Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
J. PATRICK DOBEL
University of Washington
Scandals in their private lives have destroyed the careers of many promi-
nent American public officials. In recent years, the vice president of the
United States, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, seven gover-
nors, two chairs of the House Ways and Means Committee, the House
whip, five senators, more than 30 members of the House, and the head of
the FBI have resigned under pressure because of private scandals. Four
presidential campaigns have been ruined, and three Supreme Court nomi-
nations have been withdrawn due to scrutiny of the candidates’ private
lives. In the past 20 years, 32 people were convicted of treason, and in all
but one case, the individuals committed treason for private reasons involv-
ing money, sex, or substance abuse. Discussions over private matters of
friendship, economics, family, religion, or sexual relations have intruded
into campaigns, nominations, and even deliberations over career officials
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The author would like to thank Richare Zerbe, Walt Williams, Bob Plot-
nick, and Hubert Locke for their critical comments on various aspects of this article. He owes
a special debt to the reviewers who helped clarify the argument.
ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY, Vol. 30 No. 2, May 1998 115-142
© 1998 Sage Publications, Inc.
115
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116 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / May 1998
at all levels of government. The private lives of public officials have be-
come public with serious consequences for the quality of political life and
discourse. When President Clinton’s White House lawyer, Vincent Foster,
committed suicide, he left a despairing note complaining that in American
politics “ruining people is considered sport” (Apple, 1993).
Attacks on public figures’ private lives are as old as American politics.
The intensity of the modern focus on private lives, however, has occurred
for several reasons. First, the self-imposed restraint of the media to avert
their eyes from private lives of officials ended, whereas legal develop-
ments limited the libel claims that public officials could make against
malicious accusation (Sabato, 1991). Second, the decline of the political
parties has given the media more prominence as gatekeepers to office and
has made politics more person focused. Third, candidates and interest
groups exploit the new media standards and use private scandals to dis-
credit competitors and their positions. Finally, groups ranging from the
religious right to some feminists have questioned the validity of the dis-
tinction between public and private lives, thereby weakening the claims of
privacy that public officials might assert.
This article will argue the dilemma that the controversies over private
lives present arises from the clash of two legitimate moral claims. First,
individuals and public officials, in particular, have legitimate claims to
privacy. Second, principals and citizens have strong rights to information
about the persons who occupy public office. This conflict generates some
broad guidelines but leaves no clear and absolute demarcations between
public and private lives. This lack of definitive closure is aggravated
because modern politics and media coverage erode the privacy of public
officials. The article concludes with standards balancing a respect for pri-
vacy with legitimate scrutiny by which citizens and principals should
1
evaluate the private lives of public officials.
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Dobel / PRIVATE LIVES OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS 117
but people have the right to ask that the information not be considered in
certain judgments about them, much as a jury might be instructed to dis-
count certain information in its verdict. The actual content of privacy
rights are negotiated within a society and can change over time as privacy
claims are accommodated to other moral norms. Privacy is achieved
through internalized social practices that lead people to respect others’
privacy, such as when a person refuses to eavesdrop on a conversation,
averts his or her eyes when passing an open window, or discounts private
facts and focuses on competence in job decisions (Reiman, 1976).
Strong moral foundations ground the rights to privacy. First, they arise
from privacy’s intimate connection to personal autonomy and freedom.
Privacy underlies the capacity to take possession of one’s own life by
granting persons the capacity to stand back from the demands of public
life, peer pressure, or authority. People can reflect in solitude or with
friends or advisors to make sense of, reject, reshape, or accept the many
internalized dimensions of selfhood. Claims to protect one’s body from
involuntary intrusions form a foundation, but these protective claims
move quickly to encompass attributes of mind and spirit, such as thoughts,
emotions, religious beliefs, or intimacy. Privacy provides an antidote to
the incursions of socialized power into one’s psyche and physical world
(Rubenfeld, 1989).
Privacy gains greater moral worth from how it supports human rela-
tionships. Relations of intimacy and friendship need privacy to flourish.
The exclusionary and protective nature of the private realm can encourage
the risk taking and revelations through which intimacy and trust grow. Pri-
vacy abets the growth of common and shared experiences that become
foundations for reference and trust among human beings. Under the rubric
of private relations, individuals can legitimately, with no moral harm, pre-
fer some to others, such as family, friends, colleagues, or coreligionists
(Gerstein, 1978; Nagel, 1978). Privacy encourages cooperation and trust
within different types of relationships, ranging from personal and family
2
affiliations to clubs, economic partnerships, or religion. This enables the
individual to withhold or reveal the self to people in different ways and to
sustain a rich personal life, so that people can develop different types of
relations with different individuals and not have all relations reduced to
one transparent level (Rachels, 1975). Private relations allow a communal
sense to grow and to nourish many forms of social practice and association
3
(Lippke, 1989; Schoeman, 1992).
Privacy also contributes to critical judgment and free reflection. Indi-
viduals cannot judge and think with honest clarity when they must judge
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118 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / May 1998
in the public eye and under the scrutiny of others who possess authority,
power, and influence over them (Benn, 1975). Privacy encourages persons
to give and receive advice with honesty and care. Privacy also contributes
to creativity and innovation in life. Withdrawal from conventional
demands and scrutiny can provide the psychological or social freedom
from which to challenge accepted wisdom or find unique insight. All these
aspects counterpoise the world of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s
(1947) 1984, where every action is monitored by Big Brother. The antithe-
sis of privacy is slavery, where a person cannot have a private life or rela-
tions of intimacy or control over one’s body or creations (Patterson, 1982).
The right to privacy plays out as a complex moral and social practice. It
should not, however, be elevated to an irrefutable and opaque right.
Because claims of privacy can hide or exclude, they can be abused and can
hide harm or oppression. For instance, the privacy of family can protect
the rights of a spouse to abuse, or the private suffering of a cancer patient
hides that fact that the cancer was caused by the dumping of toxic wastes
by a private company. Any claim of privacy can be legitimately chal-
lenged by other moral claims and be renegotiated on those bases.
The moral realm of privacy has particular cogency for public officials.
Privacy provides the opportunity for individuals to reflect on actions and
practices and to recover from the physical and psychological demands of
public office. Private lives enable people to keep intimate relations alive
and meet obligations to family, friends, and partners that can wilt and be
neglected because of the demands of official life. Energy, insight, endur-
ance, and capacity for innovation and independent judgment for public
officials flow from the resilience and richness of their private lives. Their
private lives can support or limit the public obligations and provide other
sources of reference beyond interest groups and power (Dobel, 1992).
Democratic life can drive officials to make judgments on the basis of
short-term calculation goaded by public opinion. Privacy carves out a
realm for intimacy, reflection, grace, or prayer to restore persons and
anchor their moral lives. Strong private lives provide the moral resources
for officials to make judgments that move beyond public opinion but still
hold them accountable.
Contrary to some feminist commentary, privacy in public life has par-
4
ticular moral urgency for women and minorities. Women and minorities
often enter the public realm as outsiders, and social mores place stricter
limits on their acceptable behavior. Social myths that sustained their out-
sider status and limited their access to power often use claims about the
private place or insufficiencies of women and minorities. For women, in
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Dobel / PRIVATE LIVES OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS 119
All individuals start with a strong prima facie claim to privacy that lim-
its the ability of people to pry into their lives. The dilemma arises from the
legitimate moral rights of principals (and citizens acting as principals) to
evaluate the persons to whom they delegate power, responsibility, and
authority. Principals have a moral responsibility as citizens, overseers, or
superiors to ensure that the persons to whom they give career, appointed,
or elected office have the competence to do the job. As individuals who
will be subject to their actions, principals have an additional moral interest
in ensuring that officials will not abuse their power. The actual range of
areas of which principals have a right to know and how they should weigh
information depends on the structure of the office. Public office involves
what Michael Walzer calls separation, in which one realm has its own
moral logic and demands that are not necessarily continuous with,
although they may be grounded in, the rest of one’s moral life (Nagel,
1978; Walzer, 1983). In this sense, the domains of private life would cover
the areas of life outside of competencies needed for the office and gener-
ally cover most events prior to the taking of office, such as private eco-
nomic relations, religious affiliations, friendships, familial and intimate
relations, recreation, sexual life, gift giving, personal pleasures and hob-
bies, thoughts, secrets, and even personal prejudices and beliefs.
In this tension between two moral claims, the rights of privacy suggest
that people should be judged only on the basis of what is relevant to their
performance. Any legitimate scrutiny of private lives should be linked to
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120 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / May 1998
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Dobel / PRIVATE LIVES OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS 121
asked for a government position, Hamilton refused because the man was
not competent to serve office. He revealed the entire sordid affair and
risked public humiliation over private actions rather than sacrifice public
honor (Ross, 1988, pp. 20-29; Rossiter, 1964, pp. 28-30).
