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| - During a stop in Nepal while on a south Asian goodwill tour in
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 EdmundHillary,'" Hillary Clinton reported.
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. Clintontold 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 EdmundHillary."
Although critics at the time dismissed the claim entirely based on the fact that Edmund Hillary didn't become a household name in the U.S. (for successfully scaling
1) 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." Although it is true that Edmund Hillary did not perform the feat that made him famous throughout the English-speaking world until 1953 (by which time Hillary Rodham was already six years old), it is not true, as many skeptics have asserted, that Edmund Hillary was nothing more than an obscure Auckland beekeeper until then. Even before
However, how likely was Dorothy Rodham, a Chicago housewife, to have seen an article about a New Zealand mountain climber? We performed a comprehensive search of several major American newspapers (including the
2) Whether or not Dorothy Rodham might have come across mention of Edmund Hillary in 1947, the story about her daughter's name didn'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 as 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
3) The tidbit of information that Hillary Clinton was named for Edmund Hillary did not 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 after that referred to referenced that one occasion. If Hillary Clinton thought an anecdote about the origins of her name was entertaining enough to repeat to the press when she met Sir Edmund Hillary in 1995, how come she had never mentioned it before in any of her numerous prior interviews and profiles?
Moreover, none of the many Hillary Clinton biographies so much as mentioned the story, not even
We opined when we first published this article back in 2003 that Hillary Clinton's claim about being Edmund Hillary's namesake might not have been completely false in the sense that she didn't say she was actually named for the mountain climber, but rather that her mother told her she was named for
For more than a decade, one piece of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's informal biography has been that she was named for
Sir EdmundHillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest. The story was even recounted in Bill Clinton's autobiography.
But yesterday, Mrs. Clinton's campaign said she was not named for
Sir Edmundafter all.
"It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add," said Jennifer Hanley, a spokeswoman for the campaign.
We still find this explanation extremely unlikely. In order to accept it, one has to believe that only after Hillary Clinton was nearly
As we noted in 2003, this tale was likely a little white lie concocted to curry favor with the public for a special occasion back in 1995, and even if it really was a "sweet family story" Dorothy Rodham told had her daughter Hillary many years earlier, the latter had almost certainly known for quite a long time that it was just a story.
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