I (mis) behaved

 

 

Illustration by Guy Billout

I was only a year and half out of law school, and a newly minted assistant United States attorney, when I was assigned to be the junior prosecutor on the investigation and then the trial of William J. Scott. Bill Scott, the sitting attorney general of Illinois, was indicted in 1979 for income tax fraud, and it was an immensely challenging prosecution, since he was generally regarded as the state’s most popular politician. Even after it had become known that Bill Scott was under grand jury investigation, he was reelected in 1978 with 65 percent of the vote.

Scott’s support was deserved in many ways. He understood media management long before many other politicians, and he had achievements worth publicizing, especially as a consumer advocate and environmentalist. However, he was also, as the evidence subsequently showed at his trial, a crook.

In 1967, Bill Scott’s then-wife had opened a joint safe deposit box and found it stuffed with thousands of dollars in cash. Scott claimed the funds were political contributions, which he was not free to share with her. Yet in the ensuing years, Scott’s lifestyle consumed more cash than he had available from any known source – salary, savings, even gifts. The inference was that he had spent the cash he claimed was political contributions on himself, thus creating taxable income.

To convict Scott, the government was required to account for every penny he’d spent or received since the time of his divorce in the late 1960s. For the prosecutors, and the team of IRS investigators who supported us, that meant we had to examine his daily life microscopically. Like many young law school graduates, thoughts of a political career had sometimes danced through my mind. But not when I saw what it took to become the state’s most popular politician. Bill Scott was up at 6 a.m. to get to the Swedish pancake breakfast, and was still going at 8 p.m. when he addressed the Wheaton Women’s Republican Club. In between, he had less time than I imagined for substantive work. His life was basically news conferences and wooing supporters and potential supporters. It was an existence that could only be satisfying to somebody addicted to the spotlight. As I sometimes joke, two political careers ended with Bill Scott’s conviction: his and mine.

The Scott case was the first time I came up close to political corruption, and in some ways the lessons I learned are still good years later. I had a long career as a prosecutor, and have worked as a criminal defense lawyer since 1986, but when I ponder what we can and can’t expect from the behavior of political leaders, I come to three “rules” I probably could have written down in March of 1980, when Bill Scott was convicted.

Expect disappointment

I tell the story of my reaction to Bill Scott’s daily life because when we ask ourselves what we can expect from our political leaders, we must bear in mind what their lives require and who they are. At their very best – and I have been lucky enough to get to know many honorable politicians – they are always struggling to win support, to build consensus, and to get things done in an environment in which somebody else inevitably favors the status quo. It’s also a truism that virtually all politicians want to keep their jobs. Who doesn’t? But in a democracy, that means offending as few people as possible on a daily basis. Brutal candor is anathema. And secretiveness is inevitable. Self-interest inevitably guides people who in theory are supposed to be selfless servants of the public.

And self-interest is a mouthful in this case. Virtually no one runs for public office, and endures the rigors of fundraising and campaigning, who doesn’t yearn for and thrive in the spotlight. Losing elections means the stage goes dark, which is something we can expect politicians by character to dread. It is an overstatement to say that nobody who is “normal” would want to run for public office. But the job requires a personality, even in the best-intentioned office seekers, that relishes unending attention and adulation. To some extent, we mock ourselves with the frequent lament that politicians are just out for themselves.

Do not accept disappointment

When I was a prosecutor, I had the unfortunate experience of sending hundreds of people to the federal penitentiary. No matter what the popular conception, this was generally unpleasant; the wailing of spouses and children and the defendant’s own visible distress often chafed my heart. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why our system demanded this result. I was not under the impression that I was going to change for the better the lives of most of the defendants who went away. In time I realized that I was doing this for the sake of the law-abiding people. As a society, we couldn’t go around and hand out a gold star every day to any person who obeyed the law. There were and are, thank the Lord, a multitude of those folks. So our society works the negative. We punish the violators so that the people who obey the law will know it was worthwhile to do the right thing. Goodness may be its own reward, but it doesn’t hurt to get a little reminder.

What I have always taken from this in larger terms is that we need each other’s help to stay on the straight and narrow. We need the reinforcement that comes from caring about being liked and admired by our peers and from seeing wrongdoers punished. And that means that we owe it to our political leaders to demand better from them.

