The Four Swordsmen of the Feminist Apocalypse
EMERY, NOEMIE
The Four Swordsmen of the Feminist Apocalypse By Noemie Emery In its brief modern life, political feminism has had four main male backers, a daisy chain of stalwart allies, four femi-knights: Bob...
...Torn they also were with Palm Beach, Willie Smith, and Ted Kennedy...
...But, oh, they all do—it's part of the pattern...
...Their different words about similar acts will be thrown up against them...
...Packwood did not fare well either...
...As the story said, Packwood was "a leading advocate of women's rights during his 24 years in the Senate," with a "much admired history of hiring women, promoting them, and supporting their careers...
...As Sheehy writes, Hart "showed up with a stewardess at a serious staff dinner after the '72 convention," with his wife back at home...
...Clearly, the feminist males and their feminist supporters have a dysfunctional marriage, cemented by unholy needs...
...But why do the feminists find themselves squirming so often, and why are they so often "torn...
...Says a Washington psychiatrist, "They choose a public life and persona in direct contrast to their darker impulses," seeking a form of cheap moral salvation...
...When this happens once, it may be an accident...
...That would be putting it lightly...
...Alleged Behavior Pattern Counters Image," ran the headline in the Washington Post when the Pack-wood charges broke five years ago...
...Their future capacity to intimidate men via protest—their way of attacking political enemies and disciplining supporters—has also been weakened...
...But even this does not explain completely the peculiar attraction that feminism has for these men...
...Noemie Emery is a writer living in Alexandria, Va...
...Two days before the Willey interview on 60 Minutes, Sgt...
...The Four Swordsmen of the Feminist Apocalypse By Noemie Emery In its brief modern life, political feminism has had four main male backers, a daisy chain of stalwart allies, four femi-knights: Bob Packwood, Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, and Bill Clinton...
...Hart had a real Don Juan complex," the campaign worker concluded...
...When she refused to back a presidential bid in the mid-'80s, he called her an "albatross," and more...
...A Ted Kennedy less "right" on the feminist issues might have been forced from the Senate after the Palm Beach episode...
...Wives were used largely as political props, when they were noticed at all...
...NOW chapters are defecting in fury...
...But his real insurance was taken out earlier, when he changed from pro-life to pro-choice...
...In the 1990s, while Kennedy anchored the cause in the Senate, Bill and Hillary Clinton moved into the White House, the first feminist first couple in American history...
...When this failed, these women were assailed in the press as "trailer trash," "tabloid trash," "trash-for-cash" bimbos, or unbalanced sluts...
...Packwood was the most ardent of all pro-abortion fanatics, star of the feminist fund-raising circuit, friend of NARAL and of Gloria Steinem, with whom he once dined a deux in New York...
...They feared retribution after leaving Packwood's employ...
...In the same publication, Hendrik Hertzberg defended Hart's feminist record: "No major presidential candidate in American history ever put more women in such influential and important posts in his campaign...
...But this sick little pact—a "symbiotic malignancy," in Collier's expression—may now be coming to an end...
...But the problem is that these payoffs are given to groups, not the parties directly injured...
...The more impeccably correct all these men are in public, the more exploitative and deranged they are in private life...
...That, and knowing no shame...
...And perhaps a defense of late-term abortion is not what Mary Jo Kopechne would have wanted...
...Yet to call his private life a separate matter is to hide behind an outdated gentleman's code...
...Some men really could help these women achieve what they wanted...
...Hersh relates numerous stories of restaurant hijinks, with "many of the liveliest" featuring "horseplay with Chris Dodd," another feminist Solon: "There was the time when the two well-lubricated senators supposedly grabbed up the woman who was serving them for a terrifying game of 'waitress toss.'" As for Clinton, his advances, wanted and otherwise, from the time of his marriage, are legion, and legend...
...They were torn another time with Gary Hart, very model of the sensitized New Age male politician, friend (said Jane O'Reilly and Barbara Ehrenreich in the New Republic) of "social justice," "equal justice," and "arms control...
...Possibly lying keeps them together...
...But why do the men flock to them...
...Time and again, they would find themselves stuffing envelopes and weeping as they watched Gary pass their desk to the rest room—without so much as a hello...
...Who was that masked man, who since has been accused of assault and harassment, and who has called his accusers liars and trash...
...This is why they stay with all of their renegade backers...
...Packwood often directed his advances toward young women, in entry-level slots," writes his biographer Mark Kirschmeier...
...With their far-out agenda—late-term abortion, quotas, identity politics—the sisters find they have few mainstream backers, and have to make do where they can...
...Her feminist husband froze her out of his life, belittling her when he was drunk, which he often was, and driving her to nervous depressions...
...This is not a strong attraction to an individual person, which can be understood, and forgiven...
