Don’t be too sure. For the one thing that seems certain is this: the phrase ““I have ordered an investigation’’–along with its cousins ““Congress will authorize an investigation,’’ ““the White House says it is investigating,’’ ““the Department is conducting an internal investigation’’–is enjoying a fabulous new career. It has taken its place beside the hoary tactic of announcing the appointment of a commission to deal with some terminally awkward political problem, mainly by getting it out of the news and sending it off to political nowhere for as long as it can be kept there. In all but a few remarkable instances, the commission can of course also be counted on to come back in a few years with recommendations that have turned the highly charged issues before it into ideological Cream of Wheat.
The solemn announcement that an investigation will begin immediately has the same delaying function that creation of a commission does, but some other functions as well that are distinctively useful when the question is not the future of immigration policy, say, but why the deputy administrator failed to act on six warnings about a situation that eventually caused something terrible to happen. Announcing an investigation permits the person at the top summarily to whisk this embarrassment off the stage. In the snap of a finger it’s gone to investigation land, and until the investigators have established the facts, only the truly irresponsible would dream of asking the guy in charge to talk about it.
It is true that legal pressures and realities argue for exceptional care and discretion in dealing with many of the episodes that end up under some form of investigation or other. But it is also true that large numbers of the official derelictions that come to public attention–especially those concerning things like a bureaucrat’s indifferent response to a clearly growing problem, or a financial officer’s failure to foresee that the till was two days from being empty or a supervisor’s apparent obliviousness to the fact that half the people on the payroll never came to work–are the kinds of things for which the person in charge should be able to demand an explanation and an accounting at once. What’s wrong with ““I intend to find out just how this happened’’? This is, after all, an intention to inquire, not an assertion of guilt or a denial of due process, and, I think, an obligation of the one in charge.
Nowadays, of course, we have made a tacit assumption that the person in charge is not the one to do the inquiring, for reasons of presumed bias and possible involvement in the scandal itself. Fair enough, and I think investigation by independent counsels, department inspector generals, congressional members of the opposition and so on is sound practice in the right circumstances. But every circumstance is not right. And some of these investigations can be real graveyards for the issue of scandal or criminality under consideration, the only difference from the real kind of graveyard being that what gets buried gets buried alive, only to be exhumed at the end of the investigation quite dead.
Death by investigation, especially investigation by a committee of Congress or an independent counsel or any other at least semi-public instrumentality, works in obvious ways. First there is the prolonging effect: the right staff personnel must be found. Then they must themselves be investigated down to the last college arrest for mooning, quarreled over, defended and finally approved. Money must be appropriated, generally more than seems warranted, although it is always said to be not enough.
Then there is the disarming, neutralizing, discrediting, diverting and ultimately miniaturizing function: some scandal of procedure in the investigation will occur and have to be much chewed over; it will be repeated until we have all accepted it as indisputable and relevant truth that the work force that wasn’t showing up, for instance, was being shockingly underpaid and that this is what we should be investigating; information will be unearthed that political opponents of the ones under investigation were found doing the same thing themselves in the past. All this combines with the passage of time to make the once substantial issue seem small and even pettish to pursue.
And, finally, there is the colonizing effect: you can see this and sense it, I think, in the Kenneth Starr inquiries, the Justice Department inquiries and the Senate and House inquiries as well, all of which concern some part of what goes under the generic name of Whitewater. There is an impulse in Washington, when confronted with difficult issues, not to try to reach a conclusion about them but rather to move in and settle down and lose all sense of urgency or temporariness of mission. ““We live here,’’ the busy colonists say when someone is rude enough to ask after a couple of years what’s going on. ““We are doing important work in a very industrious manner. When we have something to tell you, we will. Meanwhile, leave us alone; it’s dinnertime.''
You should think about this the next time you are caught siphoning funds from the treasury or abusing the authority of the office or lying in your report about how wonderful things are in the part of the operation you’re responsible for when they’re really wretched. Hope that you hear the words ““We are beginning an investigation immediately’’ instead of ““Send Carruthers to my office at once.’’ Under the first of these constructions, Carruthers has at least a fighting chance of vanishing into polemic fog.
