Notes from my Knapsack 9-17-20

Notes from my Knapsack 9-17-20

Jeff Gill

 

Leadership and lying

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It's difficult to get a clear read on this, but I strongly suspect that, when I was a kid, if someone said "all Presidents lie" there would be a great deal of pushback.

 

Kennedy was recently buried under an eternal flame at Arlington, and LBJ had just started asking McNamara what his options were in Vietnam, and Nixon was a semi-disgraced former vice-president. Ike was retired in Gettysburg, and Harry to Independence, but Johnson went to him for the signing of the legislation that created Medicare.

 

I learned when our family stopped with Grandma Gill at the Hoover birthplace in Iowa that, to my surprise, she appreciated him to the point of tears; I'd only heard him mocked as a failure, but she remembered his relief work in the Mississippi Valley and overseas, and honored the man. FDR was on the dime, and in our hearts as the one who taught us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.

 

Things changed quickly into the 1970s, and now "Vietnam and Watergate" is a phrase synonymous with loss of faith in leadership and government. Institutional trust came apart in many ways after Nixon left office and Saigon fell. It's of no small personal interest to people like myself that organized religious bodies, Scouting registration, and many other non-profit fellowship groups saw a peak in the early to mid-Seventies that has only declined in numbers and involvement since that date.

 

Putnam's "Bowling Alone" dissects this in detail, and hints at the reality that it wasn't just the Watergate tapes or the Pentagon Papers that triggered our national withdrawal from trust and commitment, but trends that go back farther, which ask us to dig deeper. I've spent most of my professional life delving into those questions, and wish I had better answers, or at least ones which fit into five hundred words, but I do not.

 

Yet I doubt I'd get much debate if I said today "all Presidents lie." Ford pardoned Nixon and said a number of things about why and how he came to that decision which I trust he privately regretted; Carter said to America "I will not lie to you" and then found in the Iran hostage crisis and as Desert One played out that it was easier said than done. Reagan and Iran-Contra set loose a tangled web of non-truths and evasions which only deepened skepticism on all sides, tripping up Bush I and setting the table for Bush II, with Clinton in between arguably not gaining a reputation for honest speech, whatever you thought he meant by "is."

 

As to Obama and Trump, in our era of hyper-polarization, you don't need me to poke the rough beast slouching through our politics today. Look back farther, and now historical studies tell us about presidential lies and misrepresentations from slave-owning scribes of equality to apostles of normalcy with mistresses in the White House hallways. Wherever you come down politically, we all think presidents lie, and what's more, there's nothing to be done about it.

 

Which is, in my opinion, our deeper dilemma. What would a truly transparent presidency look like? Can executive authority be wielded with absolute honesty? Should we ask for full disclosure of everything, always, from the Oval Office? And if not, why not, and when? We know what Colonel Jessup thinks about the subject, but what's our answer? I don't think we've had this conversation, and it's overdue.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in Licking County; he really has no opinion worth sharing about the hat you're not wearing or how those pants really fit you, but your baby is indeed beautiful. Tell him how you handle the truth at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.