World Ahead Publishing, the publisher of Thomas D. Kuiper's book “I've Always Been a Yankees Fan”: Hillary Clinton in Her Own Words, defended the book in an April 24 press release from what it describes as “attack[s]” from “left-wing critics” such as Media Matters for America and The New York Times. The press release quoted Kuiper saying: “I compiled quotes from 63 books and over 100 different articles, so Hillary's apologists have their work cut out for them.” In defending his book, however, Kuiper misrepresented his own work and twice misquoted Clinton. Also, the press release made no mention of the fact that Kuiper himself acknowledged on CNN that he “can't verify” that the book is “100 percent true.”

From the April 24 press release:

Liberals have been swift to denounce a new book of Hillary Clinton quotes, with even the New York Times backtracking on its prior coverage. The author and publisher stand by the book, however, and have issued a challenge to the book's left-wing critics.

[...]

“Liberals are attacking this well-researched and thoroughly documented quote book with vigor because it paints a devastating profile of Hillary Clinton as a crass and power-hungry politician,” says Eric M. Jackson, president of World Ahead Publishing. “It is 160 pages long and contains over 400 clearly cited quotations from dozens upon dozens of varied sources. Thomas Kuiper did his homework and it's obvious that Senator Clinton's acolytes are attempting to attack him because they're terrified of this book.”

“I compiled quotes from 63 books and over 100 different articles, so Hillary's apologists have their work cut out for them,” adds Thomas Kuiper, the book's editor. "Was Chris Matthews's statement that he saw Hillary make Secret Service agents carry her bags a lie? How about Hillary's widely quoted claim to be named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who climbed Mt. Everest years after she was born? Or her statement on Dateline that Chelsea was jogging near the World Trade Center on September 11th, a story which Chelsea herself later contradicted?"

“Was Chris Matthews's statement that he saw Hillary make Secret Service agents carry her bags a lie?”

Kuiper was referring to page 3 of I've Always Been a Yankees Fan, in which he wrote, “Chris Matthews said he witnessed Senator Clinton using a member of her Secret Service unit to carry her luggage on the Washington to New York shuttle.” Kuiper quoted Matthews from the August 23, 2001, edition of Hardball (then on CNBC):

MATTHEWS: And I saw something interesting: Hillary Clinton up in that little bank head -- bulkhead seat they reserve for VIPs in the corner, nobody around her. Secret Service guys all around with those little ear phones and one large guy, rather embarrassed, rather sheepish, walking along with his own ear phones carrying her bags. Who -- who in the Senate gets a Sherpa to carry their bags for them?

[...]

MATTHEWS: I've never heard of a senator having a bag carrier. Who pays for the air fare for this guy? Who pays for his lifestyle? Who pays his salary to walk around carrying her bags so she can walk around light-handed with nothing in her hands?

Therefore, Kuiper's claim in the press release -- that Matthews said “he saw Hillary make Secret Service agents carry her bags” -- is not true, and does not accurately reflect either the content of his book or what Matthews said. Matthews simply said that he saw a Secret Service agent carrying Clinton's baggage -- he never claimed to have seen Clinton “make” an agent carry her bag.

“How about Hillary's widely quoted claim to be named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who climbed Mt. Everest years after she was born?”

On page 138 of I've Always Been a Yankees Fan, Kuiper quoted Hillary saying in 1995: “So when I was born, she [Clinton's mother, Dorothy Rodham] called me Hillary, and she always told me it's because of Sir Edmund Hillary.”

Of this quote, Kuiper wrote in the book:

First Lady Hillary Clinton explaining that she was named after famous explorer, Sir Edmund Hillary (The New York Times, 04/03/95). Only problem -- Hillary Rodham was born five years before Edmund Hillary became famous by scaling Mt. Everest in 1953. The year she was born [1947], Edmund Hillary was an obscure beekeeper in New Zealand.

As the quote indicates, however, Clinton herself did not claim “to be named after Edmund Hillary,” as Kuiper said in the press release. Rather, she explained that her mother told her she was named for the explorer. Also, Kuiper's source for this quote and his “debunking” of it is former Clinton adviser Dick Morris's book Rewriting History (Regan Books, 2004) -- Morris' response to Sen. Clinton's autobiography Living History (Simon & Schuster, 2003). In his book, Morris claimed that Clinton wrote in Living History “that she was named after Edmund Hillary.” As Media Matters for America documented, that statement did not appear in Clinton's book.

“Or her statement on Dateline that Chelsea was jogging near the World Trade Center on September 11th, a story which Chelsea herself later contradicted?”

