Private Lives in Public

President William McKinley's wife used to have fits. If she suffered one during, say, a White House state dinner, McKinley would reach into his breast pocket for a large silk handkerchief, which with a matter-of-fact chivalry he would drape over her face. The President's forbidding dignity kept the conversation going, and when poor Ida, an epileptic, came around, he would remove the handkerchief and tenderly lead her back into the table talk.

Americans elect a President, but they inevitably get his kin as well. Into the grave splendor of his new job the President's relatives intrude a certain amount of life's awkwardness, humiliation and sheer mess. At the very least, they bring a domestic realism that no manipulator of presidential image will ever succeed in expunging.

The embarrassing presidential brother, for example, has developed into a sort of genre. Lyndon Johnson's younger sibling, Sam Houston Johnson, wandered up and down the back stairs of Lyndon's career, drinking too much and now and then writing a bad check. L.B.J. had to assign a Secret Service agent to keep him out of trouble. A rivalry with the leader of the free world played hell with Sam's self-image.

Something of the same forlorn shabbiness seemed to cling to F. Donald Nixon, Richard's younger brother, whose dubious business deals included a shadowy $205,000 loan from Howard Hughes. Richard, Big Brother indeed, actually had Don's telephone tapped for more than a year in order to keep track of him. Which brother ultimately embarrassed the other more remains a tossup.

True, the raffish-brother act has had its more edifying counterpart. Milton Eisenhower, the brains of the family according to Ike, enjoyed a sort of unappointed super-Cabinet status during the '50s. John Kennedy formalized the fraternal arrangement by making Bobby Kennedy Attorney General.

Wives have also demonstrated the unique usefulness of family by serving as excellent emissaries and advisers--Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Bird Johnson and Rosalynn Carter come to mind.

Still the gamier, scandalous side of presidential families most concerns and entertains Americans. Thomas Jefferson, that prince of the Enlightenment, left the 19th century muttering about his illegitimate children by Sally Hemings, and about his nephews Lilburne and Isham Lewis, who murdered a slave on the Kentucky frontier. Andrew Jackson's wife Rachel was widely satirized as a country clod who smoked a pipe. Mary Todd Lincoln, a sad and slightly unhinged woman, went on shopping sprees that left her $27,000 in debt by 1864. Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt suffered posthumous humiliations at the hands of their own children. Seven years ago, Elliott Roosevelt wrote a book discussing his father's love affair and his parents' conjugal sex life (none after 1918, reported Elliott).

But it is brothers who can most directly embarrass the President. They often vividly demonstrate what else besides potential greatness is swimming around in the gene pool. To reach apotheosis in the White House, the family's paragon has progressed through a series of popular idealizations and magnifications ... and then here comes his brother capering after him, making faces, blowing bubbles, wearing funny hats. It spoils the illusion.

The odd thing is that Americans usually forgive Presidents their relatives rather readily, after extracting some malicious pleasure from the spectacle of the powerful trying squirmingly to extricate himself from the tacky. It may be a while, however, before they grant such an indulgence in the Billy-Libya mess.

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