When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences - Rilegato

Eric Alterman is the “Stop the Presses” columnist for The Nation, the “Altercation” Web logger for msnbc.com (www.altercation.msnbc.com), and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Called “the most honest and incisive media critic writing today” by the National Catholic Reporter, he holds a BA from Cornell, a master’s degree from Yale, and a doctorate from Stanford.

Eric Alterman is Professor of English at Brooklyn College of City University of New York.

I.
Introduction

On Lies, Personal and Presidential
Report: Presidents Washington Through Bush May Have Lied About Key Matters—The Onion (2002)

During the final days of the Clinton presidency, Tracfone, a prepaid cellular phone service, began running a TV ad with some familiar footage of recent American presidents. First up was Richard Nixon insisting that he was not a crook. Next came former president Bush asking his fellow Republicans to read his lips, and promising “No new taxes.” Finally, the screen cut to Bill Clinton waving his finger at a television camera and sternly proclaiming that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” The spot ended with the advertiser claiming, “Talk is cheap.” Almost immediately Tracfone received what it termed a “cease-and-desist letter” from the White House. The problem was not that President Clinton took offense at the claim that he was— like all modern presidents—not to be trusted to tell the truth. Rather, the White House lawyers explained that the presidency had a long-standing policy “prohibiting the use of the president’s name, likeness, words or activities in any advertising or commercial promotion.” The accusation of presidential lying, well, no one could really argue with that.

In American politics today, the ability to lie convincingly has come to be considered an almost prima facie qualification for holding high office. Many of the lies that officials tell are obviously harmless. Audiences demand to be flattered and politicians feel compelled to oblige. The denizens of every locality expect a visiting politician to sing the praises of the “beauty” and “energy” of their fair city. The members of every interest group count on being told that their issue is “vital” and that the senator, congressman, or president who is making an appearance could not be more “delighted to be here among such good friends.” With a few exceptions, when any American politician publishes a campaign autobiography, he is accepted as its author merely for the sake of convenience. When New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wished to mock George W. Bush’s policies toward China, she noted, “W. devoted only one paragraph of his autobiography to his six-week trip to China after college to visit his parents when his father was envoy to Beijing. He wrote nothing about Chinese culture. He merely noted that the Chinese dressed alike—‘drab’—and rode bikes that looked alike.”1 But Dowd knew as well as anyone in Washington that the president did not “write” his autobiography, a job that was delegated to adviser Karen Hughes, and it is far from clear that he even read it. Yet the lie is passed over for the sake of the larger point she seeks to make, and no one even thinks to raise this issue.2 In this regard, the campaign autobiography is similar to the ritual that takes place whenever a U.S. politician sees his name floated as a potential president or even vice president. The candidate is expected to respond that he has no interest in leaving his current position, for admitting the truth of his ambition would mark him as woefully inexperienced and probably disqualify him for the office. So the candidate lies, the media dutifully report his position, everyone even remotely connected to the story understands the fiction, and we all get on with our lives. The editors of the satirical newspaper The Onion take the media’s “shock” at the revelations of presidential deception to its logical conclusion with a breathless report of George Washington’s cherry tree fable: “Evidence suggests, however, that the entire tale may have been bogus from the start. This is doubly damning to the presidency’s reputation, for it is not merely a lie, but a lie about not telling lies.”3

This is not to argue that all lies are equal. Of course some lies retain the power to shock. But as we will see in the forthcoming pages, this is less and less true of those told by any president. As The Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler noted with euphemistic delicacy in May 2004, regarding President Bush’s case for war, “Almost everything we were told before the war, other than that Saddam Hussein is bad, has turned out, so far, not to be the case: the weapons of mass destruction, the imagery of nuclear mushroom clouds, the links between al Qaeda and Hussein, the welcome, the resistance, the costs, the numbers of troops needed. All of these factors were presented by the administration with what now seems, at best, to have been a false sense of certainty.”4 And yet, when the media discovered they had been actively and repeatedly misled by members of the Bush administration on the crucial matter of whether to take the nation into its first “preemptive” war, the reaction was one of combined almost blasé denial and excuse. Whatever one thinks of the coverage of the overall argument for war, it is curious in the extreme to note that virtually every major news media outlet devoted more attention to the lies and dissimulations of one New York Times reporter, Jayson Blair, than to those of the president and vice president of the United States regarding Iraq.5 The enormous reaction to the Blair story, which included lengthy soul-searching articles based on massive internal investigations and resulted in the forced resignations of the top two editors at the Times, dwarfed any discussion of whether the president and his advisers had been honest in their arguments for war. Given that these two deceptions took place virtually simultaneously, they demonstrate that while some forms of deliberate deception remain intolerable in public life, those of the U.S. commander in chief are not among them.

Given that we have become accustomed to a culture in which everyday political lies are taken for granted, it is nevertheless remarkable to what degree presidential lies have shaped our postwar history. Yet the consequences of these lies have received precious little attention. True, the Washington establishment became unmoored over Bill Clinton’s dishonesty about his adulterous relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but nearly all felt compelled to justify this position with the qualification that his statements had been made “under oath,” to distinguish them from garden-variety presidential lies.6

The question of presidential dishonesty was also addressed with surprising vigor during the 2000 election. Vice President Gore’s campaign was consistently challenged by the media for his alleged inability to control his falsehoods. Most of these controversies centered on claims by Gore that reporters deemed to be exaggerations of his political accomplishments; stories in which he slightly embellished or misremembered a few details. In contrast, George W. Bush, who was widely understood to have trumped Gore on the “character” issue—according to both polls and media coverage—was caught in a falsehood about his arrest record, as well as any number of deliberately misleading statements about his record in Texas as well as his previous experiences in private business and in the Texas National Guard. Yet George Bush’s dishonesty never rose to the level of a major issue in the election, due to the fact that it did not comport with the larger story that the media had chosen to tell about each candidate. In this version, Gore’s “lies” were emblematic of his alleged discomfort with his own persona; of his inability to relate to people as a “real person” rather than a constantly calculating politician. George W. Bush’s falsehoods, however, were understood to be unrelated to any particular election narrative, and hence were ignored or excused regardless of their potential significance for his presidency. As ABC News’s Cokie Roberts explained, in defense of herself and her colleagues, Bush’s deceptions were not part of “the storyline...in Bush’s case, you know he’s just misstating as opposed to it playing into a story line about him being a serial exaggerator.”7

In other words, lies were only important insofar as they signaled “character” problems with a candidate. If the candidate did not have a recognized “character issue,” he was, according to these odd rules of the game, free to lie.8 Bush would take considerable advantage of this paradox once president, as well, as will be discussed in the conclusion of this book. For now, our point of departure must be to recognize that we presently operate under an unstated assumption that a certain amount of lying to the public by our presidents and other politicians has become a given in U.S. politics. In this context, the substantive issue becomes which kinds of lies are forgivable—or even admirable—and which lies are not.

In When Presidents Lie, I propose to reopen this debate by examining the lasting consequences of presidential lies. I do not do so from the perspective of a moralist. While the moral consequences of lying are certainly a worthy subject for a book, they are not the subject of this one. Parents have been warning children against lying for millennia, with merely mixed success at best. Most people, like most presidents, know that lying is “wrong,” but most people do it anyway. The argument has certainly failed to convince most postwar U.S. presidents. My hope is that the consequential arguments in this book will prove more convincing than the morality- based ones have been in the past.

This book is a detailed examination of four key presidential lies: Franklin Roosevelt and the Yalta accords, John Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lyndon Johnson and the second Gulf of Tonkin incident, and Ronald Reagan and Central America in the 1980s. In each case, the president told a clear and unambiguous falsehood to the country and to Congress regarding a crucial question of war and peace. This is not to say that the presidents in question told only lies. In some cases they may have repeated facts that they mistakenly believed to be true, but continued to repeat them even as they later learned of their falsity. For instance, Lyndon Johnson clearly became convinced that U.S. forces had been attacked in the Gulf of ...