Eleven years later, in 1989, Elena was on trial for her life after Ceausescu’s regime was overthrown. The couple was charged with grave crimes against the Romanian people, which they haughtily dismissed by refusing to acknowledge the court or answer any questions. They waved away allegations of genocide and charges that they lived in gross extravagance while the people starved. These were apparently not sore spots for the couple. It was only when Elena was called an academic fraud that they actively engaged the court. The prosecutor referred to her as “the so-called academician Elena Ceausescu,” to which she responded, “So-called! So-called! Now they have even taken away our titles!” Stung by the assault on his wife’s credentials, Nicolae declared, “Her scientific papers were published abroad!”
“And who wrote the papers for you, Elena?” the prosecutor asked.
“Such impudence!” she snapped. “I am a member and chair-woman of the Academy of Sciences. You cannot talk to me in such a way!”
At the conclusion of the brief trial, Elena and her husband were taken outside and shot. Thus with her execution, Romania lost one of its great scientists—at least on paper.
7
Gadhafi: Dead to Rights
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak once cooked a terrorist’s goose, with a little bit of ketchup.
In 1984, Libyan dictator Mu‘ammar Gadhafi wanted to assassinate his enemy, former prime minister Abdul Hamid Bakkush. Bakkush was living in exile in Egypt. So Gadhafi ordered his ambassador to Malta to hire four intermediaries, who would then find four killers, who in turn would travel to Egypt and whack Bakkush.
President Mubarak got word of the plot, however, and immediately set out to foil it. He had Egyptian undercover police pose as assassins for hire, and when the offer was made, the four intermediaries were sent to prison. Bakkush was whisked away to a secret location, where an elaborate death scene was staged. Bakkush lay on the floor, his mouth agape like a flounder, ketchup oozing from ersatz bullet holes. Photos of the scene were sent to the Libyan ambassador, as requested, along with a letter requesting payment.
Within days, Libya’s official radio was crowing triumphantly that the “stray dog” Bakkush had been executed by a death squad devoted to obliterating enemies of Gadhafi’s revolution. Celebration, though, soon turned to humiliation when Mubarak announced that Bakkush was alive and well. He proved it several hours later at a news conference. A grinning Bakkush was flanked by two Egyptian officials holding up the staged photos.
8
Red, White, and Not Always True
Legend has it that George Washington never told a lie. Although that’s an impossible standard for any man to meet, at least the first president had the goods to inspire such a myth. Few of his successors could claim similar virtue. Presidents are politicians, after all, and thus not always willing to let the truth stand in the way of an agenda. This has most often been the case when the commander in chief wants war.
In 1846, James K. Polk stood before Congress and declared that Mexico posed an immediate threat to the United States. Foreign troops, he said, had crossed the border, “and shed American blood upon the American soil.” It wasn’t true. Mexico had not invaded, but had clashed with U.S. troops on disputed land occupied by Mexican civilians. In fact, the only real threat Mexico represented was that it stood in the way of American Manifest Destiny. Though Polk got his war, his claims were disputed throughout the conflict by a young congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln, who challenged the president to show him the spot on U.S. soil where American blood had been shed. Though branded a traitor in some circles, Lincoln was mostly ignored. The United States was winning the war—and would ultimately gain an enormous swath of new territory—and no one was overly eager to question why it started.
A number of twentieth-century presidents were equally dishonest about their foreign entanglements. In 1960, during the cold war, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. President Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed the plane was destroyed in the crash, and with it any evidence that it had been on an espionage mission. He felt secure enough, therefore, to order a cover-up of the spying operation, and approved this false statement about the crash issued by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: “One of NASA’s U-2 research airplanes, in use since 1956 in a continuing program to study meteorological conditions found at high altitude, has been missing since May 1, when its pilot reported he was having difficulty on the Lake Van, Turkey, area.”
The next day, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev released a photograph of a wrecked airplane and described it as the U-2 that had been shot down. It wasn’t the same plane, but Khrushchev wanted to trick the president into believing that the actual U-2 plane had been destroyed so that Eisenhower would stick to his story about it being a weather research plane. Ike stepped right into the trap. Khrushchev then appeared before the Supreme Soviet and gleefully declared, “We have parts of the plane and we also have the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking. The pilot is in Moscow and so are parts of the plane.”
Though President Eisenhower had been humiliated by the truth, he compounded the crisis with more lies. He recognized that there was no point in continuing the charade that the U-2 had been a research plane, but he was not prepared to admit that he was personally involved in the spy operations. He authorized the State Department to issue a statement that denied the pilot had any authorization to fly over the Soviet Union. The press, however, immediately questioned who, if not the president, had authorized such a flight. This resulted in yet another false statement, which said in essence that the U-2 flights were carried out under a very broad directive from the president issued early in his administration. Eisenhower insisted that the statement make clear that he had no knowledge of this specific flight.
