Legislate the Truth?

Since 1948, a federal law has carried the threat of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for any citizen who "willfully falsifies, conceals or covers up" a material fact from any agent of the Government. Massachusetts' Senator Edward Kennedy wants to make the law a two-edged sword: his staff is drafting a bill to declare it a crime for any Government official knowingly to mislead or lie to the public.

Under such a law, the State Department spokesman who lied about Francis Gary Powers' U-2 flight over Russia in 1960 could presumably have been prosecuted. Certainly the Nixon Administration's high-level lying about the B-52 bombing of Cambodia would have been actionable. Of course, Ted Kennedy is politician enough not to want to apply the law to campaign promises and political rhetoric -- such a prohibition might jail nearly every elected official in the nation, depending on how rigorously one defined a "lie."

Kennedy's quixotic bill is an effort to legislate virtue -- like the Volstead Act. The truth bill might lower the general level of mendacity in Washington, though the cautionary example of Watergate and the Roundhead vigilance around the capital these days should be warning enough. But if the law were enacted, could a President bluff another power by announcing a course of action he had no intention of taking?

Conceivably, the Kennedy bill might render officials even less communicative and more secretive, inhibited and legalistically subtle, more adept at what Carlyle called "the talent of lying in a way that cannot be laid hold of." Where virtue and veracity are concerned, it might be shrewder to make a sunny presumption of innocence and rely on the American people's proven talent for discerning, sooner or later, that they are being lied to.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.