Arthur Sylvester's "right to lie" remarks

Arthur Sylvester's "right to lie" remarks

Speaker	Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (1961–1967)
Date	6 December 1962
Venue	Press meeting sponsored by the Deadline Club, New York City
Context	Press complaints about government deception during the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962)
Key claim	A government has an inherent right, if necessary, to lie to save itself when facing nuclear war
Follow-up	House hearing testimony; the 1960s "news management" and "credibility gap" debates
UFO relevance	Cited by UFO writers such as Donald Keyhoe as evidence of official willingness to deceive
Topics	Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Congress & law (topic)
People	Arthur Sylvester, John F. Kennedy, Donald Keyhoe
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 65
Year	1962 in UFO history
Timeline	1962 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	8

Arthur Sylvester was the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, from 1961 to 1967, under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Before that he was Washington bureau chief of the Newark, New Jersey, Evening News.^[3][8] On 6 December 1962, at a press meeting in New York sponsored by the Deadline Club, he defended the government's handling of news during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He said that a government had an inherent right, if necessary, to lie to save itself when it was heading into a nuclear war.^[1][3] The remark became a byword for official deception. UFO writers later cited it as evidence that the government might mislead the public on sensitive subjects, although Sylvester's remarks had nothing to do with UFOs.^[5]

Background

Disputes over how the Kennedy administration handled the press began almost as soon as Kennedy took office in January 1961.^[1] In April 1961 CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs, aiming to overthrow Fidel Castro, and were quickly defeated.^[2] On 27 April 1961 Kennedy proposed that the press censor itself on matters of national security, an idea that was criticized and quickly dropped.^[1]

According to Government Executive, the Kennedy administration lied during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and reporters complained afterward that they had been deceived.^[3] Sylvester's December speech answered those complaints.^[3] A later commentary in Common Dreams said Sylvester had himself put out false statements about what the United States knew of the missiles.^[8]

The remarks

After the crisis Sylvester argued that information could be withheld when the national interest required it.^[1][6] At the Deadline Club meeting on 6 December 1962 he went further. A 2002 Government Executive column quotes the transcript of his speech: he called it inherent in a government's right, if necessary, to lie to save itself when it was going into a nuclear war, and said this seemed basic to him.^[3] A civil-liberties history notes that it was not clear whether he meant saving the country or saving the administration.^[1]

The remarks caused an uproar in Congress and the press.^[1][6][7] Sylvester later explained them at a House hearing. He said that the elected representatives of the people had a duty to take whatever means they, or the top officials, judged necessary when the people faced nuclear disaster, and that this was what he had been trying to say.^[3] In 1963 Gene Robb, vice president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, warned a House committee that a government could lie successfully to its people only once, because after that everything it said would be suspect.^[3]

The Government Executive column argues that Sylvester never said the Pentagon should lie routinely. On the transcript's wording, his claim was limited to a government facing nuclear war.^[3]

"News management"

The comments became part of a running controversy over "news management" by the Kennedy administration.^[1] According to the civil-liberties history, the combination of that controversy, the Bay of Pigs and the escalation of the Vietnam War broke the complacency of the Washington press corps. By the late 1960s many reporters had become more aggressive in challenging official statements.^[1] Kennedy's press secretary Pierre Salinger discussed the administration's press relations in his 1966 memoir With Kennedy.^[1]

The Saigon meeting

Journalists also recalled Sylvester being openly contemptuous of reporters who trusted official statements. The best-known account comes from the CBS correspondent Morley Safer. In August 1965 Safer had filed a famous report showing American troops burning a Vietnamese village with Zippo lighters and flamethrowers. In 1966 he wrote an article about a meeting Sylvester held with reporters for US news outlets at the US Embassy in Saigon.^[4][8] This article's earlier version dated the meeting to 1965. The accounts used here say only that Safer wrote about it in 1966.

According to Safer, there had recently been friction over Pentagon releases on the first B-52 raids that contradicted what had happened on the ground.^[4] Safer wrote that at the meeting Sylvester:^[4][8]

• said he could not understand how the reporters could write what they did while American boys were dying, and that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to report only what made the United States look good
• when a network correspondent asked whether he really expected the press to be the government's handmaidens, replied that he did
• when an agency reporter raised the credibility of American officials, said that anyone who thought an American official would tell them the truth was "stupid"
• told a veteran correspondent who called him deliberately provocative that he did not need to talk to them, because he knew how to deal with them through their editors and publishers back home
• then put his thumbs in his ears, stuck out his tongue and wiggled his fingers

Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana entered Safer's article into the Congressional Record, and Representative Durward Hall of Missouri called for Sylvester to resign.^[4] According to The Intercept, the Pentagon also warned CBS executives that unless they got Safer out of Vietnam, he might end up with a bullet in his back.^[4] The writers of the Intercept and Common Dreams pieces argued that by then Sylvester had already told key official falsehoods about the Cuban crisis and the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.^[4][8]

Later references

Sylvester's words resurfaced whenever official honesty was debated. In 2002 the Pentagon's short-lived Office of Strategic Influence was reported by The New York Times to be planning to send news items, possibly including false ones, to foreign media. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the Pentagon did not lie to the American people or to foreign audiences.^[3] The Government Executive column revisited Sylvester in that context. It recalled that the Eisenhower administration had at first falsely described the U-2 shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 as a weather research aircraft, and that the Kennedy administration had lied during the Cuban crisis.^[3]

Use by UFO writers

UFO writers seized on Sylvester's statements as proof that the government would mislead the public on sensitive subjects. Donald Keyhoe discussed them in his 1973 book Aliens from Space: The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects.^[5]

Sylvester's remarks concerned the Cuban crisis and nuclear war, not UFOs. None of the sources used here links him to any UFO matter. They are cited as background, to explain why many people in the Cold War distrusted official statements in general, including official denials about UFOs.^[1][5]

People and topics

• Arthur Sylvester — Pentagon spokesman who defended the government's right to withhold information in 1962.
• John F. Kennedy — 35th U.S. president, named in disputed MJ-12 memos.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Donald Keyhoe — Retired Marine officer, author and director of NICAP who campaigned against UFO secrecy.

On the Timeline

• Navy reserve pilot's Wright-Patterson saucer claim (1962) (1962) — A Navy reserve pilot says he saw a saucer at Wright-Patterson in 1962.
• Dan Sherman and the telepathy breeding claim (January 1963) — Air Force Sgt. Dan Sherman says he was told of a program breeding people with telepathic abilities.

See every 1962 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References