Top 10 Things Never Said by Politicians

All 4 Presidents on Mount Rushmore appear on this list.

These are in chronological order.

1. George Washington never said, "I cannot tell a lie." At least, not in public. In 1800, within months of the death of the Father of Our Country, Mason Weems wrote The Life of Washington, which included the story of 6-year-old George (this would be in 1738) taking a hatchet, which he used on a cherry tree and "barked so terribly."

When confronted by his father about it, little George said, "I can't tell a lie, Pa. You know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet." And Augustine Washington embraced his son, sorry that he had lost the tree, but glad that his son was honest about it.

The very story of George Washington not being able to tell a lie was, itself, a lie. Or, at least, no one has ever proven it to be true, and no subsequent biography has been able to confirm it. Indeed, the original story only says that he damaged the tree, rather than chopping it down, which is how the story is usually told.

Certainly, Washington believed the adage that "Honesty is the best policy." And there may have been an incident in which he was caught in a difficult situation, with his father or someone else, and came clean rather than lie. But the cherry tree story? Most likely, it never happened.

2. Thomas Jefferson never said, "That government is best which governs least." He may have believed it. Certainly, he preferred that local and State governments have more power than the federal government has tended to allow them.

But there is no record of the statement in his public speeches or his surviving letters, and the man wrote a lot of letters, and even invented a special desk with a second pen, a proto-copier. So we have more of his own copies of his letters that survive than we do of the letters he sent.

When liberals want to quote Jefferson, they tend to use words from the Declaration of Independence, such as, "All men are created equal." When conservatives want to quote Jefferson, they tend to cite, "That government is best which governs least." Typical of conservatives to either lie or believe something that isn't true.

The saying first appeared in public in 1849, 23 years after Jefferson's death, in Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. His back-to-nature ideas certainly would have appealed to Jefferson, but he wasn't quoting Jefferson.

In that book, Thoreau also compares government to a machine, presaging by more than a century the 1964 speech by Mario Savio during the University of California's "Free Speech Movement," where he wanted people to "put your bodies on the gears."

3. Abraham Lincoln never said "The Ten Cannots." In 1916, the Rev. William Boetcker wrote The Ten Cannots, and they have come to be considered part of the conservative "gospel":

• You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
• You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
• You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
• You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
• You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
• You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
• You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
• You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
• You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence.
• And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

Was Boetcker a great prophet? After all, the Bolshevik Revolution happened the next year. Well, no: Karl Marx had written The Communist Manifesto 68 years earlier; the Paris Commune had risen and fallen 45 years earlier; the American labor movement had been well underway since then; and the Populist movement and the Progressive movement had both risen and fallen. But today's conservatives can certainly agree with all 10.

Today's liberals? They don't want to discourage thrift. And they don't want to destroy the rich. But they do know that regulated capitalism is better than under-regulated capitalism, something conservatives refuse to accept.

What does any of this have to do with Abe Lincoln? In 1942, the Committee for Constitutional Government published a leaflet titled Lincoln on Limitations. It included some genuine Lincoln quotes, but it also included The Ten Cannots, and attributed them to him. Oddly, Boetcker was still alive (and would remain so for another 20 years), and never stepped forward to correct the record.

As a result of that, the Cannots' attribution to Lincoln has persisted. Former President Ronald Reagan made the attribution in his speech to the 1992 Republican Convention. In 2015, Governor John Kasich of Ohio made the attribution in an appearance on Fox News Sunday.

Oddly, in 1993, on the syndicated late-night TV show he had from 1992 to 1996, right-wing radio demagogue Rush Limbaugh, so often known to tell insidious lies, mentioned the Cannots, but went out of his way to say that they were the product of Boetcker, not Lincoln.

Would Lincoln have believed the Cannots? Maybe. But he has been established as having said this, something modern Republicans would never have agreed with: "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

Why, Abe, you shameless Commie.

4. Horace Greeley never said, "Go west, young man." If you're not familiar with Greeley, that's understandable, given how long it's been since he was a national figure. And he barely counts as a politician at all, having been in public office for a total of 4 months. And he only ran for office twice, really only once, and rather reluctantly. But, surely, you're familiar with the saying.

In 1841, Greeley had founded the New York Tribune -- which merged in 1924 with the New York Herald, and formed one of America's best-written newspapers, until it folded in 1966. Greeley used his paper to advocate for liberal causes, including the abolition of slavery. In 1848, he was elected to fill the brief, unexpired term of a Congressman from New York, as a member of the Whig Party. He became one of the founders of the Republican Party in 1854.

