First there was a Bernie photo:
At a televised Democratic candidate forum Friday, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow showed Bernie Sanders a black-and-white photo of a man with his face turned away from the camera speaking before a civil rights protest. “This is you in 1962,” Maddow said to the Vermont senator.
“Who is that handsome young guy with the dark hair?” joked Sanders. The audience laughed.
Then there wasn’t:
There was just one problem: Four University of Chicago alumni who went to school with Sanders tell TIME they believe that the dramatic photo of Sanders, which his campaign has featured on its website and in a promotional video, is not in fact a photograph of Sanders.
[...]
The alumni say the man in the photo is actually Bruce Rappaport, a fellow student activist with a similar haircut, glasses and stature, who died in 2006. “I can certainly recognize it as Bruce Rappaport, partly because of the curvature of his spine, and I see that tall thin look from the side,” said Richard Schmitt, who was in the class of 1966 and lived near Rappaport in a campus dorm. “When I saw it, I said, ‘That’s Bruce Rappaport.”
Bruce Stark, who was roommates with Rappaport for two years and best man at his first wedding, said he was sure he recognized his friend in the photo. (Stark can be seen seated in the far right of the photo. He is the African-American man with the hair part.) “The way he’s holding the book there and his left hand—that was a Bruce gesture, and the hair,” said Stark, who was well-aquatinted with Sanders and now supports his presidential bid. “My reaction is yes, that looks like Bruce.”
Two other alumni, Sally Cook, class of 1966, and Robin Kaufman, class of 1965, also said they believed the photo showed Rappaport. Since the image does not show the man’s face, the alumni conceded that it was difficult to say for certain the man is not Sanders.
Then maybe there was?
An archivist at the University of Chicago agreed in January that Sanders was not the speaker in the photo, though the school’s official decision on the man’s identity is still pending. (Since this story was published, the photographer unearthed new evidence that the man in question is Sanders.)
But wait! Mr. Rappaport’s former wife would like a word:
A local woman is asking that the Bernie Sanders campaign stop using a 1960s photo she claims was mistakenly captioned as being of Sanders that was actually of her ex-husband.
Randy Ross, of Florence, who turned 71 on Friday, said she was married to Bruce Rappaport from 1964 to 1970. Rappaport and Sanders were both activists at the University of Chicago, where Ross met Rappaport. Sanders graduated a few months before Ross arrived as a student.
“He himself was a fighter for civil rights and for children’s rights and he should get credit and Bernie’s campaign should correct the error,” Ross said Friday of Rappaport. She added that Rappaport was a trailblazer for the open adoption movement, which allows birth and adoptive parents to know one another. The two stayed friendly after the divorce and were in touch until he died in 2006.
One thing that is certain: Bernie was indeed an activist back then, and at least two of the alumni and even Rappaport’s ex-wife are likely to vote for him. They just don’t think he’s the man in the photo.
We’ll have Donovan sing us out.