For the second time this presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton is claiming a federal agency rejected her inquiries to serve because she was a woman.
Clinton, appearing on the Steve Harvey Show (airing Wednesday), said growing up, she wanted to be an astronaut.
“I was excited about the space program. I was excited about President Kennedy saying we were gonna send a man to the moon and bring him back within the decade. I thought it was really incredible we were gonna do that,” she told Harvey.
“So, yes, I wrote to NASA,” she said.
“Really…” Harvey replied.
“I wrote to NASA, you know, and said, well, how do you get the be an astronaut. They wrote me back saying, ‘thank you very much for your interest. At this time we are not accepting women astronauts,'” she said as the audience collectively sighed.
“And it did, you know, it hurt my feelings, but I could never have been an astronaut anyway, but I was happy that Sally Ride and other women got to be astronauts later on,” she said to applause.
“So finally that was opened up.”
Clinton didn’t say when she supposedly wrote the letter to NASA. Harvey showed a picture of Hillary from 1961 — when she was about 14 years old. Kennedy announced the space challenge that same year.
Assuming Clinton even wrote such a letter — and she ever received a reply — is it possible she was rejected (again, assuming she’s telling the truth), not because of her gender but the fact that she was a teenager, barely in high school?
In November, Clinton repeatedly told audiences she wanted to join the Marines after graduating from law school, but that she was rejected over her gender.
CNN reviewed Hillary’s story and cast doubt on its authenticity — and reported that the campaign was doing nothing to clear up the details.
“We don’t have enough specifics, actually to know whether it’s true or not,” CNN’s Jeff Zeleny said.
The network’s Senior Washington Correspondent said Hillary’s story “over the years” — and told again to a New Hampshire audience that day — is that when she was around 26 years old, Hillary went into a Marine recruiting office in Arkansas to ask if she could enlist.
The claims the young officer who was working there “sized her up” and judged her glasses and her age and said “No, you can’t.” Then, according to the story, the recruiter recommended she “try the Army instead.”
Zeleny said he asked the campaign for more details on the story “because it seems so unusual.
“The Yale-educated lawyer who worked on the anti-war campaigns of McCarty and McGovern, who had just moved to Arkansas, whose husband was about the become the Attorney General of the state would decide to join the Marines?” he said skeptically.
“But the campaign said they’re not going to add any more comment on this so the questions are left to discuss here,” Zeleny concluded.
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