Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
President Donald Trump has lied repeatedly to the American people in order to enhance his chances for re-election.
Shocked?
Presidential lying shouldn’t even be news any more, but catching presidents in lies is media’s favorite blood sport.
The game is to pretend to be shocked and to convince readers that the public is shocked, because they think presidents don’t lie.
One of my COVID-19 isolation binge-watching projects was Ken Burns’ history of the Vietnam War.
Trump’s lies have plenty of precedent.
While Burns’ series made me remember my conflicted views back then, against the war but sympathetic to those who sacrificed for what they thought was right, it also made plain the degree to which at least three presidents lied almost daily about Vietnam.
First, President John F. Kennedy and his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara hid our growing involvement as we sided with French colonists rather than with freedom fighters seeking Vietnamese independence.
As our involvement grew, presidents also lied about how the Vietnamese felt about Ho Chi Minh, the symbol of Vietnamese independence.
When Vietnam won independence but was divided in two, we installed a series of corrupt puppets to rule in South Vietnam. They stole from the U.S. and their own people while American soldiers increasingly fought to “save Vietnam from the Vietnamese,” as many soldiers observed privately. Even generals eventually admitted we were likely on the wrong side.
Meanwhile presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, after Kennedy’s assassination, kept enlarging the lie that we and the brave South Vietnamese government were saving a grateful Vietnamese people from Communist tyranny.
The biggest concern for Kennedy and Johnson?
The next election. Sound familiar?
The dismal progress of combat in Vietnam even as American soldiers poured into that meat grinder by the hundreds of thousands, was hidden because Johnson wanted to be seen as a victorious war president.
Richard Nixon was elected after Johnson, exhausted and disheartened by Vietnam, decided not to seek a second elected term.
As Nixon sought an end to the war, however, he continued to commit American troops, and to lie about American success while the enemy just wouldn’t quit.
To be sure, North Vietnam called its disastrous major offensives victories, too, even as they learned the hard way they and the local Viet Cong had lost the sympathies of the South.
After Vietnam, Nixon lied about Watergate, President Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky and President George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction to justify war in Iraq after 9/11.
Tump lies shamelessly to be sure, largely because he can.
Most of his predecessors, however, like most world leaders, have often resorted to untruth.
Even if we should not tolerate it, we should no longer be shocked.
Journalists, however, have to keep exposing official falsehood as they find it, just to keep our leaders as honest as we need them to be.
Steve Hansen writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: