The Center recently signed its second contract with the City of Chicago. Under the first contract, completed February, 7987, we interviewed about half the 40 department heads, developed 24 cases for discussion, and held a half-day workshop for the whole cabinet. Under the second, we have already done a training session for the new Board of Ethics. We expect to do more interviewing, to hold a second workshop for the cabinet, and to prepare materials for use in ethics training within departments. The work has so far let us see city government from an unusual angle. It has also changed significantly what we consider important in "political ethics."

Like most residents of Chicago, we unthinkingly assumed that local government is corrupt in the same way that the summer here is humid. We made no distinctions between, say, aldermen and administrators, or between the civil servants who run departments and the political appointees who set their policy. We certainly did not take talk of reform seriously.

We drew our sense of "their" ethical agenda in part from the newspaper, then reporting more than the usual number of indictments of local lawyers, judges, aldermen, contractors, and miscellaneous city employees for bribery, extortion, tax evasion, and racketeering. But, in part too, we drew it from such philosophical discussions as Michael Walzer's "Political Action: The Problem of Dirty

Hands." We were not sure what to make of the Mayor's Ethics Order (which, by March of last year, had become an Ordinance.).

In short, we initially entered City Hall as we would enter the lions' yard at Lincoln Park Zoo, that is to say, with the excitement of one knowingly making a terrible mistake.

We were, it turned out, not eaten alive. Instead, we met a great many interesting people, less retiring than most academics but otherwise not so different. They were busy trying to do the public business efficiently and quietly. Many had a question or two for which they could find no easy answer. How, they wanted to know, should they handle this or that situation? Such questions never listed lying, cheating, or stealing among the alternatives. The questions were nevertheless hard because the most efficient alternative was often the one that would look like lying, cheating, or stealing to someone with less than full information. This issue includes a sample of the problems we collected. The full set of 24 is now on the Center's publications list.

Our experience with Chicago's city government suggested that we might usefully devote an issue of PERSPECTIVES to the relation between ethics and politics. This is the result. Included in this issue, you will find: the Executive Director of Chicago's Board of Ethics describing the politics of getting and maintaining a municipal code of ethics; a description of contemporaneous events in New York State (for comparison); a former alderman's report on how he kept his political hands clean during the bad old days; and some suggestions for teaching ethics from a former professor of public administration.

As we prepared this issue, we heard a little about what cities like Sacramento, California and San Antonio, Texas have been doing. We have, in fact, been left with the impression that municipal government may be entering a period much like that we have observed first the professions and then businesses enter, a period of new, or at least renewed interest, in ethics. Whether or not this impression is correct, the Center has certainly benefited from contact with the City of Chicago. It is therefore fitting that, though this issue was planned months before the sudden death in November of Chicago's reform mayor, we dedicate this issue to the Hon. Harold Washington without whose concern for ethics in city government this issue would never have been conceived.