Truth Has a Habit of Getting in the Way of Some Good Memories

When Orange County Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder got caught last spring in a lie on her resume about a college degree she didn’t have, I felt a small twinge of sympathy. The older we get and the more public our persona, the more likely we are to have totally benign fabrications trip us up.

We all do it. Our lives are a combination of what we have done and what we wish we had done. And sometimes the latter gets inextricably mixed up with the former until we honestly can’t tell one from the other. And sometimes we get caught.

I am given to telling people I played on our state championship high school basketball team in 1938--which in Indiana is tantamount to setting foot on the moon. Only in a torturous sort of way is that true. I played on the reserves when I was a freshman and sophomore, then my family moved to Florida and I didn’t return to Indiana until my senior year, when I failed to make the team that went on to win the state championship. Instead of thinking about that, I think about what might have happened had I not moved to Florida. And when you think that way long enough, the fantasy becomes the fact--until you tell this story to someone who knows better.

Men seem to do this sort of thing more often than women because the American male is under stress from the time he is a small boy to prove his masculinity in various ways.

My grandfather was a brigadier general in the Union Army in the Civil War, and although he died before I was born, I have often listened to my father and various uncles talk about his war stories. The old man spent much of his declining years on a rocking chair on the front porch of his small town Indiana home, where his sons-in-law delighted in baiting him into telling the same war stories, over and over. And each time, they got better.

I have some war stories like that, too, and I’ve told them so many times that I’m no longer sure what really happened and what didn’t.

One in particular comes to mind. During the last months of World War II, I lost an engine on a four-engine transport plane over the mid-Pacific while bringing several hundred wounded Marines out of Okinawa. I also simultaneously--and briefly--lost a second engine before changing course and limping successfully into Eniwetok island in the middle of the night. That really happened, and I tell it in Technicolor, especially the part about the flaming engine making a huge fireball as it fell into the Pacific.

That’s where things get fuzzy. I don’t know if that engine really fell off, although I can see it very clearly. And what I fail to mention--and can only recall now with some difficulty--is that my own stupidity caused us to lose the second engine. My co-pilot was sleeping in the crew’s bunk, and I was on automatic pilot and groggy when the No. 1 engine caught fire. In that state, I shot the fire extinguisher juice into the wrong engine and killed No. 2 as well.

The terrific torque that resulted from two engines out on the same side woke up the co-pilot, who bounded into the cockpit and somehow got the No. 2 engine functioning again while I tried to keep the plane stable. And our navigator somehow got us to that speck in the Pacific--the nearest friendly land--in spite of radio silence. Now that I’ve surfaced all of that story, I’ll probably never tell it again. So much for heroism.

I suppose the fulcrum on which the benignity of such lies balances rather precariously is whether they hurt anyone else. Or whether they will hurt us if exposed. Or whether they are deliberate, quite conscious lies as opposed to fable-become-fact after many years of fantasizing.

People in public life play a dangerous game with these lies. The lies may help them gain public office, but if they are ever exposed, the fabricator’s credibility takes a terrific beating.

I suspect that few people in the public eye knew that they would be there when the lies first took root. So before we cast the first stone at such sinners, we should probably search our own consciences, especially those of us old enough to have converted a lifetime of fantasy fulfillment into some pretty dubious facts.