The mendacious US presidents

Gone are the days of "honest Abe" or of the president who as a boy refused to lie, after chopping down a cherry tree, a favourite of his father, knowing fully well the consequences of admitting the truth. But Mr. Trump is in good company when it comes to US presidents not coming clean with the people of America. And the practice has ranged from straight faced deceits to withholding the truth, either for personal or political gains or for precipitating an international situation to gain strategic dividends, some of which have had the most devastating consequences for the world. But perhaps the 45th US president has outdone them all in the way untruths have been dispensed by him, his acolytes and the poor members of his staff struggling to give a meaning to presidential mendacities, to make whatever he says "resemble the truth".

The current White House press staff is finding it so very difficult in front of the media to give a shape to the untruths that the President gives to a subject, that Mr. Trump is contemplating doing away with the daily media briefing altogether; he is even contemplating doing the briefing himself, and less frequently, if so. But all this mess need not have occurred had he been sure of himself. This particular state of his mind, we hear some commentators attribute to the fact that Mr. Trump suffers from a feeling of uncertainty about the nature of his win. Extraneous influences far removed from politics had much to do with the outcome of the November elections, attributed by most political pundits to the "Comey-Russia Effects." Many of the President's action have underlined these two factors.

But today we withhold our urge to recount the current US president's articulations that are "without evidence," or "falsely said," or "wrongly asserted" or are "unsubstantiated claims" or "alternative facts", all euphemisms for lies. Instead, a look into history may offer a good insight of some US presidents' predilection for spewing fibs while holding the highest public office of the most powerful country in the world. And the compulsion to lie has been well narrated in the writings of various American authors.

Surprisingly, browsing through the literature on American history, and the US history is less than three hundred years only, it is surprising that so many famous persons that have occupied the White House had resorted to this expedient, some had made an art of it while some were known to be 'pathological liars'.

It is also interesting to come across opinions that suggest that to be effective leaders, "sometimes lies are necessary evils if we want to get something accomplished." Actually, it is averred that Obamacare would not have been possible had President Obama been completely transparent about some aspects of his healthcare policy. In fact there is acknowledgement of this reality among the Americans, demonstrated very explicitly by the rejection of the idealist Jimmy Carter (he promised never to lie to the public) because he was not effective and the choice of what some commentators describe as the Machiavellian prince, Ronald Reagan, whose presidency was spattered with small lies but the Contra affair takes the cake. Having earlier stated that his administration had not traded arms for the release of US hostages in Iran, Reagan was forced to admit he had lied when he said, "A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." The mismatch between the heart and the hard evidence has been very pronounced in the case of certain US presidents. And the list has been adorned by the likes of JFK, FDR, the inimitable RMN, WJC and GWB to name a few.

Distorting and withholding the truth and keeping facts deliberately from friends and allies to compel certain action and reaction of friends and allies have been as much a part of US presidential disposition as telling flat lies.

LBJ misled the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin affair to create grounds for direct US intervention in Vietnam. And while US naval base of Pearl Harbor might have been caught unawares on 7 Dec 1941, it has come to light many years after the infamy, that the knowledge of an impending Japanese attack on the US base was not unknown to the American leadership. The attack helped Roosevelt convince the American people and the Congress, who were both overwhelmingly against entering the War in Europe, of the need for a direct US involvement in the War.

And the shameless fabrications that George Bush resorted to, by contriving as many as one hundred and fifty excuses for attacking Iraq and toppling Saddam is too recent to merit recounting.

The writer is Associate Editor, The Daily Star.