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Offi cial Deception when presidents lie

By Eric Alterman

ies, like the poor and taxes, will apparently always be with us. Parents warn children against lying; most people know that lying is “wrong,” but most people do it anyway. And that in- cludes presidents of the United States. From George Washing- ton to George W. Bush – some have kept secrets, others have obfuscated, others have told outright whoppers. Democrats, Republicans, Fed- Leralists, Whigs: they all are guilty of this sin. But is it a sin? Lying is much more complicated than it looks, both morally and practically. We are all aware, as Michel de Montaigne observed, that “[t]he opposite of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless fi eld.” Postmodernism has called into question our ability to know the “truth” of any situation at any time, much less to accurately describe it. As Friedrich Nietzsche asks, “Do the desig- nations and the things coincide? Is language the adequate expression of all re- alities?” Our religious traditions teach that many great men have lied. Jacob lied to steal his father’s blessing away from Esau. Peter denies three times be- fore the cock crows that he is one of Jesus’s disciples. Much of one’s social life is lubricated by a host of apparently (and often genuinely) harmless lies. Any number of daily occurrences inspire the telling of inconsequential lies in which the act of dishonesty is not merely morally justi- fi able but close to a moral imperative. Who among us would wish to condemn Tom Sawyer for lying when he takes responsibility for Becky Thatcher’s acci- dental tearing of a special page from her teacher’s book and accepts the whip- ping in her stead? In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, two slave-catchers, looking for Jim, call out to him from the shore, demanding to know if anyone is on the raft with Huck, and, if so, whether the person is black or white. “White,” Huck says. Who would dare advise the hero to betray his friend by re- plying “black,” thereby ensuring a life of misery and human degradation for

him and his family? Tk

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AAlterman-History1.inddlterman-History1.indd 3333 44/14/07/14/07 9:36:479:36:47 AMAM People lie, nobly, to protect loved ones. But they also lie, ignobly, in the course of doing business. In a lengthy examination of the role of truth and lies in the entertainment industry published in 2001, the late Los Angeles Times writer David Shaw reported, “In Hollywood, deception is, for reporters and those who depend on them, a frustrating fact of everyday life. It appears to in- volve everything from negotiations and job changes to casting, fi nancing and scores from test screenings.” In June 2001, a Newsweek reporter who had no- ticed that a number of Sony Pictures Entertainment productions were receiv- ing consistently enthusiastic blurbs from a fi lm critic named David Manning, of the Ridgefi eld Press, a small Connecticut weekly, discovered that Manning didn’t exist; he and his blurbs had been created by Sony’s marketing team. Ac- cording to one study, most people tell between one and two lies each day, with subjects admitting to lying to between 30 and 38 percent of the people in their lives. (And, of course, they lie to pollsters, too, so these fi gures themselves may be questionable.) In a society like this, how to judge politicians? How to judge the most ex- alted of all politicians, our presidents, who are public servants but are also privy to secrets that the public absolutely must not know? It’s a diffi cult question, but before we can fi nd an answer, we must at least face the facts head on: presi- dents lie.

ny number of factors tend to interfere with a contempo- rary American president’s telling his constituents what he knows to be the unvarnished truth about almost any topic. Among the most Aprominent is the argument that average citizens are simply too ignorant, busy, or emotionally immature to appreciate the diffi cult reality that is political de- cision-making. The pundit and public philosopher Walter Lippmann, writing in 1924, famously likened the average citizen in a democracy to a deaf specta- tor sitting in the back row of a sporting event: “He does not know what is hap- pening, why it is happening, what ought to happen; he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.” Echoing these musings in his 1969 memoir, Present at the Creation, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote: The task of a public offi cer seeking to explain and gain support for a major policy is not that of the writer of a doctoral thesis. Qualifi cation must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point.... In the State Department, we used to discuss how much time that mythical “average American citizen” put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world outside his country. Assuming a man or woman with a fair education, a family, and a job in or out of the house, it seemed to us that ten minutes a day would be a high average. If this were any-

34 In Character

AAlterman-History1.inddlterman-History1.indd 3434 44/14/07/14/07 9:36:519:36:51 AMAM where near right, points to be understandable had to be clear. If we did make our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise. Acheson’s view of the attention span of the average citizen appears opti- mistic today, given what appears to be a steady decline of Americans’ interest in politics and public policy, coupled with the news media’s increasing focus on tabloid fare and “soft” features. Political scientists estimate the percentage of the public that is both interested and knowledgeable about even major foreign policy issues to be in the area of 8 to 20 percent. Yet “clearer than truth,” in Acheson’s formulation, is a tricky term. Acheson means The argument frequently it to imply that a president was able to reach a higher level of truth in his public statements by not making a fetish of adhering heard in modern times is to what he knew to be accurate – which is another way of excus- that the government’s need ing a lie. So, too, is the argument, frequently heard in modern to act swiftly and in secrecy times, that the government’s need to act swiftly and in secrecy on on matters of diplomacy matters of diplomacy and national security makes such democrat- and national security makes ic consultation impossible, even were it feasible given the relative ignorance of the populace. democratic consultation These questions are signifi cant ones, however, as the founda- impossible, even were it tion of democracy is public trust. “How,” John Stuart Mill quite feasible given the relative rightly asked, could citizens either “check or encourage what they ignorance of the populace. were not permitted to see?” Without public honesty, the process of voting becomes an exercise in manipulation rather than the ex- pression of the consent of the governed. Many a scholar has persuasively ar- gued that offi cial deception may be convenient, but that, over time, it under- mines the bond of trust between the government and the people that is essen- tial to the functioning of a democracy. Presidents, too, know that lying to their constituents is “wrong,” both in the strictly moral and philosophical sense and in the damage it causes to the democratic foundation of our political system. Yet they almost always contin- ue to lie to us, because they believe the lies they tell serve their narrow politi- cal interest on the matter in question. When, in early 2002, the Pentagon was forced to retract a plan to create an Offi ce of Strategic Infl uence for the pur- poses of distributing deliberate misinformation to foreign media, President Bush tried to undo the damage by saying, “We’ll tell the American people the truth.” At the very same moment the controversy was taking place, however, Bush’s solicitor general, Theodore Olson, was fi ling a friend of the court brief in a lawsuit against former Clinton administration offi cials whom Jennifer Harbury – a young woman whose husband had been killed in Guatemala by a CIA asset – accused of illegally misleading her about the knowledge they

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AAlterman-History1.inddlterman-History1.indd 3535 44/14/07/14/07 9:36:519:36:51 AMAM possessed about her husband’s killers. Olson’s brief argued, “There are lots of different situations when the government has legitimate reasons to give out false information,” as well as “incomplete information and even misinforma- tion.” The Supreme Court dismissed the suit and refused to rule on the legality of offi cial lies. Of course, presidential lying is hardly a new concern in American history, particularly where matters of war and peace are concerned. Excessive secrecy, a close cousin of lying and frequently its inspiration, has been a key facet of American governance since literally before the nation’s founding. Re- porters were barred from the Constitutional Convention in 1789, and Secrecy and sometimes delegates were forbidden to reveal their deliberations. The ultimate lying are occasionally success of the endeavor does not obviate the larger problem to which unavoidable in war- it points. “Concealment,” notes the philosopher Sissela Bok, insulates time, which is one bureaucracies from “criticism and interference; it allows them to cor- reason politicians tend rect mistakes and to reverse direction without costly, often embar- rassing explanation and it permits them to cut corners with no ques- to be more warlike tions being asked.” than most situations Secrecy and sometimes lying are occasionally unavoidable in war- would justify. It frees time, which is one reason politicians tend to be more warlike than them from the con- most situations would justify. It frees them from the constraint of tell- straint of telling the ing the truth or even being questioned about it. But leaving aside that signifi cant but important exception, rare is the leader who does not truth or even being argue for the necessity of secrecy while conducting sensitive negotia- questioned about it. tions with either friend or foe. From the earliest days of the republic, the president, as commander in chief under authority of Article II, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution, has restricted the dissemination of information relating to defense and foreign policy. Presidents have passion- ately argued that they could not preserve the peace nor protect the nation without keeping large portions of the actions of their government secret. This was true in Philadelphia in 1789, and it remains true today. The judicial branch generally endorses this view, and hence key sections of the very same Consti- tution that give Americans a right to examine the actions of their leaders have been declared functionally null and void as a result. The need for secrecy in certain situations is a real one, and citizens instinctively understand that no modern state can reveal everything to everyone, lest the safety of the citizens be compromised. But there is a line between refusing to divulge information and deliberate deception. Keeping a secret is not the same as telling a lie, just as refusing to comment is not the same as intentionally misleading. But it takes a brave politician to risk attack for honestly doing the former, when he can just as easily dispose of the

