Scandal

...If exposed, he faced censure, or ruin, or jail, depending on the nature and seriousness of the offense...

...Her book is a systematic attempt to explain how each element of this machine—from "ethics" laws and congressional hearings to the office of the independent counsel and the mass media—operates, and she recounts with riveting clarity the major and minor political scandals of the past decade...

...SCANDAL: THE CULTURE OF MISTRUST IN AMERICAN POLITICS Suzanne Garment Times Books/336 pages/$23 reviewed by STEVE MUNSON Once upon a time, a politician or government official risked scandal if he did something illegal, like take a bribe, or morally improper, like have an affair...

...More importantly, whatever his transgression, and whatever the penalty, neither he nor the public at large would have had any doubts as to why what he had done was scandalous...

...As Garment puts it:while promoting the careers of unscrupulous Washington lawyers, nihilistic journalists, and publicity-seeking congressmen...

...In 1985 Olsen was accused of having lied two and a half years earlier when he testified 68 The American Spectator January 1992 before a congressional subcommittee investigating the Environmental Protection Agency...

...How has this situation come about...

...CI Today's ethics police practice scorched-earth warfare of a sort readily recognizable from Vietnam days...

...As Suzanne Garment writes in her compelling new book, "When we look down the list of recent political scandals that have embroiled executive branch officials, we quickly see that many of them involved offenses that would never have become known at any other time in our political history or would not have been considered worthy of serious sustained attention...

...It followed that the job of driving out the menace posed by such officials could not be done through conventional American politics, because the old political system entailed too much ordinary electoral activity, endless negotiation, and vitiating compromise...

...That era, she argues, ushered in a radicalism that has since come to pervade our national life, inSteve Munson, a frequent contributor, has also written for Commentary and the National Interest...

...Garment notes that the Iran-contra case exemplifies the post-Watergate habit of turning fundamental disputes over policy into matters for criminal adjudication...

...Olsen wound up with legal bills in excess of $1 million...

...For as everyone in the world—including Lawrence Walsh,his staff, and their cheerleaders in the press—knows, it was not withholding information from Congress, or taking an illegal gratuity, or any of the other trumped-up charges against them that brought down Oliver North and John Poindexter and Elliott Abrams and Alan Fiers and Claire George et al...

...So far, the investigation by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh has taken five years and has cost, according to the Wall Street Journal, more than $100 million—all to investigate and prosecute men who did nothing really wrong...

...One of these is the story of former assistant attorney general Theodore Olsen...

...Others, however, were outright ideological vendettas...

...As Garment's book makes clear, the record is replete with cases that never get into court, that get thrown out of court, that end up in coerced little plea bargains, and that serve only to damage decent and dedicated men, The American Spectator January 1992 69...

...policy toward Nicaragua...

...Foreshadowing the tactics they would later use against Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, they sent their staffs looking for dirt and within days produced a Meese scandal involving allegations of cronyism and questionable loans...

...Thwarted by the electorate, the left has turned to destroying its executive branch adversaries through the misuse of our legal institutions...

...According to Garment, the roots of today's scandal politics lie in the 1960s...

...But times have changed...

...So she pressed on, at one point threatening to indict Olsen if he refused to waive his rights under the statute of limitations law...

...Those involved in the pursuit of Reagan Administration officials showed few if any qualms about what they were doing, even after it became clear that the only criminal activity they were investigating was that which they themselves had concocted...

...Likewise, when Edwin Meese was nominated for attorney general, he was immediately targeted by Democratic senators opposed to Reagan's civil rights policies...

...T he fact that so many of the "scandals" examined by Garment should never have been investigated to begin with reminds us that, although the law is the instrument of their resolution, these cases have nothing to do with criminal behavior by people in high places...

...Indeed, in reading Scandal one cannot help feeling that, in these matters, the rule of law has been thoroughly corrupted...

...eluding the political life of Washington, D.C...

...Some, like the prosecution of Raymond Donovan, President Reagan's first secretary of labor, and the Wedtech-related indictments of Lyn Nofziger and E. Robert Wallach, were inspired by standard partisan motives...

...Instead, to achieve their goals the Vietnam-era radicals and their spiritual descendants created what now amounts to a parallel political structure composed of ideologically motivated interest groups, friendly congressional staffs, activist lawyers, and willing journalists...

...Her search took four more years and, predictably, she came up empty...

...Within six months, the independent counsel, Alexia Morrison, announced that Olsen's testimony "probably did not constitute a prosecutable offense because it was literally true, even if potentially misleading in certain respects...

...Morrison was apparently determined to find some evidence of criminality and, unlike ordinary prosecutors, as an independent counsel she was unhampered by time, money, or any other constraint...

...it was only just beginning...

...And, of course, in the eyes of those under the sway of the kind of ideas about America and its foreign policy that took root in the 1960s, the Reagan Administration was no less criminal in supporting the anti-Communist struggle in Nicaragua than the Johnson or Nixon Administration had been in fighting the Vietnam war...

...The good they do is, in fact, nil...

...They display impressive inventiveness in not simply catching criminals but trying to ensure that what is offensive or imprudent behavior today can be treated as scandalous or even criminal behavior tomorrow...

...Today a political figure can end up impugned, impoverished, or imprisoned simply for doing his job...

...Garment writes that the Olsen case showed how "an independent counsel could use the office's vast discretionary power to visit harshly discriminatory law enforcement on individual government officials...

...It is this informal structure that under-girds what Garment calls "our modern scandal production machine...

...The investigation was requested even though by 1985 Olsen had already left the government...

...Their crime was to refuse to allow congressional Democrats sympathetic to the Sandinistas to dictate U.S...

...At the insistence of the subcommittee chairman, Democrat Peter Rodino, Attorney General Edwin Meese asked for an independent counsel to investigate...

...But with that the Olsen case did not end...

...And then there is the Iran-contra affair...

...They display the same awesome skill as the most radical antiwar activists did in ignoring the question of whether the pain they cause in individual cases is worth the good they do...

...As Garment points out, the Theodore Olsen case began as a battle between Reagan and Congress over environmental policy...

...At the heart of this radicalism was "the conviction that the people governing this country were fundamentally illegitimate in their claims to authority and criminal in their behavior...

...In illuminating the true character of these modern political scandals, Suzanne Garment has made an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the current scene...

...As Scandal suggests, this development is a response to the inability of the radicalized left—whose point of view remains influential in Congress, the media, and elsewhere—to win power in presidential elections through the Democratic party...