It is part murder-mystery spinoff, part Watergate hangover. At the first sign of misconduct in government we come clanking in with the heavy paraphernalia of a variety of legal and legalish proceedings. This habit has taken irony to a new place. For it manages to hound, harass and often to persecute its quarry while at the same time giving many of them an undeserved pass. Because their wrongdoing is investigated as if in a court, they ask, “What is the crime?” If no prosecutable crime is found, they will claim: You see, I did no wrong-even as the evidence of what was done wrong is lying everywhere around them. Their frustrated antagonists thus press on and on and on, trying to make the unsuitable criminal-courtlike procedures yield up a result they often can’t. Such frustration-and anger-on the part of the pursuers is matched by the exasperation of the pursued one and the pursued one’s friends. Charges of bullying and McCarthyism go up on the one side, met by charges of cover-up and dissembling on the other. In my observation it is not impossible for both sets of charges to be right.
I obviously am heading into the Hillary Rodham Clinton turmoil. But it is important to note that between the original Watergate events and now, an unending series of scandals and squalls and truly mean fights over the conduct of people in government–Democrats and Republicans–has turned the procedure into a kind of one-size-fits-all ritual, so that the same things are said and done no matter what the magnitude or nature of the alleged offense. There is nothing being said on behalf of the First Lady, for instance, that was not said on behalf of everyone else in hot water during these years, starting with Nixon himself and proceeding through the lesser uproars, the famed Iran-contra episode and the rest: that these are boring, picky, irrelevant matters; that both the independent counsel and the congressional investigators are overreaching; that no one outside the Beltway is interested in the issue; that the charges are really a disguised assault on the besieged one for something else, like being a Republican or a conservative or (in this case) a powerful woman; that the conflict is drawing attention away from other more important issues; that those in the political opposition have done comparable things; that now admired figures from the past (Lincoln for Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt for Hillary Clinton) have incurred such obloquy, showing the whole thing’s a joke.
I have no idea whether the independent counsel in this case will come up with a criminal charge. But it seems to me we already know one thing in relation to the overall problem. Summed up it is that, once again in our contemporary political life, the wages of failing to acknowledge error are being demonstrated to be infinitely more painful and worse than any timely acknowledgment, however mortifying, might have been–or might still be. The Travel Office affair is an example. It is being defended by some as a simple act of political patronage concerning relatively unimportant employees and therefore so what, and the First Lady says she was only concerned to remedy reported wrongdoing in the Travel Of-rice. But something far different and far worse went on. Seven longtime employees were summarily and unfairly smeared and kicked out, offered no chance to hear or answer the charges against them and almost immediately characterized as being potential objects of a “criminal investigation.” The White House political people had manipulated the FBI into seeming to back up this charge. It was the worst kind of unfounded and destructive assault on innocent people-people who could have been replaced in a straightforward way.
This was not, in other words, just an act of so-called cronyism. And the attempt to replace the head of the Travel Office immediately with the president’s 25-year-old relative, who had three months before any investigation at all written a memo suggesting herself for the job, does not sound to me, anyway, like an action undertaken in the spirit of good-government reform. If the president and First Lady were disturbed by reports of inefficiency, mismanagement and other evidence that the operation needed a real overhaul, that strikes me as about the last thing they would have been contemplating. When the scandal blew up, both took their distance from it. Now it is suggested that the First Lady was much more deeply involved than she said.
Nothing makes the point better about the First Family’s current troubles than this. The Travel Office affair would not be back 2 1/2 years later if it had been acknowledged at the time for the gross political misconduct it was and apologized for–not just in the stern but discreet words of the White House report concerning staff chain of command and activity, but personally by the Clintons who largely escaped responsibility. In its way it was, or could have been, a gift from heaven for them: an early and unforgettable instruction on the perils of such maneuvers and, above all, on the perils of refusing to acknowledge error plainly and directly and then moving on, as distinct from trying to elude and evade and circumvent and outsmart the pursuers. That is what has landed practically everyone who got in trouble in the soup. The pursuers, of course, should most of the time be trying to get those they are after to acknowledge their deeds, not trying to find a crime of which they are guilty. But the ritual now seems fixed. It has become an ugly game.
