A Washington Post article charging that Sen. Marco Rubio embellished the story of his family’s flight from Cuba in the 1950s has prompted a furious pushback, not only from Rubio and his allies, but also from members of the Cuban exile community in Florida. Now, some around Rubio are wondering why the Post waited until the last minute, just before publication, to request an interview with the senator — and then rushed to publish the story online without waiting to include anything Rubio said in his own defense.
From Rubio’s perspective, events began last Thursday, October 20, at 12:57 p.m. Rubio communications director Alex Burgos received an email from Washington Post reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia headed “DEADLINE request from Washington Post.” The note said the Post wanted to speak to Rubio “regarding a piece that the editors at the Post intend to post on our Web site this afternoon and run in tomorrow’s print edition that addresses the question of when the senator’s parents came to the United States.” At 1:44 p.m., Roig-Franzia sent essentially the same message to Rubio spokesman Alex Conant with the heading “URGENT deadline WAPO request,” with another request to speak to Rubio about the piece set to run that afternoon.
Roig-Franzia had been pursuing the story as part of a biography of Rubio he has signed to write for publisher Simon & Schuster. “Manuel had been reporting and reviewing documents related to Rubio’s family history for weeks as part of [the] biography,” says Washington Post national editor Kevin Merida. But Roig-Franzia, according to Merida, only approached Post editors early last week “with the outlines of the story” that Rubio’s family came to the United States in 1956 and not in 1958 or 1959, as Rubio had said in the past. “This was not some lengthy newspaper investigation focused on the Rubios’ migration to the U.S. or on whether Rubio had not accurately portrayed that history,” Merida says.
Still, at that moment last Thursday, the Post was trailing the competition on the Rubio family story. That morning, the St. Petersburg Times had published an article, “Birthers Say Marco Rubio Is Not Eligible to be President,” which discussed the work of an anti-Rubio “birther” named Charles Kerchner, who purported to prove that Rubio is not a “natural born” American citizen and is therefore not eligible to be president or vice president of the United States. (The “birther” questions surrounding Rubio have no foundation; Rubio was born in the United States, which according to U.S. law makes him a natural-born American citizen.) More importantly from the Post’s perspective, the Times published an additional bit of information from the “birthers,” who had spent months searching out public documents about Rubio and his family. “Kerchner said the records revealed another truth: Rubio’s parents came to the United States in 1956 — four years before Fidel Castro took over,” the Times reported. “[Kerchner] accuses Rubio of embellishing his narrative as the son of Cuban exiles, a powerful tale he has used in his rapid climb in politics.”
The Times story had been public for several hours when, about 2:00 p.m., Conant and Roig-Franzia spoke on the phone. According to Conant, the Times account was the subject of several of Roig-Franzia’s questions. “He was asking me about the report that was in the St. Petersburg Times that morning about the senator’s parents having first arrived in 1956 and their travels back and forth,” Conant recalls. “His initial questions were just asking to confirm the same facts that I gave to the St. Petersburg Times.” Conant says he invited Roig-Franzia to come to Rubio’s office to view copies of Sen. Rubio’s parents’ passports. (Rubio happened to have those documents in his office because he is working on his autobiography.) Conant also sent Roig-Franzia a copy of some of the answers that Rubio’s office had earlier given to the Times for its story.
Roig-Franzia came to Rubio’s office. “He showed up an hour later, at 3:15 p.m. or so,” recalls Conant. “He and I spent about 45 minutes going through the passports. He was in my office. He called to his editor with the relevant information, and while he was doing that, I went down to get the senator. The senator came up and interviewed with him in my office for 15 or 20 minutes. Then [Roig-Franzia] started to transcribe the interview, which we taped. And while we were doing that, the story popped online.” At 4:35 Thursday afternoon, the Post sent out a “Politics News Alert” linking to the story, “Marco Rubio’s compelling family story embellishes facts, documents show.” The story had no quotes from Rubio; at that moment, the Post’s reporter was still in Rubio’s office transcribing the Rubio interview.
The Post had caught up with the St. Petersburg Times. But more than anything, the headline-grabbing portion of Roig-Franzia’s story echoed the work of the birthers who had been the subject of the earlier Times article. Back in May, Charles Kerchner wrote on his blog that Rubio’s parents “were not Cuban refugees escaping communist Cuba as he said in embellishing his life story in many of his election campaigns.” Roig-Franzia wrote that “Rubio’s dramatic account of his family saga embellishes the facts” and that the story of the Rubio family’s “supposed flight” from Cuba gave Marco Rubio a status “that could never be achieved by someone identified with the pre-Castro exodus, a group sometimes viewed with suspicion.”
The Post story, as first posted on the paper’s website, quoted from the material that Conant had sent to the St. Petersburg Times and then to Roig-Franzia — Conant says it was on background — which the Post characterized as a response from Rubio’s office. But the story had nothing from the interview with Rubio himself. A later version quoted a couple of sentences from Rubio. But the senator’s staff was left wondering: Why the rush?
“We are a competitive news organization,” says Merida. “The St. Petersburg Times had already published its own story, and Rubio’s family history already was a subject of discussion within the birthers movement. I do not think we caught the Rubio staff unaware with our inquiries. Our goal is to publish timely, relevant stories that meet our standards, and publish them for our readers in a timely manner.”
Merida says the Post had not been counting on an interview with Rubio. “Manuel was never promised an interview with Rubio. In fact, just the opposite was conveyed, according to Manuel: he was told by Rubio’s staff that the senator was busy. The 14-minute interview he ultimately conducted with the senator, while at his office, was unscheduled and impromptu. Right away, we updated our story with quotes from the interview. Because Manuel wanted to be extra careful, he went through the tape with Rubio’s press secretary listening.”
“I think our story was fair, and important in the developing narrative of Rubio’s rising political career,” Merida says. And in the end, the Post’s report that Rubio’s parents first came to the U.S. in 1956 was accurate and not disputed by Rubio. But there has been tremendous dispute, beginning with a detailed refutation that appeared in the Miami Herald on Thursday, about the paper’s interpretation of the facts. And given that dispute about what the story actually means, Rubio’s staff wonders why the Post pushed its article into the public conversation with such haste. “Given the severity of the charge, I just don’t understand how they could have run the story before interviewing Rubio, but they did,” says Conant. “Within a couple of hours of asking for an interview, they were talking with Rubio. I don’t know that it’s reasonable to expect any better…Given the facts, it’s clear the Post wasn’t seriously interested in interviewing Rubio before running the story.”
