>> guest: the journal's news department i don't think was particularly antagonistic to his policies. whether it was good in principle that a public official should resign because of this sort of thing is another question, and we all have our prejudices. when there is violence involved i really tend to get off the train and say, "go!" c-span: how much of all this comes about because someone in the media has an ideological feeling, and do they only go after people in the scandal area that they dislike because of their policies? i mean, is there any correlation there? >> guest: it's certainly true that if the press likes you, you're better off. john sununu's frequent-flyer

escapades got much more sustained attention than had jim baker's very serious conflict of interest scandal some years before. the difference clearly had partly to do with the fact that baker was friendly to the press and sununu was not. c-span: in your opinion did clarence thomas get into trouble because someone in the media felt ideologically one way or the other? >> guest: i'm not sure whether it was ideology; that is, the media are now sensationalist enough so that you don't need ideology to explain the big coverage that was given. someone involved in the hearings clearly had an ideological motive, but i'm not sure that it was the press that had it.

c-span: let me ask you about how you did this book scandal. where did you write it? >> guest: at the american enterprise institute for public policy research, which is a wonderful place. c-span: how long have you been there? >> guest: three years. c-span: who owns that? >> guest: who owns it? that's an interesting question. it's a non- profit organization that is run by a board of directors and a president and that lives on contributions from foundations and other such people. so the question is whether the contributors own it, and so far i haven't seen much evidence of that. c-span: does it have an ideological bent? >> guest: it's very free-market conservative when it comes to economics; hawkish when it comes to domestic policy, which is the

field i'm in. it's a little harder to characterize. one of the resident scholars is bill schneider who does public opinion polling. our congress person is norm warnstein. c-span: you mean the person that ... >> guest: handles the field, that's right. no, he'd be good at it, but it hasn't happened. the person who writes about social policy is ben wattenberg. so we're a very mixed bag in that area. i don't think we're so different from brookings. c-span: you were a dewitt wallace fellow? >> guest: yes. c-span: what is that? >> guest: it's a fellowship that was set up by the reader's digest to give itinerant journalists a place to come and alight while doing what hopefully is serious work. c-span: do people support you

because they know what you're going to write, or do they support you and say, "suzanne garment, have at it"? >> guest: tell me, which people? c-span: in other words, did you get your dewitt wallace fellowship because they knew what you were going to write? did you get your fellowship at the american enterprise institute because of your political views? how does all this work here? >> guest: my political views made me congenial to the american enterprise institute, and because i had been writing for a long time -- i had been writing a column in the wall street journal -- everybody had a clue as to what kind of thing i was going to write, what kind of views were going to be expressed, so even if someone had the inclination to corrupt the process and lean on me, it wasn't necessary in this case, and certainly no one did. c-span: how about random house? why did they pick this topic? why were they interested in publishing your book? >> guest: well, that was a little different. my editor at random house is peter osnos.

he worked for the washington post before he joined random house. he has a terrific news sense. he is not an ideological publisher, but he knew that this had been happening in washington. in that sense, this is not a particularly original book. there are lots of other people who have seen the same thing. peter certainly saw it, and that's why he wanted the book. c-span: on the back flap, "advance praise for scandal. from mike wallace, "this 'scandalmonger' was entertained and provoked by ms. garment's remarkable catalogue. by allan bloom, author of "the closing of the american mind," "suzanne garment attracts our perennial prurient interest in scandal and then gives us a wonderful lesson. from steven brill, president and editor in chief of the american lawyer media, "suzanne garment's book is not only important, indeed profound. from seymour martin lipset, professor of public policy at george mason university, "why is

distrust of government greater than ever in america? in this brilliant book ...," on and on. >> guest: it's a good group, isn't it? it's nice. c-span: do you have anything to do with those folks, and did you go to them personally and ask them to endorse this? do endorsements matter? >> guest: i don't know whether they matter, but my editors told me that they do and that i should go get some. so, it's a very embarrassing process. you have to send the manuscript to people and say, "do you like it, and if you do like it would you please ...," so that you really do put people on the spot. c-span: so you know these four men. >> guest: yes. i know steve brill through his work. i have met him once, but i have not seen a lot of him. c-span: did you have anybody turn you down? i'm sure you don't want to say who it was, but did people say, "i don't like it and i'm not going to endorse it"? >> guest: the only people who said no were people who had a firm policy of not doing it, and

