Three great presidential lies: I am not a crook. I will never lie to you. I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
All first person. All simple declarative sentences. All uttered knowing the statement was false.
That's what a lie is.
In 1960, when the Russians shot down Gary Powers' U2 spy plane, it was the Secretary of State, not President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who claimed a weather-research plane had gone off course. "So intense was the desire to not have the President lie," says presidential historian Michael Beschloss, "to not break the bond of trust with the American people, it was left to others. Eisenhower never spoke an untruth." Of course, Ike was never the focus of an investigation by a grand jury, either.
The history of presidential lying is a brief one because the phenomenon came into its own only in the television age. The Kennedy-Nixon debates were the first time a presidential candidate could look ordinary Americans square in the eye and dissemble: "I do not have Addison's disease." When J.F.K. boldly stated that, he knew it was a bald-faced lie.
Once upon a time, Presidents might have fudged the facts to a few Congressmen in smoke-filled rooms, but who was the wiser? If voters heard the words second- or thirdhand, how could they judge them? Now it's impossible to fib in obscurity. Americans can already mouth the words when they see the incessant reruns of that finger-jabbing image: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Sissela Bok, the high priestess of the scholars of lying, says the TV camera has made it far more dangerous for a President to prevaricate than it was 50 years ago. Now it's the camera that doesn't lie.
In some ways, lying in general has become a lot easier. The breakdown of communities and the peripatetic habits of the population, notes Charles Ford, author of Lies! Lies!! Lies!!!: The Psychology of Deceit, have made lying harder to uncover. If you live in a condo in San Diego, you can pretend you were captain of your high school football team in Akron, Ohio. But for public figures, it's precisely the opposite: TV and the mass media turn the whole country into one small town.
All politicians, says presidential scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, "tell the truth selectively." Bill Clinton has been accused of telling the truth slowly. This is not the same thing as lying. It's a sin of omission, not commission. It's like the difference between lying as a legal issue and as a moral one. The definition of perjury is far narrower than what your grandfather would have considered a damned lie. The legal bar of truth is awfully low. Bill Clinton can be "legally accurate" and still be lying through his teeth. "Religion and law are fishing at the opposite ends of a continuum," says Skip Masback, a former Washington litigator who is now a Congregational Church minister. "It's not enough for religion to say, 'Just be technically accurate,' for in the depths of the soul, dissembling just doesn't cut it."