What's Wrong

By WALTER SHAPIRO

"Just about every place you look, things are looking up. Life is better -- America's back -- and people have a sense of pride they never thought they'd feel again."

-- Voice-over from 1984 Ronald Reagan TV commercial

Once again it is morning in America. But this morning Wall Street financiers are nervously scanning the papers to see if their names have been linked to the insider-trading scandals. Presidential candidates are peeking through drawn curtains to make sure that reporters are not staking out their private lives. A congressional witness, deeply involved in the Reagan Administration's secret foreign policy, is huddling with his lawyers before facing inquisitors. A Washington lobbyist who once breakfasted regularly in the White House mess is brooding over his investigation by an independent counsel. In Quantico, Va., the Marines are preparing to court-martial one of their own. In Palm Springs, Calif., a husband-and-wife televangelist team, once the adored cynosures of 500,000 faithful, are beginning another day of seclusion.

Such are the scenes of morning in the scandal-scarred spring of 1987. Lamentation is in the air, and clay feet litter the ground. A relentless procession of forlorn faces assaults the nation's moral equanimity, characters linked in the public mind not by any connection between their diverse dubious deeds but by the fact that each in his or her own way has somehow seemed to betray the public trust: Oliver North, Robert McFarlane, Michael Deaver, Ivan Boesky, Gary Hart, Clayton Lonetree, Jim and Tammy Bakker, maybe Edwin Meese, perhaps even the President. Their transgressions -- some grievous and some petty -- run the gamut of human failings, from weakness of will to moral laxity to hypocrisy to uncontrolled avarice. But taken collectively, the heedless lack of restraint in their behavior reveals something disturbing about the national character. America, which took such back-thumping pride in its spiritual renewal, finds itself wallowing in a moral morass. Ethics, often dismissed as a prissy Sunday School word, is now at the center of a new national debate. Put bluntly, has the mindless materialism of the '80s left in its wake a values vacuum?

America has been through these orgies of moral self-flagellation before. Sometimes the diagnosis was far more dire than the disease. Intellectuals reacted to the TV quiz-show scandals of the late 1950s with an outrage that now seems comically disproportionate to the offense; a prominent political science professor wrote at the time, "The moral fiber of America itself stands revealed." Just as the Iran-contra hearings began as a road-show Watergate, it is easy to find other 20th century parallels to today's eviscerated ethics. As New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan puts it, "If you want to read about Tammy Bakker, read Sinclair Lewis. If you want to read about insider trading, read Ida Tarbell."

It is tempting to argue, as Moynihan does, that the current scandals are mostly linked by coincidence. Ethical introspection, after all, is at odds with the pragmatism of the national culture. It is not accidental that the country's favored metaphor is sports: a factual world of detailed rules and final scores, where armchair disputes can be resolved by instant replays. Questions of what constitutes right and wrong are far more troubling, but there comes a time in the life of a nation when they must be addressed, not avoided.

To some extent, the problem starts at the top. Either through his actions or inactions, and certainly through the tone he has set, Ronald Reagan has contributed to the current mood of laissez-faire laxness. Of course, the President, who finds such difficulty in taking responsibility for the conduct of his own National Security Council, cannot be blamed for the indiscretions of a Democratic presidential candidate and the peccadilloes of a popular preacher. But moral leadership "should come from people in public office," argues Sissela Bok, a professor of philosophy at Brandeis University. "Aristotle said that people in government exercise a teaching function. Among other things, we see what they do and think that is how we should act. Unfortunately, when they do things that are underhanded or dishonest, that teaches too."

The President's personal decency is not in question. But nowadays, as he stumbles through answers about what he does not think he remembers and skirts the moral issues involved, he seems to have forfeited, indeed squandered, his role as the nation's moral father. Then too, he has helped set the tenor of the times: the man behind the bully pulpit must also be judged by the content of his sermons.

No better symbol exists of the public philosophy of the Reagan era than the Adam Smith neckties worn proudly by presidential confidants. As President, Reagan has fused this faith in the economic invisible hand with the rugged individualism of the "Sagebrush Rebellion." Government is always seen as a rapacious tax collector standing between businessmen and the creation of wealth. The result is an Administration whose clarion call is "Enrich thyself." For Reagan, money is the measure of achievement, and he has left no doubt that he prefers the company of the wealthy. McFarlane, shortly after his suicide attempt in February, told the New York Times of the frustrations he felt as National Security Adviser: "Shultz and Cap Weinberger and Don Regan and the Vice President had built up businesses and made great successes of themselves. I haven't done that. I had a career in the bureaucracy. I didn't really quite qualify. It didn't do any good to know a lot about arms control if nobody listened."

