The post-truth presidency: the unintended consequences of presidential lying.

• Author: Dean, John W.
• Position: On Political Books

May 22, 1973, loomed large in my life, and although most Americans may not realize it, helped determine the fate of a presidency. For weeks beforehand, rumors had circulated through official Washington that Richard Nixon was going in come clean about the Watergate cover-up. Nixon had already asked for and accepted not only my resignation, but also that of his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, his top domestic affairs adviser, John Ehrlichman, and his attorney general, Richard Kleindienst--all in an effort to contain the fallout. The Senate's Watergate investigation was just getting under way. So, when Nixon announced that he would be putting out a statement, Hays Gorey of Time magazine asked if 1 would meet with him privately, and off the record, when the much--anticipated statement was finally released. On that day in May, Gorey and I met at a mutual friend's apartment not far from the White House. I hoped, both for Nixon's sake and for the nation's, that he was actually going to tell the truth.

It was a lengthy statement. The president opened it with seven "categorical" declarations about his own role in Watergate; he claimed to be unequivocally explaining what he knew and when he knew it. I read the declarations carefully and was truly stunned. At that moment, I knew that Richard Nixon had scaled his fate: Six of the seven disclaimers were flat out lies, lies that--as I and Gorey at the time--would haunt Nixon forever. My first reading of the president's falsehoods left a knot in the pit of my stomach. Even at that late stage, and not withstanding his increasing attacks on me, 1 wanted to believe he would do the right thing. Alter all, he was the president of the United States. But he didn't, and the rest, as they say, is history. Even before the secret tapes surfaced, there were any number of ways Nixon could have been proven a liar, and when the so-called "smoking-gun" tape of the June 23, 1972, conversation with Bob Haldeman surfaced, two of his deceptions were demolished: His claim that he had not been involved in covering up anything, and his argument that he had no involvement whatsoever in implicating the CIA in the Watergate matter. Nixon had mounted his defense on lies when the truth might have saved his presidency.

Eric Alterman's new book, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, shows that Nixon is no exception when it comes to presidential untruthfulness. Alterman is interested specifically in lies pertaining to the conduct of foreign policy and focuses his study on four presidents: Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Ronald Reagan. (Nixon is excluded, Alterman explains, because the consequences of his deceptions have already been exhaustively examined. So are Bill Clinton's, although Alterman acknowledges that Clinton's Monica-related deceptions are "the best publicized of presidential lying in recent times.") in working my way through Alterman's study, I noted how helpful When Presidents Lie would be...