Though perhaps not as embarrassing as his on-stage fall at the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony in 2023, President Joe Biden recently embarrassed himself again when speaking at the West Point graduation ceremony in May of 2024. During that speech, right before Memorial Day, Biden not rambled about democracy, but repeated an allegedly made up story about being appointed to West Point.
As background, Biden has told the story, which is that he was appointed to the Naval Academy at some point in the 1960s but declined to attend , numerous times before. However, there is no record of it having occurred, and, notably, Biden does not mention it even once in his 2008 autobiography, titled “Promises to Keep.”
In any case, in the speech, President Biden said, “I was appointed by a fella I ran against when I was 29-years-old to the Naval Academy. I was one of ten, I wanted to play football.” He continued, saying, “The day I was supposed to go down for the interview, a class mate of mine who was also one of the ten appointed to be chosen from.”
President Biden then insisted that he didn’t go because he wouldn’t have been able to be the quarterback or halfback on the team, saying, “He came to pick me up, I found out two days earlier that they had a quarterback named Roger Staubach and a halfback named Joe Bellino. I said, ‘Oh, I’m not going there.’ I went to Delaware.”
The New York Post reported that the story is, at best, “unlikely,” as curators for the Delaware Historical Association went ‘box-by-box’ searching for Academy nominations and were unable to find Biden. Chief curator Leigh Rifenburg said, speaking to the NYP about it, “Our staff devoted a large chunk of last week to this project. We hauled and sorted through a few dozen boxes from the relevant years, which proved to be a needle-in-a-haystack proposition, as we feared.”
Rifenburg continued, “To be safe, we searched the full range of dates from 1960 to 1965. It does seem extraordinarily unlikely that an appointment would have been made in 1965, given President Biden’s years of matriculation at the University of Delaware, but we wanted to be thorough. We were unable to find appointments for entry in 1961, 1963, 1964, or 1965.”
Watch Biden make the claim here:
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Biden, during the speech, also called on the graduates to defend “democracy,” then said that America was founded on the idea of equality and “ideas need defenders to make them real and that’s what you, the class of 2024, are all about. The defenders of freedom, champions of liberty, guardians – and I mean this – guardians of American democracy. You must keep us free at this time, like none before.”
He also called on them to be loyal “not to a political party, not to a president but to the constitution of the United States of America, against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. And, calling on them to defend “democracy,” he said, “From the very beginning, nothing is guaranteed about democracy in America. Every generation has an obligation to defend it, protect it, preserve it – now it is your turn.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video