The Violence of Lying

Abstract

It was 1971 when Hannah Arendt first published in the New York Review of Books her essay “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers” (Arendt, in Arendt 1972, 3–47). The essay commented on the recent publication of the forty-seven-volume “History of U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy” (commissioned by Secretary of State Robert S. McNamara in June 1967 and completed a year and a half later). The scandal at the core of the publication of this report had to do with the fact that it was not meant to be published, at least not in the way that the New York Times (NYT) got hold of it. The above report became widely known as the Pentagon Papers and was, in fact, a “top-secret, richly documented record of the American role in Indochina from World War II to May 1968” (Arendt 1972, 3). The embarrassment of the Nixon administration—which, shortly thereafter, had to deal with another, more infamous scandal—in receiving the news that the public had become informed of the years of lies and deception in Vietnam was observable in its futile attempt to silence Daniel Ellsberg (the Pentagon “expert” and member of the Rand Corporation who was responsible for leaking the report to the New York Times). The NYT scoop of the Pentagon Papers preceded the Washington Post revelations on the Watergate Building infraction, with the consequences that we are all familiar with.