Among other undesirable effects, this view that wealth is the measure of all men tends to exalt the individual at the expense of the community. "No longer do we have an endowment mentality that asks what we can contribute to an organization," says Sociologist David Riesman of Harvard University. "What we now have is a transaction mentality." Few Americans succumbed to the magic of the marketplace as cynically as the Bakkers. Last week the new officials of their ministry took reporters on a tour of the Fort Mill, S.C., hotel suite they used, which features gold-plated fixtures in the bathrooms and a 50-ft.- long closet lighted by chandeliers. Soon after that, reports surfaced that the ministry could not account for $92 million.

Against the societal backdrop of value-free self-indulgence, it is not surprising that some in the Administration have been motivated by a desire to advance themselves rather than the public interest. More than 100 Reagan appointees have come under some cloud of impropriety. Last week an independent counsel began to investigate Attorney General Meese's role in soliciting defense contracts for the scandal-plagued Wedtech Corp.; Meese has associates who have worked for the Bronx, N.Y., firm.

Reagan, for all his talk of a return to "family values," has been as permissive as an Aquarian parent over the transgressions of his official family, and that has contributed to the moral lassitude. Long after Deaver began peddling his government connections with an avidity that was shocking even by jaded Washington standards, he retained his White House pass and was a frequent guest of the First Family. Even last week, when asked about former Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan, who awaits a verdict in his New York fraud trial, the President loyally declared to newsmagazine reporters, "Frankly, I found him to be a man of great integrity."

But the "sleaze factor" in the Reagan Administration is merely symptomatic of the materialistic excess that has turned the 1980s into the "My decade," a time when by one's possessions thou shall be known and judged. Deaver reflected this sense of excess when, as part of the ruling troika in the White House in 1981, he loudly complained that he could not live on $60,000 a year. Avarice perhaps had its roots in the run-up in middle-class housing prices in the 1970s, which broke down the traditional connection between wealth and work. The taming of inflation unleashed the stock market, which made investors behave like extras from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. This frenzy of getting and spending made anyone living outside the money culture, like government officials, feel like suckers.

In The Gilded Age, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner depict the boom mentality of the post-Civil War years: "He was born into a time when all young men of his age caught the fever of speculation, and expected to get on in the world by the omission of some of the regular processes which have been appointed from of old." What railroad men and land speculators were to the 1870s, investment bankers and risk arbitragers are to the 1980s. Perhaps a , modern-day Thorstein Veblen could explain the eagerness with which moneymen like Boesky vied with one another in acquiring the luxurious trappings of a baronial life-style. But the insider-trading scandal, a grotesque perversion of the Reagan free-market ethos, was perhaps the inevitable consequence of the gospel of wealth run amuck.

McFarlane's testimony last week conveyed a far different moral lesson: how easily America as a nation has come to accept public hypocrisy. With his uninflected answers and his stolid manner, his face puffy from strain and fatigue, McFarlane radiated the melancholy of moral responsibility. All his enemies were within, as a good soldier tried to square his own misguided conduct with internal standards of honor and integrity. In the depths of his soul, McFarlane had been tested and found wanting, and it was that shame he could not help conveying.

There was something sadly anachronistic about McFarlane's performance. Unlike his fellow players in America's current immorality tales, he exuded a sense of remorse, repentance, shame. He knew he had done wrong, he said. He was sorry. He deserved to be punished. How odd! This kind of guilt, this assuming of moral responsibility for one's actions, has all but vanished from public discourse. It is almost as if the closest glimpse the nation got of honor last week came from seeing it in a mirror: a man had acted with dishonor, saw it for what it was, and came forth to bear witness that there is indeed still a difference between right and wrong.

If some of the others tainted by dishonor, deceit and hypocrisy were to show a similar ability to understand their moral accountability for their actions, perhaps an air of redemption would ensue. But the new American gospel is damage control, using the arts of public relations to deflect blame. "Mistakes were made," was President Reagan's explanation for the Iran- contra affair. His absolute refusal to admit even the slightest responsibility for the ethical chaos around him is telling.

Senator Hart, too, sought to deflect responsibility, first claiming that his only mistake was not realizing that his meetings with Donna Rice could be "misconstrued," then blaming the media for the mess he was in. Even Jim Bakker, who by profession alone should have an intimate acquaintance with the theological concept of sin, resisted simply confessing his dalliance with Jessica Hahn. Instead, Bakker insisted that his troubles were all part of a "diabolical plot" by rival preachers.

Infinitely more damaging to public trust were the President's deceptive and contradictory statements on selling arms to Iran and negotiating for hostages. Jerome Wiesner, former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reflects deep concern when he says, "I am very upset by the ethical behavior that will make people believe that lying by our Government is natural." Confessing errors has never, of course, been part of the Reagan magic. For six years, as America's debt soared past $2 trillion, the President refused to admit that George Bush was right when he said during the 1980 primaries that trying to balance the budget by cutting taxes was "voodoo economics."

Some of this is standard political gamesmanship, and the debt problem stems from actions -- and inactions -- by Congress as well as the White House. But the Iran-contra affair exposes a far more disturbing undertone to the Reagan Administration: the belief that some laws are little more than inconvenient pieces of paper. It is now clear that the Reagan team consciously set out to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Boland amendment, which banned U.S. military aid to the contras. This same wink-and-nod approach to legality has often been apparent in the Administration's languid enforcement of civil rights statutes. The freewheeling business climate also owes a large debt to the President's none-too-secret hostility to many forms of economic regulation.

Other recent scandals have their roots in a similar do-your-own-thing attitude toward rules. Marine guards at the Moscow embassy bristled at strictures forbidding fraternization with foreign nationals, particularly Soviet citizens. For years many on Wall Street have held a cavalier attitude toward insider-trading laws. No one is really hurt by such abuses, they claimed. And besides, they complained, arbitragers, who buy and sell stocks on rumors of takeovers, often troll the gray areas of law. That is why it was perhaps only natural that Boesky's profitable relationship with Martin Siegel, the former co-head of mergers and acquisitions at Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., began with the sharing of mutually advantageous information. But before federal investigators stepped in, Siegel was peddling takeover tips to Boesky in exchange for briefcases filled with cash.

The murkiness of insider-trading regulations is an example of why some leading moralists worry about an excessively legalistic approach to defining ) ethical behavior. "Take corruption on Wall Street," says Donald Shriver, president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City. "There are points where we think dishonesty is wrong even if it is legal."

Certainly the spate of post-Watergate reform legislation has been undermined by unintended consequences. Campaign-spending laws spawned a proliferation of political-action committees. Strictures against lobbying by former Government officials have failed to halt revolving-door Reaganism. The very act of drawing statutory limits almost seems to guarantee that most behavior will cluster just this side of legality. As Education Secretary William Bennett puts it, "What I worry about is a legislator who says we have an ethics crisis, let's do something about it."

Any moral crusade will run smack into the messages conveyed by America's celebrity-obsessed national culture. A few moments in the limelight can mean big bucks: a book contract, a speaking tour, a TV docudrama. All Fawn Hall had to do was reveal that she helped North destroy documents, and suddenly Actress Farrah Fawcett was on the phone with plans to make Hall the heroine of a feature film. Sydney Biddle Barrows discovered there was even more money to be made from talking coyly around the subject of sex than in running an upmarket escort service. She sold her book for $250,000, and Candice Bergen will portray her in the film version of Mayflower Madam. Ethical distinctions are quickly lost as talk-show appearances and gala opening-night parties become schools for scandal.

Reagan, in discussing the investigations of his Administration during his interview with newsmagazine reporters last week, said, "I'd like to point out that things of this kind have been going on for a long time." The blame, he argued, was not his. "I am for morality. In fact, I wish there was more of it taught in our schools." He did concede, however, that the long list of transgressions by the Marines, Boesky, the Bakkers and others has bred a "kind of cynicism on the part of the people."

Such cynicism may be unjustified as the nation struggles to regain its integrity amid all the troubling revelations about covert wars and secret trysts. Perhaps if the provocations are strong enough, Americans will shed their too-easy tolerance of hypocrisy and greed. But the longing for moral regeneration must constantly vie with an equally strong aspect of America's national character, self-indulgence. It is an inner tension that may animate ( political life for years to come. For in the end, as Jimmy Carter once promised, America will, for better or for worse, get a "Government as good as its people."

With reporting by Barrett Seaman and Laurence I. Barrett/Washington, with other bureaus