Former President George W. Bush made a gaffe when attempting to cite a quote from Winston Churchill during a recent speech.
“It’s very important for our fellow citizens to remember these words from Winston Churchill: ‘America is indispensable for the world and the dangers of isolation loom,’” Bush said at the Atlantic Council Distinguished Leadership Awards dinner in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.
However, historians who spoke with the Guardian said that either no such quote from Churchill exists or there is no known documentation of it.
“I wonder if the speechwriter mixed up the citation, or perhaps the president did in his delivery, mentioning Churchill before that sentence rather than afterward. The following quotes were generally accurate,” said Michael Bishop, executive director of the International Churchill Society and director of the National Churchill Library and Center at George Washington University.
A spokesman for Bush said the former president made “an innocent mistake.”
“That line was simply mis-delivered by accident … It was an innocent mistake,” Freddy Ford, a spokesperson for Bush, told the Guardian.
Bush reportedly did successfully cite a speech Churchill, a former British prime minister, gave at Harvard University in September 1943 elsewhere in his remarks.
Bush, who was president from 2001 to 2009, has a history of making gaffes and other odd-sounding statements, lightheartedly referred to as “Bushisms.”
One of them happened in 2002 in Nashville, Tenn., when Bush said, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
