In a recent Washington Post column Dana Milbank draws provocative parallels between the official lying that cloaked our failures in Vietnam and Trump’s mis-characterizations of the Covid-19 crisis and what he is doing about it. “Unfortunately for us,” says Milbank, “he’s refighting the Vietnam war.”
But comparing the war-related mendacity of Johnson, Nixon and Ford to Trump’s epic prevarications about the pandemic does a sick injustice to the other three guys. After all, it took them ten years of serial deceit to drive us into the brick wall at the end of the tunnel. In just three months Trump’s web of lies has seriously if not fatally crippled the nation’s response to an insidious invisible enemy.
Something else distinguishes the current abnegation of honesty from its precursor in Indochina. Official doubletalk about the war produced a tsunami of public protest. Defiant insiders stood up to tell all. Ellsberg did it with the Pentagon Papers, Hugh Thompson after My Lai. Even I had a modest go at finger pointing.
Trump’s three-year rehearsal for what he is doing now did yield a steady flow of anonymous counter-leaks. And we’ll never forget the brave unnamed whistleblower who blew the lid on the Ukraine shakedown plot. But so far, no eyewitness to the inner workings of Trump’s anti-fact campaign about the coronavirus has dared to come forward, look him straight in the eye and call him out publicly to his face.
We know from press reporting that Doctors Fauci and Birx have lobbied behind the scenes for an embrace of candor, and we have seen them in public walk the tightrope between self-preserving deference and outright challenge to Trump’s monstrous falsehoods.
But I learned a hard lesson in Vietnam about such balancing acts. In hopes of preserving your place at court and your ability to make a difference you can wind up being too polite and diplomatic.
During the last weeks of the war a brave Vietnamese spy brought us the enemy’s final battle plans in time to help us prepare for an orderly evacuation. Circumstance placed me in contact with him at a crucial juncture, and I struggled with every ounce of my being – within the limits of bureaucratic protocol – to get the Ambassador to believe him. It wasn’t enough.
What that taught me is that sometimes you have to grab the bastard by the throat and throttle him (or her) into accepting the truth, even at the cost of your career and reputation. I fear that Fauci and his fellow wise men and women are fast reaching the point of having to make that choice: either they confront Trump’s lethal dishonesty head-on without equivocation or risk becoming irrelevant bobbleheads at his now routine five o-clock follies.