[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 138 (Tuesday, October 6, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1927-E1929]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP: CHARACTER, THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENT

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. PAUL McHALE

                            of pennsylvania

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, October 6, 1998

  Mr. McHALE. Mr. Speaker, I rise to insert the following speech, which 
I gave before the Bethlehem Rotary Club on September 2, into the 
Congressional Record.

       Presidential Leadership: Character, the Essential Element

       My friends, neighbors and today considering the message I'm 
     going to deliver in just a couple of moments, most 
     especially, my fellow citizens--
       I began preparing this speech focusing on character and 
     politics about a month ago. I was watching TV one day when a 
     respected journalist began to discuss the challenges and 
     allegations confronting the President. She said with a note 
     of frustration in her voice, I'm paraphasing slightly, ``We 
     hire public officials like plumbers--to get the job done. We 
     don't expect them to be role models or moral icons.'' 
     ``Character,'' she finally said, ``is largely irrelevant.''
       I listened to that statement and realized that I disagreed 
     with it so profoundly, so deeply, that it was so contrary to 
     everything that had brought me to public service two decades 
     ago, I know that at some point in some forum, I wanted to 
     respond--not merely to rebut her statement, certainly not to 
     challenge here personally, but to present a very different 
     point of view. Her opinion, in my judgement, is directly at 
     odds with the most important lessions of American history. We 
     do expect our public officials to be role models and moral 
     leaders. That expectation is neither naive nor unrealistic.
       Theodore Roosevelt was one of the truly great presidents of 
     the United States, a man whom I admire tremendously, a man 
     normally considered one of the five greatest presidents in 
     American history. In some ways it's unfortunate that 
     President Theodore Roosevelt has become almost a caricature 
     because he was a man of extraordinary substance. That 
     caricature often misleads us in terms of the lessions that he 
     had to teach. Let me read to you, if I may, a quote from 
     Theodore Roosevelt on the subject of character and politics: 
     ``Sometimes, I hear our countrymen abroad saying, `Oh you 
     mustn't judge us by our politicians.' I always wanted to 
     interrupt and answer, ``But you must judge us by our 
     politicians, not merely by their ability, but by their ideals 
     and the measure in which they realize these ideals, by their 
     attitude in private life and much more by their attitude 
     in public life both as regards their conception of their 
     duties toward their country and their conception of the 
     duty of that country embodied in its government towards 
     its own people and toward foreign nations.' ''
       He continued: ``Each community has the kind of politicians 
     it deserves. . . . The most important thing for you to know 
     is how the man you choose will conduct himself in the office 
     to which he is elected. Now to know this, you must not only 
     know his views and his principles, but you must also know how 
     well he practices and corresponds to those principles. This 
     is the all important fact. Far more important than the 
     candidate's words is the estimate you are able to put upon 
     the closeness with which his deeds will correspond to his 
     words.''
       Roosevelt spoke in the language of his time. He is gender 
     specific to ``men'' and I would, if I could, edit his 
     transcript and insert ``men and women'' but the basic lesson 
     remains true. He continued: ``What you need in a man who 
     represents you is that he shall show the same qualities of 
     honesty, courage and common sense that in private life make 
     the type of man you are willing to have as a neighbor, that 
     you are willing to work for, or to have work for you. While 
     the private life of a public man is of secondary importance, 
     it is certainly a mistake to assume that it is of no 
     importance. Of course excellence in private conduct, that is 
     domestic morality, punctuality in the payment of debts, being 
     a good husband and father, being a good neighbor, do not, 
     taken together, furnish adequate reason for reposing 
     confidence in a man as a public servant. But lack of these 
     qualities certainly does establish a presumption against any 
     public man. One function of a great public leader should be 
     to exert an influence upon the community at large, especially 
     upon the young men of a community. And therefore, it is idle 
     to say that those interested in the perpetuity of good 
     government should not take into account the fact of a public 
     man's example being something to follow or to avoid, even in 
     matters not connected with his direct public services. No man 
     can be of any service to his state, no man can amount to 
     anything from the standpoint of usefulness to the community 
     at large unless first and foremost, he is a decent man in the 
     close relations of life. . . . Jefferson said that the whole 
     art of government consists in being honest. . . . You 
     cannot be unilaterally honest. The minute that a man is 
     dishonest along certain lines, even though he pretends to 
     be honest along other lines, you can be sure that it is 
     only a pretense, it is only expediency. And you cannot 
     trust to the mere sense of expediency to hold a man 
     straight under heavy pressure.'' (emphasis added)
       That was a lengthy quote. It consumed a significant amount 
     of time, but it also reflected a significant lesson in 
     history. We can't separate a president's character from his 
     performance in office. Indeed, what he does in office finds 
     its initial motivation in the wellspring of his character. 
     There is no such thing as character ``compartmentalization.''
       The Constitutional powers that were assigned to the 
     Presidency were shaped, in part, by the expectation of what 
     type of person would be elected Chief Executive. Let me quote 
     from a book by William Peters, A More Perfect Union: the 
     Story of the Constitutional Convention. Fifty-five delegates 
     at various times over the summer of 1787 gathered in 
     Philadelphia (not very far from

