Jerry Ford, who played a highly competent center for Michigan in the 1930s, often reminds fellow jocks that the longer they're out of school, the brighter their chances of making all-American.
Although occasionally listed as all-Big Ten, the ultimate collegiate honor – all-American – happened to elude the future president.
“But with countless campaign flacks rewriting my biography, I gradually attained sports immortality,” he's fond of saying. “Frequently, if erroneously, I'm mentioned as a one-time all-American.”
Things probably won't work that well for Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, a candidate for California attorney general. It was disclosed last week that Delgadillo's political career thus far has rested in part on false claims concerning a football scholarship at Harvard and subsequent stardom in the Canadian pro ranks.
Skeptics have ascertained that Harvard did not offer football scholarships in Delgadillo's day, and that none of the Canadian League teams has a record of his playing there.
As a result, Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, California's former two-term governor, probably gains a lock on becoming attorney general. It's not that you have to be a football hero. But beyond the notion that truth is a desirable element in any prospective office-holder, we must wonder about the wisdom of an ambitious candidate who regards his campaign resume as a field of dreams.
True, many of us may devoutly wish we had been something more than what God made us. But any politician, if even mildly successful, knows he will come under close scrutiny – closest of all by folks who may not wish him well. And oh, how they love it when finding some self-acclaimed star running back who didn't even win a letter.
Military service, too, often invites exaggeration. At least two sitting members of Congress since World War II have been bounced from office for their false claims to military glory.
In 1952, when America chose a military hero as president for the first time since Grant, Utah's First District voters elected Douglas R. Stringfellow to Congress. Severely handicapped by injuries he said were linked to wartime spy heroics in Europe, he told constituents of helping rescue the anti-Hitler atomic physicist, Otto Hahn, then his own capture and torture in the Nazis' Belsen prison. Freed with the help of an anti-Hitler underground, Stringfellow claimed to have gained a Silver Star for his services.
Such, at least, was the campaign line as aired on Ralph Edwards' “This Is Your Life.” The congressman's first term was marked by statewide lecture tours under Mormon Church sponsorship.
Stringfellow was within 16 days of re-election in 1954 when it all came tumbling down. An Air Corps private, he was revealed to have undertaken no spy missions, nor been decorated. His injuries resulted not from enemy torture, but from a mine explosion along a European highway. Church elders insisted on a public confession – after which the one-termer quit Congress and melted into obscurity.
When Oregon Congressman Wes Cooley's Korean War credentials were challenged following his 1994 election, he offered an unusual reason for his inability to provide proof. Serving in top-secret Army Special Forces, he explained, he'd been sworn to secrecy. Although nominated to a second term, Cooley was induced to withdraw when the Army located records and associates showing him without overseas service. For lying on the official Oregon Voter's Pamphlet, he paid a $7,000 fine and rendered 100 hours of community service.
But the most spectacular militarily related hoax of the past century may have been by a mild-mannered Canadian, George DuPre, who fooled the literary world with his bogus account of wartime espionage as “The Man Who Wouldn't Talk.”
The best-selling scribe for DuPre's story was war correspondent Quentin Reynolds, whose 1953 Random House book became a Reader's Digest condensation. The hoax had begun with escapades DuPre related to Canadian service clubs and Boy Scout troops. They dealt with his presumed work in Special Operations and the French Resistance in World War II – how he'd masqueraded as a speechless village idiot before being captured and tortured by the Gestapo.
DuPre accepted plaudits modestly, while contributing his considerable royalties to Boy Scouts Canada. As it was certain to do, however, the ruse blew sky high. Retired Royal Canadian Air Force officers recalled sharing a Winnipeg billet with DuPre at the time he claimed to be working undercover in France.
At Bennett Cerf's suggestion, bookstores switched “The Man Who Wouldn't Talk” to their fiction shelves – where it still sold briskly.
Must our election ballots, too, offer a fiction column?
Van Deerlin represented a San Diego County district in Congress for 18 years.
