New York Times
Hillary, Not as in the Mount Everest Guy
By DANNY HAKIM
October 17, 2006
For more than a decade, one piece of Senator Hillary Rodham Clintonâ??s informal biography has been that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest. The story was even recounted in Bill Clintonâ??s autobiography.
Just one problem, it’s not true. It was, and has always been, a bold faced lie. Sir Edmund climbed Everest six years after Hillary was born. Of course, that didn’t stop her from telling it, or her husband from publishing it only a couple of years ago. Her excuse was Classically Clintonian,
“It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter,” said her office.
Ah. She was just showing loyalty to her mother’s tender efforts to ignite dreams in a daughter oppressed by patriarchy and pervasive gender bias. (A less sweet way of seeing it: Mama lied, I didn’t!)
What I am waiting for is Hillary to explain her stroke of good fortune in the commodity pits, perhaps the most difficult market of all to make money in. You may recall, Hillary turned $1000 into $100,000 in ten short months by selling cattle futures. She is after all, the smartest women in America.
Hillary Clinton Futures Trades Detailed
By Charles R. Babcock
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 27, 1994; Page A01
Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released yesterday.
The computerized records of her trades, which the White House obtained from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, show for the first time how she was able to turn her initial investment into $6,300 overnight. In about 10 months of trading, she made nearly $100,000, relying heavily on advice from her friend James B. Blair, an experienced futures trader.
Hillary Clinton has said she made all the trading decisions herself and has tried to play down Blair’s role. But she acknowledged in April, three weeks after her trades were first disclosed, that Blair actually placed most of the trades.
This Caroline Baum article from 1995 in National Review has tons more detail about how absurd and implausable this is.
Next Up: I never knew Bill was sleeping around.