The structure of public office, then, suggests the following legitimate
concerns for principals: accountability, delegation, honesty and promise
keeping, coercion and power over others, use of public resources, and
symbolic and ritual responsibilities. Morally, public officials derive their
authority from the claim to act on behalf of citizens (French, 1983, pp. 1-
45; Nagel, 1978). Citizens’ consent and obedience authorize their actions
and ground their legitimacy. Citizens finance their office. Public officials
act on behalf of laws that carry the full coercive control of the state behind
them. In theory, public officials are accountable to all citizens, and all citi-
zens are principals who have the right to acquire relevant knowledge about
the officials’ public performance, most clearly in elections where citizens
9
act directly as principals to elect and delegate.
The rights of citizens to acquire relevant information about public offi-
cials, however, are limited by delegation. Legal and moral delegations
remove the right to scrutinize lives from the general citizenry and place it
in hands of institutional principals (Burke, 1986). This delegation respects
privacy because it limits the number of people who have the moral warrant
to intrude into the privacy of officials. This changes, however, as individu-
als move to higher levels of responsibility and power. The higher the level
of responsibility, the more effective power and discretion an official has,
the more legitimate broad public scrutiny will be. Usually this implies that
career officials have the most protections, appointed officials less, and
elected legislators and executives the fewest privacy claims.
In this light, the moral structure of office can best be seen as obligations
10
held together by a web of promises and oaths. When persons take on pub-
lic responsibilities, they promise to abide by the standards, laws, rules, and
procedures that constitute and bound their positions. They pledge a good-
faith effort to perform conscientiously the tasks of their position and act
with the competence required by office. Personal honesty in making
promises and being accountable is basic to their legitimacy. Additionally,
officials control public resources that should be used with efficiency and
care. Often they stand at the intersections of wealth and creation and face
temptations to use government power and resources for personal gain. In
addition, some officials exercise considerable coercive power over the
lives of citizens, which can be abused to harm citizens (Kipnis, 1976).
Most official positions entail discretion. As power and responsibility
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126 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / May 1998
campaigns around that image (Sabato, 1981). The electronic media cre-
ates the illusion of intimacy, which persuades citizens that they know a
person based on the media image (Grove, 1992; Shickel, 1985). The
power of the image enables a public official like Ronald Reagan to inspire
confidence, despite the fact individuals may disagree with him on most
issues (Postman, 1986). In this world, citizens look to private lives to
reveal the quality of the person hidden by images.
The rules in American politics have fundamentally changed and are not
likely to return to earlier reticence about private lives. Public officials will
continue to use private lives as vehicles of attack or as warrants of their
worth. Citizens will look to private lives to provide clues about the integ-
rity of individuals. The incentives of the media and press amplify both
trends. Ironically, many editors and reporters cite the standards of rele-
vance discussed in this article as their justifications for exploring every
aspect of a person’s private life. The standards of relevance, however, are
generally meaningless for most of the modern media. Alternative media
sources and communication on the Internet, fringe political publications,
and television and print tabloids ensure that a wide range of morally irrele-
vant information about private lives enters the public forum. There are
very few moments when responsible mainstream journalism can now
even judge whether a story should be pursued. The media also engages in
“feeding frenzies” that indiscriminately dig up any aspects of personal
lives and throw them to the public to judge (Barker, 1994; Sabato, 1991).
In the words of one prominent journalist, the “character issue” has become
“an excuse to cover anything we want” (CNBC interview with Kurtz,
11
June 22, 1993).
In the mid-20th century, the press adhered to informal rules that pro-
tected the private lives of public officials. Such informal rules buttressed
the public integrity of President Franklin Roosevelt by both underplaying
his own physical infirmities and concealing the family discord and uncon-
ventional marital arrangement of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (Good-
win, 1994). On the other hand, they also covered up serious abuses, such
as the alcoholism that afflicted Wilbur Mills, Chair of the House Ways and
Means Committee, or the physical infirmities that debilitated President
John Kennedy (Reeves, 1993). The emergence of private scandals that had
clearly influenced public performance, as well as the investigative report-
ing successes of the 1970s, transformed the culture of the press and made
it far more skeptical of the private lives of public officials and far less toler-
ant of private abuses of public trust (Barker, 1994; Sabato, 1991). Given
the media’s power and resources, the capacity of public officials to
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128 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / May 1998
civility and a public realm where individuals can disagree, compete, and
deliberate without having conflict poison all other personal and social
relations. It reflects a noninstitutional politics where people, not parties or
institutions, become the focus of judgment and action.
