LIES, TIGHT SPOTS

(and other near death experiences)

Clinton has managed more Houdini-like exploits (and catch-me-if-you can, truth- defying declarations) than the slickest of pols. A sampling:

Arkansas Arrogance

TIGHT SPOT   Presidential ambitions go up in smoke in 1980 after he loses re-election as Governor to an underdog.

ESCAPE HATCH   Apologizes for raising taxes; wife softens her image, in '82, he becomes first defeated Governor in the state to regain his seat.

Luv Ya, Little Rock

LIE   In 1990, while running for Governor, he is asked, "Will you guarantee to us that, if re- elected, there is absolutely, positively no way that your'll run for any other political office and that you'll serve out your term in fun?" Clinton responds, "You bet... That's the job I want. That's the job i'll do for the next four years."

REALITY CHECK   In 1991, Clinton announces his candidacy for President.

The Longest Speech

TIGHT SPOT   Billed as the man to watch at the 1988 Democratic Convention, he delivers a turgid address that has Johnny Carson turning him into national joke.

ESCAPE HATCH   Pals Harry and Linda BloodworthThomason use their clout to get him on Carson's show. Clinton plays the sax and makes fun of himself. More people watch the show than the speech

The Draft Dodge

LIE   Early in the 1992 presidential campaign, he says that "it was simply a fluke that I wasn't called" to serve in the Vietnam War. "I was just lucky, I guess, "he shrugs. Clinton also says he "never received any unusual or favorable treatment" that helped him avoid the draft.

REALITY CHECK   Clinton receives an induction notice while at Oxford in 1969 and asks the draft board to postpone it until the end of the term, after which he enrolls in an ROTC program in Arkansas. A well-connected uncle also successfully lobbies e board on Clinton's behalf.

The Flowers Affair

TIGHT SPOT   As the primaries began in 1992, the Star tabloid prints the accusations of Gennifer Flowers, a sometime Little Rock lounge singer, that for 12 years Clinton's interest in her went beyond music appreciation.

ESCAPE HATCH   "I'm not some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette," says Hillary on 60 Minutes, as Clinton denies the affair but admits causing "pain in my marriage." Clinton cruises to the nomination.

"I Didn't Inhale"

LIE   Beginning in 1987, he repeatedly responds to inquiries about past drug use by saying he has . never broken the laws of my state" or 11 country."

REALITY CHECK   Pressed during the 1992 Democratic primaries about whether he had broken any state, national or international laws, Clinton confesses, "I've never broken a state law, but when I was in England I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it. I didn't inhale and never tried it again."

The Newt Scam

TIGHT SPOT   Clinton advocates a national healthcare system, and the country sends him to intensive care. Result: the 1994 seizure of the House by the G.O.P. - the first time the party has done so in 40 years. Newt Gingrich is dubbed the most powerful man in America.

ESCAPE HATCH   Gingrich miscalculates, shutting down the government when budget talks fizzle. The G.O.P. gets blamed for everything from putting people out of work to closing Yosemite. Clinton then steals prized G.O.P. jewels-a balanced budget and welfare reform. He wins re-election handily in 1996.

White Lie No. 1

FIB   In 1996 Clinton says he has "vivid and painful" childhood memories of black church burnings in Arkansas.

REALITY CHECK   The director of the Arkansas History Commission says, "I've never known of a black church being burned in Arkansas.

White Lie No. 2

FIB   Asked in 1993 about his taste for fast food, the President replies, "I don't eat much junk food."

REALITY CHECK   Quickly amends remark to say, "I don't necessarily consider McDonald's junk food. I eat at McDonald's and Burger King and these other fast-food places. A lot of them have very nutritious food... chicken sandwiches... salads..."

White LIE No. 3

FIB   Claims he shot a 79 on a Martha's Vineyard golf course.

REALITY CHECK   He rarely shoots below 90. Reporters saw him hit three tee shots on into the threes.

-by Tamala M. Edwards
and Romesh Ratnesar

Page 41


SPECIAL REPORT
The fine art of political prevarication is nothing
less than ordinary, everyday lying writ large
 

By RICHARD STENGEL

THREE GREAT PRESIDENTIAL LIES: I am not a crook. I will never lie to you. I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

All first person. All simple declarative sentences. All uttered knowing the statement was false.

That's what a lie is.

In 1960, when the Russians shot down

Gary Powers' U2 spy plane, it was'

the Secretary of State, not President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who claimed a weather-research plane had gone off course. "So intense was the desire to not have the President lie," says presidential historian Michael Beschloss, "to not break the bond of trust with the American people, it was left to others. Eisenhower never spoke an untruth." Of course, Ike was never the focus of an investigation by a grand jury, either.

The history of presidential lying is a brief one because the phenomenon came into its own only in the television age. The Kennedy-Nixon debates were the first time a presidential candidate could look ordinary Americans square in the eye and dissemble: "I do not have Addison's disease." When J.F.K. boldly stated that, he knew it was a bald-faced lie.

Once upon a time, Presidents might have fudged the facts to a few Congressmen in smoke-filled rooms, but who was the wiser? If voters heard the words second- or thirdhand, how could they judge them? Now ti's impossible to fib in obscurity. Americans can already mouth the words when they see the incessant reruns of that finger-jabbing image: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Sissela Bok the high priestess of the scholars of lying, says the TV camera has made it far more dangerous for a President to prevaricate than it was 50 years ago. Now it's the camera that doesn't lie.

In some ways, lying in general has become a lot easier. The breakdown of communities and the peripatetic habits of the

population, notes Charles Ford, author of Lies! Lies!! Lies!!!: The Psychology of Deceit, have made lying harder to uncover. If you five in a condo in San Diego, you can pretend you were captain of your high school football team in Akron, Ohio. But for public figures, it's precisely the opposite: TV and the mass media turn the whole country into one small town.

AR politicians, says presidential scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, "tell the truth selectively." Bill Clinton has been accused of telling the truth slowly. This is not the same thing as lying. It's a sin of omission, not commission. It's like the difference between lying as a legal issue and as a moral one. The definition of perjury is far narrower than what your grandfather would have considered a damned he. The legal bar of truth is awfully low. Bill Clinton can be 'legally accurate" and still be lying through his teeth. "Religion and law are fishing at the opposite ends of a continuum," says Skip Masback, a

former Washington litigator who is now a Congregational Church minister. "It's not enough for religion to say, 'Just be technically accurate,' for in the depths of the soul, dissembling just doesn't cut it."

In Washington lying is an art form and a growth industry. The number of Congressmen stays the same, while the number of p.r. firms, lobbyists and pundits increases exponentially. What is the modem art of damage control, after all, but putting on a false front? What is spinning but massaging the truth? Inside the Beltway, the scandal is not the lie but the unvarnished truth. George Bush's campaign barb about Reaganism being voodoo economics raised far more hackles than his claim that Clarence Thomas was the most qualified man in America to be on the Supreme Court. Watergate was the Waterloo of presidential truth. In 1976, 70% of A ericans agreed in a national poll in that the country's leaders consistently lied to them. This from a nation brought up on Parson Weems' smarmy fable about young George Washington's perfect truthfulness. Honesty has been a casualty in the eyes of Americans ever since. Today, Bok notes, the public sees a politician's clever dodge as no different from a big fat he. We're defining deception downward.

In the past few weeks, there have been a thousand sound bites from self- righteous men in button-down shirts advising some variation on "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." This is an impossible standard. No one knows the whole truth. (Omniscience is not a human attribute.) Moreover, humankind cannot bear "nothing but the truth."

Meursault in Camus's The Stranger is incapable of lying and is executed for it. Prince Mishkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot is a man of perfect honesty who brings disaster to everyone he meets. And in Liar, Liar, Jim Carrey, who has played a few idiots in his time, is even more insufferable as a truth teller than as an inveterate b.s. artist.

The reason we have etiquette books is that not only does the truth not set you free, it gets you in trouble. "Sweetbreads? I hate sweetbreads!" "That's the dumbest haircut I've ever seen." "What a suck-up you are,  you little weenie."

