Handbook on the How-To’s of Basic Ethics

In suggesting 10 books that every presidential candidate ought to have read, I led with “The Boy Scout Handbook,” a choice that may have given some readers the notion that my list was a spoof.

On the contrary, several readers have written to applaud it.

Dale Paule of Granada Hills writes that he recently bought a mint condition copy of a handbook issued in the late 1930s, and was deeply impressed by the values it taught, beyond such humble instructions as “how to start a camp fire by rubbing two sticks together.”

It contained nothing less, he said, than the complete plans for building a man: “It spoke of such things as integrity, trust, honor, loyalty, humility and even faith--qualities that are almost foreign in today’s society.”

Paule concludes: “I’m convinced that if we were to apply the principles found in the Boy Scout Manual to the candidates for President today, we would find no qualifiers. . . .”

Dr. Willard E. Goodwin, professor emeritus, UCLA School of Medicine, says a young woman who is doing a biography of his friend Robert McNamara (John Kennedy’s secretary of defense and later president of the World Bank) asked why McNamara had acted the way he had. “I said, ‘You have to know he is an Eagle Scout and that is the way he acts.’ She simply didn’t understand what I was talking about. . . .”

But surely the most eloquent if slightly ironic praise for “The Boy Scout Handbook” is in the title essay in Paul Fussell’s collection of that name (Oxford University Press, 1982).

Basing his critique on the 1979 edition (29 million copies sold of all editions since 1910), Fussell concedes that “a complex sentence is as rare as a reference to girls,” but notes no compromise with the alleged illiteracy of today’s young. “The book assumes an audience prepared by a very good high school education, undaunted by words like biosphere, ideology and ecosystem .”

Scouting, Fussell says, is neither sinister, stupid nor funny. He describes the book’s political slant as “slightly archaic liberal. It is broadly hinted that industrial corporations are prime threats to clean air and conservation. In every illustration depicting more than three boys, one is black.”

He notes that there is less emphasis on knots than in earlier editions; the official handshake has been simplified, and there is a new lyricism--”feel the wind blowing through your hair.”

Fussell observes: “There’s more emphasis now on fun and less on duty; or rather, duty is validated because, properly viewed, it is a pleasure. (If that sounds like advice useful to grown-ups as well as to Scouts, you’re beginning to get the idea.)”

Fussell notes “a post-Watergate awareness that public officials must be watched closely. One’s civic duties include the obligation to ‘keep up on what’s going on around you,’ in order to ‘get involved’ and ‘help change things that are not good.’ ”

Fussell finds that the book’s best advice is ethical: “Learn to think. . . . Gather knowledge. . . . Have initiative. . . .”

He says: “Actually, there’s hardly a better gauge for measuring the gross official misbehavior of the ‘70s than the ethics enshrined in this handbook. From its explicit ethics you can infer such propositions as ‘A Scout does not tap his acquaintances’ telephones,’ or, ‘A Scout does not bomb and invade a neutral country, and then lie about it,’ or ‘A Scout does not prosecute war unless, as the Constitution provides, it has been declared by the Congress.’ ”

He concludes: “The Official Boy Scout Handbook, for all its focus on Axmanship, Backpacking, Cooking, First Aid, Flowers, Hiking, Map and Compass, Semaphores, Trees and Weather, is another book about goodness. No home, and certainly no government office, should be without a copy. . . .”

And surely I would rest easier at night if I knew that every presidential candidate had one at his bedside.

If you thought I was kidding about the Boy Scout Handbook, you might not take my other recommendations seriously. As a reminder, here are the other nine again.

“Men, an Owner’s Manual,” by Stephanie Brush; “Is Sex Necessary?” by James Thurber and E. B. White; “The Lives of a Cell,” by Lewis Thomas; “Comfort Me With Apples,” or anything else by Peter De Vries; “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” by George Orwell; “Innocents Abroad,” by Mark Twain; “The Trivializing of America,” by Norman Corwin; “Strictly Speaking,” by Edwin Newman, and “Swedish Land-Use Planning” (author unknown, optional).