Tilting at Windmills - Column

Washington Monthly, May, 2001 by Charles Peters

SPEAKING OF NEEDS FOR MONEY FOR the District of Columbia, did you know the city's sewer system is 130 years old? Some of it is actually made of wood. "During periods of heavy rains," reports the Associated Press' Darrell Holly, "storm water and waste water ,nix together enabling raw sewage to flow unimpeded into the waterways [Rock Creek and the Anacostia and Potomac rivers] that ultimately drain into the Chesapeake Bay?" $12 million is needed to begin fixing the problem in the next year. Where is it going to come from?

AFTER A YEAR OR SO IN POWER, new administrations tend to become defensive about whatever deficiencies are revealed in the government they oversee. Up until then, they can usually get away with--and often are justified in--blaming it on the other guys in the preceding administration. But sometimes the defensiveness is so much a part of the new gang that it begins to show up immediately. Consider Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (on whom you will find more in "Who's Who"). When the army recently lowered the readiness rating of its 3rd infantry division, Wolfowitz tried to get the rating reversed, according to Paul Bedard of U.S. News and 133rid Report, even though the readiness decline could have been blamed on the Clinton administration.

The champion of this form of paranoia was Richard Nixon. When the Pentagon Papers were leaked, he exploded and got the Justice Department to try to keep The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing them--even though all of the misdeeds exposed in the papers happened in the Kennedy-Johnson period. It seems that Nixon so hated leaks that helped the truth get out that he instinctively sought suppression.

THE MONTHLY'S CONFLICT-OF-interest policy, as Christopher Buckley suggests on page 48, is a bit unconventional. In Buckley's case, we have twice asked him to review books we already knew he liked. If we respect the reviewer, we're not bothered by knowing his sentiment in advance. What harm is there? Looking for the harm is the key to our conflict-of-interest policy. It's not whether an official stands to gain personally from a decision, although that is of coursegrounds for suspicion, but whether, when all the evidence is considered, the decision was a good one or, at least, mainly made for good reasons. Too often reporters jump to the conclusion that the conflict itself makes the official action wrong. Every newsroom should have engraved on the wall Michael Kinsley's question, first asked in these pages 20-years ago: Is it a conflict of interest for a mother to have a second child?

Government can decide, often wisely, to remove officials from temptation by forbidding even the appearance of a conflict of interest, but that simply does not mean that every official involved in a conflict of interest always acts wrongly or for wrong motives. What we find least attractive about our colleagues in the press is when, because they have spotted a conflict, they refuse to even consider the possibility of a right action or a good motive.