The continuing case of John Tower - 10 March 1989

An old southern senator – old is not, in this case, just an affectionate term, he’s really old, 86 – said something on Wednesday night that is not penetrating, not brilliant, not profound.

In fact it’s obvious, but as Aristotle – old Aristotle – said, it’s one of those obvious things that in the discussion of great issues seldom gets said.

Our aged senator is Republican Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. In all the turmoil over former Senator Tower, during which the Senate seemed to be no longer a great deliberative body but something more like a moral gymnasium in which a hundred senators were performing exercises they’d never done before, nobody that I’ve heard or read about, nobody ever said "Let’s get this thing over with, let the president organise the defence department, what must our allies think of us and our system?".

It was left to this stern, frail southern Baptist who – if you knew anything about American politics you would assume would be against Mr Tower on the now achingly familiar grounds that he sometimes took his fill of the demon rum, in Mr Tower’s case the barley distillate of Scotland.

Yet Senator Thurmond was on Mr Tower’s side and on Wednesday he went to the White House with the Republican whip to talk to the president and try and salvage, or discover some tactic, some clever ruse, which would avoid the inevitable.

When he emerged from the White House Senator Thurmond didn’t attack Mr Tower or his critics, never mentioned the Baptist faith or the sin of being immersed in alcohol. The man he surprisingly went after was the president.

“What effect”, he said, “what effect is this having all over the world? What are heads of nations thinking that this man has no influence in Congress?” This man, of course, was his lord and leader, Mr Bush. Well, of course, none of us here is all over the world, but it struck me for the first time that in the whole interminable uproar we’ve had no reporting from abroad about the views of America’s allies.

Naturally, the leaders at this stage of the Bush presidency – Mrs Thatcher, Mr Mitterrand, Mr Kohl – are not going to come out and say “George Herbert Walker Bush, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Can’t you even get a Cabinet together in the third month of your reign?” But the rumbles of disbelief and the flurries or head-shakings among western statesmen, to go no further, must be actually audible.

The only international comparison with the Tower case that practically everybody has drawn has been the memorable daily routine or the late and, surely, still-great Winston Churchill. In the past week every paper and magazine I’ve read seems to have printed its own account of Mr Churchill’s daily consumption of the deadly stuff. By repetition, the alcoholic quota has gone up alarmingly.

One respected morning paper had Mr Churchill barely able to stop snoring before he took two or three shots to get him on his feet after which we were told he launched himself on an ocean of booze and collapsed at one in the morning, having during the long day, I should remind you, roused the British people to fight on alone, given orders to everybody from the coastal defences, kept a clear eye on General de Gaulle’s plots and stratagems, went on to tour bombed-out cities, despatched military memos to General Alexander, phoned President Roosevelt about the war in Burma and, all in all, do more than any other man to save Britain and, by extension, the western democracies.

The most reliable of the Churchill biographers reported that Mr Churchill was in the habit, through the furious working day, of taking two, maybe three, glasses of whisky, several glasses of champagne, a couple of snifters of brandy in the evening, and a final highball to send him contentedly to bed.

The new Senate, as we’ve seen, has had a frightful time approaching a consensus on its first great debate but it is the consensus of the Senate, as of all the newspapers, that if Winston Churchill were alive today and had been nominated as the secretary of defence he would have been turned down flat.

Mr Tower, who is, by the way, an Anglophile and a fervent admirer of Churchill, must have longed in his endless grilling to quote Churchill’s own line, “All I can say is that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has ever taken out of me.”

I find it incredible to hear myself talking like this. I have covered, as we say, the Senate for 52 years and throughout all that time, and up to a few weeks ago, I never thought I would hear days of wrangling in a Senate committee and hours of acrid and passionate debate on the Senate floor about a man’s drinking habits.

It wasn’t a taboo topic. It simply never occurred to anybody to bring it up as a relevant matter any more than you would go in public into a man’s choice of neckties. And during all that time, no group of men has agreed or even seriously debated what exactly constitutes alcoholic abuse, drinking to excess, alcoholism itself, the definition of which is still a matter of dissension among everybody from psychiatrists to neurologists to clergymen to bartenders.

