The turning point in the adultery code came at a press conference on May 6, 1987.
The Miami Herald had staked out the Washington townhouse of former Sen. Gary Hart, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, and reported that it appeared he had spent the night with a woman who was not his wife.
Hart had been dogged by whispers of womanizing, but he had not been terribly indiscreet and–after the Herald went public with its revelation–his wife stood by him and accepted his pleas of innocence.
“In all honesty, if it doesn’t bother me, I don’t think it ought to bother anyone else,” Lee Hart told the press.
Under the old rules, that would have been all. But this time the press would not drop the story. In The New Republic, then-editor Michael Kinsley crowed: “We are witnessing the breakdown, at long last, of an anti-democratic conspiracy among the Washington elite of journalists and politicians to keep information from voters.”
Hart withdrew from the race. But before that, something more important happened. At that press conference, Paul Taylor of The Washington Post asked The Question. “Have you ever committed adultery?”
That word “ever” obliterated the old rules. It declared that any act of infidelity, never mind how discreet, was part of the public picture for a public figure. The door was blown off the closet, at least for politicians.
Hart, understandably baffled, stammered that he did not have to answer the question–the right answer, at least by the old rules, although it did not save him.
If what might be called a decent hypocrisy as to adultery no longer affords protection to a man or woman, then what rules are we playing by?
Narrowing the band of possible behavior from, say, “Be discreet” to “Do nothing that might ever start a rumor”–because rumors will be investigated–is unlikely to give us a higher standard of morality among politicians and public figures. (In any case saints make lousy leaders.)
It is more likely that adultery will be flushed out into the open more often. The closet will shrink or even disappear. What then? Either exposed adulterers will be steadfastly condemned and disgraced, even (sometimes) against common sense and the wishes of the betrayed spouse. Or people will retreat from condemning so human a sin and will decide to relax about it instead.
To illustrate these options, consider two fairly obvious examples of figures caught up in high-profile adultery stories: Kelly Flinn and Bill Clinton.
Last year, the U.S. Air Force’s Lt. Flinn, the first woman to pilot a B-52, was threatened with court-martial and forced out of the service after authorities learned that she had been conducting an affair with a civilian who was married (Flinn was single) to an enlisted woman who served on Flinn’s base.
The armed services’ rules against adultery used to be enforced in the usual hypocritical way (wink, wink). But there were good reasons for punishing Flinn: She had lied to her superiors; she had disobeyed an order to change her conduct; she had threatened morale and order by her interference in the marriage of an enlisted colleague.
But the decision to punish Flinn raised important questions. What does consensual adultery have to do with flying a plane? Should a bit of hanky-panky destroy a career into which the government had put a great deal of energy and money?
The military found itself in an absurd position. Without the protection of hypocrisy they faced the possibility of a decimated officer corps. The Flinn case led to the case of Army Maj. Gen. John Longhouser who, despite a long and distinguished career, was forced to retire after a telephone tip revealed that he had carried on an affair while separated from his wife, five years earlier.
Later, Gen. Joseph Ralston, vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was disqualified for the top job after it emerged that he had carried on an affair 13 years earlier, although he too had been separated from his wife at the time.
Desperate for a policy that was both consistent and committed, the hapless generals set up a sexual misconduct hotline. But in the wake of the Flinn affair, reports of adultery came in so thick and fast that the Army shut down the hotline.
Senior officers expressed concern that minor transgressions were ending the careers of distinguished officers. The story confirmed what we already knew: No public, legalistic system of anti-adultery rules can work.
Thus the second alternative to hypocrisy is the one it seems–at least in view of current post-Starr report Clinton popularity polls–we’re going to adopt: airing adultery in public and shrugging about it.
Consider Bill Clinton. This gnawing case shows that what is happening now is the reverse of what ought to happen: Adultery is being condemned legally and excused morally.
In 1992, when Gennifer Flowers went public with allegations that Gov. Clinton had carried on an affair with her, this was rightly seen as reflecting on the character and veracity of a presidential candidate.
Next thing we knew, Clinton was on television, with Hillary Clinton at his side, doing what honesty demanded: confessing to problems in their marriage, and that he’d admitted wrongdoing, and showing they had patched it up and asked for the people’s forgiveness.
The people gave it–as they should have done, in the circumstances.
But step back, and what you see is this: In 1987 a bright young presidential candidate got caught with his pants down and was forced out of the race; in 1992 another bright young presidential candidate got caught with his pants down and was elected president.
In other words, in 1992 the public, probably for the first time, decided that it could live with an acknowledged adulterer as president.
What makes for uneasiness is not the adultery but the combination of open inquiry, open acknowledgement and open indifference. Thus, by the time Monica Lewinsky entered the picture, Clinton had all but dropped the pretense of marital fidelity, and the public had all but dropped the pretense of caring.
This made the aftermath of events all the more perverse. As part of an officially unrelated investigation into sexual harassment, Clinton was asked under oath whether he had had sex with Lewinsky. He denied it.
When Lewinsky was taped, saying she and the president had had an affair and that she lied about it, the matter became one of perjury: a federal crime.
On national television in 1992, during the Flowers affair, Clinton had been asked The Question. Could he say that he had never committed adultery? He replied: “I’m not prepared tonight to say that any married couple should ever discuss that with anybody but themselves.” Translate: don’t make me lie.
That was the right answer; it had been for centuries.
By now, in 1998, the law gives no quarter to tradition; a self-propelled legal process makes the traditional answer not just hypocritical but illegal. The lawyers were going to ask and the president would have to tell–never mind that he, his wife and his mistress all had agreed, for the protection of his presidency and of their own families, to bury the affair.
The end result is the worst of all possible worlds. Lying about adultery, even in the interests of all concerned, has been made effectively illegal.
When the adulterer’s closet becomes a zone of legal peril, adulterers will simply abandon it and take their chances with openness. According to a Newsweek poll, adultery is already at the bottom of the list of reasons for voting against a presidential candidate. As people get used to hearing about this or that prominent person’s infidelities–a U.S. president here, a British foreign secretary there–the taboo evaporates.
I don’t doubt that honesty has its good points. And yet, as with illegitimacy, abortion and dependency, we have found that there is a price for destigmatizing behaviors which should be discouraged but are not illegal.
Today most people in the United States agree that adultery is wrong, and only a few admit to engaging in it: Fewer than one in four men, and about half as many women, report ever having been unfaithful. Of course, people lie about adultery, so those figures should be taken as lower bounds. But that is the point.
Imagine a society in which, say, 50 or 75 percent of adults cheerfully admit to infidelity; people take adultery for granted; a wife’s threat to go public or a boss’ threat to be shocked ceases to be much of a deterrent, and it becomes harder to tell children, with a straight face, that cheating is really, truly, wrong–which is still a fairly useful thing to be able to say.
But a better rule than saying “Who cares?”–effectively shrugging at adultery–is: If the adulterer takes all reasonable steps to be discreet, if he (or she) performs his (or her) duties as parent, spouse and citizen, and if his (or her) spouse chooses to hang on, then nothing has happened. This is not covering up; it is being grown-up.
