Bob Torricelli?
He lives it, so I thought he might have said it.
Btw, if anyone missed it, during one of the hearings on the Clinton Scandals, New Jersey's junior senator claimed that he can remember that Italians were smeared by the Kefauver Hearings on organized crime.
Torricelli claimed he remembered watching the hearings live, as a child, and that it still causes him pain.
Well, NBC's reporter Myers noted that the Kefauver Hearings started before Torricelli was born and ended when he was a few days old!
Get this - Torricelli maintains that Myers was somehow wrong in questioning his lie! Here's the story:
Out of the Mouths of Babes
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
It took only a few opening hours of the Senate campaign finance
hearings--and just one witness--to bring a verdict: namely, that the show
was a bust and wouldn't play. Such, anyway, was the instant response
from journalists and commentators, many of whom could be mistaken--as
they held forth on the hearings' lack of drama and appeal--for network
programmers. Any minute now, we thought, we would hear that this pilot
wasn't catching on with the crucial 18-to-49-year-old audience.
In fact, the first day of the proceedings provided at least one performance
pregnant with promise, high passion, personal revelation, and childhood
trauma disclosed. All this, and more, did Sen. Robert Torricelli, (D.,
N.J.) deliver when he rose, opening day, to deliver a fervent address on
the evils of ethnic stereotyping.
The senator saw, it appears, a disturbing parallel between this Senate
Governmental Affairs Committee inquiry starring various Asian donors to
the Clinton election campaigns, and the Senate's 1951 Kefauver
Committee hearings into organized crime. He had, we learned, searing
childhood memories of that investigation years back, into--as the senator
put it--the misdeeds of a few individuals. An investigation that had visited
great pain on Italian-Americans--pain that he shared, watching, though "it
was only on a flickering television screen, but I will never forget it, and
even if I tried my family would never allow me."
The senator might have forborne dragging the relatives into this oratorical
flight--which would have been asking a lot, to be sure, considering how
rare it is to find politicians today capable of uttering more than three
consecutive sentences without a reference to family. With or without the
family, Sen. Torricelli would have been better off not launching that flight
altogether, as it turned out. Or so the senator learned when NBC's Lisa
Myers called, with a camera crew, to make inquiries about a point first
noted by the Capitol Hill journal, Roll Call--namely, that at the time the
Kefauver hearings were being carried on television, Robert Torricelli was
a newborn infant. He was five days old, in fact, when the TV hearings
described in his senate speech as being among his first memories of
government--"the first hearing of the United States Senate I have ever
witnessed"--came to an end. Ms. Myers, who knows a story when she
sees one, ended up with a memorable, if brief, interview (carried on the
NBC Nightly News), in which she asks Sen. Torricelli if he didn't think
he might have left the impression he had witnessed the hearings as they
occurred.
"I think that the insensitivity that I'm afraid will befall Asian-Americans is
exactly what you're exhibiting," the enraged senator now tells Ms. Myers.
Here he is, he tells her, raising concerns about racial stereotypes and the
journalist is concerned, instead, with these questions about fact.
After this delectable scene, the senator informs Ms. Myers--in a portion of
the interview that wasn't aired--that the questions she raised showed that
she was not in touch with the concerns of mainstream Americans. The
reporter recalls her amazement that her questions about the veracity of a
speech could have brought down on her accusations of racial insensitivity.
There is in fact nothing astonishing in this, accusations of this nature being
in plentiful supply these days. Sen. Torricelli did not, that is, invent
demagoguery of this kind--fascinating as this on-air display of it was in its
raw purity.
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