Hannah Arendt called her reflection on the Pentagon papers – the US Department of Defense’s secret, then leaked, documentary investigation into the American intervention in Vietnam – ‘Lying in Politics’. As Arendt pointed out at the beginning of her essay: ‘the basic issue raised by the papers is deception ... The famous credibility gap, which has been with us for six years, has suddenly opened up into an abyss. The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as self-deceptions, is apt to engulf any reader who wishes to probe this material.’