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Roosevelt's girlfriends
Washington Monthly, July-August, 2004 by Charles Peters
Back to the relationship of a politician's sex life to his public role. I remember being on NBC's "Meet the Press" one Sunday in December 1998 with William Satire, Sally Quinn, and Tim Russert. My fellow panelists took a stern view of President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky and his lies about it. I said that unfortunately lots of otherwise good people committed adultery and lied about it to protect their wives, children, and themselves. As I looked around the table, it occurred to me that Safire, before becoming a columnist, had worked for years in public relations in New York, a world that did not abound in innocence. Quinn's friends, I knew, were drawn from the world of fast-track journalism in Washington and New York.
During my own college and post-graduate years, my friends in New York were mostly in the fields of the arts and entertainment, neither of which is noted for putting a high value on sexual morality. Russert may have grown up an altar boy in Buffalo, but he later had high-level political jobs in Washington and New York before joining Sally Quinn in big-time journalism.
In these worlds, each of us knew people who committed adultery and lied about it but continued to enjoy our professional respect. I still can't understand why my fellow panelists refused to see Clinton in this light. I wish I had thought to cite the case of Franklin Roosevelt. The greatest president of the past century may have had sexual relations of one kind or mother not only with Lucy Mercer Rutherford, but also with his secretary Marguerite Lehand, Princess Martha of Norway, his distant cousin Daisy Suckley, and Dorothy Schiff, then publisher of The New York Post. Suppose that during the darkest days of the depression or World War II, a reporter revealed one of those relationships, and Roosevelt lied about it for the same reasons that Clinton did. Can anyone imagine that the resulting damage to his authority would have been good for the country?
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