“A prominent Washington journalist once told me that Gary Hart, after a couple of drinks on an airplane … described his own fall in 1987 as a conspiracy of power elites,” David Remnick wrote in a profile of the onetime next president, “the military establishment, the energy industry … all the institutions he planned to reform.” Hart’s mind-set lives on in Rep. Anthony Weiner, next mayor of New York until the recent unpleasantness. Both failed to see that posing with blondes in your lap while running for president and sending your crotch shots out in the Internet do not fit the term “expectation of privacy.”
Both lied to their friends, fought their party’s efforts to limit the damage and blamed everyone but themselves.
Not every infraction of private morality calls for drumming the sinner out of public life.
Among the drafters of the Constitution was the notorious rake Gouverneur Morris; Alexander Hamilton confessed to adultery; unwed father Grover Cleveland (at the height of the Victorian era) was elected president twice.
And the two candidates in the 1940 presidential election had private arrangements one could call unconventional: President Franklin D. Roosevelt was estranged from wife Eleanor and in touch with his longtime love, Lucy Mercer; while Wendell Willkie had an affair with Irita van Doren, who wrote most of his speeches, and from whose apartment some of those speeches were made.
More recently, Martin Luther King and John Kennedy were compulsive philanderers, despite warnings they courted exposure or blackmail, and risked losing support, losing their own reputations, and damaging the things for which they had worked all their lives.
What struck those close to them was the disconnect between this self-indulgence and their disciplined conduct in all other areas. As a friend of Kennedy told his biographers, he was “like Jekyll and Hyde.”
If King and Kennedy were Jekyll and Hyde (as was Rep. Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican who had an affair in his 40s), the Harts and the Weiners are Hydes two times over, being excessive in both private and in public life.
So is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the next president of France, who is alleged to have sexually attacked a hotel maid, and was stunned when arrested. So was John Edwards, the next vice president in 2004, a possible president in 2008, and a possible attorney general afterward.
Edwards’ efforts to hide his child by a cinematographer (conceived while his late wife was dying of cancer) led him to extract more than $700,000 from a hundred-year-old billionaire heiress, and talk an all-too-loyal assistant into claiming the child was his.
Strauss-Kahn and Edwards face criminal charges that could lead to years of imprisonment. Hart and Weiner merely face charges of weirdness and arrogance. When his lies killed his ambitions, Hart compared himself to the murdered Kennedy brothers. “I’m dead, walking dead,” he told a reporter.
Weiner is dead too, but seems not to know it. Who could he work with? Who wants his backing? Republicans would pay him to have him attack them. In politics, the worst thing you can do is appear to be useless. He’s no use to anyone now.
Some people have said that his high-powered wife — whom Slate put at the head of a list of “Pregnant Women Done Wrong” that includes Bristol Palin and Jacqueline and Joan Kennedy — would stay with him for the sake of “their mutual future in politics.”
But this mutual future no longer is current. She has a future, with her second husband, or as a brave single mother, raising her child in dignity. Sooner or later, she’ll realize it, too.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