The present approach to private lives of public officials inflicts serious
harm to civic life. First, many innocent human beings are hurt as they are
pulled into public scrutiny over private lives and relations of public offi-
cials (Longman, 1990, pp. 414-415, 420-421, 431-432). Second, the qual-
ity of life permitted to public officials has declined, and this discourages
others from entering public service. Third, the focus on private lives and
scandal often detracts from serious issues and trivializes concerns over
competence and policy. Fourth, this focus hurts the public service by
denying many worthy citizens a chance to serve. This is most telling when
attacks on private lives disqualify individuals from public service on the
basis of irrelevant attributes, such as sexual orientation or private activi-
ties that do not harm others or violate the public trust. The attacks gain
strength by legitimizing and encouraging the anger and discomfort of the
people who hold moral prejudices (Thompson, 1987, pp. 123-147)).
The collapse of public and private makes the excessive scrutiny of pri-
vate lives especially perilous to women entering public office. The past
rituals and rhetoric of public life excluded or questioned women’s ability
to act in public responsibilities. These norms were reinforced by expecta-
tions that limited women to private domains and defined strong limita-
tions on acceptable behavior. “Fallen” women had few resources to regain
status and credibility. Often their very entrance into the public domain
defined them as public women, an old term of insult as well as an imputa-
tion that they neglect their private obligations. The scrutiny of their private
lives can endanger their credibility in many more areas than men face. For
instance, no one would think to attack an absent father for devoting time to
public office rather than child rearing, but a woman can be challenged as
being an absent mother who is harming her children by devoting too much
time to public obligations (Matthews, 1992; Ryan, 1990). Consequently,
the collapse of private boundaries poses particular vulnerabilities for
women in public office.
The present political and media system does not have the capacity for
self-reform, given the incentives of politics and media. This means that
many qualified and proven public officials with strong public performance
records will continue to have aspects of their private lives exposed, even
when principals have no need for the information. In this case, principals,
especially citizens and overseers, must apply the second part of the right to
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Dobel / PRIVATE LIVES OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS 129
STANDARDS OF JUDGMENT
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132 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / May 1998
influences the advice handed on to the executive. This very personal pat-
tern of relations could have significant bearing on public decisions and
would be a legitimate focus of scrutiny.
Third, the use of official power to satisfy some private desires or to
effect private gain is not a private action but a public crime. Any claims of
privacy depend on the assurance that protected actions do not violate other
legal or moral claims. The misuse of office for financial gain or to extort
favors violates the trust of office and conditions on which people are
granted power; it disqualifies people from public service and has no pri-
vacy protections.
The abuse of public office can be most notorious when individuals use
the power of office to extort or gratify their own personal desires. They can
lose the capacity to separate their private desires from their public actions.
Sexual relations, which because of their intimacy enjoy a prima facie pri-
vacy protection, can nonetheless provide vivid examples of abuse of pub-
lic trust. For instance, Representative Daniel B. Crane was correctly cen-
sured for having sexual relations with a 16-year-old White House page, as
was Representative Gary Studds (Congressional Quarterly, 1992, pp. 39-
41). Wayne Hayes, a powerful Committee Chair in the House of Repre-
sentatives, placed Elisabeth Ray, his mistress, on the payroll as a typist
despite the fact that she could not type or even answer the phones compe-
tently (Congressional Quarterly, 1992, pp. 47-48, 88-89; Ross, 1988, pp.
240-244). These actions violated basic norms of office and deserved expo-
sure and censure.
The capacity of private desires and interest to subvert public trust can
open some troubling areas of life to public scrutiny and judgment. Public
officials should know these distinctions and separate their public and pri-
vate lives to avoid abuses of power. One of the most consistent traits of
individuals who abuse government office for their own aims is the inabil-
ity to sever private desires from public actions (Dobel, 1984, 1992). The
Attorney General of the Reagan Administration, Edwin Meese, was cited
by government prosecutors for this inability to separate public office from
friendship or private interests when he used his stature to solicit business
for friends (F. Z. Nebeker, memorandum, September 12, 1988). Meese
demonstrated a moral blindness that could not distinguish private desires
and commitments from the obligations of a public official. The corruption
of power often subverts judgment and leads individuals to favor personal
goals over loyalty to public institutions (Dobel, 1978, 1984).
