THE SINCERE LIAR

In the seventeenth century it was accepted that honesty and sincerity could not be communicated. Anyone claiming to be honest would at the same time give off the impression that there might be doubts about it. —Niklas Luhmann

"I'm not trying to dissemble at all with you."—Oliver North

The Iran-contra story is largely about lies, secrecy, and deception. Oliver North and the other principal characters in the story admitted to withholding evidence, writing false chronologies, and shredding documents. They described elaborate methods for securing and hiding caches of funds and conducting covert operations under pretext. Most interestingly for our purposes, they admitted that these activities were designed to enable "plausible deniability." In other words, according to North's testimony, rather than simply hiding their activities from scrutiny, he and his White House and CIA colleagues prospectively constructed a field of evidence to mislead future inquiries. They anticipated the possibility of an official investigation or other threat of exposure, and they set up their pretexts, alibis, and paper trails accordingly. The testimony about these practices, together with a set of problems associated with the interpretation of such testimony, provide a striking exhibit of how actions in history reflexively become entangled with the investigation of history.

Naturally enough, the investigating committee, the journalists who covered the hearings, and many members of the audience remained curious as to whether North and his fellow operatives were coming clean in their testimony or continuing to dissemble, dissimulate, and withhold significant evidence. This issue came to a head early during the first day of North's testimony on July 7, 1987, when House majority counsel John Nields directly challenged North for having difficulty recalling any details about the records from his office he destroyed shortly after the scandal became public.

Nields: Well that's the whole reason for shredding documents, isn't it, Colonel North, so that you can later say you don't remember, (0.4) whether you had 'em, and you don't remember what's in 'em.

North: No, Mister Nields, the reason for shredding documents, and the reason the Government of the United States gave me a shredder, I mean I didn't buy it myself, was to destroy documents that were no longer relevant, that did not apply or that should not be divulged. And again I want to go back to the whole intent of the covert operation. Part of (in- eh) a covert operation is to offer plausible deniability of the association of the government of the United States with the activity, part of it is to deceive our adversaries. Part of it is to insure that those people who are at great peril, carrying out those activities are not further endangered. All of those are good and sufficient reasons to destroy documents. And that's why the government buys shredders by the tens and dozens. And gives them to people running covert operations. Not so that they can have convenient memories. I came here to tell you the truth. To tell you:: and this committee, and the American people the truth, and I'm trying to do that Mister Nields, °hh and I don't like the insinuation that I'm up here having a convenient memory lapse, like perhaps some others have had.

Nields: Colonel North, you shredded these documents on the Twenty-first of November, Nineteen-eighty-six, isn't that true? (1.2)

North: Try me again on the date. (1.0)

Nields: Friday, the Twenty-first of November, Nineteen-eighty-six. (1.8)

Nields: I started shredding documents as early as:: uh my return from Europe in October (0.4)

North: I have absolutely no recollection (0.2) when those documents were deswere shredded. None whatsoever.=

Nields: =There's been testimony before the committee that you engaged in shredding of documents on November the Twenty-first, Nineteen-eighty-six.

North: [(as-) [

Nields: [Do you deny that?

North: I do not deny that I engaged in shredding on November Twenty-first. (1.2) I will also tell this committee that I engaged in shredding (.) almost every day that I had a shredder. And that I put things in burn bags when I didn't. (0.8) So, every single day that I was at the National Security Counsel Staff, some documents were destroyed. (0.6) And I don't want you to- to have the impression (0.2) that (.) those documents that I referred to (0.2) seeking approval, disappeared on the Twenty-first, 'cause I can't say that.

This exchange is rich with pragmatic moves that recurred throughout North's testimony: failures to recall significant details, temporal refram-ings of acknowledged actions and events, and self-righteous proclamations in response to questions and challenges. We shall revisit these moves at length, but for the present we shall observe only how North denies what Nields suggests is the "whole reason" for his apparent inability to remember significant details of the matter in question. Nields's initial challenge suggests that history was being fabricated from both ends: from a retrospective vantage point in the present, and from an anticipatory one in the past. North's present testimony fails to recall certain details from his past, and as an actor in the past he may have shredded documentary evidence of those same details. North counteracts this scenario by giving an alternative rationale for his shredding-as-usual on the date in question. Not only that, he expresses strong indignation at the very suggestion that he could be dissimulating, and, in a memorable evocation of truthfulness and patriotism, he reaffirms his will to tell the truth.

Sequences of testimony like this one create a number of analytic temptations, two of which immediately come to mind. First, it is tempting to declare that North certainly is lying, and then to give an account of how his lies can be made visible through an inspection of his words and body behavior, together with a reconstruction of what he must have known. Second, there is the temptation to politicize the question of lying by subordinating truth to a clash of ideologies. These analytic paths are temptations not because they are likely to lead to error, but because they would be all too easy to pursue with the materials at hand. The problem with yielding to such temptations is that one settles presumptively what often remains contentious and unresolved at the surface of the testimony. In contrast, we want to investigate how the parties to the testimony employed the distinction between truth and lying, and how they articulated the opposition between politics and value neutrality.

LIES, TRUTH-TELLING, AND TESTIMONY

During North's unsuccessful run for a U.S. Senate seat in Virginia in 1994, virtually every journalist, writer, and commentator...