Clinton Says She ‘Misspoke’ About Dodging Sniper Fire
By PATRICK HEALY and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: March 25, 2008
BLUE BELL, Pa. — As part of her argument that she has the best experience and instincts to deal with a sudden crisis as president, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton recently offered a vivid description of having to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire after landing in Bosnia as first lady in 1996.
Yet on Monday, Mrs. Clinton admitted that she “misspoke” about the episode — a concession that came after CBS News showed footage of her walking calmly across the tarmac with her daughter, Chelsea, and being greeted by dignitaries and a child.
The backpedaling was a rare instance of Mrs. Clinton’s acknowledging an error, and she did so on a sensitive issue: She has cited her “strength and experience” since the start of the presidential race, framing her 80 trips abroad as first lady as preparation for dealing with foreign affairs as president. That argument was behind her campaign’s “red phone” commercial, which cast her as best able to handle a crisis.
Mrs. Clinton corrected herself at a meeting with the Philadelphia Daily News editorial board; she did not explain why she had misspoken, but only admitted it and then offered a less dramatic description.
Mrs. Clinton said she had been told “that we had to land a certain way and move quickly because of the threat of sniper fire,” not that actual shots were being fired.
“So I misspoke,” she said.
Earlier Monday, Clinton advisers corrected the Bosnia anecdote, saying they did not want it to harm her credibility. One Clinton foreign policy adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity in exchange for being candid about her mistake, said that Mrs. Clinton had been “too loose” with her words and that she risked looking as if “she was trying to pump up a somewhat risky situation into a very dangerous one.”
In her most recent account, offered last week, Mrs. Clinton described an action-packed arrival in the Balkans.
“I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia,” she said, in remarks that aides described Monday as not being part of her prepared speech. “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
In interviews Monday, aides to Mrs. Clinton at the time of the trip, as well as an Associated Press photographer who was on the trip, said that she and others were briefed before landing about the possibility of sniper fire around the airport in Tuzla, Bosnia. None of the aides remembered actual sniper fire. Nor did the photographer, Doug Mills, who now works for The New York Times.
“I remember being told we were going into a war zone, but I don’t remember any commotion at the airport,” Mr. Mills said. “I don’t recall her running to cars. If that had happened, we would have made a picture of it.”
Maj. Gen. William Nash, who has since retired but was then the commander of United States troops in Bosnia and was at the Tuzla airport that day, said in an interview that there was no threat of sniper fire at the airport during Mrs. Clinton’s visit. He said she was gracious during her visit and took pictures with the soldiers, who were there to enforce the terms of the Dayton peace accord, signed five months earlier.
“She never had her head down,” General Nash said. “There was no sniper threat that I know of.”
Before Mrs. Clinton’s admission that she had misspoken, a spokesman for the campaign, Howard Wolfson, was asked Monday on a conference call with reporters to square her recent accounts with other evidence. In response, Mr. Wolfson referred to news accounts at the time that described the region as hostile.
He then added, “There is no question if you look at contemporaneous accounts that she was going to a potential combat zone, that she was on the front lines.”
Minutes later, when pressed to clarify his comment, Mr. Wolfson said news accounts made clear that the area in which she was landing was “a potential combat zone and was hazardous.”
He said that in her memoir, “Living History,” Mrs. Clinton wrote about sniper fire in the hills and “clearly meant to say that” when she brought it up last week. He said she had described the event many times the same way and that “in one instance, she said it slightly differently.”
In her comments Monday, Mrs. Clinton made a similar point, saying, “I didn’t say that in my book or other times.”
Mrs. Clinton had described the sniper fire in similar terms at least twice in recent weeks. She mentioned it on Feb. 29 in Waco, Tex., when she was rolling out her “red phone” commercial, recalling the trip to Bosnia and saying that the welcoming ceremony “had to be moved inside because of sniper fire.” |
