in her late twenties, Hillary Rodham Clinton briefly attempted to enlist in the U.S. Marines.Now there's something I'd be interested in hearing more about. Also: How often are women who want to join the military rebuffed? Does this still happen today, even with all the recruitment difficulties?That last fact -- reported in 1994 but largely forgotten since -- underlines the degree to which, unlike many of her peers, Clinton has never allowed Vietnam to define her vision of foreign policy. It's true that the war helped pull her from her roots as a Goldwater Girl and a president of Wellesley College's Young Republicans and drive her into the Democratic Party. During her junior year at Wellesley, she even knocked on doors for Eugene McCarthy's antiwar campaign. But Vietnam apparently didn't imbue Hillary with a loathing for the military. In 1975, just months after the last U.S. troops returned home, Hillary was living in Arkansas with Bill, who had mounted a failed bid for Congress the previous year. The young couple, who would marry later that year, were both teaching law at the University of Arkansas, when Hillary, for reasons never made entirely clear, decided to enlist in the Marines. When she walked into a recruiting office in Little Rock and inquired about joining, the recruiter on duty was unenthusiastic about the 27-year-old law professor in thick, goggle glasses. "You're too old, you can't see, and you're a woman," Clinton recalled him saying. "Maybe the dogs"--Marine slang for the Army--"would take you." Deflated, Clinton said she decided to "look for another way to serve my country."
From there, the trail seems to go cold.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
