When is it OK to lie, and is honesty all it's cracked up to be?
Christian Right war horse Ed McAteer, founder of the Religious Roundtable, says that, the Ten Commandments aside, there comes a time when a lie is better than the truth.But like many politicians, ministers, judges and police, McAteer draws the line when it comes to "weasel-worded" spinmeisters who use verbal gymnastics to cover up inappropriate deeds.
For each, the legacy of President Clinton will include a pre-millennium examination of truth, justice and the American way. For the first time since Watergate, lying has endangered a presidency and reminded an entire nation that honesty -- at least most of the time -- is the best policy.
There is no single moral compass when it comes to lying. Like a lie, honesty depends on time, place and other context. "If your girlfriend walks out and has on a particularly horrible dress, what are you going to say?" asks Circuit Court Judge D'Army Bailey of Memphis, a man who daily faces dueling versions of truth.
In the courtroom, it's "very difficult to have some sort of automatic standard to know that a person is lying or not," says Bailey. Fortunately for judges, the justice system is based on such concepts as "preponderance of evidence" and "corroborating circumstances" rather than an unequivocal quest for absolute truth.
If unadulterated truth were the only courtroom standard, the justice system might grind to a halt. "I don't know that there's any signal when someone's not telling the truth, and I concluded a long time ago that we were losing our search for the truth," says retired U.S. District Judge Robert McRae. "Some people are such good liars that you can't tell."
McRae says most people don't realize that even an admitted subversion of the truth may not amount to a lie for legal purposes.
In his deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, Clinton denied having a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. But to amount to perjury, appellate courts have held a lie must be "material" to the case at hand. Even if Clinton lied about Lewinsky, it may not be central or material to whether he sexually harassed Paula Jones.
So, based on strict interpretation of the law, Americans are told that if you lie to suit your own purposes on the witness stand, it may be OK. Or, at least, there's a good chance you'll get away with it.
It is the same confusing standard that confronts people in everyday life. And it's a standard people face at a very young age.
Psychologist Ed McColgan says children begin lying by age 4 or 5, maybe even earlier. "Avoiding punishment is the primary reason, and it's normal behavior."
McColgan, who teaches at the University of Tennessee, sees it as a chance "to teach children about responsibility. . . . The difficulty is not to corner children and be too rigid in setting up punishment." Severe punishment could lead to anxiety and fearfulness and to "compulsive repetition" of lying, he says.
From a psychological standpoint, some people considered "liars" are not technically dishonest. "If a paranoid schizophrenic says he's Napoleon, then it is the truth to him," says McColgan's associate, Allen Battle. That's one reason a machine, like a polygraph or lie-detector, is not always a good gauge of truth.
"Some can lie with impunity and have no more emotional reaction than if talking about the time of day or what they'll be having for dinner that evening," says Battle.
For police and other law enforcement officers, that means looking for new and better ways to search for truth. Memphis police inspector Bob Wright, in charge of investigating crimes against persons, once studied body language in the police training academy. As a homicide detective, he sometimes watched murder suspects yawning as they were questioned. "If a person continues yawning, it's an indication they're trying to mask things by getting more oxygen to the brain in order to think."
Lt. Terry Yarbrough, an instructor at a police training academy, says body language is still an important cue and that officers learn to "keep their head in the ball game" by watching for the subtlest signs of obfuscation. "There are certain involuntary impulses you can't control -- getting fidgety, blinking the eyes, staring."
One of the newest techniques was developed by a former Israeli polygraph expert who gets suspects to make written statements of their versions of an incident. Sgt. Ed Darby studied the technique at the FBI academy and says it's based on determining whether a statement is coming from memory or from the "creative side" of the brain. "A memory is going to be different than something you made up."
A body language expert might watch which direction a suspect's eyes turn as the suspect gives a known answer and an answer that he has to construct or make up. But, using the written analysis, an officer looks for discrepancies that are harder to mask. If the suspect's statement includes gaps in time, inconsistencies, large amounts of unrelated information or unusual use of pronouns, it's a clue the person is withholding information or lying, says Darby.
For example, he says Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who drowned her children and then claimed they had been abducted, told police the kidnapper had taken "the car" with her children. Darby says a person usually refers to their car or other possessions as "my car," not "the car." It was a subtle but important clue that would tip off anyone familiar with the technique, he says.
The need for such subtle dishonesty detection could be viewed as a symptom of the times. "The world today is more amoral than in the past. It's a selfish, greedy world where morals are declining and the respect for one's privacy is not protected the way it has been," says P.K. Seidman, a lawyer-economist and senior partner at an accounting firm.
Some disagree with him. Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Kemper Durand says the world is no more dishonest "than in the '50s, '60s or the 1890s. Some people tell fibs, some white lies and some outright lies. Now, though, people have a different view of the world because the world is so much more accessible. You have instant access to everything."
Even so, Seidman says accountants often face clients who ask them to cover up "creative" handling of corporate funds.
A CPA is supposed to report such approaches to the Securities and Exchange Commission. As an arbiter of truth, the SEC is a cousin to other federal agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, which considers such things as advertising claims.
When R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. claimed that its Joe Camel character was not intended to appeal to children, the FTC found otherwise, noted advertising executive John Malmo, chairman of Archer/Malmo Inc. He says that unlike the courts, the FTC is able to accuse someone of lying by "intent" rather than on the basis of words or such hair-splitting semantics as: "I didn't inhale."
While some Americans mistrust advertising, it operates on a higher standard than most realize, says Malmo. While Clinton has based part of his career on verbal gymnastics and "splitting hairs," Malmo says, R.J. Reynolds was told, "Wait a minute. You didn't have to tell a lie or overtly misrepresent. The fact is that this ad does misrepresent." R.J. Reynolds withdrew the ad.
Joe Camel aside, Bailey, the judge, points out that parents across the nation are annually moved to disregard truth in the name of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. "There's a matter of gradations of honesty, and with precious minds of young children, you can't be completely honest because they're so delicate."
With politicians, it's "far less excusable to lie. Politicians don't have a license to lie to the public," he says, making an exception in cases like President George Bush's "strategic maneuvering" during the Persian Gulf War.
University of Memphis history professor Charles Crawford says it was the dishonesty of national leaders that served as a "turning point in America. When people suspected public leaders were lying, duplicitous people came in about the time of Vietnam followed by Watergate. That's when it became the style for the media to really go after misconduct on the part of political leaders."
Author Sissela Bok, a former Brandeis University professor in philosophy and practical ethics, says an even earlier shock to the American public was when it learned President Eisenhower lied about sending spy planes over Russia only to have the U2 plane shot down. "That was a tremendous shock in this country. . . . Now we've had Vietnam and Watergate and Iran-Contra and people have become very cynical."
What crystallized much of the country against Clinton's behavior was his highly publicized and inescapable bald-faced disregard for truth, says Bok.
The president's denial and admission speeches were equally adamant, one wagging his finger and denying a relationship with "that woman," the other conceding an "inappropriate" relationship with her. "The fact that people could see that on their television screens and read in the newspapers the two speeches juxtaposed really cut to the heart of what many people feel about trust in government. How can they trust a person who appears so sincere both times?"
Michael Lollar writes for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn.