When corruption hits a wall of fog

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 11, 1997 | by Jamie Dettmer

They were incredulous in the public gallery The 71-year-old former politician initially denied having received while in office a $2 million payment from a supermarket magnate. Then a few days later he acknowledged he was the beneficiary "as a matter of probability." And in a breathtaking statement he added that financial affairs "were peripheral to his life." He then said he had "no specific knowledge" of his finances--he left all that sort of thing to his accountant.

America? Fred Thompson's Senate investigation into illicit campaign fund-raising? No, Ireland and the current explosive hearings into supermarket baron Ben Dunne's generosity to politicians in general and his largesse to four-time prime minister Charlie Haughey in particular.

Ever since the flamboyant Haughey arrived on the political scene back in the 1960s it was common knowledge that "The Boss," as he's nicknamed, was as crooked as a corkscrew--Charlie boy could see profit in something as ephemeral as a breeze flickering over an Irish bog.

And his testimony a the ongoing Dunne hearings has been vintage Haughey--defiant and roguish. Note those phrases, "a matter of probability" and "no specific knowledge." You have to love the sheer audacity of the old boy -- I did begrudgingly when I covered him in the mid-1980s. The only other politician I know who is as nimble-footed, one able to come out with such gloriously disarming remarks, is William Jefferson Clinton, who surely once must have sat at the feet of The Boss and been tutored there in the dark arts of politics.

When Haughey first became prime minister an outraged opposition leader, Garrett Fitzgerald, took to the floor of the Irish parliament and announced to the nation that The Boss wasn't to be trusted. He was a "flawed character" and Ireland would become corrupt with his ilk at the helm. Fitzgerald's almost-Shakespearean warning--he looked like King Lear raging on the storm-battered heath--was dismissed as bad manners. Only after the stain of corruption spread and contaminated virtually every institution of state was good old Charlie boy forced out of office.

"The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to everyone save the man of absolute genius," H.L. Mencken once wrote. As a seer, Fitzgerald was touched by genius--and, for a moment in 1992, so too was California's "Governor Moonbeam," Jerry Brown, who out of all Clinton's opponents in the primary season five years ago understood there were serious flaws in the character of the Clintons. Recall it was Brown who had the temerity--the "bad manners"--to bring up Hillary Rodham Clinton's dubious and highly profitable futures trading. Brown was talking on prime-time TV, but no one listened.

A handful of independent counsels later and a political landscape littered with Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate--have we left anything out?--and we're back where we were at the beginning of Clinton's first term. The president is either the most wronged American politician of the 20th century ... or he's been graced with the luck of the Irish. If he's innocent, then the never-ending congressional and federal inquiries have been outrageous witch-hunts, undemocratic instruments created by partisan enemies to defeat the will of the people. If culpable, his escape so far has to be reckoned a Houdini-act worthy of comparison with O.J. Simpson's acquittal.

The trail of documents and the heap of political corpses of aides and friends who've been prepared to fall on their swords would suggest Clinton is the political equivalent of O.J. He has a "no specific knowledge" excuse for every occasion. Wrongs were inadvertent. Mistakes were made. Will the illicit fund-raising of 1996 prove to be the scandal too far?

We have our doubts. The Victorian novelist Charles Dickens knew a thing or two about corruption and how it is spread and envelopes. In Bleak House he selected fog as a metaphor to bring out the insidiousness of corruption--in his case, the target was the courts and the legal system. "Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river.... Fog on the Essex Marshes, fog on the Kentish Heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out in the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwhales of barges and small boats ... [and] at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery."

Fog not only settles on everything, it blinds as well -- and to find its source you need eyes as keen as Dickens'. In Bleak House not many laws actually are broken. Corruption isn't always indictable--although Haughey's probably is--and it often involves moral rather than legal wrongs. Corruption can infect a body politic when people automatically take recourse in excuses such as "everyone does it." And before long no one has any "specific knowledge" and playing fast and loose is put down invariably to inadvertence, and everyone really does do it--from presidents to those who scrutinize them on congressional committees. Fog everywhere.