Few American myths have ever stampeded over reality more than those that still surround John Fitzgerald Kennedy—“the pride of Western civilization,” as he was called in one glowing tribute, “a bright racing star who lighted men’s thoughts and their dreams.” Thanks to a meticulously crafted public image, abetted by adoring biographers and an undeniable photogenic brilliance, the thirty-fifth president remains in the minds of many one of the most enlightened, heroic, and compassionate men ever to occupy the White House. The truth, however, stands in glaring contrast to the stubbornly entrenched Camelot legend. So many elements of the Kennedy legend don’t stand up—from his military service to his stand on civil rights—that, for the sake of space, we’ll simply focus, briefly, on sex.
“It doesn’t matter who you are,” Kennedy’s father once admonished. “It’s who people think you are.” JFK and his handlers wanted the public to think he was a devoted family man, when in fact he was a shameless philanderer. Select photographers took pictures of the president as he romped with his children in the Oval Office, while behind the scenes he cheated on their mother with a staggering number of women—from secretaries to movie stars—with little regard for consequence. So reckless was he, in fact, that he even shared a mistress, Judith Campbell Exner, with mob boss Sam Giancana. “There’s no question about the fact that Jack had the most active libido of any man I’ve ever known,” said his friend Senator George Smathers. “He was really unbelievable in that regard, and he got more so the longer he was married.” Kennedy himself once shed a little insight into his insatiable drive. “Dad told all the boys to get laid as often as possible,” he once told Clare Boothe Luce. “I can’t get to sleep unless I’ve had a lay.”
Thanks to a remarkably compliant press, the American people never knew of their president’s shenanigans. “They can’t touch me while I’m alive,” Kennedy once said, “and after I’m dead who cares.”
The press’s selective reporting during the Kennedy administration turned to intense scrutiny after Richard Nixon’s abuses of office were exposed. “I am not a crook,” Nixon declared, thus becoming perhaps the first president to actually lie about being a liar. Thanks to Tricky Dick, modern presidents rarely get away with anything. And when they do inevitably get trapped under the media microscope, the lies they tell tend to be doozies.
Take Ronald Reagan: “We did not—repeat, did not—trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we,” the president said vehemently in November 1986 during the Iran-Contra scandal. Just four months later, when it became clear that story simply wouldn’t wash, Reagan had to reverse himself. His televised address to the nation was an inspired bit of obfuscation: “A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”
Just over a decade later, President Bill Clinton pointed his finger in the face of the American public and indignantly declared, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” He later made the same claim under oath, and then defended it by claiming that in his mind only intercourse constituted sexual relations, not the type of dress-staining activities he engaged in with the White House intern.
Clinton’s slippery game of sex and semantics gave way to George W. Bush’s pledge “to restore honor and dignity to the White House.” Did he? Well, that all depends on what your definition of honor and dignity, and weapons of mass destruction, is.
Piltdown Man: The so-called “missing link“
Part V
SCIENCE FICTIONS
Seekers of the truth follow the rigid requirements of the Scientific Method. Those less interested in genuine discovery skip such pesky steps and create scientific mayhem. And then there are those who simply lie. Through the ages, their deceptions have sometimes stalled human progress—or at least made a mockery of it.
1
Monkey Business
In 1913, amateur archeologist Charles Dawson uncovered what many scientists believed was the pivotal figure in man’s evolution from ape. There wasn’t much to Piltdown Man—popularly named for the site in southern England where he was found—just a few skull fragments and a portion of jaw that appeared remarkably simian. But he was a sensation, perhaps the most famous Englishman of his day. People made pilgrimages to the site where he was found, and scores of scholarly books and papers were devoted to what appeared to be the most important discovery in the relatively new field of human paleontology.
