Hillary Clinton has claimed that she was named after the famous mountain climber, Sir Edmund Hillary.
During a stop in Nepal while on a south Asian goodwill tour in April 1995, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton engaged in a brief (and reportedly coincidental) meeting with Sir Edmund Hillary, the famed mountain climber who (along with Tenzing Norgay) became the first person to reach the summit of Mt. Everest, the Himalayan peak on the Nepal-Tibet border that is the highest point on Earth, in 1953. Hillary Clinton told reporters that she had in fact been named after the man who conquered Everest.
Hillary Clinton said her mother had read about the famous climber and knew his name had two L’s.
“So when I was born, she called me Hillary and she always told me, ‘It’s because of Sir Edmund Hillary,'” Hillary Clinton reported.
However, Edmund Hillary didn’t become a household name in the U.S. (for successfully scaling Mt. Everest) until six years after Hillary Rodham was born.
Also, none of the many Hillary Clinton biographies even mention the story, not even Living History, her 2003 autobiography. But it did make its way into the autobiography of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, which was published in 2004.
Within a few years, though, the story attracted some attention on the Internet when someone pointed out the key discrepancy in the story — that the mountain climber achieved worldwide fame six years after Clinton was born.
Eventually, in October 2006, a Clinton spokeswoman walked the story back.
"It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add,'' said spokeswoman Jennifer Hanley, according to the New York Times.
When the urban-legends checking site, Snopes.com, looked at the controversy, it noted that it actually wasn’t impossible that Clinton’s mother could have heard about Hillary by the time her daughter was born. Snopes noted that he was already gaining some renown as a mountain climber prior to 1953, and even as early as the pre-World War II period.
However, Snopes scrutinized several major American newspapers, including the Rodhams’ hometown Chicago Tribune, prior to 1953, it couldn’t find any evidence that the mountain climber had been profiled. This suggests that he was still too obscure a figure to have attracted Dorothy Rodham’s attention.
It was "almost certainly a bit of fiction invented for political expediency," Snopes concluded.
When Politifact reached out to the Clinton campaign for further details, they did not hear back.
So is it likely that Clinton's name claim was a lie made to curry favor with the public during a special occasion back in 1995? Most likely.
RELATED LINKS
Hillary Clinton Named for Sir Edmund Hillary? (Snopes, 8-23-17)
Did Hillary Clinton lie about being named after Sir Edmund Hillary? (Politifact, 7-19-16)