Why politicians tell all those lies

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 23, 1998 | by Stephen Goode

Have there been men in public life who told the truth about themselves? Yes, says University of Texas journalism professor Marvin Olasky, who says that 19th-century American men were less likely "to compartmentalize adultery or other behavior that they regarded as wrong and separate it from their official life and say the two never intertwined." They knew too well the story of King David's adultery with Bathsheba and all the disharmony that led to, he says. What a man is capable of in his more base moments can't be divorced from what he is at better times.

Olasky, who is about to publish a new book, God, Sex, and Statesmanship, points to President Grover Cleveland, the politician who famously acknowledged a child born out of wedlock to be his and gave it his name, even though "he didn't have to. The mother was known to sleep around. He could have claimed not to be me father," says Olasky. Cleveland's rectitude, Olasky says, spread into every part of his life as a politician and as president.

Indeed, concern about image -- as long as the truth isn't distorted -- is not necessarily a bad ming. University of Alabama historian Forrest McDonald, who has written about a number of great Americans, notes that George Washington, deeply concerned about how people regarded him, penned detailed reports about his doings as an officer in the French and Indian War. Washington saw that the reports were published and placed in the hands of the people he wanted to know about his exploits -- but they were truthful accounts.

More to the point, however: "In me 18th century, character was cultivated," says McDonald. Rather than invent a past or rewrite it, like Fitzgerald's Gatsby did, one invented a future. "You picked a part and played it and always tried to participate in it, McDonald tells Insight.

"Human beings were regarded by first nature to be base. So if you played a character long and hard and honestly enough you became mat character by second nature. That's the origin of me phrase `second nature,'" explains McDonald. "So Washington asked himself, `What does it mean to play me character Father of the Country?' He asked himself, `What does the Father of his Country do?' and men he did it."

But Americans now live in different times. Is the Gatsby syndrome more virulent today than before? There's probably no way of knowing. What has gone awry, maintains Kugelmann, is me present "blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction, between image and substance," mat makes it difficult if not impossible to assign genuine weight or meaning to anything or anyone in public life. "We've become pretty good at bad faith; so good, indeed, it almost becomes expected," he says.