Former President Bill Clinton feels stung by reports that some in his party now wish he’d resigned in 1998 over the intern unpleasantness. He is supposedly telling people in private that, by those same standards, former Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson would have been forced leave office, too.
This misses the point by quite a bit. Johnson and Kennedy broke the sixth commandment many times over, but not the laws of their country. They didn’t lie under oath, summon employees to their rooms and ask them to “kiss it,” or put public servants to work defaming their critics.
Kennedy and Johnson were never sued, as Clinton was, by people who said he abused them. They were never pursued by women enraged at him many years later, as Clinton was in the 2016 election when his wife ran for president against Donald Trump.
This is a crucial thing to remember in the purifying zeal that is sweeping the country, resulting in the mass terminations of many in business, and the forced resignations of many from office. There are ten commandments, but only three of them bring a criminal charge in this country – the ones against against theft, murder, and bearing false witness. Clinton broke that last one many times over, not least when he lied under oath.
Clinton compounded this crime by being a hypocrite, in campaigning with Anita Hill (and against Clarence Thomas) when he had already done more things and worse things to women than Thomas was ever accused of. He should have known better, coming five years after Gary Hart’s implosion.
Johnson and Kennedy lived in a world where such things were simply overlooked in our public servants. And many in Congress that Johnson and Kennedy entered in the late 1940s were as bad as they, or worse. Much that was seen was not remarked upon, and much that was known went unsaid.
It was known but unsaid that former President Franklin Roosevelt was in fact paralyzed; and that he was estranged from his wife, each having courts of their own in the White House, with their own sets of courtiers and friends.
Wendell Willkie, his 1940 opponent, was also estranged from his wife, and lived with a journalist who wrote speeches for him. Johnson, who bragged once that he had “more women by accident” than Kennedy had by design, had open affairs with Alice Glass, the socialite wife of one of his backers, and Helen Gahagan Douglas, a film star turned politician. They even went about with as a couple in town.
In 1959, when a woman tried to interest the press with pictures of Sen. Kennedy leaving the apartment she rented to a pretty young girl who worked in his office, she found no takers. Things had changed decades later, when Gary Hart, a JFK wannabe, was caught by the press with a blonde in his townhouse and driven from politics.
In between, Chappaquiddick and Watergate had brought with them an emphasis on character. The attacks on Ted Kennedy as an immature playboy when he ran for president served as a sign that things had changed.
But Willkie and Roosevelt excelled as war leaders, and the peaceful conclusion to the crisis brought on by the civil rights movement was brought to you by three of the most enthusiastic philanderers who ever drew breath.
From Alexander Hamilton down to Martin Luther King, Johnson, and Kennedy, sinners have done some big things for this country. Criminals, but not mere rakes, should be barred from high office. We don’t know when we’ll need the latter again.
