Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/100592/10059930.000

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 the truth, the cold,
hard, brutal unsparing truth, from spouses, relatives, friends
and colleagues is not a pleasant prospect. "Human kind," as
T.S. Eliot wrote, "cannot bear very much reality." Truth
telling makes it possible for people to coexist; a little lying
makes such society tolerable.

    At what point does "a little" become "too much"? The
nervous boy who cried "Wolf!" in the admonitory tale told one
lie too many and was eaten alive. The irony of this denouement,
of course, is that when the boy met his fate, he was, at last,
hollering the truth.

    This story demonstrates the creation of what is sometimes,
and euphemistically, called "a climate of mistrust."
(Translation: Everybody's lying.) It also reveals how difficult
it is for those in the vicinity of a lie to distinguish it from
the truth.

    That task would be easy if humans resembled Pinocchio (as
Clinton claims Bush does), with their noses growing longer each
time they told a lie. People, unfortunately, can fib without
suffering physiognomic changes. It would be helpful, then, if
there were some hidden manifestation of lying, invisible to most
people but clear to psychics or visionaries. The closest that
real life has managed to come to this fictional power is the
polygraph machine, which has a few serious drawbacks. It can be
stumped by accomplished actors or those delusional enough to
believe their own statements, and even experts disagree on the
machine's level of reliability. And lie detectors, of course,
are impractical to haul out on nearly all the occasions --
including first dates, tax audits, political rallies -- when
they might prove handy.

    Public perceptions to the contrary, it is impossible to
prove that more people are lying than did in the past. There is
no central clearinghouse of lies, no impartial scorekeeper
deciding on the truth or falsity of public statements. Further
complicating matters, successful lies, by definition, go
undetected. If this truly is a time of unprecedented public
lying, then it is also a time of remarkably inept liars, or of
liars who don't seem to care if they are caught.

    Certainty about lying is suspect because the practice is
extraordinarily complex. Discussions of the subject usually
begin with the assumption that everyone present agrees on what
a lie actually is. A lie happens, a rough definition might
assert, when someone does not tell the truth. Unfortunately, the
relationship between lying and the truth is nowhere near this
simple. A false statement need not be a lie. "The earth is
flat," coming from a member of the Flat Earth Society, is not
a lie but a statement of belief. Furthermore, a true statement
can be a lie. Imagine a dishonest agent telling a client, "The
check is in the mail," and then discovering to his horror that
his new secretary has actually . . . mailed the check. Even
though his client got paid, the agent intended to lie.

    So objective truth is an unreliable standard against which
lies can be measured. Most lies, of course, involve a
distortion of the truth, but so do many innocent remarks. And
the notorious difficulty of getting at the truth works to the
liar's advantage; since there are so many different versions of
reality floating around, another one, invented, won't do any
harm -- and may even be more entertaining to boot.

    Fortunately, there is a way out of this logical blind
alley. All lies, regardless of their relationship to the truth,
have one thing in common. "We must single out," writes Sissela
Bok in Lying, "from the countless ways in which we blunder
misinformed through life, that which is done with the intention
to mislead." Lies may confuse everyone who hears them, as they
are meant to, but liars know exactly what they are doing while
they are doing it. In Telling Lies, Paul Ekman, a professor of
psychology at the University of California medical school in San
Francisco, provides a slightly more elaborate definition: "One
person intends to mislead another, doing so deliberately,
without prior notification of this purpose, and without having
been explicitly asked to do so by the target. There are two
primary ways to lie: to conceal and to falsify."

    Ekman's formula is helpful, within limits. It defines the
contexts in which lies are or are not improper. It absolves
actors and fiction writers, for example, whose professions
involve fabrications but whose audiences are presumably aware
of this condition before they go to the theater or open a book.
But problems arise with Ekman's notion that lying can be an act
of concealment alone. Is not publicizing the possible dangers,
say, of silicone breast implants in and of itself a lie? Or does
this concealment merely set the stage for the true, dangerous
deception, the impression created by the manufacturer in the
enforced absence of information that such implants are safe?
When a wife asks her husband how his day went, is he obliged to
answer, "Great -- I spent the lunch hour in a motel room with
my mistress"? If he does not disclose this detail, is he guilty
of lying, or is he -- the cheat -- simply sparing his wife's
feelings or avoiding a potentially unpleasant scene?

    Not everyone agrees on the answers to these and similar
questions. Every lie -- save those of self-deception -- involves
two or more people in an intricate arabesque of intentions and
expectations. What does the person telling a lie hope to
achieve? How do the recipients of the lie understand it? What,
in short, do all the parties involved think is happening?

    St. Augustine identified eight kinds of lies, not all of
them equally serious but all sins nonetheless. The number Mark
Twain came up with, not too seriously, was 869. In practice,
there are probably as many lies as there are liars, but lying
can be roughly classified according to motive and context. No
hard boundaries exist between these categories, since some lies
are told for more than one purpose. But most of them fall
within a spectrum of three broad categories.



    1. Lies to protect others, or "I love your dress." Most
"little white lies" belong here, well-intentioned deceptions
designed to grease the gears of society. In this context, people
want to be fooled. No one expects, and few would welcome,
searing honesty at a dinner party. And the couple who leave
early, saying the baby-sitter has a curfew, would not be thanked
by the hostess if the truth were told: "Frankly, we're both
bored to tears."

