There’s a Murphy’s Law that applies to televised mea culpas. It runs like this: However bad the fix you are in, anything less than the whole truth will make it worse.
When Lance Armstrong sat down with Oprah to admit what most of the world suspected — that he had doped his way to the top of the cycling world and bullied anyone who said so — he was banking on the American belief that everyone deserves a second chance.
That faith in the American people was well-placed. What he got wrong was that forgiveness is a two-way street: It requires honesty and contrition.
After days of press leaks and two nights of television interviews, what strikes us is the uniformity of the reaction. The general take seems to be that while Armstrong admitted doing much that was wrong, these admissions owed more to calculation about his future than any desire to come clean.
For example, while Armstrong acknowledged that all seven of his Tour de France victories involved banned substances, he evaded Oprah’s question about a major allegation.
This is the charge that, shortly after he had been operated on for testicular cancer in 1996, he told doctors in an Indianapolis hospital room he had used performance-enhancing drugs.
Frankie Andreu, an Armstrong teammate, and his wife, Betsy, each swore to this under oath. Armstrong denied it in his own deposition, and others backed him up.
If he was really telling the full truth with Oprah, he would have answered her question one way or the other.
Then there is the charity, which was fleshed out in the second interview. That many cancer sufferers have been lifted from despair by the Livestrong Foundation is beyond question. No deed, however bad, will ever erase that contribution.
At the same time, no contribution — however large and however worthy the cause — can buy Armstrong immunity from accountability for his fraud and bullying.
At the end of the Oprah interviews, we are left with only two things we know for certain.
First, we know that the Lance Armstrong who now says he is telling the truth has a past built on lies. Second, we know that the people who were telling the truth all along — the people Armstrong savaged and smeared and sued — say that Armstrong is lying still.
If you had to bet the bank on it, whom would you believe?