The Cheney Affair: A Parting Shot

A friend thinks Cheney has no complaints with the way the press has been after him recently: “He knew the rules going in.”

I disagree.

Imagine if the press had held to that rule in the past. The press used to have the good sense, the good manners, and the good taste to be discreet about this sort of thing.

Knowing any kind of personal blemish or wart or pimple, either in themselves or in their immediate family, is going to be plastered across the media, surely causes a lot of good candidates to stay out of political races, to our cost. Almost certainly, this includes Colin Powell: he did not run for president because he did not want to expose his wife, who suffers from depression, to this. Ironic, because both Churchill and Lincoln apparently also suffered from depression. A press like the one the US has today would probably have lost both of them to public life.

Not to mention FDR, whose inability to walk was carefully kept by the press from the public. Or Pierre Trudeau: his wife's descent into mania was kept out of the news in Canada completely until it was picked up by the American press, and we never heard the full extent of it. She is well today; would she have survived if the press had pursued this aggressively? Would anyone have been served by destroying her? And speaking of Trudeau, what about Trudeau's war record, compared to all the fuss made about Bush's service in the reserve. Trudeau avoided serving in WWII, and spent the war motorcycling around Montreal in a German helmet. Suppose the press had pushed that bit? Or his mistress and illegitimate child? Trudeau would probably never have entered public life, had the present American rules applied.

We would have lost Woodrow Wilson—-he had a mental breakdown in office. As, unknown to us at the time, thanks to press discretion, did Rene Levesque. Would we have been better off knowing? And would the government of America have run more smoothly had everyone known the president was incapacitated?

We would have lost John Kennedy. His sexual exploits were well known to the press at the time—heck, he even slept with members of the press corps. Not to mention his bad back, kept from the public, like FDR's paralysis, to preserve his image of vitality.

We would have lost Thomas Jefferson—having an affair and fathering illegitimate children with his own slave. And Martin Luther King, who was also a bit of a sexual adventurer.

Would it have been better if the press saved us from that sort of politician? FDR, Trudeau, Kennedy, Lincoln, Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, Jefferson, Martin Luther King? I'd say the present American press is doing us all a terrible disservice.

Both Rene Levesque and Jean Marchand killed pedestrians while driving when in office, as I recall. Do you remember reading much about it? Heck, Moses killed a man. Would the world also have been better off without Moses?

Besides keeping good people out of public life, this scandal-mongering in the press forces politicians and governments to waste a great deal of time and energy, which they could be using on the public business, on personal affairs. We are all the poorer for that.

Was Bill Clinton too preoccupied and too compromised publicly with the Lewinsky affair, to focus properly on issues such as whether North Korea was developing nuclear arms or the significance of some Middle Eastern terrorist group training people to fly large planes?

Finally, having their warts or embarrassments exposed reduces the effectiveness of any leader, because their effectiveness as a leader has everything to do with their ability to inspire. Hence too the need to shut up about FDR's polio, Kennedy's bad back, Churchill's heavy drinking, or Cheney's hunting accident. Unless your criticism is substantial, patriotism obliges you to support your leader.

And in the present instance, it also seems to me pointlessly cruel to have burdened the victim with all this publicity, publicity that probably pained him personally, as a friend of the VP, when he was clearly unwell.

Some gentlemen of the press: shame.