[[Page E1928]]

     where we meet today) in order to define the Constitution, the 
     structure of government under which we today remain 
     privileged to live. When it came time to define the 
     Presidency under Article II of the Constitution, political 
     power was assigned to the executive office with a clear-cut 
     expectation of the personal moral decency, the integrity, the 
     kind of character that each president would bring to the 
     decision-making process.
       This is from A More Perfect Union: ``[At the Constitutional 
     Convention,] Dr. Franklin rose to express his agreement, and 
     in doing so made clear his belief that Washington would be 
     the Country's first executive. `The first man put at the helm 
     will be a good one,' he said, `nobody knows what sort may 
     come afterwards.' This expectation that Washington would be 
     the first at the helm was in fact shared by most if not all 
     of the delegates and it influenced not only the way they 
     envisioned the future presidency but the powers they were 
     willing to assign to that office. As Pierce Butler, one of 
     the delegates, would write to a relative in England a year 
     later, the powers of the President `are full, great and 
     greater than I was disposed to make them, nor do I believe 
     that they would have been so great had not many of the 
     members cast their eyes toward George Washington, who was the 
     presiding officer, as president and shape their ideas of the 
     powers to be given a president by their opinions of his 
     virtue.' '' (emphasis added)
       When the Constitution was written, those who gathered to 
     draft Article II realized full well what an extraordinary man 
     George Washington was. And while I doubt that they expected 
     every subsequent president of the United States to have the 
     character of our first, they did, indeed, have an 
     expectation--one that we must realize in succeeding 
     generations--that presidents of the United States would 
     certainly possess ``virtue'' perhaps not of the magnitude 
     possessed by George Washington, but that, at a minimum, there 
     would be decent men and women who would later occupy that 
     office and bring to it at least a sense of integrity 
     paralleling that of our first President. And clearly when 
     they defined the powers of the office, powers that would 
     exist long after the presidency of George Washington, they 
     had the expectation of ``character'' as a permanent element 
     of leadership resident within the office of the president of 
     the United States.
       Let me read to you briefly two other quotes from 
     presidential scholars who speak far more eloquently than I 
     can about these subjects. The first is James Barber, who has 
     written extensively on presidential character: ``When a 
     citizen votes for a presidential candidate, he makes in 
     effect a prediction. He chooses from among the contenders the 
     one he thinks, or feels, or guesses would be the best 
     president. He operates in a situation of immense uncertainty. 
     . . . He must choose in the midst of a cloud of confusion, a 
     rain of phony advertising, a storm of sermons, a hail of 
     complex issues, a fog of charisma and boredom and a thunder 
     of accusation and defense . . . to understand what actual 
     presidents do and what potential presidents might do, the 
     first need is to see the man whole . . . as a human being 
     like the rest of us a person trying to cope with a difficult 
     environment. To that task he brings his own character, his 
     own view of the world, his own political style. . . . If we 
     can see the pattern he has set for his political life, we 
     can, I contend, estimate much better his pattern as he 
     confronts the stresses and the chances of the presidency.''
       ``The presidency,'' he went on to say, ``is a peculiar 
     office.'' James Barber continued: ``The Founding Fathers left 
     it extraordinarily loose in definition partly because they 
     trusted George Washington to invest a tradition as he went 
     along . . . The Presidency is the focus for the most intense 
     and persistent emotions of the American polity. The president 
     is a symbolic leader, the one figure who draws together the 
     people's hopes and fears for the political future. On top of 
     all of his routine duties, he has to carry that off or 
     fail.'' (emphasis added)
       Richard Neustadt is probably the most highly acclaimed, 
     perhaps the best respected presidential scholar in the United 
     States. He was writing of the president's professional 
     reputation when he drafted the following words in his classic 
     work, On Presidential Power: ``The professional reputation of 
     a president in Washington is made or altered by the man 
     himself. No one can guard it for him, no one saves him from 
     himself. Everything he personally says and does (or fails to 
     say, omits to do), becomes significant in everyone's 
     appraisal regardless of the claims of his officialdom for his 
     words. His own actions provide clues not only to his personal 
     proclivities, but to forecast an asserted influence of those 
     around him. . . . A president runs the risk by being 
     personally responsible for his own reputation.'' (emphasis 
     added)
       Let me make it clear, in my judgment no candidate for 
     president should be required to pass through a star-chamber 
     of inquisition concerning matters of genuine privacy, most 
     especially in areas of past sexual activity; but to respect 
     privacy does not require that we abandon character, 
     rationalize misconduct, or accept an imaginary 
     compartmentalization of a president's moral judgement and his 
     stated public policies.
       We have, I think at most times, a healthy understanding of 
     privacy even with regard to the presidency. Herbert Hoover, 
     with some sense of frustration and certainly with a sense of 
     humor, said in May 1947, ``there are only two occasions when 
