This article ran in the Tallahassee Democrat on June 13, 1997.

In the midst of the trial of Timothy McVeigh, there is an uncomfortable point that need to be made, even by political moderates. The government hasn't helped itself by deceiving its citizens over the years, because that has made it even harder to avert conspiracy theories. While the militia crowd feels that the government's worst sins were evident at Waco and Ruby Ridge, the real mistake of the federales has been to mislead the public frequently enough to fuel conspiracy theories. The government's secret illegal activities against its own citizens, and its attempts to alter the history of those actions, is partly to blame for the insanity behind the Oklahoma City bombing.

Consider, in recent years, the revelation that the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972 intentionally failed to treat black participants in a syphilis study. Recruitment of black patients for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was easy, since they had no other recourse to health care. The study followed the untreated patients until their autopsy. As a consequence, today many blacks justifiably worry that the high incidence of AIDS among Africa-Americans is due to intentional government inaction.

Imagine the damage to federal credibility caused by the disclosure a few years ago that the U.S. government had conducted 204 secret underground and atmospheric nuclear tests, and had intentionally exposed over 600 unsuspecting citizens to radiation experiments since the 1940s. In tests that included collecting human tissue, officials monitored the effects of nuclear fallout on citizens.

Conspiracy theory has been an ongoing part of American history, but it's especially intense today. The Puritans feared that those in England conspired against them. Conspiratorial plots were imagined by the Jacksonians who feared the Bank of the United States, by the late 19th century populists who worried about corporations and financiers, and by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his followers who feared communists in Washington. But with the steep decline in trust in our government recently, there has been, if you'll pardon the term, an explosion of conspiracy theories among the American population.

The government is not uniquely deceitful, of course. American business is no better, as tobacco companies and corporate chemical-waste sites demonstrate. But government, as a representative of the public, needs to be held to a higher standard than the rest of us. It has an important responsibility to preserve the trust of its citizens. Because of this special obligation, it was especially disturbing to learn last month that the CIA in the early 1960s had destroyed its own evidence of its involvement in the 1953 Iran coup. Records on covert Cold War CIA activity in Indonesia in the 1950s and Guyana in the 1960s also have been burned.

While these CIA operations were foreign, not domestic, the destruction of records is a crime against American citizens--who need an honest historical record in order to maintain trust in their government, and to deflect the suspicion and resentment that feed conspiracy theories. It is no surprise that with this corruption of history by the CIA and other government agencies, many people fear that they have not heard the real story of John Kennedy's assassination.

We might not like everything that our government does, but an unaltered historical record allows us to come to grips with our past. In time there can be accountability and reconciliation. History, like a cathartic cultural psychoanalysis, allows us to confront and admit our mistakes and then get beyond them. To destroy our history is to lie to ourselves. For the government to falsify history is to undermine its democratic authority. It produces a situation where no one is able to trust, for there is the prospect that the truth never will be uncovered.

`It is damaging that the government for decades temporarily covered up the history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the nuclear fallout experiments. But it is far worse that the CIA has permanently erased parts of the historical record. History is the only medicine that can cure the poison of the past. Without it, trust can't operate. In that poisonous soil of suspicion, Timothy McVeighs and apocalyptic militias will blossom.