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President Biden repeated a claim that he turned down an appointment to the Naval Academy, where he said he intended to play football, during his commencement speech at West Point on Saturday.
Biden, 81, told the graduates that he was “one of 10” appointed to the naval academy by Republican Delaware Sen. J. Caleb Boggs years before he’d go on to defeat him in the 1972 election to become a US Senator.
“I was appointed by the fella I ran against when I was 29 years old to the Naval Academy. I was one of 10. I wanted to play football,” Biden said in his remarks.
“And I’d found out two days earlier they had a quarterback named Roger Staubach and a halfback named Joe Bellino — I said, ‘I’m not going there.’ I went to Delaware. Not a joke,’ the president said.
Biden previously told the same story to graduating midshipmen in 2022, where he said he had been accepted to the military institution in 1965 but declined to attend.
He didn’t give a date in Saturday’s version of the tale.
Bellino and Staubach are the only two Navy football players to win the Heisman Trophy. Staubach, also an NFL Hall of Famer, played his first game for Navy in 1962 and graduated in 1964. Bellino played his last game in January 1961 — four years before he was thinking about attending the Naval Academy.
Biden was a standout high school football player at Archmere Academy in Claymont, Delaware, where he graduated in 1961. He graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965. He reportedly played football his freshman year but did not finish the season.
RNC Research, an X account operated by the Republican National Committee’s rapid response team, called out Biden’s dubious story.
“He has repeated this lie many times before and there is still no record any of it ever happened,” the RNC posted.
Biden’s 2008 autobiography “Promises to Keep” notably does not mention the Naval Academy.
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