Pipe Dream Heroes

By Benjamin Patch | Wednesday, October 15, 1997

Of every living Dartmouth alumnus, the College fawns over no one as it does Robert Reich. His arrival on campus last week was met with a sense of endearing awe. After his speech, I received several e-mail messages from my classmates gushing about what a wonderful place Dartmouth would be if only it had Robert Reich at its helm.

Well, sorry kids, there is a slight catch. You see, Reich is also, well, an unrepentant liar. Shortly after his new book, Locked in the Cabinet landed on the shelves, journalists from across the political spectrum assailed Reich for the rash of distortions, mistruths, and plain fiction that Reich tried to pass off as autobiographical. In several instances he deliberately fabricated events, almost all of which cast himself as a sort of schoolmarmish superhero facing down vicious, greedy adversaries.

In his most widely known slip, Reich's memory somehow fudged the proceedings of a National Association of Manufacturers meeting. He conjures up a scene set in an all-male, smoke-filled room, packed with well-dressed, seething, capitalist thugs who shout him down and implore him to 'go back to Harvard.'

Sadly enough, none of it was true. There was no smoke, no jeering, no epic stand-off, and a good number of women watched it all. Most people, even politicians, would balk at such an egregious and flagrant lie, but Mr. Reich seems to find his self-aggrandizement to be rather amusing.

In a letter to Slate magazine, he laughs it off, as he recounts a conversation with a journalist from that magazine who grilled him on his inaccuracies. As he closes his wistful missive, he stops grinning for a second to add that 'I've captured the tone, the feel of the conversation, even if I got some of the words wrong. And that's the truth.'

Were Mr. Reich a novelist, a sculptor, or a dancer there wouldn't be a real problem here. However, he is an economist and a national political figure and, hopefully, deals in nothing but concrete facts when he formulates national economic policy. It's tough to run a College when you can't decipher reality.

But wait... perhaps Mr. Reich may be suited to the Dartmouth presidency after all. He's not the only one around here with an impressionist take on history. Sitting in Parkhurst right now is a man who can lie time and time again, and, every night he will set his book by his nightstand, turn off the lights, and fall asleep without the slightest twinge of guilt.

To them, there is no guilt — quite the contrary, actually. They fancy themselves latter-day moral heroes (Freedman tirelessly writes and talks about them). The facts don't matter in their world, nor do the means. Completely blinded by ideology, they know that a self-proclaimed moral hero can't go wrong.

Speaking about the Hitler quote sabotage, James Freedman told The New York Times last year that he had to 'display a side of myself that I had never displayed before. I had to face someone down. I had to attack someone. It is just not who I am fundamentally.'

So, in 1990, he clutched a bullhorn, stood on the Green and he became a hero and he felt pretty good about it, too. Unfortunately, he had to lie to do it and hurt a lot of people and the College in the process, but that's beside the point.

Words have consequences. The tone and the feel sometimes aren't quite enough. Ideologues like Freedman and Reich have to squeeze and contort the facts into their own personal David and Goliath fantasies and they don't care to know it if they're wrong.

One of my little sister's high-school classmates wrote me last year about her interest in Dartmouth. One of the first questions she asked me was, 'Is Dartmouth really as anti-Semitic as everyone says it is? My grandmother was really worried when she heard I might apply.'

I hope you sleep well tonight, President Freedman. You should be very proud of yourself.

Pipe Dream Heroes

Article Tools

Related Articles