[Updated] Hillary Clinton, Astronaut

Marking the first all-woman spacewalk, Clinton illustrated just how far gender equality has come in the last 60 years.

68FC0-little-girl.png “When I was a little girl, I wrote to NASA and told them I dreamed of being an astronaut. They wrote back and said they weren’t taking girls,” the former presidential candidate tweeted, because apparently everything has to be about her. She then expressed hope that a “new generation of little girls” will be able to reach for the stars. RT.com

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (born Hillary Diane Rodham; October 26, 1947).

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) NASA begins operations on October 1, 1958 as an independent agency of the United States Federal Government responsible for the civilian space program. Hillary Clinton is 4 weeks shy of her 11th birthday.

NASA introduces its first astronaut class, the Mercury Seven, on April 9, 1959. This is the first public use of the term astronaut by the agency. Hillary Clinton is 11-1/2 years old.

I don't know about you, but I believe Hillary's story about writing NASA when she was a "little girl" just as much as I believe her story about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia. After all, the female version of George "I cannot tell a lie" Washington is well-known for her probity about topics like Libya and email servers.

[Update]

Hillary's apparently been making this claim in various forums for years, adjusted to suit the circumstances. Here's what she said about it in a speech at an event celebrating Amelia Earhart on March 20, 2012:

When we decided, under President Kennedy’s leadership, that our nation was going to go to the moon and we were going to have an astronaut program, I wanted to be an astronaut. So when I was about 13, I wrote to NASA and asked what I needed to do to try to be an astronaut. 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. But then I realized I couldn’t see very well, and I wasn’t all that athletic, so probably, I wouldn’t be the first woman astronaut anyway.

Unfortunately for that version of the tale, Kennedy's speech was given when Clinton's 15th birthday was 2 weeks away. Of course, it may just be a memory fart on Hillary's part about exactly what age she was when she wrote to and received a soul-crushing response from NASA. That was surely not a memorable occurrence.

"We choose to go to the Moon", officially titled as the Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort, is a speech delivered by United States President John F. Kennedy about the effort to reach the Moon to a large crowd gathered at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas, on September 12, 1962.

Share
up
0 users have voted.

Comments

window for me when I said I would hold my nose and vote for that. Way back in 2014 probably, before the edict from TOP, but my God. It stuns me a bit to remember that but there it is.

Malignant narcissist or psychopath? Maybe she is both. I found myself giddy the night she lost to the Orange One. Of course I woke up the next morning horrified but still, relieved she had lost.

up
0 users have voted.

Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur

edg's picture

@lizzyh7

Relief when she lost. Fortunately, the constant investigations and scandals surrounding Trump have mostly kept him in check. With Hillary, there would have been no such checks. The Deep State and Neoliberal underground would have protected her instead of attacked her. I shudder to think what she would have done to us and the world.

up
0 users have voted.
Creosote.'s picture

@edg

up
0 users have voted.
Bollox Ref's picture

why did she end up training to be a lawyer?

I mean, if you're interested in Space, why not pursue that.......

up
0 users have voted.

Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.

snoopydawg's picture

I mentioned this in a previous essay here and said, "sure you got a letter back from NASA." Then I read this article today and saw how it wasn't even NASA then. Guess that letter got lost in the mail? The article also has a tweet of Hillary's saying that she was named after Edmund Hillary who climbed Everest. She was born in 1947 and he did that in 1953. Oh well she can still claim that she landed in Bosnia to heavy sniper fire...oh wait. I can't wait for the next time she says something about Trump lying. She will get hammered! And rightly so.

up
0 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Creosote.'s picture

@snoopydawg
were so cruelly punitive, cold, and authoritarian that she was legally removed from their influence --
but then only to other probably less publicly rabid relatives.

up
0 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

@Creosote.

Can you write more on this? I'm wondering if she is having some type of ageist issues and that's why she is taking to Twitter?

up
0 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Creosote.'s picture

@snoopydawg
and am not sure what you mean by an ageist issue. The way I interpreted what I read long ago who knows where was that Her's apparently religiously sadistic family were so obviously dangerously cruel to her that even other branches of the family (only slightly milder) stepped in to remove her from them.
A person I know regularly works with children who have spent perhaps the first six months of their life in an incubator, and the effect is profoundly damaging in a somewhat similar way.
A man who saw some 60 thousand children in his Tavistock clinic practice in London once said that when an infant looks into the parent's eyes it sees itself.
Her's absence of that reflection and the presence of much else formed her.
Not to say there isn't an ageist aspect in attacking younger women --

up
0 users have voted.