I say this, even after acknowledging that we cannot expect politicians to adhere scrupulously to our concepts of candor, fairness, and square dealing at all times. I cannot think of a president in the last 50 years who did not look into the camera and utter what history has judged to be lies, which were told in the name of the national interest. (Jimmy Carter may be the one exception to my rule, and he was repudiated at the end of one term.)

But even though we cannot expect politicians to deal with the public with the same rectitude we hope for in our personal interactions with our doctors or our clergymen, it does not follow that we need to turn a blind eye to corruption or deceit. A politician who breaks his promises because he wants to curry favor with the political majority, or because she has changed her view of the public interest, may disappoint us, but that person is being faithful to the principles of democracy and representative government. A politician who breaks his promises because he has been paid off has desecrated those principles. That official has abandoned the ideals of majority rule and service to the public interest and allowed the will of one person to dominate the rest of us. If we tolerate this kind of behavior, our democracy will perish.

Nor are we out of place in expressing our chagrin with officeholders who succumb to the temptations of power. The endless sexual escapades of high-ranking politicians – as but a few recent examples, think of Bill Clinton (who compounded his sins by lying under oath), or Eliot Spitzer, or Mark Foley, the Florida congressman who wooed his male pages – should not be dismissed as purely private behavior of no concern to the public. As an ethical matter, each of these men was using something we had bestowed on him – the allure and privileges of power – for a personal purpose to which we never agreed. Because these infractions do not imperil our system of governance in the same way as, say, bribery or nepotism, loss of office does not necessarily have to be an automatic consequence of such behavior. But the shame we have visited on each of these men is not simply lurid moralizing. We have every right to feel disappointed that these leaders have broken faith with us and to make a case-by-case decision as to whether each still deserves sufficient public confidence to continue in office.

One reason for the frequent lapses that take place in a state like Illinois, where one former governor sits in the federal penitentiary and his successor is now under federal indictment awaiting trial, is the fact that while they are indignant, Illinois voters also recognize such behavior as business as usual. It is literally our highest responsibility as citizens not to accept that state of affairs, but to cavil and complain and let our leaders know that they owe us better – not only corruption-free governance but a government that is transparent and credible, and personal behavior that does not misuse the power and status we have lent them – and that unless they give it to us, they should start looking for another job.

Have faith in the law, and demand constant reform

One of the most cynical arguments around is that you cannot legislate good faith. When I was 13 years old, I used to hear opponents of the Civil Rights Act, which had been proposed in Congress to bar discrimination in public accommodations, say that you could not change what was in people’s hearts. They were right. When the Civil Rights Act passed, it didn’t alter anybody’s belief system – at first. But it changed what happened in hotels and restaurants, in stadiums and public pools. It allowed me to come of age in a society where long-standing barriers had fallen, where we reinforced a vision of the fundamental equality of all people, which in succeeding generations undoubtedly informed and altered many hearts. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 changed America.

The same thing is true about government ethics. It’s convenient to think that a crook is a crook and will always find a way to break the law. But the years I have spent since leaving the U.S. attorney’s office as a criminal defense lawyer have taught me that there are many people who were not born bad. They just find themselves in environments where less is expected of them and where the rules are sometimes unclear.

Legislation works. Despite Bill Scott’s cash-stuffed safe deposit box, Illinois still has skimpy laws on campaign finance. In one of the most head-shaking allegations against former Governor Rod Blagojevich, he has been accused of holding up state reimbursements to our leading children’s hospital until he received a $50,000 campaign contribution from the hospital’s CEO. Assuming the charges are true, we need to realize that to some extent every voter in the state is culpable. The main reason the ex-governor could attempt that shakedown is because Illinois has still not followed the overwhelming trend among the states and in the federal government to outlaw contributions of that size – and because Illinois voters have not tossed out of office the representatives who have long refused to enact those limitations. The law in this case refused to draw an obvious boundary on misbehavior, and our state has suffered national embarrassment as a result.

In the end, my three rules put the burden where it belongs in a democracy: not just on politicians, whose lives and personalities make them vulnerable to self-interest, but on the citizens and voters whom they are supposed to serve. We need to be diligent managers and bosses of our democracy if we want it to work for all of us.