Lying in America: Appearance and reality in the land of opportunity

Were you ever told not to hide your light under a bushel? In competitive, performance-geared America, such Biblical advice seems quaintly timid. Here, it is a rare creature indeed who lingers in the shadows. Everyone else is out there shining for all they are worth, determined to catch whatever limelight may be going as well.

Sometimes, though, the pressure to shine as brightly as America expects calls for booster batteries and borrowed power, and the attendant risk of exposure. The past week has furnished two notable examples: the one tragic, the other comic (or nearly), and both instructive.

Pity poor Larry Lawrence, a millionaire businessman from California grown rich in the hotel business. Wealth alone was not enough for him. Lawrence craved respect, influence and public office. He donated cash to the Democratic Party, gained access to its most luminous star - a certain Bill Clinton - and was rewarded in the fullness of time with an ambassadorship.

On his way to recognition, however, Lawrence embellished his CV with an episode of war heroism - an injury sustained while trying to save crewmates during an attack on the Arctic convoys in the Second World War. In life, he got away with it. In death, by an accident of Washington politics, he was found out. Half a century after his fictitious exploit, he fell victim to Republican charges that Democratic Party donors had been able to "buy" burial plots at Arlington cemetery. Last week, Lawrence became the first person to be disinterred from the nation's military burial ground.

The irony was that he may not have needed a military history to be buried at Arlington; his death in ambassadorial service might have sufficed. But his lie had been exposed, and America shows no mercy to those who defile what it holds sacred. "Dig Him Up" was the headline on a New York tabloid, even before his widow proposed that very solution.

The other CV polisher was Al Gore, the Vice-President. He told reporters that he was the model for Oliver Barrett IV, the "preppy" law student hero of Erich Segal's Love Story. That Al and his wife - then girlfriend - Tipper had been the prototypes for the tragic couple did the rounds of the gossip columns for days - with never a word of denial or clarification from the Vice-President or his PR team - until Segal turned up to set the record straight. Al was half of Oliver, he explained; the staid, pressurized, son-of-famous-father half, not the creative, sensitive half. Tipper was nowhere.

These two tales, the tragic and quasi-comic, seem almost forgiveable beside other ego-boosting deceptions of recent memory. Lawrence was disinterred only weeks after a federal judge in California, James Ware, withdrew his name as an appeals court nominee. He had been forced to admit that he was not the brother of a boy who had died in an Alabama racist shooting. Although, he had told the tale for years, he had finally to concede that they were not related.

Then there was Admiral Jeremy Boorda, who committed suicide after being exposed by a journalist for wearing medals to which he was not entitled. And further back was the case of Janet Cooke, winner of America's most prestigious journalism prize, the Pulitzer, for a feature about child drug addicts that was pure invention. Her CV was fictitious, too, claiming a degree from the elite Vassar College.

Disparate though these cases seem, they have something in common beyond the boldness of the invention and the fact that they were found out. The perpetrators all wanted to improve themselves, and the establishment they aspired to wanted desperately to believe them, each compensating for his or her own inadequacy.

Larry Lawrence, perhaps over-cruelly exposed now as a self-made man of shallow vanity, gave himself a heroic past. The stolid Al Gore gave himself a trait of romantic spontaneity. Judge Ware, whose first error, like Gore's, may have been to allow someone else's mistaken assumption to stand, gave himself a civil rights history he did not have. The admiral awarded himself additional distinction. And Ms Cooke gave herself an elite degree, without which - as a former colleague of hers conceded - she would never have got a look-in at the Washington Post. But the Post (like the military, like the courts, like the political establishment) needed someone just like the person she purported to be - in her case, a bright young black reporter. All of them gave these exaggerators the benefit of the doubt.

In fast-moving, success-orientated America, the temptation for ordinary but aspiring mortals to enhance their qualifications to fill in the perceived gaps is always there. The question now is how many more have crossed the line from enhancement to lies and got away with it - from those who understated their age and overstated their qualifications to enter the US in the first place, to those who pinned an extra medal on their breast?

The barest acquaintance with American CV-writing suggests that this is an art akin to advertising. Career resumes are designed to compete with the brashest in the market. The rule is: "sell" yourself. Disappearing from one part of the country to "start" over with a new identity in another is an honourable American tradition; but this is not just "starting over", it is repackaging.

If there is a flaw in American selection procedures, it is the attention to packaging. If you look plausible, ooze confidence, speak briskly and to the point, that is taken as a measure of competence. Often, little more is required. "He's done too many talk shows" was a rare criticism of a well qualified academic whose answer to a searching question extended no further than a glib sound-byte.

Were CVs treated as advertising rather than history, all might be well; but they are not. And while legions of "fact-checkers" sift pre-publication articles and books for errors, the checking of career histories goes by the board. One call to Larry Lawrence's college would have rumbled his military claims; one check on Judge Ware's family, one call to Vassar College about Janet Cooke would have established the truth. But the truth is not something Americans are in hurry to find out.