“There are a generation of Americans whose instinctive reaction to a public statement is that it is false.” Frank Mankiewicz, national coordinator for the McGovern campaign, diagnosed the cancer in the U.S. body politic in1972. Trouble is forty-six years later Americans find themselves on the horns of the same dilemma. The demands of a phony national security crisis created the surveillance state and before you could say WTF led to historic invasions of privacy by U.S. leaders whose “arrogance of power” (Hannah Arendt) is matched only by their lack of morals. Turns out that most of the presidents Americans consider their best, the likes of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and LBJ have another trait in common. They are serial liars whose careers have been marked by their uneasy relationship with the truth. In a bizarre twist one president, himself a consummate liar, stepped up to pinpoint the perils of a lying secret government. “When information which properly belongs to the public is systematically withheld by those in power, the people soon become ignorant of their own affairs, distrustful of those who manage them and —eventually—incapable of determining their own destinies.” (President Richard Nixon, March 8, 1972). Want to know how virtually all U.S. presidents have used lies and secrecy to delude the public on a range of issues, how innumerable costly and deadly wars have started on the basis of big, fat presidential lies, take a gander at our latest “How Many U.S Presidents Lied Their Way into the White House and Beyond? All of Them!”
