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H.D.S. GREENWAY

BLOWN UP

What drives otherwise honorable people to puff their military records with patently false exploits?

By H.D.S. Greenway | May 21, 2010

ONE OF MY favorite childhood books was Dr. Seuss’s “And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.’’ A kid trying to explain why he’s late starts to embellish on a docile, horse-drawn wagon he has seen on the way home. He makes up ever more fanciful fabulosities, so that the cart is drawn by ever more wondrous animals and becomes a full-throated bandwagon with airplanes flying by dumping confetti. But in the end, under his dad’s steely gaze, there was “nothing, I said, growing red as a beet, but a plain horse and cart on Mulberry Street.’’

The beet-red face today belongs to Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, who would like to replace retiring Chris Dodd in the US Senate. His horse-and-cart military service in the stateside Marine Reserves, with duties including organizing a Toys for Tots drive, somehow got transmogrified into the whirling helicopter world of danger-filled forests in Vietnam.

At first Blumenthal was humble about his military service, former congressman Christopher Shays said. But then “he just kept adding to the story, the more he told it,’’ Shays told The New York Times. What may be charming in a story about childhood imagination becomes decidedly less so when an adult running for public office embellishes his military record.

Why do they do it? Why, time and again, do we have people who should know better adding medals and military resumes that are patently false? Blumenthal says he was simply careless. But it is more than that. Heroism, and the need for heroes, is a human trait that probably goes back to when cavemen had to stave off saber-toothed tigers, and was immortalized by Homer and his epics of the Trojan War.

For Blumenthal, who has made a specialty of veterans’ affairs and going to funerals of the fallen, it might have been a calculated credential for political life. But I suspect it was more than that: a guilt, perhaps, that he sought so many student extensions while others were serving in Vietnam — including his Harvard friend, Donald Graham, the son of his mentor, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post.

Falsifying one’s exploits is nothing new. The famous 18th-century exaggerator, Baron Munchausen, came back from the wars with such tall tales of his service — including riding upon cannon balls — that his name has a syndrome all to itself. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is when parents exaggerate or even make up symptoms in their children to gain attention and sympathy.

We have a recent example of a truly extraordinary falsifier in the 23-year-old Adam Wheeler, who lied his way into Harvard, and when he was caught, tried lying his way into Yale and Brown. He is being compared to Patrica Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley,’’ except that Wheeler didn’t resort to murder, and didn’t aspire to Princeton.

Cheating and plagiarism is becoming endemic in America, but falsifying of military records by otherwise honorable men is in a special category. In Blumenthal’s case it may be sympathy and the desire to be one with the heroes he so admires, and for whom he has done much.

Consider the case of Joseph Eillis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, who made up service in Vietnam when, like Blumenthal, he had served honorably in uniform here at home. Was it because he wanted to gain admiration from his students?

Respect for the military waxes and wanes in this country. Blumenthal might have been exposed to the treatment returning vets got during the Vietnam era without actually having been in Vietnam. Between the two world wars, the military was not much admired either. But today, with America fighting two wars and patriotism running high, the military is held in high regard.

At the end of the 19th century, as Evan Thomas relates in his new book, “The War Lovers,’’ men such as Theodore Roosevelt sought war as something necessary to prove manhood — a rising of the wolf in the heart that was necessary lest societies become soft and decadent. Something of that remains in the hearts of would-be heroes who feel the need to have been on Mulberry Street with something more than a horse and cart and toys for tots.

H.D.S. Greenway’s column appears regularly in the Boston Globe.
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