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On September 23, 1987, Joe Biden closed his campaign in a storm of public opinion surrounding a quality that he tried to convince voters that he had: honesty.
“I made some mistakes,” said Biden, who was then a United States senator running for the Democratic presidency for the first time. “But now, the exaggerated shadow of those mistakes has begun to obscure the nature of my candidacy and who I am.”
More than three decades later, Vice President Mike Pence repeated this controversy in a debate with Kamala Harris, Biden’s “deputy CEO” on October 7. When Harris said the Biden administration would focus on “tracing contacts, testing, targeting vaccines, and making sure vaccines are free for all” to fight Covid-19, Pence accused Biden of copying his policy. the Trump administration. “This appears to be plagiarism, something Joe Biden is more or less aware of,” he said.
Senator Joe Biden during a press conference in the court of the United States Congress in 1987. Photo: AP.
Biden’s first campaign began in free fall on September 11, 1987, when political reporter David Yepsen received a video comparing his remarks with those of British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. In his May 1987 speech, Kinnock emphasized the role of government before the people by referring to the backgrounds of himself and his wife.
“Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to go to college?” He said, then pointed to his wife, sitting in the audience. “Why was Glenys the first woman in a thousand generations to go to college? Is it because all of our ancestors weren’t brilliant? Those who can recite and write poetry? Can you work 8 hours underground and still be able to play? to football? “.
In closing remarks to the Iowa Democratic primary round on August 23, 1987, Biden said, “Why am I the first in my family to go to college? Why does my wife sit down?” In the audience seat, being the first in her family to go to college. Aren’t our ancestors brilliant? Does my college pass show that I am smarter than the rest of the family? People who know how to write poetry and teach me to recite poetry. Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors, who could still play rugby for 4 hours after 12 hours at Coal Mine in Northeast Pennsylvania?
Biden’s alleged plagiarism speech in 1987. Video: Vox.
Yepsen thinks the video is remarkable, but doesn’t think it has too much of an impact on Biden’s campaign. Biden and his aides don’t think it’s a big deal either. In the weeks leading up to that, Biden had included Kinnock’s statement in his statement, but clearly cites the source.
“I saw him quoting Neil Kinnock about 20 times,” said David Wilhelm, Biden’s campaign assistant at the time. “So I don’t know if this could be called plagiarism, I think he just forgot to cite the source. He is not going to get hold of the real life story of an English guy, but only. Using a quote has a great effect on the Bell “.
But on September 12, 1987, when many newspapers reported this, the impact of the video became apparent. “My stomach hurts when I watch NBC News, I put my videos and Kinnock side by side in a frame,” Biden wrote in a 2007 book. “It’s horrible, it came at a time when it couldn’t have been worse.” .
Biden was then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was trying to prevent Robert Bork from becoming a Supreme Court justice because he had a controversial conservative stance, which concerned civil rights activists.
The Biden campaign claims this is a one-time mistake. But it was later discovered that Biden had “forgotten” Kinnock’s source in an Aug. 26 interview with the National Education Association. Biden also admits that he changed some of his family details to resemble Kinnock’s background. In fact, Biden was not the first of his clan to go to college. His ancestors were not coal miners, but mining engineers.
Jeffrey Lord, a White House employee during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, knows he cannot sit still. A few months earlier, while stranded in Washington, DC, in the middle of a snowstorm, he had seen Biden speak to Democrats in California on television. As a fan of the late Senator Robert Kennedy, Lord immediately realized that Biden used some of Kennedy’s speeches without quoting them.
“So when you look at Neil Kinnock’s plagiarism case, a lot of people say ‘oh, it was accidental, he wasn’t the type to do it.’ But I know that’s not true,” Lord said.
Lord contacted the New York Times, found tapes of Kennedy’s speech, and brought this to light. Biden’s aides explained that they forgot to write the quote from Biden’s speech. However, the media discovered that Biden “put” some words of former Vice President Hubert Humphrey in another speech.
On September 16, 1987, things took a turn for the worse when there were rumors that Biden had been accused of plagiarism while in law school. A classmate flew to Syracuse University School of Law to obtain Biden’s file. The pile of documents, including notes from a 1965 faculty meeting, confirmed that Biden included 5 pages of a review of the law in his 15-page essay without citation.
To quell the controversy, Biden the next morning released a public record, including a letter he wrote to the dean, emphasizing that he did not intentionally plagiarize and pleaded not to be expelled.
At a press conference on September 17, 1987, Biden told reporters that this was just a misunderstanding of the footer. “I did a very stupid thing 23 years ago,” he said, noting that some teachers had claimed he was an honest man. Biden called the speech plagiarism allegations “a baby broke out loud.”
When the press conference ended, Biden stated, “I’m still in the race. I’m in the race to win.”
But a few days later, another problem arose. NewsWeek reporters returned to the video a month earlier, when a voter in Claremont, New Hampshire, quizzically asked Biden about his academic achievements.
Biden replied angrily, “Maybe my IQ is much higher than yours.” He claimed to have attended law school on a full scholarship and graduated at the highest rank in his class. “At the end of the school year, I was an outstanding political science student,” he said.
In fact, Biden later admitted that he attended law school on a partial scholarship, graduated close to the end of his class, and received the aforementioned degree thanks to a professor.
Recalling these events in a book a few decades later, Biden writes, “When I stopped trying to explain and think carefully, I felt it was my fault.” However, he called it an “honest mistake.” “I made a mistake about my academic performance, I don’t remember my ranking. I didn’t care. But the IQ test is dumb.”
On the night of September 22, 1987, Biden’s family gathered in the living room to discuss the pros and cons of staying in the race. His sons Beau and Hunter insisted that he should not give in to what they called a “cheap attack.” Others worried that his passionate attempt to save the campaign would distract him from Bork’s attempts to block Bork’s nomination. Finally, Biden’s mother said, “It’s time for him to retire.”
The next morning, he announced his retirement from the race, less than four months after the campaign began. Biden’s wife, Jill, said in 2019 that the scandal “is not only politically damaging” but also “has a great personal impact” on her husband. “Throughout his life in politics, Joe was known for his honesty.”
Ted Kaufman, an old friend and aide to Biden in 1987, says this mess “has been in the past for too long” and has nothing to do with the current campaign. Biden and his advisers insisted that the accusations of plagiarism and lies were exaggerated and that Biden dropped out in part because he wanted to focus on other issues.
“Look at his honesty ever since,” Kaufman said in 2019. “I don’t see any similarities between the current campaign and 1987.”
However, Kaufman’s statements were inaccurate, because after the 1987 scandal, Biden was still in more trouble due to being “nervous.” In 2007, Biden said he was “shot” in Iraq’s Blue Zone, after which he explained that he was close to where a bullet was fired.
In 2008, he told the AP that “literally hundreds of thousands of people attended my inaugural speech for the 1972 Senate campaign,” although this was not true. In April 2019, Biden also falsely accused businesses and the wealthy who benefited from Trump’s tax cut policy.
Still, Frank Fahey, a Biden voter with a fierce rebuttal in Claremont in 1987, says he regrets that their conversation may have been one of the factors that caused Biden to drop out of the race. In 2019, in the Democratic primary round, Fahey said that Biden was the candidate he favored the most.
“He’s a quiet guy and he’s developed a lot over the years,” Fahey said. “We, who never do things, should not do.”
Phuong Vu (Follow Washington Post)
