By ZEKE MILLER (AP White House Correspondent)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden made errors when talking about his uncle’s death in World War II as he praised his wartime service and said Donald Trump was not suitable to be commander in chief.
While in Pittsburgh, Biden talked about his uncle, 2nd Lt. Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr., in order to highlight the difference from reports that Trump, during his presidency, had insulted fallen service members by calling them “suckers” and “losers.”
Biden mentioned that Finnegan, the brother of Biden’s mother, “got shot down in New Guinea.” The president also said Finnegan’s body was never found and “there used to be a lot of cannibals” in the area. Biden, who also shared a similar story earlier in the day while visiting the memorial in Scranton, was not entirely accurate in his details.
The U.S. government’s official records of missing service members do not state that Finnegan’s death was due to enemy action or that cannibals were involved.
“We have a family tradition my grandfather started,” said Biden, who was a young child when his uncle died in 1944. “When visiting a family member's gravesite — I know this might sound strange to you — but you say three Hail Marys. And that’s what I was doing at the site.”
Referring to Trump, Biden, the expected GOP presidential nominee, said, “That man doesn’t deserve to have been the commander in chief for my son, my uncle.”
Biden’s older son, Beau, passed away in 2015 due to brain cancer, which the president believes was linked to his son’s yearlong deployment in Iraq, where the military used burn pits to dispose of waste.
Some former Trump officials have alleged that the then-president insulted fallen service members as “suckers” and “losers” when, they claimed, he did not want to visit a cemetery for American war dead in France in 2018. Trump denied the accusation, asking, “What kind of person would say such a thing?”
According to the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Biden’s uncle, known as “Bosie” to the family, died on May 14, 1944, while a passenger on an Army Air Forces plane that, “for unknown reasons,” was forced to land in the Pacific Ocean off the northern coast of New Guinea. “Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard,” the agency states in its description of Finnegan. “Three men did not make it out of the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash.”
The agency stated that Finnegan was a passenger on the plane during the incident. “He has not been associated with any remains recovered from the area after the war and is still unaccounted-for,” according to the agency.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates did not address the discrepancy between the agency’s records and Biden’s account when he issued a statement on the matter.
“President Biden is proud of his uncle’s military service,“ Bates said, adding Finnegan ”lost his life when the military aircraft he was on crashed in the Pacific after taking off near New Guinea.”
Biden “used his uncle’s story to make the case for fulfilling our ‘sacred commitment … to equip those we send to war and take care of them and their families when they come home,’ and as he reiterated that American veterans are anything but ‘suckers’ or ‘losers.’”
The Democratic president also got the timing wrong when discussing when his uncles enlisted in the military. He said they joined right after D-Day in June 1944, but they actually signed up a few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
After Finnegan’s death, a local newspaper printed a message from Gen. Douglas MacArthur offering condolences to Finnegan’s family:
“Dear Mr. Finnegan: In the death of your son, Second Lieutenant Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr., while in service of his country, you have my profound sympathy. Your consolation may be that he died in the uniform of our beloved country, serving in a crusade from which a better world for all will come. Very faithfully, Douglas MacArthur.”
Biden, in his 2008 book “Promises to Keep,” mentioned his uncle briefly, describing him as a flyer who was killed in New Guinea.
