HILLARY’S LSAT LIE
I noticed a news story a day or two ago in which Hillary Clinton described taking the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) as a senior at Wellesley. Hmm, I thought: what Hillary says can’t possibly be true. But I got distracted, and am now writing about it belatedly, preceded by Ann Coulter among others.
Hillary told the story of how she took the LSAT in the face of a barrage of male chauvinism to Humans of New York:
I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard.
Hillary didn’t go to Harvard, she went to Wellesley. Did students for many miles around take the LSAT at Harvard? That seems unlikely, but I can’t say for sure that Hillary’s account is untrue.
My friend and I were some of the only women in the room.
Oh, come on. Hillary was a senior during the 1968-1969 school year, and presumably took the LSAT in the fall of 1968. Women were not exactly pioneers in the law business at that time. Seven percent of the first year law class of 1969 was female, a percentage that rose rapidly over the next few years.
I was feeling nervous. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’
I don’t believe this. It was just two years later when I took the LSAT, at Dartmouth, and it is inconceivable to me that men shouted such things at women who showed up to take the test anywhere in 1968, let alone at Harvard. This is an after-the-fact fantasy of the supposedly horrible pre-feminist days.
Now we come to the demonstrable lie:
One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal.
When I first read this, I thought it was ridiculous. College students got deferments during the Vietnam era, but graduate students, including law students, didn’t. Hillary’s account made no sense. Ann Coulter corrected by memory: there was a time when graduate students were immune from the draft, but that era was over before Hillary took the LSAT:
[H]er senior year began in autumn, 1968. She says she was a senior during this harrowing experience, which is when the LSAT is normally taken. But the LBJ administration ended all graduate school deferments on February 16, 1968, except for medical, dental and divinity students, when Hillary was still a junior in college.
That is correct. So the climax of Hillary’s story: “If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam”–is a lie. Trust me, anyone taking the LSAT in the fall of 1968 knew exactly what the law was on draft deferments for graduate school.
It turns out that Hillary has told this lie before. In May 2016, she told the identical tale, in strikingly similar words to New York Magazine:
She told a story about the time she and a friend from Wellesley sat for the LSAT at Harvard. “We were in this huge, cavernous room,” she said. “And hundreds of people were taking this test, and there weren’t many women there. This friend and I were waiting for the test to begin, and the young men around us were like, ‘What do you think [you’re] doing? How dare you take a spot from one of us?’ It was just a relentless harangue.” Clinton and her friend were stunned. They’d spent four safe years at a women’s college, where these kinds of gender dynamics didn’t apply.“I remember one young man said, ‘If you get into law school and I don’t, and I have to go to Vietnam and get killed, it’s your fault.’”
So it wasn’t a slip of the tongue, or a spontaneous flight of fancy. It was part of Hillary’s repertoire of lies.
I am not a psychiatrist, and am not qualified to say what causes Hillary Clinton to lie constantly, with almost every breath she takes. My amateur guess is that she suffers from a deep-seated insecurity that comes from having been overrated through almost all of her life. She apparently feels a need to make up stories that put her in a heroic light–named after the world’s most famous mountain climber! almost shot down over Bosnia! turned down by the sexist Marines! left the White House dead broke and lifted ourselves up by our bootstraps! a pioneer feminist beset by baying male chauvinist hounds!
Far from these flights of fancy, the real Hillary is a small, unoriginal, not very talented woman who was fortunate enough (in some respects) to marry Bill Clinton. Pretty much everything else is a lie.
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