Biden adds new details to murky claim he almost went to Naval Academy before fall at Air Force commencement
President Biden told graduating cadets at the Air Force Academy on Thursday that he nearly joined the Naval Academy with a high school classmate — before deciding at the last minute against it.
Biden, 80, added new details to the latest telling after prior versions of the story were called into question due to his citation of an improbable appointment year as well as the lack of documentation.
“When I was graduating high school 300 years ago, I applied to the Naval Academy and I was picked by a senator,” Biden said at the Colorado school, shortly before he fell on stage after shaking hands with graduates.
“There’s two ways senators can pick, you can pick individually or they can name 10 people and let the academy choose,” Biden said.
“And I was a relatively good football player, so I had a shot,” he went on, insinuating he was nominated in a 10-person slate that was left to the academy to judge.
“And I remember the day that a guy named Steve Dunning from my class, [who] was also nominated, drove up, it was about seven in the morning, we were gonna drive down to Annapolis, and I had just heard the night before they had a halfback named Joe Bellino who won the Heisman Trophy and a quarterback named Roger Staubach. I went to [the University of] Delaware.”
Bellino and Staubach are the only two Midshipmen to win the Heisman Trophy as the top college football players in America. Bellino won in 1960, with Staubach matching the feat in 1963.
Dunning graduated high school alongside Biden in 1961 from Delaware’s Archmere Academy and was reached on the phone by The Post on Thursday.
The retired marketing executive said he recalled that period of time “pretty well” but declined to comment on Biden’s story.
He did not dispute the fact that online information indicates he did not attend the Naval Academy.
“These are all personal memories of his and mine and it’s not for public consumption,” Dunning said.
Biden’s ex-classmate’s LinkedIn page indicates that he enrolled in the University of Oklahoma in 1961 and later earned an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis.
His professional page doesn’t mention the Naval Academy and he isn’t mentioned in a digitized roster of 1965 academy graduates.
The Naval Academy did not respond to The Post’s request for comment but previously said it does not possess applications from the 1960s.
Biden told a similar version of the story at the Naval Academy in May of last year, saying he applied to Annapolis with a letter from then-Delaware Sen. J. Caleb Boggs.
But the year he cited — 1965 — is the same year he graduated from the University of Delaware and the academy doesn’t offer graduate degrees.
“I was appointed to the academy in 1965 by a senator who I was running against in 1972 — never planned it that way. I wasn’t old enough to be sworn in. I was only 29 years old when I was running,” Biden said last year.
“He was a fine man. His name is J. Caleb Boggs. I didn’t come to the academy because I wanted to be a football star. And you had a guy named [Roger] Staubach and [Joe] Bellino here. So I went to Delaware.”
Biden added, “The best line of the debate was after it’s all over, the announcer… he said, ‘Sen. Boggs, is there anything else you want to say?’ And he said, ‘Yes, just one thing.’ And he took the microphone. He said, ‘You know, Joe, if you accepted my commission to the — my appointment to the academy,’ he said, ‘you’d still have one year and three months’ active duty and I’d have no problems right now.’”
Biden’s 2008 autobiography “Promises to Keep” does not mention the Naval Academy and the account surprised political journalists who covered his many campaigns.
Curators at the Delaware Historical Association in Wilmington were able to find records of Boggs’ academy nominations for just one year in the early 1960s and could not locate records for either 1965 or the more plausible years 1960 or 1961.
As vice president in 2010, Biden told a slightly different version of the story at the Naval Academy.
At that time, Biden said he was “considered” by Boggs — rather than nominated, as he claimed in more recent tellings. He said that happened in 1960, which also is problematic because Boggs didn’t become a senator until 1961.
Biden has a habit of trying to relate to his audiences by sharing questionable personal anecdotes.
In December, Biden told a group of veterans that his uncle Frank Biden won the Purple Heart for his actions during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II — but there’s no evidence of the award and key details make the story factually impossible.
In October, Biden told a fire-prevention summit that firefighters nearly died extinguishing a blaze in his kitchen in 2004.
The local fire department said the event was relatively “insignificant” for trained professionals.
In January of last year, Biden told students at historically black colleges in Atlanta that he was arrested during civil rights protests — for which there is also no evidence.
In 2021, Biden told Jewish leaders that he remembered “spending time at” and “going to” the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after the murder of 11 people there in 2018.
The synagogue said he never visited and the White House later said he was thinking about a 2019 phone call to the synagogue’s rabbi.
Also in 2021, Biden told an Idaho audience that his “first job offer” came from local lumber and wood products business Boise Cascade.
The company said it was news to them and Biden had not previously described an interest in moving to the state.
In 2020, Biden said he “had the great honor of being arrested” in South Africa when he was “trying to get to see [Nelson Mandela] on Robbens [sic] Island,” where Mandela was in prison until 1990.
He said Mandela thanked him for it. Later, Biden admitted that it was untrue.
Biden is the nation’s oldest-ever president and critics often question his mental acuity.
A Washington Post-ABC poll released this month found that just 32% of the public believes Biden has the mental sharpness needed for his office.
However, Biden’s allies say that he’s simply prone to misspeaking and view it as part of his political charm.
Biden dropped out of his first presidential campaign in 1987 due to a scandal involving plagiarism of speeches and a law school paper and controversy about claims he made about his academic record.
