The truth is that sexual indiscretions committed by our leaders are our business because they do put them into compromised positions. After all, how much of the Clinton administration has been bogged down and clouded over by scandal which, by its own admission, has obscured many of its accomplishments and often allowed members of Congress to take the President less than seriously? Bad behavior, a checkered past, whatever you want to call it, is a heavy thing, an annoying thing, a distracting thing. Traditionally, spies—CIA officers in particular—were checked over for sterling character, for lack of adultery or personal embarrassment in their background, because a person with secrets is a person who will spill secrets under pressure from the enemy—or rather, a man who cannot be blackmailed is a man who can be trusted. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, lives with the threat of bimbo eruptions exploding beneath every step he takes. And it is rumored that it is only because of J. Edgar Hoover’s fear of being exposed as a homosexual with cross-dressing tendencies that the FBI was kept in check during the Kennedy administration. It was a bit of a Secret Service game of brinkmanship, at least as effective as anything George Kennan conjured up to help contain our cold war with the Soviets.
But the mysteries and allure of uncovering the scandal lives of contemporary figures is not nearly as remarkable, fantastical and inexplicable as the modern mythmaking that retroactively attaches devastating powers of attraction to historical characters about whom our knowledge is sketchy, negligible or nonexistent. Surely the most impressive groupie—married or not, political or pop—has to be Sally Hemings, a would-be or could’ve-been presidential consort. For one thing, with the exception of a small fringe element, no historian seems to believe that there ever was a relationship between Jefferson and his slave girl, a Caucasianly aspected house servant, alleged to have been the daughter of John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law. The only contemporaneous report of President Jefferson’s sexual liaison with Ms. Hemings is in the form of an 1802 editorial in the Richmond Recorder by one James T. Callender, a frustrated office seeker whose political antipathy for Jefferson, then in his first term as President, discredits his claims. “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves,” Callender begins. “Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking though sable resemblance to those of the President himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age. His mother went to France in the same vessel with Mr. Jefferson and his two daughters. The delicacy of this arrangement must strike every person of common sensibility. What a sublime pattern for an American ambassador to place before the eyes of two young ladies!” Beyond this, the recollections of Jefferson’s later-emancipated slaves put many of Sally Hemings’ children in a physical gene pool that seems clearly a cognate of that of our redheaded founding father—although historians tend to attribute this likeness to liaisons between Sally and the President’s nephews; all of her descendants were, apparently, white enough looking to have “passed” into non-Negro society undetected.
Sally Hemings’ alleged relationship with Thomas Jefferson notwithstanding, what is perhaps more notable is the way she has become a figure of legend on the basis of so very little. There is no reason for her not to have passed into history unnoticed as most of us are, since only two descriptions of this bondmaid exist at all: in one, a slave called Isaac Jefferson recollects her as “mighty near white … very handsome, long straight hair down her back”; in another, Jefferson’s grandson Thomas Randolph says she was “light colored and decidedly good looking.” These two lines are all the information we have on Sally Hemings, all the hearsay evidence that the record has to work with, and both—in, say, a court of law—can only be regarded as opinion, not fact.
But that has ceased to matter: the myth is everything. From Los Angeles apocalyptic novelist Steve Erickson’s imaginings of Sally in Leap Year and Arc d’X to the Paris-based African-American writer Barbara Chase-Riboud’s fictional account Sally Hemings and its sequel The President’s Daughter to rock songs like “Long Tall Sally” to the Merchant-Ivory rewrite of the French Revolution in Jefferson in Paris, it is taken as a simple fact that this was a lifelong and loving affair. Sally and Thomas are a presumed-innocent (as in: innocent of prejudicial feelings) and assumed-groovy interracial common-law couple in an era when Hair was not yet heading for Broadway. In the November 1992 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Douglas L. Wilson laments that historians now have to prove to their students that this affair did not take place, it is so assumed within common culture to have been a certainty. This certainty began in 1974 when Fawn Brodie published Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History and suggested that the truth of the affair had been repressed by scholars who tended to view its existence as a black mark, so to speak, on their hero’s record. But by understanding Jefferson’s love for Sally from an early seventies perspective—an error of judgment that Wilson calls “presentism”—suddenly, Brodie writes, it is “not a scandalous debauchery with an innocent slave victim,” but “a serious passion that brought Jefferson and the slave woman much private happiness over a period lasting thirty-eight years.” Suddenly, far from being an injustice for Susan Brownmiller to catalogue, we instead get something like … Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Whatever chord Brodie’s idea struck with a popular audience, historians have mostly remained unconvinced; in 1997, the University of Virginia published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, attorney and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed’s attempt to repore over the evidence, an undertaking that would seem to indicate an unremitting need for proof positive.
