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

DATE: THURSDAY, January 20, 1994                   TAG: 9401200152
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JILL LAWRENCE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

WHEN DOES SCRUTINY OF AN OFFICIAL BECOME AN ATTACK?

And there is a difference.

Let's go to William Safire's New Political Dictionary for a definition of McCarthyism. "Now applied to any investigation that flouts the rights of individuals," writes The New York Times columnist, the very one Inman has accused of same.

McCarthyism dates from the Wisconsin senator's 1950s attempts to ferret out communists in America using rumor, innuendo and guilt by association. Careers were ruined before prominent Americans began speaking out against him.

In the 40 years since, the term McCarthyism has been flung around plenty, including in the last two presidential campaigns. Both Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton made that complaint against President Bush.

But analysts say what public officials contend with is mostly super-intense and sometimes unwarranted scrutiny - from opposition political parties, interest groups and the press.

McCarthyism "in its most insidious form" probably could not recur now because people have many ways to get their side of the story out, said Ted Windt, a specialist in the modern presidency at the University of Pittsburgh.

Inman didn't think so.

At a news conference announcing his withdrawal as defense secretary nominee, Inman blasted Safire for columns he said distorted his record and allowed no balancing response - a common phenomenon among columnists, he said, in "this era of modern McCarthyism."

New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. defended Safire as "a tough-minded journalist and a fair one."

No one is suggesting that public figures who set policy that affects millions of Americans should not be scrutinized. The question is how much and about what.

The range of activities subject to examination keeps growing wider and wider: health, marital and dating history, drinking habits, draft records, drug abuse, business associates, financial investments, club memberships, sexual orientation, treatment of women, and - now - hiring of illegal aliens and payment of Social Security taxes on household help.

Some of the practices of the past seem incredible in today's find-all, tell-all environment. People weren't reminded that Franklin D. Roosevelt was handicapped; he was never shown in his wheelchair or in braces. Most never knew John F. Kennedy strayed during his marriage; it was almost never mentioned in newspapers of the time or even in early biographies.

And political enemies or interest groups trying to expose public figures rarely were able to force the issues into the public eye.

But things started changing in the 1970s. The Watergate scandal unleashed investigative journalism. And, in a hint of trends to come, former Rep. Wilbur Mills' off-hours escapades with stripper Fanne Fox made news.

Interest groups and their congressional allies became pivotal in ideologically charged confirmation battles, digging up and circulating all kinds of facts and gossip on Supreme Court justices and Cabinet secretaries. These trends grew throughout the 1980s.

Over the years, the public has adjusted to many flaws and characteristics once deemed fatal.

"It used to be you couldn't have somebody [in politics] who was divorced or Catholic. Now you have a person repeatedly accused of extramarital affairs as president of the United States," said Stephen Borelli, a political scientist at the University of Alabama. "But I'm not sure we've caught up yet. For every new thing we're forgiving, there's a new thing that we're not."

Alexander George, a professor emeritus at Stanford University, said the ever-expanding catalog of transgressions is a bad trend.

"What we really want to know about the character of our political leaders is much broader and more fundamental than whether they've engaged in peccadillos of one kind of another," said George, a presidential scholar. "The demands and expectations are out of hand."

The current climate will produce either resilient leaders with very thick skin, like Clinton, or stealth candidates without a controversy to their names. Windt, the Pittsburgh presidential scholar, does not like the latter prospect.

"If you found a person who didn't have a skeleton of one sort or another, my God, have they ever lived?" he asks. "This intense scrutiny may give us a bunch of vanilla politicians out there who have never scrambled and fallen, known what it means to be embarrassed, to have a failure on their hands, to have made a mistake."