By 1872, with slavery abolished, he was one of the most admired men in the country. A group calling themselves the Liberal Republicans, unhappy with the corruption in the Administration of President Ulysses S. Grant (Grant himself was not involved, but he kept standing up for the men who were), decided to nominate Greeley for President, despite his serious under-qualifications and his never having considered running for the office himself.

The Democratic Party, in a bit of a mess as they were seen as the party of the defeated Confederacy, was also desperate to get rid of Grant, and they nominated Greeley, too. As a result, pretty much every attack that Greeley had hurled at the Democrats for a quarter of a century was hurled back at him, including the ridiculously false notions that he supported racist policies, even the nascent Ku Klux Klan.

In addition, his wife Mary got sick, and he effectively stopped campaigning to be by her side. She died 5 days before the election, and he won only 6 States, all formerly slaveholding States. All this took a terrible toll on his own health, and he died a few days later.

Today, though, he's best remembered for saying, "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country!" Certainly, he favored Western expansionism, and was happy to popularize the slogan in an 1865 editorial. But he didn't come up with the words himself. It has been alleged that John Babson Lane Soule first used it, in the Terre Haute Express in Indiana in 1851. But this might not be correct, either. We might never know the truth, but it definitely didn't start with Greeley.

5. Grover Cleveland never said, "A public office is a public trust." Accepting the nomination for Governor of New York in 1882, Cleveland had said, "Public officers are the servants and agents of the people." He won. In 1884, the Democratic Party nominated him for President. One of his campaign aides was former journalist William C. Hudson, who remembered the earlier quote, and printed up leaflets saying, "Cleveland's motto: A public office is a public trust!"

Cleveland was -- or, at least, claimed to be -- a man who prized honesty above all things, and didn't want to be quoted as saying something he didn't say. He asked Hudson, "Where the deuce did I say that?" Hudson explained that he never said the exact words, but that his every speech and his every policy expressed the idea. Satisfied that the burden of honesty had been met, Cleveland allowed the leaflets to continue to be printed.

He won a nasty and close election for President, and, on March 4, 1885, in his Inaugural Address, he said, "Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, under the same high sanction, though in a different sphere, exercises a public trust." As with the earlier quote, the wording was close, but not exact.

The earliest known form of the phrase goes back to Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, 3 times a failed Presidential nominee. In an 1829 speech, he said, "Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees, and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people."

6. Theodore Roosevelt never said, "To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth." There is no record of this statement in any of TR's public speeches or writings. Besides, more of his policies, especially in his 1912 run to regain the Presidency on the Progressive Party ticket, would now be considered liberal rather than conservative. He was talking about universal health coverage then. And Bernie Sanders was only in graduate school at the time. (Joke.)

The quote has also been attributed to Winston Churchill, who seems to be a magnet for fake quotes; and the aforementioned Rush Limbaugh, who may well have made it up, even though he is a conservative and one of the biggest liars in American history.

7. Warren Harding never said, "Return to normalcy." When Harding, a Senator from Ohio and the Republican nominee for President in 1920, supposedly said this, some people said "normalcy" wasn't even a real word, that it should have been "normality." But the word had appeared in print before.

In the wake of World War I, and President Woodrow Wilson's moves to get America more involved on the international stage, a majority of Americans wanted nothing to do with that. And Harding, whatever else can be said about him (and plenty of it was bad), had enough sense and skill to be able to tap into this feeling. He sat in a recording studio so that his standard stump speech could be put on record, and he said the following:

America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.

Warren Harding and Babe Ruth

Another questionable quote is Babe Ruth saying to the President, "Hot as hell, ain't it, Prez?" Though it is something the Babe would have said, it's not clear whether he said it; or, if so, whether he said it to Harding or his successor, Calvin Coolidge. The gregarious Harding would have been fine with it. The much more reticent Coolidge absolutely would not.

Harding won the 1920 election in a landslide. The result was a "paper prosperity" and scandal. Within 2 1/2 years of his Inauguration, Harding was dead: He had kept his ill health hidden from the public. Within 9 years of his Inauguration, the stock market had crashed, and the full scope of his personal and professional corruption had become widely known. He was then, and remains now, regarded as one of the country's worst Presidents.

Speaking of the stock market crash of 1929, and the subsequent Great Depression:

8. Herbert Hoover never said, "Prosperity is just around the corner." When Harding died in 1923, Vice President Calvin Coolidge became President. He was not corrupt like his predecessor, but he kept the same economic policies. In 1927, he famously said, "I do not choose to run for President in 1928." Maybe he saw the crash coming, and decided to get out, and leave his successor holding the bag.

