The Watergate scandal was cresting, and it sparked a disenchantment that steered Lewis to reporting. “I didn’t really become obsessed with corruption,” Lewis said Thursday night, in a lecture sponsored by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. “But I began to notice patterns.”

His journalism career included stints at ABC News and the 60 Minutes news program. But even as his career flourished, the former Eagle Scout became unsettled by a growing belief that Washington -- and corporate journalism -- operated by rules that all too often provided cover for abhorrent public governance. And one recurring pattern he noticed was that typically no laws were broken. “Most of the problems seemed to be legal,” he said.

In 1989, Lewis left TV and founded the Center for Public Integrity, one of the pioneers of the nonprofit investigative journalism movement. “I don’t necessarily recommend walking out of your job not knowing what you’re going to do next,” Lewis, who funded the startup himself, said. “But that’s what I did.”

The CPI has since won innumerable awards and salutations, and Lewis himself received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. But the CPI will perhaps forever be best known for revealing how the Clinton White House rewarded major donors with stays in the Lincoln bedroom.

“We are the skunk at the garden party,” he acknowledged to American Journalism Review in a 2005 profile. The article noted that he got his start poking at power early, with a high school newspaper column that anonymously took administrators like the principal to task.

Reporting For Duty

When he founded CPI, Lewis was as frustrated with the clubby world of inside-the-Beltway journalism as with questionable conduct by government officials. An example: the dearth of reporting related to the Iran-Contra scandal. In Iran-Contra, high officials in the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran in part to covertly raise money for funding Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, which Congress had explicitly barred.

“Most reporters found out about it from the Attorney General announcing it,” he said. The scandal led to the indictment of several top Reagan administration leaders, including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Weinberger would be pardoned by President George H.W. Bush prior to trial. Although the scandal dates back more than 25 years, the reality is that the coverup continues, Lewis said. “We still don’t have all the Iran-Contra documents,” he said.

Lewis left the executive director’s job at CPI in 2005 and is currently a professor at American University in Washington, where he is executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

In his talk, Lewis emphasised that, in most cases, egregious conduct by Washington’s officialdom isn’t illegal. That’s the problem. “The thing that bothers me is this word corruption,” he said. “Most people think it means illegal. It doesn’t mean that, if you look it up. You can call it systemic corruption. I call it legal corruption.” (And for the record, the Edmond J. Safra Center prefers the term “institutional corruption.”)

Around We Go

An example of the kind of corruption Lewis was referring to: the unrelenting revolving door, where government officials leave to work for much bigger salaries at entities they formerly regulated. When the CPI looked at the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, it found that 47 percent of people who quit went to work for foreign governments or corporations. In another case, he found that 80 percent of departing employees from the Superfund hazardous waste cleanup program left for jobs with contractors to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Besides the revolving door, he found that regulatory capture, a common institutional corruption syndrome, is very real in Washington. The U.S. Forest Service, for instance, was “basically shilling for the timber industry.”

And the conflicts of interest arising from campaign contributions were symbolized when Congress refused to toughen food inspection standards -- pleasing powerful agribusiness interests -- despite rising numbers of E. coli infections. “Funny, that legislation requiring the USDA to do it just never made it out of committee,” Lewis said.

Furthermore, a close examination of defense spending showed it primarily went to companies that gave lavishly to the political process, and frequently employed former military officials to do their bidding. “Essentially, what we found was 40 percent of all defense contracts have no competitive bidder,” he said. “There’s all this transparency issue.”

Money Changes Everything

It is the defining role of money in Washington which Lewis finds the most intriguing. For instance, when magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes ran for president largely on a “flat tax” platform, Lewis took Forbes’s financial disclosure forms to an accountant. The conclusion: a flat tax would cut Forbes’s tax bill in half.

On a broader level, Lewis concluded that all the money funneled to candidates simply undermines democracy. “I noticed that the presidential candidate who raised the most money the year before the primaries was getting the nomination every time,” he said. “It meant money was dictating our choices even before there was a single vote.” He later added:  “Money and power go together -- always.”

That conclusion led to “The Buying of the President,” a series of books, beginning with the 1996 campaign, that document the financial forces that determine who occupies the Oval Office. His assessment: “We have a really fundamentally broken system here.” In Washington, he said,  “we always say it’s the most expensive election in history -- until the next election.”

Despite having reached some somber conclusions regarding Washington corruption, Lewis actually spoke with a gentle and self-deprecating tone. He acknowledged not having the answer to the institutional corruption problems plaguing Washington. “It’s not enough to throw the bums out in the next election,” he said. “It’s actually a much more endemic problem.”

But he did offer a theory as to why Frank Capra never made a sequel to Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. “It becomes a Stephen King movie,” he quipped.

THIS PIECE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED BY THE EDMOND J SAFRA CENTER FOR ETHICS AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY ON 12 ARPIL 2013 AND IS REPUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION THROUGH A RECIPORCAL ARRANGEMENT WITH THE CLMR. FOR DETAILS OF THE WORK OF THE HARVARD CENTER AND ITS INNOVATIVE LAB PROGRAM, SEE http://www.ethics.harvard.edu/lab