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American Presidents and their lies

Published : Tuesday, 14 February, 2017 at 12:00 AM  Count : 401
It is simply amazing how lies and falsehoods on a grand scale are taking hold of Washington under the Trump presidency. Time was when lying, at least from those holding public and elected office, was frowned upon. And the price paid for lying was severe.
We have before us the none too savoury instance of Richard Nixon, whose deliberate attempts to conceal his role in the making of the Watergate scandal eventually backfired and left him exposed as a peddler of untruths. Nixon was forced to admit his complicity in the scandal once that final tape, with eighteen minutes of it blank, which clearly had been erased of incriminating conversation, came under public scrutiny. The President, against whom impeachment proceedings were well underway, was persuaded by a group of leading politicians led by Senator Barry Goldwater that he had a single option before him: he must resign.
Richard Nixon resigned. It was August 1974. The man who succeeded Nixon as President was Gerald Ford, who had taken over earlier as Vice President once Spiro Agnew resigned in the face of a different scandal. In the twenty years left of his life after his departure from the White House, Nixon spent every single moment trying to have his reputation as a global leader restored. He wrote books, travelled to China and the Soviet Union and was consulted by his successors on foreign policy. But memories of Watergate lingered. His lies about what happened at Democratic national headquarters in June 1972 sealed his ill reputation. He would be a great President if only Watergate had not happened.
The kind of misfortune which destroyed Nixon does not appear to have affected Donald Trump as yet, despite all the lies --- about his Russian connections, his bid to denigrate Barack Obama on the latter's birth, his false belief that Muslims are terrorists who should be banned from entering the United States, his fulminations against the media --- he and his team have been spouting since the beginning of his campaign for the presidency. There does not seem to be any Senator around who, like Barry Goldwater, can tell Trump bluntly that he is committing grievous wrong. The likes of Senator Mitch McConnell are only helping the new President to perpetuate his lies. They are doing America grave disservice.
In 1964, the administration of President Lyndon Johnson invented the lie that the North Vietnamese had attacked a US ship on the seas in South-east Asia. The lie was presented as an intention on the part of Hanoi to promote instability in the region, at a time when North Vietnam and the Vietcong were locked in a war against American forces shoring up the government of South Vietnam. The lie was convincing enough for Congress to adopt the Tonkin Resolution, a move that helped to escalate the war in Vietnam. It was only later that the truth was revealed --- that there had been no North Vietnamese attack on any US ship in the Gulf of Tonkin and that the Johnson administration had invented the story to further its military objectives in the region.
No lie could have been invented on a scale as big as that produced by President George W. Bush and his administration. The administration went out on a limb to inform the global community that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that could be unleashed within minutes and wreak havoc in spots they would be directed at. Bush had a willing accomplice in the propagation and perpetuation of the lie in British Prime Minister Tony Blair. At the United Nations Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell presented, in all the dramatics he could muster, an elaborate show of where the WMDs happened to be and what Saddam Hussein intended to do with them. All the while, the UN inspectors in Iraq, led by Hans Blix, were convinced there were no such weapons. But none of that mattered. Bush and Blair were determined to invade Iraq, which they did in April 2003. No WMDs were found, but Iraq was left in a state of rubble. The men who perpetrated the crime are yet to acknowledge their guilt. They go on waffling and dissembling.
In the course of the 1976 presidential campaign, President Gerald Ford, waging an uphill battle for the White House against former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, surely did not lie. But he made a huge mistake during a televised debate when he asserted that there was no Soviet domination of Poland. Americans reacted with disbelief. Ford, already behind Carter in the opinion polls, plummeted further. He would eventually lose the election to Carter. In time, of course, Carter would go through his own difficulties as President, but that is a different matter altogether. Note, though, that as a presidential candidate he once got into trouble because he spoke a truth. In an interview with Playboy magazine, he confessed that he had committed adultery in his heart many times. The ramifications were considerable. His ratings fell rapidly, forcing him to go for damage control. He did not lie. It was the truth which got him into trouble.
During the 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon told Americans he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. He didn't, a fact proved by the relentless manner in which his administration escalated the war through expanding it into Cambodia and leaving an entire region in greater turmoil than it had been in earlier. In the early 1970s, his National Security Advisor and subsequently Secretary of State Henry Kissinger cheerfully let the world know that peace was at hand in Vietnam. He was not telling the truth, as events were to show. The war in Vietnam was still on-going, but that did not prevent Kissinger from receiving his share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. The other winner of the prize, Vietnam's Le Duc Tho, refused to accept his share from his belief that peace had not yet arrived.
Senator John F. Kennedy deliberately misled Americans during his campaign for the presidency in 1960 by letting them know, falsely, that the Soviet Union had gone far ahead of the United States in military superiority. That was not true and no matter how strenuously President Dwight Eisenhower and the Republican presidential nominee, Vice President Richard Nixon, denied the accusations, Kennedy repeated his statement everywhere. Kennedy won the election by a whisker. Questions have consistently abounded about whether he truly won the election.
This, then, is a brief story of the lies which often have characterized government in Washington. In our times, President Donald Trump appears determined to create a new record in upholding the lie as, in the sinister innovation of his counselor Kellyanne Conway, alternative truth. Into what dangers Trump will lead his presidency is a big question. And how long he can survive on his lies depends on whether his rabid Republican supporters in Congress finally decide that he can be dispensable, in the larger interest of American democracy.r
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Associate Editor,
The Daily Observer.
Email: ahsan.syedbadrul@gmail.com







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