“He Was No Sinner in His Own Eyes”
By The Economist has an excellent remembrance of Charles Keating, anti-obscenity advocate in all its forms–pornography and federal regulation of the financial industry.
Crusader and snake-oil salesman were hard to reconcile. Perhaps it all sprang from having an invalid father, too weak to steer him. Perhaps it came from spending years in navy training in the war, but never fighting. A bronze plaque on his desk declared that “A man can do no wrong if he always rides to the sound of the guns.” His energy and arrogance seemed to fire off wildly in dozens of different directions.
For him, however, there was no contradiction. He fought scum in all its forms. For him, federal regulation too was an obscenity. When the savings-and-loans industry was deregulated in 1982, it was allowed to take risks with investments. That was what he did with Lincoln, quintupling its worth in four years. Then in 1985 the rules tightened again. At that point the regulators—some of them homos, all of them evil—launched a vendetta against him. The practitioners of yellow journalism followed.
He was no sinner in his own eyes. “Martyr” and “scapegoat” were more like it. He was running a dynamic enterprise that was bound to recover when the market perked up. If Washington had let him alone, the Lincoln investors “would all be rich”. Besides, in the far worse financial scandals of 2008-09, no one went to jail.
By the way, when Keating died, did the Sunday talk shows have John McCain to talk about it? Unlike McCain’s usual blather, he actually knows what’s he talking about when it comes to Keating.