In addition to serious revelations that Richard Blumenthal misrepresented his military service, there is also the matter of his role on the Harvard University swim team.
Two profiles of Blumenthal, one that appeared in Slate magazine in 2000 and a second in the Courant’s Northeast magazine in 2004, both state — incorrectly — that Blumenthal was captain of the team. The inaccuracies were mentioned in this week’s New York Times article on Blumenthal’s misleading and false statements about his military service.
Blumenthal told the Times that he “did not provide the information to reporters, was unsure how it got into circulation and was ‘astonished’ when he saw it in print.”
The Times story says that “[r]ecords at the college show that he was never on the team.”
But Waterbury native Peter Alter, who was the captain of the Harvard swim team in 1968, the year after Blumenthal graduated, told the Courant this morning that Blumenthal was on the team.
He was a freestyler and “was actually a pretty good one,” said Alter, now a lawyer in Glastonbury who still on occasion talks to Blumenthal.
The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think-tank based in Hartford, unearthed a trove of photographs from Harvard that show Blumenthal was at least associated with the team.
A photo from the 1964 Harvard College yearbook, posted on the Yankee Institute’s Facebook page, shows Blumenthal participating in a Harvard swim meet his freshman year. “However, if Blumenthal was on the Harvard swim team, he is not included in the team’s group yearbook photo that year,” Yankee’s executive director Fergus Cullen noted in an email.
Blumenthal campaign manager Mindy Myers said it is her understanding that Blumenthal was a member of the freshman swim team at Harvard.
The captain of the swim team in 1967, Blumenthal’s senior year, was James Seubold, who is now a doctor in the Chicago area. He could not be reached for comment.
Alter, who was a diver and only the second diver in school history to be named captain, said it is a “big deal to be named captain” of any Harvard sports team.
Alter said he talked to Blumenthal a few years ago, when both of them were at a function. The two men joked about the inaccurate references to Blumenthal being the team captain. The attorney general told Alter “he had no idea where it came from.”
“He said he had tried to figure out where it had started and that he had never claimed to have been the captain,” Alter said.
1967 Harvard yearbook entry, via Yankee Institute for Public Policy
One possible source: A March, 1980 profile in the Courant, written when Blumenthal was U.S. Attorney.
“Blumenthal, a bachelor, now usually does Connecticut work during nights in Washington and on Saturday and Sunday trips to his office in Bridgeport,” the article states. “A one-time marathon runner and former captain of the Harvard swimming team, he still tries to run or swim daily.”
A July, 1978 article in the Courant describes Blumenthal as “the blond, blue-eyed, sun-tanned 6-footer, a former captain of the Harvard swimming team.”
And 1969 Life magazine profile of Blumenthal begins like this: “Dick Blumenthal is 23 and at the center of the world. He lives there hungrily, bearing that special guilt of affluent postwar youth, a Harvard magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 100-yard freestyler in 51.0, square jaw, burning eyes, mannered and muted.”
From there, the swim team detail found its way into both the Slate piece and the Courant magazine story. David Plotz, the author of the Slate article, told NPR media critic David Folkenflik that he never spoke to Blumenthal.
“It’s definitely not from him telling me that he was captain of the swim team, nor his people,” Plotz told Folkenflik. Plotz added that he relied on earlier media coverage.
Former Courant staff writer Beth Hamilton, author of the Courant magazine story, said that, without looking at her notes or the tapes of the extensive interviews she conducted with Blumenthal in 2003, she has no way of knowing for sure whether Blumenthal gave her the information, or whether he confirmed it.
“I looked in the Courant files and read the Slate article,” Hamilton said. “If it was in our paper, I probably I would have felt comfortable with it.”