Here it comes! All the Hillary Clinton facts you never knew, that you probably don’t need to know, but now you are going to know. And this is just the tip of the iceberg; I’m not even going into the bizarre imaginary conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt. Mainly because I have been known to talk to myself here and there. The difference being I don’t have the world holding me under a microscope and judging every second of my life. Then again, I am not in politics. Thank goodness. Whether or not you’re into politics, these 17 facts about Hillary Clinton are pretty interesting.
1. She once out drank John McCain. When she and McCain were touring Estonia in 2004, the two senators sat down at a restaurant and took shots of vodka. Clinton won the game with four. While the exact rules might never be known, we can conclude that this lady can hold her liquor. And I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to have a few drinks with her.
2. She puts hot sauce on everything, even salad. She likes her food like she likes her men, hot! Okay, that last part I made up. I don’t know if that is true. But she really does put hot sauce on everything. Clinton was asked a few years ago what she took with her during her many travels as Secretary of State. Her answer was sunscreen, BlackBerry and iPad converters, and she insisted she always carries red pepper flakes and a small bottle of Tabasco Hot Sauce with her.
3. She was the only first lady in history to be subpoenaed. This was for her involvement in The Whitewater Controversy. The Whitewater Controversy surrounded the Clintons during Bill’s presidential campaign and his first couple of years in office. It started with a New York Times article in March 1992 that alleged the Clintons had invested and lost money in the Whitewater Development Corporation. An investigation arose from this article, with Bill and Hillary Clinton being the main focus. It also involved their associates Jim and Susan McDougal. In May 1994, Independent Counsel Robert Fiske issued a grand jury subpoena to both President Clinton and the First Lady for all their documents relating to the case. This made Hillary Clinton the only First Lady in history to ever be issued with a subpoena.
4. Bill And Hillary Clinton are the only first couple ever to be fingerprinted by the FBI. The reason why was because of another incident that occurred during the Clinton presidency called “Filegate.” In June 1996, allegations arose that the First Couple’s administration had improper access to FBI documents between 1993 and 1994. The Director of the White House’s Office of Personnel Security, Craig Livingstone, improperly requested background reports from the FBI. These reports included those of people who had served during previous Republican administrations. The Senate Judiciary Committee became concerned that a “dirty tricks” operation had been carried out by the First Couple. This was something that Richard Nixon’s administration had done. In October 1996, Republican committee chair, Orrin Hatch, requested that the FBI do a fingerprint analysis of them. With Hillary Clinton becoming the only First Lady and Bill Clinton becoming the first ever President to be fingerprinted while in office, the FBI confirmed in November 1996 that neither had handled the files personally.
5. She won a Grammy. The award was in 1996 for Best Spoken Word Album. It was for the audio version of her book, It Takes A Village. Other books published by Clinton include Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets (1998), An Invitation to the White House: At Home with History (2000), as well as her autobiography Living History (2003) – for which she received a near-record advance of £5.5million ($8million) – and her second set of memoirs Hard Choices (2014).
6. When rumors first arose that her husband Bill Clinton was having an affair with Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton referred to it as a “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.” Hillary said in January 1998 during an interview on NBC’s The Today Show, “The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.” There is nothing like bringing out somebody’s wrong doing in front of all of America. Her husband later admitted to the affair. He became only the second President ever to be served with Articles of Impeachment due to the fact he originally denied the affair. The term ‘Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’ was actually first used in a Detroit News article in 1991 about Margaret Thatcher, and AP also used it in a story in 1995 when referring to the Oklahoma City bombing. It has been used many times since, including in a question posed to Bill Clinton in 2009 to describe press attacks against President Barack Obama.
7. She kept her maiden name after marrying Bill Clinton, and only changed it in order to appeal to voters in Arkansas. After marrying Bill Clinton in October 1975, Hillary Rodham announced that she would be keeping her maiden name because it kept her personal life separate from her husband’s work, and because “it showed that I was still me”. The decision upset both her own and Bill Clinton’s mothers, and it was not until 1982 that Hillary adopted her husband’s surname. With Bill Clinton having been re-elected as Governor of Arkansas, Hillary began to use the name “Hillary Clinton”, or sometimes even “Mrs. Bill Clinton” in order to appeal to voters. The name has remained ever since, although she is sometimes referred to as “Hillary Rodham Clinton”.
