Armageddon (5 page)

We know that her mother believed that she could do anything and would be a great success. But her father was apparently a social misfit and an emotionally withholding critic who could not ever acknowledge his daughter's academic successes, attributing stellar grades to attending a school with low academic standards. So Hillary clearly got a mixed message at home.

Author Gail Sheehy once told us of visiting the Rodham home and meeting Hillary's parents. She described Hugh Rodham as “crude” and “controlling.” In one telling—and sad—story, Hillary's mother's told Sheehy that it was embarrassing to attend her high school graduation ceremony and sit with the other parents when Hillary won most of the awards. Embarrassing? How weird is that? Just about every other parent would be thrilled. But not the Rodhams. That's the mixed message of Hillary's upbringing.

So it's certainly possible that her early parental put-downs and her father's constant lack of approval took a toll. The way we present ourselves in everyday life is not always indicative of the insecurities lurking in our inner psyche. Hillary is not charismatic but her circumstances are. They create a temporary aura of glamour. Her arrivals at an event are always dramatic, not because of any personal magnetism, but because of the unusual optics with which she surrounds herself.

First, a Secret Service motorcade of large black bulletproof cars drives into the venue. The bustle begins immediately. Agents with earphones jump out of the cars and surround her as she makes her way inside. A coterie of fawning aides carry her bag, books, and notes, and make sure that the stage is exactly as she demanded down to the size of the chair and pillow and the temperature of her drinking water (room temperature, not too cold), and don't forget the Diet Dr. Pepper!

Photographers and TV cameras line the entranceway and corridors, flashing multiple lights as a sea of microphones is lifted toward her. Crowds of onlookers try to snap photos from their phones. It's usually a friendly crowd, generally handpicked, that gives her a roaring welcome. Only Donald Trump puts on a better show.

But once she takes the podium, the theatrics are gone and the bland midwestern twang takes over and dampens the earlier excitement. Unlike Bill Clinton, Hillary can't energize and dazzle an audience. She doesn't have the preternatural talent that Bill demonstrates when he works a room. Scanning a space, he effortlessly makes eye contact, smiling, shaking hands, and enjoying the moment. As he looks around, he instinctively identifies those people who don't like him. He can feel it. And for the next hour, he will turn on the charm until they do. He's involved, engaged, and the audience is in rapt attention. He's a pro. He instinctively understands their collective mood. He is there to persuade, convince, listen, and make friends. While Hillary reads from the teleprompter and bobs her head up and down, he's unplugged. She leaves at the exact appointed time, using the Secret Service as a barrier to separate herself from the hoi-polloi. Bill wings it and connects with everyone in the place, lingering to shake the last hand.

In public, Bill is the opposite of Hillary. She is stiff, remote, and focused on her prepared script. She's on a schedule, and each event is something to get through. Since she can't succeed in wooing a crowd like Bill does, she tries another ploy. She lies to try to imitate the empathy that naturally flows from Bill. She carefully manufactures a story about herself that will likely resonate with her audience and create at least a temporary connection with them. She appropriates something about their collective experience that suggests that she is just like them.

Let's catalog her lies.

While she was First Lady, Hillary spoke at a 1997 race-relations forum for teenagers in Massachusetts. In an attempt to empathize and identify with the young victims of racial prejudice, she made up a heartbreaking tale. She desperately wanted to connect with the young people, but it was hard to use personal examples from her own upbringing. Growing up in an upper-class Chicago suburb,
attending elite schools, being married to a president, Hillary couldn't easily make the case that she was a victim of the same racism that they had experienced. So she simply made up a story.

According to Hillary, she recalled the “pain” of a “childhood encounter” that helped her understand the injury suffered by racial prejudice. During a junior high school soccer game, on a cold day, she claimed that a an “ethnic” goalie told her, “I wish people like you would freeze.” Stunned, Hillary asked the goalie how she could feel that way when she didn't even know her. “I don't have to know you to know that I hate you,” the goalie purportedly replied.
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Wow! How harsh! That must have been horrible for poor young Hillary. People hating her? What could that possibly mean?

