Presidential Untruths Hardly Unusual

WASHINGTON — “Resolve to be honest at all events,” attorney Abraham Lincoln once declared in a lecture on the legal profession. “And, if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation.”

By keeping faith with this maxim, both as a lawyer and as president of the United States, Lincoln earned for himself the sobriquet of Honest Abe. But a fair number of the nation’s chief executives have failed to adhere to that same high standard, as demonstrated by the confession this week of another lawyer-president, Bill Clinton, that he had lied to the country about his relationship with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

“You might say lying is an occupational disease of presidents,” said Stanley Kutler, University of Wisconsin historian and editor of “Abuse of Power,” a compilation of Richard M. Nixon’s Watergate tapes. “Certainly hyperbole and exaggeration and self contradictions are not unknown to them. These go with the territory.”

What makes both the lies Clinton told about Lewinsky and those Nixon told about Watergate rare in the annals of presidential mendacity is that both men were trying mainly to shield themselves rather than to protect a policy of their presidency. Just as Clinton, in his brief address to the nation, conceded that he was motivated “first by a desire to protect myself from the embarrassment of my own conduct,” Nixon wrote in his post-presidential memoirs that his decision to deny any knowledge of the Watergate cover-up was inspired by “the desperate search for ways to limit the damage to my friends, my administration and to myself.”

More typical of presidential departures from the truth was President Eisenhower’s denial in 1960 that the United States was using the U2 plane for spy flights over the Soviet Union--a denial designed to protect U.S. intelligence operations at the height of the Cold War.

“There’s a very important distinction between either lying and misleading for security purposes, which is at least motivated by a judgment as to what’s best for the country,” and the sort of lying Clinton and Nixon did, “which is pernicious,” said University of Wisconsin presidential scholar Charles Jones.

Technically, Eisenhower did not himself tell a lie. Instead, after the Soviet Union announced that it had shot down a U2 plane, he authorized the National Space Agency to issue a statement falsely claiming that the U2 was merely on a meteorological mission. But this shielding did not spare the president severe embarrassment when Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev revealed to the world that the pilot of the plane, Francis Gary Powers, had been captured alive, disproving the U.S. cover story.

A more ambiguous act of presidential misleading for national security purposes was perpetrated by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 in the wake of a supposed attack on U.S. ships by the North Vietnamese. Johnson used the incident to stampede Congress into approving the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which granted Johnson a free hand to deploy military forces in Southeast Asia and led to steady escalation of U.S. involvement. The war stirred bitter divisions at home and ultimately wrecked Johnson’s presidency.

Evidence of the North Vietnamese attack was shaky at the time and later, after visiting Vietnam, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara became convinced that it never occurred.

Presidential deceit in international affairs long preceded the Cold War. In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt’s dream of linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans was threatened by the Colombian government’s rejection of a treaty granting the United States the right to construct a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. But then he was informed that the Panamanians were planning to revolt against Colombian rule. Would the United States guarantee success of the revolution in return for the right to build the canal?

Later Roosevelt insisted that he had given “no assurances” about how the United States would react.

Nonetheless, as soon as the revolution erupted, a U.S. warship arrived to protect the rebels from Colombian forces. The United States quickly recognized the new nation and before long Roosevelt had the canal he wanted.

Roosevelt’s younger cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, displayed much the same penchant for dissembling in foreign policy before World War II, mainly by contending that the steps he was taking to aid the beleaguered British would not lead to U.S. involvement.

“Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor,” wrote a sympathetic historian of the period, Thomas Bailey. “He was like the physician who must tell the patient lies for the patient’s own good.”

But other scholars argue that, when presidents lie, they often do it for their own political good and that they sometimes miscalculate.

“Things are coming to a head soon,” Roosevelt told his confidant, Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes, in the spring of 1941. “Germany will blunder soon.”

Even as Roosevelt assured the public that his policies would keep the peace, Ickes had no doubt that Roosevelt hoped for a German submarine attack that would allow him to declare war on Hitler. What Roosevelt overlooked was the Japanese, who bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

Apart from the tangible damage that presidential lying does to the country, it also can damage the institution of the presidency.

“Presidents are chiefs of states and are supposed to be national symbols,” points out Ohio University Truman scholar Alonzo Hamby. “If they look you in the eye on television and tell you something and you find out it’s not true, it has an impact.”