Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 5, 1993 TAG: 9312070265
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By SID MOODY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Sex is only a heartthrob away from the seats of political power.
Allegations of sexual harassment against Sen. Robert Packwood are the latest in a long line of affairs of state snarled in affairs of the libido.
Reports over the years of sexual misconduct - confirmed or alleged - might bolster a belief that nation's capital has turned in to a sexual carnival.
House panjandrum Wilbur Mills takes a midnight dip with a stripper in public waters in the nation's capital.
Presidential candidate Gary Hart challenges the media to catch him in a sexual dalliance. They oblige.
The hearings on Judge Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court become concerned almost entirely with charges of his sexual harassment of female subordinates and his denial of them.
Bill Clinton's presidential campaign is almost blown up by a blonde bombshell who kisses and then tells, or so she says.
Firstly, this is a scandal-obsessed age when nothing is swept under the rug.
Secondly, sex at the summit is nothing new in this republic - or any realm you can think of. If James Earl Carter confessed to occasional lust in his heart, what was King David thinking when he spotted Bathsheba sponging herself?
Europeans, awash in royal bastardy and eminent voluptuaries, often marvel at American primness regarding sex.
When in 1899 screams erupted from the private study of French President Felix Faure, aides scurried to the scene. They found a certain distraught - and nude - Mme. de Steinheil, wife of a painter, and the Republic's leader felled at a delicate moment by a fatal stroke. Frenchmen paid no mind to the lady but conjectured whether Faure had been poisoned by a cigarette given him earlier in the day by the Prince of Monaco.
Americans, however, seem to like to hold their leaders to a higher standard than they themselves might practice. If this be hypocrisy, political scandalmongers have made the most of it.
In 1802, James Thomson Callender, a newspaper editor of few scruples but large circulation, tarred Thomas Jefferson with besporting through the chambers of Monticello with a slave, Sally Hemings. Dumas Malone, Jefferson's most exhaustive biographer, says the story is ``legend.'' Author Fawn Brodie disagrees. Take your pick, but remember the original source was from an editor who had no love for the president.
The Callenders of the goode olde days were the sources of many such scurrilous allegations.
Our forebears seemed to have been more broadminded in matters of Venus. The major complaints against a Colonial governor of New Jersey was incompetence, not that he used to dress up in drag.
We have all but canonized George Washington. We remember George and the cherry tree. A myth. We overlook the love letters he wrote Sally Fairfax, his neighbor's wife, when engaged to Martha. A fact.
One must doubt that the supermarket tabloids of today would have sat on the story. But Washington's contemporaries, had they known, probably would have shrugged - an estimated quarter of the brides in Puritan New England were pregnant at the altar.
Sex way back then was usually a cause for ribaldry. The Boston Gazette, reflecting the general racism of the time, poeticized to the tune of ``Yankee Doodle'' the gossip about widower Jefferson and Hemings.
``Yankee Doodle, what's the noodle?
``Without a wife half so handy?
``To breed a flock of slaves for stock
``A blackamoor's the dandy.''
The journals were harder on Alexander Hamilton over his affair with Maria Reynolds in 1791. He was, after all, secretary of the Treasury and blackmail was involved - and he was virulently hated by many.
The affair began when Reynolds, a stranger, asked Hamilton for traveling money, to flee her philandering husband.
``Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable,'' Hamilton recorded in a remarkable 95-page confession six years later. Its purpose was to clear his name of any fiscal irregularities with the husband who with Reynolds had set up Hamilton for blackmail.
Hamilton's career - and marriage - continued, leaving John Adams, hardly one to tolerate high-level high jinks, to understate that the secretary suffered from ``a superabundance of secretions [that he] could not find enough whores to drain off.''
Daniel Webster, giant of the Senate along with Henry Clay, was suspected of having feet of the same substance. It was rumored - later refuted - that he had taken a woman applying for a secretarial job into a back room where he encircled her waist ``in his brawny arms.'' She said he said: ``This, my dear, is one of the prerogatives of my office,'' that being secretary of state.
Eight years later, in 1850, a Pittsburgh newspaper claimed Webster had a Negro mistress. The Lowell, Mass., American said it hadn't heard such ``but the fact that he had a mistress of some color is, we suppose, as notorious as any other fact concerning him.''
Nonetheless, Webster's abiding reputation as a compromiser relates not to his love life but to the Compromise of 1850 which staved off civil war for a decade.
