Just five weeks after Brian Williams was suspended from his post as managing editor and anchor of the weekday NBC Nightly News for six months without pay for “embellishing” events that took place while he was covering the Iraq War in 2003, another well-known figure is facing similar charges.
During Wednesday's edition of the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler accused the current secretary of state of having “a Brian Williams problem” since Kerry claimed in a speech last Thursday that he was part of the group that included then-senator Al Gore and then-senator Tim Wirth in “organizing the first Senate hearings on climate change.”
While addressing the Atlantic Council, Kerry asserted:
Climate change is an issue that is personal to me, and it has been since the 1980s, when we were organizing the very first climate hearings in the Senate.
Al Gore, Tim Wirth and a group of us organized the first hearings in the Senate on this, 1988. We heard Jim Hansen sit in front of us and tell us: “It’s happening now, 1988.”
However, noted Kessler -- who is also the Fact Checker for the Post -- some discussion on the topic took place in the 1960s, while others point to "hearings in the House and Senate in the 1970s, which led to the creation of the National Climate Program Act of 1978 to study the impact of climate change.”
But “Kerry did not join the Senate until 1985, and some argue that those earlier hearings did not specifically focus on a possible global warming trend and the role of humans in climate change,” Kessler stated.
“Yet, in 1982, while in the House of Representatives, then-Rep. Al Gore (D-Tenn.) organized a hearing that for the first time featured the testimony of James E. Hansen, then-head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies,” the Post columnist indicated.
“Then came Hansen’s testimony on June 23, 1988, before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee,” Kessler stated. “That hearing was chaired and organized by then-senator Timothy Wirth of Colorado, who told an interviewer that, for a bit of stage effect, he chose a particularly hot day in the summer -- it turned out to be a record high -- and left the windows of the hearing room open the night before."
“Thus, witnesses were sweltering and wiping their brows as they testified about global warming,” Wirth said.
“This was not the first time Kerry placed himself at that hearing,” Kessler noted. Back in 2009, Kerry even mentioned opening the windows:
On a sweltering June day, some Senate staff opened up the windows and drove home the point for everyone sweating in their seats during Dr. James Hansen’s historic and tragically prescient testimony.
But neither Kerry nor Gore was a member of the Wirth committee -- though, as noted, Gore as a House member certainly was responsible for Hansen’s first testimony before Congress.
Nevertheless, Kessler stated, his speech last Thursday wasn't the first time Kerry claimed he was a pioneer in discussing climate issues in a public setting.
In 2007, while giving a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, he asserted: “I was privileged to be part of the first hearings that we held in the United States Congress on this subject, with Al Gore, on the Commerce Committee, where we sat together in 1987, 20 years ago.”
Two years later, while presenting the opening statement at a Senate hearing where Gore testified, Kerry stated:
It’s well known that Al and I have a certain political experience in common. What is less well-known is that we also teamed up on the first-ever Senate hearing on climate change for the Commerce Committee back in 1988.
Kerry next referred to the matter in an article published in 2010 on the Huffington Post website, where he wrote: “My bottom line: Al Gore and I held the Senate’s first climate change hearings in the Commerce Committee way back in 1988. Since then, precious little progress has been made, and ground has been lost internationally, all while the science has grown more compelling.”
“In all of the statements, there is a common theme -- Kerry and Gore, riding shotgun together, organizing the 'very first' Senate or Capitol Hill hearings on climate change,” Kessler indicated.
“To be fair to Kerry,” the Post columnist added, “he has been involved in the debate about climate change for many years. Gore might have bragging rights about organizing one of the first hearings, but not Kerry. “
“And yet, like Brian Williams claiming to have come under fire in Iraq, Kerry has repeatedly placed himself at the center of the action -- and the narrative,” Kessler stated before giving the current secretary of state four Pinocchios, the highest rating in his scale of dishonesty.