“This is a sad and perplexed capital tonight,” reported James Reston in The New York Times after the statement was released, “caught in a swirl of charges of clumsy administration, bad judgment, and bad faith. It was depressed by the United States having been caught spying over the Soviet Union and trying to cover up its activities in a series of misleading official announcements.” As a result of the debacle, a planned arms summit between Eisenhower and Khrushchev was scuttled, and the cold war continued.
As the Eisenhower administration ended with a pack of lies, so began the John F. Kennedy administration that followed. The new president agreed to a secret plan, concocted during the previous administration, to back anti-Communist exiles in an invasion of Cuba with the aim of overthrowing its dictator, Fidel Castro. Yet while Kennedy had made up his mind to back the invasion at the Bay of Pigs, he told the world something entirely different. He pledged in a news conference on April 12, 1961, that U.S. armed forces would not “under any circumstances” intervene in Cuba. “The basic issue in Cuba is not one between the United States and Cuba,” he said. “It is between the Cubans themselves. I intend to see that we adhere to that principle, and as I understand it, this administration’s attitude is so understood by the anti-Castro exiles from Cuba in this country.” Meanwhile, U.S.-backed rebel forces were gearing up.
On the morning of April 15, six B-26 bombers supplied by the United States, but disguised to hide their country of origin, attacked three Cuban air bases. The damage they inflicted was minimal, but the reaction was ferocious. Castro put his nation on full military alert, and announced that the United States was behind the attack. “Our country has been the victim of a criminal, imperialistic attack which violates all the norms of international law,” he thundered. Though the White House denied any involvement in the air raids, the claim was compromised somewhat by the fact that two of the B-26s ended up in Florida. “If President Kennedy has one atom of decency, he will present the planes and pilots before the United Nations,” Castro challenged. “If not, the world has a right to call him a liar.”
Kennedy, now thoroughly shaken, was persuaded by Secretary of State Dean Rusk to cancel a second planned air strike, considered crucial to t
he coming invasion, for fear American involvement would be further exposed. It was a fateful decision, and the invasion that followed was a fiasco. The tiny fleet of invaders, escorted but unaided by seven disguised U.S. destroyers, was battered by coral reefs and fierce counterattack. Castro’s forces, vastly superior in number, quickly captured or killed the invaders on the beach, and took a large cache of U.S.-supplied weapons. Yet as the disaster unfolded, the president refused any overt American assistance. “The present struggle in Cuba . . . is a struggle by Cubans for their own freedom,” Dean Rusk said in a statement. “There is not and will not be any intervention there by United States forces.”
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, inherited a commitment to the protection of South Vietnam’s independence, and with it an emerging mess. Americans in 1964 were queasy about any escalation in the ill-defined, undeclared war in Southeast Asia, as was President Johnson himself. But he was also afraid that any faltering on the part of the United States would send a dangerous signal of weakness to the aggressive Communists in North Vietnam. Plus, the president was to face Barry Goldwater, a committed hawk, in the upcoming November elections.
On August 4, 1964, Johnson received a report that two U.S. destroyers had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. The president immediately leapt to action. He and his advisors mapped out a military response that included an air strike against North Vietnamese torpedo-boat bases. He sought congressional support for military action, as well as a resolution that backed a firmer policy in Southeast Asia. That night the president went on television to tell the nation what had happened. “Aggression by terror against the peaceful villagers of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America,” he announced. The next day, in a speech at Syracuse University, he said: “The attacks were deliberate. The attacks were unprovoked. The attacks have been answered. . . . Aggression—deliberate, willful, and systematic aggression—has unmasked its face to the entire world.”
What Johnson neglected to say was that there were serious doubts at the White House as to whether the attacks ever occurred. The commander of one of the destroyers reported that “a review of the action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects on radar, and overeager sonarmen may have accounted for many reports. No visual sightings have been reported.” The commander suggested that “a complete evaluation be undertaken before any further action.”
“Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish,” Johnson was reported to have said in one conversation, and in another he told Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, “We concluded maybe [the North Vietnamese] hadn’t fired at all.” Nevertheless, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution for escalated force passed in Congress. Nine years later, more than fifty-eight thousand Americans had died in Vietnam, and more than three hundred thousand were wounded.
The Constitution provides quite adequately for an incapacitated president. Theoretically, the government would barely miss a beat. But perception is an entirely different matter. People tend to equate a sick king with a sick kingdom. As a result, a number of chief executives, or those serving them, have gone to extreme lengths to conceal illness and disability.
Grover Cleveland risked his life in 1893 when he had a portion of his jaw, which showed signs of cancer, secretly removed aboard a pleasure yacht at sea rather than in the relative safety of a hospital. The nation was in a financial crisis at the time and Cleveland, who had recently been reelected after losing the White House to Benjamin Harrison four years earlier, didn’t want a cancer scare to jeopardize his economic recovery program. What resulted was an elaborate ruse perpetuated by the president and his doctors.
To keep the press at bay, Cleveland called a cabinet meeting on June 30 and announced that he would reconvene Congress in August to address the serious economic depression. He instructed the cabinet members not to discuss the meeting with reporters, and the White House withheld the announcement until 6 P.M. that evening. That allowed the president time to slip out of town on a train bound for New Jersey, from where he would ostensibly continue on to a vacation at his summer home at Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts.