“In Eoanthropus Dawsoni [the scientific name given to Piltdown Man] we have in our hands, at last, the much-talked-of ‘missing link,’ ” wrote scientist Ray Lankester in Divisions of a Naturalist, adding that the Piltdown jaw was “the most startling and significant fossil bone that has ever been brought to light.” Another scientist, Arthur Keith, pronounced Piltdown Man “the earliest specimen of true humanity yet discovered.” And Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at London’s Natural History Museum, was so excited about the find that he devoted the rest of his life to studying the fantastic fossils.
In the midst of all the excitement, however, there were a few scientists who noted the incongruity between the skull and apelike jawbone. One of them, Gerrit S. Miller of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., prepared a reasoned analysis of the Piltdown find and concluded that the jaw and cranium, if combined, would create some kind of freakish specimen that would never be found in nature. Miller’s observations were utterly dismissed. William Pycraft, a zoologist at London’s Natural History Museum, wrote a twenty-page screed in Science Progress that slammed the presumptuous Yankee. Miller, Pycraft wrote, had “woefully misread” the data, demonstrated a disgraceful “lack of perspective,” and had obviously set out “to confirm a preconceived theory, a course of action which has unfortunately warped his judgment and sense of proportion.”
Pycraft’s smug self-assurance seemed validated when Charles Dawson produced some more bone fragments that matched Piltdown Man’s. He claimed to have found them about two miles away from the site where he had discovered the original. “If there’s Providence hanging over the affairs of prehistoric man it certainly manifested itself in this case,” wrote Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History. A second Piltdown Man appeared to prove there was indeed a first. As he looked at the remains side by side, Osborn was forced to admit that “they agree precisely; there is not a shadow of a difference.” Thus, with most traces of scientific skepticism effectively banished, Piltdown Man was firmly established as the first true missing link. It would take another four decades until he was exposed as one of the greatest of all scientific frauds.
Joseph Weiner, a professor of physical anthropology at Oxford University in the 1950s, was troubled by the fact that Charles Dawson had never revealed the precise spot where he had uncovered the second Piltdown Man. His investigation into that significant omission in 1953 led to the complete unraveling of what he called “a most elaborate and carefully prepared hoax,” the perpetration of which was “so entirely unscrupulous and inexplicable, as to find no parallel in . . . paleontological history.”
In short order, Weiner learned that Piltdown Man’s teeth had been chiseled down to resemble a humanlike chewing pattern and had been stained with what appeared to be ordinary house paint to give them the patina of age. Other fossils recovered from the discovery site, such as ancient elephant and hippopotamus teeth, were determined to have been planted, as were some Paleolithic tools. Testing on the skull and jaw fragments proved they were planted as well. The cranium, stained like the teeth, was judged to be about five hundred years old, and the jaw apparently belonged to an orangutan. Thus, wrote author John Evangelist Walsh, “Piltdown Man, the most famous creature ever to grace the prehistoric scene, had been ingeniously manufactured from a medieval Englishman and a Far Eastern ape.”
This was no merry prank. One scientist called it “the most troubled chapter” in the study of
man’s origins. It set back for years the search for understanding, compromised reputations, and, in the process, really gave creationists something to crow about. The deception “was nothing short of despicable,” opined Walsh, “an ugly trick played by a warped and unscrupulous mind on unsuspecting scholars.” So who was the maniacal schemer behind it all?
A variety of suspects has been put forth over the years. One of the more compelling is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the man behind Sherlock Holmes (and later himself the victim of a fabulous hoax: see Part X, Chapter 1). Sir Arthur lived near the Piltdown discovery site and had plenty of access to fossils. Also, many of his works of fiction indicate a close familiarity with archeology and paleontology. The Lost World, for example, features curious apelike men. Most of all, Doyle had a motive. He deeply resented the scientists who mocked spiritualism, a realm that obsessed him in his later years. What better way to make fools of the “materialists,” as Doyle contemptuously called scientists, than with the Piltdown concoction?