TOO SMART TO LIE DWIGHT EISENHOWER did not want to be caught
in a whopper during the U2 crisis, so he got someone else to do his fibbing

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One researcher asked his test subjects: If you could have the ability to read the minds of everyone within 50 ft. of you, would you want it? No way, Jose'. Bella DePaulo of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, who has done several studies on lying in everyday life, notes that no one is totally honest all the time. "The tendency to tell lies," as jean Piaget wrote in 1932, "is a natural tendency, spontaneous and universal." One of DePaulo's studies, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, showed that people told at least one he a day, and that more socially adept folks stretched the truth more often than the less sophisticated. There's a reason the devil is always depicted as a smooth- tongued fellow. Facility breeds falsity. In the end, Presidents lie for the same reason everyone else does. It's just that the rest of us can't blame national security or cite Executive privilege when we say, "Yes, honey, I picked up the laundry."

In his briefest of speeches on Monday night, Clinton offered a taxonomy of lying. Parse his remarks, and you will find many of the categories of lies that have been promulgated by scholars and philosophers:

This is the one breathtaking line in his speech, because it is breathtakingly self-aware. Sociologists suggest that almost all lies, certainly the most pernicious ones, are motivated by selfinterest. This is what is known as an adaptive lie, a lie to avoid punishment or to achieve gain. Sociologists observe this phenomenon in children as young as two years old. This is also an expression of self- interest: by protecting his family he was protecting himself. This is the he sociologists see when one partner in a marriage hides an adulterous liaison. One study showed that while women committing adultery tend to blame themselves, the men cast the blame elsewhere. Women feel shame when they lie; men regret. A woman will say, "I lied; therefore I'm no good." A man will say, "I lied, but Ken Starr forced me to." Hey, it didn't matter. Who was being hurt anyway? For a while, we have heard tales of Bill Clinton's fabled ability to "copartrnentalize." This is a euphemism for denial, which is a defense mechanism that disavows thoughts that cause anxiety. Denial is a lie to oneself. We rationalize away the fear. Bill Clinton is a genius at denial. ""We fool others in order to fool ourselves," writes Robert C. Solomon of the University of Texas in an essay on self-deception, "and we fool ourselves in order to fool others." This exemplifies the moral principle that if you are asked an immoral question you can answer with a lie. The Philosophy 101 example of this is, if the Nazis came looking for a family of Jews whom you were hiding in your attic, you would be permitted to lie in order to protect them. Most people would say such a lie was an act of virtue. Not 19th century philosopher Immanuel Kant. He was an absolutist who believed the prohibition against lying was a paradigm of a "categorical imperative," an unconditional moral law. Kant was cruel; he would have turned in Anne Frank. With honesty like that, most people would prefer lying. People who say they never lie tend to be supercilious and self-absorbed-and not a whole lot of fun to be around.

DENY, DENY, DENY John F. KENNEDY didn't want anyone else to know
he wasn't the picture of vigor, so he lied vigorously about his health

Fortunately, all lies are not created equal. St. Augustine enumerated nine categories of lying, several of which would go into the category we call white lies. Such benign falsehoods make the world go round. No. 6, for example, is a lie that harms no one but helps someone else. This is when you tell your friend who is getting chemotherapy for breast cancer at she looks marvelous.

Clinton - and almost all pofiticians are congenitally guilty of St Augustine's lie No. 5: "That he which is told from a desire to please others in smooth discourse." It is from this desire, not more carnal ones, that he gets the nickname Slick Willie. The presidential candidate who tells audiences one thing in New Hampshire and another in California fits into this category. Politicians have been helped mightily in this regard by the ubiquity and sophistication of pollsters who tell politicians what pleases voters.

But this leads us to an unpleasant conclusion. You can be lied to only if you suspend disbelief. Author Charles Ford asserts that "politicians are mouthpieces for the selfdeception of the people. Wittingly or unwittingly, they tell us that which we have asked them to tell us." Ergo, we have all been enablers for Bill Clinton. Poll after poll reveals a populace that doesn't want to know the awful truth. "Lie to me," sings Sheryl Crow, "and I'll promise to be true." Bok says that because we expect to hear hypocrisy from our leaders, we get it.

Ultimately, BillClinton stopped telling a full-blown lie not because he wanted to or even because we wanted him to, but because he had to. In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wasn't a fanatic about the truth, wrote: "'I have done that,' says my memory. 'I cannot have done that,' says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually, memory yields." In Bill Clinton's case, pride yielded, and the rest is history.

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