Judgment Day Comes for All in Politics : Washington: Because making the right call is intuitive, we will always have investigations like Whitewater.

Watching a young man writhing under the televised wrath of a Senate committee investigating Whitewater is not a congenial sight. One aches with compassion. Particularly when the young Treasury Department official, laden with academic credentials (Yale, Oxford), a civilized, educated, literate young 28-year-old, stirs in visible discontent. If he had been offered a blindfold and a cigarette, the scene would have been complete.

But his torment is an object lesson in one of the least publicized requisites for any young man or woman who aspires to be in any kind of high public office. The requirement is all the more stringent if that aspiration takes him or her to that icy, thinly populated level of the presidency and the Cabinet.

That requirement is judgment. Sound judgment. Wise judgment. It is the dividing line that marks the difference between the mostly right and the mostly wrong decisions. It is the distinction, as Mark Twain said, “between lightning and the lightning bug.” It is not to be found in academic degrees or SAT test scores or grade averages nor does it necessarily reside within the great universities.

Judgment is that inner voice, that tiny elf who lives somewhere in the brain and gut of a public official, and who from time to time whispers, “Go this way; don’t do that because it will get you in trouble.” It is an intuitive nostril that twitches and notifies the senses whether the political environment that day is fair or foul. It’s what separates war from war games. It is a nameless instinct that guides the public person through hidden political mines on which judgment-less mortals blithely step and are blown to bits on the evening news.

The prime specifications for a presidential or Cabinet aide are: loyalty--without loyalty nothing counts--and judgment, which is learned often through bitter experience, or is genetically inherited.

If you examine every great issue that presses against the Oval Office or within the committee rooms of Congress, there is not one where the facts are clear, the direction precise, nor any comfort level in an estimate of results down the road. Every great decision taken emerges from shadows without a certainty of outcome. Or to put in more mystical terms, as one philosopher said, “Men must leap into faith as they do into darkness, without any reassuring proof that God is there.”

In my service in the White House I was never once witness to any presidential decision where the President had all the facts he needed. Inevitably, data, information, knowledge thin out, the pathway grows dim and then the President walks down an unlighted corridor. At the moment when he must decide, it is his judgment--call it instinct, intuition, sixth sense--which he now summons, without any proof he is right.

Perhaps one day, some researcher will come up with a blood test that will gauge the “judgment level” in each of us. Meanwhile, the committee hearings and investigations will continue as they have since the birth of this republic, all targeting the judgment or the lack thereof of discomfitted witnesses.