Bedroom Bombshells

Bedroom bombshells
Elizabeth Nickson. The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Mar 18, 2006. pg. D.15

The death of John Profumo is a reminder, ELIZABETH NICKSON says, of how some indiscretions can rock a nation

John Profumo lived most of his life as a penitent: decorous, humble and worthy, far different from the swinger with "wandering hands and wandering eye" that Christine Keeler called him in 1961.

I reached him on the phone once, at his ministry office. I had never heard a more extinguished voice, as he declined, infinitely polite, to be photographed by Life Magazine on the occasion of the 1989 film, Scandal . We, of course, wanted another chance to run the luscious, pouting Keeler, naked astride an Arne Jacobsen chair, preferably opposite a current photograph of the disgraced minister of war.

This man believed he had a chance to be prime minister, I remember thinking. He had one of those enviable Nash terraced palaces at Regent's Park, where he entertained the Queen. Then, one summer day, he met a silly, sleazy 19-year-old in the pool at Cliveden, and for 12 weeks of sporadic sex, he got two years of slow roasting over a tabloid fire, then a public execution. A year later, 11 years of Conservative government was toast.

No one, by the way, had been remotely bothered that Harold Macmillan's wife had been engaged in a long-term affair. And why was John Major's interminable reign replete with ministers practising auto-erotic asphyxiation in suspender belts and frilly knickers, and no punishment? What is the difference between Lyndon Johnson slipping into the bedroom of a female aide and saying, "Move over, it's your president," and Slick Willie's two-year-long humiliation, followed by a sea change in Washington so thorough that it's practically a different city? What kind of sex scandal brings down a government?

First, we must put ourselves in the hands of John le Carré with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Gollancz, 1963), wherein he found his astonishing voice. "The best spy story I have ever read," Graham Greene said, and it was a landmark, an instant bestseller.

Why? Its tone of moral relativism indicated a massive cultural shift. For le Carré, there was little difference between toffs mucking around with tarts, running off to be double, even triple agents, and the inhabitants of the Kremlin. For the public, worried by the earlier defections of Maclean and Burgess, traumatized by the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and Kim Philby's defection in 1963, it triggered the following reasoning: If the aristocratic minister of war Profumo was sleeping with a tart who was sleeping with a Russian naval attaché who happened to be a spy, what other profoundly rotten and dangerous thing was lurking at 10 Downing Street? The toffee-nosed idiots were going to run them into nuclear war. Better to have Labour in power. At least they could talk to the Soviets in the same language.

Primary Colors (Random House, 1996) is arguably as important a novel as le Carré's in this regard, and just as addictive. Its author, Joe Klein, might not have written another readable word, but who cares? Here is Bill Clinton (Governor Jack Stanton) in all his splendid, porky, amoral extroversion, and the lovely Gennifer Flowers (Cashmere McLeod), with her incriminating tapes; not to mention the black teenager with her paternity test. We didn't really care in 1992 whose hen house Clinton raided (what fun! how real!), but by 1997 we cared a lot, and I mean a lot, every night, interminably. But even in his darkest hours, Clinton's approval ratings soared. We liked the guy, we recognized his massive talent: We wanted him to win. We also wanted to be tolerant; nothing is less attractive than being seen as judgmental.

A year later, the Republicans held all three branches of government, and now they have the Supreme Court. How did that happen?

For the answer you have to turn to William J. Bennett and The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals (Free Press, 1998). It is a primer on first principles. Thou shall not commit perjury, thou shall not obstruct justice, thou shall not gather FBI files on one's enemies, thou shall not threaten or bribe past sexual partners, rent out the Lincoln Bedroom and so on. It describes the limits of moral utilitarianism, the dangers of having a leader who essentially says, as Clinton essentially did, "It doesn't matter, I wasn't involved. My political enemies are to blame. I have nothing more to say. The rules don't apply to me. There are no consequences to my actions. It's irrelevant. My only responsibility is to do the people's business." His later contrition was what theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace, "the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs."

Clinton lost the country for Al Gore and John Kerry because too many NASCAR dads had to explain oral sex to their eight-year-olds.

There was no great crime in the Clinton administration, just a whole raft of little ones, and eventually we sickened. Bennett's bracing tone, his clear demarcation of what is right and what isn't right, was a palate cleanser for a generation for whom political pragmatism had become everything. The Death of Outrage -- for all you may mock Bennett's gambling addiction, loathe the Christian right and their public "intellectuals" -- is the one book that will explain precisely why the White House is occupied by the most activist Christian ever, after the silliest political sex scandal in living history.

Elizabeth Nickson was the European bureau chief of Life Magazine from 1988 to 1991.