It is fitting that the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal erupted during the presidency of Joe Biden, America’s most prominent plagiarist.
It is fitting that the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal erupted during the presidency of Joe Biden, America’s most prominent plagiarist.
C laudine Gay has now lost her job as president of Harvard University due to a startling procession of revelations showing many plagiarized passages in her comparatively short and pedestrian roster of academic publications. Her position had already been weakened by her disastrous performance at a congressional hearing into Harvard’s tolerance for antisemitic harassment of Jewish students. Harvard could abide Gay’s indulgence of bigotry and her embrace of the ideology that breeds it, but it ultimately could not stomach the embarrassment of academic malfeasance in the service of academic mediocrity.
It is only fitting that a major plagiarism scandal — one big enough to bring down the leader of the nation’s most prominent university — should erupt on the watch of Joe Biden, the nation’s most prominent plagiarist. The tales of Biden’s plagiarisms run the gamut from academic dishonesty to cribbing other people’s rhetoric to stealing other people’s life stories. Combined with a battery of lies inflating his own academic record, they sank his first campaign for the presidency and made him a national laughingstock. They sit comfortably alongside a lifelong pattern of fabulism that continues to this day. Yet they did not ultimately stop him from advancing to the nation’s highest office.
A Stolen Life
The main Biden plagiarism story — the one that everybody remembers if they lived through the 1988 campaign — was cribbing from speeches by Neil Kinnock. Specifically, Biden stole lines from the British Labour Party leader that were featured in Kinnock’s campaign ads in a losing June 1987 race against Margaret Thatcher. Biden, by all accounts, watched the ads and loved them, thinking they supplied the message his own presidential campaign was then missing. The big Kinnock riff charged that his country was a class-ridden place where ordinary folks could never get ahead. Why, the Welsh-born son of a coal miner asked, was he the first in his family to ever go to university? Why was he the first in a thousand generations to get there? Was it because his people weren’t smart enough, or were they denied the opportunity?
It was powerful rhetoric. But it was also a faintly ridiculous argument for Americans (certainly, white Americans) to be making in the late 1980s, four decades after the G.I. Bill. This was well over a century after the self-educated Abraham Lincoln spoke in 1859 of a country where “the prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” Three years later, as president, Lincoln signed the law creating America’s public agricultural and vocational colleges.
And yet, Biden told Kinnock’s hard-knock life stories about the British class system as his own. As Richard Ben Cramer described it in his book What It Takes, “It was uncanny: it wasn’t just the words — it was every gesture, every pause. And not one mention of the name Neil Kinnock!” Biden had credited Kinnock at first when he started using the riff, but it was working, so he gradually just turned it into his own story, including in a debate at the Iowa State Fair. As Cramer noted, this was a pattern: Biden had been cautioned repeatedly to stop telling audiences that he had marched for civil rights when he hadn’t, and he just kept doing it because the crowds liked it.
The misappropriation of Kinnock’s biography was all caught on a damning videotape in the possession of John Sasso, the campaign manager for Biden’s primary rival Michael Dukakis. Yet it took weeks of showing the video for Sasso to get anybody in the mainstream media — the same institutions that refused to investigate Claudine Gay — to report on it. Not even a reporter from the Boston Globe who laughed out loud when Sasso showed him the tape.
Finally, Sasso found a few takers: Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register published their findings the same day in September 1987. As Dowd wrote:
On this side of the Atlantic, many Presidential campaign strategists of both parties greatly admired the way [the ad campaign] portrayed Mr. Kinnock. . . . Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. . . . was particularly taken with it. So taken, in fact, that he lifted Mr. Kinnock’s closing speech with phrases, gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact for his own closing speech at a debate at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 23 — without crediting Mr. Kinnock. . . .
Senator Biden began his remarks by saying the ideas had come to him spontaneously on the way to the debate. “I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?” he said. Then, pointing to his wife, he continued: “Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?”. . .
This was also a false biography for Jill Biden, by the way; her father went to business school on the G.I. Bill and became a banker:
“Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse?” continued Mr. Biden, whose father was a Chevrolet dealer in Wilmington. “Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?”
As Dowd acidly observed at the time, “The football Mr. Biden’s forebears played may not have been the same game that the British refer to as football.” It’s fortunate for Biden that Kinnock didn’t use British slang for what his family smoked.