c-span: in the front, "for len, sara, paul and annie. who are they? >> guest: they're the garment children. after the garment husband come the garment children. two of them are grown and living in new york. sara is a student and paul garment is a musician like his father. annie garment is age nine and has her father's temperament and just wrote an autobiography in which she said she wanted to be the first female chief justice of the supreme court, but if she could really be anything she wanted, she'd be her dog lola. so annie's got her priorities straight. c-span: is this your first book? >> guest: no, it's not. it's the first trade book that i've done alone. i wrote one very academic book

about anti-trust policy, and then i wrote a book with pat moynihan, after we had gotten out of the u.n., about those seven months. c-span: when you go to putting a dedication down, was this an easy thing to do or did you have to agonize over it? >> guest: i suppose that when people have written more books they have a harder time because they've already taken care of the obvious, and they have to decide what to do next. c-span: how about reaction to this book, and you're getting a lot of reviews. what are people saying that surprises you, and are they ignoring things in the book that you wanted them to pick up? >> guest: the reviews that have come in so far have been pretty good, and so i haven't read them with a critical eye saying, "well, it's wonderful of him to call the book marvelous, but i sure wish he had looked at chapter 6 a little more. but they have been good, and i am somewhat surprised.

i had expected more hostility. i think the reason there has not been more hostility is that, as usual, i was a terrible predictor and that a lot of people are getting fed up. but this is not a voice in any wilderness. c-span: alright. for those that joined late, go back over the main thesis of your book. "scandal" is the title of the book. what are you trying to say? >> guest: we have more scandals than ever before in our history, and they are making us not idoaner but only more afra do our jobs, and they are making political life very ugly. it about time we got hold of them. c-span: got hold of what? >> guest: got hold of our own scandal-making proclivity and started exercising a little more judgment. c-span: how can you possibly expect a nation like this, of 250 million people with all this freedom, to do that?

>> guest: actually, i'm very pessimistic, but these things have changed before. for instance, our 19th century press was much more sensationalist than the 20th century press that followed it, and the change came because people changed their minds. i mean, fashions changed and intellectual fashions changed, and this is a cultural phenomenon. it changes when people change their mood. c-span: you named the brits earlier. any other country in the world do what we do with the scandal? >> guest: no. there are countries whose scandals are becoming more like when ours as our polities all converge, but we really do lead the pack in moralism. i'm told by people returning from europe that the reaction of europeans to this clarence thomas scandal is exactly their reaction during watergate, which is, what are these people doing?

what is this strange tribal ritual that they practice once every three years? that the certainly no other country has conflict of interest laws and rules like ours. nobody comes close. c-span: does that make us better or worse? >> guest: that makes us more web high-minded and sillier because those rules, or the extreme part of the rules, is making public service less attractive to good people. when good people are not there, the tone of public life is lowered rather than raised. c-span: any evidence that people may be cleaning up their act? >> guest: people are still doing things that are bad. i have a kind of dark view of human nature -- there's going to be evil there. but i think that they're being much more careful about things that might show. there are congressmen who will

not have their picture taken with a beautiful woman, at least all alone, because god knows how it could be used. c-span: let me ask you what sounds like a leading question, but is it possible that the end result of all that's been going on here is that people in public life who do wrong things are getting what they deserve? >> guest: some of them are getting what they deserve. some of them have done some wrong, but end up getting a little more than they deserve. c-span: name some of those. >> guest: for instance, geraldine ferraro. you remember when she ran for vice president in '84 there were these charges of mafia ties that were hurled at her. after the campaign, her family was in almost continuous legal trouble for five years. her husband had his real estate

license suspended at one point over a dispute on financing of one of his projects. her husband was then accused of bribery -- much more serious -- of which he was acquitted. her son was arrested by an undercover cop for possession of cocaine, and he got a sentence that was stiffer than what people usually get under that circumstance. this really was five years of purgatory, and i don't think she deserved that. c-span: okay, she didn't deserve it but she's back running for the senate. why? >> guest: yes. first of all, these people are in public life, and they wouldn't be there if they weren't resilient human beings. so it's easier for them to come back than it would be for civilians. also, scandal has become

