TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/031389/03138900.056

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 9KB | 154 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.