Fourth, to the extent it is legitimate to inquire into private lives, the
information should be limited to the smallest possible circle of people
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Dobel / PRIVATE LIVES OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS 133
who oversee and evaluate individuals. Although this is easier for career
officials, it places strong obligations on those who approve appointed offi-
cials to respect this limit despite political temptations to release informa-
tion. When private information comes out beyond that circle, it should be
discounted as “none of our business.”
Fifth, sometimes no public or performance record exists or is only
weak and limited. At others, individuals are moving from one domain to
another, where no clear analogy between skills and stakes exist. In these
cases, the public record alone is often not strong enough to enable princi-
pals to assess a person’s worthiness. In these cases, principals can look to
other private areas to discover the quality of promise keeping, caring,
integrity, strength of will, competence, and judgment.
Given the importance of democratic accountability, the temptations
and potential abuses of public office, and the moral structure of office, a
person’s integrity and ability to keep promises matter profoundly. If
doubts exist in these areas, it can sometimes open the controversial area of
sexual relations and fidelity. In other countries, marital infidelity is some-
times accepted, even as a point of honor, and there seems to be little evi-
dence that marital fidelity correlates with public honor and effectiveness.
Yet, when a public record is weak or troubling, individuals’fidelity to their
spouses could reflect their own basic capacities for keeping promises or
for disciplining their desires for public purpose. Infidelity, especially
durable and consistent, suggests a capacity for extended deceit to inti-
mates and friends.
Constant womanizing, moreover, because males are usually the issue,
can manifest not just problems with commitment but with women—a dis-
respect or one-dimensional obsession with them as objects of desire and
satisfaction. It suggests a capacity to discount the pain inflicted on spouses
and family by betrayal and deceit. People committed to a political order
that accords women equal respect and opportunity may be cued to deep
and disturbing attitudes toward more than half of humanity. Incessant
marital infidelity can alert citizens to the extent that politicians are more
driven by the need for power and adulation, because the womanizing and
15
obsessive ambition may reveal the same character source.
On the other hand, marriages can wither and die or be hollowed out
within public life just as they can everywhere. The death of a marriage is
no clear measure of the quality of a person. In some cases, commitment to
a dead marriage for the sake of children can manifest a strong moral char-
acter, and spouses may develop their own uneasy sexual agreements to
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134 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / May 1998
keep the marriage afloat. Other times, marriages can die because public
commitment and devotion to office denied married couples time for inti-
macy and communication. These complexities suggest that despite its
potential to illuminate character, infidelity is seldom a clear or helpful
indicator of public integrity.
Sixth, if people make their private lives an issue in their public images,
they open their private lives to judgment in those areas, especially if they
had claimed their private lives were proof of their integrity. Similarly,
when a person attacks others for transgressions or proposes regulating the
private lives of citizens, his or her own adherence to such standards is open
to legitimate scrutiny. This enables citizens to judge the public hypocrisy
or the authentic capacity for truth telling and the moral consistency of a
person.
Principals may legitimately seek to discover if an official is genuine
and believes what he or she says. If an official is living with another person
or having an affair, this may be legitimate—if uncomfortable—knowl-
edge if he or she projected a different image. In the 1890s, W.C.P. Breck-
enridge, a Congress member from Kentucky, thrilled the nation with his
impassioned defenses of “chastity as the foundation, the cornerstone of
human society” (Ross, 1988, p. 133). “A pure home makes pure govern-
ment,” he argued (Ross, 1988, p. 133). These positions created a national
constituency for him. In 1884, Madeline Pollard proved that he had
seduced her at age 17 and fathered two children by her. The scandal rightly
destroyed Breckenridge’s career (Ross, 1988, pp. 131-134). President Bill
Clinton found that his moral leadership on family values rang hollow for
many people given his own promiscuous life. In 1980, Robert Bauman, a
leading Republican ultraconservative in the House of Representatives,
was charged with soliciting sex from a 16-year-old nude male dancer in a
gay bar. Bauman, married for 20 years and a father of four, had cospon-
sored legislation to bar gay men and women from housing and jobs. Not
unjustly, Bauman lost his family, job, and career (Congressional Quar-
terly, 1992, p. 90; Dionne, 1994; Ross, 1988, pp. 266-268).