Sex threatened to run away with the 1884 presidential campaign when Republicans dug up one Maria Halpin who claimed Grover Cleveland was the father of her 8-year-old son, Oscar Folsom Cleveland, born on the wrong side of the blanket. Cleveland, the Democratic candidate, assumed paternity in lieu of other great and good friends of Halpin - and himself - on the grounds that they were all married and he wasn't.
Gleeful Republicans burst into verse:
``Ma, Ma where's my Pa?
``Gone to the White House, ha! ha! ha!''
Cleveland had some minor matrimonial dirt on his opponent, James G. Blaine, which he ordered his aides to throw in the wastebasket. His advice to his campaign staff:
``Tell the truth.''
Warren Harding was not compelled to follow such counsel. His administration's scandals outlived him. He died in midterm before Nan Britton made public their steamy love affair. It began in 1916 when the 20-year-old Britton told Sen. Harding that she had had a crush on her hometown hero since high school in Marion, Ohio. In between torrid trysts in New York, Harding wrote her 50- and 60-page love notes during languid sessions on the Senate floor.
At the 1920 GOP convention in Chicago, politicos fought interminably over Harding's nomination in the famous smoke-filled room while the senator cuddled with Nan in her scented boudoir a few blocks away. She watched his acceptance speech from a back seat while her sister sat with their infant daughter.
Once elected, the president and Nan made love among the umbrellas and galoshes of a coat room off the Oval Office while Secret Service Agent Warren Ferguson stymied a suspicious and furious Mrs. Harding, known as The Duchess, from battering down the door.
Years later, a long and impatient line formed outside another coat room, this one at the humongous old mansion of the Vanderbilts in Newport, R.I., The Breakers. The guests at a white tie charity ball were told the cloakroom was off-limits until the junior senator from Massachusetts emerged with his date.
The presidential sex life of that senator, John F. Kennedy, has stimulated revision of the idyllic portrait of Camelot-on-the-Potomac. Starting with interludes between Inaugural Balls, Kennedy left a record of White House hospitality that may never have been surpassed. Such as sharing the mistress of a Mafia don, to name one of many mentioned in Richard Reeves' current biography of Kennedy.
How this might affect his place in history is moot. Franklin D. Roosevelt is not best-remembered for a 30-year relationship with Eleanor's one-time social secretary, Lucy Page Mercer, which ended only when he died - died in her presence while sitting for a portrait for her niece.
Americans still liked Ike despite his strong affection overseas for his wartime chauffeur, Kay Summersby.
Indisputably, the biggest flap of the political bedclothes, one that did indeed alter the course of the ship of state, centered on one Peggy (nee Margaret O'Neale) Timberlake (first husband) Eaton (second husband). Peggy's father ran an inn between the capital and Georgetown, and Peggy was equally accommodating. Hardly 15, she had already caused a duel. Her elopement soon after was foiled when she awakened her father by kicking over a flower pot while crawling out a window.
Timberlake, on leave while his accounts as a Navy purser were audited, espied Peggy in the tavern taproom and declared he would meet her by 6 p.m. He did and by 11 had her promise to wed. They did in 1816 when she was sweet 16.
Then, Sen. John Henry Eaton of Tennessee, a friend of president-to-be Andrew Jackson, became an admirer. He pulled strings to have Timberlake assigned to sea duty, leaving Peggy all to himself. When Timberlake returned, his accounts were once again in question. Eaton gave him $10,000 to help balance the books, then finagled Timberlake to sea for four more years aboard the U.S.S. Constitution.
Peggy, meanwhile, fought off the attentions of Richard K. Call, a boarder at the O'Neale Tavern and another friend of Jackson's, with a coal shovel in a display of unaccustomed virtue that evoked Old Hickory's lasting admiration.
Thus, when Jackson was elected president and named Eaton his secretary of war, he pressured him to marry Peggy to present a licit domesticity to Washington society. (Timberlake had died: from pneumonia, officially; from too much grog according to his shipmates.)
Washington society, however, was all too familiar with Peggy and her saga and turned its backs and closed its doors on her. This included most notably the wife of Vice President John Calhoun.
Furious at the snubs, Jackson, who had survived slurs of marrying a bigamist himself (technically so, but the couple did not know Rachel Jackson's divorce was not official), was furious and threatened to fire any Cabinet officer who shunned the companionable Peggy.
Disharmony crippled the administration and did nothing to help strained relations between Jackson and Calhoun, the states rights Southerner. Eaton finally got the message and resigned, as did the whole Cabinet.
Eaton subsequently drank his way through an ambassadorship to Spain where Peggy, bruised but unbowed, took up cigars, the smoke curling upward as she passed into history.
by CNB