Ethical Dilemmas

Soon after we returned to California we went to a party for Egil Krogh. Bud Krogh is a bit older than I am and worked in a more responsible position than I did in the Nixon White House. One of his tasks was to advance the Elvis visit to the White House but he also had a number of roles with the plumbers in Watergate. Bud had just gotten out of prison for his role in the scandal. My wife, who is considerably less political, was intrigued to meet Bud. She also was quite impressed. When someone asked about his involvement in Watergate, he said, when you are young and the President of the United States asks you to do something you may not think as carefully as you should about whether the thing is the right thing to do. Bud went on to get readmitted to the bar and have a good career in the law and in lecturing on ethical issues. He and his son actually wrote a book about the issues in 2007 called Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House.

I bring this up because a friend who is a rector of a public university in Mexico wrote me this morning to tell me cryptically that he was resigning his position. In the state he is in, they are going into elections in the next year and evidently a couple of the key aides to the Governor have asked him to do a couple of things which he thought to be unethical. My friend in Mexico is a bit older than Bud was when he was asked to work on the projects he was convicted for, and also he is a person of enormous faith. Thus, he was able to look power in the face and say, No.

C.S. Lewis has a great essay about the ethical dilemmas that each of us face. He said for the most part we don't get confronted with momentous ethical dilemmas rather they are things that simply do not pass the "scratch and sniff" test (my words not his) but the sum total of those small decisions eventually moves you into a very different position in life. My friend in Mexico, when confronted with one of those seemingly minor decisions, made the right choice. I admire him for that decision.