Where Lies the Greater Good?

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies." - Winston Churchill, November 30, 1943, Tehran Conference

"There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the Bill of Rights into a suicide pact." - Robert H. Jackson, 1949, Terminiello v. City of Chicago

"[Foreign diplomats] are not dealing in the civil society we live in under the Constitution. They are dealing in an anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply." - John Bolton, 2010

It has been a light week, mainly spent going far back into the archives of the Florida Historical Quarterly, so the three quotations above have been weighing on the back of my mind a good bit. In a nutshell, the ideas in them twist into a Gordian Knot: how do you reasonably recognize that your government may need to lie to the public to get back onto Nazi-occupied continental Europe, but not give them carte blanche to lie in the name of national security any time the truth might be political hazardous?

I do not expect ever to be governed by a group of people in whom I have complete trust--I suspect I will always be a human, governed by humans. However, I think it is vital that our political culture have a clear litmus test for evaluating whether or not dishonesty is warranted. Vaguely, I can identify a tripartite division:

1. Justified by American lives being at risk (D-Day)
2. Dubious and Dangerous, possible grounds for dismissal (James Clapper about the NSA collection of call records)
3. Malicious and Self-Serving (Joe McCarthy's "card-carrying communists" yarns)

The question that I still need to ruminate on is how to define the categories. It is sad to me that we do not yet have a robust vocabulary on this subject. After so many scandals involving rationalized dishonesty, we are long overdue.