The Profound Lie Behind Gonzales

Rick Perlstein

April 19, 2007

The list of alleged lies told by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who testifies before the Senate today, is  already long. The latest is a technical one, that he had nothing to do with identifying which United States attorneys should be fired, even though evidence proves he was intimately involved. The most profound lie may just be the foundation of his entire defense—that he's an incompetent buffoon, that that all the things done in the Justice Department over the last two years that were legally or morally questionable happened without his approval or even his knowledge.

He wouldn't be the first right-wing attorney general to be a black-hearted man willing to break the law out of a twisted means-justifies-the-ends morality. He's not even the second. John Mitchell, Richard Nixon's attorney general, boasted proudly in 1972 that "this country is going so far to the right you're not even going to recognize it," then did his part to make it so by helping lead the Watergate conspiracy to steal the 1972 president election as Nixon's campaign manager.

And here's an amazing story about the nation's next right-wing attorney general. It was told in Lou Cannon's latest Reagan biography, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power, though it's not widely known. Reagan had a close advisor, Phil Battaglia, that a cabal of Reagan's other advisors, including chief of staff Edwin Meese, wished to get rid of. (One of the reasons they wished to get rid of him was that he was insufficiently right-wing.) They suspected he was a homosexual. So they bugged Battaglia's hotel room in order to get the goods. They failed. But it's astonishing to think about. This is the man Ronald Reagan made the chief law enforcement officer of the United States—where he turned out to be the subject of an investigation by the United States Office of the Independent Counsel.

I once wrote that the tragic thing about our public life is not that we are led by liars. It is that they have turned us into a nation of liars. What I meant by that is simple. It is the ordinary and honorable instinct of patriotic Americans to believe that America's leaders are honest, decent, and law-abiding. It is the ordinary and honorable instinct of Americans to defend them as such. So ordinary patriotic Americans—who harbor the simple belief, logical enough, that to call the men leading America monsters is akin to calling America monstrous—do defend them. And American leaders who are not, in fact, honest, decent, and law abiding, count on these patriotic Americans to defend them, as if they were defending America itself.

How sad. How tragic. They rely, to preserve their power, on treating patriotic Americans like suckers.

UPDATED: Bill Scher and Rick Perlstein liveblogging of the the Alberto Gonzales hearing is at  the Common Sense blog.