Syed Badrul Ahsan
There was the liberal Republican called Nelson Rockefeller who for years sought his party’s nomination for the presidency. He never was able to come by it, a good – and early – reason being his divorce from his first wife in the early 1960s and his second marriage to a woman named Happy. They had a happy marriage, but that did not translate into political contentment for Rockefeller, who served as Governor of New York and then for a year and a half was Vice President under Gerald Ford but was unable to realize his goal of being the occupant of the White House someday. America in the 1960s was not ready to catapult to high office a man who had abandoned his wife for another woman. Rockefeller’s final shot at the nomination of his party came in 1964, when he was beaten by the conservative Barry Goldwater.
Stories about the women in John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s life are legion. He married the beautiful journalist Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953 when he was a Senator. But that certainly did not stop him from letting his eyes rove on and across other women. During his brief presidency between January 1961 and November 1963, he indulged in serious sexual escapades with a whole phalanx of women. Every time Jackie Kennedy went out of town, JFK had the Secret Service bring in women to the White House for his sexual demands to be gratified. It once so happened that while he was frolicking in the White House pool with some young women, he was informed by alarmed security people that his wife had come back to the presidential residence. The women in the pool quickly disappeared and the President swiftly made his way back to the residence.
It is not that Jacqueline Kennedy did not know of her husband’s infidelities. Hers was certainly a wounded soul, but outwardly she maintained a stoic appearance. That President Kennedy was also involved with the actress Marilyn Monroe was public knowledge. Interestingly, the President’s brother, Attorney General Robert Francis Kennedy, was enjoying Monroe’s affections at the same time. To this day, questions about Monroe’s suicide and whether it had anything to do with the Kennedy brothers have never been satisfactorily answered. The sex drive in the Kennedys was surely a matter of family legacy. Their father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who served as US ambassador to Britain under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had numerous affairs of his own. One of them was with his twenty-four year-old secretary when he was sixty. Another and a more prominent one was with the actress Gloria Swanson.
There have been no substantive reports on the extra-marital relations that the youngest child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, Senator Edward Moore Kennedy, may have had, but then again, one cannot quite forget the suddenness with which his presidential ambitions were dashed on a night in 1969. A car which Edward Kennedy was driving and in which with him was his companion, the young Mary Jo Kopechne, slid off a narrow bridge and plunged into a lake. Kennedy managed to get out of the car and the water but did not seem to have made any efforts to save Kopechne. He went home and not until the next morning did he inform the police of the accident. The car was retrieved, with Kopechne’s body inside. Kennedy, elected Democratic whip only months earlier, was in disgrace. He eventually made a bid for the presidency by challenging President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. The effort came to naught.
There are, closer to present times, the many peccadilloes of Bill Clinton which quite marred the reputation of his otherwise brilliant presidency. Early on in his campaign for his party’s nomination in 1992, a woman named Gennifer Flowers emerged with stories of her sexual relationship with Clinton. The scandal nearly destroyed his campaign, until his wife Hillary Rodham went on television with him to profess her love for and confidence in her husband. Gennifer Flowers was not the end of the Clinton infidelity saga. There would be others, Monica Lewinsky being the most prominent instance. Bill Clinton remains one of only two American presidents ever to have faced impeachment in office, the other being Andrew Johnson, successor to Abraham Lincoln. It was Clinton’s priapic tendencies which led to the impeachment proceedings. Clinton survived the ordeal. Ironically, one man who demonized Clinton over the Lewinsky affair, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, was himself discovered soon after to have been having his own relationship with a woman not his wife. Gingrich was never able to recover his reputation.
In 1988, America’s Democrats thought they had a potential President in Senator Gary Hart. The media made much of Hart’s popularity and how he could be getting his party’s nomination and eventually replacing President Ronald Reagan, who was nearing the end of his second term in the White House. And then all hell broke loose. Hart was discovered cavorting on a yacht named, curiously enough, Monkey Business, with a young woman named Donna Rice. She was photographed sitting on his lap. The images, captured on journalists’ lenses out of sight of Hart and Rice, swiftly eroded the senator’s presidential ambitions. He announced his withdrawal from the race. It would be Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis who would be the Democratic standard bearer that year. He would lose to Vice President George H.W. Bush.
Jimmy Carter never engaged in any adultery. But when the born-again Christian in him confessed, in an interview with Playboy magazine at the height of his campaign against President Gerald Ford in 1976, to having had lustful thoughts in his heart about women, his popularity plummeted. He had simply said there had been times when he committed adultery in his heart. Carter was lucky. He was able to recover and go on to beat Ford at the election.
Senator Edmund Muskie had no affairs. But it was media criticism of his wife Jane which was a reason for him to lose momentum in 1972. Widely credited with bringing energy to the beleaguered Democratic ticket he shared with Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Muskie was the man everyone thought would take on Richard Nixon in 1972. His popularity was high and he went to New Hampshire as the Democrat poised to be the party presidential nominee. Then a journalist printed some unflattering comments, a forged letter, about him and also had critical remarks about his wife. Standing in the snow in New Hampshire, an angry and emotional Muskie denounced the report. Many thought he wept as he spoke, though Muskie later said it was the snow melting off his face. That did not help. Senator George McGovern took the lead. Muskie went out of the race. In later years, he was to serve as Secretary of State in the Carter administration.
That in brief is the story of women in the lives of some American politicians. Franklin Roosevelt has been reported to have had an affair with Lucy Mercer, his wife Eleanor’s secretary. The FBI was constantly after the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and dug out information on his sex-related activities. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as Governor of California, indulged in adulterous relationships.
The difference between all these men driven by sexual desire in American public life and Donald Trump is simple: Trump, a much married man, brags about his lewdness even when it comes to comments on his daughter Ivanka’s sex appeal.
Most significantly, Trump has been uncouth where the others have been discreet and relatively sophisticated. His lack of intellect and social graces has underlined his career and undermined basic decency.
And that says a whole lot about the man Hillary Clinton needs to beat, not just to replace Barack Obama but also to keep American values intact and in place.
Source: bdnews24
