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Show Elder Dunn's untruths hurt BOUNTIFUL After more than a year of being passed around the newspaper fraternity like a smoking potato, the Walter Mitty-style Mitty-style lies Elder Paul H. Dunn uses to captivate his mostly LDS audiences au-diences have finally been laid bare. The investigative story, shopped by freelance writer Lynn Packer to daily newspapers throughout much of the West, was finally printed last week by The Arizona Republic. It was promptly picked up by the wire services and reprinted in all of Utah's major dailies. TarriciT1 LEAVin Managing Editor Two things strike me as ironic. First, that Elder Dunn appears to be unruffled over the disclosure that he did not perform the feats of valor in war laid claim to in books and public speeches, nor did he excel well enough in baseball to have personally per-sonally experienced the deeds of athletic greatness he brags about. Not only do the untruths the 66-year-old Dunn has made his living off not bother him, he compares his first-person fiction to the parables told by Jesus. Second, it is interesting to note that while the daily newspapers in Utah and elsewhere had access to the story of Dunn's misrepresentations misrepresenta-tions for many months, none who circulate in predominantly Mormon areas dared carry the torch of truth first. It's as if each editor feared his readers would kill the messenger, then feel sorry for Dunn who was dropped by the Mormon Church from his position as a member of the First Council of the Seventy in October 1989, about the time Packer's investigation of his background began to surface. But once the Arizona newspaper went on record, the Utah dailies, safe in being able to attribute the story to a credible source other than themselves-have been quick to print the sordid details. Not exactly cutting edge, print-the-truth-at-any-cost journalism, is it? For his part, Packer, a Mormon and former KSL-TV reporter, was terminated from his teaching position posi-tion at the church-owned Brigham Young University when he pursued attempts to publish his disclosures about Dunn's story fabrications. Publication of the Dunn article would damage the church and the university, Packer was told in a memo before his contract for the 1990-91 school year was not renewed. But the trepidation of Utah's newspapers and the purge of Packer aside, it is Dunn's own response that staggers the sensibilities. Here is one of the church's best known speakers he receives royalties from 23 inspirational cassette tapes and 28 books, many of which contain his phony war and baseball stories-justifying his actions ac-tions by saying they were merely teaching tools. Amazing. After disclosure, for instance, that Dunn's wartime buddy, Harold Lester Brown did not die in the church leader's arms in a World War II foxhole shattered by mortar fire, but in fact is living today in Odessa, Mo., Dunn justifies the oft-told oft-told story with incredible logic. Once he'd told the story to a group of children at a church, Dunn said, he couldn't change it even through he knew it to be untrue. "Rather than go back and change something where it would be deceitful," he said, "I just kept it the same." Now there's an object lesson for LDS kids. If you tell a lie and it makes a better story to illustrate a point, then it's OK! What a wonderful world of tall tales Dunn opens for all of us. By claiming that you were in the general gen-eral area, then you can in sen yourself into the story and tell people peo-ple you personally performed the heroics done by others. Hey, you're just teaching, so it's all right to claim you were one of only six in your 1,000-man combat group who survived. "How's that for odds," Dunn likes to say when he tells that story. Never mind that when pinned down, Dunn admits only 30 soldiers in his unit died during the entire war. 4 |