Yesterday Hillary Clinton told Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” that she was 14 years old when she heard Dr. King speak in person.

She turned 14 in October of 1961.

But on March 4, 2007, at the 42nd Anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, Mrs. Clinton recounted how as a young girl she had the great privilege of hearing Dr. Martin Luther King speak in Chicago: “ The year was 1963”, Clinton said in her speech. “My youth minister from our church took a few of us down on a cold January night to hear someone that we had read about, we had watched on television, we had seen with our own eyes from a distance, this phenomenon known as Dr. King".

Had she seen MLK in 1963, as she said in Selma, she would have been 15 or 16 at that time.

But authors Don Van Natta, Jr. and Jeff Gerth, ("Her Way”, 2007) seem to think that Hillary was then 17, which would have put her at a King speech in late 1964 or 1965. A December, 2007 Washington Post article by Sally Jenkins had Hillary at an MLK speech “on a Sunday night in 1962”. Carl Bernstein, the former WaPo writer in his book “A Woman In Charge", says Hillary saw King in the the fall of 1961 (Hillary would have been 14 at that time). And The Boston Globe also recently had Clinton with King in the spring 1962.

So when was it? Was Hillary at King’s speech on that “cold night in January” 1963, or the spring of 1962. Was it 1965 or the fall of 1961?

Perhaps more importantly, how is it that Pulitzer prize-winning journalists such as Bernstein and Van Natta, Jr manage to get such simple biographical facts wrong?   Don't they do basic historical research when they write biography?  And did Senator Clinton herself not remember the date correctly when she spoke at Selma? 

I asked another journalist, Michael Dobbs at washingtonpost.com’s FactChecker, to help out with the answers to these questions.

Dobbs asked the Clinton campaign about the discrepancy, and not surprisingly, the “no surprises” candidate never got back to him after repeated requests.

So Dobbs spoke directly to Rev. Don Jones,  who was Hillary's youth group minister from mid-1961 to some time in 1963.   He took Hillary and others to the King speech.  Jones couldn't remember the exact date, but thinks that it must have been shortly after he attended another lecture by Christian theologian Alvin Rogness which took place in January 1962.  Jones added that he thinks he was single when he took Hillary's group to see Dr. King, which leads Dobbs to conclude that since Jones got married in 1963, the "overwhelming evidence" points to April 1962 .

So why did Mrs.Clinton say a “cold January night in 1963” in her Selma speech?  Dobbs says the “most likely explanation” is that Clinton’s speech writers used the reference from Gail Sheehy’s 1999 book , “Hillary’s Choice”.

But wasn’t this book slammed by Clinton’s supporters for its bias and inaccuracies?  Why would they use such a questionable source for a Clinton speech?  Why didn’t they just ask  Hillary?  Didn’t she read the speech beforehand?    She surely would have corrected the date if the speech had such an impact on her.   

Dobbs tried to get the date right by going to the Rev. Jones, who is the only source of this story.  In ten different versions of this story that have appeared over the years in books and articles in major newspapers,  no one other than Hillary and Jones is ever quoted about the event, even though there may have been as many as 60 kids in Hillary's youth group.  And Jones's own recollection of that night is at some times vague and at other times vivid. 

Dobbs credits his Washington Post colleague, Sally Jenkins, as one of a few reporters to get the date right in her 2007 article.  But Dobbs overlooks the fact that Jenkins also gave a slighlty different account:  When Jones took the group to hear King, he “introduced the children to King personally.”

Here’s the slightly embellished Sheehy version:

As if Hillary in her teenage innocence were not sufficiently awed by the speech, Jones had arranged to take his charges onstage to meet the great man. One by one, they placed their small, white hands in his warm palm. Then they filed back through the aisles, feeling the exuberance of soul brothers and sisters, and returned to their sequestered existence.

So not only did Hillary see and hear Dr. King that night, she actually met him on the stage after his speech!

Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, (“A Woman In Charge”, p.35):

Jones had taken up his assignment in Park Ridge in 1961…[T]hat fall, when Martin Luther King Jr. again came to preach in Chicago, Jones took Hillary and other members of his youth group to Orchestra Hall to hear him…After the program Jones took his awed students backstage to meet Dr. King.

The story gets more interesting when we go back to pieces written in the early 90’s.  This is from a March, 10, 1992 style piece in the Washington Post (“Hillary Clinton, Trying to Have it All”, by Lloyd Grove), and  Jones is quoted directly:

"I remember that when she was 16, I took the whole youth group to Chicago to hear this famous preacher one Sunday night in Orchestra Hall. Afterward, we all went up and I introduced her to Martin Luther King Jr."

And here is Jones a year later, again talking to the Washington Post (“The Education of Hillary Clinton”, by Martha Sherrill, January 11, 1993)

[I]n 1962, [Jones] took them into the city again, to Chicago's "Sunday Evening Club," to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak. "Hillary still talks about it, remembers it vividly," says Jones. "She says that afterward, I took everybody backstage to meet Reverend King. Now, I can't say that I recall this precisely, but she says that I introduced King to each of the kids, one by one."

So in it sounds like that in 1992 Jones vividly remembered that he introduced Hillary to King, but the following a year he couldn't precisely recall the introduction, forgot that he introduced her, but instead relied on Hillary's recollection of the event.

And finally, back to Sheehy:

"Park Ridge was sleeping through the biggest social revolution this country has ever had," says Don Jones. Hillary did not grasp the relevance at the time, but in retrospect it had clearly shaken her rigid Republicanism. Twenty years later, when she invited Jones to the Arkansas governor's mansion for tea, Hillary told him, "I'll never forget when you introduced me to Martin Luther King Jr."