From Vietnam to Iran, War Is the Reason Americans Don’t Trust Their Government

That trust has been fragile since the early 1970s. And while some commentators point to scandals (like Watergate), political polarization, or—in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s view—excessive regulation to explain why so many Americans doubt the government’s ability to fulfill its promises, nothing has done more to erode trust than war.

Vietnam shattered the confidence that Americans had developed in the federal government during the New Deal and World War II. Its impact on public trust has endured as a reminder of the damage that mishandled military operations can inflict on the nation.

When President Lyndon Johnson intensified the war in Vietnam in 1964 and 1965, a majority of the country still felt confident about the federal government. The impact of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal on the economy in the 1930s and the success in defeating global fascism in the 1940s had greatly boosted public confidence in what Washington could achieve. The scale and scope of the federal government had grown dramatically during that period, bringing relief to millions of Americans suffering from economic insecurity and leaving a deep imprint on almost every element of U.S. life.

For this reason, the popular two-term Republican president of the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower, believed that any effort to dismantle Roosevelt’s legacy would be politically devastating. “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history,” he wrote to his brother Edgar in 1954. In 1958, according to the National Election Study, 73 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do the right thing almost always or most of the time.”

President John F. Kennedy, who began his term in January 1961, inspired a new generation of Americans to believe in what Washington could achieve with their help. “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” he declared in his inaugural address.

Then came the disaster of Vietnam. The public began to sense that the administration was not telling the truth about the war in 1967 and 1968, when reporters on the ground finally started to break with the official military statements they had been relying on. Gradually, the press started to produce a greater number of stories revealing the problems U.S. troops were encountering against the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. The anti-war movement was also producing its own information, through newspapers, flyers, and rallies, that challenged the veracity of official statements. These two forces came together in February 1968 when CBS anchor Walter Cronkite went on air after visiting Vietnam during the Tet Offensive—a surprise attack against U.S. forces that contradicted official claims the war was nearing an end—and stepped away from conventions of journalistic objectivity to say: “[I]t is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out … will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy.”

In 1965, Johnson ushered through Congress one of the most sweeping domestic programs in U.S. history, but toward the end of his term, he was bogged down by a credibility gap that left many voters without confidence in the words that they heard coming from his mouth.

The publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, a top-secret study commissioned by the Department of Defense and leaked to reporters by Daniel Ellsberg, revealed the full history of misrepresentations, deceptions, and outright lies surrounding the war. The Supreme Court rejected President Richard Nixon’s effort to block publication, and the New York Times and the Washington Post (along with the extensive coverage in over a dozen other outlets) provided Americans with a detailed account of how the United States had become trapped in the deadly quagmire—much of it contradicting the stories they had long heard from presidents and other officials. That key moments in the war, such as when Johnson asked Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964 (which authorized the use of military force in Southeast Asia), had been based on faulty claims, if not outright lies, underscored just how far presidents were willing to go in betraying the public trust.

The ways government officials hid their actions from the public received further scrutiny during the widely publicized hearings led by Rep. Otis Pike and Sen. Frank Church, which investigated how the national security establishment operated behind closed doors during the early Cold War. While presidents boasted of fighting communism to protect democracy, officials in the executive branch were attempting to assassinate foreign leaders without authorization, spying on U.S. citizens involved in anti-war protests, and frequently violating basic civil liberties.

In the 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter won the election by promising voters, “I will never tell a lie to the American people.” But Carter failed to reverse the trend line.

Public trust in government entered a long period of decline during the mid-1960s and then intensified as a result of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, from which it has never fully recovered. The lies kept coming: Investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987 revealed that the Reagan administration had sold weapons to Iran (then considered a leading state sponsor of terrorism) and secretly funneled the proceeds to the Nicaraguan Contras, despite an explicit congressional ban on doing so—though Congress failed to find smoking gun evidence that the president himself had directed the entire operation.

The praise that followed the swift success of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, when President George H.W. Bush led the United States and an allied coalition to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, also shifted attention away from the many false claims that the administration had made in the lead-up to war, including bogus stories that Iraqi troops had ripped babies from incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital.

Nothing since Vietnam came close to President George W. Bush’s conduct in launching the war in Iraq in 2003. As Americans were still struggling with the aftermath of 9/11, the administration argued that it needed to attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein’s regime had built up a cache of weapons of mass destruction that could be used against the United States, and because it was connected to the al Qaeda networks responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Despite the fact that neither of these claims proved true, some of the most trusted officials surrounding Bush, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, publicly made this case to the world. Not long after the war began, it became clear that the president had misled the public. As the conflict dragged on for nearly nine years and remained deeply unpopular, the consequences of these claims became a central part of Bush’s legacy.

Those five decades of falsehoods and warmaking have left the nation cynical, distrustful, and skeptical of almost anything the government does. Republicans have often been better positioned to navigate this public culture of doubt, since their agenda has largely centered on limiting the role of government. Democrats, by contrast, have borne much of the burden of this history because their party continues to champion a strong governmental role in a country where distrust runs extremely deep.

The war in Iran will likely make things worse. The fact that Trump never sought congressional support has created a situation in which Americans have little understanding of why the United States launched these dangerous attacks, which have continued to escalate. The shifting arguments and contradictory claims from administration officials, including quickly disproven assertions that Iran had missiles capable of reaching the United States, have done little to bolster public support, even in the early days of the operation, a period when public opinion has historically rallied around the flag. The fact that the war is taking place under the leadership of a president who has a well-documented record for uttering falsehoods does not help matters.

If presidents are ever going to rebuild trust in government, the effort must begin in times of war. The dangerous dynamics of “official lies,” Eric Alterman wrote in his 2004 book, When Presidents Lie, is their “amoeba-like penchant for self-replication. The more a leader lies to his people, the more he must lie to his people.”

Despite the strong incentives to say whatever is necessary to legitimate military operations, the lies will be exposed over time. Presidents cannot ignore the long-term costs that result from dismissing the truth in pursuit of national security. The damage inflicted on the missions themselves; the legacy of the presidents who wage them; and the standing of the federal government—on which all Americans depend—has been immense.

If the president wants to launch a military attack, he should have the courage to make his best case—based in fact not fiction—to the nation and use the power of persuasion to work within the democratic system that the founders created, rather than around it.