On the presidents and their lies

The Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2007

Carl M. Cannon recounts some famous presidential lies in the new issue of the Atlantic. My favorite:

Witness a favorite Reagan story about his role in a football game in high school in which, he claimed, players for a rival school, Mendota, complained to the referees that Reagan, playing for Dixon High, had committed a penalty that was not called. The refs supposedly asked him about it. “I told the truth,” Reagan later said. “The penalty was ruled, and Dixon lost the game.” My father, the Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, investigated this claim. He discovered that there were no contemporaneous accounts of any such incident, and that Dixon lost to Mendota only once when Reagan was a member of the varsity team—by a score of 24-0. “The ironic point here is that Reagan seems to have told the story to demonstrate how truthful he was,” notes George Mason University political scientist James Pfiffner, who has studied presidential lying. “Yet he was telling an untruth to make the point.

Along with telling similar stories about every president since FDR, [I really should give each president his own post; some of the lies they told are remarkable] Canon also gives us a laundry list of some of W's most famous half-truths. These include (all word-for-word from the article):

■ In his 2006 State of the Union address, Bush cited Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of “the great story of our time”—the advance of freedom. He proclaimed that the number of democracies in the world had increased from about two dozen at the end of 1945 to 122 today, but he didn’t mention that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan was counted as such by the organization whose statistics he was touting.

■ The president also asserted, accurately, that the U.S. economy had gained 4.6 million new jobs in the previous two and a half years, but he failed to note that it had lost 2.6 million jobs in his first two and a half years.

■ In March 2003, Bush insisted that it was “a matter of fact” that the coalition he cobbled together for the invasion of Iraq included more nations than the alliance assembled by his father in 1991... [unfortunately for the truth] most of George W. Bush’s partnering nations (with the notable exception of the British) were a reluctant bunch. The Poles fought, but resented being there. The Italians wouldn’t get out of their vehicles on patrols. The Japanese wouldn’t patrol at all and, in fact, wouldn’t even guard their own perimeters—Dutch troops did it for them.

■ In June 2004, when asked about Ahmad Chalabi... Bush acted as if he barely knew the man’s name. “Chalabi? My meetings with him were very brief,” Bush said. “I think I met with him at the State of the Union and just kind of working through the rope line, and he might have come with a group of leaders. But I haven’t had any extensive conversations with him.” Perhaps. But Chalabi wasn’t confined behind a rope line at the 2004 State of the Union address. He was listed by the White House as a “special guest” of first lady Laura Bush and seated directly behind her.

■ After the Democrats’ victories in the 2006 midterm elections, the president allowed that “Democrats are going to support our troops just like Republicans will” and that the Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid “care about the security of this country, like I do.” Those gracious statements were at odds with his campaign rhetoric from just days before, when he had said, regarding Iraq, that if the Democrats’ vision were to prevail, “the terrorists win and America loses.” On November 8 at the White House, Bush suggested that it was the campaign talk that was disingenuous. But maybe it was the other way around—that Bush meant what he said in Texas, and was only being politic in the East Room.

■ At the same press conference, Bush essentially admitted he’d lied to three White House correspondents who had asked him in an Oval Office interview the week before whether Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was staying on. The president had assured the three reporters that Rumsfeld was remaining. Now, standing in the East Room, Bush was revealing the details of a different reality: he’d decided before the election to sack his Pentagon chief, and when asked the question, he was already focused on Rumsfeld’s likely replacement. Bush provided dueling explanations: First, he maintained that he didn’t “want to inject a major decision about this war” into the waning days of a campaign. Then he immediately added the more Clintonesque explanation that his answer hadn’t really been dishonest, because he hadn’t yet had his “final” conversation with Rumsfeld, and hadn’t interviewed Robert Gates in person.