Who Melts When the Political Heat Is On? : Public life: In Washington, officials get scorched by charges of ethics violations, power mongering, lying--and worse. Veterans figure out a way to get over it and get back in the game.

During his days as Speaker of the House, former Congressman Jim Wright found a way to lower his routinely high blood pressure: He’d close his eyes and imagine a lovely scene near his ranch on the Guadalupe River in Texas.

So in 1989, when his turn came for a public flogging after a House committee accused him of 69 counts of ethical misconduct, the Democrat tried to calm himself by envisioning that same limpid pool, those beautiful trees, that dramatic sky.

After a year, however, Wright says he could no longer “psych myself out.”

He fled to Texas.

Washington scorches public officials every season. Winter, spring, summer and fall bring new charges of ethics violations, power mongering, felonious crime and/or lying.

The media and political opposition seize the allegations and replay them until Washington assumes the worst qualities of a small town and loses most redeeming virtues.

Yet if Washington relishes engaging in reputation homicide--as White House deputy counsel Vince Foster Jr. alleged in a note he left before committing suicide last month--how is it that Richard Nixon, once disgraced and now in his 80s, still advises Presidents?

And why are ex-Congressman Tony Coelho and former Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger comfortably working Washington as advisers and consultants, giving speeches and going to parties there?

In fact, on any weekday it is possible to run into a whole cast of similar characters, once scorned, having jolly lunches at Duke Zeibert’s, a sort of political wax museum.

Just how did they survive?

Usually, they were prepared for it, says Leonard Garment, an attorney who shepherded Nixon, Judge Robert Bork and former National Security Adviser Robert (Bud) McFarlane through their Washington traumas. Like mountain climbers, such survivors had gone through a long process of adaptation, adjusting to the air pressure as they ascended the heights.

“Vince Foster was the exception,” says Garment. “He hit an altitude his system was unprepared for.”

Still, some people’s coping powers amaze even Garment.

He recalls the meeting with Nixon when they discovered the infamous 18 1/2-minute gap on Rosemary Woods’ tape: “We knew this was bad, but he walked across the street and received some (diplomat’s) credentials and he was calm, even cheerful. I couldn’t believe it.”

People in the spotlight usually have strong--in some cases gargantuan--egos and, after dismissing criticism, show incredible resilience. Yet men like Foster and McFarlane, who himself attempted suicide in the wake of charges of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair, were unable to stand accusations of misconduct or hurting their country, Garment says.

They were honorable people, he says, but fragile--and troubled.

Foster’s closest friends acknowledge that he did not die of public scrutiny working for his friend, Bill Clinton. During his seven months in Washington, Foster felt some public heat: over the failed nominations of Zoe Baird as attorney general and Lani Guinier as assistant attorney general, over the crisis in the White House travel staff, and over the efforts to keep the health care task force proceedings private.

But why a person takes his life is too personal, too idiosyncratic and too complicated to just blame Washington’s third-degree.

Though each case of those who survive such grillings is dramatically different, the process seems to treat them similarly.

Like a blunt instrument, it doesn’t seem to distinguish between someone who thumbs his nose at the Constitution like Nixon and someone like Bork, whose only “crime” was to hold different ideological views from a needed Senate majority.

While outraged during his unsuccessful confirmation hearings for the U.S. Supreme Court, Bork never had the slightest sense he had personally failed anything or anyone, Garment says.

“He’s a truly Falstaffian character, and he survived very much by his sense of self. When someone suggested he cut off his beard to look kindlier during the hearings, he nearly through him out a window.”

Blaming “Washington” for such episodes--as if it is some faceless android--may miss the point. Insiders squarely finger the media, saying they have become so vast and aggressive in trying to advance the story-of-the-day that any sense of common sense and nuance is lost.

In a Washington Post column this week, Jody Powell, former press secretary to President Carter, eviscerated the “ghoulish pack of sensation-crazed journalists” for acting just as Foster said they had. (In a note found after he died, Foster wrote, “Here, ruining people is considered sport.”)

“There’s something wrong with unjustly hurting people, even if you don’t kill them,” Powell says. “It’s particularly wrong when it’s done with an air of arrogant indifference.”

In an interview, Powell recalls the damage done to his friend Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s White House chief of staff, after two New York nightclub owners, under investigation by the Justice Department, accused Jordan of using cocaine at their club.

