Forum: Hillary's re-invented history

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Hillary Clinton must be dumb as a post or else or she spins fiction. An Oct. 8 Newsday story about Hillary Clinton's induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame begins:

"Inspired by Alan Shepard, the first American to journey into space, a 14-year-old from suburban Chicago wrote a letter to NASA in 1961 asking what she needed to do to become an astronaut. Back came a curt reply: Girls are not being recruited by the nation's space program.

" 'It had never crossed my mind up until that point that there might be doors closed to me simply because I was a girl,' recalled the letter writer, better known today as former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"The rejection stung her to the core, opening up the teenager's eyes to sexual stereotypes, career barriers and discriminatory practices that soon came under assault from landmark laws beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

" 'We have made so many advances in the last 40 years that are really unprecedented in the history of the world,' said Clinton, one of 10 women inducted Saturday in the National Women's Hall of Fame."

It simply would not be possible, unless one were in some form of isolation, to spend one's girlhood in the 1950s and not notice there were some "doors closed" to women. I was born in 1959 and knew it by kindergarten.

Either Mrs. Clinton is, or used to be, dumb as a post, or she made up the story.

As it happens, Mrs. Clinton doesn't always tell the letter-to-NASA story the same way.

As she was inducted in the National Women's Hall of Fame this weekend, Mrs. Clinton said the young Hillary Rodham was 14 and inspired by Alan Shepherd's 1961 trip into space when she wrote to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

But in this transcript of a May 2005 commencement speech by Sen. Hillary Clinton, archived on her own Web site, the young Hillary is 12 when the incident occurs: "I wrote off to this new agency called NASA, and asked how a 12-year old girl could become an astronaut."