The purpose of this research is to examine the issues concerning ethics in government. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the subject of government-related ethics issues have achieved importance, and then to discuss the variety of views, some of them controversial, surrounding such subsidiary topics as a hierarchy of ethical priorities as against the priorities of governance.
There appears to be an inherent tension between the idea of democracy and that of ethics in governmental principles and priorities in the modern period. Boundaries between democratic values, ethics, and power to influence government seem blurred. De Tocqueville famously remarked about 1830s America that suc cessful foreign relations demands scarcely any qualities democ racy is noted for but almost all it is deficient in (De Tocque ville 42). In the modern period, the same appears to hold true of the successful conduct of government policy more generally.
Moral issues been a persistent feature of political discourse in the modern period. A pivotal event in regard to government ethics was the Watergate scandal, which has passed into popular imagination as an example of government misbehavior and which had the effect of forcing Richard Nixon, facing impeachment, to resign from office. By the time that occurred, Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, had already resigned in consequence of a whole range of charges regarding ethical violations, including bribery.
Unethical activity as an instrument of public policy in the Nixon White House was well documented. What came to be known as the Huston Plan, a series of national-security memoranda written by White House aide Tom Huston, were published by The New York Times in 1973, in the wake of myriad Watergate disclosures. One memorandum read in part:
A. Interpretive Restraints on Communications Intelligence. . . . Present interpretation should be broadened to permit and program for...