Make it a full-assed apology and we'll talk
Your "actual quote" comes word-for-word from that same Kansas City Star editorial. It probably made its way into living memory and thence onto the internets via hack novelist Taylor Caldwell's 1965 novel A Pillar of Iron, which is apparently littered with similar bogosities. For the Caldwell connection I am indebted to a 1971 letter to the Chicago Tribune by John H. Collins, Professor of History at Northern Illinois University, who added that a novelist "has a perfect right to put invented conversations and anecdotes into a novel, but should not represent these inventions as authentic history."
Spurious quotations attributed to eminent characters of the past are by way of a minor hobby of mine, box. If I tell you one of these is of dodgy provenance you can take that assertion—but not the counterfeit nugget—to the bank.
cordially,
