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  • 2007-03-04 (xsd:date)
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  • The HildaBeast (en)
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  • Attempting to assign any kind of status to this 2007 collection of purported quotes by Hillary Rodham Clinton poses something of a problem. All of them have appeared in print as things the former first lady and current U.S. senator from New York supposedly said (although some of them are missourced in the example reproduced above), but they are stripped of explanatory context (and/or accompanied by misleading explanations), and they range from scripted public statements to spontaneous private utterances, from reports by mainstream journalists to revelations by unnamed or anonymous sources to mere hearsay repetition of rumor. We have attempted to trace each entry back to its first print source, provide a reasonably full context for the given quote, and note where the print source came by its information: While this quote is included in more than one book about the Clintons, its original source was a January 1994 American Spectator article by David Brock, who interviewed four state troopers who had worked for the Clintons while Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas. The quote was taken from information provided by Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson: But in 1998, David Brock himself expressed skepticism about the validity of some of the claims he made in his American Spectator Troopergate article and doubts about the truthfulness of the sources he depended on for it: Attorney Joseph Califano worked in the Pentagon under Robert McNamara (who was Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations), served as an aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, and held the cabinet position of Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Carter administration, and he remained involved in national politics while in private practice. In 1970, when Senator Walter Mondale (then chairman of the Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, under the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare) was conducting an investigation into migrant labor problems, Califano was retained by Coca-Cola chairman and CEO Paul Austin to represent that company. (Coca-Cola was involved in the issue Mondale was investigating due to its 1960 acquisition of Minute Maid, whose Florida groves employed migrant farm workers.) According to Califano's 2004 memoir (Inside: A Public and Private Life), Hillary Rodham, then a first-year law student at Yale, was present at the Senate hearings and chastised him for daring to represent corporate interests: An endnote indicates Califano confirmed the date and time of Hillary Rodham's 1973 interview at his firm through a notation in his daily calendar, but how he recognized her from having encountered her fleetingly on a single occasion years earlier is not explained. (No other reference to her appears in the book, and Califano said the Senate incident wasn't mentioned by either party during the interview.) Possibly he crossed paths with Hillary Rodham at other times, or had other opportunities for learning about who she was, that were not mentioned in his memoirs. On 16 April 2004, Dateline NBC aired an interview with New York's junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, conducted by Katy Couric. The following question-and-answer exchange regarding the 9/11 Commission (which was then investigating the September 11 terrorist attacks upon the United States) was part of that interview: Chapter 4 of the 9/11 Commission Report (Responses to Al Qaeda's Initial Assaults), issued a few months later, noted: The first U.S. presidential reception celebrating Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim fast-breaking festival that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan, was held at the Old Executive Office Building on 20 February 1996. On that occasion, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton addressed about 180 Muslims in attendance, including members of the American Muslim Council. The web site truthinmedia.org reported the following about her remarks at that reception: As the Washington Post noted of that same event: This quote is taken from Christopher Andersen's 2004 book, American Evita: The endnotes for the corresponding chapter reference a number of conversations and print articles but don't indicate which might have been the source for this putative quote. This quote appears in Joyce Milton's 1999 book, The First Partner, but no source is provided for it — the statement is simply reported (without detail) as a comment the First Lady purportedly made to an unnamed agent: This statement is taken from the 2003 book Hillary's Scheme, where it is quoted from a February 2000 article published in the supermarket tabloid Star and attributed to an unidentified informed source: This quote is taken from (the 1998 edition of) former FBI agent Gary Aldrich's 1996 book, Unlimited Access. The passage in which it appears is part of a section detailing President Clinton's supposed habit of sneaking out of the White House to evade his Secret Service detail while on his way to trysts at a nearby hotel and is attributed to an unnamed source identified as a senior law enforcement officer with more than twenty years' service in a federal agency: In 1997, David Brock, author of the American Spectator Troopergate article cited above, wrote of Aldrich's book: On 28 June 2004, New York senator Hillary Clinton appeared at a San Francisco fund-raising event for California senator Barbara Boxer, where she explained that Democrats hoped to overturn tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration that they felt had unfairly favored the wealthy over middle- and lower-class taxpayers. Senator