The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

All things considered, the Federal Government is probably as free of big raw scandal and corruption as it has been since its very first years. James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers that there would always be some people trying to cheat the system, but his faith rested in the belief that there would be more people trying to keep it honest. A pretty good hunch.

Over the past two centuries, we've had just about every type of schemer and scoundrel, and we've risen up and investigated, passed laws and codified standards of behavior in Government. All of that has helped. And then about the time Watergate hit us, something else emerged: a highly informed and sensitized public. In today's politics the terrible swift sword of public opinion is formidable.

A Lyndon Johnson, parlaying a one-horse radio station into a $20 million media, banking and land empire at the same time he was climbing up the Washington power ladder to Vice President, would not be allowed today. The Washington Post would have him back on the ranch within a year. There are just no guaranteed safe havens these days for the greedy and venal. The so-called sleaze list from the Reagan Administration ranks as testimony that we can find them.

Yet, we are an inventive people possessed of no small desire to accumulate wealth. Eschewing the old-style, simple sin, we've developed refined forms. Pentagon contractors, thoroughly wrapped in the flag, figured the U.S. Treasury came along with the contracts, and whatever high living they had in mind, they could put on the tab.

Many of Ronald Reagan's second- and third-level appointees had the idea that the Government, justly won, was theirs to be used to help friends or enhance their own worth. That still does not work in this system. For the most part those persons have been expunged.

Now comes Mike Deaver with a new art form. He spent so many years in honorable service to a man (Reagan) and a cause (Republican conservatism) that he could rightly claim some rewards. But once he headed out of the White House and into the public relations business, all sense of proportion seemed to desert Deaver. His blatant use of access to the White House sullied Reagan's own reverence for tradition. The idea of Deaver's selling his year-old firm --founded almost exclusively on his Reagan intimacy--for some $18 million would be perfectly legal, and perfectly appalling. Reagan himself is worth only $5 million, tops.

It is doubtful that Deaver ever sensed he was pioneering a new style of impropriety. Ambition of that magnitude often wears blinders. He moved jauntily in the world of foreign intrigues and calculating corporate interests.

Money is the capital's poison--unprecedented amounts of it for political campaigns, for Government programs, for kiss-and-tell memoirs, for personal prestige. A Pentagon purse of $312 billion and a Health and Human Services budget of $155 billion are almost beyond comprehension, and certainly beyond precise management. Where we used to have tens of millions of dollars, we have hundreds of billions. Where we used to have a few hundred influence peddlers, we have tens of thousands. Sheer size has produced a critical mass.

The great irony of the Deaver affair is that Reagan, whose trust is being abused, is probably less interested in greater wealth than any of the past seven Presidents, with the exception of Jimmy Carter. So, about now, Reagan would do himself, Mike Deaver and the rest of the nation a great favor if he would state in his compelling style his own code of public ethics. That code has inspired a rare public trust so far, but it has to serve him until his last day on the job.