Ethics in government

Just before switching off the light the other night, I came on this sentence written by the anonymous author of a scientific treatise published in 1776: 'All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of Mankind.'

It's a glum, but a very common, thought and I suppose I should have passed it over if I had not, in the previous day or two, been pouring over reports on the widespread corruption in New York city government, on the prosecution of a whole gang of Wall Street brokers for insider trading and on the impending trial of Michael Deaver, once the president's closest adviser on charges of violating the Ethics in Government Act.

This depressing bout of reportage came after I'd read the history of the decline of a once greatly respected investment banking firm in a book whose title is 'Greed and Glory on Wall Street'. Way back, it seems, in January 1986, a New York city official, in charge of the parking tickets section of the Department of Transportation, tried to commit suicide. He was charged with somehow misappropriating parking fines. Two months later, he tried again to take his life and succeeded. It was, I think, regarded by New Yorkers at the time as an aberration, a random stain on the enlightened, vigorous and famously honest administration of New York's mayor, Edward Koch.

Mr Koch, elected and re-elected as mayor in an unprecedented landslide, is one of the most engaging figures in recent American politics and maybe I ought to remind you that the mayoralty of New York city, of all the five boroughs, is not a ceremonial office. It has been called, rightly, the second most powerful executive job in the United States. Second only to that of the president.

At the end of his gutsy, funny and fascinating autobiography, Mayor Koch has written, 'I have had responsibility for more than seven million people. The city of New York includes nearly 200 different religions, races, nation groups, ethnic backgrounds. I am the mayor of a city that has more Jews than Jerusalem, more Italians than Rome, more Irish than Dublin, more blacks than Nairobi and more Puerto Ricans than San Juan, and somehow or other, we have learned to live with each other. It is a tremendous responsibility but there's no other job in the world that compares with it. Every day is new. Every day is dangerous. I love it.'

Until the past year, the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers who put him in for a second term would have said, 'Amen' and there's still no doubt – very little doubt anyway – about the mayor's personal honesty, but he's more powerful than the president in appointing the people who administer affairs in the five boroughs. Though their chief officers are elected, there are few checks and balances on the mayor's power to pick whomever he wants for hundreds of the most influential political jobs.

Well, instead of listing the growing catalogue of city officials who have left their jobs in a hurry or been indicted for crimes or actually gone to jail, let's go back to a scene in the autumn of 1981. It was a rousing ceremony and one of which Mayor Koch was, at the time, rightly proud. President Reagan was there on the lawn of the mayor's colonial house on the East River. The president was happy to present to the mayor a cheque for $85 million; it was the federal government's contribution to building a grand new highway on the west side of Manhattan alongside the Hudson River. Never mind that the whole project was later cancelled.

The president had, at his side, his secretary of labour. The mayor was surrounded, naturally, by a circle of the city's political bigwigs. Well, that's five and a half years ago. Today, 21 of those attending politicians have either resigned under fire, been indicted or convicted on criminal charges of corruption. The president's then secretary of labour, by the way, is awaiting a criminal trial.

The same question is being aired about the mayor in connection with his corrupt officials as about the president in connection with the Iran-Contra affair – what did he know and when did he know it? At present, there's little doubt that the mayor, as I say, is personally as honest as he has always claimed to be, but the same fact dogs him as dogs President Reagan. He is responsible for them.

You'll notice that I've used the word 'indicted' – a word as seldom used in Britain as the word 'remanded' is here. I remember the time before the Second War when a distinguished British journalist, the diplomatic correspondent of The Times – THE Times – was on a first visit to this country.

I was assigned to take care of him and the second morning I visited him in his hotel room, he tossed away the New York Times with a helpless gesture and said, 'I don't understand. Somebody is always being in-dic-ted in this country.' It's perfectly true. Some official, politician, businessman, gangster, lawyer even, is always appearing before a grand jury and when it has finished its secret deliberations, if it finds that there's a case against the man, the accused, which ought to come to trial, the grand jury brings in a true bill of indictment.

The word, its practical use, its frequency in our headlines, all derive from the continuing institution in this country of the grand jury – an English invention at a time not much later than the Middle Ages. A judge, especially one riding around on circuit, would come into a town, hear that Ned Tomkins was accused of a crime. What more fair and sensible than to call together a number – 16 was usual – of his neighbours, people who knew him? They could best decide whether Ned was or was not likely to do such a thing. If they thought there was a case, then the judge would send the man to trial.

The practice waned in England throughout the nineteenth century and in, I believe, 1913, Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor, made a brilliant and typically derisive attack on it. 'How splendid,' he wrote, 'how just, to take at random 12 or 16 citizens out of a population of six or seven millions and maintain the pretence that they were the knowing neighbours of the accused. Time,' Birkenhead said, 'to abolish the grand jury once for all.' And 20 years later, it was done. It was left to magistrates to decide if there was a case.

But the grand jury system was brought over to this country, took root and not only flourishes, it is the essential preliminary to a criminal trial. A grand jury comprises, in different states, between 16 and 23 jurymen. All right, persons. They are called by the district attorney, the public prosecutor, and he presents the evidence against. Their sessions are secret and to publish the way things are going is, itself, a criminal offence but in this itching, investigative age, some newspapers often relay damaging, if unattributed, rumours. That's the first mischief.

The second is far worse. It's nothing less than the entirely proper publication of a grand jury's findings. Once a true bill has been handed down and a person has been indicted, inevitably – especially if the subject is a public figure – the fact of the indictment and the list of the charges are front-page headline news, so that a man indicted is at once presumed to be a man carrying a smoking gun. He is, in the general view, half guilty and from then on, as many an indicted person has bemoaned, he has to prove his innocence.

And yet, all that an indictment means is that there is a case to be made, no more. The man is innocent, if suspect. Time and again, when a person comes through the following trial and is acquitted, his public reputation has suffered so badly from the airing of the charges, that he's lucky to recover his old life and restore his career.

I imagine that nobody in public life today has more bitter cause to resent the publicity and the stigma that go with an indictment than Mr Michael Deaver – only a couple of years ago, the closest of presidential aides and friends and now a man who, however his trial comes out, has seen his career in ruins. When Mr Deaver voluntarily left the White House to earn a little more money for himself and his family, he went into the public relations business, a very common practice of former executive assistants. Common, because it's natural that their potential clients should assume that they have important connections and can carry weight with people in government.

Mr Deaver soon built up a very influential and profitable business representing foreign governments as well as independent clients. Among them was the government of Canada. Since he left the White House, Mr Deaver has been Canada's best, most forceful, spokesman on behalf of having the United States do something radical to reduce the plague of acid rain that falls on Canada from America's industrial Midwest.

Unfortunately Mr Deaver started his advocacy too soon. There is an act of Congress called the Ethics in Government Act, passed after Watergate which forbids former members of the executive branch to lobby for anybody until one year after they have left their government post. Mr Deaver was indicted for perjury by a grand jury which says he lied in saying he had not started to lobby within the grace period of one year.

There's surely a very fine line between lobbying and promising to lobby and winking at the hint of lobbying later on. Mr Deaver will tread that fine line in his trial.

For the moment, I can only say that if other democratic countries had a similar act, I suspect that half the former Cabinet ministers and a lot of ambassadors would be behind bars.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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