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  • 2018-12-04 (xsd:date)
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  • Did George H.W. Bush Say He Would Be 'Lynched' If Americans Knew the Truth? (en)
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  • The passing of George H.W. Bush on 30 November 2018 occasioned torrents of public praise for the forty-first President of the United States, as well as recitations of his perceived failings and alleged misdeeds as a public official. As regards the latter, some commentators revisited Bush's pardoning of six former members of the Reagan administration who were involved in the Iran-Contra Affair and cover-up, a decision which, in the words of the New York Times, decapitated independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh's efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice. They also pointed out that Bush withheld documents from investigators that could have shed light on his own suspected involvement in the affair, which took place during his tenure as Ronald Reagan's vice president. Memes circulating after the announcement of Bush's death proffered a quote attributed to him that purportedly amounted to an admission of culpability in those and other nefarious doings: Variants of this statement have been making the online rounds since the mid-1990s. Whenever a source for those words is cited, it is invariably the famous White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who wrote for several national publications, operated her eponymous news service, and for decades published a widely-read newsletter, Sarah McClendon's Washington Report. This 2004 iteration, in which it was claimed that the quote in question appeared in a June 1992 issue of McClendon's newsletter, is typical: In other variants the date of the statement is given as December 1992. This version from the Democratic Underground message board was posted in July 2005: Despite the seeming unanimity as to the statement's alleged source, there is no dearth of reasons to doubt the statement's authenticity. None of the variants we examined cited a specific issue of McClendon's newsletter (which was usually published biweekly, not monthly), for example. Nor, tellingly, was the statement repeated or commented on by other mainstream journalists or publications, despite its explosive implications and the prominence of the cited source. It was not quoted in any biographies of George H.W. Bush, nor was it to be found in any of the academic and popular histories of the period we checked. The furthest back we were able to trace the quote was an anecdotal report posted online in October 1995, secondarily sourced to an interview on a radio program devoted to far-right conspiracy theories: In point of fact, however, neither the quote nor any remark resembling it can be found in any of the five issues of Sarah McClendon's Washington Report (that we know of) published in June and December of 1992, even though Bush and Iran-Contra are discussed in them. It seems preposterous, moreover, that Bush, who always publicly denied having firsthand knowledge of the machinations underlying Iran-Contra (despite entries suggesting the contrary in diaries released in 1993), would have made such an openly self-incriminating admission to a journalist. More preposterous still, the remark received no subsequent press coverage. Given that more than a quarter-century has passed since Bush allegedly uttered the statement, yet no one since has been able to document a verifiable primary source, we rate the claim that he said it False. (en)
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