That Fatal Political Flaw

American voters are sometimes strangely tolerant of sins and shortcomings in their political leaders. Who can ever forget the spectacle of Boston voters donating their nickels and dimes to help pay the fine lodged against their legendary mayor, James Michael Curley, after he was convicted of fraud? Or of former Rep. Adam Clayton Powell twice winning reelection from Harlem despite a House committee’s finding that he misused public funds?

But there is one character flaw that voters find difficult to forgive: cowardice. And we think that must have weighed heavily on Republican candidate Pat Robertson when he decided to seek the dismissal of his libel suit against former Rep. Paul N. McCloskey (R-Calif.). Robertson obviously prefers to spare himself a full-blown trial that would lay open to public scrutiny his boast that he was a Korean War combat veteran and McCloskey’s 1986 charge that the former television evangelist actually pulled strings to avoid going anywhere near the front.

Even if Robertson were ultimately vindicated at trial, the testimony that McCloskey intended to introduce would certainly have damaged Robertson’s campaign to depict himself as a true patriot dedicated to reintroducing old-fashioned values to a nation on the brink of moral bankruptcy. Not only does McCloskey say that he remembers Robertson’s calling on his father, Sen. A. Willis Robertson, to intervene on his behalf, but the former congressman has found other ex-Marines, also shipmates of Robertson, willing to testify that he boasted of ducking combat in a war that claimed 34,000 American lives.

An attorney for Robertson has conceded that his client may indeed have told his fellow Marines that his father intervened, but, the attorney insisted, he was only joking. Legally, that distinction is important; politically, no. Even a hint that someone shirked his duty can be politically devastating. Does anyone remember former California Supt. of Public Instruction Max Rafferty? Rafferty’s 1968 bid for a Senate seat was torpedoed by the revelation that he escaped World War II service with a medical deferment and then celebrated V-J Day by throwing away his cane.

Robertson charges that McCloskey is trying to ruin him by insisting on going to trial next week on Super Tuesday, when 17 states will hold GOP primaries. But just who started this fight? And who refused to submit it to arbitration last year when McCloskey offered? And who bypassed chances to ask for a postponement during pretrial hearings last fall?

Federal rules don’t allow Robertson to drop the case unilaterally: It is up to U.S. District Court Judge Joyce Hens Green to decide whether dismissal would serve the ends of justice. We would like to see the trial proceed, now or later, simply because we have faith that the adversary system of justice is more likely to produce some rough version of the truth than would more mud-slinging.

But we recognize that busy federal judges rarely force an unwilling plaintiff to proceed with a trial; more rarely still do they order a plaintiff to pay a defendant’s legal fees and other costs. What that means, we fear, is that McCloskey will probably get stuck with $400,000 in legal bills and Robertson will always be able to claim for himself the benefit of the doubt.