Flat-out lies finding a receptive audience in voters seeking denial

By PIERRE TRISTAM
ESSAYS

At the White House in 1983, Ronald Reagan told a visiting Israeli prime minister that he'd been among the first American photographers to take pictures of the liberated victims of Nazi death camps in Poland at the end of World War II. Reagan, whose presidency was an analgesic of tall tales that have gotten taller since, was lying: His military service during the war was as a cameraman for the Army Air Corp's First Motion Picture Unit on Hollywood lots, beyond which he never strayed much. Lyndon Johnson lied to U.S. troops in Korea when he told them that his great-great grandfather had fought and died at the Alamo, although the guy had been a real estate broker who'd never fought a day in his life. Bill Clinton lied on television about not having sex with Monica Lewinsky. In 1988 Joe Biden lied his way through an entire speech about his humble beginnings -- a speech mostly cribbed from a TV ad for a British politician.

None of the lies was of any consequence, including Clinton's about sex. I subscribe to the Talmud's exemptions from truthfulness when it comes to sex and hospitality, but not to the juvenile proposition that every lie is a matter of state -- or worse, of "character." Otherwise the likes of Thomas Jefferson, who technically raped Sally Hemmings, and Franklin Roosevelt, who not so technically cheated on his wife with Lucy Page-Rutherfurd until the day he died (when Lucy, not Eleanor, was at his bedside), should be booted off their memorials' pedestals. For the current generation of inquisitors, our experience with the last two presidents settles the issue: The adulterer takes Mount Rushmore compared to the bible-thumping teetotaler who's losing three wars, ruined the economy and reaped global ridicule.