Debunking ad Nauseam: A Walk on the Seamy Side : Pathography: Steve Ross’ obits revealed that, in our cynical times, every individual is believed to have his or her own personal credibility gap.

Anyone reading the recent obituaries of Time-Warner Chairman Steve Ross had to search to find Ross’ rescue operation back in the ‘60s of the then virtually defunct Warner Brothers studio, his resurrection of the studio into an industry giant, his masterminding of Warner Records, his brilliant management style, his charitable contributions--all of which, one would think, weigh heavy on any scale of accomplishment.

Instead, most accounts seemed to suggest that the two milestones of Ross’ life were not only effecting the largest of the media conglomerate mergers but also presiding over the company during a minor scandal involving associates’ financial improprieties at a dinner theater in Westchester, N.Y. In fact, generally the latter got nearly as much space as the former and more space than Ross’ truly extraordinary achievements.

I never met Ross nor do I hold brief for him. But the magnification of the small, sordid affair in Westchester at the expense of the man’s very real accomplishments seems an injustice to his memory as well as another example of a disturbing trend: a fascination with the chinks in the armor of any public figure.

That the press has become preoccupied with scandal is hardly a bulletin by now. But it’s not the news I’m talking about so much as the way we have come to regard public figures and the impossible and frequently irrelevant standards by which we have come to judge them. Where public figures were once measured by their achievements, they now seem reduced by their transgressions, however inconsequential some of these may be. As a result, there may be a whole generation who know John F. Kennedy less as a President than as a philanderer, Sylvia Plath less as a poet than a suicide, Charlie Chaplin less as a filmmaker than a defendant in a paternity suit, Pete Rose less as a ballplayer than a gambler.

Thus our heroes fall.

Like so much else in recent American life, the diminution of public figures, contemporary and historical, can be traced to Vietnam and, specifically, to how Vietnam altered our sense of truth.

Before Vietnam, no one had cause to doubt that what his government said, what he read in the newspapers, was fact. The official version of events was the accepted version--indeed, there was no other. It was only as the war disastrously proceeded and correspondents’ dispatches from Vietnam didn’t jibe with glowing Administration reports that one began to suspect for the first time a deliberate conspiracy to lie, a conspiracy to keep the truth from being known.

The distance between what we were told was happening in Vietnam and what we learned was actually happening soon became known as the “credibility gap.” It is difficult now, when everyone distrusts government pronouncements and even distrusts the press, to imagine what a shock the gap was to our system. But Robert A. Caro, Lyndon B. Johnson’s biographer, is right to see it as one of Johnson’s most enduring legacies. It is largely because of the credibility gap that our faith in government has been shattered. And the disillusion Johnson set in motion with Vietnam, Richard M. Nixon accelerated with the Watergate cover-up, where the distance between lies and truth was more a canyon than a gap.

The “credibility gaps” of Johnson and Nixon changed our attitude toward government and revised the practice of journalism by transforming journalists into truth hunters. Far more important, the gaps created a general skepticism toward any received wisdom.

Having been deceived by lies, many Americans felt that everything had to be set free from lies. If politics has been erected on untruths, what about history? If one could scrutinize political action under the glaring light of truth and thus illuminate those things government didn’t want us to know, why couldn’t one apply the same method to the past?

It has taken a while for us to move from debunking politics to debunking history to debunking public figures, but we have arrived. Today, almost everyone takes it as an article of faith that people, like governments, have their own credibility gaps: the difference between what one presents to the public and what one is.

Every politician, athlete, artist, performer, businessman is now presumed to have a truth to hide, be it alcohol or drug addiction, sexual perversion, marital infidelity, child abuse, financial chicanery--whatever. If you dig deep enough, so the attitude goes, you will find that even the most revered among us is corrupt. And dig we do, gleefully heaving out shovelfuls of dirt until we prove their imperfectness and confirm our own cynicism.

It would seem small comfort to know that, deep down, no one is any damn good. Yet this knowledge evidently provides us with certain satisfactions, otherwise we wouldn’t leap on it with the alacrity we do. One satisfaction of unearthing the secrets of our heroes may be that it asserts our priority over them; it redeems them from “official” verdicts and subjects them to our own--which makes debunking, like its handmaiden gossip, an exercise in democracy.

A second reason for finding fault may be that it helps explain our national blunders without making us accountable. According to the old “great man” theory of history, events were the putty of great individuals--shaped by them. Proof that our public figures were and are less-than-great provides a corollary to the theory: The mismanagement of events is the result of flawed individuals.

There is, however, another possibility. Reading about a person’s moral lapses is good, cheap, voyeuristic fun--a lot more fun, if one is to be honest, than reading about that person’s achievements. In fact, when you begin dynamiting the monuments to find the lapses, you wind up with lurid melodrama that not only competes with entertainment, it is entertainment. Did Kennedy have an affair with Marilyn Monroe? Was Ernest Hemingway a closet homosexual? When did William and Babe Paley stop making love? Was Abe Lincoln a manic depressive? Did Ann Sexton’s parents abuse her?

“Pathography” was the word novelist Joyce Carol Oates coined to describe this new fashion in biography, which purported to reveal the deepest secrets of a subject and, in doing so, frequently turned the lives of our greatest artists, our towering political figures, our titans of industry into the sorts of case studies you might see on a typical “Geraldo.”

Of course, no one can deny that highly personal information may enable us to better understand an individual. I certainly am not opting for the days of hagiography. My fear is while we may now know whom someone was sleeping with, whether he did drugs or abused his children, we may have lost the very things that made these figures worthy of biography in the first place. In a frenzy to reveal, we may have lost the myth, the grandeur, the perspective on these lives.

I am not sure whether Ross qualifies as a mythic figure. But he was a powerful man who revived a studio and created an empire, and he may have been the last of the media moguls who was a visionary rather than a bean counter. Whatever he was, he deserved better than he got. At the very least, he deserved the posthumous reward of his accomplishments--the reward that we sin junkies have denied him by demanding he be flawed.