My Life and Times

December 19, 2004
It Will All Come Out. Some of It Matters.By SAM ROBERTS

If there are skeletons in your closet - from unpaid taxes or debts to a run-in with the law to the messy details of a broken marriage - you must disclose them to the White House and be prepared for the possibility that they may become public knowledge."
- "A Survivor's Guide for Presidential Nominees," November 2000.
IN more than two centuries of confirming presidential nominees for cabinet-level posts, the Senate has rejected only nine outright, and none since John G. Tower failed to win confirmation as Secretary of Defense in 1989 after public allegations of womanizing and excessive drinking. Senate vetting of nine more ended without a vote when the nominations were declined or formally withdrawn, like Zoe E. Baird, Bill Clinton's first choice for Attorney General in 1993 and the first to be tripped up by a "nanny problem."
Bernard B. Kerik's name belongs on a third list: Nominations announced, but then scuttled before they even reach the Senate. While denying him the cabinet post, the hasty retreat might at least have spared him further embarrassment, or worse, had it not been for a daily drumbeat of fresh disclosures about his past.
"That's a bigger list," said Don Ritchie, the Senate historian.
Even in the shifting sands that constitute Washington's moral foundation, some lines are not to be crossed, especially lines clearly defined by the tumblings of earlier nominees. You cannot get a job as top enforcer of the nation's immigration laws - once at Justice, now at Homeland Security - if you haven't enforced them in your own home. Moreover, Mr. Kerik's belated announcement - that he had employed a nanny who may have been in the country illegally and had failed to pay taxes on her behalf - contradicted assurances he had given before the president nominated him. That led skeptics to speculate about what else he might be hiding, and his supporters to ask why the skeptics were so cynical.
"Whenever this happens, there is always the idea that it must be something else - it must be something else," said Rudolph W. Giuliani, who, as mayor of New York, appointed Mr. Kerik corrections commissioner and later police commissioner and now employs Mr. Kerik at his consulting firm. "But that is when there is not a good reason. This is a good reason."
Mr. Giuliani is right. These days, and for this job, the nanny would have been reason enough to pull out.
But the skeptics may be right, too. Though the nanny herself had yet to materialize after a week, other problematic disclosures have dribbled out about Mr. Kerik's business dealings, his personal life and some of his associates. Perhaps none was a nomination-killer by itself (though an administration that claims a mandate based on moral values might have been hard-pressed to defend a man who apparently cheated on both his wife and his mistress). But put them all together, and the White House must be wondering what - or if - Mr. Kerik was thinking.
Some storms you just cannot ride out.
"With Kerik, it was easy," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "When the Chinese water torture becomes the drip, drip, drip of scandals with ascending importance, you know you're finished."
Which blemishes are important changes over time, of course. It was not long ago when a mere divorce would disqualify someone from public office in the United States. But with more marriages ending in divorce than death these days, the pool of happily married (or at least, terminally married) candidates has dwindled.
Nowadays, you can even generally admit to the once-mortal sin of having used marijuana, as long as you didn't smoke a joint just before your confirmation hearing. And you might have undergone emotional counseling of some sort and still be eligible, provided the regimen stopped well short of electroshock therapy, which forced Senator Thomas Eagleton off the Democratic presidential ticket in 1972.
The standards also vary by office. Federal judges are typically held to a higher standard, in part because they serve for life. (In 1987, having smoked pot long ago was enough to keep Douglas H. Ginsburg off the Supreme Court.)
Elected officials are also held to a different standard than cabinet nominees, and not necessarily a higher one. They are empowered by a vote of their constituents, and they serve for a set term, after which the voters can render their own verdict.
And the rules are situational. Only months after Robert G. Torricelli was forced by ethics issues to abandon his reelection race for the United States Senate in 2002, he resurfaced as a major offstage player in New Jersey politics. "In Oregon, Torricelli would be finished," Mr. Sabato said at the time. "But in New Jersey, there's no telling where he might end up."
Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University, helped draft a handbook for presidential nominees that was published in 2000 by the Brookings Institution and the Council for Excellence in Government. He still gets calls from prospective public servants, including one respectable gentleman who said he had been arrested for check-kiting when he was 19.
"Do I have to tell them?" Professor Light recalled the man asking about the people vetting him. "Will they find out?"
His answer was yes, they will, and so will everyone else. And while the offense itself might not disqualify him, would the embarrassment be worth it? His advice to the man was, "Don't pursue the appointment."
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