Abstract

When Presidents Lie

The author argues that presidents should never lie. Presidential dishonesty, like so many things in life, is not what it used to be. Before the 1960s, few could even imagine that a President would deliberately mislead them on matters so fundamental as war and peace. When the evidence of presidential lying grew so enormous the phenomenon could no longer be avoided, its revelation helped force both Lyndon Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, out of the office. From the standpoint of personal political consequences, the act of purposeful deception by an American President depends almost entirely on the context in which it occurs. With few exceptions, Presidents lie largely for reasons of political convenience. The decisions to lie were bred of a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the practice of American democracy. American Presidents have no choice but to practice the diplomacy of Great Power politics, but American citizens have rarely if ever been asked to understand the world in those terms. Walter Lippmann believed mass political consciousness does not pertain to the actual environment but to an intermediary "pseudoenvironment" which is complicated by the manner in which it is perceived. Even those Presidents with the best of intentions come to view deception as an unavoidable consequence of a system that simply cannot integrate the unpleasant realities of international diplomacy. Whether this situation is remediable depends on one of two possibilities: Either future Presidents become convinced that the long-term cost of deception outweighs its short-term benefits, or the public matures to the point of seeking to educate itself about the need for complicated arrangements in international politics that do not comport with the nation's caricatured notion of itself as an innocent and benevolent force throughout the world.