It is no wonder that people love the idea of this story, that it has inspired mash-note B movie fantasies (as well as some B-movie realities) and has become American history’s unholy grail, with Hemings becoming to this country what Mary Magdalene is to Christianity. But while it’s completely understandable that New Testament faithfuls, Catholics in particular, should want to believe that Jesus was made weak by at least one woman (from a cinematic perspective, I think most of us prefer post-collagen Barbara Hershey to pre-Saturday Night Fever Yvonne Elliman), there is no need for long tall Sally to confirm Jefferson’s lust. Whether it is because he has red hair, that he was a Francophile stationed in Revolutionary Paris or simply because it is true, Jefferson was known to be a ladies’ man. Sally is hardly necessary for his mystique.
But the Christ comparison is apt because Jefferson was the primary author of the American catechism, he was the Jesus of the religion of liberty. If the possibility of Christ carrying on with Mary Magdalene is meant to remind us of the intrinsic weakness of his loving-kindness and tolerant teachings—i.e., if you take in a whore, you will eventually lie down with a whore—then miscegenation would seem the logical mishap in Jefferson’s enlightened worldview. That he was racist on the record does not seem to matter because this fits too well into a well-hewn story structure. And no wonder: it really is a lovely fable, whether false or true, a counternarrative to Mandingo and Emmett Till, but also to all the purple pieties that patriotism, patriarchy, all those grandly historic traditions have left us with: one black woman, written into history, can carry the mantle for everyone else who has been left on the margins.
It seems sad, pathetic and telling that President Clinton, whose middle name is Jefferson, should most closely resemble his namesake only in that his sex habits are a public scandal that his political adversaries use to make hay. But if we remove the threat to statesmanship that extramarital affairs can pose (and the closest we’ve seen of this with Clinton is Susan McDougal, who is not talking), if we look at Gennifer Flowers as a relationship Clinton had as a philandering private citizen, it is easier to put into perspective. Other than that, I have to say that the impressive thing is not that Bill Clinton had a long-term affair with Gennifer Flowers, and received some under-the-desk blow jobs from some other gals along the way, but that he is still married.
The funny thing abou
t whatever extramarital liaisons have been part of the Clintons’ union is that it has always struck me as odd that people think of them as indications that their marriage is a sham or a convenient political partnership or worse. According to an array of statistics, affairs are business as usual in American coupledom: in fact, the term “extramarital” seems a real misnomer when speaking of a kind of relationship that seems to be part and parcel of marriage. Dr. Joyce Brothers, therapist for the Good Housekeeping set, believes that “situational infidelity”—at a business convention, after a career disappointment—does not necessarily reflect badly on the state of a marriage. Gary Smalley, marriage counselor to Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford, says couples should not split up over an affair, which can be “a medication of sorts.” Which is not to say that I think it makes for a happy home or that the violation of trust that an affair brings forth is not hugely painful, often devastating and frequently homewrecking. But the way things look to me—and I have never been married—when I see people who have been together for fifty or sixty years, when I look at my grandparents, my great-aunts and -uncles, when I gaze upon long, strong bonds of love—when I look at people whose particular histories and plot developments I am not aware of, people whom I know only as conclusion, as denouement: when I look at aged love what I see are people who have come to terms with their turbulence.
I don’t mean turbulence in a small way: I mean it as the feeling that I am going to jump out of my own skin, that I have had enough of this life, that I am sick to death of the choices I made. This is not just about infidelity, though no doubt there is that too: and I see people who have been tempted and succumbed, people who have hurt and hated and forgiven and made a little bit of shaky, awful, awesome peace with themselves and the person they are married to every day. I see people who frequently can’t remember why they took their vows all those years ago in the first place, and who live not just with the vague sense but with the utter certainty that if they had to do it all over again they would be better off with almost anyone else. I see people who have made peace not with their spouses but with themselves, and with the mundane tedium of daily life that is so often so empty that to stay trapped in a marriage that is so hollow, so “unfulfilling,” seems like succumbing to the abyss in ways that existence should not demand of anyone. I see people who understand that love is a nightmare, not just once in a while but as a matter of course, because people you love will disappoint you and betray you as a matter of course, they will do it without thinking about it, without knowing about it, without meaning it. I see people who understand, not that love, not that marriage and not that relationships of any sort are a long, long road, but that life itself is trying.
I see people who are happy. Because they have built a life, a real life, something so substantial that not only is it invulnerable to the whims of daily, petty emotion, but it has withstood years of bad moods and ill will and guilt and sorrow and sickness and misfortune and grievances so long-held that no one even remembers where they started. I see people who live in the world, who are anchored and tethered and attached to the world. And they are happy.