Hoover was Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge, and seemed both professionally and personally qualified for President. It can be argued that his life before the Presidency and his life after it were exemplary. But his Presidency was a disaster. It wasn't all his fault: The market probably would have crashed soon, anyway. But the fact that it did so within 8 months of his Inauguration hurt him badly.

It's not fair to say that Hoover caused the Depression. It's also not fair to say, as has usually been said these last 90 years, that he did nothing to fight the Depression. It is, however, fair to say that he didn't do enough, and that some of the things he did do worked a little bit, and he should have backed them further. He didn't, and he thought the Constitution prohibited him from doing any more.

When he went from one of the great landslide wins in 1928 to an even bigger landslide loss to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, Roosevelt acted as though the Constitution did allow him to do much more, and the argument that it didn't failed to hold.

At some point from 1930 onward, Hoover is alleged to have tried to boost people's confidence in the economy by saying, "Prosperity is just around the corner." But there's no evidence that he ever said it. The closest he came was in 1931, at the annual dinner of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States: "We have now passed the worst, and with continued unity of effort, we shall rapidly recover. There is one certainty of the future of a people of the resources, intelligence and character of the people of the United States. That is prosperity."

But things did get worse, and when Inauguration Day came on March 4, 1933, the economy was on the brink of total collapse. Hoover couldn't stop it. Roosevelt did.

9. Richard Nixon never said, "I have a secret plan to end the war." Or anything remotely like that. That saying has been around since the 1968 Presidential election.

If he had such a plan, the right thing to do would have been to call outgoing President Lyndon B. Johnson, and arrange a meeting, and tell him the plan. If it worked, LBJ would have gotten the credit, but Nixon could also have claimed credit, and he still might have beaten LBJ's Vice President, Hubert Humphrey. If it had failed, or if LBJ had refused to try it, Nixon could have gone to the voters and said, "I tried." By not telling LBJ the plan, he was essentially letting people die just so that he could win the election and then put his plan into action, and that would have been unconscionable.

But he didn't have such a plan, secret or otherwise. Nor did he ever say that he did. Indeed, he apparently would have been willing to share the plan with LBJ. As Ray Price, one of Nixon's speechwriters, explained a few years after Nixon's death:

That myth had its origin in the New Hampshire Primary, when a wire-service reporter, new to the campaign, filed an article misinterpreting one line of Nixon’s standard stump speech: that "a new administration will end the war and win the peace."

We on the Nixon staff immediately pointed out, to all who would listen, that he had not claimed a "plan." Nixon himself told reporters that if he had one, he would have given it to President Johnson.

It was his rival for the nomination, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who derisively added the word "secret," and, on that basis, reporters and commentators ever since have snidely accused Nixon of claiming a "secret plan" he did not claim and denied having.

The mere suggestion that Nixon had a plan to end the war, but was keeping it a secret to help his electoral chances, was plausible, given that, even before this campaign, he had a reputation as one of the most deceitful and craven politicians in American history. For Nixon's critics, it seemed like exactly the sort of thing that the man known, since his 1950 campaign for U.S. Senator from California, as "Tricky Dick" would do.

But he didn't do it. Say what you want about Richard Milhous Nixon, but his heinous acts did not include this one.

10. Sarah Palin never said, "I can see Russia from my house." That was Tina Fey, doing an impersonation of the Governor of Alaska and Republican nominee for Vice President, in the cold open of the September 13, 2008 installment of Saturday Night Live. It seemed like the sort of thing that dingbat would have said, but the real thing didn't say it. And Fey did revive her career by going on SNL and, mostly, just repeating verbatim things Palin said. But this wasn't one of them.

What did Palin say? Two days earlier, in her 1st major interview after being nominated, she sat down with Charles Gibson, then the anchor of ABC World News Tonight. He asked her about the proximity of Alaska to Russia, specifically easternmost Siberia, and she said, "They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska." And, given a day with clear enough skies, that turns out to be true.

I think that's actually Palin, and not Fey.

Can we really be sure?

The problem was this: She seemed to be citing this actually true fact as a foreign policy credential. It shouldn't have been considered one. In other words, it was actually dumber than the dumb quote misattributed to her.

Of course, 8 years later, Donald Trump got into the White House, with help from Russia. Which led to me thinking of this joke: "Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, but Donald Trump can see Russia from anybody's house."