Kuiper's claim that Clinton said her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, was jogging around the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, is false. On page 139, Kuiper quoted Clinton from the September 17, 2001, edition of NBC's Dateline, saying: "[Chelsea had] gone on what she thought would be a great jog ... [S]he was going to go around the towers. She went to get a cup of coffee and that's when the plane hit ... She did hear it. She did."

Of this quote, Kuiper wrote in the book:

Hillary explaining to Jane Pauley that Chelsea was close enough to the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11 to actually hear the impact of the first plane and that she was in potential danger (Dateline, 09/17/01). Chelsea later wrote a first-person account of her experience on 9/11 for Talk magazine. Her version contradicted her mother's story from Dateline. Chelsea wrote she was in a friend's apartment on the other side of town and watched the horrific events of that day unfold on television. She did not mention a jog around the towers or getting coffee when the planes hit (Talk, 11/09/01).

Clinton's full quote from Dateline is as follows:

CLINTON: She'd gone, what she thought would be just a great jog. She was going to go down to Battery Park, she was going to go around the towers. She went to get a cup of coffee and -- and that's when the plane hit.

PAULEY: She was close enough to hear the rumble.

CLINTON: She did hear it.

PAULEY: And to see the smoke in person, not on television.

CLINTON: No. Of course, Bill was in Australia. And, you know, he was so upset by what he was seeing on television that I didn't want to tell him that I couldn't find her until I found her. I told him that, you know, everything's fine, don't worry. But I couldn't do it with the level of assurance that I needed until I could find her a couple of hours later.

Clinton never said Chelsea was “jogging near the World Trade Center,” as Kuiper claimed in the press release. Rather, Clinton said Chelsea "was going to go around the towers." Dick Morris made this same false claim in Rewriting History, as Media Matters noted. Kuiper's claim from his book that Sen. Clinton said Chelsea “was in potential danger” is also false. At no point did she suggest that Chelsea was endangered by the attacks.

Moreover, Kuiper misrepresented Chelsea's account of the attacks in claiming that she “contradicted” her mother. From Kuiper's account of Chelsea's retelling of the attacks, one would believe she spent the entire day in her friend's apartment “on the other side of town” and that she did not go to get coffee. A November 9, 2001, UPI article, however, gave a different account:

“When the World Trade Center collapsed on Sept. 11, I was 12 blocks away, (and) nothing has been the same since,” Clinton wrote in the December/January issue of Talk magazine, on sale Friday in New York.

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Clinton had been staying with her high school friend Nicole Davison in her apartment near Union Square for a few days in September before she went to England to study at Oxford. After they had coffee together, Davison went to work and Clinton returned to the apartment.

Davison called Clinton with the news of the first plane that crashed into the World Trade Center. Clinton turned on the television and watched the second plane crash into the second WTC tower, and tried to reach her mother in Washington, but after speaking to her assistant, the phone line went dead.

Chelsea Clinton is the daughter of former President Bill Clinton and U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.

Panicked, Chelsea Clinton left the apartment and found herself running toward downtown “in the direction everyone else was coming from,” in search of a public telephone. She was desperate to call her mother and her father, who was on a speaking tour in Australia.

Chelsea Clinton was downtown in line at a pay phone when she heard the rumble of the second tower collapsing. Later she found Davison and another friend, and the three spent the day walking uptown. Chelsea Clinton wrote that she had an “irrational medley of thoughts” running through her head.

Also, Kuiper's and World Ahead's vigorous defense of the book did not address -- or even mention -- Kuiper's comments from the April 18 edition of CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer: “Everything in the book is -- I believe it to be true, but since I wasn't there, I can't verify that it's 100 percent true.”

World Ahead attacked The New York Times for publishing an editors' note to reporter Anne Kornblut's April 16 article on Kuiper's book explaining that “because of an editing error, the article did not make it clear until the 16th paragraph that many quotations in the book had been culled from disputed sources or unverifiable private conversations.” As Media Matters noted, Kornblut's article placed Kuiper's book on equal footing with other collections of quotes from the likes of President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld that actually contained verifiable quotations.

World Ahead Publishing describes itself as “the West Coast's premier publisher of conservative and libertarian books.” Its other titles include Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! by Katharine DeBrecht, described as an antidote to “overtly liberal children's books advocating everything from gay marriage to marijuana use.” The book tells “the story of two brothers who open a lemonade stand only to encounter a [Sen. Edward] Kennedy-esque mayor determined to tax away their profits while a pants-suit clad Hillary outlaws sugary drinks and an ACLU lawyer confiscates their picture of Jesus.” For an upcoming book in the series, World Ahead held an eBay auction in which the highest bidder will appear as “the hero who finally gives Hillary what she deserves for being bossy and trying to tell families what to do” by sending her to jail.