Word: robertson
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...Robertson tried his best to look unruffled, but the charge rankled. Did the famed televangelist, as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps in 1951, ask his father, then a U.S. Senator from Virginia, to use his pull to help the young man avoid combat duty in Korea? After fielding reporters' questions about the allegation, Robertson last week launched a counterattack. He filed two libel suits for $35 million each in Washington federal court against his accusers, former Republican Congressman Paul McCloskey Jr. and Democratic Congressman Andrew Jacobs Jr. of Indiana. "I may become a candidate for President...
...controversy began last summer, when Jacobs heard Robertson make a speech supporting military action by U.S.-backed rebels in Nicaragua. Jacobs thought McCloskey, a Korean War veteran who had been assigned to the same unit as Robertson, had once singled out the evangelist as a hawkish conservative who had avoided combat service. Jacobs, who served as a combat infantryman with the Marines in Korea, asked McCloskey to provide greater detail...
Back came a six-page letter from McCloskey, who now works as a lawyer in Palo Alto, Calif. In January 1951 he left San Diego on the U.S.S. Breckinridge along with Robertson and some 2,000 other Marines. The ship stopped at Yokosuka and Kobe, Japan; Robertson did not continue on to Korea. "My single distinct memory," McCloskey wrote, "is of Pat, with a big grin on his face, standing on the dock . . . saying something like, 'So long, you guys -- good luck,' and telling us that his father (Democratic Senator A. Willis Robertson) had got him out of combat duty...
According to Robertson's office, he did leave the U.S.S. Breckinridge in Kobe, but was later transferred to Korea, where he served at 1st Marine Division headquarters as an assistant adjutant for six months. In his 1972 autobiography Shout It from the Housetops, Robertson fleetingly mentions his service as a "Marine combat officer in Korea"; at a press conference last month where he vehemently denied McCloskey's charge, Robertson said his duties included transporting classified codes between Korea and Japan. But he did not claim any battle experience, and since then the words combat duty have been dropped from...
...most important trials of the last several decades." So maintains Robert Skolrood, executive director of Televangelist Pat Robertson's conservative National Legal Foundation and chief counsel for the 624 plaintiffs, all Christian Evangelicals. Anthony Podesta, president of the liberal lobby People for the American Way (P.A.W.), which is providing the legal team for the defense, counters that the case is a "hoax perpetrated by people who don't want the 42 million schoolchildren in this country to learn about ideas these people disagree with -- everything from divorce to evolution." The two sides are clashing in a federal courtroom in Mobile...