As we've written earlier, it's a touching story, but it's highly unlikely that it ever happened. It's just another example of Hillary making up a story from whole cloth to try and show that she's just like her audience. Hillary was in middle school in 1959–1961. There were virtually no girls' middle school soccer teams in existence in the entire United States at the time. It was not until well after the passage of Title IX in 1972 that schools were required to provide girls equal athletic opportunities. Even then, it took a long time before there was a proliferation of soccer teams available to girls. The athletic director of the Maine South High School in Park Ridge, Illinois—a 34-year veteran of the school—confirmed to us in 2003 that there were no girls' soccer teams there in the 1960s. In fact, even in 1972, there were only 28 schools in the United States with girls' soccer teams. But Hillary undoubtedly attended Chelsea's school soccer games in the 1990s and learned the lingo and knew of the popularity of girls' soccer teams. So she imagined a story and delivered it with a straight face. This haunting and unforgettable incident didn't make it into Hillary's memoirs—for good reason—it never happened. Nothing to remember.

She was at it again in this year's campaign, twisting the truth to make herself seem just like her audience so that they would identify with her and like her. This time it was immigrant families that she wanted to pander to. She tried to illustrate that her family was the epitome of the American melting pot, with all of her grandparents coming to the United State as immigrants to seek a better life.

At a campaign stop before a business roundtable in Iowa, Hillary spun a story about her four immigrant grandparents, suggesting there would be lots of immigrant stories like hers in the room. But it turns out that three of those four “immigrant” grandparents she cited were actually born in America. Her immigrant grandparent story just wasn't true. Hillary's maternal grandparents were born in Illinois, where she grew up, and her paternal grandmother was born in Pennsylvania.

She was caught by the sleuths at
Breitbart
, who checked census records. When confronted, she claimed that she got mixed up and thought that her three grandparents were actually immigrants because they talked about the “immigrant experience.” Well, her maternal grandfather (who wasn't an immigrant) died in the year she was born, so he wasn't telling her any stories about his immigrant experience. And she knew her maternal grandmother very well and had to know she wasn't an immigrant. Same with her paternal grandmother.
Hint
: They were born in America and had no accent.

Hey, Hillary, haven't you ever heard of
ancestry.com
? You can build your family tree there. You would easily see that. You won't have to look through the Ellis Island documents, though, because they don't exist for your family. Why make up such an unnecessary story? Hillary does that to make the discussion more personal and to connect her to today's immigrants, an important constituency of the Democratic Party. How great to be an immigrant success story!

Here's the narrative: Four grandparents came here from Europe. One worked in the lace mills and now, guess what? One of their
grandchildren is running for president of the United States. It's a nice story, but it's not true. But she wanted to be just one of the folks, so she told a new story.

Then there was her absurd claim that she had unsuccessfully tried to join the Marines—both the reserves and active duty—in Arkansas in 1975, shortly before she married Bill Clinton. That story made its first appearance in 1994 when she gave a speech to a group of women in the military in Washington. She repeated the tale in early 2016.

Clearly, Hillary had no military experience in common with the women. In fact, if anything, her background was downright hostile to the military. Ron Kessler, author of
First Family Detail,
wrote of the animosity Hillary engendered in the Secret Service. “Hillary didn't like the military aides wearing their uniforms around the White House,” one former agent remembers. “She asked if they would wear business suits instead. The uniform's a sign of pride, and they're proud to wear their uniform. I know that the military was actually really offended by it.”
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But never mind her personal preferences; she needed a hook to appeal to the military women. So she made up a story designed to show her empathy for them as well as to subtly suggest that they shared joint values of patriotism and service to our country. She reported that she was turned down by the Marines because of her eyesight and her age. According to Hillary, that rejection led her to “look for another way to serve my country.”
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Yet, she never filled out an application and never took any physical. She doesn't recall to whom she spoke.

