How have the private lives of American leaders affected policy and history? How much knowledge is enough? Excerpted from Inforum’s “Larry Flynt: One Nation Under Sex,” May 18, 2011.

LARRY FLYNT, Publisher; Activist; Co-author, One Nation Under Sex
DAVID EISENBACH, Ph.D., Core Lecturer of U.S. History, Columbia University; Co-author, One Nation Under Sex

PHIL BRONSTEIN, Editor at Large, San Francisco Chronicle – Moderator

 

EISENBACH: We didn’t want to write a book that was just a collection of one sexcapade after another involving the presidents and the first ladies. We wanted to write a book that connected the personal and the private to the political. So if the story was something that was just Chester A. Arthur’s mistress, we weren’t interested in that. We wanted to see how the mistress maybe was involved in policy, and if that was the case, if she had an effect on policy, she made it into the book. So that’s why we don’t cover every single president with a dalliance.

BRONSTEIN: Do you think this is a function of power and the convergence of power, politics and ego?

EISENBACH: Yeah, I think politics attracts a certain personality type. They aren’t motivated by money. They’re motivated by this desire to get in front of the crowd and get some feedback. That’s a kind of needy personality type. Then, couple that with the opportunity – when you are a man and when you are speaking in front of large audiences, chances are there is a woman or two in the crowd who’s interested, if you do it well, and these guys do it well. That and traveling a lot open up a lot of opportunities, so that you see, for example, the divorce rate of the incoming freshmen class of congressmen: They have like a 30 percent divorce rate after the first two years in office. Well, there’s a reason for that. Opportunity and personality type have a lot to do with it.

FLYNT: We were accused of: All you want to do is expose a guy’s sex life. Well, that’s not it at all; it was just the hypocrisy that was there. But in all of these people that I’ve studied over the years – some of them have been inconsequential congressmen, and some of them have been governors, many of them have been U.S. senators – I found that there was a common trait with them: They had a huge ego, and in order to feed that ego, they did it with the conquest of young women or men. I found out that was prevalent in those that we ended up exposing over the years.

BRONSTEIN: I wonder: Redemption always seems possible in politics. You write about a number of presidents who had redeemed themselves, or did redeem themselves after being outed after having affairs and so forth, and hookers, and all the other stuff. There was a quote in your book, “Purity of character after a period of political existence is not necessary for public patronage.” In other words, you can be a hound and somehow get away with it.

FLYNT: People could forgive Bill Clinton. They never will forgive Arnold Schwarzenegger, because he was a dog. He picked on the housekeeper – been under his roof for over 20 years – and you know it wasn’t just that one time that she happened to get pregnant. It was probably a regular occurrence. So it’s almost as bad as John Edwards, who was having an affair while his wife was dying of cancer.

There’s some things that you will have redemption in. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Arnold’s career. Any personal redemption he’s looking for, he’s not going to get.

BRONSTEIN: What is not attributable in American history, in the key moments, to sex?

EISENBACH: We don’t attribute it all to sex. The Second World War and America’s inability to join the League of Nations was not a result of Woodrow Wilson’s sexual affair with Edith Galt. But we are saying that in each of these cases, sex played a major role in how the history unfolded. So that when historians who have traditionally turned a blind eye to the private lives and the sex lives of presidents and first ladies, because they don’t consider it serious history, [they] have missed a very important component of the larger history of America. This book is the corrective of that, bringing the sex back into the politics.

BRONSTEIN: Larry, you have particular respect for the Kennedy era. You’ve talked about it as an era of hope. I saw an interview that you did where you said that you had revelations about the Kennedys, and I think you should buy [the book] just for that.

FLYNT: It was devastating for me to work on the chapters with Kennedy, because I grew up in that era. Camelot, when everyone loved their country, you could accomplish whatever you believed, and it was sort of that feel-good generation –

EISENBACH: Definitely, they were feeling good in that administration.

FLYNT: – and Kennedy, I think, was part of that. There’s no doubt that had President Kennedy lived, everything that has come out would have come out, and even more. I want to explain to you what bothered me. He’s the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world; if he wants a woman, he’s not going to have any trouble. Why did he have to go with the starlets like Marilyn [Monroe], Angie Dickinson, Marlene Dietrich, and on and on – a laundry list of Hollywood conquests that he was interested in? These rendezvous were not very well thought out, or planned. They were just careless.

First of all, I am the first person to defend a philandering president. I think if you can fight two wars and balance a budget at the same time, you deserve to sleep with whoever you want to. He just wasn’t being cool about it.

