Ducking the Truth

After 16 years of silence on the subject, Robert McNamara has finally acknowledged that as early as 1965 he was convinced that the U.S. could not win the war militarily in Viet Nam. Yet when he later went before a Senate committee, testifying as the Secretary of Defense, he strongly denied that we were in a "no-win" war. By ordinary standards, this would seem a lie, but not to McNamara. Testifying in the current libel trial of General William Westmoreland vs. CBS, McNamara said he based his testimony to Congress on the unstated hope that Henry Kissinger (then a private citizen) might be able to work out a diplomatic peace. That is what is known to theologians as a mental reservation, and to children as crossing your fingers behind you when you say something you don't really believe.

The fact that the Viet Nam War was on makes a better excuse. As Winston Churchill once remarked, "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Nowadays public figures are confronted with the problem of telling the truth or lying in a way that never faced Washington, Jefferson or Lincoln. Before congressional committees or television interviewers they face cameras, instant answers are demanded, and the pictorial proof of what is said goes into the files to haunt them. In the Westmoreland trial, McNamara was a reluctant witness; for 13 years previously as head of the World Bank he ducked discussing Viet Nam on the ground that he could not talk about it as an international civil servant. Not many public officials are that lucky. They are usually condemned to explaining themselves constantly without getting much sympathy: They asked for it, didn't they? Businessmen can decline to talk; in fact, should one truthfully answer a reporter's question and acknowledge that his firm is going to agree to a merger tomorrow, he would be in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Public figures can evade too: "I think 'No comment' is a splendid expression," said Churchill after learning it on a trip to the U.S. "I am using it again and again."

But it won't fill up half an hour on a midday Sunday talk show. These programs are both opportunity and trap to a politician who feels the need to get public exposure. The shows get relatively low ratings, but the ratings would be even lower if the programs were only sober discussion of the issues; viewers hope that Roger Mudd, George Will or Sam Donaldson can draw blood. Secretary of State George Shultz can be droningly evasive and still be asked back; lesser fry do not dare. (Andrei Gromyko doesn't have to face the problem at all.) No American politician could get away with an Englishman's jolly "I say, would you mind terribly if I ducked that?" He is both "guest" and adversary, which explains the peculiar studio atmosphere of wary cordiality: neither side wants to appear either a patsy or the heavy.

Until the mid-20th century no politician faced such indecent public exposure, expected to answer tough questions instantly without squirming and with seeming candor, under the camera's up-close searching eye. The questions are often prosecutorial: if a politician tells the truth, he may get in trouble; if he tells a lie, he may get into worse trouble; if he waffles, he will be pressed further. The talent to survive is essential to the politician, but detrimental to the man. It has produced a new mutant in the modern political animal--the chummy dissembler--that many people find distasteful.

Perhaps the way this blood sport is played also contributes to the public's misgivings about the press and some of its more assertive egos. In its own defense, the press can point to the many times in recent history the truth was not demanded about governmental actions and was not told. Before the press lets down its guard too far someone always remembers Harry Truman's remark about who belongs in the kitchen's heat.