Lies & Plagiarism
Commonplace in Washington, DC
Congressman-elect George Santos (R-NY-3) has been making headlines for falsifying his resumé. It’s been said that if only honest men and women were sent to Congress that each chamber would become a very lonely place.
There have been countless politicians who have embellished, exaggerated, or flat-out lied about their past experiences. Congressman Wes Cooley (R-OR-2) lied about his education and Vietnam service. So did Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) also lied about his exploits in Vietnam, as did Senator John Kerry (D-MA).[i] New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Torricelli recounted watching the live, televised Kefauver organized crime hearings … when he was just five-days old.
Then-Senator Hillary Clinton lied about coming under a barrage of sniper fire during a visit to Bosnia. On the other side of the senate aisle, Mark Kirk (R-IL) fibbed about his military awards and claims he served in Iraq. Georgia senate-hopeful Herschel Walker’s claim he graduated near the top of his college class does not square with his leaving school a year early to play professional football.
It is not just politicians. Famed military historian William Manchester embellished his WWII service. US Olympic Committee president Sandra Baldwin didn’t have the academic credentials she claimed. Ward Churchill and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) lied (here, here) about being Native American to further their academic careers.
It's not just padding resumés and adding sparkle to campaign literature that have been a problem. Plagiarism, the use of the words of another without proper attribution, has been an unfortunate staple of Washington politics. Perhaps the most prolific in plagiarizing others has been Joe Biden. He’s had a long, sad history of passing off the words of others as his own. It started at least as early as his law school days.
During his first year at Syracuse Law School, Biden was called before the law school’s disciplinary body to answer charges of plagiarism. After the board found him guilty, Biden “threw himself on the mercy of the board” and promised that he had learned his lesson, according to a school official. Biden’s mea culpa was enough to convince the board not to expel him from the school.
Years later, when it became known that Biden had been embroiled in a plagiarism scandal at Syracuse Law School, his senate staff falsely told the press he had been exonerated by the disciplinary board. Eventually, Biden came clean and admitted he had committed plagiarism. He confessed to lifting five entire pages from a law review article and including it as his own work in a paper he submitted. He argued that the public should disregard his “mistake” because it “was not in any way malevolent.”
The general public became aware of Biden’s tendency to plagiarize the words of others when he was running for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. Appearing before the California Democratic Party Convention on February 1, 1987, Biden told convention delegates that “each generation of Americans has been summoned” to test their devotion to democracy. This phrase was nearly identical to a phrase used by John Kennedy in his presidential inaugural address: “Each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty.”
Biden also borrowed liberally from Kennedy’s younger brother, Robert. Sometimes it was entire passages quoted nearly verbatim. The Miami Herald compiled several examples, including this one:
From the…Biden speech to the California Democratic Party:
“Few of us have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can act to affect a small portion of events and in the totality of these acts will be written the history of this generation.”
From a speech Robert Kennedy gave at Fordham University in June 1967:
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can work to change a small portion of events and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”[ii]
According to Time magazine, Biden also lifted passages from Hubert Humphrey and others without giving credit.
Biden’s tendency to use the work of others without attribution may reflect poorly on his character. But plagiarizing the life story of a British politician as his own raises serious questions about his overall judgment.
During an August 23, 1987, appearance before the Iowa State Fair, Biden told the audience about a thought that had occurred to him while he was on his way to the fair. Biden said, “I was thinking to myself why was it that I was the first person, the first Biden in probably a thousand generations to go to university and to law school…Was it because our mothers and fathers were not as smart as we were?”
But Biden’s thought was not nearly as spontaneous as he claimed. Biden’s description of his family’s struggles was nearly identical to one made by British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock just three months earlier, at the Welsh Labour Party Conference. Kinnock told party officials, “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?…Was it because our predecessors were so thick?”
Biden’s line, “Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse,” was eerily similar to Kinnock’s, “Those people who could sing and play and recite and write poetry.” Biden’s address, “My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after twelve hours and play football,” was not much different from Kinnock’s, “Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football….” Except, as the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd observed, Biden’s relatives “seemed to stay underground longer.” And unlike Kinnock’s father, who was actually a coal miner, Biden’s dad was a used-car salesman.[iii]
Biden’s campaign staff explained away the failure to credit Kinnock in the Iowa State Fair speech as merely an oversight. But Biden used nearly the same campaign lines on several other occasions, and each time he failed to credit Neil Kinnock.
Biden ended his presidential bid on September 23, 1987. He was elected the 46th president 23 years later.
Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, and Post at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).
[i] Mark Hyman, Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation, (New York, Post Hill Press, 2019), 13-18.
[ii] “The Similarity in Biden Speeches,” Miami Herald, September 18, 1987.
[iii] David Wilsford, Political leaders of Contemporary Western Europe: A Biographical Dictionary, (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1995), 236.