TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/87/87capeth.1

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                                                                                May 25, 1987

ETHICS

What's Wrong


Hypocrisy, betrayal and greed unsettle the nation's soul


"Just about every place you look, things are looking up. Life
is better--America's back--and people have a sense of pride they
never thought they'd feel again."

--Voice-over from 1984 Ronald Reagan TV commercial


Once again it is morning in America. But this morning Wall
Street financiers are nervously scanning the papers to see if
their names have been linked to the insider-trader scandals.
Presidential candidates are peeking through drawn curtains to
make sure that reporters are not stalking out their private
lives. A congressional witness, deeply involved in the Reagan
Administration's secret foreign policy, is huddling with his
lawyers before facing inquisitors. A Washington lobbyist who
once breakfasted regularly in the White House mess is brooding
over his investigation of an independent counsel. In Quantico,
Va., the Marines are preparing to court-martial one of their
own. In Palm Springs, Calif., a husband- and-wife televangelist
team, once the adored cynosures of 500,000 faithful, are
beginning another day of seclusion.

Such are the scenes f morning in the scandal-scarred spring of
1987. Lamentation is in the air, and clay feet litter the
ground. A relentless procession of forlorn faces assaults the
nation's moral equanimity, characters linked in the public mind
not by an connection between their diverse dubious deeds but by
the fact that each in his or her own way has somehow seemed to
betray the public trust:  Oliver North, Robert McFarlane,
Michael Deaver, Ivan Boesky, Gary Hart, Clayton Lonetree, Jim
and Tammy Bakker, maybe Edwin Meese, perhaps even the President.
Their transgressions--some grievous and some petty--run the
gamut of human failings, from weakness of will to moral laxity
to hypocrisy to uncontrolled avarice. But taken collectively,
the heedless lack of restraint in their behavior reveals
something disturbing about the national character. America,
which took such back-thumping pride in its spiritual renewal,
finds itself wallowing in a moral morass. Ethics, often
dismissed as a prissy Sunday School word, is now at the center
of a new national debate. Put bluntly, has the mindless
materialism of the '80s left in its wake a values vacuum?

America has been through these orgies of moral
self-flagellation before. Sometimes the diagnosis was far more
dire than the disease. Intellectuals reacted to the TV quiz-show
scandals of the late 1950s with an outrage that now seems
comically disproportionate the offense; a prominent political
science professor wrote at the time, "The moral fiber of America
itself stands revealed."  Just as the Iran-contra hearings began
as a roadshow Watergate, it is easy to find other 20th century
parallels to today's eviscerated ethics. As New York Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan puts it, "If you ant to read about Tammy
Bakker, read Sinclair Lewis. If you want to read about insider
trading, read Ida Tarbell."

It is tempting to argue, as Moynihan does, that the current
scandals are mostly linked by coincidence. Ethical
introspection, after all, is at odds with the pragmatism of the
national culture. It is not accidental that the country's
favored metaphor is sports:  a factual world of detailed rules
and final scores, where armchair disputes can be resolved by
instant replays. Questions of what constitutes right and wrong
are far more troubling, but there comes a time in the life of
a nation when they must be addressed, not avoided.

To some extent, the problem starts at the top. Either through
his actions or inactions, and certainly through the tone he has
set, Ronald Reagan has contributed to the current mood of
laissez-faire laxness. Of course, the President, who finds such
difficulty in taking responsibility for the conduct of his own
National Security Council, cannot be blamed for the
indiscretions of a Democratic presidential candidate and the
peccadilloes of a popular preacher. But moral leadership "should
come from people in public office," argues Sissela Bok, a
professor of philosophy at Brandeis University. "Aristotle said
that people in government exercise a teaching function. Among
other things, we see what they do and think that is how we
should act. Unfortunately, when they do things that are
underhanded or dishonest, that teaches too."

The President's personal decency is not in question. But
nowadays, as he stumbles through answers about what he does not
think he remembers and skirts the moral issues involved, he
seems to have forfeited, indeed squandered, his role as the
nation's moral father. Then too, he has helped set the tenor of
the ties:  the man behind the bully pulpit must also be judged
by the content of his sermons.

No better symbol exists of the public philosophy of the Reagan
era than the Adam Smith neckties worn proudly by presidential
confidants. As President, Reagan has fused this faith in the
economic invisible hand with the rugged individualism of the
"Sagebrush Rebellion." Government is always seen as a rapacious
tax collector standing between businessmen and the creation of
wealth. The result is an Administration whose clarion call is
"Enrich thyself."  For Reagan, money is the measure of
achievement, and he has left no doubt that he prefers the
company of the wealthy. McFarlane, shortly after his suicide
attempt in February, told the New York Times of the frustrations
he felt as National Security Adviser:  "Shultz and Cap
Weinberger and Don Regan and the Vice President had built up
businesses and made great successes of themselves. I haven't
done that. I had a career in the bureaucracy. I didn't really
quite qualify. It didn't do any good to know a lot about arms
control if nobody listened."