Her implication that the Marine Corps was not interested in women or discriminated against them at the time was simply not true. According to the Women Marines Association, women first joined the Marines in 1918. There were 2,700 women in the Corps during the Vietnam War and over 1,000 women were deployed during Operation Desert Storm. In 1967, the first woman was assigned to a combat zone—in Vietnam. And of course the Judge Advocate General's Corps
(JAG) was actively recruiting women at the time Hillary dreamt that she went to the Marines. They were looking for women. It was Hillary who wasn't looking for them.

Maureen Dowd of the
New York Times
didn't buy the story of Hillary's military sisterhood when she initially unveiled it. Dubbing her “Private Hillary,” Dowd pointed out why the story didn't add up. She was right. Think about Hillary's background. What is the likelihood that she would choose to join the military? Zero. She was part of the student antiwar movement at Yale, a passion she shared with Bill. When George McGovern ran on an antiwar platform, she moved to Austin, Texas to work on his campaign. Was she really going to join the military three years later and leave her soon-to-be new husband behind? The
Washington Post
fact checker reviewed her story, and two more “Pinochios” were added to her growing collection.

Hillary even tried to concoct a romantic association for her name, claiming to have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to climb Mt. Everest. She apparently told the lie to Bill, who faithfully recounted it in his own autobiography. But when her own book came out, it was missing, raising suspicions about its veracity. These suspicions stemmed from the obvious fact that Sir Edmund was an unknown beekeeper in 1947 when Hillary Rodham was born. He rocketed to world fame when he climbed Everest in 1953. Hillary claimed that her mother told her that she had named her after Sir Edmund, making the point that both the mountain climber and her daughter spelled the name with two Ls. When the lie was exposed, Hillary had her campaign simply issue a press release in 2008 noting that she was not named after Sir Edmund. We expect that she'll have a lot of new press releases coming up.

As she ran for president in 2008, Hillary was desperate to establish her foreign policy bona fides. Her First Lady ceremonial ribbon
cutting wouldn't cut it. So Hillary claimed that she was “instrumental”
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to the Irish peace process, a claim that brought immediate criticism from some of the diplomats who were actually involved in the process. According to Hillary's own memoirs, it seems that Hillary's involvement in Ireland was simply to attend a meeting of women from Ireland and Northern Ireland where they presented her with a teapot. She also lit a Christmas tree at Belfast City Hall and read letters from Catholic and Protestant children hoping for peace. And she spoke to a group of women from the North and South in Dublin. That's it. That's her idea of a foreign policy achievement and ending a war that lasted more than 75 years. Lord Trimble, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless work to end the troubles in Ireland, publicly disagreed with Mrs. Clinton's own characterization of her leadership in the peace process, calling it “a wee bit silly” for Mrs. Clinton to claim an important role. He said, “I don't want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player.”
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If anyone would have firsthand knowledge of the then First Lady's role, it would be the chief negotiator for the United States, former Senator George Mitchell. But in his book
Making Peace,
the senator's only mention of Hillary is that she and the president “were warmly received in London, cheered in Belfast, and embraced in Dublin. Huge crowds met them with rousing enthusiasm. The president rose to the occasion.”
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Nothing further about Hillary. Bertie Ahearn, the Irish prime minister at the time, described her role to
The New York Times
, “She was the first lady of the United States, not a party leader in Northern Ireland . . . No one would expect her to get into the nitty-gritty of the process.”
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Even Bill Clinton must have forgotten Hillary's seminal role, because he didn't include it in his memoir. Of all of the principals involved in the peace process, only one mentions the name Hillary Clinton. That was Jonathan Powell, then chief of staff to UK prime minister Tony Blair, made only a passing reference to Hillary in his depiction of the peace talks in his book
Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland
. It
seems that Powell mistook a Secret Service officer assigned to Hillary for a friend and boldly asked for a kiss. That's the only way that Hillary was mentioned by anyone writing about the peace process first hand.