THE APPEARANCE OF IMPROPRIETY: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society.

By Peter W. Morgan and Glenn H. Reynolds. Free Press. 272 pp. $25

Between 1975 and 1995, the number of prosecutions of federal officials on corruption charges increased by an astonishing 1500 percent. Yet most informed observers would say that authentic corruption (graft, slush funds, and the like) decreased during those two decades, as potential wrongdoers heeded the cautionary example of Watergate. So what’s the explanation? Following the Gulf of Tonkin, the Credibility Gap, and the Nixon scandals, American culture changed. Legislators passed a slew of ethics laws, resulting in more violations, leading to still more laws and still more violations. Americans created in the process an Ethics Establishment—an army of lawyers, journalists, and consultants who make money and reputations on ethics scandals, and who further fuel our obsession.

Behavior that was once commonplace now is deemed unethical. In the political sphere at least, we have defined deviancy up. The resulting culture of scandal might be welcome if it increased public confidence in American institutions and decision makers. But the opposite is true: the more we focus on scandal, and the more ethics rules we enact, the worse voters seem to feel about leaders and institutions.

While there are few signs that scandal politics is abating—look at the Paula Jones embarrassment, the frenzy over campaign fund-raising, the myriad independent counsel probes and the pressures for more—a few authors have begun to raise questions about it. In their excellent scholarly study, The Pursuit of Absolute Integrity (1996), Frank Anechiarico and James B. Jacobs showed how anticorruption efforts in New York have led to ineffective governance.

Now add to the list The Appearance of Impropriety. In this lively book, Morgan, a lawyer in Washington, and Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, describe our ethics obsession while railing against it. They particularly target the frequent alarms over improper appearances, a concern they trace from Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749) through Watergate and Whitewater. The appearance standard, they argue, has destroyed careers when evidence later suggested no wrongdoing at all. Along with convicting the innocent, the focus on appearance sometimes helps true miscreants slip away: those who dilute their shame by arguing that their only violation was a trivial one of appearance, and those who artfully hide their misbehavior beneath a façade of propriety.

The authors conclude that "ethics is in danger of becoming an elaborate legalistic ritual," one that stresses multifactor tests instead of oldfashioned moral values. "For government employees who must negotiate this ritual, the result is frustration and alienation. For citizens who hear all the ethics fanfare but nonetheless see government ‘as usual,’ the result is cynicism and disillusionment."

There is no easy way to change a culture, but repealing or sharply revising some of the ethics rules would be a good start. Instead of making such recommendations, Morgan and Reynolds close by offering seven guidelines for better behavior, including "Responsibility Is for Everyone"—a sensible but not very pragmatic prescription. Still, The Appearance of Impropriety is a good and useful book, part of what should be a growing body of work on a culture of scandal run amok.

—Norman Ornstein