Why politicians tell all those lies

Lying to look better seems to be a hallmark of power. What motivates the most talented tale-tellers among us, and why are Americans so willing to believe them, lie after lie?

We might call it "the Gatsby syndrome," after Jay Gatsby, the fabulously rich, rags-to-riches, F. Scott Fitzgerald character who made up a glamorous and almost entirely fictitious past for himself to impress his friends and acquaintances and make himself appear better than he thought he otherwise might, had he told the truth.

President Clinton has done it lots of times. He has told stories about how he hadn't done anything to get out of the draft after he received his induction notice in March 1968 (he had, and a lot), about how he hadn't smoked marijuana (he finally said he had but added that he hadn't inhaled, which he implied made it somehow right and legal) and about how he didn't have an affair with Gennifer Flowers (now he reportedly has admitted under oath that he did). Who knows what the truth is about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, the center of the current Clinton scandal?

Vice President Al Gore has done it, too, but not so often and not nearly so well. In December, Gore was caught in a fib after boasting to reporters aboard Air Force Two that his youthful romance 30 years ago with his wife Tipper was author Erich Segal's inspiration for the popular 1960s novel and film Love Story. It was a trivial fib that quickly was put to rest when Segal told the New York Times that Tipper and Al hadn't been his source at all and that it was the vice president's Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones, who really was his model for Love Story character Oliver Barrett IV.

What it is, of course, plain and simple, is lying, sometimes big and sometimes small and trivial, so that it's hardly noticeable. Clinton, for example, in the midst of pondering a wave of church burnings in 1996, casually said they reminded him of the racially motivated church burnings in the Arkansas of his youth. The problem was there weren't any such church burnings in the Arkansas of that time to call to memory. When corrected, Clinton said he really hadn't meant churches, but "community centers," words that might be stretched to cover a variety of incidents for a variety of reasons.

So why do they tell these elaborate stories that turn out to be lies? One reason that has been widely suggested is hubris: These statements often come from powerful and prideful men and women who perhaps think that they can get away with almost anything.

But experts cite other reasons. "America has always been a nation of promoters. Self-promotion has always been important; the self-made man has been central and constructing your public image has been part of that. Look at the curriculum vitaes people make up for the jobs they want!" says Robert Kugelmann, chairman of the department of psychology at the University of Dallas and a highly regarded expert on stress.

Ben Franklin famously wove fact and more than a little fiction together to present an idealized portrait of himself in his Autobiography. Richard M. Johnson, Martin Van Buren's vice president, let it be known far and wide that he personally had shot and killed the great Indian warrior Tecumseh, when at most all he could prove was that he might have been present at the battle in which the Shawnee tribal chief died. And many a 19th-century political figure claimed a log cabin as his place of birth, keeping secret the brick house in which he'd really seen the first light of day.

Finally, though, Kugelmann says that motivations for lying vary from individual to individual, the reasons men and women bear false witness about themselves have as many different explanations as there are people. And significantly, other experts on the behavior of public figures point out that perhaps the public itself bears some responsibility because it is willing to tolerate fibs, misstatements and outright lies without paying much attention -- or saying "it's something everybody does" -- giving leeway to public figures to stretch the truth with impunity whenever they feel like it.

On occasion, raw ambition is to blame whether its goal is a seat in Congress or the honor of being buried in Arlington National Cemetery. In his successful 1994 bid for a congressional seat from Oregon, Republican Wes Cooley, for example, claimed that he'd been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Later, Cooley talked about his service as a demolitions expert with a special-forces unit behind enemy lines during me Korean War, and claimed he'd been a famous motorcycle racer. None of these claims withstood scrutiny. Cooley even got caught in a lie about his marriage, whose true date he'd misrepresented so that his wife, the widow of a Marine, could continue to receive her widow's benefits.

But few Americans have invented a new life for themselves with greater aplomb or shown more blatant disregard for the truth than the late Larry Lawrence, who served as Clinton's ambassador to Switzerland, a reward for millions given to the Democratic Party and the $200,000 gift Lawrence gave early in Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign.