Word: affair
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Certainly, Lance must be given every chance to knock down all charges that are being made. The man's ordeal has been severe. But for the nation, the overriding issue is not Lance's difficulties or his fitness for office but just what the affair has revealed about Jimmy Carter. Although the situations are worlds apart in both kind and importance, that familiar Nixonian question is at least remotely relevant: What did he know and when did he know it? Indeed, as various investigations continued last week, some officials who had been involved in checking Lance's record prior...
Certainly, Carter has been hurt by the Lance affair. His reputation as the champion of ethical purity has been permanently tarnished?a point that Delaware's Republican Senator William Roth hammered home with devastating effectiveness last week merely by citing two Carter comments before the Ribicoff committee: "Just staying within the law will never be enough for a Carter campaign or a Carter Administration." And: "The Watergate tragedy showed that concealment of a mistake or impropriety can be more serious in some instances than the impropriety itself." Just how seriously Carter's effectiveness has been damaged is less clear...
...Jimmy Carter, the affair may be a domestic Bay of Pigs, on a far less serious level. John Kennedy shouldered the blame for that disaster and emerged from it scarred but, in a sense, enlarged. How Carter now concludes the Lance affair may well determine not only how bad his scars will be but also how capable he is of growing in the presidency. Blaming others for having failed to detect Lance's flaws, or denying that the appointment was a mistake, would do him no good and could damage him further. But if Carter were to assume full responsibility...
Outside, as these melodic strains were filling the cool evening, there was the jarring counterpoint of a growing political crisis. From Capitol Hill to Foggy Bottom, Congressmen, bureaucrats, journalists and their groupies hovered in offices near phones for new fragments from the Bert Lance affair...
This murky area of what is proper and improper is at the heart of the banking industry's worries about the Lance affair. As Comptroller of the Currency John Heimann declared in his report last month, the OMB director's finances raised "unresolved questions as to what constitutes acceptable banking practice." Bankers fear that congressional reformers will seize on the nationwide hue and cry over Lance to resolve those questions by further tightening of federal banking laws...