A person’s private life can also become relevant by a public decision of
the official. When President Clinton appointed Roberta Achtenberg as
Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the open fact
that she was a lesbian made her intimate private life a public issue given
the political climate. Achtenberg and President Clinton chose to battle the
issue for the very purpose of breaking the public barrier to service
imposed by prejudices against open lesbians and gays. They sought to
confirm in a public forum that a person could be a competent and effective
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Dobel / PRIVATE LIVES OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS 135
professional no matter his or her sexual orientation and that the private
issue of one’s sexual orientation should not be central to the decision to
hire, elect, and appoint (“Helms to Fight,” 1993; “Senate Confirms,”
1993). At the same time, President Bill Clinton made his marriage a cen-
tral issue in assessments of him by claiming that he and his wife Hillary
constituted a team. He argued as part of his appeal that he respected and
listened to his wife’s advice and gave great weight to it. In making this a
direct point of the campaign and granting her significant influence in the
formation of his administration and health policy, he made his wife and
their relationship a legitimate issue of scrutiny (Fineman & Miller, 1993;
Pear, 1993).
Seventh, some private actions can subvert an individual’s ability to live
up to the symbolic dimensions of an office. Many public offices possess a
dimension beyond competence or policy commitments—they require
officials to exercise moral leadership (Rhode, 1988). When individuals
represent an institution and its purposes, their actions take on powerful
symbolic aspects that contribute to the legitimacy of the institution. Argu-
ments about this can be easy to abuse, especially if generalized to the
claim that a public official must represent a set of idealized values that are
ideologically correct. Officials, however, should act in a manner that
inspires respect for their position and the laws and policies that they repre-
sent. In an illustrative case, Appeals Court Justice Douglas Ginsberg’s
name was withdrawn from nomination for the Supreme Court when it was
revealed that he had broken the law and smoked marijuana in his office
with students as a law professor at Harvard. Many other public officials
escaped censure by revealing they too had smoked marijuana at other
times, but they argued that a past action in their youth should not be the
grounds to judge their present character. What gave the Ginsberg charges
cogency was Ginsberg’s very limited history as a judge combined with the
habitual and recent nature of his actions. In addition, he did it in a work-
place setting with students whom he should be teaching to respect the law.
Furthermore, he was nominated by a president who had mounted a
national campaign against drug abuse, and as a judge himself, he would
have to make judgments about the laws dealing with drug use. None of
these charges addressed competence, but focused quite rightly on the cost
to the legitimacy of the office and the person’s credibility in that office
(“Ginsberg Withdraws,” 1987).
Eighth, when private and unneeded information comes to principals’
attention, principals have special obligations to dismiss or discount the
information if possible. In assessing it, they should focus on the integrity
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136 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / May 1998
and character of the official. This means that principals should distinguish
between an isolated mistake, a personal experiment, a tragedy, and a char-
acter flaw. Singular events or mistakes or tragedies matter far less in
assessing someone than patterns of actions over time that reveal basic
lineaments of character. Citizens need to fit patterns together and discover
when public and private actions reinforce each other or reveal discontinui-
ties or when they reflect youth and immaturity that a person has outgrown.
In The Laws, Plato exposes would-be rulers to vices so that they have
experiences that illuminate what is at stake. Living a boring life is not the
same as being a mature, wise, or fine human being. Overcoming failure,
personal wreckage, or alcoholism, or rebuilding a marriage or life can
demonstrate dimensions of character and strength as well as extend a per-
son’s moral imagination. For these reasons, it also makes sense to exercise
a statute of limitations on incidents that occurred years ago, even if ger-
mane to performance, if they are offset by a long and honorable life lived
after the incident. The past should not be a prison for anyone.
CONCLUSION
Three stories involving the troubling area of sexuality and fidelity dem-
onstrate how these standards can be applied. In 1995, Senator Robert
Packwood was accused of sexually importuning female lobbyists and
members of his own staff. He used his office to leverage favors and intimi-
date individuals for favors. These unwanted overtures occurred during a
15-year period. Packwood had served for two decades as a senator with a
strong public record, including consistent support for women’s rights.
