A good friend asked me today if I believed the immensity of the testimony of Michael Cohen would have a similar effect on the American public as Watergate did. As a millennial, she asked with hope and suspense, something of me who had lived during the Watergate period. Why this is important is obvious to me, in that during the Watergate hearings much of the country was horrified, mesmerized, and galvanized in the watching of testimony that shocked and appalled many people. People wanted the details of the truth in fact, and seemed to settle for nothing less.
I told my friend I didn’t think so and talked about why that was.
Nobody (as I recall) said John Dean shouldn’t be listened to because he was going to get a plea deal. There was not yet the relativism about truth that we see today. If someone had evidence and it was seconded and affirmed again and again, well there was reason to believe the testimony.
I was not a Republican during Watergate, but I realized that people from any side of the aisle were frozen in disbelief and worry. The press was still sturdy in that you could get a fair share of fair mindedness wherever you looked. Of course there were conspiracy theorists but not to the extent we have this phenomenon today.
I have heard the Republican Party line in public be something like: Well, of course Michael Cohen is lying; after all he is a liar and has even confessed to lying before. He wants the three-year sentence to stand rather than the potential 70-year sentence he could have gotten if he didn’t testify. Nobody, as I recall, said lead witnesses in Watergate who had previously sworn loyalty to Nixon and lied about their own activities should be dismissed out of hand because they too were trying to limit their own prison sentences. In essence nobody said you couldn’t trust the testimony of someone who lied and who rescinded the lie in favor of the truth.
In a concise book called On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt (Princeton University Press, 2005) he called to mind Viggo Mortensen’s rendition of Tony Vallelonga, the Italian American who was security guard at the Copa before he became chauffeur to the African American musician Don Shirley, as portrayed in the recent film “Green Book”. In the movie Tony brags about being a superb “bullshitter”. When Dr. Shirley questions his apparent lack of shame in view of his being a liar, Tony clears this up, insisting he is not a liar. He is rather a “bullshitter”, someone who “just” convinces people to do what they don’t want to do. Frankfurt would agree with Tony’s self-assessment, I am pretty sure, because he distinguishes the bullshitter from the truth teller and from the liar.
According to Frankfurt, a liar knows he is lying or at the very least considers false that which he is saying. The honest person is telling the truth or at least perceives that to be so. The bullshitter, however, cares neither about truth or for that matter lies, at all, only about getting his or her way. Wow, this seems very relevant to today. In fact it feels like we have entered an era in which the actor voted the best not only wins an Oscar, but also the vote of the people. All one has to do is cast aspersions about the witness, and that is enough to call the person a liar and dismiss his/her offerings. That’s enough to discredit both the witness and possible facts, facts we need to have if we aim to move towards real democracy. Facts, if not taken to be important, are like a fragile disappearing species inhabiting less and less of human discourse.
A committee of some, on either side of any of the arguments today, can get together and at the very least probe for the discovery of what is true, if it can be known. Even if the truth is unpleasant to many, there are things we can do to work with it without trying to break each other down.
My hope, and perhaps it is a hope against hope, is that a majority of Americans will want the truth, wherever it lands. And that most people will want an honest President—at the very least someone with respect for his/her constituents, his/her job, and for reckoning with the truth as well.