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The hypocrisy operates on two levels. First, many of those who profess moral outrage, while they doubtless feel that they are doing their jobs and serving the nation, also enjoy an opportunity for personal gain. Democrats have found a potentially exploitable means of sullying Reagan. The chairman of the investigating subcommittee, Representative Donald Albosta of Michigan, has been rocketed up from obscurity. President Carter's former advisers have suggested that their man lost in part because of a dirty trick. On the Republican side, Reagan's ousted National Security Adviser Richard Allen has been brought forth by some alchemy as an expert on morals; on television he has happily fingered, as a source of leaks from the Carter camp, the man who triggered Allen's own departure from office over an all but forgotten $1,000 gratuity left in a Government safe. Other Republicans too have latched onto the episode to advance factional disputes. Most of the Reagan aides who admit having seen Carter's papers are from the staff's pragmatic, centrist wing; conservative rivals have gleefully described the dustup as a chance to root out the White House moderates. Though exposure of wrongdoing is one of the highest callings of a free press, some of the journalists on the story have simply savored the excitement of a big-game hunt against a government.
Beyond the jockeying for position in the name of moral probity, a deeper hypocrisy is at work: many of those who have denounced the ethics of the Reagan campaign know full well that finding out what an opponent is up to is an absolutely normal part of politics. In the real world, rather than the world of civics textbooks, campaigns often aim intelligence operations at each other. The stakes are substantial and emotions run high. Candidates and staffs can be driven to excesses by a genuine belief that their program and point of view will help the country. It is difficult to name a major American campaign that did not run afoul of some legal technicality or transgress someone's notion of propriety. Politics is no justification for crime. But within the law, political professionals sharply disagree as to what ethical standards apply to campaigns. They suggest that greater leeway can be given to challengers, who must combat the advantages enjoyed by incumbents. The conduct of sitting Presidents must protect the image of their office; besides, they already have at hand the resources of the Government.
One measure of the prevailing moral confusion is that pundits have not lined up predictably on this story. Columnist James J. Kilpatrick, an ardent supporter of President Reagan, is deeply troubled by the idea that the Reagan team had Carter's briefing book. Yet George Reedy, a former top aide to Lyndon Johnson, says, "It takes a positive effort of will for anyone who has been involved in presidential campaigning during the past 50 years to seethe with genuine indignation over the case of President Carter's purloined briefing documents." Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert Strauss similarly has said that politicians need not aspire to sainthood, and can accept data that come to them unsolicited. Recent candidates would not have doubted that: campaign aides to John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, among others, sought information from the camps of opponents.