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Government has no right to lie

WASHINGTON — More than half a century ago, a Pentagon official got himself into an ethical storm by declaring during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 that “the government has a right to lie” to avoid a nuclear disaster.

Arthur Sylvester, a former Washington correspondent for the Newark, N.J., News serving as an assistant secretary of defense for public affairs under Robert McNamara, uttered the claim after fibbing about details regarding the crisis. While a public information agency was generally obliged to deal in “truthful facts,” he argued, “you do not tell all the facts” to an enemy under such circumstances.

As a nation, we have come a long way from that rather reasonable assertion. We are now under a president who lies as easily as he breathes, amid conditions far short of a nuclear confrontation. His chief mouthpiece, White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway, a graduate of the political poll-taking business, has trumped that declaration with her infamous pitch that there are “alternative facts” to any story to justify government actions.

The late Mr. Sylvester, long schooled in professional journalism, surely would turn over in his grave if he could hear that self-serving alibi for lying that has become a basis for Donald Trump’s free-wheeling fictions masquerading as fact.

A central element in his continuing assault on the news-media business, whose freedoms of speech and the press are protected in the First Amendment, is Trump’s hyping as “fake news” any news stories in print, on radio or television that convey well-researched facts detrimental to his manufactured falsehoods.

This flagrant distortion of truth-telling was commonplace in American politics before Trump’s emergence from the shady world of real estate.

From real-life political hucksters George Wallace, Joe McCarthy and Huey Long to fictional rogue characters like Elmer Gantry, Lonesome Rhodes and “The Music Man’s” Harold Hill, the political con man has always been with us.

But never before has he seized real power in our democratic process and poisoned public discourse to affect domestic and foreign policy in the manner of the current president. He regularly attaches the slanderous label — “Crooked Hillary,” “Lyin’ Ted,” etc. — with impunity to various political rivals, to the joy of his faithful.

At a time when common decency toward fellow citizens has flown out the window on the wings of a crude and abusive president, some signs finally are emerging in the public culture to declare, “Enough!”

The recent decision of the ABC News television network to cancel the latest reincarnation of the popular “Roseanne” show for particularly egregious racist comments by its star, may be no more than the financial ramification of the ugly phenomenon. Given her open embrace of Trump, both in her character and in real life, it was not surprising that Trump’s response was, in effect: How about an apology to me of nasty things said on the air about me?

The general dumbing down of mutual respect and tolerance among much of the American TV-satiated audience obviously can’t be laid entirely to the mouth of this impulsive, intemperate and culturally divisive president. But compare his words and behavior to another American political maverick, fellow conservative Republican Sen. John McCain, fighting for his life in Arizona.

Though he is known also for having a low boiling point, he is widely admired and loved for his fairness and general good humor, beyond his great military service to his country as a Vietnam war Navy pilot and prisoner of war.

His most recent display of independence in casting the one Republican vote that was decisive in saving the Obama health-care law from repeal has been a noted defiance of a president who has personally demeaned him.

For all of McCain’s irascible nature, his basic decency in an era of disrespect for others in the Trump era, especially toward minority and immigrant newcomers, has been a welcome antidote to the current devaluation of our national spirit in the fake patriotism promoted from the Oval Office, and his assumed right to lie with impunity.

Editor’s note: Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.

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