Six months after White House counsel Vincent Foster took his life, his last words still linger in a political culture that critics say has turned mean and nasty and drives away many talented people.
In a suicide note found in his office, Foster wrote he was not cut out for the spotlight in Washington where, he said, “ruining people is considered sport.” Backing up this view in an interview with Larry King last Thursday night, President Clinton decried the “politics of personal destruction” he that said hangs heavily over political life here.
When Bobby Ray Inman, Clinton’s nominee for defense secretary, withdrew last week after casting himself as a victim of “modern McCarthyism,” it put new focus on the Foster-Clinton vision of a pernicious political climate that supposedly frustrates and sullies those who seek to serve their country.
Whether this vision is as extreme or as threatening as painted either by Foster, Clinton or Inman, there seems little doubt that Washington’s political culture is undergoing change, putting greater demands on political leaders and subjecting many of them to closer personal scrutiny.
But for all its rough-edged faults and despite the criticisms by Foster and Inman, the change may be for the good. It may represent the emerging salutary essence of democratic practice in a nation of instant, round-the-clock communication.
As in sports and entertainment, said Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution scholar, politicians aspiring to success likely will have to learn to live with a less gentlemanly code of conduct.
“The climate is changing,” said Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary to former President George Bush. “It is more difficult and more immediate . . . Television has made government focus more on personalities because it is a people medium. Also the political process has become more personal. The Robert Bork nomination (to the Supreme Court in 1987) is widely regarded as the first case of this intense personal examination.”
Bork, nominated by former President Ronald Reagan, went down to defeat following a highly orchestrated campaign against him. It was the forerunner of several unsuccessful nominations, including the late Sen. John Tower (R-Texas) as Bush’s defense secretary and Zoe Baird as Clinton’s attorney general.
In the Tower and Baird cases, personal problems proved to be the deciding factors.
With Tower, it was allegations of drinking and womanizing. With Baird, it was failing to pay Social Security taxes for a nanny.
Garry Wills, a Northwestern University historian and journalist, said that contrary to a common attitude in the nation’s capital, this additional scrutiny in Congress and by the press corps is good for the country and representative of more democratic participation.
“Take this whole business of Nannygate (involving Baird),” he said.
“There was this notion that you shouldn’t get into private lives. The breaking down of an elite is occurring. That kind of thing wouldn’t have been challenged before. That was the way the privileged lived. With more openness and scrutiny, which is good, you can’t now say everybody does it (fails to pay Social Security taxes).”
The political system appears to have grown more democratic and moved many decisions away from the smoke-filled room, said Walter Berns, a Georgetown University professor of government.
There is no question that Washington’s political establishment feels threatened by the scrutiny, the focus on personality, and the greater exposure of public decisions through television.
Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) finds cynicism is on the rise and many of his colleagues increasingly have turned to using polls to decide how they will vote on controversial issues.
“We are electing far too many people who simply follow the polls,” he said last Thursday. “The end result is that you don’t solve the problems. There are not popular answers to all these problems.”
In the Baird case, the presumption was that she was well qualified and would be confirmed. Only after the nanny problem was uncovered by investigators and picked up by the press did a groundswell of opposition arise.
William Adams, professor of public administration at George Washington University, said it is at this stage of disclosure that a “feeding frenzy” of news coverage develops that makes it difficult for any nominee to survive.
The evolving Whitewater real estate controversy involving dealings by Clinton and his wife, Hillary, in Arkansas reached the “feeding frenzy” level after the president and his administration resisted efforts for full disclosure. Clinton gave in and asked for a special counsel.
Charles Peters, founder of the Washington Monthly magazine, which often takes an iconoclastic view of politics and government, said it’s healthy that “the press is paying more attention. Historically, there has been far too little scrutiny.”
But Peters isn’t impressed with the apparent rising aggressiveness of the Washington press corps. All too often, he said, there is “a growing love of trying to prove your toughness by taking on the simple scandal stories” while neglecting the more substantial issues like health care or the economy. “This is supposed to show you’re not a patsy. But you are still the same old patsy you always were.”
To Fitzwater, the advent of TV and radio talk shows only increases the personality-driven character of the emerging political process. To try to change this may be neither possible nor desirable, he said, even if it is meaner. What the atmosphere may create is a new breed of public official, one with a thicker skin and the ability to make decisions more quickly, he said.
“With the growth of television, more channels, several networks, C-SPAN, CNN, other live channels, it definitely shortens the time span for making decisons,” Fitzwater said.
“Government is certainly affected by it. It requires better people with different kinds of skills. You will still need top people in government, but they may have to think faster, work faster, and be more stable than they used to be.”
In his interview with King, Clinton reported that a Cabinet officer told him that if he had to do it over again, he wasn’t sure he would go through with the nomination. “It’s just too brutal, what you are put through,” Clinton said.
Yet Wills said the appointments process should be “somewhat like the election process. Nobody says in an election process you shouldn’t scrutinize a candidate.”
While critics of the nominations process lament its focus on personal peccadilloes and claim it forces many good candidates to stay away from government service, no one has come up with proof that the result has been less qualified candidates. In fact, the opposite conclusion could be reached in selected cases.
With Tower out of the picture, Bush turned to Richard Cheney as his defense secretary. Cheney played an instrumental role in winning the Persian Gulf war, laying the groundwork for a possible presidential bid in 1996. And Janet Reno, who became attorney general after Baird withdrew, has been one of the Clinton administration’s stars.
Yet professor Adams and Rush Loving, a public relations executive who served in the Carter administration, maintain that many good people are being driven away from government service because of the emphasis on the personal.
“Would you prefer to have a competent rogue or an incompetent saint?” Adams asked. “While we all prefer to have a brilliant saint, they are in short supply.”
Richard Fisher, a Dallas businessman who is running for the U.S. Senate in the Democratic primary, said one of his clients, former Dallas Cowboy quarterback Roger Staubach, “thinks I’m nuts. He’s been in show business and knows what it’s like.”
Fisher, who served as a Treasury Department official in the Carter administration, said he has seen the darker side of politics and feels moved to try to change it.
“I am not going to let the ugliness of the system scare me away from public service,” he said.
