COMMENTARY: A legacy for Bill and Hillary: Just tell the truth

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.) UNDATED _ My father’s advice to me would be a big help to President Bill Clinton. He told me […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ My father’s advice to me would be a big help to President Bill Clinton. He told me that I should always tell the truth. It was the right thing to do and it was easier to remember.


There is little doubt our president could have avoided a lot of trouble had he followed this wonderful American counsel, at once moral and pragmatic.

Now the president suffers a double curse: He finds it hard to tell the truth and he can’t remember his lies. That leaves him and the country without a moral compass. You cannot have one if you can’t locate true North.

At the same time, he is searching desperately for a legacy that will be spangled with honor.

And the first lady is out on the same mission for herself, feigning an intrinsically improbable desire to play second fiddle as the junior senator from New York.

Therein is the tipoff and you heard it here first.

Mrs. Clinton does not want to be second anything. That is a truth we all recognize so why is she still using the subjunctive mood in every sentence about running?

There is, however, a project on which they could collaborate that would earn them the proud and fitting reputation for which they long as movie stars do for fame. This initiative would not only gild their images, it would also serve as an antidote to the nation’s longest running spiritual woe.

America’s principal social, moral and spiritual problems rest uneasily above a common denominator. We may identify it as straightforward lying as public and remorseless as that of the gambler who does not bother to mask his marked cards as he fleeces you.


Right now, that is the Clinton Legacy _ a confection of double talk and legal distinctions that has made it almost impossible for even fellow Democrats to believe them. This style makes everyone hesitate _ what were the qualifiers in that sentence, what does the word is mean? _ to accept at face value anything they say.

Such Direct Lying resembles Direct Mail solicitation. The letter announcing you may have won $10 million dollars is as baited and bent as the fishhook it actually is. As soon as you slit open that brown envelope, you feel you have diminished yourself, tossed an irreplaceable and unrecoverable bit of your integrity into the roaring Niagara of falsehood.

As a nation, we have been assaulted by so much flagrant public lying our souls have lost their trim and our spiritual possibilities have been blunted. You cannot make light of words without damaging the central religious concept of the Word itself.

Pope John Paul II has criticized the West as a”culture of death.”The way is prepared for that, however, by a culture of lying. Once you slay the truth, you can kill anything else easily.

Suppose our First Couple decided that in their last year in the White House they would tell the truth to America on every important subject, including their own relationship.

Let them also pledge to answer directly, without public relations qualifications or crossing their fingers behind their backs, all questions put to them.


They would thereby work a transformation of consciousness in the country comparable to the effect of the conversion of the first Roman emperor to Christianity.

They could wear white lapel ribbons to celebrate the purity of the truth.

Falsehood, after all, is worse for the nation than nicotine and the Clintons might get their adoring trial lawyers to shoot a stone of lawsuits at the advertising/public relations Goliath, felling the monster and extracting billion dollar settlements from these corporations for getting Americans hooked on falsehood.

Instead of talking about birds and beasts on the endangered list, Clinton should draw attention to truth as the most woefully endangered attribute of life.

In the long run, truth is that which holds life together. There can be no faith or hope, and nothing we could really call love, without the support of the truth without which the spirit cannot survive.

What a relief for ordinary citizens if they felt once again they could trust their own language and those, whether prophets or politicians, who speak it to them.

The truth does make us free. And it is easier to remember.

DEA END KENNEDY

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!