Lie society; the cold war's over. But its legacy of lying remains

Washington Monthly, May, 1992 by Peter Gray

The Cold War's over. But its legacy of lying remains

One ordinary morning-it was March 27, 1992-1 opened up my New York Times and here's what I found: One in four scientists suspect that their peers lie about their work; nuclear test site employees in Nevada, claiming they were lied to about the dangerous levels of radiation to which they were exposed, are suing the government; two California inmates are freed after 17 years in prison for murder after three "witnesses" admit they lied in their original trial testimony; the federal government and Rockwell Corporation admit to lying about their handling of radioactive waste at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant; a letter to the editor defends a law firm that lied on behalf of its client, Charles Keating; and an op-ed notes that as a Silverado Bank officer, Neil Bush approved a $100 million loan to his business partners and then, straight-faced, claimed he never suspected it was a conflict of interest. With my morning coffee, I got one piece of toast, two eggs, and six lies. And that's just the A section.

The lie is a little like smog: It blankets us, but we hardly notice. Oliver North admits he lied and we not only forgive him, we pay him to tell us about it. The Bush administration lies about the covert U.S. aid that helped Saddam Hussein build up his military and about the extent of allied "friendly fire" deaths, and we throw parades to celebrate our victory." There are plenty of causes of America's current immobility besides deception-but as an explanation, don't sell it short.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Marlin Fitzwater, was the first in modem times to observe that big lies work best. And in America, the biggest and best lie has long been "national security." In the fifties, a senator lied to the nation about the Communist conspiracy. In the sixties and seventies, the military lied to thousands of young soldiers, their parents, and itself about Vietnam. Meanwhile, the facts about the Castro assassination plots were sealed up so tight by the inner government they will probably never be unstuck.

In the seventies, a president used the CIA and the FBI to help hide the most embarrassing political scandal in American history. Which brings us to the eighties and Iran-contra, which was steeped in so many lies that historians may never get to the bottom of it.

Unfortunately, all this lying isn't just a political problem. To lie, and lie righteously, seems to be the one trickle-down effect that's actually trickled down. A generation ago, Dow Chemical used the veil of national security to keep soldiers in the dark about Agent Orange. Today, without even that superficial justification, a subsidiary, Dow Corning, has apparently employed similar deception in marketing silicon breast implants.

It's not just faceless institutions doing innocent citizens wrong. Dow Coming's employees, like employees everywhere, probably have done their fair share of lying, too. A survey by executive headhunters recently concluded that more than 40 percent of executives lied on their resumes. But forget statistics. Just think of how many times you've lied to disengage from a dinner date, a job responsibility, a forgotten familial obligation. And how easy it was to rationalize it to yourself.

We Americans love to think of ourselves as Huck Finns, but there's a little of the King and the Duke in all of us. No matter how much we hate to be lied to, we are remarkably comfortable with the lie. So why harp on it now? Today, with the end of the Cold War, we have a unique opportunity to erase this deepening national character stain. Gone with the Soviet threat is the biggest excuse for big lies-lies about the harmful effects of nuclear weapons production, about our government's domestic spying, about the need for gold-plated weapons systems. For the first time in half a century, we have a chance to safely renounce our willingness to lie and to be lied to-a chance to realign our moral compass. And yet the needle hardly flutters.

MKULTRAgedy

It's ironic that Americans fell into the national security lie just as they began fighting a nation with vast expertise in the technique. Marxist dogma is based on doing just about anything for the greater good. The American version of the greater good theory seemed to be that the separation of powers had worked so well that it was no longer needed, and that the market economy had provided so many benefits that corporations could be trusted to voluntarily act in the public interest. Americans bought the gambit-public confidence in government and private institutions soared during precisely the period when the military, the CIA, and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) were using the dark to do their darkest deeds.

Most five-year-olds can identify the harm that comes from lying, but perhaps we adults need it spelled out more dramatically. Let's start with the most sinister of all government lies: denial of the harmful effects of nuclear weapons tests.

In Countdown Zero, former Marine 2nd Lieutenant Thomas Saffer described an atomic bomb test he watched from an open trench just two miles away: