News reports in December 2022 questioned some biographical details for Congressman-elect George Santos. The reports raised questions about his claimed educational background, employment history, charitable works, and financial acumen. Follow up reporting even raised some questions regarding his claimed religious affiliation, athletic prowess, and a previously undisclosed marriage. Santos eventually owned up to “embellishments” to his resume and his name has become something of a punchline.
Santos’ case is flagrant, but tall tales from well-known people are not uncommon. What’s notable is that some of these literally unbelievable stories are accepted without question. For example, Alibaba founder Jack Ma claimed to have been rejected by Harvard ten times. This claim is repeated as fact even though it would be difficult to picture a scenario where this could be true.
Ma was interviewed by Charlie Rose at the World Economic Forum when he made this claim. You’d at least expect the interviewer to ask a few follow-ups. For example, Rose could have asked whether Ma applied every year to ten years. How much did the application cost and how could he afford it? Did Ma take the GMATs (or SATs or GREs), where did he take the test, and how did he do. Did Ma apply to any other American schools. Why only Harvard? If Ma could only get into a fourth-tier school in China, why would he expect to get into the world’s most famous university? Rose might also have pointed out that 99% of Americans couldn’t get into Harvard either. After a while, it’s likely that Ma would admit he made the story up or would dissemble his way into an ever more tangled web.
Ma’s dubious Harvard story makes me also question another tale Ma spun during the interview. Ma said that when KFC came to his hometown, 24 applied and 23 were accepted. Ma was the only one rejected. I know nothing about fast food hiring practices in China but it’s hard to believe that a large American company in a newly open China would need to accept 96% of job applicants. It seems that Ma didn’t want facts to get in the way of a good story.
Ma’s tales were self-effacing, meant to portray himself as an underdog. Celebrity chef David Ruggerio went a step further by boasting of criminal activity, even murder. Ruggerio’s career was sidetracked in 1998 when he was charged and pled guilty to falsifying $190,000 in credit card receipts. He later claimed in a 2022 Vanity Fair interview to have been a made man in the Mafia, with mob activity dating from the 1970s. Ruggerio’s claim was widely and credulously reported (well, by the Daily Mail and New York Post). I’m unconvinced. For one thing, according to Ruggerio’s chronology, he would have become a made man at 15. Perhaps he was the Mozart of mobsters, achieving professional success at an early age. But it sounds to me more like the embellishments of a washed-up former celebrity pitching a memoir.
Others stretch the truth, but less brazenly. An old family friend of ours became a successful businessman. When he died, obituaries across the country repeated the same story: that he attended a local university where he studied architecture. (No, the family friend was not George Costanza.) One problem is that the local university didn’t offer architecture as a course of study. From what I can piece together from various sources, he briefly attended the university and once worked for an architectural firm. His academic credentials were exaggerated but not completely made up. Still, you wonder why no reporter thought to ask, hmm, can you actually study architecture at that university? It’s not like saying he majored in, say, Business.
Some challenges to biographical claims are picky if not trivial. For example, Matthew Whitaker, Acting Attorney General in 2018 and 2019 played football in college and claimed he was an Academic All-American. It turned out he was only a “District VII Academic All-District” selection. (The University of Iowa Football Guide described him as a GTE District VII Academic All-American.) The resulting coverage struck me as much ado about not much, especially in terms of academic honors. Academic All-America is a cool award, but it’s historically more about honoring outstanding athletes who are pretty good students rather than the other way around. For example, Danny Ainge made Academic All-American with a 3.12 GPA.
An especially notorious form of bogus biography is “stolen valor,” where someone makes up or at least exaggerates his military exploits. I can remember seeing news reports back in the 1990s where, cameras rolling, real veterans would confront and publicly humiliate someone falsely claiming military service or awards. I often found these confrontations needlessly cruel. I’m not a veteran so realize I don’t have a lot of standing on the matter. But my father, a combat veteran of World War II, felt the same way.
Ron Castille, who was Philadelphia District Attorney and later Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, once pulled a gun on a fellow attorney who wore a military ribbon though he was not a veteran. (The other attorney claimed it belonged to his father from World War II.) Castille claimed he pulled the gun as a joke, but it’s not my idea of humor. Castille lost a leg in Vietnam, so I could see where he might be especially sensitive. But pulling guns at bars does not suggest a judicial temperament.
While Castille’s gun drawing bordered on the farcical, the case of Adm. Michael Boorda had tragic results. Boorda was a great success story, rising from the enlisted ranks to become Chief of Naval Operations. However, it was reported he wore two ribbons he was apparently not entitled to wear based on his service record. Although the wearing of the unauthorized ribbons appears to have been an honest mistake rather than an intentional deception, it nonetheless caused a media feeding frenzy. Boorda eventually took his own life. While there are doubtless many factors that can lead someone to take such an extreme action, there are indications, including a suicide note that suggest the ribbons scandal was a contributing factor.
It’s important to make a distinction between someone running a scam or launching a political career with people, say, exaggerating their military records to their grandchildren. The latter isn’t admirable but it’s essentially harmless. Congress passed two versions of the Stolen Valor Act, but only the second version struck the right balance.
The Stolen Valor act of 2005 made it a misdemeanor to falsely claim to have received any military decoration or medal and could result in imprisonment. The law was extremely broad, and the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds in United States v. Alvarez. Alvarez seems like a piece of work. He claimed to have served 25 years in the Marines and to have won the Medal of Honor, when he never served at all. Alvarez also falsely claimed to have played in the NHL. The Stolen Valor Act of 2015 was more tailored, requiring not just a false claim but also intent to obtain money, property, or other tangible benefit.
W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe captures a small-time fabulist with some sympathy and poignance. The novel, where farmer Ray Kinsella turns an Iowa cornfield into a baseball diamond, was made into the hit film Field of Dreams. The motion picture departs in some notable ways from the book. A fictionalized version of J.D. Salinger appears in the book but not the movie. But there was also an entirely fictional character who didn’t make it to the screen version. Eddie Scissons was an elderly man who claimed to be the Oldest Living Chicago Cub. It turns out Eddie never made it past the low minor leagues. Ray’s jerk of a brother-in-law, Mark, gleefully exposes Eddie. Ray, on the other hand has a more sympathetic view of Eddie as a harmless old man who wanted some attention.
With much available on the public record, it’s easier today to check on dubious claims. For example, a future Eddie Scissons might have trouble sustaining his claim for long since you could just look up his name on www.baseballreference.com. Many times, though, you don’t need an online database. To paraphrase the old 1990s show, Steals and Deals, if a claim sounds too good to be true, it probably is.