     Americans respect privacy, especially the president's--those 
     are prayer and fishing.'' Now I suspect that the scope of 
     privacy is a little bit broader than that. I like to believe 
     that it is. Biographical profiles sufficient to evaluate a 
     candidate's character need not contain salacious detail. A 
     legitimate requirement that we evaluate the whole candidate--
     his temperament, honesty, demonstrated decency and public 
     policy positions need not and ought not be used to 
     rationalize the journalists' equivalent of a ``Peeping Tom.'' 
     Responsible reporters and a tolerant citizenry usually know 
     where to draw the line.
       Unfortunately, by claiming the right of privacy to shield 
     an immoral predatory relationship, a relationship between the 
     president and a twenty-two-year-old intern conducted in the 
     Oval Office and subsequently denied under oath, President 
     Clinton has damaged the genuine right of privacy which many 
     of us defend, the right to be let alone as defined one 
     hundred years ago by Louis Brandeis.
       The demand for character is not constant in a president or 
     in any other office-holder. I have had the privilege to serve 
     in public office for about a decade and a half. I have been 
     involved in political activity for almost two decades. There 
     are some days when there are not a lot of pressures upon you 
     in public life. There are days when you simply go about the 
     business of serving the people and you don't have to struggle 
     on that particular day with your conscience, you don't have 
     to reach for moral courage. Those are the routine days of 
     political life for a Member of Congress--a public servant and 
     ordinary citizen.
       However, there are other days which prove to be much more 
     challenging for a Member of Congress, and similarly, for the 
     president of the United States. During periods of relative 
     tranquility and prosperity, such as we have enjoyed during 
     most of this decade in no small part thanks to the efforts of 
     President Clinton, you need only administer and command. 
     There are certain powers granted to a president under Article 
     II of the Constitution. Those powers have been enhanced by 
     subsequent legislation enacted by the Congress. Those are the 
     levers of authority that are the president's by virtue of his 
     elected position. But during a period of national crisis, a 
     president can't merely administer and command, he must lead 
     and inspire. The Civil War, World War I, World War II, The 
     Great Depression and the 20th Century Civil Rights Movement 
     all demanded a substantial level of applied, not merely 
     rhetorical presidential character. None of these challenges 
     could possibly have been met merely by a series of dry 
     presidential position papers. That is why Franklin Roosevelt 
     stated that ``(the presidency) is preeminently a place of 
     moral leadership.''
       We don't expect sainthood from our presidents. I know very 
     few saints in public life. I suppose there are a few, but I 
     have not met many of them. We expect ordinary people in times 
     of crisis to rise to the challenge of superior leadership 
     based on patriotism and moral decency, where the contribution 
     they make may even be beyond their own expectations. 
     Perfection is not the standard, but neither should we abandon 
     the fundamental test of character in determining who shall 
     lead us as a people and as a nation.
       During the past few minutes, I have spoken on presidential 
     character and the vital role it plays in the process of 
     shaping and implementing our nation's public policies. In the 
     closing minutes of my presentation, I want to apply the 
     concept of presidential character to the troubling, genuinely 
     disheartening presidential misconduct which will soon be 
     brought before the Congress of the United States.
       I want my strong criticism of President Clinton to be 
     placed in context. I voted for President Clinton in 1992 and 
     1996. I believed him to be the ``Man from Hope'' as he was 
     depicted in 1992. As a member of Congress, I voted for more 
     than three-fourths of the President's legislative agenda 
     and would do so again. I have strongly supported President 
     Clinton's proposals in such areas as Social Security 
     reform, child care, environmental protection, campaign 
     finance and the continuing effort to curb the tobacco 
     industry and discourage teenage smoking. My blunt 
     criticism of the President has nothing to do with policy. 
     The President has always treated me with courtesy and 
     respect and he has been more than responsive to the 
     concerns of my constituents. I do not feel a shred of 
     animosity toward the president of the United States. 
     Unfortunately, he is an exceptionally bright man who is 
     now guilty of extraordinary misconduct.
       I must tell you, in complete candor, that I am saddened and 
     dismayed by his actions. I now have an obligation as a member 
     of the United States Congress to evaluate that conduct not as 
     a puritan, but as an elected representative with duties of my 
     own under Article I of the Constitution, to hold this 
     president accountable, as I would hope every Congress would 
     hold any president accountable for misconduct of this nature. 
     Finally, I also want to note that in my judgment Kenneth 
     Starr was wrongly appointed as independent counsel, 
     possessing a background far too partisan and demonstrating 
     personal political ambition inconsistent with the neutral 
     role of a special prosecutor. Nonetheless, only the President 
     is ultimately responsible for his own reprehensible and 
     tragic misbehavior.
       Unfortunately, the President's proven misconduct has now 
     made immaterial my past support or my agreement with him on 
     issues. Last January 17th, the president of the United States 
     attempted to cover-up a sordid

