A Festival of Ethics--Honest!

Jeb Stuart Magruder is well-versed on the subject of honesty. Now a Presbyterian minister outside Columbus, Ohio, he served a seven-month jail term for his role in Watergate. He also is chairman of the newly formed Columbus Commission on Ethics and Values, which has just kicked off a campaign to promote the virtues of honesty and ethics. It will include sculptures or signs with an “honesty symbol” at entrances to the city, an “Honesty Week” and honesty awards and leaflets, coffee mugs, pen sets and other items about being truthful. The campaign was prompted by an incident last year in which the door of an armored car flew open and bags of cash spilled out onto a busy Columbus freeway. One man turned in $57,000 he had recovered, but most of the money, estimated at more than $1 million, was never returned. “(Honesty is) a natural first issue to deal with because of the armored car incident,” Magruder said. The deputy director of communications in the Nixon Administration and deputy director of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President in 1972, Magruder went to prison after he admitted destroying records and committing perjury in the Watergate scandal.

--President Reagan will leave office Friday with a few more wrinkles and gray hairs than when he became chief executive in 1981--but he has retained a remarkably trim physique that belies his 77 years. First Lady Nancy Reagan and others close to him say it’s all due to a dedicated fitness regimen that he began as a teen-age lifeguard and honed as an actor. Reagan keeps a close watch on his weight--hovering at 189 to 190 pounds with a 34-inch waistline--by comparing himself weekly with his personal physician, Dr. John Hutton, who also tries to keep his weight constant. “Every Tuesday we have a weigh-off,” Hutton said. “If we’re a pound or two over, we see who can get it off first.” The President uses body-building equipment daily, and even had it hauled to Moscow last year for his three-day summit with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. “He worked out every night, after the meetings and before dinner,” presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said. When Reagan attended a fancy dinner in New York City last week, Fitzwater said he donned the same white tie and tails that he wore 40 years ago at the 1948 Academy Awards--with no alterations.

--Two Americans became the first women to reach the South Pole overland when they and nine other adventurers completed a 750-mile, 51-day trek across Antarctica. Shirley Metz, 39, of Capistrano Beach, Calif., and Victoria Murden, 24, a Harvard divinity student, and their companions skied an average of 15 miles a day into winds of up to 60 m.p.h. and temperatures as low as 40 below zero, according to Hugh Culver, spokesman for the Canadian adventure travel company that organized the trip. Metz’s husband, Dick, said everyone suffered from frostbite but was otherwise in good shape.