8. Clinton tried to join the Marines but was rejected. And not in a nice way; they were pretty brutal. When Hillary Clinton was 27, she visited the US Marine recruiting base in Arkansas and asked about joining because she had become interested in the military. Explaining that the recruiter was in his early-20s, Clinton said she asked about becoming a Marine or a reserve but the response she got was, “You’re too old, you can’t see, and you’re a woman. Maybe ‘the dogs’ (the Army) would take you.” Ouch! Clinton said of the experience, “It was not a very encouraging conversation. I decided maybe I’ll look for another way to serve my country.” I think she has found a pretty good alternative.
9. Her secret service code name while she was the first lady was “Evergreen”, and her husband President Bill Clinton’s was “Eagle”. If you ever watched the TV series The West Wing, you might notice they adopted the use of those names. The same code names remained in place during Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and are likely to remain the same for the 2016 campaign as well. Interestingly, due to the fact President Clinton’s half-brother Roger Jr. was regularly in trouble, he was given the Secret Service code name “Headache”. I bet they have come up with some pretty good code names throughout the years.
10. Clinton was the only first lady ever to run for public office and also win when she was elected as the first female senator for New York in 2000. Hillary Clinton moved to New York in 2000 and then stood for the Senate there. She won the election and took office on January 3, 2001, serving until January 21, 2009, when she was appointed as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. Bill Clinton was still in office for a little while after Hillary was elected, and the latter’s victory made her the first First Lady to run and win a seat for public office, as well as the first female senator for New York.
11. She hasn’t driven a car since 1996. At least she hadn’t as of last year and we suspect that hasn’t changed. The Secret Service, apparently, is not exactly happy about this. Maybe she doesn’t like driving. I can’t say I blame her, traffic can be a nightmare.
12. She once convinced a newspaper delivery driver to take her to the Atlanta airport at 5 a.m. We assume this happened before her days of Secret Service protection. I bet she can be very persuasive.
13. She gutted fish at a processing plant in Alaska one summer during her law school years. It was her job to scoop out entrails, but the plant soon fired her for asking too many questions about how long the fish had been dead.
14. She out earned her husband several times over when he was serving as the governor of Arkansas. In 1991, Hillary cashed $188,000 worth of paychecks as a lawyer at a private firm, while Bill made considerably less working in government. Twice, both in 1988 and 1991, the National Law Journal noted her among the 100 most influential lawyers in America.
15. She attends a separate church from her husband. Born and raised a Methodist, she didn’t abandon her roots when she married Bill, who is a Southern Baptist. And while Hillary carries around a small Bible in her bag, she told The New York Times her, “faith has always been primarily personal.”
16. She was director of Wal-Mart for six years. She used her position to champion liberal policies. The first ever female member on Wal-Mart’s board, Clinton continued to campaign for more women to be added to the company’s management. Although she reportedly largely failed with this, she championed the group adopting more environmentally friendly policies.
17. During an interview in 2010 which was done in the town of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave one of her most famous quotes. The exchange between the interviewer and Clinton went like this:
Interviewer: “Okay. Which designers do you prefer?”
Clinton: “What designers of clothes?”
Interviewer: “Yes.”
Clinton: “Would you ever ask a man that question?”
Interviewer: “Probably not.”
Clinton then continued to lambast the interviewer for asking such a sexist question, and this remains one of her most famous quotes to date.
I think that it is noteworthy that she was told many times in life that she could not do things because of her gender. When Clinton wrote to NASA asking how she could become an astronaut as a child, they replied saying, “Women couldn’t be space travelers.” During the 1960s, Clinton became fascinated by the US government’s space program and decided that she could see herself as an astronaut in the future. But after writing to NASA in 1962 explaining her interest in becoming an astronaut and asking about how she could undertake such a career, she got a reply saying, “We’re not interested in women astronauts.” Speaking of the reply, Clinton commented, “And of course, there weren’t any women astronauts, and NASA wrote me back and said there would not be any women astronauts. And I was just crestfallen. NASA may have said I couldn’t go into space, but nobody was there to tell Amelia Earhart she couldn’t do what she chose to do.”