Obama is rightly being creamed for his lie about the Affordable Care Act, but Andy and I aren’t shocked about the matter. We were both independently disillusioned in May, 1960, when President Eisenhower lied about the U-2 incident. We didn’t know each other at the time, but whenever someone talks about not trusting the government, we both respond, “Yes, the U-2! If Eisenhower would lie to us, anyone would!” It’s become a family joke.
I felt betrayed by Eisenhower at the time, but I have some sympathy for him. He was trying to ease the arms race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., but he wanted to be sure it was safe. He wanted mutual verification but the U.S.S.R. refused, so he reluctantly agreed to some U-2 spy flights. The Central Intelligence Agency had assured him the U-2 flew high enough that it couldn’t be attacked by missiles or fighter planes. After the U-2 on the last flight was missing, the C.I.A. assured Eisenhower that the plane was designed to self-destruct — it was safe to say it had been just a weather research plane that had gone off course. Unfortunately the U-2 was not destroyed, the pilot was captured alive — with pictures he had taken — and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev humiliated Eisenhower and called off an upcoming summit conference. Instead of tensions thawing, the hardliners in the Kremlin gained more power and the Cold War got worse.
So Eisenhower paid a heavy price for the lie, and Andy and I became disillusioned.
Have you ever been disillusioned? By a lie or ….?
In 1970, while waiting for a bus, I saw a political rally for a local congressional candidate. He won the election and, over the years, even though I joined the Navy and moved away, I sort of kept track of his highly successful career. I never actually voted until I was in my 30s and he was one of the candidates I voted for on that ballot. Four year later, I voted for him when he ran for, and won, a different office. After winning this time though, he didn’t focus on the issues the voters wanted him to and he made stupid promises that he didn’t keep. Disillusioned, I voted for the other guy this time.
The name of the 1970 congressional candidate from Texas? George Herbert Walker Bush. The other candidate? William Jefferson Clinton, at the time the governor of our state.
A great story, thanks! I assume one of the broken promises was “Read my lips. No new taxes.”
That would be right.
In Aus we are a good deal more cynical about our pollies. So not so often disillusioned.
One for me was when I was at Uni and the newly elected Labor leader (Bob Hawke) didn’t follow through on his promise to shut down uranium mining. He betrayed Australian workers in numerous ways too – even though he had been head of Aus’s peak union body (the ACTU). It was he and his treasurer (allegedly heading a Labor government) who really cemented neo-liberalism into Aus’s political culture. Though he wasn’t purely delusional like our current PM (a climate change denialist! I kid you not.).
Cynicism is well warranted. Andy and I were young and naive, and I think Eisenhower was basically a good man, but politics is a rough business.
To be disillusioned with our politicians one should be first illusioned. No thinking voter in India is about any politician. They are simply treated as necessary evils.
So when you were a kid you didn’t have civics classes telling you how great your system of government was? Was it only in the U.S. that kids were brainwashed? I love hearing about what happened/is happening in other countries.
Wasn’t it Eisenhower who said, the national income tax would only last a couple of years?
Actually the 16th amendment in 1913 gave Congress the authority to levy income taxes. No one expected them to be temporary. 🙂
Oops.
I think most politicians that end up in the top positions, then want to be re-elected – get into “weasel words” – where later they might say “I was wrongly quoted…or…that is not what I actually said”
Of course, much of what they do say…has be re-worded, or revoked…because it just isn’t feasible to go down that pathway. Or they meet a boulder in the road and that causes them to backtrack or go off on another side road!
Or just when everything is going their way – there is a natural disaster/man made incident, which puts paid to everything and on and on and on it all goes…
I cheerfully admit, I would not want to be a politician. Too many people would be waiting to pounce on me!