Not content with breaking new ground on this topic there came, at a national press club lunch – a public lunch that was televised – there came the astonishing moment when a question sent up to the podium was read out, “Have you ever committed adultery?” There was a gasp and a crackling silence.

We all instantly recalled the same question, probably never before put in public in this country to a public man, the question put to the luckless Senator Gary Hart about a year ago. Remember, he was running for the Democratic nomination?

He fumbled it badly, going on about the self-righteousness and the pruriency of the press – in which he was right – but he could have said "None of your damn business" or "How about you?".

Mr Tower, on the other hand, did not flinch. I wish he’d said, “I will answer that question if the person who sent it up would sign his or her name. An anonymous question is as contemptible as an anonymous letter.” But he didn’t preface his reply. He said, quite calmly, quite amiably, “Yes I have been unfaithful to wedding vows and I think I am not alone here.”

Now, how did this whole brand of quizzing of public men come about and why? I’m not sure I know why, but I have a theory about how and it goes beyond the startling novelty of Mr Tower’s inquisition into changes in American life, especially changes in the balance of outside pressures on American politicians which we’ll go into once this melancholy business is behind us and we have a new secretary of sefence who is pure, without fault or flaw.

It would be interesting to see how good a secretary of defence he turns out to be, but there’s one other aspect, also obvious, which only one American public man has brought out – the questioning not of Mr Tower’s habits at the bar, but in the bedroom – surely arose from an assumption which so far no politician has been required to challenge.

It’s the assumption that every senator and every congressman, every member of a parliament, the assumption is, I think, just as general in western parliamentary countries as here, the assumption that a married man who is also a public man is not and never has been an adulterer.

We bookworms can dredge from the old memoir the confidential remark of Mr Gladstone that – what was it? – “I have known 11 Prime Ministers, seven of whom were adulterers.”

Well, that sort of remark was stowed away for the private delectation of friends and biographers, it was not anything that Mr Gladstone would have said in public. That assumption came to dictate an unspoken requirement of public life with the reign and the character of Queen Victoria, not before, but ever since it has been a standard taken for granted throughout all the upheavals and moral revolutions of this century.

In our time, it brought down one Conservative government. It has never brought down an American administration and, until about a couple of years ago with the emergence of Senator Hart, it was never brought up by the press as a qualification for public office. Once poor old Gary Hart went down the tabloid press, and also some representatives of the supposedly very serious and respectable press, saw a wide opening in a previously closed topic and went hurtling through it with their flashlights and tape recorders, and came up, for the first time, with lurid but also many true revelations about the private lapses of some almost sacrosanct figures.

For the first time, the people knew something discreetly buried by friends and foes for decades that Franklin Roosevelt had had a mistress and certainly one halo that was badly fractured by the new muckrakers was that of John F Kennedy.

I saw that the general assumption that all public men and women of course were chaste was unchallenged until a year or two ago, but what about Dr Alfred Kinsey? Remember him? An American zoologist who turned from examining the habits of moles and glow worms to the sexual habits of human beings, not how they were supposed to live, but how they did.

He put out two immense statistical studies which in the early '50s were thundering best-sellers. One of his discoveries was that something like three or four married men in ten had had an extra-marital affair.

Even so, it was a conclusion not acceptable to the vast majority of the great American voting public. Pretty soon, while accepting that this might be true of the general population, we went back to assuming that our politicians were drawn from the six or seven that stood in no need of repentance.

Now a study has just come out in England, more scientifically impeccable than Dr Kinsey’s, which says that more like 55% of married men have in their time committed adultery. Will this, too, disturb but eventually pass by the average voter?

There must come a time when the marriage vow question will once again be decently buried otherwise, as a former senator, the honest, the ever-downright Barry Goldwater, said the other day “If you were to go searching for every man who’d never drunk too much and never slept with some girl, you’d have no government.”

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