Almost two decades ago, as a junior political reporter on the Evening Standard, I heard the cabinet office minister William Waldegrave tell a parliamentary committee that in certain circumstances it was right for a prime minister to lie. The words made no impression on the committee itself, but I nevertheless dashed up to my office in the press gallery and constructed a story around his observations, which duly appeared as the late edition Evening Standard splash.
The most enormous row followed. There were calls for poor Waldegrave’s resignation. The Labour opposition made out that his comment showed that no Conservative government could be trusted. This was terribly unfair. William Waldegrave, whatever his faults as a politician, is an exceptionally scrupulous man and his remarks reflected his painful and exacting honesty. There are indeed certain exceptional circumstances where politicians have a duty to lie to their electorates.
Today the argument continues to simmer, and the American political scientist John Mearsheimer has made a valuable contribution to the growing literature surrounding political lying. The strength of his book lies in the power and clarity of its examples. The professor lucidly summarises many of the lies deployed by British and American political leaders over the last century: the deliberately misleading statements issued by Franklin Roosevelt about the German attack on USS Greer in 1941 in an attempt to convince US public opinion to support war; Lyndon Johnson’s lies about North Vietnamese aggression in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964; Hitler’s deception of the West in the 1930s; Jimmy Carter and the Iranian hostage crisis; the host of falsehoods knowingly uttered by George W. Bush and Tony Blair in an attempt to shape public opinion ahead of the invasion of Iraq.
Mearsheimer is admirably rigorous in his definition of lying. He rightly argues that concealment or manipulating the facts are not lies: only deliberate falsehood counts. He does not get into the rights or wrongs, taking a purely utilitarian approach. The question that Mearsheimer tries to solve is this: does lying work?
He concludes that, on the whole, it does not. Roosevelt’s lies over USS Greer might have been morally justified, but they failed in their aim of drawing the US into the war. The Bush/Blair lies were extremely effective in making the case for war, but the consequences were dire. Not only was the war a disaster, but as it emerged that the casus belli was an invention, the war itself (and the reputation of the American president and the British prime minister) were discredited.
Exactly the same point applies to the Johnson administration and its fabricated claims about the North Vietnamese attack on the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. Professor Mearsheimer fails to take account of more successful attempts. The elaborate tissue of deception constructed by the Allies ahead of D-Day aimed at German high command was both moral and highly successful.
Like so many distiguished US academics Mearsheimer is a ponderous and self-important bore. His book should be regarded as a useful footnote to, rather than a replacement for, Sisela Bok’s masterly examination of the subject, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. He is prone to make portentous ex cathedra pronouncements of doubtful validity such as: ‘In the foreign policy realm leaders can tell seven different kinds of lies.’ Why seven? Why not three, eight or 994? No explanation is forthcoming. Machiavelli could just about get away with remarks such as this, but not Mearsheimer.
Nevertheless this book is clearly written and mercifully short. The Professor has a mastery of detail and a telling eye for a quote. Here is Jimmy Carter’s press secretary Jody Powell anticipating William Waldegrave: ‘In certain circumstances government not only has the right but a positive obligation to lie.’ The question remains: what are those circumstances?
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