Word: towering
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...Tower's problems in this area are far from unique. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft returned to Government after advising foreign clients as vice chairman of Henry Kissinger's international consulting firm. Largely because Scowcroft is a noncontroversial official serving in a post that does not require Senate confirmation, there has been scant debate over the propriety of ) his prior business entanglements. Such quiet acceptance is not likely to be the fate of Lawrence Eagleburger, who became president of Kissinger Associates in 1984, after 27 years in Government. About to be nominated as Deputy Secretary of State, Eagleburger is expected...
This kind of easy tolerance among the powerful in Congress is what allows Tower to so adroitly muddy the waters surrounding his own ethical problems. The everybody-does-it defense may be cynical, but it has persuasive power, as long as Congress continues to confuse honor with honorariums. Ethics in government should be a bipartisan concern, not merely the responsibility of the Bush Administration. If the White House has fallen short of the standards it set during its much ballyhooed "ethics week," so too has the Democratic Congress been unwilling to judge itself by the criteria it sets for others...
...Nunn, who believes that the tests of private relations and public life cannot be different simply because it is impossible to split a whole person in two, it was a painful admission. A few days before Nunn would lead the charge against John Tower on the Senate floor, the 50-year-old chairman of the Armed Services Committee sat in his office under the influence of two diet Cokes and finally confessed that he once stole some eggs from a neighbor who kept chickens...
...hurting for military contracts, and there was also the time, when he was 26, that Nunn got loaded at a party and sideswiped a car and pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and paid a $100 fine. That one made the papers again last week when Tower partisans were dredging up anything they could find "on" Nunn. "Well, that is something, isn't it?" says a senior White House aide, who will speak only on background because it doesn't take a genius to realize that Sam Nunn is going to be around long + after George Bush...
...point to the Bushies: Sam Nunn is not a saint. But he is perhaps the nation's most widely respected Senator, and it is his opposition to Tower, more than anything else, that is likely to doom the would-be Defense Secretary. And no matter who rules the Pentagon, it is fair to say that few major national-security decisions will be made without Nunn's approval. He is that powerful...