Kalb and Integrity

Defending the Reagan Administration’s anti-Libya program of “disinformation” that was publicly exposed last week, Secretary of State George P. Shultz quoted from a remark made by Winston Churchill during World War II. “The truth is so precious,” Churchill said, “it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” It was, in the context of things, a remarkably inappropriate citation, confusing the deception practiced in wartime to fool an enemy with lies told in peacetime that have the effect of misleading one’s own people. The moral and political distinction is simple but vital. Bernard Kalb is one who understands it.

Kalb has resigned as the State Department’s chief spokesman, after a week of agonizing over the ill-conceived plan to use the news media in a campaign to confuse and frighten Libya’s Col.Moammar Kadafi. The Administration contends that its plan did not envisage deliberately deceiving the American press, and through the press, the American people. Whatever it intended, the record is clear that the Administration never officially tried to correct the falsehoods that appeared in the press because of its campaign of disinformation.

Kalb, who says he learned of that campaign only when the basis for it was disclosed last week in the Washington Post, quit over the fundamental principle of governmental credibility. He could not, as he said, be absorbed in the ranks of silence after his government sought to deceive the public. In the long span of things it seems likely that Kalb’s resignation will at best be only a footnote to the history of the Reagan Administration. All the more reason, then, why the integrity it reflects should be recognized now.