by James A. Leach

About the author: James A. Leach, a Republican from Iowa, has served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1977 and is the chairman of the House Banking and Financial Services Committee, which began an investigation of the Whitewater affair in August 1995.

Iwould like to take this opportunity to talk not of the issues of the day, but rather of the ethics of our time. In so doing, I would like to take as a starting point a scandal that has come to be dubbed “Whitewater” and suggest it is a central issue not because it is big, but precisely because it is small. In its very smallness, Whitewater evidences the shortcomings of public leadership in America today.

The German architect Mies Van Der Rohe once suggested that “less...