ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 15, 1994                   TAG: 9403170027
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ROBERT RENO
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SCANDALS AREN'T WHAT THEY WERE

IF GIBBON or Macaulay were to lend their genius to chronicling the disintegration of American civilization, they might write: ``Americans were losing their cultural self-assurance. By 1994, even their political scandals had become prosaic.''

Some would argue it's been all downhill since the Grant administration. If Ulysses and Julia had been found dabbling in Arkansas land speculation, everyone would have said what a blessed relief that the Grants were into something wholesome, the better to distract voters from such multiple enormities of corruption then raging around the president as the Whiskey Ring, the Credit Mobilier scandal and the secretary of war's acceptance of bribes.

But it was during the Harding administration that scandal enjoyed its golden age. That the Teapot Dome mess flourished is not surprising given subsequent revelations of the private lives of the Hardings. What lovesick president would have had time to notice his interior secretary running off with the nation's oil reserves if he was married to a battle-ax as vigilant as the redoubtable Florence Harding?

Warren Harding's biographer tells us the Secret Service had to guard the White House closets from the prowling Florence when he stole moments in the darkness with his mistress, thrashing amid the cloaks amd boots.

The Franklin Roosevelt presidency, long as it lasted, was astonishingly bereft of scandal. Perhaps that is why by the time of the Truman administration, the coinage of corruption had become so debased that the acceptance of a few deep freezers and mink coats by administration officials was thought to have doomed the Truman presidency in 1948. A vicuna coat accepted by the White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, from a millionaire who later went to jail, caused the most protracted scandal of the Eisenhower administration.

Lyndon Johnson's private and political finances would have been troublesome to a lesser mortal, and red meat to a lawyer like Robert Fiske. Today, beside such victories as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Medicare Act of 1966, and such failures as the Vietnam War, they fit into history merely as corollary to the Johnson legend, on the face of which no unprofitable land deal the size of Whitewater would be more than a speck.

Watergate, of course, sealed the fate of American presidential scandal, set the pattern of banality that persists and established the fortress mentality that has obsessed every White House staff since. Perhaps when Nixon drastically lowered the threshold for the sort of idiotic mischief and petty villainy thought appropriate to the time and attention of a president, he also drastically lowered the public standard for presidential behavior thought worthy of going into a national swoon about.

Robert Reno writes for Newsday.

L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service 


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