Clinton was not addressing her remarks to the general public; she was speaking to a group of mostly well-off Democratic supporters who had paid several thousand dollars each to attend the event: In his 2005 book about Bill Clinton in the White House, The Survivor, John F. Harris (a Washington Post national correspondent who covered the Clinton administration for six years) wrote of Hillary Clinton's 2000 campaign for a seat representing New York in the U.S. Senate: The endnotes to Harris' book indicate his source for this quote was an interview with an unnamed Hillary Clinton adviser. This quote appears in Edward Klein's 2005 book, The Truth About Hillary. As with much of the information contained in that work, the documentation behind this quote is rather weak: no details of when, where, or other context are provided, and the source was apparently an interview subject who was simply repeating a rumor he'd heard rather than relating an account of something he'd witnessed: On 28 January 2005, the following statement on the upcoming Iraqi elections was posted to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's web site at clinton.senate.gov: This passage is taken from Dereliction of Duty, a 2003 book by Air Force Lt. Colonel Robert Patterson (who served as a military aide to President Clinton for two years): During a Barbara Walters interview with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton that was aired on the ABC news magazine program 20/20 on 8 June 2003 (corresponding with the upcoming release of the latter's new book, Living History, the next day), the following question-and-answer exchange took place: This statement echoed a similar remark Hillary Clinton had made five years earlier (27 January 1998) during an interview with Matt Lauer aired on NBC's The Today Show: In the aforementioned book The Survivor, John F. Harris recounts Hillary Clinton's addressing her 1998 statement during the first televised debate of the 2000 Senate campaign in New York: In American Evita, Christopher Andersen wrote the following about Senator Clinton's 2003 Thanksgiving holiday visit with U.S. Troops in Afghanistan and Iraq: As throughout Andersen's book, the endnotes for the corresponding chapter reference a number of conversations and print articles but don't indicate which might have been the source for this putative quote. John F. Harris wrote in The Survivor that: Harris' endnotes indicate his source for this quote was interviews with (unnamed) West Wing aides. During an interview with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton conducted by Steve Scully (aired on the C-SPAN cable channel on 17 January 1997), the following question-and-answer exchange took place: Hillary Clinton did not really say (as claimed in the text accompanying this quote) that the mainstream media are all conservatives in her opinion (in fact, she stated twice during this portion of the interview that she didn't believe there was a bias in the mainstream press), but rather that she thought there was no liberal or left-wing equivalent to what she termed the political advocacy press. This is another quote that originated with David Brock's January 1994 American Spectator article and was taken from information provided by Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson: (As noted above, David Brock later expressed skepticism about the truth of Patterson's accounts.) These words were spoken by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton during an interview with Michael Kelly for a 1993 New York Times magazine piece, but the context presented here is completely misleading: Ms. Clinton did not say this about herself; she offered it as a hypothetical example of something someone else might think to himself: At the end of January 1993 (just weeks after being inaugurated for his first term of office), President Clinton arranged a weekend retreat for his cabinet and senior White House staff at Camp David to discuss the direction he hoped his administration would take. After the President spoke, according to journalist Bob Woodward (as reported in his 1994 book, The Agenda), First Lady Hillary Clinton took the floor to address some practical questions: Woodward doesn't cite specific sources in his book, noting in the Acknowledgements section at the end that virtually all the information in this book comes from my own reporting. Although this quote is cited in some books as such, it did not come from a commencement address delivered by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin in 1993. (According to the Houston Chronicle, the 1993 commencement speaker at that school was the university's president, Robert Berdahl, not Hillary Clinton.) Rather, this is a sentence taken from Hillary Clinton's appearance at UT on 6 April 1993, where she was honored by the Liz Sutherland Carpenter Distinguished Lectureship and gave a talk entitled Remolding Our Society, which opened thusly (as recorded in Michael Lerner's The Politics of Meaning): This quote is found in another Christopher Andersen work about the Clintons, his 1999 book Bill and Hillary: The Marriage: As is common in Andersen's books, the endnotes for the corresponding chapter reference a number of conversations and print articles but don't indicate which might have been the source for this putative quote. This quote comes from a conversation relayed by Rep. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, then the chairman of the Republicans' House task force on health care, at a 1993 meeting with Hillary Clinton (as reported in David Brock's The Seduction of Hillary Rodham): In a 3 March 1996 Booknotes discussion with Brian Lamb about her recent published book, It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Our Children Teach Us, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton said: (en)
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