TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031389/03138900.056

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 8.6 KB | 169 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 18

Drawing the Line


In the Senate furor over John Tower's sobriety, some basic
ethical concerns have been obscured

By Walter Shapiro

    "Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people
whom we personally dislike."

    Oscar Wilde's aphorism comes close to summarizing John
Tower's last-ditch defense. Forget the sandstorm of charges
swirling around the diminutive former Senator; ignore the
serious questions of sobriety, sexual escapades and the sale of
Government expertise. To the beleaguered nominee for Defense
Secretary, the real issue is the motivation of his judges in
the Senate, who he implied were hypocrites pursuing the
partisan politics of personal pique. "Is it an acceptable
standard for Senators late in the evening who've had a few
drinks . . . (to) vote on vital issues of nuclear deterrence?"
Tower asked with rhetorical venom. "Is it an acceptable standard
for Senators to accept honorariums, PAC contributions and paid
vacations from special interests?"

    Tower is enough of a realist to recognize that his chances
of confirmation are not much better than the odds that
Breathalyzers will be installed in the Senate cloakroom. But
his argument serves as a deft reminder that there are also
Senators whose alcoholic and amorous behavior might not stand
sustained scrutiny. There is just enough merit to Tower's
who-is-fit-to-judge-whom bluster to accentuate the confusion
over the proper standards of conduct for public officials.

    Ethical posturing is fast becoming the Washington version of
the old radio show Can You Top This? Tower, of course, was a
major contributor to the piety on parade with his melodramatic
vow that he would resign as Defense Secretary if a drop of
liquor ever touched his lips.

    But Tower's just-say-no theatrics pale in comparison with
the price paid by Louis Sullivan, who was approved last week as
Secretary of Health and Human Services. To avoid possible
confirmation complications, Sullivan renounced all claims to
nearly $500,000 in severance pay and deferred compensation
legally owed him by the Morehouse School of Medicine. Even
Senate Democrats wondered aloud if Sullivan's excessive concern
with appearances did not overstep the bounds of financial
prudence. Meanwhile, George Bush's ethics commission solemnly
debated whether a top Government official should be entitled to
royalties if he composed a hit song in his spare time.

    Small wonder that fashionable opinion in Washington is now
having second thoughts about this sudden overdose of ethics.
Take Bush, who in late January declared that his commitment to
the highest ethical standards "is not, believe me, a fad or some
passing fancy." Of course, this was before Tower began to
crumble and it was discovered that Secretary of State James
Baker owned an estimated $2.9 million worth of Chemical Bank
stock while he was Treasury Secretary with policymaking
influence over the treatment of the bank's shaky Third World
loans. These days the President sounds less like a patrician
reformer as he muses aloud, "I hope I haven't created something
that just carries things too far."

    It is easy to parody the overzealous quest for purity in
Government and depict an Administration where top officials file
disclosure forms each time they purchase an imported VCR at K
mart. But it is also sobering to recall the taint that the
"sleaze factor" left on the Reagan Administration and the
nation's faith in Government integrity.

    So the question remains: How clean a regime in Washington
should Americans demand? It is difficult to extract general
rules of conduct from the Tower inferno because so many of the
facts remain in dispute. Certainly America cannot afford a
Defense Secretary with an untreated drinking problem. The issue
is how closely this description fits Tower. There are also
legitimate concerns raised by the widespread, but not
unequivocally documented, tales of Tower's predatory behavior
toward women. If true, the allegations of sexual high jinks
seem to reflect a pattern of reckless and perhaps unbalanced
behavior that should disqualify Tower for such a sensitive post.

    These sensationalized aspects of the Tower battle are
riveting, but they distract from far more universal questions
about the conduct of public officials. The reason ethics in
Government seems so tiresome is that the goal has become
obscured in a legalistic fog of disclosure requirements,
recusations and blind trusts. Lost in the mist are commonsense
standards for integrity in Government like these:

    The Nation Can Demand Sacrifices for Public Service. Few
deny that top Executive Branch officials are underpaid. Money,
however, is but one measure of compensation for serving at the
highest levels of Government; there is also a huge premium to be
derived from fascinating work, public recognition and perhaps
even the chance to shape history. This is why it is disturbing
that the President's ethics commission last week kicked the
issue of limits on outside earned income for top officials to
Congress, an institution not known for its ethical sensitivity.

    Second Trips Through the Revolving Door Are Dangerous. Tower
left the arms-control talks in Geneva in 1986 with the clear
sense that after 25 years in public office, it was now time to
get rich. With this sense of entitlement, he promptly lined up
more than $750,000 in consulting work with six leading defense
contractors. To believe Tower, he provided them with little more
than the "enlightened judgment" they could just as easily get
from reading the papers and dropping by a few academic think
tanks. If true, it appears that Tower was vastly overpaid for
his services, and it is troubling to contemplate what he now
owes his benefactors.

    Tower's problems in this area are far from unique. National
Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft returned to Government after
advising foreign clients as vice chairman of Henry Kissinger's
international consulting firm. Largely because Scowcroft is a
noncontroversial official serving in a post that does not
require Senate confirmation, there has been scant debate over
the propriety of his prior business entanglements. Such quiet
acceptance is not likely to be the fate of Lawrence
Eagleburger, who became president of Kissinger Associates in
1984, after 27 years in Government. About to be nominated as
Deputy Secretary of State, Eagleburger is expected to face a
grueling confirmation battle revolving around the firm's
globe-girdling client list that touches everything from Middle
Eastern oil to Third World debt. Granted, Eagleburger is
respected. But are his credentials so special as to override the
possible conflicts of interest?

    Legal and Ethical Are Not the Same Thing. By seeking to
codify ethical conduct, the Government has inadvertently
encouraged behavior that borders on what is legally
permissible. Consider C. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel.
While serving as an aide to then Vice President Bush, Gray
moonlighted as chairman of a family-owned communications firm,
which paid him as much as $50,000 a year. White House officials
are formally barred from such outside employment, but not the
Vice President's staff. Even when appointed White House ethics
czar, Gray apparently planned to continue this cozy arrangement
until it was reported in the press.

    Far more ingenious was the way House Speaker Jim Wright
skirted the already generous congressional ceiling on outside
income. Not content with mere honorariums, Wright arranged an
unusual sweetheart deal: a supporter published one of Wright's
books, sold most of the copies in bulk to groups like the
Teamsters, and then handed over 55% of the proceeds (nearly
$60,000) to the Speaker as royalties. This daisy chain was
probably legal, but clearly unsavory. It is among a welter of
charges against Wright contained in a voluminous report now
being studied by the House Ethics Committee. Few expect more
than a mild reprimand.

    This kind of easy tolerance among the powerful in Congress
is what allows Tower to so adroitly muddy the waters
surrounding his own ethical problems. The everybody-does-it
defense may be cynical, but it has persuasive power, as long as
Congress continues to confuse honor with honorariums. Ethics in
government should be a bipartisan concern, not merely the
responsibility of the Bush Administration. If the White House
has fallen short of the standards it set during its much
ballyhooed "ethics week," so too has the Democratic Congress
been unwilling to judge itself by the criteria it sets for
others.