RALEIGH — People in power can create a pretty thick cocoon for themselves when times get tough and their judgment or moral choices are called into question. The cocoon’s walls are made of hubris, and rationalization, and desperate hope, all mixed up together. It deadens the senses, forcing reality to intrude on the cloistered one within only in vague and roundabout ways.
Unfortunately, for the most part, the tactic only delays. It doesn’t exonerate. The cocoon becomes a prison of miscalculation, not a refuge. And when the prisoner finally has to emerge, there is no resemblance to a beautiful new creature.
Indeed, when the charges are criminal, it may just be a matter of leaving a metaphorical prison to enter a real one. That very well may happen in the case of two of the four powerful folks who finally resigned this week amid scandal. It should have happened much, much sooner.
Agriculture Commissioner Meg Scott Phipps announced Thursday that she would contravene previous political promises and resign her post Friday as the campaign-finance and political-extortion cases swirling around her kicked into a high gear. Her father testified before a grand jury. Another of her top aides at Agriculture, Mike Blanton, appeared likely to receive a criminal indictment. And few statewide Democratic leaders and donors were rallying to the defense of her and her famous family.
The day before, Martha Stewart resigned as chief executive of the publicly traded company that bears her name on the heels of her arrest on charges of securities fraud and obstruction of justice. And the day of Phipps’ belated decision to step down, top editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd announced their resignations at The New York Times in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal.
I would argue that in all three cases, the resignations came too late and reflected too little concern for others. Phipps must have known how deeply her own personal involvement in her campaign-finance problems had damaged her credibility and her ability to lead a state agency. She should also have known how staying around, in the face of what has seemed overwhelming evidence of her incompetence (her criminal liability, a separate matter, as yet unrevealed), was damaging the legacy of the Scott family and raising expectations among their few remaining defenders that could not, in the end, be met.
Stewart’s intransigence imposed a direct financial cost — it likely made the salvation of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia impossible. The stock price has plummeted over the last few months. Perhaps there was no way to save the company, based as it is around her own persona, but certainly her lengthy tenure as its CEO during the period could only have made sure of that. By the way, I think that the criminal case against Stewart is flimsy. But in the best interest of her company, she should have stepped down as CEO early on, let the legal process run its course, and then resumed leadership after a public vindication.
As for Raines and Boyd, the reporting of their own newspaper and the cogent observations of media critics and others established clearly that their editorial misjudgments were a key explanation for Blair’s rein of error. They coddled him. They used him as a token for the sake of “diversity” when they should have embraced and enforced high standards for everyone. They helped to create a culture at the newspaper that enabled corner-cutting, fact-twisting, and agenda-peddling.
Instead of taking responsibility and its consequences up front, Raines and Boyd let their colleagues twist in the wind for weeks and helped the scandal swirl to a size and scope it likely would not have otherwise reached.
I’m not suggesting that every leader of every organization should fall on his or her sword at the slighest hint of scandal or misbehavior by others within it. A large degree of personal responsibility for the criminality or immoral act is required. In most of these cases, the apples didn’t just fall close to the tree. They were still on the tree.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.