Among other undesirable effects, this view that wealth is the
measure of all men tends to exalt the individual at the expense
of the community. "No longer do we have an endowment mentality
that asks what we can contribute to an organization," says
Sociologist David Riesman of Harvard University. "What we now
have is a transaction mentality."  Few Americans succumbed to
the magic of the marketplace as cynically as the Bakkers. Last
week the new officials of their ministry took reporters on a
tour of the Fort Mill, S.C., hotel suite they used, which
features gold-plated fixtures in the bathrooms and a 50-ft.-long
closet lighted by chandeliers. Soon after that, reports
surfaced that the ministry could not account for $92 million.

Against the societal backdrop of value-free self-indulgence, it
is not surprising that some in the Administration have been
motivated by a desire to advance themselves rather than the
public interest. More than 100 Reagan appointees have come
under some cloud of impropriety. Last week an independent
counsel began to investigate Attorney General Meese's role in
soliciting defense contracts for the scandal- plagued Wedtech
Corp.; Meese has associates who have worked for the Bronx, N.Y.,
firm.

Reagan, for all his talk of a return to "family values," has
been as permissive as an Aquarian parent over the transgressions
of his official family, and that has contributed to the moral
lassitude. Long after Deaver began peddling his government
connections with an avidity that was shocking even by jaded
Washington standards, he retained his White House pass and was
a frequent guest of the First Family. Even last week, when
asked about former Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan, who awaits
a verdict in his New York fraud trial, the President loyally
declared to newsmagazine reporters. "Frankly, I found him to
be a man of great integrity."

But the "sleaze factor" in the Reagan Administration is merely
symptomatic of the materialistic excess that has turned the
1980s into the "My decade," a time when by one's possessions
thou shall be known and judged. Deaver reflected this sense of
excess when, as part of the ruling troika in the White House in
1981, he loudly complained that he could not live on $60,000 a
year. Avarice perhaps had its roots in the run-up in
middle-class housing prices in the 1970s, which broke down the
traditional connection between wealth and work. THe taming of
inflation unleashed the stock market, which made investors
behave like extras from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. This
frenzy of getting and spending made anyone living outside the
money culture, like government officials, feel like suckers.

In The Gilded Age, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner depict
the boom mentality of the post-Civil War years:  "He was born
into a time when all young men of his age caught the fever of
speculation, and expected to get on in the world by the omission
of some of the regular processes which have been appointed from
of old."  What railroad men and land speculators were to the
1870s, investment bankers and risk arbitragers are to the 1980s.
Perhaps a modern-day Thorstein Veblen could explain the
eagerness with which moneymen like Boesky vied with one another
in acquiring the luxurious trappings of a baronial life-style.
But the insider-trading scandal, a grotesque perversion of the
Reagan free-market ethos, was perhaps the inevitable consequence
of the gospel of wealth run amuck.

McFarlane's testimony last week conveyed a far different moral
lesson:  how easily America as a nation has come to accept
public hypocrisy. With his uninflected answers and his stolid
manner, his face puffy from strain and fatigue, McFarlane
radiated the melancholy of moral responsibility. All his
enemies were within, as a good soldier tried to square his own
misguided conduct with internal standards of honor and
integrity. In the depths of his soul, McFarlane had been tested
and found wanting, and it was that shame he could not help
conveying.

There was something sadly anachronistic about McFarlane's
performance. Unlike his fellow players in America's current
immorality tales, he exuded a sense of remorse, repentance,
shame. He knew he had done wrong, he said. He was sorry. He
deserved to be punished. How odd!  This kind of guilt, this
assuming of moral responsibility for one's actions, has all but
vanished from public discourse. It is almost as if the closest
glimpse the nation got of honor last week came from seeing it
in a mirror:  a man had acted with dishonor, saw it for what it
was, and came forth to bear witness that there is indeed still
a difference between right and wrong.

If some of the others tainted by dishonor, deceit and hypocrisy
were to show a similar ability to understand their moral
accountability for their actions, perhaps an air of redemption
would ensue. But the new American gospel is damage control,
using the arts of public relations to deflect blame. "Mistakes
were made," was President Reagan's explanation for the
Iran-contra affair. His absolute refusal to admit even the
slightest responsibility for the ethical chaos around him is
telling.