...McGovern's campaign was run by Gary Hart, master of New Age liberal politics, which he carried over to his own endeavors...
...But the Kennedys' blood heir—their younger brother, Teddy—had also emerged as a national figure, blending the feminists' social agenda with a fondness for the welfare state...
...Kathleen Willey may be the great rock that breaks it: the vulnerable woman, in financial distress, shortly to be a widow by suicide, groped in the Oval Office by the president of the United States...
...Said Clinton at the time, "George Bush certainly bears no glory for his personal attack on Anita Hill, which is consistent with a lot of his anti-woman positions...
...Press criticism, from left, right, and center, has been uniformly disdainful and mocking...
...Gene McKinney was cleared by a military court of 18 counts of sexual harassment, brought by six different women...
...Infidelity nestled within infidelity: After the exposure of Hart's cruise on the Monkey Business, a longtime mistress of his was stunned to find out he had cheated on her...
...Opportunistically, the feminists and their men friends are locked in a death grip, the feminists threatening the men with exposure and censure, the men threatening the feminists with leaving them alone and friendless in the political wilderness...
...First is the lure of issue convergence: To the narcissistic, satyristic, self-indulgent, perennial-adolescent male politician, the pro-choice movement is heaven on earth...
...He'd see a woman down there, and say "I want her...
...Bill Clinton, with his power-shared marriage, would appear the exception, but the disregard he shows for his wife's reputation and feelings suggests otherwise...
...When it happens three and four times (or five and six), it can no longer be described as an accident...
...Feminists in effect have been acting as bagmen, taking the tributes due to other women, giving their friends the license to roam and to pillage, in exchange for the "right" kind of vote...
...Complaints aired in 1992 revealed the names of nearly 30 women who claimed to have been pressured or assaulted by him...
...And they have nothing in common with what is often referred to as "personal failings," or "sin...
...Thus feminists help creepy men cling to power...
...In 1989, he convened his family, telling them he wanted no part of them any longer...
...The Clintons, who sacrifice friends and aides daily, talk of compassion and empathy...
...Back in 1972, Steinem was advising George McGovern, whose presidential campaign was the national start of identity politics...
...The femi-knight behavior is not like having been married twice, or having had a few affairs in the course of a marriage...
...And men accused of sins, even crimes, against women, crusade for their interests and rights...
...And that voice can be very cruel...
...This is a dynamic not all that unheard of in modern political life...
...The Kathleen Willey story is the fourth—or the ninth—report about Clinton and women the feminists have had to face since the 1992 election...
...The low-level aides assaulted by Packwood may not have liked all his causes...
...In a friendly book, Burton Hersh writes of Kennedy's "random, hectic tom-catting," a "droit de seigneur" that went with political power...
...They may never make a credible protest again...
...Issue-wise, each of these men was always faithful...
...A pro-quota vote or an aggressively pro-choice platform buys years of immunity from pickets and clamor...
...They pretend it doesn't...
...I don't believe men who really like women carry on in this way...
...Later, colleagues were stunned to learn he was married...
...Indeed, under pressure, the mean streaks appear with a vengeance...
...But each also had a shadow side...
...In 1991, says the Los Angeles Times, Bill Clinton, then a presidential candidate, castigated the Senate Judiciary Committee for its Hill-Thomas hearings, which, he said, "reminded me of a trial where someone accuses someone else of a sexual offense, and then an attempt is made to destroy the character of the victim...
...But it does, again and again...
...At the same time, Gary Hart had evolved from his Puritan youth into a Hollywood wannabe, using his newly formed Lone Ranger image to rack up a series of conquests, notwithstanding his marriage...
...They're finding a concept that keeps them from facing the reality about themselves...
...So pity the feminists, at it again, picking up after one more friend in trouble, a staunch advocate on the policy level, nonetheless running amok...
...asked the Boston novelist James Carroll when Kennedy's nephew was cited for rape...
...Patricia Ireland has been semi-defecting, while other "women's leaders" stay robotically faithful...
...These are not the relations of humans, and equals, but rather the habits of users with victims, the commerce of masters and slaves...
...No fuss, no bother, no weary commitments to women and children...
...They separate private and public morality, and cite Kennedy's record...Kennedy has never strayed from the feminist agenda...
...Feminist leaders are standing by their man, just as the Kennedy women have always done," Eleanor Clift reported in Newsweek...
...When it happens twice, it could be a coincidence...
...The ravaged faces of Lee Hart and Joan Kennedy unnerved many people...
...It bought Bob Packwood some 10 years of silence...
...It's something he couldn't stop, but the women weren't people to him at all...
...Many, after run-ins with Pack-wood, reacted with shame, self-doubt, and, most important, silence...
...It was truly the best of all worlds...
...Why was Ted Kennedy so anxious to leave Florida...