After he arrived in New Jersey, the president boarded a yacht anchored several hundred yards offshore in the lower Hudson River. He was joined by a team of doctors and dentists who would secretly perform the operation while the yacht made its way up the Atlantic coast to Massachusetts.
The surgery was extremely dangerous for the overweight, fatigued president, and made more so by the makeshift facilities aboard the boat. There was the risk of his bleeding to death, or succumbing under the strong anesthesia. Worse, Cleveland had kept the surgery a secret from his cabinet, Congress, and even his vice president. Had anything gone wrong, there would have been a power vacuum. “If the president dies during surgery,” one of the physicians on board reportedly said, “I hope the yacht sinks and we all drown!”
Fortunately, Cleveland made it through the procedure and was soon up and walking about the deck. To avoid suspicion, the doctors left the yacht one by one at various stops along the journey, and by the time the president arrived at Buzzards Bay, he looked perfectly fine—at least from a distance. The operation had been performed entirely inside his mouth, so there were no visible wounds or dressings. Had he tried to speak, though, people would have known immediately that something was wrong. Therefore, he stayed in seclusion.
Despite the elaborate scheme to fool the public, reports started to surface that the president was seriously ill. Cleveland’s doctors denied it, but the stories persisted. The Philadelphia Press, in fact, correctly reported almost everything that had happened aboard the yacht. In response, President Cleveland launched a campaign to discredit the newspaper, and was largely successful. Eight weeks after the surgery, he was looking quite well. A prosthesis inserted into his jaw allowed him to speak normally, and he had regained weight. The Philadelphia Press stopped pursuing the story, and the true account of Grover Cleveland’s secret surgery remained hidden for many years after his death in 1908.
Woodrow Wilson had just completed a tour of the western United States to advocate U.S. participation in the League of Nations when, on October 2, 1919, he suffered a massive stroke. “The President lay stretched out on the large Lincoln bed,” recalled White House usher Ike Hoover. “He looked as if dead. There was not a sign of life. His face bore a long cut above the temple [sustained in a fall during the stroke] from which the signs of blood were still evident. . . . He was just gone as far as anyone could judge from appearances.”
The president was indeed utterly incapacitated, and powerless to carry out his executive duties for a month after the stroke. His doctor and his secretary conspired with the first lady to conceal his wretched condition from the nation and the rest of the world, while Vice President Thomas Marshall, whom Wilson called “a small calibre man,” was reluctant to take on any presidential powers or responsibilities. “During this period,” wrote Wilson biographer August Heckscher, “no proclamations were issued, no pardons granted; bills became laws without a signature. The regular meetings of cabinet members gave the country the impression that some matters were being dealt with. They sat, these lieutenants who had once gathered around a formidable chief, discussing for the most part trivial matters, and even then were often unable to make decisions.”
With the executive branch broken, the government effectively stopped running. And though Mrs. Wilson never assumed the power of the presidency, as is sometimes maintained, she wielded an enormous amount of influence by determining who would be granted access to her ailing husband, and who would not. Those who did get in found his behavior erratic and unsettling and saw that he was in no condition to steer the nation. Still, misleading reports of his recovery continued to emanate from the White House.
Though President Wilson did gradually improve, he was a broken man, both mentally and physically. The conclusion of hi
s second term was a sad coda to a once brilliant career. His most dearly held policies were rebuked, and this shadow of a president left office with his administration in shambles. Perhaps fate would have been kinder after that horrible October day in 1919 if Wilson and his handlers had not tried to fool the nation, and simply let the Constitution do its job.
Unlike Wilson’s, there was nothing about Franklin Roosevelt’s disability that would have interfered with his ability to perform his duties as president. But people didn’t always recognize that. Polio was a dreaded disease in the first half of the twentieth century, and those paralyzed by the effects of the virus, as Roosevelt was, were sometimes perceived to be lesser people. FDR was determined no one would ever think of him that way. His efforts to conceal the true extent of his condition, what author Hugh Gregory Gallagher called his “splendid deception,” were extraordinary—as was the press’s cooperation. There are only two known photographs of the president in his wheelchair, and news stories never mentioned that he used one.
In public appearances, Roosevelt seemed to stand on his own, an excruciating effort that involved leg braces, a strong upper body developed through years of vigorous exercise, and lots of practice to make his stance appear natural. He was usually drenched in sweat by the time he was finished. On one occasion in 1936, before an enormous crowd at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, Roosevelt took a terrible fall on the podium from where he was to accept the renomination of his party for president. Aides surrounded him and helped him up before anyone in the crowd noticed, and not a word of the incident was ever reported. (President Gerald R. Ford should have been so lucky thirty years later when he took so much grief after he slipped on some steps coming off an airplane.) Given his desire to hide his disability, it is ironic that in 2001, after much debate, a statue of President Roosevelt in his wheelchair was added to his memorial in Washington, D.C.
A Treasury of Deception Page 10