His wife Jacqueline, the first lady, women in this country thought of her as royalty. Her approval ratings were through the roof. Jackie could do no wrong. She was having affairs even before the president was assassinated and continued them afterwards, one of them being with Bobby, the president’s brother who later was assassinated. I don’t know how you can get any more tacky than that.

BRONSTEIN: There was something more tacky than that. She, Jackie, according to your book, was sleeping with Aristotle Onassis – whom she had been sleeping with before her husband died – two days after he died, in the White House. 

EISENBACH: We give a whole chapter to Jackie, because it’s a much more complicated story than the story we’ve been taught. We present her not as she’s been traditionally been presented, as a victim, but she’s also a player. That’s not something that we’ve traditionally liked to have seen in our first ladies, but they are complicated and in many cases voracious in their sex lives also, not just the guys.

In 1963, the Republicans had already begun to gear up for the 1964 re-election campaign that Kennedy intended to run. They were about to smear the administration with [charges of] lax morals. They had already begun to develop dossiers on the president’s sex life. One of the women that they knew about was Ellen Rometsch, who was from East Germany and a prostitute who frequented the White House swimming pool parties that the Kennedys would throw.

Senator [John James] Williams, this prude from Delaware, intended to bring Ms. Rometsch into the Senate chamber and grill her on her relationship with the president. If that [had] happened, it’s quite possible that Kennedy would have been impeached – not only on the morals issue, but because the FBI had begun to investigate her as a possible communist spy. Here you have the president of the United States carrying on an affair with a prostitute from a communist country. You can see how this could have doomed the Kennedy presidency. So how do you stop the Senate from going forward with an investigation? There was one man who could stop the Senate, and that was J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI.

Hoover wanted a concession, so he says to the Kennedys, “Okay, I’ll stop the Senate. But you’ve got to give me two things. Number one, make me FBI director again, and number two, give me written approval and permission to wiretap and bug Martin Luther King Jr.”

Washington was an absolute cesspool, in large part because these guys were not exposed in the press, but they were sexually blackmailing each other. And J. Edgar Hoover was at the forefront of this entire operation.

FLYNT: Hoover’s technique – he didn’t necessarily go through political channels if he wanted to destroy somebody’s career. Walter Winchell, a well-known radio commentator in New York, was friends with Hoover because of the information he could get, as was Drew Pearson, a very famous columnist in Washington. When [Hoover] wanted to leak a story, he went to one of them. He could be so deadly; a career could just evaporate overnight. That’s how powerful Hoover was. You’ve got to think about: Here’s a guy who stayed in power as the director of the FBI for almost 50 years. You know something had to be going on there. Nixon wanted to fire him but couldn’t, because [Hoover] had too much. Every president who came into office and wanted to do something about it couldn’t, because Hoover had so much information.

BRONSTEIN: In fact, Roosevelt was the first president who used Hoover, right?

EISENBACH: Right, and that’s it. Hoover was very useful to presidents if they needed to have something shut down. So he worked with presidents, not only against them.

Everybody knew that even if the stuff in your FBI file wasn’t true, it still could destroy you. The problem is that no one could criticize J. Edgar Hoover, even though he was director of the FBI. He refused to acknowledge the existence of the national mafia syndicate. At a time when the mafia was taking over America’s unions, flooding America’s cities with heroin, basically becoming this huge menace, he was running around chasing after communists.

BRONSTEIN: Wasn’t that because the mob essentially had information about [Hoover] being gay?

Women play a huge role in this book and obliviously not just as subjects – as hookers and mistresses and so forth – but really, it’s interesting to think about; particularly the women who were cheated on and sometimes themselves did the cheating as well. You have these women who stood by their men in a sense. A lot of them did. A lot of the wives of presidents past have: Hillary Clinton did, Maria Shriver did in 2003, probably regrets it today. Then, a lot of them traded that for some power. I think the idea that Hillary Clinton was sort of the first co-steward first lady – you know, you had Edith Galt, and Warden Harding’s wife was counting delegates at the convention, and Jackie Onassis was an extraordinary manipulator. The women come out as having a certain kind of power in these relationships.

EISENBACH: That’s right. Ellen Wilson, Eleanor Roosevelt, they all make their compromise, because they believe that “once we get into the Oval Office we’re going to do good.” They’re not standing by their man just because they love them. They want the power too. And they’re powerful actors, not just victims.

