Richard Allen. Robert Bauman. James Beggs. Peter Bourne. Tony Coelho. Tai Collins. Daniel Crane. Deborah Gore Dean. Raymond Donovan. Fanne Foxe. Newt Gingrich. Stephen Gobie. Thereza Imanishi-Kari. Rita Jenrette. Tim Kraft. Bert Lance. Rita Lavelle. Donald Lukens. Robert McFarlane.

Edwin Meese III. Ozzie Myers. Lyn Nofziger. Oliver North. Theodore Olson. Tom Pappas. Paula Parkinson. Elizabeth Ray. Nancy Reagan. Donna Rice. Gus Savage. Denise Sinner. Gerry Studds. Jim Wright. Joseph Wright Jr. John Zaccaro Jr.

Pop quiz: Try to recall how these people became embroiled in front-page Washington scandal (or what passes for scandal); which of them were accused of crimes; which were convicted; and what became of them. (For answers, see Page 29.)

Then read Scandal: The Crisis of Mistrust in American Politics. It’s a much-needed antidote to the obsession with exposing wrongdoing that has distorted our political culture since Watergate.

Scandal, a new book by former Wall Street Journal columnist Suzanne Garment, is one of the most sensible and readable analyses of our capital’s peculiar rituals ‘in years. Garment argues compellingly that political Washington and its scandal-happy press corps have spent far too much energy chasing tales of corruption, sin, impropriety, and the appearance thereof, and far too little on our deeper problems, which "spring less from individual wrongdoing than from more widespread failures of political will."

It’s a cautionary tale for the self-appointed, often self-righteous guardians of ethical purity whom Garment calls "scandal entrepreneurs." The carefully documented, entertainingly rendered, sometimes deliciously ironic narrative lends weight to Garment’s sobering conclusion:

"We have built ourselves a system that knows how to create a public outcry over even the appearance of an appearance of a conflict of interest but could not get itself interested in the policy sins that underlay our savings and loan crisis until Charles Keating had personalized it for us. . . .

"Instead, we seemed-and still seem-able to focus only on scandals of intention, moral failing, and criminal liability. In this sense, scandal hunting since Watergate has almost certainly made our government worse instead of better."

Garment convincingly demonstrates how the ideologically polarized politics and the adversarial journalism of the post-Watergate era set in motion a "self-reinforcing scandal machine," with prosecutors, reporters, andffcongressional staffers as the main cogs and new ethics rules as the grease; and how that machine has spun out of control, churning up hype sometimes far out of proportion to any wrongdoing, threatening to do the nation more harm than all the miscreants who ever set an investigative reporter’s nose a-twitching:

• The climate of moralistic sensationalism fostered by scandal-chasing "has contributed to public cynicism and to the fact that symbolic issues, like flag burning and public funding for offensive art, shoot more speedily than ever to the top of the public agenda."

• Public service is increasingly shunned by talented people, as a blood sport involving not only financial sacrifice but loss of privacy and the risk of embarrassment and humiliation.

• The scandal machine "gives us so many scandals that scandal loses its power to stigmatize," leading to such incongruities as the political reincarnation of Richard Nixon.

A system has lost its sense of proportion when it blurs the monstrous lies of a Nixon with, say, the domestic arrangements of former Rep. William Gray III (D-Pa.). He was mystifyingly pilloried on the front page of The Washington Post in 1989 for staying on weekends, for free, at his mother’s home in Philadelphia, which happened to be the parsonage of a church where Gray preached and where he, his late father, and his grandfather had been pastor.

The scandal? Gray (who had sold the house to the church in 1978) had passed on to the church speaking honoraria that were above the limit that he could have kept for himself. This was grist enough for journalistic speculation that he might be indirectly deriving personal gain by using the honoraria in lieu of rent.

Garment also provides poignant insights into the personal pain of those ensnarled in scandal stories: the officials who find their homes staked out by jostling reporters and sound trucks, their phones ringing with hostile intent at all hours, their "friends" suddenly shunning them; the children who see people saying bad things about their parents on TV.

She is especially instructive in showing how major news organizations have succumbed to ever more tenuous rationalizations for publicizing sexual misconduct and other private misdeeds of public officials, while turning up their noses at important policy stories "unless they could find some personal malfeasance in them."

Garment does not spare the executive branch. She shows how Iran-Contra was spawned by "embarrassing disarray" and personal squabbles at the top of the Reagan administration, as well as by mixed signals from Congress. The result: "No one governed." And she shows that it was not just an overzealous press but manipulative colleagues and a gutless President Reagan who squeezed Richard Allen out of his position as national security adviser in 1981.

Allen was buffeted by publicity over his receipt of an envelope containing $1,000 from a Japanese reporter who had interviewed Nancy Reagan and intended the money as a gesture of thanks to her. Allen plausibly said that he planned to turn the money over to the Treasury, but forgot about it after leaving it in an office safe-where it was discovered by the next occupant of the office. An official investigation found no impropriety. But other White House aides who disliked Allen saw a chance to get rid of him. He was left twisting in the wind with no presidential support and hammered by cutting, anonymous comments.

"If so much distaste was pouring forth from Allen’s own colleagues," Garment writes, "a journalist might be forgiven for assuming that the charges against him were somehow justified."

The book does have one significant flaw: It palliates the seriousness of the misconduct engaged in by some of its scandal-ravaged protagonists, notably the wanton deception of Congress by Iran-Contra figures Oliver North, Robert McFarlane, and others to conceal the ReagHn administration’s lawless efforts to keep military supplies flowing to the Contras after Congress had barred such activity.

(As Garment notes, McFarlane has been a client of her husband, Leonard Garment of D. C.’ s Dickstein, Shapiro & Morin.)

Garment delicately describes two letters to Congress in 1985-in which McFarlane denied that his National Security Council staff had played any role in seeking either aid from third countries or private donations for the Contras or in helping organize their military activities-as couched in words "not simply of dispassionate accuracy but of persuasion, protection and politics."’

In fact, these letters were couched in categorical, bald-faced lies. Garment’s euphemistic treatment of their mendacity bespeaks a broader failure to appreciate the systemic corruption represented by the almost reflexive tendency of executive-branch officials in this era of inter-branch warfare to lie to Congress and the public when it suits their convenience.

But Garment makes a powerful case indeed for her more central points: that scandals should not dominate political discourse, that we need to regain our collective sense of proportion, that "acceptance of some corruption [is] the price of democratic politics," and that politicians and journalists-fond of the rationalization that any scandal they can find is news-"need to exercise moral judgment in deciding whether to expose private wrongdoing."

After all, Garment notes, some of our greatest leaders might have faredoadly under today’s merciless microscope. Think of Alexander Hamilton, who had an affair with a Philadelphia woman and later paid her and her husband hush money. Think of Thomas Jefferson, who seduced both the wife of a close friend and another married woman. Think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, according to a 1921 Senate report, lied to a . naval court to cover up his involvement in a scheme in which young enlisted men were dispatched to gather evidence against suspected homosexuals by having sex with them.

With our leaders, as with the rest of us, the flesh is weak. Also the spirit. But government must go on. And while this does not mean we should condone real corruption, it does mean, as Garment suggests, that "a network of prohibitions and sanctions tight enough to eliminate all undesirable behavior might also create a government incapable of accomplishing much that is worth doing."