Maybe Vice President Joseph R. Biden is learning a lesson about telling historical inconsistencies.
Mr. Biden once famously told an interviewer that President Franklin D. Roosevelt “got on the television” to reassure Americans when the stock market crashed in 1929. Roosevelt did not become president until 1933, only experimental TV sets were in use at that time, and his famous “fireside chats” later in the 1930s were broadcast over radio.
On Monday at the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, the vice president was more careful this time when he took another trip down someone else’s memory lane. He described his father’s support for creating the state of Israel at the conclusion of World War II.
“I remember my father, a Christian, being baffled at the debate taking place [over the creation of Israel] at the end of World War II,” Mr. Biden said. Then he quickly added, “I don’t remember it at that time,” as if pre-empting second-guessers.
Mr. Biden was born in 1942, and was not quite 3 years old when World War II ended. Israel became an independent state in 1948.
The vice president said he learned the phrase “never again” as a child from his father at the family dinner table.
“It was that table that I learned that the only way to ensure that it could never happen again was the establishment and existence of a secure Jewish state of Israel,” he told AIPAC.
