Abstract
It is the awesome responsibility of historians to depict the past and the characters of the past as they really were, warts and all. Is this not a rather presumptuous exercise now that we realize that it is seldom the real president, prime minister or secretary-general that appears on our television screens, but rather a product or an image that has been artificially manufactured? Richard M. Nixon’s deleted expletives, Kurt Waldheim’s expurgated past, and the modifications to Margaret Thatcher’s voice, John Major’s teeth, and Tony Blair’s hair are aspects of the processes of adaptation, creation, and re-creation that now employ whole teams of public relations officers, speech-writers, couturiers, coiffeurs, spin-doctors and advertisers. What we see is not reality. It is an image designed to appeal to and shape public opinion and win elections. Fortunately for democracy, there are today many others professionally concerned to dispel and discredit such images. They give access to alterna tive official and journalistic sources almost as each image is created.
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