You said what? Lies and propaganda throughout history

YOU SAID WHAT?

LIES AND PROPAGANDA

THROUGHOUT

HISTORY

@ EDITED BY

BILL FAWCETT

Dedicated to the memory of

James Patrick Baen,

the most honest person I have known

CONTENTS

Introduction: So Many Lies, so Few Pages

Politics 1

Watergate: The Great American Scandal 3

Stalin’s Big Lies 10

McKinley’s Missionary Position 16

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere: Silversmith

or Poster Child for Civil War Draft 21

J. Edgar Hoover’s Not-so-Red Menace 29

The Soviets Blink 35

Daley Country 41

The First Casualty of War Is Truth 47

James K. Polk’s Fabrication to Congress 49

How the Roman Empire Lost Its Gallic Wars

but Julius Caesar Became Emperor 53

vii

iv CONTENTS

Radio Raiders of the Polish Frontier 58

Murder Most Foul 62

Listening In 67

The Yellow Peril That Wasn’t 73

The Magical Lies of Quicksilver 78

And U-2 89

How Not to Sell a War 93

Incident in Tonkin Gulf: The Dishonest Truth 100

Sink or Swim with Ngo Dinh Diem 106

King Hussein’s Trust Issues 122

History Books Lie Too 127

Cleopatra: Looks Were Not Deceiving 129

Death on the Nile 137

Christmas—In May? 141

Witches, Devils, and Puritans in Massachusetts 148

So Humble in Green County, Tennessee, 1834 154

J’Accuse! 157

Seventy-nine Bridges 162

Village of the Damned 168

World War II’s Master of Lies 174

Arms for Hostages? 181

CONTENTS v

But It Was in a Book . . . 189

This Is a True Story . . . Not 191

The Author of This Book Is . . . 203

The Janet Cooke Pulitzer Fiasco 213

Mark Hoffman’s Forgeries and Murders 217

The New York Times’s Khmer Rouge Story 222

The New York Sun’s Six-Part Story on Life on

the Moon 226

Trust Me, I Can Cure You 231

The Royal Touch That Healed 233

Grover Cleveland’s Secret Dental Surgery 237

Dr. Albert Abrams and the ERA 241

The High-Voltage Cure-all 246

Bad Blood 252

FDR’s Legs 257

Smoking Is Good for You 261

A-OK JFK: The Presidential Campaign Trail, 1960 266

Killing by Bureaucracy 270

What Lies Ahead? 277

“We Are Here to Save the Holy Land, Making

a Profit Is Just Incidental!” 279

The Fake of a Fake 285

vi CONTENTS

Tower of London: Not Really Where You Get

a Head 289

Are My Arms Tired! 295

No Speak English 299

Eric Clapton’s Undying but Temporary Passion

for Patti Boyd-Harrison 304

Vincent “the Chin” Gigante 308

Epilogue: Color Him Red-Faced 313

About the Editor

Other Books by Bill Fawcett

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

@ INTRODUCTION

S O MANY L IES , S O F E W P AGES

S o many lies, so few pages. When this book was proposed there

was no shortage of lies, deceptions, and frauds great and small

to use as examples. The fact is that the lies told in an era give

us some real insights into history. So this book could be a deep

study of the philosophical ramifications of deceptions on histori￾cal, um . . . okay, you got me. It isn’t philosophical anything. We

did this book because lies, when you are not the one caught tell￾ing them, anyhow, are both fascinating and fun. They do tell you

a lot—mostly that some of the greatest leaders in history should

be embarrassed. So we looked at all those uncounted thousands

of lies that have been told to us and to those who came before us

and came up with what follows, the story of some of the strangest,

best known, and darkest lies. You are even likely to find a few lies

here that you thought were truths. (Hint, I threw out my coonskin

cap, and it wasn’t to please the terrorists at PETA.) This selection

of lies from history are fun and interesting—and a few will simply

viii INTRODUCTION

amaze you that anyone ever believed them. Their topics run the

gamut from war and politics to medicine and crime. Oh, and it’s

safe to leave this book in the bathroom or take it to the offi ce. We

carefully did not cover the lies lovers and married couples tell each

other and will leave to you all of those deceptions perpetrated by

our current leaders.

Some of the lies we include caused great pain, others great

embarrassment. Through the perspective of history it may seem

strange that anyone, occasionally just about everyone who heard

them, believed some of the whoppers in this book. Still they “made

sense at the time.” There are some lies people just want to believe.

Other lies are accepted because no one knows better. Many lies are

successful simply because the liar is so good at telling them.

This book is written in many small sections. It really is meant to

be picked up, put down, read while commuting. It may make you

think, it might even outrage you a few times, and it will occasion￾ally elicit a chuckle or two. When editing this book, it has been

tempting to draw conclusions about the nature of truth and the

state of man from its contents, but I will leave that to those of you

so inclined. That said, while the intent of this book is to entertain,

no one who has contributed to it will be upset if you view the lies

we are hearing and accepting today with a little more skepticism.

That said, to get us off to a roaring start and because it just has to

be in a book on lying somewhere, so needing no introduction here

it is:

“I did not have sex with that woman” (President William Jefferson Clinton).

BILL FAWC E T T

ED I TOR

POLITICS

@ How can you tell a politician is lying?

His mouth is moving . . .

A joke that likely first appeared

sometime during the Sumerian Empire.

“I am not a crook” (Richard Nixon, 1956).

(He should have added “yet.”)

Lesson one: If you are going to lie, don’t record the truth.

@ WATERGATE

T H E GR E A T A MERICAN S CANDAL

Peter Archer

The biggest political scandal in American history began with a lie

and contained so many different lies told by so many different

people that it’s almost impossible to keep track of who wasn’t lying.

