A country slicker tangles with a divided, defensive committee
Even for a nation long saturated with theatrics in Washington, the spectacle was fascinating. Easy-going Bert Lance, the country slicker whose financial low jinks as a Georgia banker had deeply imperiled his survival as Jimmy Carter's most intimate and visible Cabinet official, had turned from an amiable Teddy-bear figure into a charging grizzly. Seizing his long-promised day in court, the man widely considered doomed tore into his tormentors, sent a senatorial committee into confusion in nationally televised hearings and gave himself, however temporarily, a fighting chance to remain in office in big, bad Washington.
The skillfully crafted argument of Carter's Director of Management and Budget, as unveiled before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, was much stronger in its attack on the excesses of a few of his senatorial critics than in its often strained and flawed defense against the most serious charges. Those charges focused on his great and persistent overdrafts at Georgia's Calhoun National Bank, and his frequent use of the bank's plane for personal trips when he was the president or chairman, from 1963 to 1974. Lance went too far, mawkishly equating his plight with that of victims of governmental oppression abroad, the human rights martyrs. No one, after all, has an inalienable right to a high Government job. But he struck chords designed to set off sympathetic vibrations across a scandal-weary nation.
Lance presented himself as a wronged public servant, condemned as guilty by his critics and a sensation-bent press before he could fully set forth his own defense. Invoking the Bible and Abraham Lincoln, he rather grandiosely said that his ordeal was a test of the system by which the U.S. determines whether its high public officials merit their trusted positions. That turnabout, putting his inquisitors on the defensive and setting them to partisan bickering among themselves, was a remarkable achievement for Lance. He had sufficiently muddied up some of the allegations against him so that the joking question wagging around Washington was "Now, will Bert ask the committee to resign?"