The Public Image of Public Figures

...Of the many episodes of flagrant influence-peddling that have emerged from the courtroom, there was one that seemed to me to be quintessential...

...Having striven for almost seven years to keep the President focused on building a military shield against the Soviets and shunning their disarmament enticements, he could see Reagan stumbling into budget restraints with Congress and weapons restraints with the USSR...

...My deliberate refusal to acknowledge these dire predictions itself became an element of the supposed crisis.' Thus does former President Richard M. Nixon recall in his memoirs the Senate's rejection of Judge Clement F. Haynsworth, after the White House refused to withdraw the nominee despite almost certain defeat...

...But, alas, that didn't happen...

...The moral absolutist associated with his wife's "Just say no...

...We are in a period of a great public uneasiness over our public servants, a distrust of video images—especially now that the Reagan image has started to crumble—and a search for "true character...

...Ginsburg...

...A government monopoly protects Korean tobacco growers—so well that, until recently, a Korean could be sentenced to prison if caught smoking an imported cigarette...

...Deaver was working as a consultant for Philip Morris...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR The Public Image of Public Figures "The controversy over my Supreme Court nomination [along with other events] created the impression of an administration reeling under siege...

...Whoever invents an identity will have to live by that identity or face the consequences...

...At one point, Philip Morris expected Deaver's intercession to result in its getting exclusive rights to import foreign cigarettes into Korea—a market share estimated to be worth a half-billion dollars a year...

...For their pains, Philip Morris executives ended up obliged to testify in Deaver's trial...

...According to the testimony at the trial, Allen, for Reynolds, got to Seoul first, seeking, in the nameof trade liberalization, to break into the cigarette market...

...Fresh out of the White House, he was in Seoul a month later with credentials so imposing that President Chun Doo Hwan gave him a 75-minute interview...

...When, within nine days, Reagan got Judge Ginsburg to call il quits (by having Education Secretary William J. Bennett deliver the message in a feeble attempt at Presidential deniability), he was, typically, doing the right thing for the wrong reason: The least of the problems with Judge Ginsburg—which included a skimpy judicial record, exaggeration of his courtroom experience, and a possible conflict of interest involving his stock ownership —was that he had smoked marijuana asa student and law professor...

...The matter goes beyond hypocrisy to an unsettling public sense of vanishing identity...

...Nixon next proceeded to name Judge G. Harrold Carswell, having "unfortunately" overlooked his "youthful indiscretions" in endorsing racial segregation, and was defeated again in a Senate roll call vote...

...In the USA Today poll, 70 per cent said it would make no difference to them if a candidate had smoked marijuana in college, but 73 per cent would vote against one known to drink and drive, and 80 per cent against a candidate failing to report his income to the Internal Revenue Service...

...The Confused Reagan Twilight For leading President Reagan into the Ginsburg disaster Attorney General Edwin Meese, so far as is known, suffered no rebuke, let alone dismissal...

...All this provided an eerie sense of déjà vu as President Ronald Reagan, after losing on Judge Robert H. Bork, lunged out rashly and vengefully with the nomination of the less qualified Judge DouglasH...

...An admiring Philip Morris vice-president testified that not even Richard Allen could do that...

...Recent polls by Newsweek and USA Today found that a vast majority of Americans do not consider earlier use of marijuana to be a disqualification for public office, including the Presidency...

...This is more than a matter of being haunted by your own rhetoric or hoist by your own petard...

...Inthe confused twilight of the Reagan era, Washington was no longer a good place for an absolutist...

...Democratic Presidential candidates Albert Gore and Bruce Babbitt seem, after all, to be serenely riding out their disclosures that they tried marijuana as youngmen...

...President Reagan had already disillusioned many Americans by violating his antiterrorist identity with the Iranian arms deal...

...On the foreign policy scene, Reagan seems not to understand where he is being inexorably taken by budgetary and international circumstance...

...to drugs) campaign, and with drug testing of Federal workers, risked turning himself into a national joke when he sought compassion for Judge Ginsburg by asking, "How many of us would like to have everything we did when we were younger put on the books...

...Nixon was in the first year of his tenure, however, and Reagan is nearing his last...

...The Korean Government ultimately announced, in the name of trade liberalization, that it would open 1 per cent of its cigarette market to imports on a nonexclusive basis...

...Now, in his initial reaction to the Ginsburg marijuana re\ elation, he seemed to be heading toward destroying his antidrug persona...

...Philip Morris claimed that Allen, in an effort to shut it out of Korea, branded it "a Democratic company...

...But thereis less tolerance for departure from your own portrait of yourself...

...Preposterous," says Allen, who also told me that, as an international trade consultant, he objects to being compared with Deaver...

...These factors were lumped together in the media and labeled a crisis of leadership...

...A 1985 survey by the National Institute of Drug Abuse concluded that 62 million Americans have tried marijuana at least once...

...In the guessing game about the new center of gravity, the President himself, remarkably enough, is almost ignored...

...He expected his cause to suffer in two summits—the budget parley with Congress and the arms control parley with the Soviet Union's Mikhail S. Gorbachev...

...DANIEL SCHORR is currently the senior news analisi for National Public Radio...

...just two decades ago, divorcecould be a barrier to election...

...Indeed, to a student of media-age politics the explanation goes as follows: At a time when public figures appear to be inventing themselves for television, there is an iron law that you must live by the image you create for yourself...

...Richard V Allen, Reagan's initial national security adviser, was working as a consultant for the R.J...

...Reynolds tobacco company...

...True, except they, unlike Reagan, had never presented themselves as antidrug zealots...

...Weinberger clearly does understand, and one could perceive in the timing of his resignation some combination of concern over his wife's health and his own battle fatigue...

...Much ink and air time have been devoted to speculation about changes in policy and style under the new national security constellation of Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci, National Security Adviser Colin L. Powell and Secretary of State George ? Shultz...

...Americans have come a long way in tolerance for departures from traditional norms...

...There must be a lesson there somewhere—perhaps even for Ronald Reagan, who has never publicly criticized friends and associates who have profited financially from their connection with the President...

...In that twilight, too, the trial for perjury of Michael K. Deaver, former deputy White House chief of staff and intimate of the First Lady, has served to underscore the way ideological absolutism has coexisted with moral relativism...

...Why, then, was the nomination of Judge Ginsburg, already in trouble on other counts, yanked so precipitously on the marijuana issue...

...In any event, in June 1985 an alarmed Philip Morris engaged Deaver, for $300,000, to trump the Allen ace...

...Where there's smoking, there's fire...

...Gary Hart's trouble was not so much his extramarital affairs as that they violated his depiction of himself as a good family man...

...hecould not afford the luxury of waiting to be rebuffed by the Senate once more...

...Furthermore, through the American ambassador and the National Security Council, Deaver arranged for President Reagan to receive a Korean trade official bearing a letter from President Chun...

...After the recent stock market crash, a Time magazine cover story shook its head over the "bizarrely disengaged" President...

...Koreans smoke almost $2 billion worth of cigarettes a year—Korean cigarettes...

...Senator Joseph Biden's problem was not so much his borrowing of speech lines and his enhancement of his resume as that these things contradicted the image of candor and breezy spontaneity he had fashioned for himself...

...He seems more important than ever to Reagan as the last guardian of the ideological flame from the old California coterie after the resignation of Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger...

...It involved what might be called "the second Korean war," pitting against each other two big guns of White House caliber...