Hillary "The Marine" Insults Military with Sexist Fabrication?

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Wednesday March 26, 2008 · 11:37 AM PDT

2008/03/26 · 11:37

Did you know Hillary sought enlistment in the Marine Corps in 1975?

In June 1994, Clinton told an organization trying to build a memorial for women who had served in the armed forces, that while living in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1975, “I decided that I was very interested in having some experience in serving in some capacity in the military. So I walked into our local recruiting office...”

This is while she was a young lawyer about to Marry Bill Clinton, a man widely seen as the next Attorney General of Arkansas. The story is difficult to verify certainly, but there is a larger problem with the story, in telling the tale, she insulted the Military and accused the recruiter of being heinously sexist..

“He looked at me, and in those days that was before I learned how to wear contact lenses," Clinton said. "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.'”

As Jake Tapper points out, there is a huge problem with this story... Marines, as history tells it, were quite welcoming to Women at the time.

That seems an odd pronouncement for the recruiter to have made, considering that at the time, according to A History of the Women Marines, female Marines who became pregnant were permitted to remain on active service, as this photograph attests. And I believe the military had a few recruiting problems back in the 1970s -- hence their abject rejection of a brainy lawyer wouldn't make much sense. (Then again, ask a soldier how often Pentagon rules "make sense.")

In 1994, Maureen Dowd wrote a column about this Tale and expanded on Hillary's take in 1994.

Mrs. Clinton offered the story to illustrate how far women had come. She said that "it was not an isolated situation" for women to be turned away by military recruiters. And she lauded efforts to bring women into more aspects of military service.

Two Questions:

Is this story even true? It's possible, as suggested at the end of the article, that she had interest in the J.A.G.'s, but even still, it's not a story she's since retold.

How does she explain her claim of Sexism by the Recruiter at a time that the Marines were infact hospitable to women members, going so far as to retain the services of Pregnant Members?

I think Hillary has a Credibility Problem and this is another story that should be Revisited.

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