devalued. there are so many of them that it's much easier now for someone involved in a scandal to portray himself or herself as the victim of overzealous congressional staffers or overzealous prosecutors. when he or she says that now to an audience, there is a good chance that he will be believed and a better chance as more and more of his listeners are people who have themselves had brushes with scandal. on the judiciary committee questioning clarence thomas, three of the democrats who were supposed to be the opposition had been involved in their own scandals -- [joseph] biden with the plagiarism scandal, deconcini with the keating five scandal, and teddy kennedy with, you know, everything -- with a whole series of scandals.

i can't but believe that that affected their attitude towards thomas, that when he made his statement about how much he had been harmed and how bad a thing they had done to him, it wasn't simply that they were afraid of him. my guess is that part of them sympathized. c-span: were we better off knowing all of those things about those senators? >> guest: probably not. with some of them, yes. deconcini's connection with keating is a matter of very direct public policy interest, though it turned out during the ethics hearings that some of the senators involved hadn't done anything all that different from what senators usually do. but deconcini did do a little more, and that's a very straight scandal.

biden, though, and the plagiarism is a little bothersome. it's the kind of thing that politicians do all the time. the public probably doesn't suffer for it. the public, in fact, probably benefits from it since the british are much better speakers than american politicians. then they went back to his law school and started investigating charges of plagiarism there. i think that there has got to be some kind of informal statute of limitations on charges like that. after 20 years or so, we really have to assume that a guy has gone straight, rehabilitated himself and led a useful life, or people really will be afraid to go into politics if they've ever been in trouble for anything. c-span: we're about out of time,

but on page 144 you mention clarence thomas this way, "clarence thomas, who has since been named to succeed thurgood marshall. when was the last day you had to write something in this book? >> guest: that day. he had just been named. the galleys were open until almost the end, but if my thesis was true, there's no way that the book wasn't going to be out of date very soon because the scandals continue at a steady pace. c-span: but clarence thomas is discussed at great length in here for what reason? >> guest: he was involved in another scandal, a very different one. it had nothing to do with sex. it had to do with accusations that he had lied to congress during an investigation of the eeoc, of which he was chairman, and he came out of that pretty well.

i don't think he did lie. c-span: but it involved, what, a senator -- a couple of senators? >> guest: it was a couple of senators, but the main one was senator [john] melcher who said that thomas had withheld information about the eeoc's treatment of age discrimination cases. probably the opposite was true; that is, thomas was the one who put in a computer system for the first time at that agency, and the delay in getting the information was probably due to the transition. ultimately the agency was much better off. c-span: who refused to talk to you when you went to them? anybody? >> guest: oh, a number of people did. they would do so by not answering, or by writing something very gracious. for instance, tony coelho didn't want to talk about it, and i didn't want to pursue people who

didn't want to talk about it. c-span: who is the most interesting person that did talk to you about a scandal they were involved in? >> guest: bert lance. after he left office he was in further trouble for many years. he was indicted and there was a hung jury, and they chose not to prosecute him again. but he was the most interesting for his sense of just how the dynamic had worked in his case -- just how he had been gotten out of office. he knew all about the different stages and the different players. he's a very smart man. c-span: did anybody talk to you that you said to yourself, "what a waste of time that was, and i didn't learn anything"? >> guest: oh, yes. i talked to john tower shortly after his nomination was rejected, and he was very nice and talked very graciously, but by then there had been so much

reporting on the case that there wasn't much left to say. c-span: we're out of time. i'm sorry, because there's a lot more to talk about. suzanne garment has been our guest on "booknotes" this week, and her book looks like this. >> guest: thank you. cybele suzanne garment is president of s. suzanne garment incorporated a policy consulting firm. ms. garment currently sits on the board of trustees and a national and dohman for democracy. she was a special assistant to daniel moynihan if during the four did administration whatever she co-authored, a dangerous place. for more information about the authors and books featured on encore booknotes visit us on line at booknotes.org.