By Jim Heffernan
I’ve been thinking a lot about our government lying to us lately. I wish it would stop.
I think the lying started out small, but has grown throughout my life. I mark it by presidents, but there are many, many accomplices along the way.
My first president was John F. Kennedy. I barely got a chance to know him. I was 17 and in my first month of an Air Force enlistment when he was shot in November of 1963. Fifty of us spanking-new airmen were marching to the chow hall after qualifying with the M-1 carbine. I’m sure most people near my age know where they were when they got the news of his assassination.
I don’t remember JFK for any lies, but I do remember his wonderful aspirational plea of, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Promoting unity was good politics back then.
LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson) was my next president, swept into office by an unspeakable tragedy in 1963 and elected in an historic landslide in 1964. He wanted to build a “Great Society” and might have done it except for a lie he told about Viet Nam and the threat of communism. It led us into a pointless war that cost us billions of dollars and 55,000+ American lives. More than a million Asian lives we’re sacrificed.
By 1968, America was ready for a change and we got almost eight years of Richard Nixon. We called him “tricky dick”. He’s the only president ever to resign. At the time, I thought his botched burglary scheme bad, but the lying about it was worse.
Jimmy Carter was next in 1976. He campaigned with the slogan “I’ll never lie to you.” Maybe that was his problem. I can’t say for sure, but I think his ideas about energy conservation made him very unpopular with big oil. I bought into the negativity the media wrapped him in and voted for Barry Commoner. I was close enough to enough Californians to know Ronald Reagan wouldn’t be a good idea.
Not many people agreed with me about Reagan. He was very popular and his lies about “welfare queens” and “tax cuts will shrink the national debt” were swallowed like candy. We laughed at his joke about “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” and relished his promise to get government off our backs. It took 205 years for our national debt to reach $1 trillion dollars. Ronald Reagan brought it to $2 trillion dollars before he left office.
After Reagan, a procession. GH Bush, Clinton, GW Bush and O’bama. Each promised to be for all Americans, but things never got better for all Americans. Trillions of dollars of wealth were shifted from the middle classes to the upper classes.
2016 brought us Donald Trump and a new level of lying mixed with an undisguised appeal to our dark side. 2020 brought Biden and good intentions and an open checkbook, but it wasn’t enough.
2024 brought us an uninhibited Donald Trump and complicit Congress. We are saddled with a government bereft of morality and decency. Our national debt is now $39 trillion dollars and I know it’s not going to go down. We spend more on interest for the national debt than we do on national defense. Washington doesn’t care, we can pass it on to our kids.
I’ve never been much for prayer, but I’ve changed. My prayer is for wholesale changes in upcoming elections to heal our country. I would like to again live in a country known for our morality and decency.
I think a good first step will be to make lying wrong again.