Hillary Clinton Says She Once Tried to Be Marine
By MAUREEN DOWD,
Published: June 15, 1994
- WASHINGTON, June 14— The First Lady has offered a kaleidoscope of images to the public, but today she added the most curious one yet: Private Hillary.
Speaking at a lunch on Capitol Hill honoring military women, Hillary Rodham Clinton said that she once visited a recruiting office in Arkansas to inquire about joining the Marines.
She told the group gathered for lunch in the Dirksen Office Building, according to The Associated Press, that she became interested in the military in 1975, the year she married Bill Clinton and the year she was teaching at the University of Arkansas law school in Fayetteville.
She was 27 then, she said, and the Marine recruiter was about 21. She was interested in joining either the active forces or the reserves, she recalled, but was swiftly rebuffed by the recruiter, who took a dim view of her age and her thick glasses. 'Not Very Encouraging'
"You're too old, you can't see and you're a woman," Mrs. Clinton said she was told, adding that the recruiter dismissed her by suggesting she try the Army. "Maybe the dogs would take you," she recalled the recruiter saying.
"It was not a very encouraging conversation," she said. "I decided maybe I'll look for another way to serve my country."
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.
The First Lady's cascading, contradictory images have been the subject of much commentary. This month's Mirabella magazine runs a dizzying array of different looking Hillary Rodham Clintons, to match her blur of different roles, with a story that frets: "We sense that we aren't seeing the 'real' Hillary, and this makes us very nervous."
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. Macho Contrast to Clinton
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?
Neal Lattimore, Mrs. Clinton's spokesman, said her visit to the recruiter had to be seen in the context of her dedication to public service.
"I'm never surprised when Mrs. Clinton is doing something service oriented," he said. "She was just taking in all her options, saying 'This is where I am in my life, this is what fits into my life right now.' "
But she had moved to Arkansas to be with Mr. Clinton, so why was she thinking about joining the Marines?
"Maybe she was thinking about the J.A.G. Corps," he said, referring to the legal branch of the service. "She was exploring all her options, the National Guard, everything."
I'm beginning to believe that people really were trying to shoot her on the tarmac in Bosnia.
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