In her latest column for the Washington Examiner, WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor Noemie Emery offers a brief recent history of philandering and promiscuous politicians:
During the election of 1940, the married Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, gave speeches from the apartment of his editor girlfriend, Irita Van Doren (who helped write them for him), while the campaign train of President Franklin D. Roosevelt made routine stops at a certain small town in New Jersey so that the president could see his old flame. Flash forward twenty years to the year 1960 and you will see the press not writing of the all-but-open affairs of John Kennedy, and a year later FBI director J. Edgar Hoover would use these affairs to blackmail Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy into letting him gather proof of the similar activities of Martin Luther King. While it is true that Willkie and FDR were your normal philanderers while King and Kennedy were bona fide addicts who should have had therapy, it is undeniable that the country was much better governed, much better off, and much happier when Willkie and Roosevelt, King and Kennedy, were its lead politicians than it has been in years after, when the feminists, the Christian conservatives, and other self-styled enforcers of morals held sway. Clearly, their efforts have not made things better, while our soi-disant moral thought leaders have embarrassed themselves in spectacular fashion, presenting profiles in partisan opportunistic behavior that only they could pretend not to see.
Read the whole thing here.