...In 1992, the Clinton campaign boasted quite openly of its success in using private detectives to frighten and silence old flames...
...Before then, they had to deal with their three other friends...
...When not conferring with Gloria Steinem, Packwood was hitting the bars of Hell's Canyon with a rotating harem of female assistants, lunging repeatedly at aides and staffers, and using his male aides as pimps...
...The public stance tends to negate the private transgressions, minus the cost and pain of repentance...
...This is not the language Kennedy would use on the floor of the Senate...
...The same is true of feminist women, enabling many attacks on all women, while they spout out of all sides of their mouths...
...Rather, it is the frenzied pursuit of nameless and featureless figures, reduced to one single physical function, who are quickly discarded after being used...
...Another feminist added, "When one of your principles—loyalty . . . —is in conflict with another—speaking out against despicable behavior— you are torn...
...The heir, unsure that he merits his millions, makes common political cause with the underclass, expunging his guilt, while still spending his money...
...Embracing a cause counter to the sins and foibles you embody, is a way of wiping them out...
...The show-business wiz denounces the income gap, then invests in his third Maserati...
...As Joe Klein suggests, guilt over the death he caused at Chappaquid-dick may have pushed Ted Kennedy on his hard left-wing vector, to a "no questions asked indulgence of any and all groups claiming to be aggrieved," a political stance that allowed him to expunge the guilt of the accident, without correcting the conduct that caused it...
...This is the typical feminist male, in the tradition of Packwood and Kennedy, whose addled brain never seems to have truly acknowledged what his wandering hands may have done...
...Our four different stories read like four takes on a common resume...
...The persistence with which he chased women became notorious," writes Ronald Kessler...
...Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy had been outdoing his older brothers, though with less finesse and discretion...
...As Eleanor Clift wrote in Newsweek, "A rape counselor thinks it is 'reprehensible' that Kennedy referred to the woman who brought rape charges against his nephew as 'some girl.'" "Some girl," "that woman"—this is the voice of the feminist male when women are seen not in the abstract but in the particular, not as voting blocs or sources of money, but as real people...
...All four men believed in what Hart once called "reform marriage," in which wedlock is no barrier to dating...
...Hart's idols had been John, and then Robert, Kennedy, both of whom he attempted to emulate...
...His victims were frequently powerless, and young...
...In October 1991, the Atlanta Constitution reported that "Gov...
...Second is an even more cynical form of self-interest: A "correct" agenda buys a large zone of safety, like the paying of protection money to the mob...
...This is not like the love relationships of FDR and Lucy Mercer, Wendell Willkie and Irita Van Doren, or Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway (and/or Sally Hemings...
...Along with his wife, his past and promised veto of the partial-birth-abortion ban is the single most critical factor buying reprieve from the feminist pickets...
...Such is the price of attracting the eye of our feminist president...
...Bill Clinton had the foresight to take out insurance against lawsuits, sexual-harassment suits among them, before his fateful meeting with Paula Jones in Little Rock...
...On his son's birthday," writes Kirschmeier, "Bob left [his wife], telling her he should have done so years before...
...Bill Clinton...placed on Mr...
...Bill, Bill—you should talk...
...They inoculate themselves, . . . build up a firewall so they can go on with their bad behavior," says Peter Collier, a biographer of the Kennedys and others...
...Patricia Ireland of NOW called the Packwood affair a "blow in the stomach...
...The senator has admitted his early knowledge that the police were investigating a 'serious matter,' but since it involved only 'sexual battery,' or 'sexual harassment,' he felt free to leave...
...As Suzannah Lessard writes in a 1979 piece on Ted Kennedy, "The constant pursuit . . . of semi-covert, just barely personal, and ultimately discardable encounters . . . suggests an old-fashioned, male-chauvinistic, exploitive view of women . . . I associate this type of behavior with misogyny...
...Reporters joked about his 'Blonde of the Week Club.' Columnist Marquis Childs quoted a senator friend of his who had occasionally traveled abroad with Kennedy: 'It was just like traveling with a bull...
...The sisters, she added, were "squirming...
...and Mrs...
...It is something specific, a special dynamic, a pattern that should be explored...
...Bush responsibility for the treatment of Anita Hill...
...It shouldn't happen, they say...
...Only sexual battery...
...The imperious film star, who treats aides like serfs, campaigns for the worker, while throwing fits if his small wants are not seen to...
...Monday mornings, time and again, these breathless, brainy little buds would turn up in Washington, to commit their lives to working for Gary Hart...
...These people's politics do not begin at home...
...Shackled by the pass given by them to Clinton, the feminist leaders were mute...
...Not all the sisters were charmed by this...
...As Gail Sheehy quotes a 1972 campaign co-worker, "Hart would speak for McGovern at a college political science club, and then spend the weekend with the club president...
Vol. 3 • March 1998 • No. 28
