Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Jonathan Rauch | October 10, 1998

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Still, I concede that this is an issue of temperament rather than morals, and that outrage is a reasonable response to lies in public life. So, to the outraged, I propose a deal. Stay outraged, but look a little less at intentions and legality, and more at real-world harm.

Bill Clinton's lie about sex was legally wrong and morally shabby. But the lie--as distinct from the consequences of its exposure--didn't do very much real-world damage. In fact, the country would have been much better off if Clinton had gotten away with it. Personal lies and policy prevarication co-exist in a curiously transverse relationship: Shabby lies of self- preservation usually cause only retail damage, whereas even well-intentioned policy dissembling can do mischief wholesale.

On Aug. 4, 1964, Washington got word that the North Vietnamese had launched a nighttime attack on two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. The North Vietnamese had already skirmished with an American destroyer in the area two days earlier, and the Johnson administration took the second attack to Congress as justification for a broad grant of war-making powers. What the administration did not say was that reports from the scene were conflicting and confused. Owing to the dark night and the rough weather, not even the men in the gulf were sure whether they had been shooting at real enemies or phantoms. Congress gave Johnson his authority to ''take all necessary measures'' in Vietnam--but the attack that justified this mandate had not occurred.

The country is still living with the consequences of the Johnson administration's Gulf of Tonkin not-quite-lie. Dishonest non-defenses of affirmative action have inflamed racial resentment; the states' tobacco suits will cost smokers billions of dollars that they do not properly owe; nonsense about the Dutch murder rate fuels obsessive drug-war overkill.

So here is a suggestion: Barry McCaffrey should manfully step forward and declare, for the record, that America is a more criminally lethal country than the Netherlands. He should come clean and admit the obvious, instead of hiding behind legalisms and technical dodges. Then we can forgive him, and put this whole sorry episode behind us.