Hillary Clinton's Walter Mitty Moment
by DHinMI
Sat Mar 22, 2008 at 06:31:18 PM PDT
Did Hillary Clinton Risk the Life of an 8 Year Old For a Photo-Op?
No. Hillary Clinton did not risk the life of an 8 year old for a photo opportunity in Bosnia in 1996. She also didn't risk the life of her only daughter by making her stand under withering sniper fire on the tarmac in Tuzla so 12 years later she could burnish her foreign policy credentials by claiming her plane landed amid gunfire and that she had to scamper across the tarmac to safety.
What Hillary Clinton DID do, 12 years later, was fabricate a series of events that never occurred.
This is what Clinton said on Monday at George Washington University in Washington, DC:
I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia, and as Togo [West, former Secretary of the Army] said, there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, so send the First Lady. That’s where we went.
I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.
The problem is that there was no sniper fire. The ceremony took place on the tarmac. And nobody ran with their heads down to get in to vehicles in fear of being shot.
In fact, if there had been sniper fire, there are few things more callous than knowing you're a target but nonetheless pulling to your chest an 8 year old girl and allow your daughter to stand by your side:
Of course, Clinton wasn't using the 8 year old, Emina Bicakcic, as a human flak vest. She didn't have to, because "'[th]ere is peace now,' Emina told Clinton, according to [reporter John] Pomfret's report in the Washington Post the following day, 'because Mr. Clinton signed it. All this peace. I love it.'"
In nitpicker's diary, Kossack reglogge makes it clear that the landing preceding the ceremony in the video was Hillary's only landing by plane in Tuzla. [reglogge's claims are corroborated in Salon and the Washington Post.] Nobody was shot at.
In the WaPo, a former Clinton staffer gives her impression of the trip:
I was on the plane with then First Lady Hillary Clinton for the trip from Germany into Bosnia in 1996. We were put on a C17-- a plane capable of steep ascents and descents -- precisely because we were flying into what was considered a combat zone. We were issued flak jackets for the final leg because of possible sniper fire near Tuzla. As an additional precaution, the First Lady and Chelsea were moved to the armored cockpit for the descent into Tuzla. We were told that a welcoming ceremony on the tarmac might be canceled because of sniper fire in the hills surrounding the air strip. From Tuzla, Hillary flew to two outposts in Bosnia with gunships escorting her helicopter.
Well, I'm about to go out to meet friends for a beer, and it's not inconceivable that I could be mugged. However, saying at a later date that I could have been mugged so I took precautions, and saying I was mugged are not the same thing. Therefore, the Clinton staffer's recollections are nice context, but they do nothing to reconcile what Clinton said with what appears overwhelmingly to be the truth.
This is a very peculiar lie. This isn't a campaign-ender, but it's certainly a significant screw-up, and it provides an opportunity for the media (and maybe the Obama campaign) to ask why the hell she made it up. [Look for this to be joke fodder on all the late-night talk shows.] Why would Clinton say she was under fire when she wasn't? It's not like she could possibly have confused her imagined incident with another incident in which she was shot at. Hilary Clinton was never in combat, she was never under fire.
Sometimes candidates say profoundly stupid things. Gerald Ford may have lost the 1976 election in the second debate with Jimmy Carter when he made the bizarre claim that there was "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration...I don't believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union." But at least that ridiculous statement wasn't about Ford's personal experiences.
When during the Bitburg controversy Ronald Reagan was asked a question about Nazi massacres, he said "I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform four years myself." As Lou Cannon wrote in President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, "Reagan did indeed know about the bad things that happened, at least if they had been recorded on film." Reagan regularly blended real events, reel events, and imagined events, often with him playing a starring role.
In this case, what's recorded on film does indeed include Hilary Clinton, but nothing bad happened. What happened was the same thing that happened over and over again during Clinton's 8 years as First Lady: she showed up in another country, dignitaries met her on the tarmac, and no shots were fired. One wonders is Clinton almost wishes she had at least once come under sniper fire, as if having been shot at would have helped her secure the nomination that she probably is beginning to realize has slipped away.
In James Thurber's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, quotidian events inspire reveries of grand but imagined adventures. It's a wistful tale of a man whose fantasies of heroism belie his boring life. According to The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, "an ordinary person who dreams of leading a romantic life may be called a "Walter Mitty".
This incident with Clinton is a Walter Mitty moment, wherein she makes her experiences—in this case a relatively uneventful stop in peaceful post-war Bosnia—in to a moment of high drama and danger.
Barack Obama may not have an excess of foreign policy experience. But I'd prefer that our presidential nominee not have a lot of experience but also not claim brushes with danger that never happened. Walter Mitty is a compelling fictional character that captured some of the sense of thwarted dreams of adventure and achievement many of us succumb to in our indulgent reveries. But Walter Mitty would make a terrible president.
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