Books, Arts & Manners: Why Lie? An Inquiry

IN All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President—the new book she has written with her new husband, James Carville—Mary Matalin tells a revealing story about the 1992 presidential campaign. There had been reports in the press, possibly planted by the Bush campaign itself, that the President was going togotoa veterans’ convention in Utah to attack Governor Clinton as a draft evader. Miss Matalin says: “I thought it was a really bad idea. I thought it was beneath him. I also thought, even if he was going to attack Clinton, it was bad tactics for us to telegraph it.” Thus, she says, “I didn’t know what the President’s plans were, but I denied the story for both reasons.”

Later she goes on to describe the great pleasure that the Bush team took in having psyched out the Clintonites over this rumor. It never occurs to her that this successful deception was in any morally reprehensible sense dishonest. On the contrary, she is doubtless completely sincere when she lists as the first of her five cardinal rules for dealing with the media the following principle: “No matter what, don’t lie to the press”

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James Bowman

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IN All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President—the new book she has written with her new husband, James Carville—Mary Matalin tells a revealing story about the 1992 presidential campaign. There had been reports in the press, possibly planted by the Bush campaign itself, that the President was going togotoa veterans’ convention in Utah to attack Governor Clinton as a draft evader. Miss Matalin says: “I thought it was a really bad idea. I thought it was beneath him. I also thought, even if he was going to attack Clinton, it was bad tactics for us to telegraph it.” Thus, she says, “I didn’t know what the President’s plans were, but I denied the story for both reasons.”

Later she goes on to describe the great pleasure that the Bush team took in having psyched out the Clintonites over this rumor. It never occurs to her that this successful deception was in any morally reprehensible sense dishonest. On the contrary, she is doubtless completely sincere when she lists as the first of her five cardinal rules for dealing with the media the following principle: “No matter what, don’t lie to the press”