FDR later turned to MacLeish to administer the straightforwardly named but unfortunately acronymed Office of Facts and Figures, America’s official propaganda agency. OFF’s staff was almost as flossy as McClure’s contributor list: Malcolm Cowley, E.B. White, McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. But MacLeish soon came to despise his job of administering government-approved news (spin, avant la lettre). The conundrum remained: spinning stuck in the craw as a fundamentally distasteful undertaking.

On the dark side of the Atlantic, in Germany, spinning was not only highly regarded, but practically a Mosaic (as it were) commandment. As Greenberg notes, scholars view the chapter on propaganda in Hitler’s Mein Kampf as the only one with any value. The rest of it is an incoherent rant. In that chapter, Hitler instructs that people will fall for the big lie rather than the small one, and preaches that the target of propaganda is the emotions, not the intellect.

We learn from Greenberg (at least I did) that Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s, er, spin doctor, got a Ph.D. in Romantic Literature from Heidelberg University. He was the author of an unsuccessful novel and two unproduced plays. If only that fucking book had sold. If only Hitler’s paintings had sold. (There’s a tale waiting to be told: two failed Weimar artistes come together and put on a show.) Greenberg delivers fascinating details: American PR guru Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew twice over, was horrified to learn that his book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, had been recently seen on Goebbels’s desk in his library. Not quite the endorsement an author would hope for.

 

AFTER WORLD War II, White House spin developed pari passu with the increasingly sophisticated techniques of Madison Avenue and political consulting. After polls predicted the 1948 election with hilarious imprecision, new scrutiny and rigor were imposed. Teleprompters arrived in 1952. “Psy War,” eagerly embraced by Eisenhower, replaced propaganda. Ike himself, having to deal with TV, got makeovers and coaching appearances from the actor Robert Montgomery. Montgomery was such a constant presence that he became the first person in professional show business to have a permanent office in the White House. (Bonus detail: Montgomery bummed cigarettes rather than carry a pack, so as not to cause his suit pockets to bulge.)

Mad Men played a huge role in the Eisenhower administration, even if they didn’t get their own office space. The advertising firm BBDO became a sort of de facto government agency. Ike soon found himself being accused of running “an administration of hucksters and manipulators.” Poor Ike, moaning in the halls, “To think that an old soldier should come to this,” was capable of erratic PR impulses. At one point he decided cabinet meetings should be televised. (A nonstarter.) We are grateful that his impulses a decade earlier were sounder.

Then came 1960 and the Nixon and Kennedy debates, and nothing would ever be the same. Debates, which we cannot have enough of now, were not at the time universally regarded as a good thing. Historian Daniel Boorstin for one thought them a highly dubious development. But Boorstin presciently declared “Never again would any man attain the presidency or discharge its duties satisfactorily without entering into an intimate and conscious relation with the whole public.” And so today candidates for the job of leader of the free world must grovel before Stephen Colbert. I remember in 1993 watching Al Gore telling David Letterman that his Secret Service codename was “Joey Buttafuoco” and thinking, well, there goes what’s left of “the dignity of the office.”

In 1960, too, came author Teddy White, playing Toto very well indeed by yanking back the curtain with his paradigm-shifting The Making of the President. Nothing would ever the same on his side of the curtain after that. White begat Joe McGinnis and The Selling of the President 1968. Greenberg nicely calls his book a rebuttal, rather than a sequel, to White’s. McGinnis begat Timothy Crouse and The Boys on the Bus, which begat, along with Watergate’s Woodward and Bernstein, the reporter as celebrity. Which later, with the explosion of cable TV and the Internet and blogs and all the rest, begat the reporter-bloviator and the Sabbath Day gasbag.

As for pulling back the curtain, the grouchy Boorstin did allow that there was a certain pleasure to the act. (In this he disagreed with Walter Bagehot, who insisted that the British monarch must remain largely unseen by the public: “We must not let in daylight upon magic.”) Boorstin wrote of the debates, “We are all interested in watching a skillful feat of magic; we are still more interested in looking behind the scenes and seeing precisely how it was made to seem that the lady was sawed in half. . . . Even after we have been taken behind the scenes, we can still enjoy the pleasures of deception.” Cue The War Room.

 

WE COME, THEN, to Hannah Arendt, author of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report in the Banality of Evil, who wrote, “No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other.” In the 1960s, after she turned against the war in Vietnam, amidst 78 rpm-speed government spinning, Arendt enlarged upon the theme in a widely read piece in the New Yorker: “National propaganda on the government level has learned more than a few tricks from business practices and Madison Avenue methods.” Greenberg notes that Arendt “was not particularly worried that falsehood would triumph; firmly anti-relativist, she considered facts ‘stubborn’ and resilient. Her fear, rather, was that society would succumb to ‘a peculiar kind of cynicism—and absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything.’”

And there’s the rub. Does it matter, at this point, that there weren’t cheering mobs of Muslims in New Jersey on 9/11? Or is it a reductio ad absurdum to cite pronouncements of Donald Trump as an indicator of, really, anything? By the end of this year, we will know if Trump was an aberration, or an evolution. Meanwhile, here we are. It is 2016 in the Republic of Spin.

In the end, Greenberg himself doesn’t succumb to the cynicism Arendt warned of. Though he loudly clangs the tocsin of alarm, he draws reassurance from our Janus-like view of spin. We may be denizens of Plato’s cave, where we see only shadows on the wall instead of real forms, but at least we know we’re in the cave. “Paradoxically,” he says, “our persistent worry about spin, though at times debilitating, does serve to keep us vigilant about its abuse.” And thank God for that.

As for Plato’s student Aristotle, Greenberg reminds us that Aristotle did not disdain rhetoric. He viewed it as an essential element of politics.

Where do we stand on the Plato-Aristotle divide? Naturally, being American, we want it both ways.

“We fancy ourselves Platonists,” Greenberg writes, “deploring the inauthenticity of media politics and the unholy ministrations of the spin doctors. But deep down—perhaps unwittingly—we’re Aristotelians. Like the Obama of 2010, we’re ready to embrace spin if it serves what we consider legitimate purposes.”

We may live, he observes, in a “post-truth society” but as Arendt pointed out, there are limits to spin. French premier Georges Clemenceau was once asked how history would assess responsibility for World War I.

“This I don’t know,” Clemenceau is said to have answered, “but I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.”

Christopher Buckley’s new book is The Relic Master, a novel.

Image: Flickr/The White House