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Days of whine and poses; John Tower's lament - and what it misses
Washington Monthly, March, 1991 by Steven Waldman
Nunn created a new standard for judging drinking. He looked for evidence not of whether drinking affected Tower's job performance but of whether Tower had been an alcoholic. Nunn concluded there had been "a pattern of the abuse in the seventies [that] made incidents in the eighties assume more significance." Then, the question became not, "Does Tower drink occasionally now," but, "Did Tower ever address his problem?" Nunn's conclusion: "I could find no point of where [the pattern] was recognized and dealt with, and that was all the way up to the late eighties." In other words, an alcoholic cannot cure himself by drinking a bit less; he has to stop and face his problem. So the fact that Tower continued to drink, even if not quite as much, was damning. Nunn may have developed this more inclusive-and sensible-standard merely as an excuse to get Tower, or he may have been influenced by something from his past: Tower notes that Nunn worked for several years on the staff of Senator Herman Talmadge without realizing that Talmadge was an alcoholic, perhaps convincing Nunn that the Lampshade Standard was unrealistic.
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Altogether unreliable sources
But Tower has every right to fume over some of the other techniques used during his confirmation hearings. The most commonly misused standard in ethics debates is the "appearance of impropriety" test. In the discussions about the Keating Five, Tower, and other scandals, ostensibly scrupulous ethics monitors have said that a particular legislator's actions weren't improper per se but created the appearance of wrongdoing. "The perception is there," John Glenn said in arguing against Tower's nomination on the floor of the Senate. "The perception [of a drinking problem] is in the press. I cannot verify [it], but it is a perception that is out." Glenn's remarks were truly scurrilous because he repeated the charges without knowing whether they were true, simply on the grounds that some people thought they were. If this standard were applied against Glenn, a Keating Fiver, he would get censured for sure.
The Senate Armed Services Committee added the "public confidence" corollary to the "appearance of impropriety" test. Bad appearance matters, quite aside from the truth, because it damages public respect. After investigating whether Tower gave defense contractors classified information he obtained while a U.S. arms control negotiator, the committee concluded: "The committee has no evidence that Senator Tower provided his clients with classified information. In the committee's judgment, however, this situation created the appearance of using public office for private gain and casts doubt on his ability to command public confidence in the integrity of the system." This argument is like a criminal court judge saying, "We have no proof that this man is a burglar, but the popular perception says that he is, so the public will lose faith in this court if we do not convict him."
The appearance test should be used only when misdeeds are so hard to prove that one must look at secondary evidence. After all, the appearance isn't wrong because it looks bad but because it is a reasonable indicator that something bad actually happened. A smoking gun isn't damning because smoke is dangerous but because it hints that a bullet was fired.