Pressed to back this up, Biden consigliere Tom Donilon lamely offered to Dowd the spin that “evidently [Biden] had a great-grandfather who worked in a mining company.” In a 2004 interview with Jon Stewart, Biden made light of it: “Turned out I didn’t have anybody in the coal mines. I tried that crap . . . it didn’t work. . . . I actually believed it! You know, I came from Scranton, Pennsylvania, figured there had to be a coal miner somewhere in the family . . . nothing. It was an engineer. . . . I found out he graduated from Lehigh, what can I say?”
As David Greenberg wrote in Slate in 2008:
Biden’s misdeeds encompassed numerous self-aggrandizing thefts, misstatements, and exaggerations that seemed to point to a serious character defect. . . . Biden didn’t simply borrow the sort of boilerplate that counts as common currency in political discourse. . . . What he borrowed was Kinnock’s life. . . .
Unlike Kinnock, Biden wasn’t the first person in his family history to attend college, as he asserted; nor were his ancestors coal miners, as he claimed when he used Kinnock’s words. Once exposed, Biden’s campaign team managed to come up with a great-grandfather who had been a mining engineer, but he hardly fit the candidate’s description of one who “would come up [from the mines] after 12 hours and play football.” At any rate, Biden had delivered his offending remarks with an introduction that clearly implied he had come up with them himself and that they pertained to his own life. . . .
The sheer number and extent of Biden’s fibs, distortions, and plagiarisms struck many observers at the time as worrisome, to say the least.
Biden even lied about where he got the tape of Kinnock’s speech. It wasn’t just Kinnock, either. Greenberg: “Over the next days, it emerged that Biden had lifted significant portions of speeches from Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. From Kennedy, he took four long sentences in one case and two memorable sentences in another. . . . Yet another uncited borrowing came from John F. Kennedy.”
An Academic Fraud
What Biden did to Neil Kinnock was less a matter of academic dishonesty than of identity theft. But he was no slouch at academic dishonesty, either. In law school in 1965, he failed a legal-methods class and was almost kicked out of school for plagiarizing a law-review article. Cramer:
Most of his friends figured if they didn’t copy their notes for Biden (and make sure the notes got to Neilia [later his first wife] so she’d read them) . . . there was no way in hell Joe was going to make it to the second year! . . . It was in Legal Methods class . . . a course on how to cite a case, type up a brief . . . Joe handed in his crappy brief — he didn’t spend much time on it. He found a Fordham Law Review piece on the subject — “diversity jurisdiction” — and he took several cases from that. Thing was, when he took the facts of those cases from the law review, he took the journal’s description of the facts. And then he copied the footnotes, too. . . . Joe didn’t try to hide it: he footnoted the law review piece at the end . . . but only once.
A faculty committee agreed to limit his punishment to retaking the class. A normal person might, after that experience, be carefully modest about his academic attainments. Instead, in an exchange caught on camera in New Hampshire in April 1987 and reexamined once the Kinnock and law-school stories hit the press, Biden told a voter who challenged him, “I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” and followed by firing off a rapid-fire fusillade of lies about his education:
E. J. Dionne, then with the Times, wrote in detail on how much of this was untrue. For example:
He then went on to say that he “went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship,” Mr. Biden said. He also said that he “ended up in the top half” of his class and won a prize in an international moot court competition. In college, Mr. Biden said in the appearance, he was “the outstanding student in the political science department” and “graduated with three degrees from college.”
In his statement today, Mr. Biden, who attended the Syracuse College of Law and graduated 76th in a class of 85, acknowledged: “I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school and my recollection of this was in[n]acurate.”
Seventy-sixth out of 85 is not the sort of class rank that you just accidentally misremember as “the top half” of your class. The rest of the rant was wrong, too, such as the fact that he only had one undergraduate degree, albeit a double major. “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” Biden conceded to Dionne.
Democrats at the time reacted with fury . . . at the Dukakis campaign for pointing this out to the media at the time when Biden was chairing the hearings for Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination. Sasso and another member of the campaign were sacked for doing opposition research against a fellow Democrat. Donilon had tried to talk Dowd out of running the story because it would undermine their side: “Maureen, we’re in the biggest Constitutional fight in fifty years, and you want to know whether Biden’s great-grandfather was a coal miner?” Still, the damage was done: Biden became a regular punchline for Johnny Carson and Saturday Night Live, had to drop out of the race, and wasn’t treated as a plausible presidential contender when he ran in 2008. It took more than 30 years to find a generation of voters who weren’t there in 1987. But then, the stories he told were things Joe Biden wasn’t there for, either.