BLITZER: … one example of what Bob Shrum writes. He says, “The consensus view from both the foreign policy experts and the political operatives was that even though Edwards was on the Intelligence Committee,” — the Senate Intelligence Committee — “he was too junior in the Senate; he didn’t have the credibility to vote against the resolution. To my continuing regret, I said he had to be for it. He was the candidate and if he really was against the war, it was up to him to stand his ground. He didn’t.”
Because he was referring to the vote in October of 2002, in favor of the resolution authorizing President Bush to go to war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Is Shrum right about that?
EDWARDS: Can I tell you what really happened?
BLITZER: Please.
EDWARDS: There was a meeting on teacher tenure issues at our house that a number of people were at, and Bob Shrum was one of the people who came. He always liked to come to policy, thinks he’s very interested in policy, and he always wanted to express his opinion.
At that meeting, which was entirely about education, at some point in the discussion, Bob Shrum — I don’t know whether Bob Shrum was the one who brought it up, but Iraq became a topic of conversation. It was not the purpose of the meeting. There were no foreign policy consultants there or advisers of any kind in the room because it was an education meeting.
And Bob Shrum said that John Kerry had hurt himself by voting against Iraq once and that John couldn’t. At that meeting, another person who — I’m going to let him speak for himself — another person who is an economist, spoke out against the Iraq war. John was not — this was not why he was there. John was disinterested in it.
I was also — in addition to being at that meeting, I was also at a meeting later where John really did have the foreign policy advisers there, people who had worked previously in the State Department, worked in the National Security Council.
He was listening to what they said because that meant he was getting information from George Tenet, but also getting information from people who had worked in the Clinton administration. Those two pieces of information jibed, and though John was not happy with and confident about George Bush, he was convinced that if he was getting it from the Bush administration and the Clinton people thought the same thing, the information was reliable. Unfortunately, it was not, which is why John said the words every woman likes to hear her husband say every once in a while: I was wrong.
CNN.com [aired June 3, 2007]
Election 2008 John Edwards Candidates@Google: John Edwards