At least one commenter at another site said that perhaps I was being naive if I thought that we didn't have the politics of personal destruction and character assassination before the administration of President Ford. After all, what about the hateful things they said about FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt? What about the slash and burn politics at the turn of the 20th century and the whispering about Grover Cleveland's illegitimate child? Or the infidelities of Warren G. Harding, who carried on with his mistress right in the West Wing? Or the accusations against Thomas Jefferson and his fathering of children with his slave Sally Hemmings? What about Senator Joe McCarthy? What about the dirty tricks that led to Watergate? And didn't the Democrats do it as well?
Of course it happened. But the distinction we made then was that it didn't become common knowledge until long after the people involved had passed from the scene, and even if it was known, it was, as my grandmother used to say, something that "nice people didn't talk about." It was not part and parcel of the campaigns, and it never reached the visceral and personal level that it has in the last twenty years. Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan had their differences; they didn't see eye to eye on very much at all, but at the end of the day, they could sit down with a bottle of Scotch and, as Harry Truman called it, "strike a blow for liberty." John F. Kennedy had a deep respect and friendship with Barry Goldwater in spite of the fact that Goldwater planned to run hard against JFK in 1964. They knew that it was politics, not personal.
Nowadays it's become vicious, personal, and acceptable to dig up as much dirt on anyone that pokes his or her head up to run for public office. In some ways that's good; it keeps the scoundrels in check. But it also means that the gloves are off. No one gets to hide their past. It's a little alarming to wonder what would have happened to this country if FDR's history with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd was in the headlines in 1932. Photographers didn't even take pictures of Mr. Roosevelt's leg braces, and most Americans didn't know that he was paralyzed from the waist down as a result of polio in 1922. (Imagine the field day someone like Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter would have had with that.) Barry Goldwater, along with the rest of Washington, D.C., probably knew that JFK was a horndog to the degree that makes Bill Clinton's escapades look monkish. He also knew that one of LBJ's top advisers, Walter Jenkins, had been arrested in a gay sex sting in 1964, but refused to allow his campaign to bring it up, saying,
"It was a sad time for Jenkins' wife and children, and I was not about to add to their private sorrow," Goldwater later wrote in his autobiography. "Winning isn't everything. Some things, like loyalty to friends or lasting principle, are more important."I'm not going to get all Pollyanna on this; I know times have changed, and I don't think we can go back. But I also think that if we're going to have full disclosure down to the type of shorts a man wears, we're not only getting into the area of TMI (Too Much Information), we're getting into the realm of distortion and destruction for the sake of purely winning an election, not for the betterment of the nation. It's going to be hard to find people who will want to run for office, and the ones that do and survive the acid test of having the right name, the right ancestry, the right marriage, the complete lack of scandal, and all the "right stuff" will be so insulated or pre-packaged that they will be nothing but an empty shell, devoid of the knocks and the mistakes that make us human, and unable to learn, grow, and rise to the abilities of leadership that we need. Either that or they will be so hard-boiled that nothing reaches them, touches them, or moves them. Both are unpleasant prospects for the future.