When will she STFU and what will it take to make her disappear?

up
0 users have voted.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Anja Geitz's picture

The most powerful being
In the world. She wrote a letter to the CIA asking them if she could get an interview . They said they weren't taking girls. So she became a lawyer instead.

image_34.jpg
up
0 users have voted.

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

As usual, we are "us", she is "her".
Bill got disbarred, so the bar grievance committee does have standards.

up
0 users have voted.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

snoopydawg's picture

@on the cusp

because she lied about something? But her worst lawyer tale is how she got her client off for raping a young girl by playing tricks with the evidence. She laughed about it for years.

up
0 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Hillary was off with her memory on this one. She was indeed "about 13" when Kennedy made his first speech announcing the US would send a man to the Moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade.

This was his speech before Congress in May 1961, when Hillary would have been 13 1/2 yo.

You are referencing JFK's 2d major Moon speech, the one given on a very hot day (Sept 1962) at the football stadium at Rice Univ, Houston, where he says "We Choose to Go to the Moon". The speech is available to view on YT -- notice all the dignitaries sitting behind Kennedy in considerable distress from the heat, including Lyndon Johnson. Some very clever lines, including one extemporaneous utterance comparing the heat involved in re-entry of the spacecraft with the excessive temperature that day in Houston.

up
0 users have voted.
edg's picture

@wokkamile

She's conflating several things into a changeable storyline. It was the announcement of the Mercury astronauts in 1959 that stirred children's desire to become astronauts. Kennedy's rather dry and technical 1961 address to Congress stressed putting a MAN on the moon and safely returning HIM to the earth.

Hardly encouraging for a young girl. A young Republican girl no less. More than 80% of Republicans opposed the space program. Former President Eisenhower declared, "To spend $40 billion to reach the Moon is just nuts." Senator Barry Goldwater argued that the civilian space program was pushing the more important military one aside.

Meanwhile, Kennedy's 1962 speech at Rice was non-gender specific and far more inspiring. It lit the imagination of many youngsters.

If Clinton's imaginary letter had happened, it would have made far more sense to have occurred either in '59 with the Mercury astronauts or in '62 with the Rice moon speech.

up
0 users have voted.

@edg @edg convincing. First, use of male terms like "man" was routine back then, par for the course in referring generally to humankind. If she even gave it a second thought, it might have meant only the usual public discourse of the day and nothing more to concern herself with.

Second, JFK's first Moon speech was likely nationally televised, being an address to a joint session of Congress. Therefore much more likely that she might have seen it, read about it, heard about it -- and it was in fact the first time he announced his bold program, so a major news making item, and of little consequence that it was delivered in a dry manner.

The more dynamic and rousing Rice speech, a year and a half after he'd announced the Moon program, likely was not televised nationally (I've never seen video of it, only news film) but it has become slightly better known among the public today -- today, not necessarily back then.

As for the rest, it's unlikely a 13 yo girl, even a precocious one, would have been aware of let alone influenced by the general GOP view of space nor Barry's view.

Possible other factor here: NASA did accept women to its astronaut program. Would have to look it up as to the timeline.

(edit: Testing for female astronauts began in 1960 and was apparently a private program but "not unknown to the public" . Possible she may have heard about that too ...)

up
0 users have voted.
edg's picture

@wokkamile

it's unlikely a 13 yo girl, even a precocious one, would have been aware of let alone influenced by the general GOP view of space nor Barry's view

Consider this:

She grew up in Park Ridge, Ill., a Republican suburb of Chicago, and describes her father, Hugh Rodham Jr., as a "rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican and proud of it". Her 9th-grade history teacher was also a very conservative Republican who encouraged her to read Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book, "Conscience of a Conservative," which inspired Clinton to write a term paper on the American conservative movement.

"I was also an active Young Republican and, later, a Goldwater girl, right down to my cowgirl outfit and straw cowboy hat emblazoned with the slogan 'AuH20.' … I liked Senator Goldwater because he was a rugged individualist who swam against the political tide.

Source: Hillary Worked for Goldwater? -- Factcheck.org

The most likely scenario is that someone, somewhere, sometime told Hillary about writing to NASA and she co-opted the story as her own as an example of the sort of struggles she faced as a woman. Politicians do that sort of thing all the time.

up
0 users have voted.

@edg @edg Gooper when young and precocious and all in for Barry. I don't doubt. It's still a ways from saying authoritatively that she read the GOP party platform on space, did a 180 on her big dream and decided to put aside such ideals in order to toe the party line.

But whatever, I find all this a non-sell.

edit: and this is even taking into account her own ambitious pol's tendency to manufacture stretchers ...

up
0 users have voted.