September 1, 1998
All the Presidents?
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
Seven and a half months is a long time to hear about how all the presidents
have done it, about the great threat Ken Starr poses to our rights and our
legal system, about $40 million, about the right to privacy (in the Oval
Office) and consensual sex, how this is all about adultery, a problem
common to most marriages--a long time to hear about how the American
people just plain don't want to hear about this story, whose details so many
of them are tuning in to listen to every night.
For a while there, indeed, it looked as though we might become so
accustomed to the various extraordinary arguments offered up on Mr.
Clinton's behalf by all the president's men and women that in time none of
them would elicit so much as a blink. A false assumption. Even today--after
the world-famous map room speech--it is impossible to turn on the TV set
without hearing new, head-spinning versions of the aforementioned
arguments.
We aren't speaking here of the sort of moment--otherworldly though it
was--in which the newly ubiquitous John Dean, former counsel to Richard
Nixon, summed up for us the difference between Watergate, with its cancer
on the presidency, and the skein of lies and charges in which the current
administration is now enmeshed. The difference, Mr. Dean told a TV
audience , is that the offenses committed during Watergate grew out of
hatred and enmity--but in the current case, the offenses were committed
"out of love." Swell news--though it may come as something of a surprise to
the loved one to whom the president had referred, in another famous
speech, as "that woman, Miss Lewinsky."
What is extraordinary--though not so extraordinary as the unremitting
campaign to demonize Kenneth Starr--are the efforts, which can be heard
every day, to portray this president as a victim singled out for behavior no
different from his predecessors'. On talk shows, we have heard former
White House counsel Lanny Davis inveighing at the unfairness of it all. After
all, Mr. Davis a few weeks ago resentfully declared, before America and
the world, no "criminal charges" were ever brought against Dwight
Eisenhower for his behavior.
This assertion, so tripping from the tongue, went unchallenged, as did Mr.
Davis's similar plaint about Franklin Roosevelt. As, indeed, have nearly all
the now routine arguments by Mr. Clinton's defenders, that other presidents
had committed adultery--as though adultery were the central issue in the
charges against the current resident of the White House. Diversionary
prattlings of this kind have of course had their effect--as is evident from all
the TV debates and town meetings and daytime talk shows, now mired in
discussions about infidelity, as exemplified by the problems of the Clintons:
the pain of couples trying to overcome, the need for family healing, etc. etc.
Meanwhile, television's anointed presidential historians bob up here and
there, on public television and elsewhere, providing chatter and amiable
anecdotes, and evidently undisposed to offer a straight answer to the fog of
nonsense about former presidents, being thrown up on Mr. Clinton's behalf.
Yes, Franklin Roosevelt had a serious involvement with a woman not his
wife toward the end of World War I, many years before his election; his
daughter arranged for FDR to visit with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd as his life
was drawing toward his its close; and his devoted assistant, Missy, may
have loved him--a love there is no evidence he returned.
To equate any of this with what is known about Mr. Clinton's behavior and
character is laughable, in its dark way. Or would be, if this and similar talk
about all the other presidents--and not just Warren Harding, JFK and LBJ,
the three presidents in this century who were in fact womanizers--had not
proved such successful propaganda. The president's Monica problem
became front-page news in January. By February, citizens across the
country had, at the ready, the mantra that "they all did it."
As for Dwight Eisenhower, whose alleged offenses and escape from
criminal investigation Lanny Davis so casually invoked, the facts are these.
Rumors notwithstanding about a wartime affair Gen. Eisenhower was
supposed to have had with his driver, and clear though it was that he
enjoyed the companionship of the lively Kay Summersby, no historian has
ever been able to discover any evidence of such an affair.
Summersby's second memoir, "Past Forgetting," published posthumously in
1976, refers to an unconsummated romance. Just before had come "Plain
Speaking," Merle Miller's interviews with Harry S Truman--in which
Truman claims that a horrified Gen. George Marshall had, in June 1945,
received a letter from Eisenhower announcing that he wished to divorce
Mrs. Eisenhower and marry Kay. Both he and Marshall, Truman alleged,
had sternly warned Eisenhower not to do so.
References to this matter were excised from later editions of "Plain
Speaking," and for good reason. According to Forrest C. Pogue, author of
the definitive biography of Marshall, the Marshall papers held no evidence
of any such correspondence. Indeed, the Eisenhower divorce story was, as
historian Stephen Ambrose points out, entirely untrue. What Eisenhower in
fact sent Marshall was a letter pleading for permission to have Mamie join
him in Europe. More to the point, even if Eisenhower had contemplated
divorce and engaged in a wartime affair--could such matters merit any
comparisons with the bottomless squalor Mr. Clinton & Co. have brought
to the presidency?
Not everywhere, it should be said, did the they-all-did-it line pass
unremarked. For Chris Matthews, host of CNBC's "Hardball," it all
became too much last week when a guest--U.S. News & World Report
writer Matt Miller--recited his list of other presidents' infidelities.
"What presidents did you just smear then, Matt?" Mr. Matthews inquired.
He hadn't smeared anyone, Mr. Miller answered, startled--and not
surprisingly. Deliverers of this litany have not been accustomed, these 71/2
months, to objections. Much less anything like the long, richly assaultive
rejoinder Mr. Matthews now went on to offer, ending with the suggestion
that Mr. Miller try reading some history.
That would seem to be the end of that--but not quite. Following a break,
the guest--evidently impelled by a sense of mission--went on to offer the
name of another leader, someone, he assured the host, he would not
dispute. "How about Martin Luther King?" Mr. Miller put in, hopefully.
Stop trying to change the subject, Mr. Matthews snapped. Then, his voice
taking on an icy edge, Mr. Matthews delivered an impressive broadside
about people who would "dig up Eisenhower's grave on this show to defend
Bill Clinton."
Still, 71/2 months of a war on the independent counsel, months of Mr.
Davis, James Carville and assorted allies arguing they-all-did-it--not to
mention it's-all-about-sex--have failed to derail the investigation of this
president. On "Larry King Live," a hard-eyed Roger Clinton ominously
declared last week that politicians--"the people in the glass houses"--should
"be careful, very careful." This dark warning from the first
brother--delivered with all the subtlety of a cut-rate mob boss--could not
have been clearer. No one could miss the startling transformation in this
heretofore genial guest, as he sent a message to congressmen, suggesting
what could happen to any of them with, say, an affair in their past. Nor
would anyone have failed to note, either, the raw thrust of this open warning
aired on prime time--a message the Clinton camp has up to now transmitted
in less public ways.
Here we were then, last week with the president lecturing citizens on school
crime, his brother issuing televised threats to Congress. All the while, the
train of this saga moves along, powered by a press that knows a story when
it sees one, to a destiny now beyond the control of spinners and even,
possibly, of cowed congressmen.
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