[[Page E1929]]

     and irresponsible relationship by repeated deceit under oath. 
     Contrary to his later public statement, his answers were not 
     ``legally accurate,'' they were intentionally and blatantly 
     false. President Clinton was untruthful at length and 
     untruthful in detail. He allowed his lawyer to make arguments 
     to the court based upon an affidavit that the President knew 
     to be false. The President was present in the room at the 
     time when his lawyer made those unethical arguments to a 
     federal judge who was also physically present. The President 
     later lied to the American people and belatedly admitted the 
     truth only when confronted, some seven months later, by a 
     mountain of irrefutable, conflicting evidence. I am convinced 
     that the President would otherwise have allowed his false 
     testimony to stand in perpetuity. Judge Susan Weber Wright 
     may yet hold the President in contempt of court. If the 
     President avoids a perjury conviction he will be lucky, not 
     innocent.
       What is at stake, my fellow citizens, is really the rule of 
     law. When the President took an oath to tell the truth, he 
     was no different at that point from any other citizen, both 
     as a matter of morality and as a matter of legal obligation. 
     We cannot excuse that kind of misconduct because we happen 
     to belong to the same party as the president or agree with 
     him on issues or feel tragically that the removal of the 
     president from office would be enormously painful for the 
     United States of America. The question is whether or not 
     we will stand true to the rule of law. The question is 
     whether or not we will say to all our citizens, including 
     the president of the United States, when you take an oath 
     you must keep it. It was four centuries ago that Sir 
     Thomas More gave up his life rather than swear to a false 
     oath. Now perhaps that's the saintly ideal, but we ought 
     not abandon our nation's historic commitment to the 
     sanctity of the judicial oath, based upon the dangerous 
     rationale that we are all less than perfect.
       As we gather here today, eight blocks from where I live, my 
     wife is on jury duty in Philadelphia. Kathy was called to 
     jury duty in federal court. She, right now, is sitting in a 
     courtroom in Philadelphia hearing a sexual harassment case. 
     She and her fellow jurors will have the legitimate 
     expectation that every witness who comes before the court 
     will, to the best of his or her ability, tell the truth. 
     There may indeed be mistakes in recollection; nobody's memory 
     is perfect. But Kathy and every other juror will necessarily 
     conclude, in the absence of conflicting evidence, that the 
     facts presented by witnesses in testimony under oath will be 
     truthful. That is the linchpin of our legal system's search 
     for justice.
       I have had the privilege to serve in public life at the 
     local, state and federal level. I started out on the Planning 
     Commission of the Borough of Fountain Hill, served in the 
     state legislature and have now represented you for three 
     terms in the Congress of the United States. I have voted 
     thousands and thousands of times over the last twenty years, 
     but I tell you from personal experience that the venue where 
     the law really takes on meaning is in the courtroom. We can 
     vote for magnificent pieces of legislation in the Congress of 
     the United States, but it is only when that law enters the 
     courtroom that it takes on true meaning for the individual 
     citizen. Whether it's a custody matter, a domestic relations 
     conflict, a contract dispute, an accusation of criminal 
     misconduct, it is in the courtroom that life enters the law. 
     I see Tom Murphy seated in the audience, one of our District 
     Justices. Tom is a former police officer and, I'm confident, 
     fully understands what I am saying. You can pass a great bill 
     in Washington, but if you are unable to equitably enforce it 
     because individual witnesses are untruthful under oath, then 
     the courtroom becomes a sham. Nothing is more important to 
     our democratic system of government than the obligation of 
     citizens to tell the truth when the law is applied to a given 
     set of facts.
       Having deliberately provided false testimony under oath 
     the President, in my judgment, forfeited his right to 
     office. It was with a deep sense of sadness that I called 
     for his resignation. By his own misconduct, the President 
     displayed his character and defined it badly. His actions 
     were not ``inappropriate.'' They were predatory, reckless, 
     breathtakingly arrogant for a man already a defendant in a 
     sexual harassment suit, whether or not that suit was 
     politically motivated. In light of his own misconduct, how 
     can this President now speak with moral authority on 
     issues such as teenage pregnancy, male responsibility for 
     children born out of wedlock and the duty to treat women 
     with dignity, equality and not merely as objects for male 
     gratification? How can he lead, not merely command, our 
     men and women in uniform, knowing that his actions would 
     in a military environment result in a court martial? How 
     could I defend the President knowing that I would fire an 
     employee under similar circumstances?
       And if in disgust or dismay, we were to sweep aside the 
     President's immoral and illegal conduct, what dangerous 
     precedent would we set for the abuse of power by some future 
     president of the United States? And are we really prepared to 
     substitute polling data for the rule of law? For our 
     country's sake, I hope not. But if we sweep this aside, that 
     is the precedent that we will inevitably establish. All of 
     us, I think, have been repelled by the detail of reporting in 
     terms of the President's specific activity. I have heard all 
     that I need to hear.
       But if we are so repelled by the facts as they have now 
     become known that we push this presidential misconduct aside, 
     I assure you that twenty-five, fifty, one hundred years from 
     now there may well be some other temporarily popular 
     president of the United States who will choose to violate his 
     oath of office and perhaps provide false testimony to a court 
     believing and relying on the precedent that if you are 
     popular enough, somehow you are different from and superior 
     to your fellow citizens, that somehow you too may be excused 
     when you lie under oath. That is a dangerous precedent we can 
     ill afford to set as a nation. It is a precedent that would 
     ominously outlive every person in this room.
       We cannot define the President's character--he correctly 
     noted that reality a few weeks ago. He alone has that power 
     and that responsibility. But we must define our nation's. 
     That is the challenge that we face today.
       I have had the opportunity on many occasions, particularly 
     during this presidency, but also on a few occasions 
     beforehand to visit the White House. I would encourage you to 
     do that. If you can enter the White House and not be 
     inspired, you have a tougher set of emotions that I do. Every 
     time I enter that building and the one where I work, the 
     Capitol, I am overwhelmed by the sense of history and the 
     obligation that that history imposes on us, we who serve 
     today.
       On many occasions, I have spent time in the White House 
     State Dining Room. I think it was on my first visit to that 
     dining room, probably on the public tour, that I noticed that 
     there is in that room a wonderful fireplace and carved into 
     the mantle of that fireplace, a prayer. The prayer goes back 
     to the days of John Adams who first voiced it on November 2, 
     1800, nearly two hundred years ago. His prayer remains 
     centrally relevant to the issue of character and politics 
     today. John Adams' prayer for those who would later occupy 
     the White House may be read upon the mantle as follows: ``I 
     pray Heaven bestow the best of blessings on this House and 
     all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and 
     wise men ever rule under this roof.''
       John Adams was wrong in his gender limitation, but he was 
     unquestionably right in his eternal hope.