This Is (Not Quite) Your Life
"Why would he do something
like that?" asked James Ware--the real James Ware, whose 12-year-old brother
was shot while riding on the handlebars of his sibling's bicycle during the
Birmingham civil-rights strife of 1963. A federal judge, also named James Ware,
had to give up a promotion to the appellate bench the other day, when it turned
out that the dramatic story he'd been telling for years about his martyred
brother actually happened to someone else. Why on earth would he tell such an
obvious whopper?
You may
be thinking that asking why public figures lie is like asking why fish swim.
But this is not conventional résumé padding. Nor is it a standard
cover-your-ass prevarication (we are not involved in: the Bay of Pigs
invasion/bombing Cambodia/trading arms for Iranian hostages). Nor is it the
foolish bravado of a philandering Gary Hart ("put a tail on me ... you'll be
very bored."). Or the of a Chuck Robb (my wife "is the only woman I've loved,
slept with, or had coital relations with") or a Bill Clinton (Gennifer Flowers
is "a woman I never slept with").
No, we're talking about the "self-defining" kind of lie, as
Judge Ware himself described it: the biographical embellishment for public
consumption. This kind of lie is remarkably common, even though it is also
often remarkably easy to expose. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, for example, fabricated
an entire heroic World War II history for himself as "Tail Gunner Joe." But
McCarthy lied without compunction about nearly everything. The more interesting
cases are those involving people who generally tell the truth.
Ware's
explanation is that he was confused. His actual sister, he says, was shot
around the same time as the bicycle incident. His "feeling of loss" and
possible kinship to the murdered youth led him to merge the two happenings in
his mind, he says. Doesn't seem likely. More plausible is that Ware was
entrapped by his own rhetorical success. He'd been enthralling audiences with
this tale for years. You tell a good story. The crowd loves it. Word of your
marvelously moving speech gets around. You are invited to give more speeches.
How could you explain the sudden disappearance of your signature anecdote? "I
decided it wasn't so self-defining after all"?
Many a politician has been enticed into
self-enrichment by an appreciative audience, or the anticipation of one. In his
standard stump speech of the 1988 presidential campaign, Sen. Joe Biden started
off by quoting British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock on the hard life of his
uneducated, coal-digging forebears. Pretty soon, though, Kinnock had dropped
out of the speech and it was Biden himself whose ancestors "worked in the coal
mines ... and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours."
Biden grew up in a white-collar suburb, his father was a car salesman, one
grandfather was a state senator, and the only Biden on record as having worked
near a mine was a mining engineer.
Al Gore
galvanized the 1996 Democratic convention with his moving account of holding
his sister in his arms while she died of lung cancer--an experience that, he
said, caused him to "pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our
children from the dangers of smoking." But Gore continued to seek the support
of the tobacco industry. "Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco," he
told an audience of tobacco farmers in his 1988 bid for the Democratic
nomination some years after his sister's death. "I've hoed it. I've chopped it
... put it in the barn and sold it."
As Jonathan Rauch reported in Slate a few
months ago, the published memoirs of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich are
full of self-aggrandizing fictions. Reich is constantly the lone honest tribune
of the people in rooms full of unattractive fat cats and grandees making
improbable and unflattering remarks.
Over the
years, Jesse Jackson has got a lot of mileage out of remembering the blood of
Martin Luther King Jr. that smeared his shirt when he cradled the dying leader
in his arms. Testimony from other witnesses indicates that Jackson was
initially reluctant to go to the balcony where King was shot, though he might
later have been close enough to King's body to acquire some stains from the
pool of blood on the floor.
Some politicians' discovered memories are less
melodramatic. At the recent campaign-finance hearings, Sen. Robert Torricelli
waxed eloquent about his memories of the "first hearing of the Senate I ever
witnessed"--the 1951 Kefauver hearings on organized crime, which he recalled as
a festival of anti-Italian prejudice. But Torricelli was five days old when
those hearings ended.
President
Clinton, who never did get his draft story straight, said in a radio address
last year that a wave of black church burnings brought back "vivid and painful
memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child."
When Arkansas historians pointed out there were no black church burnings in the
state then or perhaps ever, a Clinton spokesperson said he meant "black
community buildings" (though there is no record of that either). But, wherever
the fires were, she insisted, Clinton's recollections were "very vivid and
painful."
No doubt. As the literature on lying often observes, those
who become skilled in the art of deception can easily fool themselves. When
Ronald Reagan regaled world leaders with his story of having witnessed the
liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, he probably saw the event as vividly
as he had once seen the film about it that he helped to make. Of course, Reagan
was a special case. He made himself up as he went along, borrowing bits and
pieces from this movie or that. ("I paid for that microphone" probably came
from a Spencer Tracy political comedy; his faith in an invulnerable "Star Wars"
nuclear shield perhaps came from the "inertia projector" portrayed in a 1940
movie in which he starred.) While some of his political lies were far from
harmless, most of his autobiographical lies were relatively small stuff: "I
never wore makeup in films" (check the films); "I believe in tithing to
charity" (check the tax records); I got my nickname Dutch because ... (choose
one of at least three versions).
Like
McCarthy, other Republicans like to pilfer their glory from the field of
battle. Former Rep. Bob Dornan, R-Calif., who went down in grudging defeat last
fall, described his military career thusly in a 1994 House speech: "I went into
the Air Force and volunteered for whatever dangerous assignment there was." In
fact, he avoided action in Korea by going to drama school, and his subsequent
military career was mostly spent directing and performing in armed-forces
theatrical productions (though he did crash one helicopter and three jets while
in pilot training).
Christian Coalition head Pat Robertson
described himself in résumés and a published autobiography as a Marine officer
assigned to combat duty during the Korean War. In fact--with the help of his
father's connections--he was conveniently detached from a unit headed for the
battlefield and spent his tour doing administrative tasks. Wes Cooley, R-Ore.,
lost his seat last fall after falsely claiming a Korean War combat tour--as a
member of the Special Forces, no less.
Curiously, Richard Nixon,
that archetype of political deceit, provides no ready example of résumé
rewriting--unless you want to count "I am not a crook." By contrast, pious
Jimmy Carter once described himself as a "nuclear physicist." He later
acknowledged that "nuclear engineer" was a more just description of his
academic qualifications. A modest fabrication, but not bad for a president
whose subsequent campaign slogan was "I'll never lie to you."
Why do they do it? The
easiest answer is that, by and large, or at least for long periods of time,
public figures get away with it. And even when they are discovered, the public
is often forgiving (or at least forgetting). One theory has it that public
figures see their audience as a distant, easily manipulated mass to which they
can lie with impunity. But maybe that's not the whole story. Perhaps we, the
public, don't mind being lied to if the lies evoke a vision not only of better
leaders--persons of uncompromising principle, noble deeds, and generous
spirit--but of a nation that responds to such leadership.
