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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 22KB | 441 lines

                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 32

LIES, LIES, LIES


The current political campaign is erupting in a series of charges
and countercharges of dis honesty and deceptions, all of which
raise the question, Is anyone around here telling the truth?

By PAUL GRAY -- With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington and
Priscilla Painton and Elizabeth Rudulph/New York


    Bill Clinton says George Bush is "just like Pinocchio." A
Democratic statement accuses the President of "intentionally
lying to win the election." Presidential press secretary Marlin
Fitzwater contends that Clinton's "regard for honesty and
veracity is so low that he has no business calling anybody else
a liar." Al Gore, Clinton's running mate, describes G.O.P.
campaign strategy as a "big-lie technique." Dan Quayle argues
that detractors are lying about his position on single
motherhood.

    Is anyone telling the truth in this campaign? According to
a TIME/CNN poll conducted last week, many Americans think not.
Sixty-three percent have little or no confidence that
government leaders talk straight. Seventy-five percent believe
there is less honesty in government than there was a decade ago.
Forty percent say George Bush does not usually tell the truth,
and 36% say that about Bill Clinton.

    These numbers indicate a degree of public skepticism that
seems, paradoxically, naive and more than a little excessive in
the bargain. True, both major presidential candidates have
well-established and largely self-administered credibility
problems. "Read my lips" -- Bush's infamous 1988 pledge not to
raise taxes -- and "I didn't inhale" -- Clinton's account of his
youthful experiment with marijuana -- have become jokes, good
for a chuckle or a bored wave of the hand wherever the
politically world-weary gather.

    It is also true that the candidates persist in being
evasive about questionable episodes in their past. In Bush's
case, it is what he knew as Ronald Reagan's Vice President about
the Iran-contra scandal. His continued claim that he was "out
of the loop" or "excluded from key meetings" when this murky,
subterranean scheme was being hatched in the upper echelons of
the Reagan Administration has been constantly challenged,
notably by a 1987 memo dictated to an aide by former Secretary
of State George Shultz.

    Clinton's albatross -- now that Gennifer Flowers'
accusations of adultery have receded into the half-life of media
memory -- is his convoluted account of dealings with his
Arkansas draft board back in 1969. Clinton has bumped into
questions about avoiding induction into the military during the
Vietnam War since his early days in Arkansas politics, and his
responses amount to a tortuous thicket of incomplete and not
entirely compatible explanations.

    Ross Perot's return will revive similar concerns about his
respect for the truth. Over the years, the Texas billionaire
offered different accounts of his attempt to cut short his Naval
service. One of Perot's explanations -- that he wanted out
because he had been told by his commanding officer to bend or
break certain shipboard regulations -- has been flatly denied
by the now retired officer.

    Little wonder that the campaign has produced a sour
disenchantment with politicians, a pervasive sense of moral
moonscape where authority ought to reign. Everyone in power
lies, the current wisdom runs, and those who are caught lying
either don't care or tell more lies in order to clear
themselves.

    This attitude may be more important than anything any
candidate has said to date. Sissela Bok, a philosopher and the
author of Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (1978),
believes public veracity has been going downhill in the years
since her book was published. Says she: "I couldn't believe that
we would soon see something like Watergate again. But I do think
that the Iran-contra and B.C.C.I. scandals were in many ways
much more international. They covered much larger territories
and involved a great many people." And Bok says the
proliferation of such frauds has seriously frayed the social
fabric: "Now, there is something strange and peculiar: people
take for granted that they can't trust the government."

    Such mistrust has erupted in cycles. Jimmy Carter, who won
the White House in 1976 with the promise "I'll never lie to the
American people," probably met a higher standard of
truthfulness in office than any other President since Woodrow
Wilson. "After Watergate," says Carter's former press secretary,
Jody Powell, "whether or not you were telling the truth seemed
to be of considerable importance. But now it almost doesn't seem
to get attention paid to it anymore." Part of the reason may be
that the kind of goody-goody idealism that motivated Carter's
truthfulness also made him a spectacularly ineffectual leader
in the world of hardball politics.

    The public may now assume lying on the part of its
representatives because it expects them to lie. Clinton himself
reflected this cynical view recently, when he whimsically
entertained reporters with his laws of politics, including this
one: "Nearly everyone will lie to you, given the right
circumstances."

    Can the truth survive in the current marketplace of ideas
amid the splintering of old coalitions and the proliferation of
hot-button issues? Today's electorate seems an archipelago of
special interests -- abortion, gun control, taxes, the
environment -- offering no prospect of bridge-building
compromises. Thus winning over one group risks alienating the
others, a situation that encourages candidates to tell each
constituency what it wants to hear and puts a premium on hedging
the truth.

    In this new geography, the nature of the presidency itself
seems embattled. Americans have never cheered the arrival of a
proven liar in the White House, but they have also given the
Chief Executive generous leeway when it came to telling part,
or almost none, of the truth. During the cold war, Presidents
were allowed to lie when national security could plausibly be
invoked. But now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, this
exemption is gone.

    Presidents were also allowed to lie when they appealed to
cherished national beliefs and mythologies. George Bush's
orchestration of the 1991 Gulf War was an inspired and inspiring
example of this dispensation. The central truth of Desert Storm
was not the peril of freedom-loving Kuwaitis or the delusions
of a tin-pot Middle Eastern despot. The Gulf War was fought over
oil and the West's continued access to it. As reasons for waging
war go, this was rather good: a national interest was
threatened, and a military response met the immediate threat.
But almost no one wanted to say or hear that young American
lives were being put at risk for a commodity. Hence the
successful collusion in mythmaking between the leaders and the
led.

    What the current hubbub over political lying ignores or
drowns out is the fact that there are disabling truths, messy
realities that positively stymie adequate response unless their
particulars are reduced to deceptive simplicities. Every
sentient human being knows this from daily experience. What has
shattered in the public sphere, as epitomized by the
Bush-Clinton campaign, is the once agreed-upon etiquette of
lying.

    The injunction against bearing false witness, branded in
stone and brought down by Moses from the mountaintop, has always
provoked ambivalent, conflicting emotions. On the one hand,
nearly everyone condemns lying. On the other, nearly everyone
does it every day. How many of the Ten Commandments can be
broken so easily and with so little risk of detection over the
telephone?

    Hence the never-ending paradox: some bedrock of honesty is
fundamental to society; people cannot live together if no one
is able to believe what anyone else is saying. But there also
seems to be an honesty threshold, a point beyond which a virtue
turns mean and nasty. Constantly hearing