Last week’s assault on Governor Clinton is clearly on my mind. Even if I take him at his word in denying the spectacular tabloid charges against him, I still need to make my own judgment about the charges elsewhere he doesn’t deny but seems to confirm: that at some point in his marriage he “strayed” (as we used to decorously say), but that he and his wife have worked all that out, got past it and got right with each other now. If this is true it seems to me to be neither disqualifying nor all that uncommon, let alone even that interesting. What is interesting is that we now live in an age when the press asks, the candidates answer and the public chews it over on the radio call-in shows. Just as we have gone from a publicly maintained if totally fictitious assumption (nobody does it) to its intellectually and morally blowsy opposite (everybody does it), so we have gone from a time when the personal lives of candidates were more or less off-limits to a time when they are discussed in detail. There is a sense in which, much as I miss the good old days of fiends, I think this is good. But I also think it really compels us to be alert and disciplined-anything but reflexive and lazy-in the way we deal with this material.
A word of clarification on what used to be off-limits. In the 19th century and well into this one, perfectly gruesome and often as not wholly untrue personal libels were habitually leveled against presidential candidates. It has been in more modern times that things got more circumspect, with the result that candidates themselves tended to present implausible, idealized, cardboard images of their personal and family lives, and their opponents forbore to challenge them openly, the scurrilous stuff being passed on mainly in well-orchestrated whispers along the underground. Even score-settling memoirs and posthumous biographies tended to avert the gaze from the truly raunchy and disreputable stuff. No more: nowadays American presidents and other bigwigs who have died in relatively recent times are routinely subjected to literary strip searches. One result is that the lapses and misconduct of our contemporary bigwigs, put in the context of their immediate predecessors, sometimes look less horrendous than puny. Not so longgone presidents, Supreme Court justices and members of Congress who were and are greatly revered by many Americans turn out to have had the personal morals of a billygoat. Are we then to tear the pages about them out of our history books? Revise our judgments? What?
There is a huge amount of hypocrisy among public and press alike in dealing with such issues, especially as they affect our contemporary leaders and would-be leaders. Privacy may be invaded on the flimsiest and most unconvincing claims of relevance to the public person’s capacity to carry out his public duties. People may get awfully censorious about public officials who do no more and sometimes a good deal less than they themselves have done in their lifetimes along some line of unacceptable behavior. And practically everyone is much harder on the miscreant in the other guy’s party than the one in his own. Still, ever the Pollyanna, I believe that both press and public are getting better at handling this newly copious information. I believe that people are capable of reaching right judgments about the seriousness of this charge and that, and about the relationship of personal events to public duties. And, on the whole, I think the availability of more information on the real people involved in our official life, as distinct from the campaigns’ phony projections of them, is a beneficial thing.
The candidate with the best position papers is not always the candidate who would be the best presidenttoo bad, but true. Read into the wonderful biographical material available now on our recent presidents and you will see how much in the conduct of that office depends on the human nature, as distinct from the political opinions, of the person who holds it, how much such different qualities as stubbornness, curiosity, ambition, selective ruthlessness, personal insight, constancy have to do with getting things to happen. Or consider the argument the country is embarking on now as to whether George Bush and Dan Quayle or one of the Democratic candidates and a running mate or (I suppose) Patrick Buchanan and someone or other should be elected next fall. In some ways this is the most issue-minded, even ideological of election years. There are clear choices. There are irreconcilable differences of position on things that really matter between most Democrats and Bush and between Bush and the Buchananites. But ask yourself whether your feelings about Bush and Quayle or the others have to do strictly with the issues, or whether your judgment is not also in large part based on your analysis of and reaction to them as people.
Until we go completely automated in this country–can it be all that far from voice mail to voice president?-these personal accounts of our public officials will matter. Still on my Pollyanna kick, I dare to hope that at some point the scandal-forepay and trash-mag aspects of it will recede, that we will get more fairminded, more relaxed, more realistic and, it goes with all of the above, less hysterical about these disclosures of conduct that does not fit the “I Love Lucy” vision of life, adorable as that was. I’m not saying we shouldn’t exercise our critical judgment. On the contrary, it seems to me that we can’t make any critical judgment worth having until we can accept that our leaders and prospective leaders need to be judged by normal human standards, not as tabloid fiends or as little Rollos too good to be true.
