Drawing The Line

By WALTER SHAPIRO

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

Oscar Wilde's aphorism comes close to summarizing John Tower's last-ditch defense. Forget the sandstorm of charges swirling around the diminutive former Senator; ignore the serious questions of sobriety, sexual escapades and the sale of Government expertise. To the beleaguered nominee for Defense Secretary, the real issue is the motivation of his judges in the Senate, who he implied were hypocrites pursuing the partisan politics of personal pique. "Is it an acceptable standard for Senators late in the evening who've had a few drinks . . . ((to)) vote on vital issues of nuclear deterrence?" Tower asked with rhetorical venom. "Is it an acceptable standard for Senators to accept honorariums, PAC contributions and paid vacations from special interests?"

Tower is enough of a realist to recognize that his chances of confirmation are not much better than the odds that Breathalyzers will be installed in the Senate cloakroom. But his argument serves as a deft reminder that there are also Senators whose alcoholic and amorous behavior might not stand sustained scrutiny. There is just enough merit to Tower's who-is-fit-to-judge-whom bluster to accentuate the confusion over the proper standards of conduct for public officials.

Ethical posturing is fast becoming the Washington version of the old radio show Can You Top This? Tower, of course, was a major contributor to the piety on parade with his melodramatic vow that he would resign as Defense Secretary if a drop of liquor ever touched his lips.

But Tower's just-say-no theatrics pale in comparison with the price paid by Louis Sullivan, who was approved last week as Secretary of Health and Human Services. To avoid possible confirmation complications, Sullivan renounced all claims to nearly $500,000 in severance pay and deferred compensation legally owed him by the Morehouse School of Medicine. Even Senate Democrats wondered aloud if Sullivan's excessive concern with appearances did not overstep the bounds of financial prudence. Meanwhile, George Bush's ethics commission solemnly debated whether a top Government official should be entitled to royalties if he composed a hit song in his spare time.

Small wonder that fashionable opinion in Washington is now having second thoughts about this sudden overdose of ethics. Take Bush, who in late January declared that his commitment to the highest ethical standards "is not, believe me, a fad or some passing fancy." Of course, this was before Tower began to crumble and it was discovered that Secretary of State James Baker owned an estimated $2.9 million worth of Chemical Bank stock while he was Treasury Secretary with policymaking influence over the treatment of the bank's shaky Third World loans. These days the President sounds less like a patrician reformer as he muses aloud, "I hope I haven't created something that just carries things too far."

It is easy to parody the overzealous quest for purity in Government and depict an Administration where top officials file disclosure forms each time they purchase an imported VCR at K mart. But it is also sobering to recall the taint that the "sleaze factor" left on the Reagan Administration and the nation's faith in Government integrity.

So the question remains: How clean a regime in Washington should Americans demand? It is difficult to extract general rules of conduct from the Tower inferno because so many of the facts remain in dispute. Certainly America cannot afford a Defense Secretary with an untreated drinking problem. The issue is how closely this description fits Tower. There are also legitimate concerns raised by the widespread, but not unequivocally documented, tales of Tower's predatory behavior toward women. If true, the allegations of sexual high jinks seem to reflect a pattern of reckless and perhaps unbalanced behavior that should disqualify Tower for such a sensitive post.

These sensationalized aspects of the Tower battle are riveting, but they distract from far more universal questions about the conduct of public officials. The reason ethics in Government seems so tiresome is that the goal has become obscured in a legalistic fog of disclosure requirements, recusations and blind trusts. Lost in the mist are commonsense standards for integrity in Government like these:

The Nation Can Demand Sacrifices for Public Service. Few deny that top Executive Branch officials are underpaid. Money, however, is but one measure of compensation for serving at the highest levels of Government; there is also a huge premium to be derived from fascinating work, public recognition and perhaps even the chance to shape history. This is why it is disturbing that the President's ethics commission last week kicked the issue of limits on outside earned income for top officials to Congress, an institution not known for its ethical sensitivity.

Second Trips Through the Revolving Door Are Dangerous. Tower left the arms- control talks in Geneva in 1986 with the clear sense that after 25 years in public office, it was now time to get rich. With this sense of entitlement, he promptly lined up more than $750,000 in consulting work with six leading defense contractors. To believe Tower, he provided them with little more than the "enlightened judgment" they could just as easily get from reading the papers and dropping by a few academic think tanks. If true, it appears that Tower was vastly overpaid for his services, and it is troubling to contemplate what he now owes his benefactors.

Tower's problems in this area are far from unique. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft returned to Government after advising foreign clients as vice chairman of Henry Kissinger's international consulting firm. Largely because Scowcroft is a noncontroversial official serving in a post that does not require Senate confirmation, there has been scant debate over the propriety of ) his prior business entanglements. Such quiet acceptance is not likely to be the fate of Lawrence Eagleburger, who became president of Kissinger Associates in 1984, after 27 years in Government. About to be nominated as Deputy Secretary of State, Eagleburger is expected to face a grueling confirmation battle revolving around the firm's globe-girdling client list that touches everything from Middle Eastern oil to Third World debt. Granted, Eagleburger is respected. But are his credentials so special as to override the possible conflicts of interest?

Legal and Ethical Are Not the Same Thing. By seeking to codify ethical conduct, the Government has inadvertently encouraged behavior that borders on what is legally permissible. Consider C. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel. While serving as an aide to then Vice President Bush, Gray moonlighted as chairman of a family-owned communications firm, which paid him as much as $50,000 a year. White House officials are formally barred from such outside employment, but not the Vice President's staff. Even when appointed White House ethics czar, Gray apparently planned to continue this cozy arrangement until it was reported in the press.

Far more ingenious was the way House Speaker Jim Wright skirted the already generous congressional ceiling on outside income. Not content with mere honorariums, Wright arranged an unusual sweetheart deal: a supporter published one of Wright's books, sold most of the copies in bulk to groups like the Teamsters, and then handed over 55% of the proceeds (nearly $60,000) to the Speaker as royalties. This daisy chain was probably legal, but clearly unsavory. It is among a welter of charges against Wright contained in a voluminous report now being studied by the House Ethics Committee. Few expect more than a mild reprimand.

This kind of easy tolerance among the powerful in Congress is what allows Tower to so adroitly muddy the waters surrounding his own ethical problems. The everybody-does-it defense may be cynical, but it has persuasive power, as long as Congress continues to confuse honor with honorariums. Ethics in government should be a bipartisan concern, not merely the responsibility of the Bush Administration. If the White House has fallen short of the standards it set during its much ballyhooed "ethics week," so too has the Democratic Congress been unwilling to judge itself by the criteria it sets for others.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington