The character issue
McCarthy, Abigail
OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy THE CHARACTER ISSUE BILL, FRANKLIN, & PERICLES People polled on exit from voting places after the New York, Kansas, and Minnesota primaries were asked...
...How is that honesty and integrity thought needed to be demonstrated in public life...
...Despite all this, this same Franklin Roosevelt rallied a nation from despair in the Great Depression and rescued a generation from poverty, hunger, and lack of opportunity by a brilliant series of executive acts and the promotion of legislative reforms...
...Do I suggest, then, that moral defects are qualifications for leadership...
...The same skills that made him resort to political subterfuge in the past made him the very leader the nation needed in its time of crisis...
...Commonweal 8 May 1992: 9...
...The ability to lead is one of them...
...In Roosevelt's time, however, the press did not concern itself with such private matters, and one can only imagine how the aristocratic but politically astute FDR would have handled any questioner with the temerity to ask about them...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy THE CHARACTER ISSUE BILL, FRANKLIN, & PERICLES People polled on exit from voting places after the New York, Kansas, and Minnesota primaries were asked whether the candidates had "the honesty and integrity to serve effectively as president...
...Franklin Delano Roosevelt's private life, we now know, was far from being above reproach...
...In Wilson's Washington he was considered "high-spirited, handsome, energetic, and dashing...
...Pericles's forthright method of handling slanders and personal attacks could also be instructive...
...He took no part in supporting the commission appointed to investigate the working conditions that resulted in the Triangle Company Factory fire that resulted in the death of 147 women...
...How do you estimate the honesty and integrity needed to serve effectively as president...
...There are other parallels...
...Like Clinton, he had served in public office—first as a New York state senator, as Wilson's assistant secretary of the Navy, and then as governor—and had had his difficulties with the press of his own state...
...He was guilty, for example, of making fun of and mimicking Josephus Daniels, the secretary of the Navy under whom he served, and of eventually supporting Daniels's severest critic in order to appear as always independent h i m - self...
...The ability to draw people with varying interests together is still another...
...In the Albany years, FDR was not much interested in issues of reform...
...Having just finished reviewing the new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook (Eleanor Roosevelt, Viking), I cannot help wondering how Franklin Roosevelt, surely one of our greatest presidents, would have survived the scrutiny to which Clinton has been subjected...
...There were flirtations and eventually the marriage crisis over his affair with Lucy Mercer...
...It was a leading question obviously aimed at Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas who, in primary after primary, has been battered by questions about his private morality...
...Perhaps Rhodes scholar Clinton might be well advised to take another look at Pericles, the Athenian ruler to whom FDR has been compared...
...Yet he was, years later, to claim credit for the legislatively imposed fifty-four-hour work week for women and children and for thirtytwo other labor reform acts passed because of the commission's work...
...Above all, after the conflicts of the primaries, Clinton might be persuaded to emulate that Pericles who "had never gratified his envy or his passion, nor ever had treated any enemy as irreconcilably opposed to him...
...Plutarch depicts him as a leader who had "an elevation of purpose and dignity of language raised far above the base and dishonest buffooneries of mob-eloquence...
...Of course not, but I do say that other qualifications may compensate for and even override these defects...
...According to Cook, "he boasted that he had 'committed enough illegal acts' to be impeached and jailed had he made 'wrong guesses...
...In addition we know now, too, that FDR's commitment to social justice was a slowly evolving commitment and, in many cases, a commitment to which he was led by his much more idealistic wife...
...Roosevelt had these qualities...
...Given so much that might have been turned up from his past, would a Franklin Delano Roosevelt have made it through today's primary season...
...Women flocked to him" (Cook...
...There is a foretaste here of the FDR who played a little fast and loose with Lend-Lease in order to aid Britain before we entered World War II...
...And, as Cox's vice-presidential candidate in 1920, he rejected immigrant voters saying "we want all-American voters only," and hailed as "martyrs" the dead of the Centralia, Pennsylvania, American Legion—the very 8: 8 May 1992 Commonweal legionnaires who had attacked members of the IWW there, initiated a gun battle, and had gone so far as to lynch one IWW leader...
...Franklin Roosevelt's honesty in public matters also had its limitations...
...He did nothing to halt the military's mob-like abuse of blacks in the race riots of 1919...
...and some excuse for the malevolent accusations of the Roosevelt-haters who were to accuse him of precipitating Pearl Harbor by deliberately overlooking the imminent peril to the fleet there...
...Now, as a Democrat and a voter, I have not as yet succumbed to Clinton's rather slippery charm nor do I have any clear idea of what his qualifications for the presidency may be...
...But I do wonder what the existing voters who answered the honesty and integrity question in New York, where they were dubious, and in Kansas, where they were affirmative, really meant...
...FDR's career was not distinguished by loyalty...
...After World War I he boasted in a speech that, as assistant secretary of the Navy, he had "spent $40,000 for guns before Congress gave me or anyone permission to spend the money...
...The personal magnetism that attracts other competent men and women is another...
...In part this is because, like any other voter, I have been deprived by the media of information about his stance on issues, his proposed program, and his vision for the country...
...We certainly have reason to doubt it...
...It remains to be seen whether Clinton has, although the praise of his fellow governors seems to suggest the possibility...
...Even in the early years of his marriage he took to staying out till dawn drinking and playing poker...
Vol. 119 • May 1992 • No. 9
