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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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1953
1995
2006
2008
asia
bill-clinton
celebrity
edmund-hillary
first-lady
first-lady-of-the-united-states
foreign-policy
hillary-clinton
jennifer-hanley
lies
mount-everest
nepal
new-york
politics
tenzing-norgay
united-states
united-states-elections-2008
united-states-senate
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Christopher Hitchens |