It's Tuesday, October 15, 2024 – three weeks from Election Day. A close election it is, too, as you can see from the RealClearPolitics polling averages. In the national popular vote, the Democrats' ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz leads Republican standard-bearers Donald Trump and J.D. Vance by 1.7%, while the GOP leads in the top battleground states by a miniscule 0.4%. The RCP Electoral College map has Trump slightly ahead, 219 to 215, with 104 too close to call. The battle for control of the U.S. Senate is also tight. We'll know in three weeks. Hopefully.
On this date in U.S. history, during another election season, a Republican candidate for the Senate drew laughs from his audience in Alton, Illinois, by telling his rival, a prominent Democrat, "If you stop telling lies about me, I'll start telling truth about you."
Actually, that is not what Abraham Lincoln said to Stephen A. Douglas on Oct. 15, 1858 – even though during the 2008 campaign Barack Obama repeatedly attributed the line to Lincoln. It's a real quote, but it's misattributed – and Obama should have known better. What Lincoln actually said about slavery on this date during the seventh and final Lincoln-Douglas debate was this:
"That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings."
As you can see, it's folly to put words in Lincoln's mouth. He was too good at doing so himself. Insightful, forceful, and self-effacing, Lincoln left audiences spellbound. Even those who ended up voting against Lincoln had to chuckle during an earlier debate when Douglas accused him of being two-faced. "If I had another face," Lincoln quipped, "do you think I'd wear this one?"
"Facts are stupid things," Ronald Reagan said in a famous 1988 slip-of-the-tongue. He was presumably going for John Adams' line about facts being "stubborn" things. In truth, they can be both, depending on how accurate they are.
For many years, Reagan regaled audiences with an allegory about fair play during a high school football game. In his telling, players for a rival school, Mendota, complained to the referees that Reagan, playing for Dixon High, had committed a penalty that was not called. The refs supposedly asked young Dutch Reagan about it. "I told the truth," Reagan later said. "The penalty was ruled, and Dixon lost the game."
My father, Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, investigated this claim. He discovered that there were no contemporaneous accounts of any such incident, and that Dixon lost to Mendota only once when Reagan was a member of the varsity team – by a score of 24-0. "The ironic point here is that Reagan seems to have told the story to demonstrate how truthful he was," George Mason University political scientist James Pfiffner told me years ago. "Yet he was telling an untruth to make the point."
A similar dynamic was at play in 2008 when Barack Obama attributed the "if you stop telling lies about me" line to Lincoln. Obama was fond of quoting Lincoln for a number of reasons, including the fact that they both began their political careers in Illinois. But it was another Illinois politician, Adlai Stevenson, who used that quip in 1956 about his "Republican friends."
William Randolph Hearst trotted out a similar line 50 years earlier while unsuccessfully campaigning for governor of New York. Hearst apparently borrowed it from another New Yorker, Republican Sen. Chauncey Depew, who used the same line – but with the parties reversed from Stevenson.
Nor did Alexis de Tocqueville ever assert, as Bill Clinton often said, that "America is great because America is good." Likewise, Edmund Burke said many interesting things, but not, as John F. Kennedy claimed: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." And Harry Truman certainly wouldn't have libeled the nation's capital, despite frequent citations, by proclaiming: "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog." Truman had plenty of friends in Washington, D.C., and he grew up on a farm where dogs were considered work animals.
Inaccurate quotes are often attributed to presidents as well. Laziness is frequently to blame. Other times, the culprit is ideological blinders: People employ fake Lincoln, imagined Tocqueville, made-up Burke, and fictional Truman for perceived partisan advantage. "Honest Abe" is so often misquoted that there's a two-volume set, "Recollected Works of Abraham Lincoln," by historians Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher, that debunks hundreds of faked, dubious, or sketchy quotations attributed to the Great Emancipator. Lincoln, especially, is often being blamed for saying things he would never have even thought. Whether he is predicting the end of capitalism or ruminating about fooling the people some of the time (but not all of the time), writers and politicians who wouldn't know a Bartlett's from a log-splitter are forever trying to posthumously enlist Abe in their pet causes.
The romantic notion that America is great because she is good is definitely not Tocqueville – and is too pithy to sound much like the famous Frenchman – but the misquote is not originally from Bill Clinton, either. Dwight Eisenhower was duped by this fake quote, as was Reagan. In time, the forgery was exposed by John J. Pitney, a Claremont McKenna College political scientist, who traced it to an obscure 1941 tome about religion and the American Dream. Even after this debunking, Clinton was so enamored of the sentiment he kept using it anyway.
This is also a trend: Once a catchy quote is misused by a president, it's hard to kill it, as President Kennedy frequently demonstrated. JFK and his speechwriters were notoriously unreliable with quotations, most notably in a 1961 speech to the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, in which he quoted British statesman Burke's supposed "good men to do nothing" line.
Those words have subsequently been used by politicians ranging from Gerald Ford to Florida chameleon Charlie Crist. They have inspired the launching of a private school in Washington, D.C., a charity in Tanzania, a million school essays, and were once voted by the editors of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as the most popular quote of modern times. But Burke never said them.
It reminds me of my own favorite John F. Kennedy quote: "Some men say things as they are and ask why. I dream of quotations that never were, and ask, why not?"
