975, Hillary walked into a local Marines recruiting office. The Marine recruiter looked at her, she recalled, and asked how old she was. Twenty-seven, she said. “He looked at me, and in those days that was before I learned how to wear contact lenses,” Sen. Clinton told a crowd of women veterans in 1994. “I had these really thick glasses on. He said, ‘How bad’s your eyesight?’ I said, ‘It’s pretty bad.’ …Finally said to me, he said, ‘You’re too old. You can’t see. And you’re a woman….But maybe the dogs would take you.'”
(“Dogs” being a reference to the Army.)
Perhaps she did so — and hence Bill Clinton’s Army story today?
Or maybe he’s conflating the two stories?
(Add that Bosnian sniper fire, and you might have something there that Julia Roberts would want to option.)
Does anyone really believe that, after graduating Yale at the top of her class, she wanted to join the military? Or that she was so dumb that she thought the way to do that was to go to a recruiting office (where they enlist privates)? Or that, in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam war and the earliest days of the all-volunteer force, they were turning people away by glancing at their glasses?
Maureen Dowd was a bit skeptical, as well, when the Marine story broke in 1994. In that iteration, Hillary made her approach in 1975, when she was a professor at Arkansas Law and the year after Bill made an unsuccessful bid for Congress.
But, even given the fact that the nation has become accustomed to Mrs. Clinton’s intriguing shape-shifting — from liberal do-gooder to high-risk commodities trader, from power lawyer to cookie baker, from health care czar to housewife supervising the menu for the state dinner for the Emperor and Empress of Japan — the latest one is still jarring.
First, it presented a macho contrast to a President who had just visited England, where news reports recalled the letter he wrote from there to a representative of the Reserve Officers Training Corps at the University of Arkansas, explaining why many members of his generation loved their country but still found themselves “loathing” the military.
And it did not seem to fit in with the First Lady’s own persona. After all, Hillary Rodham was an up-and-coming legal star involved with an up-and-coming political star. She had made a celebrated appearance in Life magazine as an anti-establishment commencement speaker at Wellesley College, where, as president of the student government, she had organized teach-ins on her opposition to the Vietnam War. She was a Yale law school graduate who had worked on the anti-war Presidential campaigns of Eugene J. McCarthy and George McGovern.
Mrs. Clinton told friends that she had moved to Arkansas for only one reason: to be with Bill Clinton. Years later, she would tell Vanity Fair that she had stayed because “I didn’t see anything out there that I thought was more exciting or challenging than what I had in front of me.” She and Mr. Clinton married on Oct. 11, 1975 in Fayetteville. So, if she was talking to a Marine recruiter in 1975 before the marriage, was she briefly considering joining the few, the proud and the brave of the corps as an alternative to life with Mr. Clinton, who was already being widely touted as a sure thing for Arkansas Attorney General?
The Clintons, Bill in particular, have a long history of telling stories about themselves — illustrating how they became so gosh-darned public service oriented and good — that couldn’t possibly be true. This seems to be another installment in that genre.
Photo credit: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton: Marine Corps Sunset Parade
Ah, the whiff of desperation…
I thought it was the French Foreign Legion but she didn’t speak french. Maybe that will be his or her story next week, stay tuned. maybe the Clintons have a condition that truly prevents them from being honest.
To be fair, the recruiting office near the university I attended was open for recruiting officer candidates.
That being said, I think she is Clintoning the truth here.
Well, I highly doubt the entire anecdote – Peace Corps, maybe. But military? Hell no. And the idea that any service would turn down a lawyer (one assumes that’s what she would go in to be) because of eyesight anywhere short of legally blind is highly dubious. Do the Marines even have lawyers? I know they use Navy personnel for doctors and chaplains…
That said, given the general lack of familiarity with military recruiting, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if even someone with her quaifications thought first of a recruiting office – did Yale even have an ROTC detatchment at that point?
It’s NOT her EYES that were/are bad, It’s her VISION!!
I always thought it was the same with lawyers, except on TV and the movies, but it turns out there are actually Marine JAGs:
Actually, the recruiters were trying to be nice. The Army or the Marines do not recruit any individual whose ass and mid-riff bulge presents a target larger than a medium sized tank.
Did she try the Navy, fat floats.
What basis do you have for saying that she was at the “top of her class” at Yale?
Harvard doesn’t give out class standings directly, but Obama was magna cum laude at Harvard Law.
I’ve never seen Hillary’s degree from Yale Law even described as cum laude, however, and I don’t know where in her graduating class her grades put her. She did proceed to flunk the D.C. bar exam, however.
Wow, it is difficult to fail the DC bar.
Yale is an awfully good law school — usually ranked 1st or 2nd in most polls — and it teaches a “national curriculum,” rather than one designed for any particular state’s unique laws, with an emphasis on broad theory over actual practice.
I’ve read, however, that the D.C. bar exam, at least at that time, consisted only of the “multistate.” I know she did pass the Arkansas bar; most graduates, and especially graduates from a “national” school like Yale, would certainly have taken a bar review course specific to the state whose specific laws they’d need to know for their exam. So maybe she slighted her study for the multistate and the D.C. bar in favor of the state-law specific portions of the Arkansas bar.
I don’t think it’s a big deal that she flunked the D.C. bar. I think she’s plenty smart.
On the other hand, I doubt merely a middle-ranking degree from Yale (if that’s what she had; it could have been lower, for all I’ve been able to tell), with no Yale Law Journal experience, judicial clerkship, or other special credentials, would have gotten her a tenure-track offer at another top law school like Chicago. Obama, by contrast, was offered a tenure-track position at Chicago, and almost certainly could have ended up as a top legal academic if he’d been inclined to go that way.
As far as either’s credentials to be president, this isn’t a big deal. But I don’t think she was at the top of her class, nor that she’s ever claimed that.
I read quite some time back, somewhere that I regarded as reputable, that she finished #1 and Bill finished #3 in their class. Could be wrong, though, and haven’t been able to verify with a quick Google search.
Someone was pulling your leg, or (more likely) had themselves been misled. Here’s the entirety of what’s on her campaign website about her performance at Yale:
Or, per Wikipedia (footnotes omitted):
I guarantee you that if she had so much as a “cum laude” to report, it would be in at least one of these two places. (Wikipedia duly reports that she “graduated with departmental honors in political science” from Wellesley College.) And the Yale Review of Law and Social Action was, at best, a fourth-tier journal that was in existence for only three years; it’s not remotely comparable in prestige to either the Yale Law Journal or the Harvard Law Review (the latter of which, Obama was famously the first black president of).
Maybe you, or whoever misled you, were thinking of the Stanford Law School Class of 1953, in which Rehnquist was reportedly #1 and O’Connor was #3? (Even that may be an urban legend, as Stanford says it too didn’t announce class-rank determinations.)
Shortly after posting, I thought about this & realized why: the Geneva Conventions.
Every Marine, regardless of primary specialty, is trained as a basic rifle infantryman as well. Since Doctors and Chaplains have specific restrictions about that sort of thing (and JAGs don’t), they get ‘loaned’ by the Navy.
Not even the Army wold take her! Even if this story is true, it’s still makes her look bad. If she’s trying to get the military vote, she lost it with the sniper story. Now every Marine just hates her.
Another reason she couldn’t make it in the Marine Corps. Marine Core Values: Marines NEVER Lie, Cheat, or Steal.
(cough)Ollie North(cough)