I don’t think that F.L.W’s personality made his architecture any less brilliant, but surely it affected his business relationships (as it did his personal ones).

I suppose that’s where I would disagree. It seems to me that the motivations for an extra-marital affair and the motivations for being a corrupt politician are different and not necessarily connected. After all, there was no sexual component to the Sposorship Scandal a number of years ago, and there was no (connected) corruption component to the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal in the 1990s.

Another quick analogy: I’ve been watching a documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright. It turns out that he was a massive jerk (multiple affairs, abandonment, a sense of moral superiority), but that doesn’t make his architecture any less brilliant than if he were a model husband and father.

I do see what you’re saying about applying it to all civil servants and of course that becomes problematic.

It’s tricky, because of course — you’re right — that finding any public figure to demonstrate integrity and honesty is a very dangerous thing.

I agree that Miller’s quotation of Trudeau was not appropriate, but I don’t agree with your overall thesis. Imagine two public figures from two different cities: Jim from Pleasantville and Bruce from Happytown. Jim and Bruce have identical service records; they cleaned up the streets in their community, they made transit more efficient, they eliminated corruption in the municipal electoral system, etc. Three years after they both retire from public life, you find out that Jim was actually a womanizer and had many extra-marital relationships. Does that somehow make Bruce a better public servant? If you say “yes”, imagine a situation where Jim was a womanizer but was never found out and carried his secret to his grave? You couldn’t possibly say “yes” in that case. It seems that knowledge of personal indistrection in the case of The Jambroni is purely accidental and not really relevant to The Jambroni’s ability to do his job (any more than it would be for the fellow at the MTO that I mentioned above). As a result, you’re right to think he’s a sleezebag, but having an affair doesn’t really disqualify you from running a transit system. Accepting kickbacks from Bombarier would disqualify you, but that’s because kickbacks create a financially corrupt conflict of interest.

Teaching our kids about honesty and integrity is a tough job to do; relying on anyone (public and private figures alike) to provide good examples for them is a dubious plan.