Essay: PUBLIC FIGURES AND THEIR PRIVATE LIVES

LESS well remembered than Lord Acton’s celebrated aphorism about the corrupting effects of power is his dictum that “Everything secret degenerates; nothing is safe that does not show it can bear discussion and publicity.” Carl Jung agreed that “all personal secrets have the effect of sin or guilt.” These statements aptly define the attitude of a democratic society—particularly the U.S.—toward its leaders. The man in public life has a private life that is not exclusively his own. It is assumed that the people’s right to know includes the right to know all, or almost all, about their chosen leaders: health, habits, character and foibles. The public’s curiosity is insatiable, and often for good reason. If a politician behaves badly in private matters, he might act the same way in his public duties. That, at any rate, is the theory that has always linked scandal and history, low gossip and high statesmanship.

Empires have been shaken and governments have fallen because of private indiscretion. Thwarted in love as well as politics, the bitterly frustrated young Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, killed himself and his mistress at the resort of Mayerling in 1889. The royal family did its best to hush up the scandal, but rumors rocked the empire and speeded up the pace of its dissolution. Home rule seemed all but assured for Ireland until the chief advocate in Britain’s Parliament, Charles Parnell, was haled into court as a corespondent in a divorce case. Because of his affair with Kitty O’Shea, which outraged Irish Catholics and British Nonconformists alike, Parnell was ruined and home rule was set back for more than 30 years.

The Relativity of Scandal

The death of Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquiddick Island last month does not belong in the same category as these and similar scandal-tinged tragedies. Edward Kennedy has denied all charges of indiscretion with the young woman, and there is neither proof nor convincing speculation to the contrary. Yet his inconsistent and clearly incomplete explanations have allowed doubts to persist that involve much more than Kennedy’s political future. The fortunes of the Democratic Party in the 1972 presidential election have been affected; so, perhaps, have been some of the liberal causes that Ted Kennedy espoused.

The reaction to the Chappaquiddick mystery once again illustrates that in the processes of public judgment, perhaps the most powerful factors are appearance and imagination. Scandal is a relative matter. How people react to an alleged or suspected indiscretion depends on time and place, on who knows and who tells, on the prestige—and vulnerability—of the persons involved. Pure caprice is often a factor. What one man gets away with for a lifetime may destroy another overnight. Charles Parnell fell from power because of the honest love of a married woman, while his near-contemporary, David Lloyd George, remained Prime Minister of Great Britain despite many love affairs and several illegitimate children. As his son almost boastfully put it: “He was probably the greatest natural Don Juan in the history of British politics. To portray his life without taking into account this side of his personality is like failing to depict Beethoven’s handicap of, deafness during the composition of his greatest works.”

How much a scandal hurts often depends on how skillfully it is exploited by political enemies. When he accepted a token gift for putting in a good word for his friend Bernard Goldfine with the Federal Trade Commission, Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s Presidential Assistant, did not do anything much out of the ordinary in Washington. But congressional Democrats, who were smarting from charges of corruption during the Truman Administration, seized their opportunity and drove Adams from public life. Former Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas exercised bad judgment when he accepted a retainer from the foundation of Financier Louis Charles Wolfson, whose case was due for review by the court. Yet Fortas might have been able to keep his seat on the bench if he had not been associated with the wheeler-dealer politicking of Lyndon Johnson, or so closely identified with the liberal, activist opinions of the Warren court.

Nuances of Behavior

Even if they are surrounded by enemies ready to pounce at their first lapse, public figures can get away with a lot if their misdeeds are only a matter of gossip. The U.S. President, in particular, is well insulated against excessively prying eyes. Warren Harding employed the Secret Service to keep watch over his liaisons in the White House. Franklin Roosevelt’s affair with his wife’s social secretary, Lucy Mercer, was successfully kept out of print even though it almost broke up his marriage. Washington gossips amused themselves with stories about John Kennedy’s attentiveness to pretty girls; yet no hint of scandal emerged to damage his career.

There is a kind of safety in the undocumented rumor. On the other hand, even relatively innocuous events can become damaging once they are matters of public record. Justice Hugo Black’s brief, youthful membership in the Ku Klux Klan did nothing to shape his judicial philosophy; yet when Black’s Klan affiliation was revealed shortly after his appointment to the Supreme Court, he was almost forced to resign. Nelson Rockefeller had a possible shot at the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. But he was removed from contention when he divorced his wife of 18 years to marry a mother of four, who lost custody of her children by choosing to marry Rocky.

The kind of private behavior that is tolerated in public figures varies considerably from nation to nation. Each country has its own unwritten code of seemly behavior. It would have been acceptable for the Prince of Wales to carry on a discreet affair with Mrs. Wallis Simpson, if he had wanted to; but for him as King Edward VIII to marry a divorced American woman was unthinkable. Class resentment and sexual envy were aroused in the British public by the disclosure that the Tory Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, had fraternized with Christine Keeler and assorted other shady characters. But when Profumo lied about the matter to the House of Commons, he destroyed his standing with the Establishment as well. Such flouting of tradition brought about his own resignation and contributed to a Labor victory the following year.

Italy is sunnily tolerant of sexual peccadilloes; in a land without divorce, why should an unhappily married man of wealth and influence not be allowed a mistress? What an Italian politician must guard against is making a brutta figura —roughly, a fool of himself. The late Communist Party boss, Palmiro Togliatti, left his wife to live with a woman 27 years younger than he; yet his standing in politics was unaffected. By contrast, Foreign Minister Amintore Fanfani was forced to resign from office in 1965 simply because his wife made a mistake. The right-wing magazine Il Borghese published a politically embarrassing interview with Fanfani’s old friend Giorgio La Pira, the former mayor of Florence. When La Pira tried to deny some of the remarks attributed to him, Il Borghese then revealed that the interview had been arranged by Fanfani’s wife— and had taken place in his own house. Che brutta figura.

France, too, is tolerant of misbehavior by its leaders, but they must take place within the proper social milieu. During the recent French election, Presidential Candidate Georges Pompidou had to combat rumors that his lively wife had taken part in several wild parties tossed by the rich-hip pie jet setters of Saint-Tropez. Whether or not the charges were true, many Frenchmen were displeased, partly because Madame Pompidou had consorted with people who were not her kind — a social rather than a moral misstep. In Japan, where women are emerging from second-class citizenship, politicians are accustomed to entertaining guests with bar girls hired for the occasion. Last winter, Premier Eisaku Sato’s wife admitted in an interview that her husband used to run around with other women and even beat her up occasionally. The public was not outraged but amused.

America Asked Less

Americans once demanded a lot less of their national public figures than they do now. In the frontier days, a politician often proved himself by demonstrating his capacity for drink, women and duels. Alexander Hamilton was able to continue his career in politics even after publicly acknowledging that he had paid blackmail to a woman. The fact that Andrew Jackson killed a man in a duel, defending the honor of his wife, probably helped him get elected President. During his four years in the White House, Franklin Pierce often drank himself into a stupor, but, says Historian John Roche: “In those days it really didn’t make much difference. The President didn’t do anything anyway.” Nor did Pierce ever mend his ways. “After the White House, what is there to do but drink?” he complained.

Gradually, frontier lustiness was replaced by a Victorian sense of decorum and a growing belief at least in the surface dignity of politics. Politicians had to be more careful. Shortly after Grover Cleveland received the Democratic presidential nomination in 1884, a newspaper revealed that he had been supporting an illegitimate child for several years. Distraught party leaders asked him what to do. “Tell the truth,” he doughtily replied. The truth scarcely satisfied Republicans, who improvised several more scandals about Cleveland and made the most of a campaign ditty: “Ma, ma, where’s our pa? Gone to the White House. Ha! Ha! Ha!” Cleveland narrowly won because of his public probity and also because women did not have the vote.

The growth of national politics with a universal franchise and universal publicity has made it much harder for a public figure to hide his indiscretions. Only politicians with safe constituencies can carry on the way they used to. By pacifying their constituents with assorted favors, Congressmen as diverse as South Carolina’s hard-drinking Mendel Rivers and Harlem’s high-living Adam Clayton Powell are still able to ride out allegations of impropriety. Where money is concerned the public is more exacting. As a Senator from Massachusetts, Daniel Webster maintained a private fund that had been collected from wealthy businessmen. He was criticized for it, but he had nothing to worry about: he was elected by a state legislature dominated by these same businessmen. In 1952, when it was disclosed by the press that Richard Nixon had a similar fund, he was saved only by a dramatic television appeal: the famous “Checkers speech.”

Strain of Office

While the U.S. has become more permissive about such matters as divorce and sex outside marriage, the public is demanding more of politicians these days—possibly because they are demanding more of themselves. Since the new politician relies more on his “image” and personality, he must answer for their defects as well. And these are scrutinized more closely than ever by an omnivorous press. His flaws are almost always excruciatingly on display.

It is hard to object to this rise in political standards; yet perfection has its limits. The man entrusted with high public office today operates under unprecedented strain: he may well feel personally responsible for the survival of much of the human race in the nuclear age. More than ever, he needs the kind of private release that the open frontier once provided. A successful politician often possesses immense energy that needs to be released. The obscure private citizen can lose control of himself in public. Nobody but his friends will care. The man in public life must exercise iron control.

It may be that Americans have overmoralized public office. They tend to equate public greatness with private goodness, forgetting that a revered President like Abraham Lincoln suffered assorted psychosomatic ailments, that he was absentminded, and told jokes that made him seem callous. If private rectitude were tantamount to public usefulness, then Calvin Coolidge would be esteemed the greatest President.

In a way, too much purity begs to be tarnished. It is only human to want to tear down that which has been built up too far. Americans have borrowed their notion of statesmanship in large part from the Romans, who emphasized dignity and piety. Perhaps they should have taken some lessons from the Greeks as well, who knew better than to expect more than moderately good conduct from their leaders. A quest for perfection was hubris and ended in disaster.

Life, said John Kennedy, is unfair—and he might have added that it is especially unfair to politicians. Although they, in fact, have asked for it by seeking the glory and the burden of public service, they do have the right, simply as human beings, to privacy, relaxation and escape from responsibility. Politicians are bound to have their share of sins and foibles. Their problem, however, is not the foibles themselves but how to deal with them when they become public. The significance of the Chappaquiddick incident for Ted Kennedy is not whether he drank too much or planned a romp on the beach with the unfortunate Mary Jo. The key question, in the mind of the public, is why he took so long to report the accident. His self-confessed “inexplicable” behavior in a moment of stress raises the issue of how he might act in a major crisis. The bizarre and ugly rumors that have arisen since Mary Jo’s death are deplorable and, for the most part, almost certainly untrue. Innocent as Ted Kennedy might be in that respect, he can be faulted for not following Grover Cleveland’s example: tell the whole truth. His carefully prepared and yet unsatisfying explanation leaves room for the suspicion that he was somehow trying to escape blame for his actions. When a woman threatened to write about her liaison with the Duke of Wellington, he retorted: “Publish and be damned.” She did, and who remembers her? The case was different, of course, but frankness can dispel the power of ambiguous appearances and overactive imagination. The truth, after all, is less strange than the fictions other people tell.