Does Kennedy's philandering matter?
Henry Fairlie
Washington By nothing more than a freak of accident, Edward Kennedy's announcement that he is now truly a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination has been accompanied by the surfacing of a hitherto publicly unmentioned subject: his real or alleged proclivities as a lecher. The accident is simply recounted. The editor of the New Republic ordered an article on the matter from Suzannah Lessard, an occasional writer for the New Yorker. He liked the piece and had it set in type under the headline: 'Kennedy's Philandering'. On seeing it in galley form the publisher did not like it, and refused to run it. This caused the editor to resign on the spot, and the story will be told to the masses this week in Time magazine.
But as the editors of Time know very well, they are not publishing a story about the New Republic, but are indirectly publicising the matter of 'philandering'. If more is not read into the phrase than is intended, a whole can of worms may have been opened by their action. It seems unlikely now that, during the long 12 months of campaigning that lie ahead, the subject will not come to the fore. Two questions then arise. Will Kennedy be hurt by it? Whether or not he is, should he be hurt by it? Let us be clear what we are discussing. The allegation is not that Kennedy has in the past enjoyed or now enjoys the favours of a mistress. If that were all to point at, who would throw the first stone? It is not yet regarded as a proof of total insanity to keep a mistress, but it is of course as evidence of some instability of character, an unfitness for the highest office and its responsibilities, that the supposed sexual inclinations of Kennedy give the tongue-waggers their licence, One is reminded of the story of Disraeli, When his secretary came running to him with the news that all London was saying that the octogenarian Lord Palmerston was having an affair with a mere slip of a girl. Disraeli did not have to ponder long before he replied — 'Spread that story through the country, Mr Corry, and his Lordship will sweep all England tomorrow'. But it is not of such a relationship, or even of such relationships in the past, that Kennedy is accused. As I heard an editor put it with less delicacy than I choose to use in print, Edward Kennedy is charged with addressing his attentions to 'anything that moves'. Although it was known to 'all Washington' that John Kennedy had much the same Weakness even while he was president, it has been only posthumously that the evidence of his activities has been revealed to the public. This does not seem to have harmed the reputation of John Kennedy dead: but will the suggestion of it now harm that of Edward Kennedy alive? I would We to think that it will not. My distrust of the Kennedys runs deep, and was once distilled into a book which still seems to enjoy a decent reputation here even among the supporters of the Kennedys, but it is a distrust of their methods as public men. Even if it is true that Edward Kennedy is still given in his middle-age teo the pursuit of what are inelegantly known as one-night stands, I simply find it odd that so late in the day anyone should be surprised that men of power in their private lives are often no more than studs, and that they often continue to be studs long past the age when most of us have re-evaluated such activities on the strictest principles of costeffectiveness.
It is true there are monkish men of power. Distrust them, I say, 'shun them.' Put your trust in the man of energy, as long as that energy is at least partly emptied on the mound of Venus, so that he will be less anxious to flagellate us. A great injury is done to unprepared and prurient minds by reading Suetonius too early and too nervously. They take the connection between private and public vice too literally. What seems to me to matter in Suetonius is that his most atrocious emperors enjoyed none of their indulgences, and so arrived in the market-place with their thongs and their manacles and their pitiless ill humour. The Kennedys are hardly like that. On a more healthy level than it was given to Suetonius to describe, there is an unfearful and even enjoyable connection between lustfulness and lustiness, which has some bearing on the confused question of leadership. Jimmy Carter was most unkindly dragged over the coals in the last election for his remark to Playboy that he sometimes felt lust in his heart. Unkindly, but he earned it. As even the most urgent of the Christian Fathers could have told him, the heart is not only a peculiar but also the least fitting place for lust to lodge. The cry for leadership which is spreading in America now, suspect as it certainly is, is nevertheless a cry for Carter to get his lust out of his heart and into one of his limbs.
In answer to one of my questions — whether the allegations against Kennedy should hurt him — my answer is therefore that they should not. I can find not the slightest reason for thinking that his private conduct is a disqualification of him in public life. But in reply to the second of the questions — will they hurt him? — I fear that the answer is yes. The man already seems to have so much in his private life on which the jackals can fix that this will now come like one more stench of corruption. His wife, his drinking, Chappaquiddick: and now his fornication. It must be said that both he and the rest of the Kennedys are in part to blame; they invite so much publicity to themselves that they must take the bad with the good. But that said, enough is enough.
Unfortunately, there are other influences that are sedulously working. This permissive time is more rife with hypocrisy that even the most puritanical age in the past. Private lives have been opened to the most evil-minded public gossip. The gossip can be vindicated by appeals to feminism. Already on every side one hears the accusation: 'Kennedy treats women as if they were objects . , Kennedy not only cheats on his wife, he cheats on the other women as well.. . Kennedy uses women as possessions.' There is only one answer to this kind of talk: balls. Kennedy has not yet been accused of being a rapist. Perhaps he is a seducer, but I do not know. It seems to me far more likely that his name and power and glamour are seduced.
Perhaps he should resist the harpies. But it has yet to be proved to me that a one-night stand — his or anyone's — is necessarily lacking in gracefulness. Even if all the stories of his activities are true, who or how am Ito judge what was exchanged or why? The permissiveness in the discussion of sex has wrought such a puritanism about its usually hapless but cheerful endeavours that one is inclined to count Kennedy as one of its first and most vilified of victims.
Perhaps we are seeing this new puritanism at work in our public life for the first time; the freedom to talk loosely about sex has been translated into a licence to talk about the lives of others. Television will already be multiplying its cameras. Since they cannot get into the boudoir, they will be satisfied as ever to be sly. Not once will television ask if anything that we know of Kennedy's private conduct is any reflection on his public character, the character to which the voters should give their attention.
In the New Republic itself the other week, I criticised what I called the 'denial affirmative'. The most obvious form which it takes is the now common statement: 'I do not intend to mention Chappaquiddick in my campaign'. This can obviously be carried to any lengths: 'I see that John Connally has said that he has never been responsible for the death of a woman by drowning; nevertheless I will stick to my intention not to mention that tragic incident in the course of my own campaign'. It is this kind of slyness that awaits us now, If I were an American voter,! would vote against Edward Kennedy. I would vote against him because I think he is an untrustworthy politician, with an appeal 'which is dangerous, and the ship of state will be much safer without him at the helm. But of the private life of the man I know little; the little which I know .throws no very interesting or revealing light on him; and the gossip about him is tedious to a degree. He may be immature. Do the rest of us have to be also?
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