Clinton campaign: Hillary's interest in Marines was "sincere"
Hillary Clinton's campaign is responding to questions surrounding a story the candidate has told repeatedly about attempting to join the Marines in 1975 and getting turned away by recruiters.
A Clinton spokesperson has said that her interest in joining the Marines was "sincere."
"As she has noted in the past, Hillary visited a Marine recruiter shortly after moving to Arkansas because she was interested in exploring options for serving in the military," campaign spokesperson Nick Merrill told CNN late Thursday. "She did not pursue the idea further and her sole reason for visiting the recruitment center was to determine if there was a suitable opportunity for her to serve in some capacity."
On numerous occasions, the former secretary of state has told the story of visiting a field recruiting office when she first moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, just a few years before Bill Clinton was elected governor.
Skeptics first questioned the anecdote in 1994, when Clinton was first lady. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd observed that Clinton had been vehemently anti-war as a Wellesley College student and that she had worked on the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. Since then, others have questioned whether Clinton's attempt to enlist may have had an ulterior motive -- for example, to test how easy it was for a woman to join the corps.
The story has not changed over the years. Most recently, Clinton repeated the anecdote at a New Hampshire forum.
"He looks at me and goes, 'Um, how old are you?'" the Democratic candidate said Tuesday at a breakfast forum hosted by WMUR-TV. "And I said, 'Well I am 26, I will be 27.' And he goes, 'Well, that is kind of old for us.' And then he says to me, and this is what gets me, 'Maybe the dogs will take you,' meaning the Army."