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6bcd822
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"Seeing the name in a headline last week--a headline about a life that had involved real achievement--I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995--the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy 'experience'--Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim 'worked' well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York. Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually . Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: 'It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.'
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lies
politics
1995
2006
asia
edmund-hillary
first-lady
first-lady-of-the-united-states
jennifer-hanley
mount-everest
nepal
tenzing-norgay
united-states-senate
foreign-policy
2008
hillary-clinton
united-states-elections-2008
bill-clinton
1953
united-states
celebrity
new-york
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Christopher Hitchens |
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3b315a0
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Even in former days, Korea was known as the 'hermit kingdom' for its stubborn resistance to outsiders. And if you wanted to create a totally isolated and hermetic society, northern Korea in the years after the 1953 'armistice' would have been the place to start. It was bounded on two sides by the sea, and to the south by the impregnable and uncrossable DMZ, which divided it from South Korea. Its northern frontier consisted of a long stretch of China and a short stretch of Siberia; in other words its only contiguous neighbors were Mao and Stalin. (The next-nearest neighbor was Japan, historic enemy of the Koreans and the cruel colonial occupier until 1945.) Add to that the fact that almost every work of man had been reduced to shards by the Korean War. Air-force general Curtis LeMay later boasted that 'we burned down town in North Korea,' and that he grounded his bombers only when there were no more targets to hit anywhere north of the 38th parallel. Pyongyang was an ashen moonscape. It was Year Zero. Kim Il Sung could create a laboratory, with controlled conditions, where he alone would be the engineer of the human soul.
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1953
curtis-lemay
division-of-korea
hermit-kingdom
japan
korea
korea-under-japanese-rule
korean-demilitarized-zone
korean-war
mao-zedong
siberia
south-korea
pyongyang
world-war-ii
joseph-stalin
kim-il-sung
north-korea
china
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Christopher Hitchens |