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Making it up, then and now "Just the Facts," Says the GOP. (This Time.)By Rick Horowitz
Have we really heard the last of Albert's uncle? Don't count on it. Albert's uncle, you'll recall, was a bit player in this year's first presidential debate. The Vice President of these United States dropped him into a discussion of foreign policy -- how important the Balkans are, how important the Balkans were as the tinderbox for World War I. "My uncle," said the Veep, "was a victim of poison gas there." Are the Republicans taking his word for it? Dream on. You can bet your bumper stickers that the GOP's crack oppo-research team is digging into that claim -- and everything else the man has ever said -- to see if it stands up to scrutiny. And if it stands up as well as some of the Veep's other recent comments do, well... "The Vice President didn't mean to suggest that his uncle was gassed during World War I. He meant to say that his uncle had gas during World War I. There was this all-bean diet, you see, and..." Anyway, the Republicans are outraged (actually they're ecstatic, but outrage plays better) that Al Gore can't seem to get his facts straight, can't seem to keep from puffing up his own accomplishments. You just can't have that kind of behavior in the highest office in the land, they insist. If Gore can say he visited fires in Texas with the FEMA director when he didn't visit fires in Texas with the FEMA director, what's he going to say if he's elected? Maybe he'll say he photographed the Nazi death camps at the end of World War II. Actually, Ronald Reagan said that. About Ronald Reagan. Which was interesting, because Ronald Reagan was nowhere near the Nazi death camps at the end of World War II. In fact, Ronald Reagan never left the United States during World War II. Which didn't keep him from suggesting otherwise, according to longtime Reagan biographer Lou Cannon. On at least two occasions, Cannon reports in his "President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime," Reagan apparently recounted his experiences as a photographer in the U.S. Signal Corps, documenting the horrors of the death camps. He made the claim to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir during Shamir's November, 1983, visit to the White House, according to an Israeli newspaper account. He then apparently told the same story to Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal in February, 1984. Cannon, at the time a reporter for the Washington Post, tried to confirm the story with the Reagan White House -- "sending the press office into red alert," he writes. (It was an election year, after all.) Even chief of staff James Baker got into the act, calling Cannon to assure him that Reagan had told Baker he "never left the country" during World War II and "never told anyone that he did." Cannon reported the White House denials in his column, though he also set forth his own reservations, reservations he repeated years later in the biography: "How could Shamir and Wiesenthal, fluent in English and known for their grasp of detail, have misunderstood so completely what Reagan said to them in two different meetings more than two months apart?" Of course, this was hardly the only time, as president or candidate, that Reagan said something that was of...questionable accuracy. In fact, he was notorious for it. And how did his fellow Republicans react to their guy's occasional arm's-length relationship with the truth? (When they weren't simply denying, that is, that he'd ever uttered the particular whopper in question.) If memory serves, they reacted with a shrug. Ronald Reagan's a big-picture kind of guy, they said; he doesn't get bogged down in details. He's making a larger point, they said; who cares if he embellishes things? It makes a better story. That's not the tune they're singing these days. And in some peculiar way, Reagan's very reputation as a bit of a bumbler helped him; at least, people assumed, he wasn't trying to mislead them. Unlike some brainy type, for instance. Better a rube than a rascal, the people say. More good news for George W. Posted 10/10/00.
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Rick Horowitz