Presidents and their flacks have always had to backpedal, take things back, unsay things without admitting they’d been lying in the first place. Richard Nixon, the Babe Ruth of lying presidents, told so many tall ones during the Watergate scandal that his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, had to issue a blanket repudiation, saying of all the White House’s previous utterances on the subject, “This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.”
Ronald Reagan wriggled out of taking responsibility for any untruths he may have uttered about the Iran-Contra affair through the deft use of the passive voice: “Mistakes were made.” This formulation proved so successful that President Bush invoked it when explaining the abuses at Abu Ghraib–and now McClellan echoes it in his memoir.
The genius of Reagan’s mantra was its terse impersonality, while McClellan’s language verges on the poetic. You can easily imagine Candor and Honesty capped and personified in our Everyman President’s personal Pilgrim’s Progress–and despair for his salvation as he turns away from them.
But while McClellan has raised the bar, there are doubtless millions of other felicitous ways to describe official fibbing. So. Our challenge to you, the Stumper reader: Come up with the best euphemism for a, well, lie, and post it in our comments below:
