Two prominent Americans recently have heard their off-the-record words come back to haunt them. Both Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill and the Rev. Billy Graham thought they were speaking privately. The similarity ends there. The contrast in their behavior may hold lessons for other public figures.

Secretary O’Neill told a foreign policy group last week that he disagreed with the Bush administration’s decision earlier this month to protect the domestic steel industry by imposing tariffs up to 30 percent on imported steel. He said the new tax would cost more jobs in steel-using industries than it would save in the aging domestic steel plants.

Mr. O’Neill addressed more than 200 people at a New York dinner meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. He said he was expressing his personal views and did not expect to be quoted publicly. But of course he was. The New York Times found several who reported the secretary’s departure from an administration decision on a sensitive issue. He was probably correct in his economic assessment and in his advocacy of free-trade principles often advanced by President Bush. An administration trade official had acknowledged, however, that the tariff decision was political, necessary to appease steel-producing states so as to bolster general support for free trade.

It was not the first time Mr. O’Neill diverged from administration policies. In an appearance before a congressional committee, he questioned whether the United States should continue to bar American citizens from visiting Cuba. The White House issued a “clarification,” saying that the secretary supported the current policy.

The Rev. Graham’s remarks were made in 1972, in an Oval Office conversation with President Nixon. When H.R. Haldeman’s White House diaries came out in 1994, Mr. Graham categorically denied Mr. Haldeman’s report that the two men joined in discussing the “total Jewish domination of the media.” Mr. Haldeman quoted Mr. Graham as blaming “satanic Jews” for the nation’s problems. Mr. Graham issued a public denial at the time, saying: “Those are not my words. I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.” Most people accepted the denial, and Mr. Graham’s reputation as a fair-minded bridge builder remained intact.

Until, that is, the National Archives made public a tape of that 1972 conversation. It was even worse than Mr. Haldeman had reported. On the tape, the North Carolina preacher can be heard saying, after agreeing that left-wing Jews dominated the news media, that the Jewish “stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.” He added that if Mr. Nixon was re-elected “then we might be able to do something.”

Mr. Graham, how 83 years old, issued a brief statement saying, “I can’t imagine what caused me to make those comments, which I totally repudiate. Whatever the reason, I was wrong for not disagreeing with the president, and I sincerely apologize to anyone I have offended. I don’t ever recall having those feelings about any group, especially the Jews, and I certainly do not have them now.” The apology, taken at face value, leaves the impression that the famous clergyman valued so strongly his relationship with a series of presidents that he chimed in with the harshly bigoted views of a president known for his racist, some would say paranoid, private behavior. He stained his reputation, perhaps fatally.

Better, of course, if Mr. Graham had done like Mr. O’Neill, who, as the Quakers say, “speaks truth to power.” Mr. O’Neill may sometimes offend a White House that places special value on loyalty and support. He may even eventually fall victim to the fate of former Army Corps of Engineers director Mike Parker, who was fired for openly opposing Mr. Bush’s proposed budget cuts for his agency.

But Mr. O’Neill seems to be proving that he’d rather be right than secretary.