    On rare occasions, lying to protect others can literally
be a matter of life or death. Anne Frank survived as long as
she did because those sheltering her and her family lied to the
Nazis. The French Resistance during World War II could not have
operated without deception. Military and intelligence officials
will as a matter of routine lie to protect secret plans or
agents at risk.

    Few would condemn such protective lies. But problems arise
when the alleged noble purpose of a lie loses the clarity, say,
of saving innocent lives and gets muddled by other
considerations. National security has been a notorious refuge
for scoundrels who confuse their interests with their country's
and therefore lie to cover up both. Convinced that winning the
Vietnam War was essential to U.S. interests, President Lyndon
Johnson was exasperated to learn that not all Americans agreed
with him. These ignorant, shortsighted people therefore had to
be protected from themselves, an end that justified almost any
means. The long trail of lies and deceptions that followed is
a lamentable matter of record.



    2. Lies in the interest of the liar, or "The dog ate my
homework." Here rest the domains, familiar to everyone, of being
on the spot, of feeling guilty, of fearing reprimand, failure
or disgrace, and on the other side of the ledger, of wishing to
seem more impressive to others than the bald facts will allow.
Complicity between liar and auditor rarely occurs in this
category; the liar wants to get away with something. If a lie
turneth away wrath, or win a job or a date on Saturday night,
why not tell it? Because to do so is immoral and wrong, runs the
standard, timeworn answer. But this stricture has never cut as
much ice with potential liars as moralists would wish. The vast
majority of criminal defendants assert their innocence, no
matter what the evidence against them. Watergate was a baroque
pageant of major players and spear carriers trying to lie
themselves out of jeopardy.

    Greed ranks right up there with guilt as an inducement to
lie. The S & L debacle and the Wall Street insider trading
scandals of the late 1980s involved exquisitely complex patterns
of lies and deceptions. These fiascos harmed thousands of
investors and left taxpayers with a staggering bill to pay, but
that was not their intent. The purpose of the lies told in these
massive scams was to enrich the perpetrators.

    Lies in the interest of liars may also extend to those
with whom the liars feel closely bound -- the individual to his
tribe, sect, community or nation, the employee to his employers,
the professional to his peers, the advertiser or lawyer to his
client. If collective success or profit is a paramount goal, a
lie told to achieve it may seem a tempting alternative.



    3. Lies to cause harm, or "Trust me on this one.'' The
role model here is Shakespeare's Iago, insidiously,
malevolently and falsely poisoning Othello's mind against his
faithful wife Desdemona. These are the lies people fear and
resent the most, statements that will not only deceive them but
also trick them into foolish or ruinous courses of behavior.
Curiously, though, lying to hurt people just for the hell or the
fun of it -- the Iago syndrome -- is probably quite rare. Though
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote influentially about Iago's
"motiveless malignity," the play itself does not really support
this judgment. Iago has a motive, all right: he believes Othello
has unfairly passed him over for a promotion, and he wants
revenge. Some perceived advantage prompts most lies. If there
is no benefit in telling a lie, most people won't bother to make
one up.



    Lies flourish in social uncertainty, when people no longer
understand, or agree on, the rules governing their behavior
toward one another. During such periods, skepticism also
increases; there will be a perception that more people are
lying, whether or not they actually are. That seems to be what
is happening now.

    The weakening of the major parties and the rise of
television have made politics an infinitely more difficult --
and morally tenuous -- endeavor. It is no longer sufficient for
candidates to say they are Democrats or Republicans, explain
their views on the issues and let the voters decide. Campaigns
now consist of offending as few people as possible, so the
possibilities for mischief and misunderstandings are endless.

    Politicians know they are widely perceived as liars. They
also remember what happened to presidential nominee Walter
Mondale after he told the 1984 Democratic National Convention
that he would, if elected, raise taxes. Voters say they want the
truth, and then they get angry when they hear it.

    Furthermore, the prolonged recession has created endemic
anxieties. If survival seems to hang on getting an edge, cutting
a corner, telling a lie, then many otherwise moral people will
choose to survive. The economy will, of course, improve; but the
hangover from the recession may stick around: the impression
that doing business, earning a living, is a con game, with
rewards going to the clever and the unscrupulous.

    Finally, a phenomenon has become so pervasive that it
almost goes unnoticed. Everyone seems to have got incredibly
nosy. The press is part of this problem, particularly the
aggressive new tabloid and infotainment TV shows. But reporters
would not yell intrusive questions if they knew their readers
or viewers did not care about the answers.

    After Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-contra and the Gary Hart
indiscretion, it is hard to make a case against the public's
right to know. But not impossible. Candor is necessary when it
really matters, and little more than a nuisance when it doesn't.
At the moment, people are unsure which is which. A lie may be
a defensive response to an unwarranted invasion of privacy. The
oddity that Oprah and Phil and Geraldo can attract guests
willing to confess anything on TV does not oblige everyone else
to bare all when asked.

    St. Augustine defined all lies as sins because they
misused God's gift of speech. In a better world than this one,
people would agree and act accordingly. In fact, in a better
world lies would not be necessary at all, since the truth would
be self-evident and foolish to deny or attempt to refute. The
world we have discourages such certainties. Lies will continue
to be told, as will the difficulty of recognizing them as such.
But some modicum of trust will probably also survive, as it has
through notable periods of lying in the past. When the
perception of lying grows too acute, some shift, some click in
the social consciousness, takes place: Danger ahead. The bad,
suspicious mood of this political year is a sign of health, a
recognition that the private advantages of lying are being
eclipsed by the communal necessity to tell -- or to try to tell
-- the truth.