What’s Ethical?

The Senate is clearly anxious to pass on to other matters now that Senator Dodd has been censured, but surely the victimization of one of its members suggests that the time is overdue to do something on the matter of putting together an ethics code. We all know that individual senators and congressmen resist an ethics code, for reasons mostly but not altogether discreditable. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who as a member of the Ethics Committee served as one of the more unflinching prosecutors, made in the course of the general discussions last week a most provocative observation: “We should not push too far in attempting to determine standards, nor be too harsh in applying them.” He quoted a contemporary poet: ‘And if we purify the pond, the lilies die.”

I think I see what the Senator means, and no doubt, as an intelligent man, he saw, even though he did not acknowledge, the difficulties that led him to his position. Those difficulties are, brusquely stated, these: that a man can do something which is perfectly defensible, but which nevertheless doesn’t look good emblazoned in a public report, let alone on the front pages of a newspaper. Many of the most venerated men in recent history—men of the public quality of Bernard Baruch and John D. Rockefeller Sr.—while not (from the available evidence) ever acting unlawfully, took advantage of certain situations so as to add greatly to their private fortunes. Would they have been able to do so if they had been senators of the United States, under the klieg light of the public-disclosure doctrine? It is always possible for the envious and for the contumacious to assert a base relationship between any single financial activity and any single political activity. Not long ago a Secretary of the Air Force was made to resign because he had—absent-mindedly, there is every reason to believe—used his official stationery to scratch out a note urging a particular person to take his business to a firm with which the AirSec had been associated. Suppose a congressman, at the urging of his broker, puts a few dollars into a building supplies corporation, a month later votes in favor of, say, compulsory arbitration’in the event of a nationwide strike against major industries. In the hands of Drew Pearson, addressing a community which is still given to puritanical seizures, the two acts become as closely related as the eating of the apple and the expulsion from Paradise. What most senators and congressmen mostly care about is not that a full disclosure of their financial affairs will leave them prey to the dragons of Internal Revenue or the Justice Department: but that they would forever after be grist for the Drew Pearsons of this world, who grow fat from the business of malevolent distortion, which by the way ought to be listed on the stock exchange, and count me in for a hundred shares. What the scholarly Senator McCarthy has not apparently turned his attention to is the danger in leaving it exclusively to the imagination of ad hoe ethics committees just what is wrong and what is right. It is an axiom of justice that the law should be visible and plainspoken. Heaven only knows it was nothing of the sort on the matter of the testimonial dinners for which Senator Dodd has been sent to Coventry. What about the business of receiving fees for referring business to other lawyers? There are sixty-odd lawyers in the Senate. Which of them will move to clarify this question? At what point can speculation in the stock market be said to raise questions as to a lawmaker’s motivations when called upon to face legislation whose passage could affect the lawmaker’s portfolio?

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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The Senate is clearly anxious to pass on to other matters now that Senator Dodd has been censured, but surely the victimization of one of its members suggests that the time is overdue to do something on the matter of putting together an ethics code. We all know that individual senators and congressmen resist an ethics code, for reasons mostly but not altogether discreditable. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who as a member of the Ethics Committee served as one of the more unflinching prosecutors, made in the course of the general discussions last week a most provocative observation: “We should not push too far in attempting to determine standards, nor be too harsh in applying them.” He quoted a contemporary poet: ‘And if we purify the pond, the lilies die.”

I think I see what the Senator means, and no doubt, as an intelligent man, he saw, even though he did not acknowledge, the difficulties that led him to his position. Those difficulties are, brusquely stated, these: that a man can do something which is perfectly defensible, but which nevertheless doesn’t look good emblazoned in a public report, let alone on the front pages of a newspaper. Many of the most venerated men in recent history—men of the public quality of Bernard Baruch and John D. Rockefeller Sr.—while not (from the available evidence) ever acting unlawfully, took advantage of certain situations so as to add greatly to their private fortunes. Would they have been able to do so if they had been senators of the United States, under the klieg light of the public-disclosure doctrine? It is always possible for the envious and for the contumacious to assert a base relationship between any single financial activity and any single political activity. Not long ago a Secretary of the Air Force was made to resign because he had—absent-mindedly, there is every reason to believe—used his official stationery to scratch out a note urging a particular person to take his business to a firm with which the AirSec had been associated. Suppose a congressman, at the urging of his broker, puts a few dollars into a building supplies corporation, a month later votes in favor of, say, compulsory arbitration’in the event of a nationwide strike against major industries. In the hands of Drew Pearson, addressing a community which is still given to puritanical seizures, the two acts become as closely related as the eating of the apple and the expulsion from Paradise. What most senators and congressmen mostly care about is not that a full disclosure of their financial affairs will leave them prey to the dragons of Internal Revenue or the Justice Department: but that they would forever after be grist for the Drew Pearsons of this world, who grow fat from the business of malevolent distortion, which by the way ought to be listed on the stock exchange, and count me in for a hundred shares. What the scholarly Senator McCarthy has not apparently turned his attention to is the danger in leaving it exclusively to the imagination of ad hoe ethics committees just what is wrong and what is right. It is an axiom of justice that the law should be visible and plainspoken. Heaven only knows it was nothing of the sort on the matter of the testimonial dinners for which Senator Dodd has been sent to Coventry. What about the business of receiving fees for referring business to other lawyers? There are sixty-odd lawyers in the Senate. Which of them will move to clarify this question? At what point can speculation in the stock market be said to raise questions as to a lawmaker’s motivations when called upon to face legislation whose passage could affect the lawmaker’s portfolio?