Mrs. Mark Sanford, as we now know, found out from a letter written to her husband that he had had an affair. This was what happened in 19l8, when Eleanor found letters from Lucy Mercer to Franklin D. Roosevelt that made it clear they had fallen in love.
Franklin wanted to leave, but stayed for the sake of his career and his duty, which was to his marriage and children. Politically, the decision was right, as he did remain viable, but emotionally it was a catastrophe: The Roosevelts tormented each other for the rest of their marriage, and the children, whom nobody disciplined, could hardly have turned out much worse.
Ideally, FDR could have run, and been there for Lend Lease, when it was needed, while Eleanor did her own thing in feminist politics, and the lovely and capable Lucy served as a smashing First Lady. This is not an ideal world, so this didn’t happen, but one thing to remember when dealing with others’ emotional crises is that the advice of outsiders is frequently wrong.
Another thing to remember in these situations is that snap judgments made at a distance can have little basis in fact. Is it true a man’s character is all of a piece, and one who breaks vows to his wife will also break vows to his country? Think again.
Think of Alexander Hamilton, who, when accused in 1797 of betraying his trust while in government defended his honor by insisting he would never have countenanced such an atrocity: he was paying blackmail to a man, Mr. James Reynolds, with whose wife he had had an affair.
Later, he would prove his devotion to country by throwing his life away in a duel he knew would end the career of a rival and sinister figure: Aaron Burr, the vice president, who nurtured secessionist schemes.
Think, too, of Martin Luther King and John Kennedy, who inspired millions, and put lives and careers on the line for cause and for country, but wouldn’t or couldn’t rein in their cosmic adulteries, despite warnings they courted disgrace and exposure, and put weapons in enemies’ hands. (J. Edgar Hoover blackmailed Robert F. Kennedy into tapping King’s phones because of the dirt that he had on his brother, the president: Talk of two birds and one stone.)
The selfishness with which they carried on these affairs was wholly at odds with their workaday conduct, which tended towards duty and discipline. At a loss to explain this disjuncture, Kennedy’s friends described him as “Jekyll and Hyde.”
Some say that without a strong and serene family background a man can’t survive White House pressures, and that someone who can’t run his own family can’t run his country, or state.
But Lincoln and Roosevelt had nightmarish marriages that gnawed at their nerves and their energy, and Reagan and Roosevelt had hostile and highly embarrassing young. On September 11, when he was holding the city, and country, together, no one cared much that New York’s mayor once held a press conference to tell his second wife he was leaving, and was at the moment estranged from his son.
Unhappy families are not alike, and neither are those who have made them unhappy: Gary Hart was a flake, Bill Clinton a delayed/prolonged adolescent, Eliot Spitzer a creep; Jim McGreevey and Larry Craig even creepier.
And John Edwards was a cad (as well as a hypocrite); while Hamilton, King and JFK were serious people who put their public and private lives into two different boxes: One part James Madison, one part James Bond.
But Sanford last week was a whole other story, less like James Bond than “Brief Encounter,” the World War II-era six-handkerchief weepie, about two straight-laced people with spouses and children, unexpectedly pole-axed by unexpected grand passion, and torn into shreds by the stress.
Perhaps that’s what FDR felt when he fell for Lucy, but in his day, they’ll didn’t have cable news, email, or televised press conferences. The closest thing was Hamilton’s tell-all in the form of a pamphlet, but he didn’t love Mrs. Reynolds. That was his luck, and our own.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