The evil of The Bridges of Madison County, a hideous book for so many reasons, was in its implication that a three-day love affair is the real thing and a marriage that lasted for years and years and produced good, happy children is a sham. The leading man, the traveling stranger with a camera, never even has another girlfriend thereafter until he dies: the daily importance of life and love is thrown away for some fake notion of the one big love. The banality of the ideas presented in the book, passed off as romantic, is more frightening than all the sex and violence in all other aspects of American popular culture that make everyone so hysterical. The problem with Arnold Schwarzenegger movies is that they are dumb and senseless—the violence is all for special effect. On the other hand, Sam Peckinpah’s chiaroscuro Westerns are beautiful, full of red red blood in black and white. And they don’t pass off a three-day affair as the great love of one’s life. What I am trying to get across is that the ruin of this country will not be the bombs and machine guns and blood and guts flying through the air that constitute a large part of what we consider entertaining; what will kill us is the inability to think critically about these images or to raise children who know how to interpret them sanely. And as long as there can be a national craze over the notion that three days in Iowa does a great love make, I think it’s safe to say that we’re not thinking straight. People who ought to know better bought into the Bridges version of romantic love, imagining that all the love inside you—which is enough to last a lifetime—can be meaningfully spent over a long weekend. It’s not that movies should only celebrate lifelong love stories, but that the real romance is the staying together. No one should stay in an oppressive relationship, there should be no Noras, no Nicole Simpsons, but the fact is that a couple staying together only because they are already there is more substantial than people give it credit for, that the rewards of having a partner for life is hugely gratifying in ways that are so surprising and probably understandable only from the other end. The beauty of faith is that it requires faith, it is not a certainty, and the worth of a marriage may not be clear until the couple is eighty years old, but growing old together—just sticking with it—is no small thing.
In this context, women like Gennifer Flowers, the mistresses, these evil interlopers, become much less dangerous, much more a thing that can happen in a long-term relationship. Not that it’s okay to cheat, but in the event of such a thing, the most important part is how the couple works it out. Are they in it together for life? Or are they like Robert James Waller, believing the great love of your life can be three idyllic days? Do they understand that love is cumulative, that quantity is more important than quality because ultimately it is quality?
All this is to say that one of the most impressive things to me about the Clintons, either individually or together, is their marriage. The very thing that most people study askance seems to me their greatest accomplishment. Clearly, these are both people who have made peace with their own turbulence. And that is why my judgments about the deals that Hillary Clinton has struck with the devil along the way are not about the choices she made: those choices are her business. My quarrel is with the way she has been perceived, with the way she has been looked upon as a nontraditional First Lady or simply as a willful, independent woman. In fact, this is a woman for whom being a wife clearly comes first.
And heaven knows it took a strong woman to keep the Clinton marriage together—my Aunt Esther always said that the woman makes the marriage, and I think that’s probably right—and I am sure Hillary worked long and hard at that. She succeeded where so many others have failed or given up or snapped, and sometimes I think people resent her for that more than her career woman bravado or anything else. She has the smugness of the one he comes home to. She has the arrogance of the one who has won. In fact, it is the fictional account of the Clintons in the novel Primary Colors, which finds both Susan and Jack Stanton—as the campaigning couple are called—cheating on each other time and again, and letting each other down in different ways, but still somehow sticking with it, that does the Clintons’ marriage more justice than either one of them is able to give it in their own awkward and defensive presentations. In a paraphrased version of the 60 Minutes interview that the Clintons did following the Flowers free fall, Susan Stanton makes Cokie Roberts understand what it takes to hold a marriage together—and it is her strong speech beside Jack’s lame and guilty mumblings that makes it clear that this is a woman of valor. “You are making an assumption,” Mrs. Stanton interjects, regarding some assessment of the state of their union. “I mean, Cokie—where have you been these past twenty-five years? People have suffered and struggled and been through all sorts of crazy things. So yes, we did have some tough times. But we’re still here. And if you want to draw a political lesson from that about Jack Stanton’s character, it has nothing to do with inconsistency, or what was the word you used? Untru
stworthiness. It’s the exact opposite: This man does not give up. He will work through the tough times. He will wake up every morning and bust his butt for the American people.”
Joe Klein/Anonymous has rendered this speech in close approximation to the real 60 Minutes vituperation. Both fact and fiction have Hillary as way more competent and confident than her husband, rushing to defend his honor after he has insulted hers. There is something masochistic about this whole approach of hers, but the individual acts, the tough rhetoric, is in itself quite impressive, in fact astonishingly so. She really is very capable. Julie Burchill’s estimation of Hillary’s abilities as superior to Margaret Thatcher’s is likely correct. Somehow the atmosphere she has developed her almost-political career in has not helped her to thrive.
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