Pit for the cabinet?
Carlin, David R Jr.
FIT FOR THE CABINET? PERSONAL CONDUCT & PUBLIC'LIFE Poor John Tower. As I write this he is still twisting in the wind, ac-cused of too much cozi-ness with defense con-tractors, too much boozing,...
...In all events I applaud the revival of interest in the nation's sexual virtue that the Tower inquiry seems to portend...
...Unfortunately, the press that reports the allegations of his womanizing never defines the term precisely...
...If Kennedy reminded us of Greek heroes, King reminded us of Hebrew prophets and Christian saints...
...But John Tower is no Wade Boggs...
...But Kennedy...
...Yet one expects saints and prophets to be models of sexual fidelity...
...Despite the suit, de-spite public ridicule, despite unending attention by the press, he continues to be the best hitter in baseball...
...Not because (in these particular cases) their actions were public betrayals of the public trust...
...But King was more than a politician and a movement leader...
...With his bat he proves that his devotion to his craft is superior to a world of noisy distractions...
...That explains why I have failed to catch the recent wave of enthusiasm for chastity in public leaders...
...And how many women do you have to have before you can fairly be charged with it...
...Thus the British public of a generation ago had a perfectly legitimate, albeit somewhat prurient, interest in John Profumo's ex-tracurricular activities with Christine Keeler...
...they were, at the time, not widely known...
...These were not simply moral lapses, they were moral lapses that became dramatic lapses as well...
...There were far too many women, and his relationships with them were far too casual...
...If President John Kennedy had limited his extramarital escapades to one or a small number of women to whom he had a genuine romantic attachment, that would have been one thing...
...What, exact-ly, is womanizing...
...start worrying about what kind of secretary of defense he'll be...
...At the same time I admit that I am not perfectly consistent in these matters...
...Indeed, his-tory suggests that it ranks lower than quite a number of personal traits not even considered sins-stupidity, for example, or laziness, or the kind of mental dullness that renders a person incapable of seeing a problem from someone else's point of view...
...he is no Martin Luther King, Jr...
...We are on our way to becoming not only a kinder and gentler nation but a more chaste one as well...
...So it came as something of a surprise that...
...De-spite the principle of indifference just enunciated, from time to time I have been distressed by the sexual misconduct of prominent public figures...
...Now, I certainly don't look to professional athletes for models of chastity...
...he would allow his total commitment to the game to be interrupted by the distrac-tion of an extramarital affair...
...Such misconduct does nothing to impair his reputation as a great political figure and as America's premier champion of civil rights for blacks...
...I incline to the antique view that a public officials sexual conduct or misconduct is not usually a public matter or a reliable guide to his or her conduct of public of course, when it in-volves relations with, say, Russian spies or, persons carrying on simultaneous liaisons with Russian spies...
...But many of them are models of devotion to their craft, and there is none more devoted than Boggs...
...So the most relevant question becomes, which sins are the most incompatible with specific public offices...
...Not because they were sinners...
...But if he is guilty of womaniz-ing-well, what are we to make of it...
...It would have been something like Franklin Roosevelt's relationship with Lucy Mercer, which, no matter how unfortunate it may have been for his mar-riage, enhanced the drama of his life...
...It must be that I've grown too old...
...As I write this he is still twisting in the wind, ac-cused of too much cozi-ness with defense con-tractors, too much boozing, and too much womanizing...
...Finally, there is Wade Boggs, the perennial American League batting champ, who is the target of a palimony suit by Margo Adams...
...It is as though Homer had told us that Achilles, in addition to sulking in his tent and ferociously killing Hector, earned some spare change by selling re-creational drugs to the Greek troops...
...Be it confessed to my shame, I never got upset about Gary Hart's affair with Donna Rice, either...
...But Boggs is handling it well...
...and (like Dan Quayle) he is no John Kennedy...
...Perhaps it would have only added drama and glam-our to an already dramatic and glamor-ous life...
...The heroic and tragic story of Ken-nedy's life suddenly sinks to levels of bathos when we reach the part about his girlfriends-especially the girlfriend who was simultaneously the girlfriend of Sam Giancana, the Chicago mafia big-shot...
...He still stands as a great witness to the reality of the spiritual order...
...Stop worrying about whether John Tow-er is a womanizer...
...Martin Luther King, Jr., was even more of a disappointment...
...But for my part, though I'm sure I deplore as much as any Senator Tower's misconduct with women, I find it hard to work up a head of steam about it when I contemplate him as a prospective secre-tary of the Department of Defense...
...Thanks to electronic bugs installed by J. Edgar Hoover, who was looking for Commun-ists but found women, we learned about King's extramarital activities while on the road for civil rights and nonviolence...
...lam genuinely bothered, however, by Tower's coziness with defense contrac-tors...
...Lust for battle, lust for weapons, lust for power, money, or the oblivion of intoxicants-these all seem to me far more pertinent to choosing a secretary of defense tjian lust for the opposite sex...
...and I am confident that the terrible example that has been made of John Tower's misdeeds will strike sexual terror into the hearts of libidinous young Americans-and perhaps libidinous old ones as well...
...If Ken-nedy's having girlfriends damaged his heroic image, so King's damaged his im-age of sanctity...
...If FDR's affair counts as a moral failing, at least it counts as a dignified moral fail-ing...
...after all, it was his belief in this order that guided him throughout an arduous career and led him to an almost voluntary martyrdom...
...so are we all, and judgment belongs to God...
...And if there is truth in the charge that he drinks too much, I'm bothered by that, too...
...Politicians and public figures are sinners like everyone else...
...When I ask myself that, I find that womanizing, however destructive it may be in other respects, does not rank high on the list of impediments...
...King's want of discipline, while it doesn't make it im-possible to view him as a saint, certainly makes it more difficult to do so...
Vol. 116 • March 1989 • No. 5
