The Potent Culture of Scandal

Bill Clinton is hardly the first American president to be bedeviled throughout his administration by scandals. Throughout U.S. history, when leaders and governments failed to live up to the public’s expectations, charges of corruption usually followed. Politicians and governments being what they are, there is usually corruption to be found.

It has not just been Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding and Richard M. Nixon--our most famously scandal-burdened presidents--who wrestled with accusations of corruption. It has also been John Adams and John Quincy Adams, two of the most incorruptible men in U.S. political history, who were harried throughout their presidency by accusations of corruption and abuses of power. Rutherford B. Hayes, a paragon of propriety, was known during his unhappy administration as “His Fraudulency” for having allegedly stolen the 1876 election from Samuel J. Tilden. Harry S. Truman, a folk hero today for what Americans like to remember as his plain-speaking honesty, was buffeted by charges of “cronyism” and “corruption”--for creating what Nixon and many others in 1952 liked to call the “mess in Washington.” Even Dwight D. Eisenhower, famously genial, enormously popular, legendarily honest, suffered from embarrassing revelations about his chief of staff, Sherman L. Adams, and other improprieties. What is happening today to Clinton, and so many other political figures, is in many respects part of the ordinary pattern of U.S. political life.

Yet, there is also something about today’s preoccupation with corruption that seems very different from the fears and obsessions of the past. In earlier eras, most scandals came and went reasonably quickly and most of those who became ensnared managed, in the end, to free themselves. But in our political world, scandal has become institutionalized. The search for it, the investigations of it, the self-righteous drumbeats of condemnation of it: All seem to have become a more or less permanent feature of public life.

It makes no difference any longer whether times are bad or good, whether the public is aroused or uninterested, whether the evidence of corruption is strong or weak The political scandal machine grins on inexorably, impervious to the world around it. Accusations of scandal, once raised, seem never to go away. Instead, they make their circuitous way through an endless series of hearings and investigations that seldom bring anything to resolution.

Both political parties have helped construct this machinery by making accusations of corruption an ordinary tool of political competition. They have done so in part because of a cycle of escalating “paybacks” extending from Watergate through Robert H. Bork, former House Speaker Jim Wright, Clarence Thomas, and now the president, the vice president and the first lady. And they have done so, too, because in a time when basic differences over major issues appear not to divide the two parties very much, the natural, perhaps inevitable response is to find some other way to discredit the opposition. When issues won’t do, scandal takes their place.

But the culture of scandal rests on more than simple political rivalry. It draws as well from a large, well-paid and more or less permanent bureaucracy: the professional staffs of congressional investigative committees, whose success depends on their ability to generate publicity through sensational hearings; the heavily-populated offices of independent counsels, whose lawyers hope to make their careers by breaking a sensational scandal and who consider their efforts a failure if they end without indictments; the investigative reporting staffs of major newspapers, magazines and broadcasting companies, searching for advancement, prizes, audiences and competitive advantage over rivals by uncovering corruption; permanent investigative staffs in the Justice Department, whose numbers have burgeoned in response to the enormous number of scandals referred to them for review; the Senate confirmation process, which has become a protracted search for even the smallest potential ethical question in a nominee’s past.

The reign of scandal draws as well from the collapse of the institutions that once worked to contain it: powerful congressional and party leaders who usually found ways to prevent or at least limit inquiries into accusations of corruption. This older culture of clubby protectionism covered up big and legitimate scandals as readily as small and inconsequential ones; but the justifiable reaction against the code of “honor among thieves” of the past has now made almost any restraint in dealing with accusations of scandal, even frivolous ones, appear to be evidence of complicity in it.

There are, of course, scandals that need to be uncovered and investigated--many more, undoubtedly, than we know about. Some of those scandals are, certainly, the product of the greed or immorality of individuals. But the biggest scandals in U.S. public life are less the product of personal malfeasance than of structural defects in our laws and institutions. The problem of campaign finance, for example, is less what Clinton or Vice President Al Gore did or did not do than what the current system all but requires virtually every candidate to do.

The hypocrisy of members of Congress self-righteously denouncing the Clinton campaign while at the same time gleefully, even boastfully, beating back every effort at changing the campaign-finance laws is one of many indications of how the culture of scandal--by focusing attention on individuals rather than systems, laws and structures--has become less a route to reform than a means of evading it.

The institutionalization of scandal has had many unwelcome consequences for our political system. It has increased cynicism about government, not only by calling attention to real or alleged scandals, but by dragging out investigations interminably until the public loses faith in the capacity of the system and abandons what little interest it had in the first place. It has blurred the distinction between serious breaches of public trust and minor lapses of judgment so that fewer and fewer Americans seem capable of discriminating between serious wrongdoing and trivia. Perhaps most of all, it paralyzes the will of public officials at almost all levels of government.

Those who work in public agencies in America are acutely conscious of the heightened scrutiny they receive. In the increasingly adversarial political world, they are vulnerable at any moment to investigations, hearings, public denunciations, intensive media scrutiny, even criminal prosecutions for behavior that in the past attracted little or no notice outside the bureaucracies themselves. And so they respond in increasingly defensive ways that are both understandable and self-destructive, ways that worsen the problems they are designed to avoid.

The fear of scandal leads to the creation within bureaucracies of increasingly defensive procedures that are stultifying to public performance and alienating to citizens. It creates an excessive aversion to failure, a belief that any public effort that does not succeed will invite accusations of corruption and destroy the reputations and perhaps the careers of those who undertake them; the result is a widespread reluctance to experiment, a desperate clinging to safe, uncontroversial ways even if they are ineffective. Another result is a fear of discretionary authority, a reluctance to permit lower level officials to make any significant decisions (out of fear such decisions might produce scandal) and hence a top-heavy decision-making process that produces inefficiency and bureaucratic stagnation.

The culture of scandal affects the way elected officials behave as well. Aware of the suspicion with which the public views them and the speed with which any unpopular decision is likely to be linked to corruption, they become morbidly sensitive to swings in public opinion. Fearful that voters will not believe anything they say, they tailor their rhetoric to what they believe are prevailing views--whether or not those views accord with reality. Nothing is more central to the anti-government ethos of our time than the widespread belief that politicians seldom tell the truth. And while that belief is exaggerated, it is certainly the case that many politicians measure what they know to be the truth against what they fear so be the likely popular response to it; and in those measurements, the truth is often overmatched.

This pattern has been characteristic of politics since time immemorial. But in our scandal-driven culture, the pattern has spread, poisoning the relationship between citizens and their representatives in countless ways. Politicians, like bureaucrats, seek to defend themselves from a culture they helped create. In mounting that defense, they increase the anger.

An indiscriminate preoccupation with scandal can be as dangerous to a democratic society as an excessive toleration of corruption. Inadequate attention to corruption can be relatively easily remedied. But our current culture of scandal--in which so many people and institutions now have a considerable stake--will not be easily dismantled. In the meantime, the already high price of participating in public life will grow even higher.*