From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Stories like John Tower's come along with uncomfortable regularity on Capitol Hill. Hays Gorey knows that. TIME's chief congressional correspondent can't stay away from the beat he first covered more than 20 years ago. Back then, Gorey watched the Senate agonize over passing judgment on another of its own: in the dock in 1967 was Connecticut's Thomas Dodd, eventually censured for a misuse of campaign funds. Now happily back on the Hill after a two- decade hiatus reporting on national politics, Gorey finds Congress is still just as loath to bring down a colleague.

Last Thursday evening Gorey watched it happen again. A Senate aide told him that the Senate Armed Services Committee was about to hold its momentous vote on whether John Tower, the former G.O.P. Senator from Texas, should be the nation's next Secretary of Defense. Gorey hustled over to Room 608 of the Senate Dirksen Office Building. But he knew the outcome even before the vote was taken. "After I got there, two Senators, Republicans John McCain and Pete Wilson, arrived," Gorey recalls. "I could see by their glum expressions that they knew Tower did not have the votes."

That kind of prescience comes with the territory. Gorey is, after all, no stranger to Capitol controversies involving senatorial indiscretions. Since he last covered Congress, he has kept TIME's readers abreast of a number of national scandals, from Chappaquiddick to Watergate to Iran-contra. Although last week's vote against Tower ran strictly along party lines, Gorey hastens to point out that the flap is not as partisan as it may seem. "Senators are co-workers who see one another daily, travel together and become friends," Gorey explains. "Senators do not exult in the fall of a colleague." Nor, contrary to popular opinion, do journalists such as Gorey. "No one finds joy in the misfortune of politicians. Members of Congress are pretty much like the rest of us," he says, "but less fortunate in one respect. Most of us are not compelled to read about our indiscretions on the front page or hear them recited on the nightly news."