One of the things we’ve learned from the Giuliani affair is that there’s nothing inevitable about the press’s prying into private lives. Contrary to the easy expectations of media critics like me in the 1980s, the proliferation of news organizations and insatiable appetite for entertainment news have not opened the floodgates. The best proof is that until the Giulianis offered themselves as human sacrifices, even the New York tabloids let the mayor stray from his marriage for five years without hassling him. Part of the explanation was self-censorship by editors aware that their owners are allied with the mayor. And part was a genuine desire within the media to keep some perspective.
I once thought I knew exactly where to draw the line. When Gary Hart got caught in 1987 spending the night with Donna Rice on a Florida boat called Monkey Business, I settled on a simple–and alas, simplistic–standard. If the private behavior involved a president or presidential candidate, almost anything was fair game. As Charles Peters, the editor of The Washington Monthly, wrote of Ted Kennedy in 1980: “We should not have to wonder from whose bed the commander-in-chief will be summoned at the moment of nuclear decision.” But lesser officials should be spared scrutiny of their private lives unless they, say, got crocked on the job.
In its broadest outlines, this distinction still applies. The “even presidents have private lives” argument President Clinton used in his 1998 speech admitting to the Lewinsky affair fell flat with almost everyone, including those of us who strongly opposed impeachment. He had shamed the office with behavior that forfeited his claims to privacy. At the same time, who wants the press or (God forbid) prosecutors examining the sex lives of every city councilor? No one good would run for anything ever again.
But the problem with the Presidential Exception approach to privacy violation is someone like Giuliani. While in theory we shouldn’t be sniffing the bedsheets of our mayors and members of Congress, the Giuliani case is a perfect example of how private behavior–or at least the way it is handled–can sometimes offer important clues to the character of any public official. As painful as it was to watch last week, the peek inside his marriage was also a look inside him.
This is a quick way to start an argument. If you admire Clinton or Giuliani, you most likely believe public performance and character are disconnected. You can be a good president and an irresponsible man; a good mayor and a cruel man. Those who believe public and private behavior are separate realms invoke Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy–both of whom strayed from their spouses. They argue that we shouldn’t obsess over common character flaws. It’s a fair point, and one that a sophisticated American public seems to have absorbed.
But we can’t ignore those flaws, either. And if you can’t ignore them–if you concede that character counts–then private behavior is relevant, even if you’re running for dogcatcher. Not decisive; not more important than public acts of character like standing up for unpopular positions. But relevant. Giuliani’s decision to tell his wife that he wanted a legal separation on television is not just a private matter or a salacious bit of gossip. It’s of a piece with his contemptuous attitude in his public life. In another politician, this might more easily be excused as an understandable human blunder amid a disorienting cancer diagnosis. But Giuliani’s official arrogance–refusing to meet with major city officials for months or even years because they somehow displeased him; blaming an unarmed man killed by police officers for provoking his own death–changes the standards for judging him.
The inconvenient fact is that people aren’t so easily divided in two; their public and privates lives are always connected at some level. Clinton’s word is not his bond. Giuliani seems to be missing the gene that regulates human relationships. These are big flaws, much bigger than sex, and illuminated by their political as well as personal behavior. As Ross Perot used to say: It’s tragic, Larry. Both Clinton and Giuliani could have been not just capable administrators but real leaders; not just good, but great.
The political process in this country is pitiless and often vacuous. But it works. The relentless pressure brings out the best and worst in people, and gives us some of the personality puzzle pieces we need. Most politicians understand this. Hillary Clinton knows that New York voters are judging her character more than her position on child-health-reimbursement formulas. Before Giuliani turned churlish last week, he had a moment of fatalistic reflection about his predicament and quoted the Lee Strasberg character from “Godfather II”: “This is the business we have chosen.”
Sometimes the clues are overinterpreted: sexuality is not destiny; the bedroom is a worse place than the library or public stage to approach the truth about someone, and a lot less accessible. But the business chosen by politicians is one where all decisions on hiring and promotion are made by the voters. And as in any job interview, we need to at least try to find out who they really are.
