President Biden’s first public speech following his announcement that he would seek re-election contained a wildly inaccurate statement about the time and place of his grandfather’s death.
Biden, 80, claimed that his grandfather “died in the same hospital I was born in two weeks before I was born” as he addressed the North America’s Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference in Washington Tuesday.
The president appeared to be referring to his father’s father, Joseph H. Biden, an oil executive who died on Sept. 26, 1941 in Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, according to an obituary published at the time.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. was born more than a year later — at St. Mary’s Hospital in Scranton, Pa.
The president’s maternal grandfather, Ambrose Joseph Finnegan, did die at St. Mary’s, but not until 1957, when the future Democratic president was still a teenager.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment or clarification on the misstatement.
Biden’s propensity for exaggerating, misremembering and making up biographical details is well known.
In December of last year, Biden recounted the story of awarding his uncle Frank a Purple Heart for his actions during the World War II Battle of the Bulge — though there is no evidence of the award and parts of the president’s reported chronology are impossible.
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