Hiram Johnson
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Hiram Warren Johnson (September 2, 1866 – August 6, 1945) was a leading American progressive and later isolationist politician from California; he was Governor of California from 1911 to 1917, and a Senator from 1917 to 1945.
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- The first casualty when war comes is truth.
- Widely attributed to Johnson, but without any confirmed citations of original source; a more famous variant on this theme is one by Arthur Ponsonby in Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First World War (1928): "When war is declared, truth is the first casualty." Samuel Johnson also expressed a similar idea in a much earlier statement from The Idler (1758) : "Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages."
