Ethical behaviour

I don't know who it was who said that a honeymoon ends the day you buy a pair of galoshes and take out life insurance, but George Bush's so-called honeymoon ended the Monday after his inauguration when he sat down with his Cabinet, stopped reciting the list of issues he meant to tackle and got down to tackling them.

I was interested to read that the first thing he brought up with all the new men was the first thing he'd mentioned in the summer the day after he was nominated by the Republican convention. The topic, the word, was ethics.

At New Orleans, he'd said, casually enough for it not to be widely reported, that he intended to set up an ethics commission to sketch out a code of behaviour for the presidential staff. On his first day in office, he again talked earnestly to his Cabinet and told them he expected from them the highest possible code of conduct. He mentioned the classic phrase that is, used to be at any rate, the stated requirement for anyone appointed to the higher branches, perhaps all of them, of the British civil service. Namely, that it was not enough to avoid wrongdoing, that you could be legitimately sacked for having given the appearance of wrongdoing.

Well, in the past decade or two, we've seen from lots of memoirs and declassified government documents that in the United States and Great Britain, to go no farther, that standard has too often been woefully forgotten or violated. In this country, the ethical mess of Watergate was evidently enough to frighten or sober up the men and women who served under Presidents Ford and Carter, so that we appeared to be back with two administrations untainted by scandal.

However, as we've had to report all too often in the past eight years, many Reagan appointees came and went, carrying with them the stigma of murky rumours culminating in the underground machinations of the Iran-Contra Affair. Apart from that, two of the president's closest White House aides, friends from long ago, were convicted and are out on appeal. In all, over 100 presidential appointees left office under suspicion, under a cloud or under indictment. I don't believe that President Reagan ever disowned or expressed disappointment in a single one of them. They all had his support and his blessing and they went.

It's a measure of the almost hypnotic effect of his personal charm, amiability, that most Americans either don't know about this record of poor judgement or don't hold it against him and most Americans are too young to recall how very different things were under President Truman and President Eisenhower.

Truman had a military aide. All presidents did until Lyndon Johnson abolished the post. It was much more than a ceremonial post. Kennedy's military aide, for example, was the one who saw him first thing in the morning, when Kennedy was in his bath, and briefed the president on the overnight cables that had come into the White House.

Well, President Truman's military aide was given a present by a friend, a businessman who might remotely have business too do with the government – it was a present of a refrigerator – Truman was outraged. 'Out!' he said and fired the military aide.

President Eisenhower had somebody much closer and more important than a military aide – his political chief of staff, no less, a former New England governor of great administrative gifts and, we assumed, of untouchable probity. He accepted one Christmas time a present of a coat, a vicuna coat, from a banker who could very likely do business with a government department. Eisenhower was appalled and saddened, but never hesitated. The distinguished aide and former governor was banished to obscurity.

Eisenhower, as I recall, repeated when he fired the man the phrase he first used when he had appointed his Cabinet. He expected all his appointees, he said, to be 'as clean as a hound's tooth'. We've not heard that phrase since and I don't remember a president ever voicing publicly the warning about 'avoiding the appearance of wrongdoing'.

What struck me as surprising, when Mr Bush mentioned it, was that it should have come, and so soon, from him – a man committed, for his salvation in the election, never to cast the slightest aspersion against his predecessor, his long-time boss, his mentor, the most popular president of our time. Mr Bush, we've learned, has a favourite word – prudent. And, in such a man, it was highly imprudent, not to say courageous, to seem to pick on the main flaw of the Reagan administration. A habit of, you might say, moral indifference to the public behaviour of so many of its members.

One commentator – strangely, only one – was quick after that first Cabinet meeting to infer correctly what surely Mr Bush had implied by his early insistence on ethics. As this man wrote it, when Mr Bush said, 'Read my lips' what he was really saying, in this instance, was 'I am not Reagan'.

Since that first week, an awful lot has been written about the various ways in which President Bush seems to be, as the saying goes, 'distancing himself' from President Reagan. I say 'an awful lot' because most of it is nonsense, putting every striking phrase in the Bush inaugural through a filter and distilling it into a rebellious anti-Reagan statement.

But on the question of setting a new standard of executive behaviour, no other inference is possible and, as I've said, the evidence is there. If we'd forgotten some of that evidence, we had a stunning reminder this past week in a special report put out by an office of the Department of Justice which serves as a watchdog on the professional behaviour of the department, of the department's staff.

Apparently, it's been sleeping in its kennel these past few years. It's a report devoted entirely to the conduct of one man. Mr Reagan's attorney general, himself, Mr Edwin Meese, who had been under a criminal investigation. This is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, who had been under a criminal investigation for nearly two years before nothing was found on which to prosecute him – a result which caused Mr Meese to return to California with his arms spread-eagled and with the joyful declaration, 'I have been completely cleared'. As some people said at the time, it''s a heck of a qualification for attorney general that he has escaped criminal conviction.

But the department over which Mr Meese presided was not so indulgent. The burden of both the criminal investigation and the charges on which the Justice Department reported was that while he was attorney general, Mr Meese had done many favours for a man who is now coming to trial in a corporation scandal and had taken part in many judicial decisions on companies in which he owned stock. The report ended by saying that if Mr Meese were still attorney general, disciplinary action would be taken against him for – and I quote – 'conduct which should not be tolerated in any government employee, especially not the attorney general of the United States'.

Mr Meese's lawyer responded that the report is a travesty of justice and back in the affluent foliage of Bel-Air, that exclusive mountain retreat in Beverly Hills, Mr Reagan was impenitent. The report, he thought, was unjustified.

And now this week, Colonel Oliver North came, at last, to trial. He was indicted on several criminal counts but, after the special prosecutor, Mr Walsh, laboured for two years to accumulate the evidence, he, the prosecutor dropped them because the proof lies in secret documents which concern the present security of the United States and may, therefore, not be released. I should have thought the long, labouring Mr Walsh would have suspected that this would be the case at the beginning.

However, there stand against Colonel North charges that he lied to Congress, fraudulently despatched monies to the Nicaraguan rebels at a time when Congress had prohibited it, and destroyed documents in the Iran-Contra scandal that would have incriminated him. It will take two or three weeks to pick a jury and there are sage lawyers who think it may be impossible to collect a jury that is unprejudiced one way or the other.

However, assuming that a jury is chosen, the trial is expected to last about six months. In American practice, that more likely means eight months. At the end of which time, we shall either have lost all interest or we shall know whether Colonel North is a dangerous zealot and a felon or, as Mr Reagan has said, a national hero. That's to say, we may know whether Colonel North was acting on his own or, as he maintains, with the knowledge and approval of his superiors.

My own suspicion is that when it's all over, whichever way the verdict goes, most people will retain their original prejudice for or against him. That wouldn't settle anything except his case and we shall be haunted, maybe for decades, by the problem which is at the root of such things as official secrets acts and the pledge of intelligence agents to lie, if need be, to protect what they take to be national security. It's the ethical question of secrecy in a democracy.

As for the general question of a code of conduct in the presidential branch, and come to that, the other branches of government, I should think that President Bush, having plainly stated the standard not to give the appearance of wrongdoing, could now simply say to all his appointees, 'Go to work and behave! And if you don't, I'll fire you!' But that's not the way of a democracy. We appoint a commission or committee to redefine principles of conduct.

I think it unlikely that its report will be as short and sharp as either the Sermon on the Mount or the Ten Commandments.

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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