Clinton Email: Bill vs. Hillary and the Different Ways the Couple Uses It
The differences can be staggering.
— -- Hillary Clinton, currently under fire for using a private email account during her time as Secretary of State, says she sent more than 60,000 emails during her four-year term.
Her husband isn’t quite so e-savvy.
President Bill Clinton has sent only two emails in his lifetime, both during his tenure as commander-in-chief, his spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.
It’s been widely reported that Bill’s first email -- supposedly the first e-mail ever sent by a sitting president -- went to Sen. John Glenn, an astronaut who at the time was orbiting the Earth aboard the space shuttle Discovery.
"Hillary and I had a great time at the launch,” Clinton wrote in 1998. “We are very proud of you and the entire crew, and a little jealous.”
“We can’t wait for you to get home so we can have a first hand report. Meanwhile back on earth, we’re having a lot of fun with your adventure,” he added. “I asked an 83 year old lady what she thought of your trip. She replied that it seemed like a perfectly fine thing for a young man like you to do! I hope your last few hours go well. Give my best to the rest of the crew.”
According to White House physician Robert Darling, who reportedly loaned Clinton his Toshiba laptop that day, the president “seemed to really enjoy himself, particularly when he pressed the send key.”
However, John Gibbons, Director of White House Office of Science and Technology policy, recalled Clinton’s first email a little differently.
“We wanted to introduce the President to email and the Net. So we brought him over to the old EOB, and he sat down in front of this computer—it may have been the first time he sat down in front of a computer—and showed him how email worked,” Gibbons said in an oral history for the University of Virginia recorded in 2006. “So he typed in his first email message. It was something like, ‘Bill Clinton, it’s time to come home for lunch. Signed, Hillary,’ something like that. I saved a copy of it. That was his first email.”
According to Hillary Clinton, the private server she used to transmit her emails “started with my husband” and “contains personal communications from my husband and me.”
Mrs. Clinton is likely referring to emails sent by her husband’s staff -- and not Clinton himself. The president acknowledged as much during a speech at a tech conference in 2011:
“I sent a grand total of two emails as president, one to our troops in the Adriatic, and one to John Glenn when he was 77 years old in outer space. I figured it was okay if Congress subpoenaed those,” Clinton joked.
But Bill Clinton’s not a total tech loser. He regularly uses Twitter, and even poked fun at his wife’s iconic phone photo with his own photoshoped version.