Ronald Reagan’s wartime lies: The president had quite a Brian Williams problem

[applegrove]

Ronald Reagan’s wartime lies: The president had quite a Brian Williams problem

by Luke Brinker at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/07/ronald_reagans_wartime_lies_the_president_had_quite_a_brian_williams_problem/

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Reagan’s fibs were manifold. They included his campaign-trail tale of a “Chicago welfare queen” with 80 aliases, 30 addresses, and 12 Social Security cards, whom he alleged had claimed “over $150,000? in government benefits. The woman whom Reagan made infamous was convicted of using only two aliases, used to collect $8,000.

Once in office, Reagan’s deception in the Iran-Contra scandal briefly threatened his presidency. First, Reagan flatly denied wrongdoing, publicly declaring, “We did not — repeat, did not — trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.” Months later, when subsequent revelations rendered that assertion untenable, Reagan delivered an Oval Office address in which he tried to reconcile his public claims with the factual record. “A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages,” Reagan said. “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

But Reagan’s fabrications also included whoppers about conflict zones reminiscent of those put forth by Williams and Clinton. During Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s November 1983 visit to the U.S., Reagan told Shamir that during his service in the U.S. Army film corps, he and fellow members of his unit personally shot footage of the Nazis’ concentration camps as they were liberated. Reagan would tell this story again to others, including Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal. But Reagan was never present at the camps’ liberation. Instead, he spent the war in Culver City, California, where he processed footage from the liberation of the camps.

Reagan biographer Edmund Morris proposed an especially charitable explanation for Reagan’s misleading Holocaust claim, arguing that the images “so burned into his brain that later in life — quite understandably — he imagined he had been there at Ohrdruf and Buchenwald.” Like Williams’ mea culpa, in which he stated that he mistakenly “conflate[d]” one helicopter with another, Morris’ explanation stretches credulity. Just as it’s exceedingly difficult to see how someone could misremember such a searing episode as being fired upon in a war zone, it’s hard to believe that one could confuse viewing footage of Nazi death camps with actually being present at them.

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