That was a long time ago.
Via Daily Caller:
Hillary Clinton once claimed that she tried to join the Marines in 1975, shortly before marrying her draft-dodging boyfriend, future president Bill Clinton. Or did Hillary Diane Rodham attempt to join the Army, as Clinton suggested in 2008? Or did she indeed try to sign up for the Marine Corps as part of an experiment to see how receptive the military was to female volunteers, as her friends have suggested?
Questions over whether presidential candidates have fudged their youthful interests in the military came to the forefront on Friday when Politico reported that Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson fabricated a story about being offered a scholarship to West Point. Carson’s campaign disputed the story, and Politico came under heavy scrutiny.
But Clinton has a military story of her own that once came under question but has since taken a back seat to numerous other Clintonworld scandals. In June 1994, the then-first lady spoke at a luncheon for female military veterans where she told a story about her attempt to sign up for the Marines in 1975.
“You’re too old, you can’t see and you’re a woman,” Clinton recalled a young military recruiter telling her. “Maybe the dogs would take you,” he added, referring to the Army.
“It was not a very encouraging conversation,” Clinton added. “I decided maybe I’ll look for another way to serve my country.”
Clinton, a feminist who was 27 years old at the time of the attempted sign-up, said that her rejection was “not an isolated incident” and that it was common for women to be rejected by military recruiters.
But many were skeptical of the claim at the time. And in more recent years — in April 2008, to be exact — Bill Clinton said that his wife had attempted to sign up for the Army, not the Marines.
“I remember when we were young, right out of law school, she went down and tried to join the Army and they said ‘Your eyes are so bad, nobody will take you,’” Clinton said at a campaign event, according to Jake Tapper, then a reporter with ABC News.
HT: Doug Ross