The Lies of Presidents from JFK to Bush

The fact that dictators lie is normal. Totalitarian regimes are hinged on lies; they eat them to stand. During the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev bluffed on the number of missiles in the Soviet arsenal to deter the Americans from firing the first shot and starting the arms race. In his last days in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein, who was on the ropes by that time, launched belligerent proclamations from his bunker as if he were on the verge of a final victory over the Great Satan. In the face of Arab uprisings, the Gadhafis and Mubaraks have built smokescreens of propaganda, posing as victims of foreign conspiracies or of fundamentalist fringes.

For different reasons, democratic leaders also lie. When Clinton swore on TV to millions of Americans that he did not have sexual relations with “that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” he clung to a subtle distinction in the Baptist ethic between sexual intercourse in the strict sense and oral sex. It was not technically a lie, but neither was it the truth, and voters did not forgive. That said, we should acknowledge that he had to save face and was confronting an investigation that violated his privacy (at least in the White House, there were no sex parties and female escorts like in Italy).

It was a selfish lie that was different from the “altruistic” ones that are told for the sake of the country, such as when George W. Bush engineered the story of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. It was nothing but a ploy to convince Congress and the public of the need to attack Iraq. The CIA and the Pentagon cast guilt on the dictator who would have boasted a dummy arsenal to scare Iranians. The same dictator, however, then backed off and U.N. inspectors confirmed the bluff. It is not the first, nor the only, case in U.S. history. In 1964, another president, Democrat Lyndon Johnson, used the shameful Gulf of Tonkin incident to escalate military activity in Vietnam. Four years earlier, Eisenhower exaggerated the threat of Soviet U-2 spy planes in order to cancel a planned summit with the Kremlin.

Going back even further, in 1941 Roosevelt overstated the size of a skirmish between a German submarine and a destroyer of the U.S. Navy to hasten the country’s entry into World War II. In short, who has the longest nose — an absolute tyrant or a president elected by the people? Chicago political scientist John K. Maersheimer has no doubts. He clearly proves in his latest penetrating essay, “Why Leaders Lie,” that democratic leaders spout more bullshit, especially when there is some kind of threat against national safety, because, unlike despots, they need popular support to go to war.

Think of it as a “fearmongering” mechanism or the trafficking of fear. They pump up the size of upcoming dangers and they call citizens to arms. Another kind of lie is the “strategic cover-up,” in which a leader conceals the truth about a decision that could provoke negative reactions. John F. Kennedy, for instance, denied a deal with Moscow to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey in exchange for the withdrawal of Russian ones from Cuba. Mearsheimer calls it a “noble lie, since it helped defuse an extremely dangerous confrontation between two states armed with nuclear weapons.”

Then there are lies used to build national myths. French textbooks magnify the colonial past, those of Putin’s Russia gloss over crimes of Stalinism to emphasize the victory of the Red Army at war, and Italian schoolbooks have long suggested to the young a sweetened and patchy version of fascism, of the Sept. 8, 1943, Italian armistice and of the civil war. Finally, there are those which Mearsheimer calls “liberal lies,” when a leader tries to gild the bad pill of actions and choices clearly contrary to the country’s ideals. For example, Churchill and Roosevelt were obliged to paint a holy picture of a “good” Stalin since he was an essential ally against Hitler’s Germany. What could they have done differently? Unmask him? Denounce purges and gulags at risk of losing his support? For the American political scientist, therefore, a lie is not always ethically condemnable. A head of state or government usually has excellent strategic reasons to lie, and some lies, omissions or half-truths are considered “clever, necessary and perhaps even virtuous.” This is especially true in foreign policy.

It is a pity that people are more easily teased than allied or enemy governments. On another level, the English philosopher Ian Leslie, in “Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit,” advocates the right to lie. If we want the world to remember us, it would not happen without a certain amount of fibs and hypocrisy. The Augustinian definition of lie as “a falsehood with the intention of deceiving” is too narrow to be applied to all the kinds of truth-handling to which we are exposed in everyday life. When a real estate agent wants to sell us a house, he would magnify the garden’s size or the convenience of getting to the supermarket, but he would keep quiet on the closeness of the highway.

The difference between lying and bragging (or embellishing the reality) was effectively conveyed by the golfer Tiger Woods, a known liar and serial cheater (ask his wives), when he said, “I’ve learned you can always tell the truth, but you don’t have to tell the whole truth.” Even Machiavelli advised the Prince to lie to keep his power. It is, however, a double-edged sword in democracy, because if everybody sees the politician as a professional liar, nobody will believe him anymore unless he has enough influence to make himself seem reliable in the eyes of fans.

The pounding lies of the Italian head of government about the number of his legal accusations, about the age of his occasional lovers or about those lovers’ kinship with Mubarak, amplified by the “omertà” and the servility of Rai, the public TV network, and Mediaset, a TV network owned by Berlusconi himself, become a huge robbery of truth at the expense of voters, who are deprived of the knowledge they need to vote, as is well-explained by Franca D’Agostini in the recently released book that this article anticipates. Moreover, they spread distrust toward public institutions.

Sometimes, in politics as in love, some things are more important than truth. Those in power, however, tend to see more of these things than necessary. This is proven by the reactions to Wikileaks’ dossier, by the NATO spokespersons’ vagueness during briefings about Libya bombing, and by the fibs that Tokyo’s leaders and Fukushima plant’s managers foisted upon the Japanese people. Disguising the truth in a case like that does not serve to avoid a worse evil, but it serves to save wages and legislative seats in place of human lives.