Most of us have our worldviews shaped by the era in which we came of age. For me, it was the Watergate hearings of 1973–74. I still recall the inspiring bipartisan investigation into that scandal. Thoughtful and idealistic senators like Howard Baker (R-Tennessee) probed witnesses, asking questions like “What did the President know and when did he know it?”
Obviously, that America is long gone. We now live in a highly polarized country, where even election results are contested. Politicians are cheerleaders, not statesmen. Economic statistics are discussed not in terms of their implication for the economy, but rather whether they have been altered to reflect a political agenda. The media is highly polarized and “news” is often just propaganda. People speak of “red states” and “blue states”, terms that were never used when I was young.
I think that politicians had more integrity in the twentieth century than they do today.1
When I was born, Dwight Eisenhower was President. I have no memory of him. But in my opinion he was a great President. He ran a balanced budget, ended the Korean War, stayed out of Vietnam (when the French defeat there made it seem to some hawks that we should get involved), and is mostly known for initiating the Interstate Highway System. Eisenhower seems to have possessed a great deal of integrity.
Eisenhower probably moved too cautiously on Civil Rights, as did his successor, John Kennedy. Eisenhower also bequeathed to Kennedy a hare-brained CIA scheme to send Cuban exiles to try to invade Cuba. Kennedy authorized this “Bay of Pigs” invasion, an ignominious failure. Probably Kennedy’s most notable project was his initiative to land an American on the moon.
President Johnson, Kennedy’s successor, believed strongly in Civil Rights and in lifting up the poor. Those were genuine passions. But Johnson was willing to use his political positions for personal gain. And he had no commitment to telling the truth. So I rate him as low on integrity.
Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, was nicknamed “Tricky Dick” by his enemies, and he was brought down by the Watergate scandal. But I would rate him as high on integrity in comparison with recent Presidents. For better or worse (mostly worse), he did things that were championed by the liberal establishment, like wage-price controls, creating the Environmental Protection Agency, and opening to China.
Gerald Ford had integrity. President Carter also had integrity. And he gets very little credit for starting the era of deregulation and appointing Paul Volcker to run the Fed.
Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush had integrity. They were not in the office for personal profit. They were not liars.
With the Clinton Foundation, we start to see the sort of personal corruption that has exploded in recent years. With George W. Bush, we start to see the sort of ram-it-through partisanship that has characterized legislation in this century.
President Obama continued the ram-it-through approach. He also ended up remarkably wealthy for someone with his career path. The Bidens also loaded up on personal wealth far in excess of what they could earn from their salaries.
President Trump is comparable to President Johnson. That is, Trump has some genuinely passionate feelings about where he wants to take the country. But Mr. Trump is utterly without shame or precedent in the extent to which he employes his office for personal enrichment. And whereas Johnson demanded absolute loyalty from his top aides, Trump judges everyone—in government or not—by their personal loyalty to him.
When it comes to integrity, the decline from Eisenhower to Trump has been steep. Our system of government, with its checks and balances, is supposed to be robust with respect to the personal qualities of its leaders. But I am not sure that it is robust enough.
It might be useful in a post on integrity to provide a working definition of what the term actually means. What does it mean to have integrity? What does it mean to not have the quality of integrity?
I say this only because many of the examples of integrity that Arnold draws upon seem to be easily summarized as: I like this policy = integrity. I don’t this policy = corruption.
I know it's an article of faith with Trump haters that he is personally corrupt but it is hard to accept the claim he's using his office for personal gain when he donates the salary he receives from the government and, per Forbes, his net worth has declined in the vicinity of half a billion dollars since 2015 and he no longer makes the Forbes 400 list. His evident inability to profit from high office puts people like the Clintons, Obamas, and Bidens in an even worse light for the way their fortunes track with their political advancement. He's either making horrid business decisions, which raises the question of why he didn't lose his entire inheritance long ago, or he's just not connected to the grift machine.