BRONSTEIN: I’m wondering, as we talk about this, whether we are not better off in the days, I would say, in the first 50 years of the 1900s, where, go up through the Kennedy administration, where Bobby Kennedy could call his friends in the press or enemies in the press and say, “Don’t run that story,” and they wouldn’t run it. There was a politician in San Francisco – I will not reveal who it is – many years ago who we found out, as reporters, had a very active night life. Was married, with kids; two reporters went out and followed this guy for two weeks and filled their notepads with the most eye opening kind of activity – you know, three in the morning, in a Volkswagen in the shadow of Grace Cathedral. But we decided at that time, again 20 years ago, that the politician showed up for work every morning and did his job. Therefore, what he did on his own time, however scandalous, was not a story. Would we be better off to going back to those days?

FLYNT: There’s a saying: Sunshine is the best transparency. Now we hear that our government agencies talk about transparency. Problem is, you never see it. Now I think the time is eroded, the time is gone where we’re going to be able to ever regain any of the individual liberties and personal freedoms that we gained with the very liberal Warren [Supreme] Court back in the ’60s. I think we might as well accept that, because of companies like Google and Facebook, we’ll probably see the loss of privacy. It’s probably what we pay for this technology. It’s a terrible thing for me to conceive of, because I feel just as strongly about the privacy issue as I do about the First Amendment issue.

Life changes, technology changes, but the problem really is not the technology. It’s not the lifestyle of the American people. American people have to become brave enough to create a revolving door in Washington, D.C., and keep that thing going each election. If you vote for somebody and he doesn’t perform the way you think he should, then the next two years or the next six years, you vote him out again. But Americans have so much apathy that they don’t feel like they can make a difference, so they sit back and do nothing. Millions don’t even vote at all. That’s a disservice to yourself and your friends.

EISENBACH: On the issue of the changes of technology and how that has opened up the sex lives of presidents and politicians as never before: One of the interesting things that we talk about in the book is how, with the Founding Fathers and in the early 19th century, the press was filled with stories of the sexual affairs and private lives of presidential candidates and first ladies.

It’s not until the 20th century, with the rise of the national security state and the professionalization of journalism, that journalists began to see themselves as part of the establishment, that they were there to kind of guard against any threats to the president, including gossip about his personal life. That continues and intensifies in the Cold War, but once the Cold War is over, then there is this sense of: “Oh, well, the heat’s off.” Right? America is the best nation on earth. We’ve got no threats, stock market’s up, let’s have fun [with a] little sex scandal involving the president. We got burned by that. Our hope in this book is, in a weird way, that yes, we’re returning to the days of the pamphleteers, now called bloggers, but we have to have the maturity to handle this power, to handle this information, so the next time we do have a sex scandal involving the president, it doesn’t occupy the country’s attention for two years.

BRONSTEIN: I agree with what Larry said about hypocrisy; I think California voters have proven that they’ll accept lying, cheating and stealing, but they do not like hypocrisy.

When you talk about sex scandals and the doors and windows that you’ve opened in this book and other people open on a daily basis, there’s really a question: Does it reflect a character, a personality? Let’s talk about John Edwards, who not just let down his family, but let down millions of people who believed that he was someone he was not. You quote Joseph Kennedy as telling his sons, “Doesn’t matter who you are, it’s who people think you are.” Is there a character issue that we ought to take from this kind of behavior and apply it to what kind of leader they would be? Is bad behavior a character trait that we ought to apply when judging someone as a politician?

FLYNT: I think so. You know, the sad part of it is, most people are pretty good about judging people. They just don’t take action. They can’t get it to the ballot box.

EISENBACH: But in the terms of sex, the fact is that we’ve had bad presidents who were on the straight and narrow in terms of their wives and we’ve had good presidents who were fooling about. So there’s really no correlation. Jimmy Carter is one president that we can definitely say was entirely loyal, but an awful president. So there you go.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: When I was a kid learning history, we kept on reading that “George Washington slept here,” “George Washington slept there.” Was that a double-entendre?

FLYNT: If he did, he was awful slick. What I found interesting is that Jefferson and Washington were the only two Founding Fathers that never freed their slaves. We know why Jefferson didn’t, because he was doing them all.

Another interesting take that we really didn’t dwell on in the book, because there was no way of substantiating it, but it’s a theory that’s been around for over 200 years, is: When George Washington married Martha, she was 27 years old and had two kids by a previous marriage. They wanted desperately to have more children. They weren’t able to. After the Revolutionary War, Washington was the most popular man in the country. He was a hero, a legend, he was everything the colonies believed in. If he wanted to be King George instead of president, he could have been. There’s a school of thought that thinks that because he couldn’t produce an heir that he decided to go the presidential route. We can’t back it up with research, but it’s interesting to discuss occasionally, especially when we are able to document how desperate they were to have additional children.