Paul "rewrites history?" | Page 4 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Was going to post this in the ‘Overall was John politically good or bad?’ thread but on further investigation it deserves to be here instead.

In 2008 Paul gave an interview to Prospect magazine, the full interview is behind a paywall and so the relevant section cannot be read in full, however in the mass media,  in articles such as this from the Guardian, it was reported as “Sir Paul McCartney : I politicised the Beatles” writing

Whereas John Lennon is widely considered the “political one”, penning songs like Revolution and Give Peace A Chance , sweet Sir Paul is now presenting an alternative history. In a forthcoming interview with Prospect magazine, McCartney claims to have been the catalyst for the group’s anti-war position.

and dripping in sarcasm and resentment with sentences such as 

In a statement that forces us to read Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da as a commentary on American neo-colonialism, Sir Paul has said that it is he who turned the Beatles on to politics, introducing John, Paul and Ringo to the evils of the Vietnam war.

and 

While it’s John Lennon who has retained the reputation for rabble-rousing, “I politicised the Beatles,” McCartney insisted. And now he has passed the “megaphone” to a new generation of political artists, he said. People like Bono.

Bono, meanwhile, was honoured in Paris this weekend, at the Peace Summit. “I am an over-awarded, over-rewarded rock star,” Bono said after receiving the Man of Peace prize. “You are the people who do the real work.”

Somewhere in England, Paul McCartney is squeaking: “Me too!”

However a dig into the world of the internet brings up a response by the man who Paul spoke to during the interview, Johnathan Power, titled ‘Twisting the words of Paul McCartney‘. The whole piece should be read but part of it reads

One of the prices of the fame he has is to see his honest words and honest thoughts twisted almost out of recognition. I saw this happen close up last week when my long conversation with McCartney was published in Britain’s leading intellectual monthly, Prospect magazine. It was if the press has a mindset about the McCartney-John Lennon relationship that demands that anything he says be squeezed into some previous mold, and if doesn’t quite fit then an extra shove is made so that the verbal tentacles are distorted beyond recognition as they are pressed down.

After banner headlines over the misleading story in British newspapers, led by the big circulation, Rupert Murdoch paper, the Sunday Times, the wire service, Associated Press, carried the story around the world, where it was printed in literally hundreds of papers. One report, one identical story, the world is covered with misleading information by editors too uncaring or unmotivated or just plain lazy to make a call to Prospect to ask for the original wording. Not one journalist called me.

The fact is the interview carries not a word of rivalry with John Lennon . Neither about which Beatle discovered the Vietnam War first, (the main themes of the Sunday Times/AP story). Nor about the allusions the story made to McCartney’s (mythical) claim, at Lennon’s expense, to have written the best of the Beatles’ tunes.

The interview runs to about 5000 words — double that in its uncut form. The discussion on the Vietnam War is perhaps a dozen lines of that. The mention of John Lennon is once — when Paul describes how he returned from a conversation with Bertrand Russell to tell the other three what he had heard from the old philosopher about the evils of the war in Vietnam.