Word: toweritis
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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These sensationalized aspects of the Tower battle are riveting, but they distract from far more universal questions about the conduct of public officials. The reason ethics in Government seems so tiresome is that the goal has become obscured in a legalistic fog of disclosure requirements, recusations and blind trusts. Lost in the mist are commonsense standards for integrity in Government like these...
...Tower's just-say-no theatrics pale in comparison with the price paid by Louis Sullivan, who was approved last week as Secretary of Health and Human Services. To avoid possible confirmation complications, Sullivan renounced all claims to nearly $500,000 in severance pay and deferred compensation legally owed him by the Morehouse School of Medicine. Even Senate Democrats wondered aloud if Sullivan's excessive concern with appearances did not overstep the bounds of financial prudence. Meanwhile, George Bush's ethics commission solemnly debated whether a top Government official should be entitled to royalties if he composed a hit song...
Small wonder that fashionable opinion in Washington is now having second thoughts about this sudden overdose of ethics. Take Bush, who in late January declared that his commitment to the highest ethical standards "is not, believe me, a fad or some passing fancy." Of course, this was before Tower began to crumble and it was discovered that Secretary of State James Baker owned an estimated $2.9 million worth of Chemical Bank stock while he was Treasury Secretary with policymaking influence over the treatment of the bank's shaky Third World loans. These days the President sounds less like a patrician...
...question remains: How clean a regime in Washington should Americans demand? It is difficult to extract general rules of conduct from the Tower inferno because so many of the facts remain in dispute. Certainly America cannot afford a Defense Secretary with an untreated drinking problem. The issue is how closely this description fits Tower. There are also legitimate concerns raised by the widespread, but not unequivocally documented, tales of Tower's predatory behavior toward women. If true, the allegations of sexual high jinks seem to reflect a pattern of reckless and perhaps unbalanced behavior that should disqualify Tower for such...
Second Trips Through the Revolving Door Are Dangerous. Tower left the arms- control talks in Geneva in 1986 with the clear sense that after 25 years in public office, it was now time to get rich. With this sense of entitlement, he promptly lined up more than $750,000 in consulting work with six leading defense contractors. To believe Tower, he provided them with little more than the "enlightened judgment" they could just as easily get from reading the papers and dropping by a few academic think tanks. If true, it appears that Tower was vastly overpaid for his services...