Is Everybody Doing It?

A national motto seems to 'have changed from E Pluribus Unum to Omnes Idem Faciunt--Everybody's Doing It. The President himself has helped propagate that notion. In his TV speech on Watergate two weeks ago, he assured the nation that "both our great parties have been guilty of such tactics ... the campaign excesses have occurred on all sides." Last week Vice President Agnew concurred. This is not the first time that governments have been linked to scandals, from Teapot Dome on down, said Agnew.

In a strange way, Nixon and Agnew were thus close to agreeing with the line pushed hard by the far left, that it is the entire system, the Establishment and all its works, that is to blame for whatever is wrong in the U.S. Most of the public appears to agree, at least about politics. In a Gallup poll taken just after the President's TV talk, 58% of the respondents said that there was little difference between the corruption of the Nixon Administration and that of other Administrations in the last 25 years. People who were queried last week voiced similar viewpoints. Said Mrs. James Aycock, a Gastonia, N.C., housewife: "If we got rid of all the shady people in Washington, who'd be left to run the Government?"

James Howell, chief economist of The First National Bank of Boston, shrugged off the newest revelations! "Who are we kidding here? Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson did everything in the book. They just never got caught."

Bad Actors. Current news of public officials indicted or newly convicted of crimes sustains the ancient cliche of democratic life--that politics is a dirty business. Yet most professional politicians and a great many other observers of American life are convinced that despite all the depressing evidence, American politics is not endemically corrupt, and that Watergate is not to be used for glib generalizations.

How to prove it? The proof that something is not happening is always difficult. Without being naive, longtime watchers of Congress and the bureaucracy insist that what is really remarkable is the general absence of corruption. Most of the 100 U.S. Senators and 435 Congressmen live in modest circumstances, work hard, and earn every penny of their scarcely extravagant salaries. So do the vast majority of the unsung bureaucrats and local officials. In the past dozen years, only a handful of Senators and Congressmen have been accused--let alone convicted--of corruption or outright crimes. Given the parade of temptations, the siren appeals of lobbyists and special interests, it is a wonder not that so many of them are "doing it" but so few.

Of all the accused in the Watergate scandal, none was elected to political office. Almost all were appointed by Nixon. A glance at the list of alleged conspirators recalls Sam Rayburn's grumble when he considered John F. Kennedy's best and brightest: "I'd feel a lot better about them if one of them had run for sheriff once."

Says Senator Philip Hart, the Michigan Democrat: "The level of decency among politicians is at least as high as it is among lawyers. Most of the bandits and bad actors in Watergate are not politicians. Whatever they are, they're not politicians." Representative John Anderson, an Illinois Republican, provides the bottom line: "Watergate was an aberration ... it should not be viewed as some new evidence that all the timbers are rotten."

Corruption certainly exists, but it is important to make distinctions--between larger and lesser transgressions, between various motives and aims. The big city machines, forever symbolized by Boss Tweed, were rotten, but some also performed necessary social functions. The Teapot Dome affair of Harding's Administration, the freezer and coat giveaways of the Truman and Eisenhower eras, were corrupt acts based on organized greed, some massive, some relatively modest. Watergate is a far greater malignancy. These conspirators wanted to short-circuit the electoral and judicial processes, to rewrite the book on national security, to manipulate the standards of ethics and morality.

Past Presidents, including Kennedy and Johnson, have of course stretched their powers to the limit. But nowhere in U.S. history does there seem to be the systematic breaking of laws by White House officials and the involvement of Government agencies that characterize the Watergate affair. As the Charlotte Observer put it, if the American majority believes that Watergate is "just a somewhat exaggerated version of politics as usual," then "the American political system is deathly ill." Perhaps the most important thing to rescue from the Watergate mess is the public's ability to make distinctions, both moral and legal. Fortunately, despite the pervasiveness of the every-body-is-doing-it line, the U.S. still appears to be shockable.

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