Last night in his post debate interview with Sean Hannity, Ron Paul was asked once again about the racists newsletters that were published in his name in the early 1990′s. I have heard this subject discussed multiple times and have come to a personal conclusion about his answer to questions and his responsibility for those words. However, this time in his answer, Paul cited a source with information about them that I wasn’t familiar with, a piece done in a magazine called Texas Monthly a decade ago.

Here is the portion of the transcript with the relevant question and answer exchange between Hannity and Paul:

Sean Hannity: … And I really admire your fierce supporters, but when I brought up the issue of your newsletters from the early 1990s, and some really outrageous things that have been written in there. And you had gone on record saying you had no idea what was in them. That kind of surprised me. Why do you not take responsibility for the things that were in your individual newsletters?

Ron Paul: In 2002 [2001], the Texas Monthly reviewed that and they wrote a long, long article, and that’s a real liberal newspaper. So you read that and you’ll that I did not write it and I do not support those views and they’re painted as something that maybe I’m racist or something.

And the video of the entire interview:

After spending some time digging through the Texas Monthly archives, I managed to find the article he was referencing. It’s an October 2001 feature article by S. C. Gwynne titled “Dr. No.” Everything other than the first few paragraphs are behind a registration gate. Fortunately for you, I went ahead and registered in order to find the relevant paragraphs. After an explanation of how they were initially dug up and made an issue of by his Republican primary opponent Greg Laughlin during his 1996 bid to return to Congress, they publish a couple quotes from an interview Paul did with Texas Monthly:

What made the statements in the publication even more puzzling was that, in four terms as a U. S. congressman and one presidential race, Paul had never uttered anything remotely like this.

When I ask him why, he pauses for a moment, then says, “I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren’t really written by me. It wasn’t my language at all. Other people help me with my newsletter as I travel around. I think the one on Barbara Jordan was the saddest thing, because Barbara and I served together and actually she was a delightful lady.” Paul says that item ended up there because “we wanted to do something on affirmative action, and it ended up in the newsletter and became personalized. I never personalize anything.”

His reasons for keeping this a secret are harder to understand: “They were never my words, but I had some moral responsibility for them . . . I actually really wanted to try to explain that it doesn’t come from me directly, but they [campaign aides] said that’s too confusing. ‘It appeared in your letter and your name was on that letter and therefore you have to live with it.’” It is a measure of his stubbornness, determination, and ultimately his contrarian nature that, until this surprising volte-face in our interview, he had never shared this secret. It seems, in retrospect, that it would have been far, far easier to have told the truth at the time.

This the most candidly I have ever heard Ron Paul speak about the story behind how that content ended up in his newsletters. While there is a link to the Texas Monthly article in the oft-cited Reason article on the newsletters, they don’t use any quotes from it. I think these remarks are the best answer to the controversy that I have seen him give. He would be wise to make similar statements if he is asked about them again.