https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/18/us/biden-admits-plagiarism-in-school-but-says-it-was-not-malevolent.html
Quotes:
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his
Presidential campaign, today acknowledged ''a mistake'' in his youth, when he
plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law
school.
Mr. Biden insisted, however, that he had done nothing
''malevolent,'' that he had simply misunderstood the need to cite sources
carefully. And he asserted that another controversy, concerning recent reports
of his using material from others' speeches without attribution, was ''much ado
about nothing.''
Mr. Biden, the 44-year-old Delaware Democrat who heads
the Senate Judiciary Committee, addressed these issues at the Capitol in a
morning news conference he had called expressly for that purpose.
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The file distributed by the Senator included a law school
faculty report, dated Dec. 1, 1965, that concluded that Mr. Biden had ''used five
pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution''
and that he ought to be failed in the legal methods course for which he had
submitted the 15-page paper.
______________________________________________________________________________
The faculty ruled that Mr. Biden would get an F in the
course but would have the grade stricken when he retook it the next year. Mr.
Biden eventually received a grade of 80 in the course, which, he joked today,
prevented him from falling even further in his class rank. Mr. Biden, who
graduated from the law school in 1968, was 76th in a class of 85.
The file also included Mr. Biden's transcript from his
days as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware. In his first three
semesters, his grades were C's or D's, with three exceptions: two A's in
physical education courses, a B in a course on ''Great English Writers'' and an
F in R.O.T.C. The grades improved somewhat later but were never exceptional.
_________________________________________________________________________________
In the course of his news conference, Mr. Biden also
acknowledged that he was mistaken when he implied on several occasions that it
was Denis Healey, a prominent British Labor Party official, who had given him a
videotape of another speech whose words the Senator later used. In London, Mr.
Healey's office denied giving Mr. Biden the tape, and today the Senator said
that in fact it had not come from Mr. Healey.
In addition, Mr. Biden said that in his talks invoking
that speech, by Neil Kinnock, the Labor Party leader, he had miscast some of
his own forebears, painting them as having rather more humble origins than they
in fact did. For example, borrowing Mr. Kinnock's sentiments, Mr. Biden had
said he was ''the first in his family ever to go to university.'' In fact, Mr.
Biden said today, ''there are Finnegans, my mother's family, that went to
college.''
Mr. Biden also appeared to signal a shift in the way he is casting himself politically, toward an image as a leader of the ordinary middle class rather than as a civil rights and antiwar firebrand.
''During the 60's, I was, in fact, very concerned about
the civil rights movement,'' he said. But at another point he said, ''I was not
an activist,'' adding:
''I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side
of Wilmington, Del. I was involved in what they were thinking, what they were
feeling. But I was not out marching. I was not down in not out marching. I was
not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a
dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans.''
In an address to the New Jersey Democratic State
Convention on Sept. 13, 1983, Mr. Biden appeared to suggest that he had been
deeply involved in civil rights battles.
''When I was 17, I participated in sit-ins to desegregate
restaurants and movie houses,'' he declared then. ''And my stomach turned upon
hearing the voices of Faubus and Wallace. My soul raged on seeing Bull Connor
and his dogs.''
Asked about the apparent inconsistency, Larry Rasky, the Senator's
press secretary, said that as a youth in Wilmington, Mr. Biden ''did
participate in action to desegregate one restaurant and one movie theater.''
Near the end of his news conference, Mr. Biden issued a
dramatic defense of the man he considers himself to be. He offered a kind of
rebuttal to reporters who have insistently asked how, having once cast himself
as the candidate of a ''new generation'' who spoke often of the civil rights
and antiwar movements, he could have done so with little record of
participation in either movement as a young man. He called the queries
''bizarre.''
''When I was at Syracuse,'' he said, ''I was married, I
was in law school, I wore sports coats. You're looking at a middle-class guy. I
am who I am. I'm not big on flak jackets and tie-dyed shirts. You know, that's
not me.''
