Accuracy In Media
Weekly Column
Al Gore's Veracity Problem
By Reed Irvine
April 6, 2000
The Associated Press recently reported that Al Gore had stated that "his family’s involvement with Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum began after his father was defeated for reelection to the Senate in 1970. He said his father opened a law firm and Occidental became a client."
The truth is that the relationship of Al Gore, Sr. with Armand Hammer had started long before that. New York Times reporter Douglas Frantz said in a March 19 article that Gore Sr. and Hammer met back in the 1940s, and that the two men were partners in the cattle business. Frantz said Hammer "helped make the elder Mr. Gore a wealthy man, and the politician became one of the oilman’s most valued allies in Washington." This was mainly during the 1960s — many years before the vice president claims his father developed a relationship with Hammer. Frantz did not shy away from discussing Hammer’s notorious love affair with the Soviet Union.
He pointed out that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wanted to have Hammer prosecuted on suspicions of his being a Soviet agent. Gore Sr. defended Hammer on the Senate floor, and Hammer was not prosecuted. Hammer boasted that he had Gore, Sr. in his back pocket. When Tennesseans voted Gore out of office, Hammer rewarded him with a cushy $500,000-a-year job as head of Occidental’s coal division.
Bob Somerby, a friend of Gore’s who roomed with him at Harvard, recently appeared on C-SPAN’s "Washington Journal" to defend his old friend against charges that he has a veracity problem. Somerby has a web site called "The Daily Howler," which he uses to expose what he believes are misrepresentations of statements made by the vice president. He cited as an example the claim that Gore had given himself credit for uncovering the pollution at Love Canal. He made what seemed to me to be a persuasive case that Gore had been misquoted. This was important to me, because I had included it on a list of 17 Gore lies that I had published.
Thinking that I was going to have to make a retraction, I went to Somerby’s web site to get his refutation in print. It accuses the Washington Times of "lying" about what Gore said, citing an editorial that quoted an AP story of Dec. 2, 1999. The AP had reported that Gore said, "A girl wrote (to me) that her father and grandfather suffered mysterious ailments she blamed on well water that ‘tasted funny.’ I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other places like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal...Had the first hearing on that issue. That was the one that started it all. We made a huge difference and it was all because one high school student got involved."
The Washington Times editorial had not used the entire quote, omitting the part about the high school student and saying, "I was the one" instead of "That was the one." Substituting "I" for "That" was improper, but he was clearly claiming credit for having started it all. Somerby seems to think that Gore was giving credit to the student, not himself, and failing to mention her role constituted a lie. I can’t buy that.
I decided I wouldn’t have to strike Love Canal from my list of "algorisms." I found support for this in a quote on Somerby’s web site by Bill Turque, a reporter for Newsweek, described by Somerby as "a straight shooter." Turque discusses Gore’s problem with the truth in his book, Inventing Al Gore: A Biography. This is the book that exposes Gore’s lie about his pot-smoking being "rare and infrequent."
Turque says, "(T)he old Gore — the one with a penchant for embellishing the facts — still shows up. Describing his investigation of toxic-waste sites as a young House member in the late ‘70s, he said, ‘I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal.’ Gore did hold the first congressional hearings on [Love Canal]. But Love Canal had been declared a disaster area two months before his hearings after grass-roots organizing by residents, not Gore’s heroics. The next day, Gore corrected the ‘misimpression.’"
Somerby doesn’t fault Bill Turque for failing to mention the student’s letter. He says Turque’s statement is "admirably restrained by current standards," but he sees it as "the kind of microscopic parsing that could make any public speaker a liar." If anyone is an expert on "microscopic parsing" it is Bob Somerby. He is a skilled practitioner of the art.
With Gore’s new lie about his father’s relationship with Armand Hammer, my list of algorisms is now up to 18.