36 In Character

AAlterman-History1.inddlterman-History1.indd 3636 44/14/07/14/07 9:36:529:36:52 AMAM problem with an easy resort to the latter. America in its infancy was blessed with the leadership of many such brave leaders whose sense of personal honor and destiny overrode their narrow political self-interest. For instance, in 1795, President George Washington refused to supply the House with details of the treaty that his emissary John Jay had negotiated with Great Britain. He de- manded that the legislature appropriate funds to carry out its terms, but re- fused to enumerate them, insisting that his “duty to [his] offi ce forbade it.” This was antidemocratic behavior on Washington’s part, but it was admi- rably honest. If the Congress did not want to appropriate funds for purposes it did not understand, it was free to refuse. Within a generation, however, this

Brooks Kraft/Corbis Brooks dedication to secrecy in the conduct of diplomacy had degenerated into a policy

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AAlterman-History1.inddlterman-History1.indd 3737 44/14/07/14/07 9:36:529:36:52 AMAM of deliberate dishonesty. During President Monroe’s administration, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams intentionally sent the Senate incomplete sets of documents relating to a set of Central American treaties in order to receive, by subterfuge, its advice and consent. When challenged, he published a series of letters under the pseudonym “Phocion” that were meant to mislead unsuspect- ing readers regarding the nature of South America’s revolutions. These deliberate evasions and dishonest occasions frequently accompa- nied the conduct of American diplomacy during the nation’s fi rst century, par- ticularly when that diplomacy threatened to spill into war. For instance, the name of Abraham Lincoln fi rst came to public recognition when in 1848, as a nearly anonymous congressman, he rose on the fl oor of the House to respond to that body’s decision to recognize the existence of war with Mexico. In fact, no war with Mexico had existed until President James K. Polk falsely insisted that the southern nation had attacked an American army detachment on American soil. Lincoln demanded to know the precise spot upon which the al- leged attack had taken place. Polk did not respond. The stakes of presidential lies grew immeasurably as the United States began its march toward super- power status. While lying to lure the United States into a war of conquest with Mexico was hardly a trivial presidential action, nor were President McKinley’s exaggerations and misinformation with regard to Spain’s conduct in Cuba that led America to war there a half-century afterward. It was not until after Amer- ica entered World War II that the nation moved into an era of permanent wartime footing; it was then that lying and its attendant dangers became a con- tinuous feature of the nation’s political and cultural life.

he president present at the creation of this new nation was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who successfully led America into war to a considerable degree by stealth and deception. The president liked to call Thimself a “juggler,” who “never let my right hand know what my left hand does.” He was perfectly willing, in his own words, to “mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war.” Against the background of the 1937 Neutrality Act, Roosevelt added a “cash and carry” provision to permit England and France to buy American weapons. The president made his case to Congress and the na- tion in deliberately disingenuous terms, presenting what was really a step to- ward belligerency as a measure to avoid war. During the 1940 election cam- paign, Roosevelt repeatedly assured Americans, as Lyndon Johnson would do twenty-four years later, that their sons would not be sent to fi ght in “foreign wars.” On November 2 he stated fl atly, “Your president says this country is not going to war.” In early September 1941, however, a U.S. destroyer, the Greer, tracked a German U-boat for three hours and signaled its location to British

38 In Character

AAlterman-History1.inddlterman-History1.indd 3838 44/14/07/14/07 9:36:539:36:53 AMAM Franklin Delano Roosevelt successfully led America into war to a considerable degree by stealth and deception.

forces before the sub turned and attacked. It had been issued secret orders to escort British convoys and aid in the effort to sink German submarines. In an eerie foreshadowing of the second Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Greer escaped unharmed, but Roosevelt used the incident to denounce Germany. “I tell you the blunt fact,” Roosevelt explained, “that this German submarine fi red fi rst .. . without warning and with deliberate desire to sink her.” Without informing Americans that the ship had provoked the submarine, Roosevelt used the incident to step up U.S. participation in the undeclared war against Germany in the North Atlantic. Senator J. William Fulbright would later remark, in speaking of Lyndon Johnson’s disastrous decision to mislead the nation about the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964, which led to direct U.S. involvement in the Vietnamese civil war, that “FDR’s devi- ousness in a good cause made it much easier for [LBJ] to practice the same kind of deviousness in a bad cause.” During the Cold War, presidential deception for security purposes became

POPPERFOTO/Alamy routinized, defended in elite circles as a distasteful but necessary matter of

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AAlterman-History1.inddlterman-History1.indd 3939 44/14/07/14/07 9:36:539:36:53 AMAM Realpolitik and, frequently, national survival. This was true not only for the men responsible for lying but also for those independent intellectuals and scholars who might be expected to object most vociferously. This principle, later enshrined into law by a series of Supreme Court cases, would be neatly enunciated during the Cuban Missile Crisis by Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Arthur Sylvester, who informed Americans, “It’s inherent in [the] government’s right, if necessary, to lie to save itself.” The era’s Magna Carta would prove to be an internal bureaucratic report of April 1950 to President Truman entitled NSC-68. Though the document remained classifi ed until 1975, it functioned within the government as the op- erational blueprint for the policy of containment, inspired by George Kennan’s theological treatise known as the “Long Telegram,” and published as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” in Foreign Affairs, under the pseudonym X. As the end-product of extensive interagency negotiation, NSC-68 lacked Kennan’s poetic fl air. But its prescriptive elements were clear, present, and dangerous to Alison Seiffer

40 In Character

AAlterman-History1.inddlterman-History1.indd 4040 44/14/07/14/07 9:36:549:36:54 AMAM the norms of constitutional democracy. Believing that the Kremlin leaders were possessed of a “new fanatic faith,” seeking “absolute authority over the rest of the world,” the authors argued that “the integrity of our system will not be jeopardized by any measures, covert or overt, violent or non-violent, which serve the purposes of frustrating the Kremlin design.” In 1795, James Madison had warned that “[n]o nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” But in 1962, John Kennedy found himself leading a nation in which “no war has been declared, [but] the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent.” As in all wars, truth would necessarily be among the fi rst casualties. The necessity of the noble lie thus became almost an a priori assumption within the Ameri- can leadership during the Cold War, so deeply and widely held was the consensus regarding the threat posed to the United States by global Communism. Even so, the idea that a president might tell the nation Nixon was destroyed an outright lie remained a shocking one to many Americans, as Presi- by lying, Reagan dent Eisenhower would learn to his considerable chagrin. When, on weakened by it, May 1, 1960, Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev initially disclosed and Clinton almost that an American plane had been shot down inside Soviet territory, undone by it. Eisenhower’s minions were quick to issue denials. The White House stuck to its story that a NASA “weather research plane” on a mission inside Turkey might have accidentally drifted into Soviet territory, and identifi ed the pilot as Francis Gary Powers, a civilian employee of Lockheed. The White House fi ction turned out to be Nikita Khrushchev’s cue to disclose to the Supreme Soviet, “Comrades, I must let you in on a secret. When I made my report two days ago, I deliberately refrained from mentioning that we have the remains of the plane – and we also have the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking.” Howls of laughter followed as the premier added that the Soviets had also recovered “a tape recording of the signals of a number of our ground radar stations – incontestable evidence of spying.” Eisenhower admitted to his sec- retary, “I would like to resign.” It’s hard to say that the lie hurt Ike in any way, politically, and from the standpoint of personal political consequences, the act of purposeful deception by an American president depends almost entirely on the context in which it occurs. Nixon was destroyed by it, Reagan weakened by it, and Clinton almost undone by it. Just about the only safe prediction a politician can make before telling a lie or authorizing one to be told in his name is that he or she will not be able to predict its ultimate consequences. Of course Clinton lied about a private matter and one that no president before had ever faced. It doesn’t re- quire an abundance of empathy to feel that perhaps we unfairly changed the rules on him in the middle of the game.

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AAlterman-History1.inddlterman-History1.indd 4141 44/14/07/14/07 9:36:549:36:54 AMAM To the relief of many made uncomfortable by the complicated moral ques- tions raised by a president who lied about what most people consider to be a private, moral sphere, Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, returned the pres- idency to the tradition of presidential deception relating to key matters of state, particularly those of war and peace. Bush may have claimed as a candidate that he would “tell the American people the truth,” but as president, he has ap- peared remarkably unconcerned with the question of whether he even ap- peared to be speaking truthfully. As the liberal commentator Michael Kinsley would observe early in the administration’s tenure, “Bush II administration lies are often so laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother. Until you realize: They haven’t bothered. If telling the truth was less bother, they’d try that, too. The characteristic Bush II form of dishonesty is to construct an al- ternative reality on some topic and to regard anyone who objects to it as a sniv- eling dweeb obsessed with ‘nuance,’ which the president of this class, I mean of the United States, has more important things to do than worry about.” A Bush press aide, in response to a string of revelations of Bush’s falsehoods about the reasons for invading Iraq, put it another way: “The President of the United States is not a fact-checker.”

here are several reasons to worry about presidential lying. Obviously, Mill’s point still holds: A democratic people cannot sensibly be depended upon to choose their leaders if forced to do so on the basis of Tfalse information. No one would pay for a Mercedes and expect to see a Volk- swagen delivered the next day. How then can we choose a president or a sena- tor or a representative if we cannot be allowed to judge their actual actions in offi ce? Too many lies eat away at the foundation of our discourse, making any kind of political negotiation all but impossible. Why do a deal with anyone whose word is not his bond – unless you can coerce him to follow through? And if you need to rely on coercion, then what’s the point of the negotiation in the fi rst place? The primary reason for a president to resist lying, however, is a pragmatic one: reality cannot be lied away. It will demand its tribute, even if the presi- dent’s opponents, and the frequently toothless watchdogs of the mainstream media, do not. And toothless they are. As the legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bra- dlee observes, “Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to han- dle public fi gures who lie with a straight face. No editor would dare print this version of Nixon’s fi rst comments on Watergate, for instance: ‘The Watergate break-in involved matters of national security, President Nixon told a nation- al TV audience last night, and for that reason he would be unable to comment

42 In Character

AAlterman-History1.inddlterman-History1.indd 4242 44/14/07/14/07 9:36:549:36:54 AMAM on the bizarre burglary. That is a lie.’” Part of the explanation for this is defer- ence to the offi ce and the belief that the American public will not accept a mere reporter’s calling the president a liar. Another factor is the insular nature of Washington’s insider culture – a society in which it is considered a graver matter to call another person a liar than it is to actually be one. And, fi nally, with the rise of the Republican far right, many ideologically driven reporters view their allegiance to the cause of their allies as trumping that of their jour- nalistic responsibilities. The journalist Robert Novak has admitted to me that during the Iran-Contra crisis that he did not mind at all being the conduit of offi cial lies so long as they served the ideological causes in which he believed. In that particular case, Novak was explaining that he “admired” then-Reagan and now-Bush offi cial Elliott Abrams for lying to him on his television pro- gram in order to hide the U.S. government’s role in support of the Contras. (Abrams was convicted of perjury but pardoned by President George H. W. Bush and hired and promoted by his son.) Such deference – to say nothing of the ideological self-censorship – is not only not in the interest of the nation, it is a disservice to the president as well. Presidents do themselves no favors when they tell signifi cant lies to the nation, and journalists do no favors to either party when they let those lies pass with- out comment. As Bradlee observes, “Just think for a minute how history might have changed if Americans had known then that their leaders felt the [Vietnam] war was going to hell in a handbasket? In the next seven years, thou- sands of American lives and more thousands of Asian lives would have been saved. The country might never have lost faith in its leaders.” The virtue of truth in the American presidency had, for all practical purposes, become en- tirely operational. Whether its citizens were aware of it or not, the presidency now operated in a “post-truth” political environment. American presidents could no longer depend on the press – its powers and responsibilities en- shrined in the First Amendment – to keep them honest. And the resulting death and destruction; the inexorable catastrophe we are currently experienc- ing in Iraq; and Bush’s inability to secure the trust of more than a small minor- ity of Americans are just some examples of the price that reality is demanding in return. ;

Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation, is a professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and at Media Matters for America, where he publishes the popular weblog “Altercation,” (www.media- matters.org/altercation). He is the author of six books, including When Presidents Lie: A History of Offi cial Deception and Its Consequences (Viking/Penguin), from which this essa¥ is drawn.

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