Looking for honest Abe

...Time was when we held honesty as the quintessential trait to be admired in our leaders and to be emulated as far as possible by us, their followers...

...Our airlines regularly lie about departure and arrival times and available space...

...an inspector passes them, and astronauts and passengers meet a fiery death...

...We have to have leaders...

...That was painfully apparent in the explanations given by randomly interviewed voters when Gary Hart reentered the race and almost immediately shot up in the polls...

...We seem to be totally confused about it...

...The other - the story of Abraham Lincoln and the pennies - seems to have some basis in fact...

...By any dictionary definition of the words "honest" and "honesty," Gary Hart is not an honest man...

...Can we muster the resolve to change for the better...

...Neither is integrity, nor sincerity - the synonyms Webster gives for honesty - his to claim...

...I am oversimplifying a bit but it is generally true that the licentiousness and cynicism of the eighteenth century was replaced by a time of moral living and simple virtue...

...And we must make ourselves and our community worthy of it...

...What do they see to emulate...

...Pennies had more value in Lincoln's day, and the story varies a bit in the telling - in one version the customer is a poor widow, in another a crabbed old farmer...

...Railroad engineers under the influence of drugs wreck trains...

...Even the vice president, it seems, was party to all this...

...Perhaps the story is no longer taught because the reaction of today's young, who must have designer jeans and running shoes and aren't too particular about how they get them, is apt to be either disbelief or scorn...

...The point was that Lincoln was honest...

...The attorney general, who has responsibility for the Department of Justice, is closely associated in business and friendship with men indicted for racketeering, fraud, and conspiracy...

...The respondents were wildly beside the point: "He deserves a second chance...

...A company whose chief executive is sometimes approvingly suggested as our next president, turns back the odometers on thousands of luxury cars and sells them as new...

...He lacks "straightforwardness of conduct," he is not known for "adherence to the facts," he cannot claim "freedom from subterfuge and duplicity...

...What was the method and the cost...

...In her forthcoming book, Convictions (Random House), Arlene Violet, former nun and first woman attorney general has this to say of her native state: "Rhode Islanders know that ethical standards exist, but they never demand that they be put in place, lived up to, or made part of their lives.'' In the face of the daily headlines we can well think that the country has become one vast Rhode Island, Can we change this national climate...

...As of this writing, he himself has not been indicted but the prosecutor indicates that he may well be...

...We must demand it...

...Historically there is some precedent...

...Men like North, Poindexter, and State Department official Elliott Abrams are hailed as patriots for illegally selling arms, misappropriating money and soliciting under false pretenses, conspiring to destroy evidence or to smuggle it past government guards, and lying about it all under oath...

...His private life shouldn't enter into it...

...Mergers involve colossal indifference to those served by the companies involved and their shareholders...

...For generations children were taught this by two cherished national myths...

...After Black Monday on Wall Street state security regulators had eight thousand reports of brokers who had almost ruined small investors with unauthorized trading, misleading sales pitches, and unsuitable investments, including options...

...In the financial markets, according to convicted financial trader, Ivan Boesky, insider trading is rife...

...There is nothing we need more in these days of 1988 than a national resolve to recover the old-fashioned virtue of simple honesty and its practice...

...In another time the corruption of the Renaissance church (which brought about the Reformation) was corrected by the Counter-Reformation...

...American autos are regularly recalled for lethal defects...

...So much for those governing the country and their "freedom from subterfuge and duplicity...

...Banking companies have laundered money for organized crime and smuggled huge sums abroad to avoid taxation...

...A White House aide is convicted of perjury and high officials laud him and express sorrow, apparently because he was caught...

...Assembly-line workers have been known to weld beer cans into the parts and pass on things like faulty wheel assemblies...

...We must be clear about honesty in our leadership...

...They entrust their passengers to hundreds of pilots who have drunk-driving records...

...I would wager, however, that it is the rare school child today who knows about the young store clerk who, after a long day's work, walked six miles to return a few pennies he had inadvertently overcharged a customer...

...A technological manufacturer with a fat government contract sells inadequate rings to NASA...

...What of honest work, once believed to be a unique American value...

...One, concocted by a well-meaning parson, was the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, a tale intended to inculcate the importance of straightforwardness and truthfulness, characteristics the nation at large earnestly wished to attribute to our first president...

...It is not enough simply to resort to the old Chinese prayer, "O Lord, convert the world - and begin with me...

...What of honesty of word and purpose...

...This is a man who offered uncertain information about things as basic and verifiable as his age and name, who never gives credit to those who contributed to his "new ideas'' and helped with his books, whose flagrant unfaithfulness and marital deceit was far from private - indeed made public through his own arrogant carelessness, then lied about in the face of fact...

...He was done in by the press...