Looking back on the affair, the curious thing is that Richard Nixon,

hailed by many as the consummate American politician, made so

many missteps—mistakes that ultimately led to his resignation in

August 1974. Yet had Nixon been able to pull himself free of an

almost pathological fear of the truth, he might have ended the scan￾dal almost before it began.

The events that were to consume the national consciousness for

two years began in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, when

a security guard at the Watergate hotel in Washington, D.C., no￾ticed tape over the lock of an entry door. He removed the tape, but

when, an hour or so later, he found it had been replaced, he called

the police. An unmarked squad car responded, and the cops swiftly

searched the building’s offices. In the suite housing the national

4 YOU SAID WHAT?

headquarters of the Democratic Party, they arrested five men wear￾ing business suits and surgical gloves, carrying photographic equip￾ment and walkie-talkies.

Clearly this was no ordinary burglary, but the D.C. police weren’t

sure what they had. One of the men, James McCord, identifi ed him￾self as a “security consultant” who had just left government service.

“What service?” the judge later asked.

“CIA,” McCord answered.

Later that day, it was revealed that McCord’s security consult￾ing had been done for the Nixon reelection campaign, then in full

swing.

John Mitchell, former attorney general of the United States

and chairman of the Committee to Reelect the President (CRP),

announced, “We want to emphasize that this man and the other

people involved were not operating on either our behalf or with

our consent. There is no place in our campaign or in the electoral

process for this type of activity, and we will not permit or con￾done it.” The statement is notable for being the first major lie of

Watergate.

On the surface, there seemed to be no reason for Mitchell not to

be telling the truth. By June it was clear that the Democratic presi￾dential candidate that fall would be George McGovern, considered

by most analysts to be the weakest opponent Nixon could face.

Nixon’s campaign committee had already raised vast sums of money

and had a highly efficient and ruthless campaign organization in

place, ready for the post-convention season of campaigning.

What no one outside a small circle of White House offi cials

knew was that Watergate was merely part of a larger program of

dirty tricks, spying, and political sabotage organized by Nixon’s

aides. Nixon especially feared a Ted Kennedy candidacy, and he was

willing to do anything to avoid it.

The spy campaign had first been organized around a plan pro￾posed by a young Republican activist, Thomas Charles Huston. The

POLITICS 5

“Huston Plan,” as it came to be known, was personally approved by

Nixon and included spying on political opponents through illegal

wiretaps, mail opening, and burglary, as well as drawing up plans to

intern thousands of dissenters in the event of a national emergency.

Shortly after approving the plan, though, Nixon rescinded his ap￾proval, and the Huston Plan was quietly put on the shelf.

The second plan of operation was code-named GEMSTONE and

was drawn up by G. Gordon Liddy, a White House aide with a fas￾cination for the world of spies and secret intelligence. Liddy’s plan

included “black bag jobs” (burglaries), bugging, and even less savory

ideas. (Part of the plan suggested that leaders of the protests at

the Republican National Convention should be kidnapped, drugged,

and spirited over the border to Mexico.) Liddy and his backers

presented the plan to John Mitchell. Though Mitchell later testifi ed

that he was “aghast” at the plan, he gave no indication of this at the

time, and his underlings began to carry out elements of it.

At the same time, Nixon himself, furious at the leaking of the

Pentagon Papers study of the war in Vietnam, raged against Daniel

Ellsberg, a military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation,

who had leaked the papers. With Nixon’s knowledge, if not exactly

his consent, operatives broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychia￾trist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, hunting for information that could be used

to discredit Ellsberg.

Nixon also grew increasingly paranoid about leaks from the ad￾ministration to the press. Under the direction of Charles Colson,

one of the president’s advisers on domestic policy, Liddy and a

compatriot, E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative, formed a unit

within the White House to seek out and prevent leaks. When one

of those affi liated with the unit told his mother-in-law about it, she

joked that now they had a plumber in the family. From that remark,

the unit was named the Plumbers.

Watergate, therefore, was simply part of a much larger plan

designed to disconcert and upset Nixon’s political opponents. Much

6 YOU SAID WHAT?

of the plan came under the direction of Jeb Stuart Magruder. Typi￾cal of the young men working in the Nixon White House, Magruder

was bright, fanatically devoted to Nixon, and beholden to the White

House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. It was Haldeman who had

picked Magruder to be the first director of CRP, thus setting in mo￾tion the events that led to Watergate.

When Magruder was replaced by Mitchell, the younger man kept

his new boss, Haldeman, in the loop, though Mitchell rarely knew

the details of what was being done against “the opposition.”

Liddy and Hunt recruited a group of Cuban anti-Castro activists

and a mercenary named Frank Sturgis, who had trained Cubans

for action in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, as well as the ex-CIA

man McCord, to carry out the burglary at the Democratic National

Headquarters. When the burglars were caught, their handlers pan￾icked. Liddy told his wife, “There was trouble. Some people got

caught. I’ll probably be going to jail.” He began shredding docu￾ments and records having to do with the Plumbers and their se￾crets.

Hunt was caught when someone noticed that one of the Cubans

arrested had an address book that contained the name and phone

number of Howard E. Hunt and a notation: “W. House.” Reporter

Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, whose name, along with that

of his colleague Carl Bernstein, would become forever linked to

the Watergate story, called the phone number and confi rmed that

Hunt knew the burglars. Hunt was arrested, and he and Liddy would

later both be indicted in connection with the burglary.

Woodward and Bernstein gained a second important lead when

they discovered that a cashier’s check to the order of Kenneth Dahl￾berg had made its way into the bank account of Bernard Barker, one

of the burglars. Dahlberg, it turned out, was a major fund-raiser

for Nixon. He claimed to have no idea how the check, money he’d

raised for the campaign, had ended up in Barker’s account, telling

Woodward that he had turned the check over to CRP.