2)HISTORY)@

Official Deception
when presidents lie

By Eric Alterman

L
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-
eralists, 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 field.” 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-
fiable 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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 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, financing 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 film critic named David Manning,
of the Ridgefield 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 figures 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 difficult question, but
before we can find an answer, we must at least face the facts head on: presi-
dents lie.

A
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
prominent is the argument that average citizens are simply too ignorant, busy,
or emotionally immature to appreciate the difficult 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 officer seeking to explain and gain support for a major
policy is not that of the writer of a doctoral thesis. Qualification 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-

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 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
it to imply that a president was able to reach a higher level of
The argument frequently
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-
ic consultation impossible, even were it feasible given the relative and national security makes
ignorance of the populace. democratic consultation
These questions are significant 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 official 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 Office of Strategic Influence 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 filing a friend of the court brief
in a lawsuit against former Clinton administration officials 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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 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 official 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-
rect mistakes and to reverse direction without costly, often embar-
reason politicians tend
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-
ing the truth or even being questioned about it. But leaving aside that
straint of telling the
significant 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

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 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] office forbade it.”
This was antidemocratic behavior on Washington’s part, but it was admi-
Brooks Kraft/Corbis

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
dedication to secrecy in the conduct of diplomacy had degenerated into a policy

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 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 first century, par-
ticularly when that diplomacy threatened to spill into war. For instance, the
name of Abraham Lincoln first came to public recognition when in 1848, as a
nearly anonymous congressman, he rose on the floor 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.

T
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
himself 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 fight in “foreign
wars.” On November 2 he stated flatly, “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

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 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 fired first . . .
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
POPPERFOTO/Alamy

kind of deviousness in a bad cause.”

During the Cold War, presidential deception for security purposes became
routinized, defended in elite circles as a distasteful but necessary matter of

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 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 classified 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 flair. But its prescriptive elements were clear, present, and dangerous to

Alison Seiffer

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 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 first 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,
Eisenhower’s minions were quick to issue denials. The White House undone by it.
stuck to its story that a NASA “weather research plane” on a mission
inside Turkey might have accidentally drifted into Soviet territory, and
identified the pilot as Francis Gary Powers, a civilian employee of Lockheed.
The White House fiction 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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 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.”

T
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
false 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
office? 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 first 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 figures who lie with a straight face. No editor would dare print this
version of Nixon’s first 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

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 on the bizarre burglary. That is a lie.’” Part of the explanation for this is defer-
ence to the office 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, finally,
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
official 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 official 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 significant 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 Official Deception and Its Consequences (Viking/Penguin), from
which this essa¥ is drawn.

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