Back in late May, President Joe Biden issued a commencement speech to the graduating class from the Naval Academy located in Annapolis, Maryland.
In the speech, he made the claim that he was once appointed to the military school back in 1965 by then Sen. J. Caleb Boggs (R-DE).
The pair would seven years later battle it out when Biden challenged Boggs for the seat in the Senate. As stated in one debate, Biden spoke about how Boggs had stated that Biden would still be in the military if he actually accepted the appointment, as Biden would have finally graduated in 1969 and then served in the Navy for at least the next five years.
“The best line of the debate was after it’s all over, the announcer, the questioner — who was a good guy, but supported my opponent, who was a good man as well, I might add — and he said, ‘Sen. Boggs, is there anything else you want to say?’ And he said, ‘Yes, just one thing.’ And he took the microphone. He said, ‘You know, Joe, if you accepted my commission to the — my appointment to the academy,’ he said, ‘you’d still have one year and three months’ active duty and I’d have no problems right now,’” Biden stated about his ‘memory’ within his address.
Ever since, many journalists have been attempting to come across any record of that actually happening, especially given the fact that Biden is known for stretching the truth of things, or just outright lying about others.
“Curators at the Delaware Historical Association in Wilmington were able to find records of Boggs’ academy nominations for just one year in the early 1960s and could not locate records for either 1965 or the more plausible year 1961,” reported The New York Post.
“That means, barring evidence from an unlikely third party, that it’s probable only Biden — who often shares incorrect or exaggerated memories — can prove his claim.”
“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,” stated Leigh Rifenburg, the chief curator, in an interview with the Post.
The periodical highlighted that Biden officially graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965 and then went through law school at Syracuse University, stating that an appointment happening in 1965 would have been extremely unusual as “the academy doesn’t grant graduate degrees.”
“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,” Rifenburg stated to the paper. “We were unable to find appointments for entry in 1961, 1963, 1964, or 1965.”