Senator Hart, too, sought to deflect responsibility, first
claiming that his only mistake was not realizing that his
meetings with Donna Rice could be "misconstrued," then blaming
the media for the mess he was in. Even Jim Bakker, who by
profession alone should have an intimate acquaintance with the
theological concept of sin, resisted simply confessing his
dalliance with Jessica Hahn. Instead, Bakker insisted that his
troubles were all part of a "diabolical plot" by rival
preachers.

Infinitely more damaging to public trust were the President's
deceptive and contradictory statements on selling arms to Iran
and negotiating for hostages. Jerome Wiesner, former president
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reflects deep
concern when he says, "I am very upset by the ethical behavior
that will make people believe that lying by our Government is
natural."  Confessing errors has never, of course, been part of
the Reagan magic. For six years, as America's debt soared past
$2 trillion, the President refused to admit that George Bush was
right when he said during the 1980 primaries that trying to
balance the budget by cutting taxes was "voodoo economics."

Some of this is standard political gamesmanship, and the debt
problem stems from actions--and inactions--by Congress as well
as the White House. But the Iran-contra affair exposes a far
more disturbing undertone to the Reagan Administration:  the
belief that some laws are little more than inconvenient pieces
of paper. It is now clear that the Reagan team consciously set
out to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Boland
amendment, which banned U.S. military aid to the contras. This
same wink-and-nod approach to legality has often been apparent
in the Administration's languid enforcement of civil rights
statutes. The freewheeling business climate also owes a large
debt to the President's none-too-secret hostility to many forms
of economic regulation.

Other recent scandals have their roots in a similar
do-your-own-thing attitude toward rules. Marine guards at the
Moscow embassy bristled at strictures forbidding fraternization
with foreign nationals, particularly Soviet citizens. For years
many on Wall Street have held a cavalier attitude toward
insider-trading laws. No one is really hurt by such abuses,
they claimed. And besides, they complained, arbitragers, who
buy and sell stocks on rumors of takeovers, often troll the gray
areas of law. That is why it was perhaps only natural that
Boesky's profitable relationship with Martin Siegel,the former
co-hear of mergers and acquisitions at Drexel Burnham Lambert
Inc., began with the sharing of mutually advantageous
information. But before federal investigators stepped in,
Siegel was peddling takeover tips to Boesky in exchange for
briefcases filled with cash.

The murkiness of insider-trading regulations is an example of
why some leading moralists worry about an excessively legalistic
approach to defining ethical behavior. "Take corruption on Wall
Street," says Donald Shriver, president of Union Theological
Seminary in New York City. "There are points where we think
dishonesty is wrong even if it is legal."

Certainly the spate of post-Watergate reform legislation has
been undermined by unintended consequences. Campaign-spending
laws spawned a proliferation of political-action committees.
Strictures against lobbying by former Government officials have
failed to halt revolving-door Reaganism. The very act of
drawing statutory limits almost seems to guarantee that most
behavior will cluster just this side of legality. As Education
Secretary William Bennett puts it, "What I worry about is a
legislator who says we have an ethics crisis, let's do something
about it."

Any moral crusade will run smack into the messages conveyed by
America's celebrity-obsessed national culture. A few moments
in the limelight can mean big bucks:  a book contract, a
speaking tour, a TV docudrama. All Fawn Hall had to do was
reveal that she helped North destroy documents, and suddenly
Actress Farrah Fawcett was on the phone with plans to make Hall
the heroine of a feature film. Sydney Biddle Barrows discovered
there was even more money to be made from talking coyly around
the subject of sex than in running an upmarket escort service.
She sold her book for $250,000, and Candice Bergen will portray
her in the film version of Mayflower Madam. Ethical
distinctions are quickly lost as talk-show appearances and gala
opening-night parties become schools for scandal.

Reagan, in discussing the investigations of his Administration
during his interview with newsmagazine reporters last week,
said, "I'd like to point out that things of this kind have been
going on for a long time."  The blame, he argued, was not his.
"I am for morality. In fact, I wish there was more of it
taught in our schools."  He did concede, however, that the long
list of transgressions by the Marines, Boesky, the Bakkers and
others has bred a "kind of cynicism on the part of the people."

Such cynicism may be unjustified as the nation struggles to
regain its integrity amid all the troubling revelations about
covert wars and secret trysts. Perhaps if the provocations are
strong enough, Americans will shed their too-easy tolerance of
hypocrisy and greed. But the longing for moral regeneration must
constantly vie with an equally strong aspect of America's
national character, self- indulgence. It is an inner tension
that may animate political life for years to come. For in the
end, as Jimmy Carter once promised, America will, for better or
for worse, get a "Government as good as its people."

--By Walter Shapiro.  Reported by Barrett Seaman and Laurence
I. Barrett/Washington, with   other bureaus