Doyle certainly makes an interesting suspect, but evidence points to a far more obvious culprit: Charles Dawson himself, the one who first discovered Piltdown Man. Beneath his affable surface, Walsh and others have noted, Dawson was fiercely ambitious and desperate to be inducted into the prestigious ranks of the scientific elite in the Royal Society. An amateur archeologist, he was responsible for a number of other frauds in that field, some of them quite successful. His writings also show him to be a shameless plagiarist. If Dawson, who died in 1916, really was responsible for the hoax, it was by far his greatest success. It’s ironic, then, that the man so eager for recognition has never been given official credit for the scheme. And that, it seems, is the most appropriate punishment.
2
Bunny Tale
Imagine if some of the nation’s top scientists responded to a Weekly World News report, like HOUSEWIFE GIVES BIRTH TO BUNNIES, and then actually endorsed it! Well it happened, almost three centuries ago in Britain, during what was supposed to be the Age of Enlightenment. In 1726 a woman named Mary Tofts was said to have delivered a litter after being ravished by a rabbit. (Could it possibly have been of the same breed that President Jimmy Carter said attacked him in 1977?)
A local doctor witnessed the woman’s labor and was stunned to see the dead animals she produced. Soon news of the incredible bunny mum spread across Britain and generated so much controversy that King George I ordered an investigation. His court surgeon, Nathanael St. André, went to see Mary Tofts in the town of Godalming in Surrey and found her in labor with her twelfth rabbit. The king’s doctor saw for himself the lop-eared delivery. It was, he declared, a “preternatural” phenomenon. The air in the dead animal’s lungs and the contents of its colon, both of which St. André had taken careful note of, might have given him a clue that this bunny had already been hopping about before it went up the, er, rabbit hole. But they didn’t. The royal doctor took the dead animal and its siblings back to London, where he performed further scientific examinations before an awed king and court.
Meanwhile, Mary Tofts’s strange deliveries became a national obsession, even among the intellectual elite. The poet Alexander Pope wrote to a friend about “the miracle of Guildford,” and asked him if he believed. “There is a thing that employs everybody’s tongue at present,” wrote noted political observer Lord Hervey, “which is a woman . . . of Surrey who has brought forth seventeen rabbits, and has been there these days in labor of the eighteenth. I know you laugh now, and this I joke; but the fact as reported and attested by St. André the surgeon (who swears he has delivered her of five) is something that really staggers one.”
St. André wrote of the amazing births in a tract entitled A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits, which became a bestseller—just before it made its author a laughingstock. The story that riveted the kingdom started to unravel when Mary Tofts was taken to London and put under strict gynecological observation. “Every creature in town, both men and women, have been by to see and feel her,” wrote Lord Hervey. “All the eminent physicians, surgeons, and man-midwives in London are there day and night to watch her next production.” Not surprisingly, it never came.
A boy came forward and claimed Mary had bribed him to sneak her a rabbit. Under threat of a medical procedure that Mary apparently thought would be worse than having dead rabbits shoved up her birth canal, she was compelled to confess her hoax. She had done it, she said, “to get so good a living that I should never want as long as I lived.” After a brief stint in prison for fraud, Mary Tofts was allowed to return to her home in Godalming, where soon after she reportedly gave birth to an actual human.
3
Casting Stones
The rush a scientist gets when he thinks he’s discovered something new hit Johann Beringer like crack; it short-circuited all his reason. The dean of medicine at the University of Würzburg, who was also an amateur archeologist, came across some strange stones in 1725 that he concluded were fossil proof of God’s hand in creation. The rocks were said to have been recovered from a mountain near the university. They featured prominent shapes of plants and animals, Greek and Hebrew letters, as well as other objects, like shooting stars and planets carved in sharp, three-dimensional relief. Most scientists would have at least suspected a human hand in the creation of these mysterious stones, but where was the glory in that? To Dr. Beringer, they had to be some sort of divine signature left upon the earth.