After 1 year of hearings that proved the allegations, Packwood chose to
resign from the Senate rather than face certain expulsion. He had clearly
abused his power and office regardless of his public record. In the 1884
presidential campaign, the Republicans revealed that the Democratic can-
didate, New York Governor Grover Cleveland, had fathered a child out of
wedlock. The uproar over the revelation hurt Cleveland. Ultimately, how-
ever, voters correctly concluded that his long and impeccable record as a
public executive of the country’s most powerful state, coupled with the
fact that the affair had occurred in the far past and that he acknowledged
the child and had provided for her support, overrode misgivings about the
private scandal. Additionally, the alternative, Republican James Blaine,
had serious problems of his own with conflict-of-interest charges. In
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Dobel / PRIVATE LIVES OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS 137
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138 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / May 1998
NOTES
1. The private lives of officials are mentioned in many studies of public ethics but usu-
ally in a cursory fashion. For example, see French (1983), Gortner (1991, pp. 42-50) and
Lewis (1991, pp. 53-59). The most systematic and thoughtful assessments have been written
by Thompson (1981, pp. 221-247; 1987, pp. 123-127). This article builds on and expands
Thompson’s basic insights.
2. Cooper (1991, pp. 176-199) discusses the range of affiliations and their impact on
public life. Claims of privacy and secrecy can be abused and encourage individuals to act
without moral restraint and to escape moral scrutiny and accountability (Zimbardo, 1969).
3. Schoeman (1992) provides an insightful account of the day-to-day role of privacy in
social practices that support dignity and humane social relations.
4. Boling (1996) provides an excellent survey and critique of the discussions within
feminist scholarship over the role and limits of privacy claims.
5. See Remick (1994) for a study of how Marion Barry, convicted for drug possession
while mayor of Washington, DC, and exposed as a constant womanizer, portrayed himself as
a redeemed man. He used myths of redemption deeply imbedded in the Christian and Black
American community to excuse himself and gain forgiveness and acceptance by the voters.
6. Matthews (1992) provides an enlightening account of the vulnerabilities of women
as well as strategies for renegotiating the public and private realms.
7. Cooper (1989) examines the central importance of roles and commitment in public
office. Dobel (1990a) extends this analysis.
8. This stance can become a problem if individuals neutralize their consciences, sever-
ing all connections within themselves so that they can go along with anything in office in the
name of subordinating personal self to public roles. See Sabini and Silver (1982).
9. This is further narrowed by three considerations: First, to whom is the person ac-
countable? Second, what are the legitimate private areas that are relevant to official perform-
ance? Third, what are the legitimate means that can be used to answer these questions? This
article focuses on the first two questions. Thompson (1987) examines the answer to number
three. O’Neal (1971) discusses the issue with specific relation to public employees.
10. Rohr (1986) demonstrates the central role promise taking plays in defining the moral
obligations of a public official.
11. For a defense of this untrammeled breakdown of public and private distinctions from
a major practitioner, see the lead editorial “Dark Side of History” (1997).
12. The story of Secretary of Labor in the Reagan Administration, Raymond Donovan,
demonstrates the ability of media coverage to end a public official’s capacity to govern, forc-
ing him to resign even when he was later exculpated of all wrongdoing (Longman Group,
1990, pp. 431-432).
13. Sabato (1991, pp. 216-219) provides an excellent set of standards that members of the
media could use to judge the merits of information they obtain about private lives of public
officials and decide whether to reveal the information. However, he is also very pessimistic
about the capacity of the modern media to implement them except on a sporadic basis.
14. Kurtz (1996) describes the debate over how to cover a past affair by presidential can-
didate Bob Dole. The affair was discovered and documented but went largely unreported in
the media. The unusual and rare debate for today’s media agreed that it was too long ago, ir-
relevant, and not germane to Dole’s presentation of himself. However, many editors felt that
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Dobel / PRIVATE LIVES OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS 139
if Dole had attacked President Clinton for his own character flaws around this area, they
would have believed it had become legitimate to report. The whole debate relied extensively
on the type of standards presented here.
15. For instance, Klein (1994) argues that President Clinton’s promiscuity in his private
life flows into a political promiscuity and pattern of deal making in public life.
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J. Patrick Dobel is an associate dean at the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the
University of Washington. He has authored many articles on public ethics and man-
agement and has written Compromise and Public Action: Political Morality in Lib-
eral and Democratic Life and Public Integrity. He has chaired a number of civic com-
mittees, including the King County Ethics Board, and consulted with numerous pub-
lic and nonprofit agencies on issues of ethics and leadership.
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