Essay: The Devilish Doctrine of Deniability

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"We know perfectly well how things will turn out," the knight explained, his armor probably still smeared with the blood of Archbishop Thomas a Becket. "King Henry—God bless him—will have to say, for reasons of state, that he never meant this to happen; and there is going to be an awful row ..."

So said Sir William de Tracy when he stepped forward at the end of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral to tell why he and three other loyal servants of Britain's King Henry II had just carried out the poisonous wish implicit in the King's angry question, "Will nobody rid me of this turbulent priest?"

Eliot intended for us to despise the knights' oily justifications for the butchery, but history has been somewhat kinder to the King, who may or may not have wanted his wish thus fulfilled. As soon as Henry learned that the knights who overheard his question had hastily departed from his court, he guessed their mission and sent a messenger to summon them back. And when he heard that his onetime friend Becket had indeed been murdered, according to the contemporary chronicle of Arnulf of Lisieux, "the King burst into loud cries of grief ... At times he seemed stupefied with suffering, but then he would begin groaning again and calling out more loudly and bitterly than before."

Well, what did the King know, as we phrase these matters nowadays, and when did he know it? More important and more interest ing, how can a King (or President) order some action that he perhaps should not order, or that he would not want widely known as his order?

Even the best-intentioned men, once they enter the jungle of power politics, have to confront the necessity of directing actions that they would, in normal circumstances, be in clined to call immoral. The high-minded Abraham Lincoln, for example, was provoked by antiwar agitation into suspending the right of habeas corpus and arresting a number of peaceable citizens who had generally committed no crime worse than being Democrats.

Foreign affairs seem particularly apt to bring out a presidential capacity for hypocrisy. Kindly William McKinley, who used U.S. troops to suppress the fledgling Philippine republic in 1898, said he had prayerfully searched his soul before deciding it was his duty to "civilize and Christianize" the Filipinos. Theodore Roosevelt, who encouraged an insurrection in the Colombian province of Panama so that he could build a canal through it, liked to consult with Attorney General Philander Knox about the legality of his various aggressions, but Knox was not the sternest of critics. "Ah, Mr. President," he asked on one occasion, "Why have such a beautiful action marred by any taint of legality?" When Roosevelt yearned to seize the Hawaiian Islands, Admiral Alfred Mahan was equally encouraging: "Do nothing unrighteous, but take the islands first and solve afterward."