“God, the Father of Nature, would fill our minds with His praises and perfections radiating from these wondrous effects,” he gushed, “so that, when forgetful men grow silent, these mute stones might speak with the eloquence of their figures.”
The prospect of fame, sure to accompany such an amazing discovery, intoxicated Beringer to such an extent that he ignored other, far more rational explanations for the rock carvings—like fraud. “The figures expressed in these stones, especially those of insects, are so exactly fitted to the dimensions of the stones, that one would swear they are the work of a very meticulous sculptor,” he wrote, never once considering that the “meticulous sculptor” could be anyone other than the Almighty. The “strokes of a knife gone awry,” and the “superfluous gouges in several directions” that Beringer discerned in some of the carvings were, he decided, little slips of the Lord’s hand as he practiced his art.
Now granted, paleontology was primitive in the early eighteenth century—a time when scientists still scratched their heads and wondered how those little critters ever crawled into the rocks that fossilized them. But even in such an age, Beringer was shockingly oblivious. He produced a book on the miracle rocks, which featured expensive plates the doctor paid for himself to showcase God’s handiwork. The treatise, Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, was a masterpiece of deluded self-promotion, and gives some indication as to why Beringer’s colleagues thought him such an insufferable windbag.
“Behold these tablets,” he wrote in one illustrative passage, “which I was inspired to edit, not only by my tireless zeal for public service, and by your wishes and those of my many friends, and by my strong filial love for [the German state of] Franconia, to which, from these figured fruits [the stones] of this previously obscure mountain, no less glory will accrue than from the delicious wines of its vine-covered hills!”
It was precisely this kind of pomposity that made Beringer’s associates at the university so eager to humiliate him. Two of them, geography professor J. Ignatz Roderick and librarian Georg von Eckhart, had planted the carved stones on the “vine-covered hills” where Dr. Beringer’s assistants uncovered them. They relished watching their arrogant colleague make an utter ass out of himself as he held forth on the divine origins of the rocks. But Roderick and von Eckhart began to worry that things had gone too far when they learned Beringer was planning to publish his book. They tried to alert their victim to the hoax by spreading stories that the stones were fake, and even produced some carved stones of their own.
The warnings were to no avail. Ber
inger, in fact, devoted a section of his book to his colleagues’ attempt to “bring down to the dust all my sacrifices and labors, my very reputation.” And, he gloated, “their clever efforts might have succeeded had not my vigilance discovered the deceit and throttled it at birth.” When the poor doctor finally realized he had indeed been duped, he reportedly spent the rest of his fortune trying to recover all the copies of the book he had published. He might as well have saved his money. Lithographiae Wirceburgensis was republished after Beringer’s death, not for any scientific insight it provided, but just for laughs.
4
A Hoax in Perpetuity
A fundamental and inflexible law of nature is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just converted from one form to another. That inviolable rule, however, has never discouraged people from believing in perpetual-motion machines, sham devices purported to run forever on almost nothing.
One of the most successful purveyors of impossible apparatus was a nineteenth-century inventor and con man named John Worrell Keely, who convinced wealthy investors that he could convert a quart of water into enough fuel to run a thirty-car train seventy-five miles in seventy-five minutes. The Keely Motor Co. was formed around his idea, and millions of dollars were invested.
Keely called his illusionary source of energy the “hydropneumatic-pulsating-vacu-engine,” which he said would use the vibrations from a device he called a “liberator” to disintegrate a few drops of water, freeing nature’s basic “etheric force.” Through the years he held demonstrations of prototype miracle engines at his Philadelphia home. They appeared to confirm his claim that revolutionary success was on the horizon. One engine seemed powerful indeed, its pressure gauge registering fifty thousand pounds per square inch. The machinery it drove ripped apart cable, twisted metal bars, and fired bullets through several inches of wooden boards—all apparently with only a few drops of water as fuel.
A Treasury of Deception Page 11