Mac-Coleman

6 February 2014 – 

Are You Sure That’s What You Want to Say?

Thirty-five years ago, the Air Force told me I was going to be an intelligence officer.  I filled out a mountain of paperwork in order to get a top secret, special compartmented intelligence clearance upon entering active duty.  Not being in control of my life’s story started that day. 

I was required to list every place I had lived, what I did when I was there, and provide the names of people who knew me at the time.  A special investigator asked me about my lifestyle, if I had a criminal record, used drugs, or associated with subversive groups. He also delved into my spending habits.  My answers were simple.  Boring lifestyle, no criminal record, nothing more subversive than the Eagles Lodge in my hometown, and I think I had smelled marijuana once.  Nothing to hide.  I flippantly added that I was a married student with two children; I had no money to spend. 

The investigator glared at me. Everybody has something to hide, he said.  It would be best to tell him all my secrets because if he were to find something later that I had failed to disclose, I might not receive a clearance and might not even be commissioned.  Trust had to be established at the beginning or it never would be established, he warned.  I told him I would remember his advice, but that I simply had nothing else to tell him.  

I’ve never forgotten that interview.

Every five years for the next thirty years of my Air Force career I had to update my security clearance and answer the same questions.  My life’s story, the narrative of who I am and what I do, has long been captured and held by somebody else.  The Air Force regularly verified every aspect of my life before it, as an organization, continued to trust me with classified information and with the authority to act in its name.  As long as I stayed honest and accurate with my narrative, I remained the Air Force’s trusted agent.  Looking back, I am as proud of maintaining the Air Force’s trust as I am of any impressive or exciting thing I may have done in uniform. 

Establishing and maintaining trust with those whom we serve should be the dominant standard for all who want to be elected to political office as well.  Our narrative should be precise and truthful; it’s the only sure way to be believed.  That doesn’t mean a politician’s life won’t include difficult moments or occasions of less-than-stellar decision-making.  Nobody’s perfect.  But when the truth is obscured, reworked, or sidestepped, somebody’s going to pay.

Texas State Senator Wendy Davis, a gubernatorial hopeful, learned this painful lesson when she stre-e-etched her personal narrative.  She was indeed a young, divorced mother who persevered and succeeded in school and politics.  It’s a compelling story.  But, she stretched the dates of her early years of marriage and divorce in order to gain emotional support from her constituents.  And, she got caught.  Accurate marriage and divorce dates, combined with an explanation of who paid for her elite schooling and when he paid for it, now present the narrative of an apparent self-serving gold digger who would do pretty much anything and abandon even her children to get what she wanted.  Somehow, Ms. Davis missed the important advice that false narratives are fodder for political opponents who revel in exposing them.  These opponents knew, as Wendy Davis apparently did not, that if you do not tell the truth about your own life, somebody else will.

A particularly sobering warning in the Information Age is that now, more than ever, embellishments and lies will be discovered and displayed.  All e-mails, tweets, phone calls, and written communications eventually find themselves in some data base somewhere.  The opposition party will lead the effort to find these damaging secrets; that is what opposition parties do.  Then, when the moment is most advantageous, the opposition will make the lies public and try to destroy the liar.  Even war is more polite than politics.

Here’s the question:  should voters trust anything a politician says or does in political life if he has already shown he lied about his life’s narrative?  I suggest that we trust him at our peril.   A career in the business of political/military secrets has convinced me that trustworthiness is the greatest virtue one needs to rise from politician to statesman.  Heaven knows we need such statesmen as leaders right now.