Eighteen months and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses later, Jordan was cleared. But, says Powell: “He’s had to deal with it every day of his life since. People say, ‘Aren’t you the guy that used cocaine?’ ”

Older hands in Washington are more philosophical than Powell about media madness. Only the amateurs stay mad, these wisemen insist.

Democrat Coelho and Republican Nofziger remain inured to the media visor. Although there is an element of vindictiveness and a level of bile when they talk about their Washington scandals, they figured out how to get over their personal tragedy and get back in the game.

“Hell, Vince Foster didn’t know what pressure was,” says Nofziger, who, when not writing Western novels, is still a player in Republican circles. “Everybody alive has pressures on them.”

Nofziger’s 1988 convictions for illegal lobbying were overturned because prosecutors had failed to prove he knew he was breaking the law.

“I can understand,” Nofziger says, “how you get very much attached to a politician, Ronald Reagan in my case and Bill Clinton in Foster’s case, and do something stupid or unknowingly illegal on his behalf. But you don’t serve the man well if you shoot yourself. You create problems for him. Instead, you resign and take the pressure yourself.”

Nofziger seems to have half-enjoyed his battles. And while he panicked at times and says he worried his hometown friends in Canoga Park might think he was “a real sleazeball,” he was determined to fight his political opponents.

“When they came after me, even after I was indicted and convicted, my attitude was that I would walk down the street and look everybody in the eye and fight these people as long as I could.”

Coelho, the California congressman who represented Merced, concluded that getting out--and getting out quick--was the best strategy.

It was just three weeks in the spring of 1989 between a Washington Post story that raised the possibility he had used campaign funds to finance the 1986 purchase of $100,000 in junk bonds and his resignation. He denied the charges, but admitted failing to report a $50,000 personal loan used to cover half the bond purchase on his financial disclosure form. Two years later, a House committee cleared him of ethical misconduct.

“I knew that there was no way you could survive in regards to your integrity,” says Coelho, now head of an investment banking firm on Wall Street. “I didn’t want my family and my party to go through the whole thing.”

His ordeal came during the Jim Wright uproar. Democrats were so grateful for Coelho not forcing them to face further public turmoil that members threw him a grand farewell party.

Many survivors cling to their Washington ties not just for financial purposes, but to hold onto some piece of themselves with which they so closely identify.

Today, Wright spends quiet afternoons writing books in a Ft. Worth office that is an exact replica of the Capitol office he occupied as Speaker. He talks with former colleagues in Washington at least weekly and says he sometimes feels like their “psychiatrist and they’re lying on my couch telling me their troubles.”

“Vince (Foster) took a much more profound route than I did,” says Wright, reflecting on the agony he felt in leaving Washington. “I became convinced I could no longer provide strong moral leadership that Congress needed so I stepped aside rather than go up there to Ft. Marcy.”

On his way home during his 34 years in Washington, Wright often drove past the out-of-the-way Civil War monument where Foster took his life. On a number of occasions, he says he stopped to look around the old cannons erected to protect the city from attack from the sea. Wright laughs at the idea of calling the winding Potomac River a “sea,” then wonders if when Foster gazed at the city he recalled what Jesus said when he looked toward Jerusalem: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee. . . .”

Wright says that if during his ordeal he had been asked what kept him afloat, he wouldn’t have had a clue: “You lose all perspective during those times.” Now he points to his belief that he did nothing wrong.

A Justice Department investigation of Wright concluded several months ago, and he was never charged.

The sense that Washington might “chew up” another public servant at any moment doesn’t just affect the men and women who make the front pages.

David Pellegrini, a Washington psychologist, says he has clients who are G-14s--just below the political-appointee level--who worry constantly that they are unwittingly violating laws or ever-changing ethics codes. And while most don’t attempt suicide when something goes wrong, they have similar feelings of unfair persecution, he says.

“They are often in a rage and have fantasies of revenge, and of frustration at not being able to effectively act those out. There’s a sense of helplessness, a Kafkaesque feeling, of a person caught in web. Like Foster, even if it’s perceived, they feel powerless to fight back in a way that is dignified.”

But most survive such episodes, Pellegrini says, because they have something or someone or somewhere to go back to:

“They have family, friends, a sense of who they were before all this happened. They have something else to do with their lives.”