c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(AT)compuserve.com.)

(UNDATED) If I qualify as an expert in any field besides prisons, it is government scandals _ the latter, as it happens, having led to my intimate knowledge of the former.

Sadly, my expertise is beyond question. I was present at the creation of Watergate, the granddaddy of all contemporary scandals, whose third syllable has attached itself to scandals ever since.

Now the Clinton Administration is embroiled in a controversy some call Filegate, in which two security workers in the early days of the Clinton White House improperly obtained FBI files on more than 400 former officials, including several high-ranking members of the Bush Administration. Some estimates are higher.

Is this a scandal on par with Watergate?

Let’s agree that our country does not need another Watergate crisis. Indeed, anyone who hopes for such is the worst kind of party hack who lives in total ignorance of the damage Watergate did to the nation’s faith in public institutions, damage which continues to haunt us today.

I have my share of disagreement with Clinton policies. But I sincerely hope the best-case scenario _ that this was a rogue operation by former White House security aides Craig Livingstone and Anthony B. Marceca _ will explain much of what went on.

But the worst-case scenario is that these two political appointees did not act on their own. If so, the damage to the Clinton Administration and to the body politic could be immense.

In a technical sense, Filegate goes far beyond the circumstances that resulted in my incarceration. My crime _ and it was indisputably a crime _ was to leak to the press information taken from antiwar activist Daniel Ellsberg’s FBI file. In Filegate, at least 400 files are in question _ including some that apparently contain information from the Internal Revenue Service. Yet there are differences between our times and the Watergate era.

Watergate came at the end of the most convulsive decade in America’s domestic history since the Civil War. The Watergate hearings unleashed a huge amount of public anger and pure moral outrage. We are a decidedly different people than we were then. I wonder if we are capable of such outrage today.

The scandal du jour served up by an increasingly predatory and cynical press corps has become a part of American public life. We have been so inoculated with scandals false and true that we have difficulty recognizing the real thing. This explains why President Clinton can enjoy very high approval ratings despite the large number of problems _ political and personal _ that have marked his public life.

The deeper factor, however, is the rise of a radical form of individualism, which teaches us that the primary purpose of life is not to pursue moral virtue, but to pursue our various enthusiasms, moral or otherwise. Some people call it the”unencumbered self.” In this world of moral relativism, we are less likely to be critical of personal scandal. If someone wants to chase skirts or cheat to win, that’s his business. This attitude is reflected in a recent U.S. News and World Report survey that put character at the bottom of the list of qualities people look for in a leader.

While this live-and-let-live attitude has a superficial libertarian appeal, its effects cannot be limited to the purely personal. If we are willing to scuttle the importance of virtue in our personal lives, we should not expect our public institutions to somehow, magically, retain a virtuous character.

If the Clinton Administration’s political cronies are found to have used personal information from those FBI files for political ends, prepare for a free for all.

There is an unwritten contract between a president and the people that the president is to be given both an element of respect and the benefit of the doubt. You can pile a lot up on the negative side of ledger without breaking this bond. But once it is broken, an administration cannot recover.

My most vivid memories of Watergate center on the moment this unspoken bond broke. Watergate, after all, started out much like Whitewater and Filegate, and made no difference to most Americans until six months after the 1972 election. Then, in June 1973, Congressional hearings began. The hearings were televised daily, and when people became aware of the abuses of power that had transpired, something snapped.

Outrage exploded in a way I never will forget. The day I went to the courthouse to be indicted, police had to hold people back behind ropes on both sides of the entrance. Hundreds of people were shouting and shaking their fists. I was spat upon. Why? Because the Nixon Administration had violated the moral norms that governed our nation.

For the moment, the Clinton Administration may be resting easy. A self-centered and morally indifferent public appears incapable of moral outrage. But then, it appeared that way to those who surrounded Richard Nixon.

And if my experience as a Watergate conspirator has any relevance to Filegate, I have this advice for the Clinton White House:

Watch out. If Americans conclude their privacy is in peril, that fragile bond between the president and the people will break.

JC END COLSON