Geeez.....Hillary Clinton lies about her own name

[Brent]

Claim:   Hillary Clinton was named after world-famous mountain climber Sir Edmund Hillary.


Examples:   [Collected on the Internet, 2002]
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Taking a weekend break from official duties on her Asian tour, the first lady escaped already-remote Katmandu and traveled two hours by prop plane, land rover and rowboat to the Tiger Tops Jungle Lodge.

Later, she got to meet Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to reach Mount Everest's summit in 1953.

Sir Edmund Hillary, a frequent visitor and benefactor of Nepal since his historic trek, had a brief Hillary-to-Hillary handshake at the Katmandu airport before Clinton departed Sunday for Bangladesh.

The first lady said her mother had read about the famous climber and knew his name had two L's.

"So when I was born, she called me Hillary and she always told me, 'It's because of Sir Edmund Hillary,'" Hillary Clinton reported.
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For her part, Mrs. Clinton confessed that her mother, Dorothy Rodham, had read an article about the intrepid Edmund Hillary, a one-time beekeeper who had taken to mountain climbing, when she was pregnant with her daughter in 1947 and liked the name.

"It had two l's, which is how she thought she was supposed to spell Hillary," Mrs. Clinton told reporters after the brief meeting on the tarmac, minutes before her Air Force jet flew past the peak of Everest itself. "So when I was born, she called me Hillary, and she always told me it's because of Sir Edmund Hillary."2  
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Origins:   During a stop in Nepal while on a south Asian goodwill tour in April  1995, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton engaged in a brief (and reportedly coincidental) meeting with Sir Edmund Hillary (who, along with Tenzing Norgay, became the first person to reach the summit of the world's highest mountain, Mt. Everest, in 1953) and told reporters she had been  named after the famed mountain climber.

Plenty of critics scoffed at Ms. Clinton's claim, noting that Edmund Hillary was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper back in 1947 and did not become internationally famous until his ascent of Mt. Everest in 1953, six years after Hillary Clinton was supposedly named for him. But there are some subtleties to the story which need to be explored before it is so quickly dismissed:

One point is that Hillary Clinton said her mother, Dorothy Rodham, "had read an article about the intrepid Edmund Hillary, a one-time beekeeper who had taken to mountain climbing, when she was pregnant in 1947 and liked the name." This is plausible in the sense that Edmund Hillary didn't go from unknown Auckland beekeeper one day to world-famous conqueror of Mt. Everest the next — even before World War II he was already a serious mountain climber who had boasted to a friend that "some day I'm going to climb Everest," and by 1947 he was honing the necessary skills on the peaks of the Southern Alps.

It's certainly possible young Edmund was profiled in some publication back in 1947, but how likely was Dorothy Rodham, a Chicago housewife, to have seen an article about a New Zealand mountain climber? We can't say for sure (other than noting that a search of the Chicago Tribune turned up no articles on Edmund Hillary in 1947); the best we could do was to perform a comparative experiment by querying the New York Times historical database to find the earliest mention 'Edmund Hillary' in that publication.

The results revealed that Edmund Hillary's name did not appear at all in the pages of the New York Times until 1953, so it's probably fair to say that the American media paid him little note prior to his successful assault on Mt. Everest that year.

But whether or not Dorothy Rodham might have come across mention of Edmund Hillary in 1947, the story doesn't quite jibe with the circumstances. Depending upon how one interprets Hillary Clinton's claim, either seeing Edmund Hillary's name in print inspired her mother to name her 'Hillary' (even though she came across it being used a surname rather than a first name), or it inspired her to use the less-common spelling of 'Hillary' rather than 'Hilary' when naming her daughter.

However, 'Hilary' (spelled with one 'l') was a common woman's name which Dorothy Rodham would undoubtedly already have seen and heard hundreds of times before reading about Edmund Hillary, and the two-l spelling, while less common, was one she was far more likely to have encountered reading about persons (both male and female) much more prominent than Edmund Hillary in 1947, such as film actress Hillary Brooke and Cornell football and basketball star Hillary Chollet.


Another point is that Hillary Clinton didn't quite claim the story of how she came by her name was literally true; she said her mother told her it was true — a minor but important distinction, especially given how often parents make up harmless little fibs to amuse their children. But if Hillary Clinton thought the story, true or not, entertaining enough to repeat to the press when she met Sir Edmund Hillary in 1995, she's been curiously circumspect about telling it at any other time.

It doesn't appear in any news stories about the First Lady written prior to her 1995 south Asian tour, and every appearance of it in news articles since then refers to that single 1995 account. Moreover, none of the many Hillary Clinton biographies we checked so much as mentioned the story, not even Living History, her recently-published autobiography.

A staggering amount of information has been published about Hillary Rodham Clinton in her lifetime (going all the way back to her days as a Wellesley College graduate in 1969, when she was featured in Life magazine); isn't it odd that a basic fact like how she got her name has been disclosed only once in all that time?

Given all the available facts, it's difficult to view the claim that Hillary Clinton was named after Edmund Hillary as anything but a little white lie concocted for a special occasion. Only her mother, Dorothy Rodham, knows for sure, but so far she hasn't spoken up.

[kiddosmom]

Well I do not see why Hitlary would lie about something like that.
Its only when she opens her mouth that lies come out.

[StPaulieGirl]

This one's been going around for a while.  Amazing how some people can get caught lying, and not even blush.

If I ever stumble across the article, I'll post it here; but we can thank that giggling beast, Dorothy Rodham, for shaping the creature we know as Hillary.  Don't think that PAS only exists when the parents live apart from one another.  She carefully nurtured her daughter to become a cold, calculating little monster.  Hill's nickname, either in high school or college, was Sister Frigidaire.  Apparently, Dorothy Rodham had some issues...

Hillary lies like most people breathe.

Just my opinion, not SPARC's...