Did Hillary misspeak again?
Wed Mar 26, 2008 at 01:37:35 PM PDT
What's up with Hillary lately? Is she still missing sleep? Here's another misstatement. Not as bad as Bosnia but you think that she would have learned a lesson. If this is how she is going to govern if elected - we are in deep trouble
Hillary claimed that she misspoke about Bosnia but then said that she was the First First Lady to fly into a combat zone. Wrong again!
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton explained how she "misspoke" about a story she's told several times over the past four months, that of avoiding sniper fire on a 1996 trip to Bosnia. (I already mentioned how reporters were mocking the Sinbad story back in Iowa.)
But while discussing the issue at a Pennsylvania news conference, Clinton added another inaccuracy to the Bosnia story.
From today's Washington Post:
Questioned about this speech yesterday while campaigning in Pennsylvania, Clinton said that she remembered being told by the military and the Secret Service that "we were going into a war zone," adding: "I was the first first lady taken into a war zone since Eleanor Roosevelt.
Pat Nixon’s biographer, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, wrote as follows in Pat Nixon: The Untold Story (1986):
The [July 1969 South Vietnam] visit marked the first time that a First Lady had been in a combat zone, although another First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, had also visited troops on her numerous travels to England and throughout the South Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand during World War II. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger later described how the President and his party were "whisked from the airport to the Presidential Palace in a helicopter that seemed to go straight up out of range of possible sniper fire and then plummeted between the trees of [President] Thieu’s offices. I never learned how often the pilots had rehearsed this maneuver or," he added ruefully, "how its risk compared with that of sniper fire." While my father met with President Thieu, Madame Thieu hosted a formal tea for Mother in the Presidential Palace. The palace was an armed fortress, with sandbags in every entrance to douse fires from shelling and bombing attacks. Mrs. Thieu told Mother she had sent her children to the country, out of danger of the war zone, and how much she missed them.
Politico
Tags: Hillary Clinton, misspoke, combat zone, first lady (all tags) :: Previous Tag Versions