Kennedy Going on Nixon

By LANCE MORROW

Sex is worth dying for . . . Sex is indeed imbued with the death instinct. -- Michel Foucault

In Frank Capra's 1946 movie, It's a Wonderful Life, the angel allows the James Stewart character, George Bailey, to walk through his hometown and see what the town would have been like if George had never existed. George is an American saint. When he and his works are rescinded, the town becomes harsh and evil.

Play the same game, with a reverse twist. Wander through American history and imagine what it might have been like without certain sinners -- without, say, men who have had an appetite for women other than their wives. Sudden voids. The New Deal and the New Frontier might vanish, for example -- both Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy had relationships with other women. If all the adulterers who ever served in the U.S. Congress were to have their lives and legislative works obliterated from history, America might revert to forest. Perhaps the Supreme Court would remain intact, its virtue protected by advanced age. Play the game on a world scale, annulling the lives and works of leaders who have fallen into carnality, and much of history vanishes. The sex drive -- generator of life, begetter of history -- is not an orderly citizen.

Does it matter if a political figure has sexual relationships with people to whom he or she is not married? Is there not a dense hypocrisy in forcing the leading Democratic presidential candidate out of the race because he has spent time alone with women other than his wife? Europeans watch the periodic spasms of American moralism with an air of horrified superiority. America, they conclude, is not a land inhabited by grownups. In the European mind, American sex and power are adolescent urges. American politics can seem dangerous and trivial.

The matter of Gary Hart is not simple. One turns it in one's mind like an enigmatic object, and with each turning it glints with a different light. The questions raised last week are as complicated as Hart's mind, which is complicated indeed.

Whatever the French think, Americans are not particularly immature on the subject of sex and the misdemeanors of public men. On the whole, Americans tend to look beyond the act. They examine the deed for what it tells them about the man. Americans are not simpletons of morality.

All adulterers are not the same, whatever Dante's lurid punishments by the appropriate circle of hell. A sinner is not only his sin, but many other things. Strength and weakness coexist. People struggle on through complex weather.

Franklin Roosevelt's romance over the years with Lucy Mercer had a wistful sweetness about it. John Kennedy was ridiculously incautious to get involved with Judith Exner, the girlfriend of a Mafia don. Kennedy's sex drive may have been a healthy creature, a sleek dog that needed to run in the woods, but it struck some as too healthy, edging toward obsession.

Quite apart from the subject of sex, the procession of Presidents after Kennedy has included men of rather peculiar and divided psyche. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter were personalities utterly different from one another, but they all shared, to some degree, an odd, self-thwarting trait. Each became his own worst enemy.

Gary Hart belongs in that somewhat mysterious recent tradition. He has often, consciously or unconsciously, tried to imitate John Kennedy. He has brushed back his hair with the same gesture that Kennedy used, walked with the same gait, held his hand in his jacket pocket with the thumb sticking out, just as J.F.K. did. He has a penchant for some of the high destinarian rhetoric that Kennedy used, the appeal to a visionary new generation. Hart kept using the first person plural in his press releases. His campaign sounded a note of the bogusly grand. Hart is Kennedy typed on the eighth carbon.

Womanizing was a side of Kennedy too: Did Hart take emulation that far? Yet one could also detect in Hart some unbidden traces of Richard Nixon. Some Americans sensed a troubling vibration in Gary Hart that was difficult to describe, but that rang wrong. Hart may be right to be bitter about the amateur psychiatry that has been practiced upon him. Still, Americans have fairly sensitive instruments of perception. Hart said last week that it was issues that gave him his "link" to the American people, a strange conceptual way of putting it -- as if he knew that he had failed to make the real, the visceral connection. Something got in the way, some opacity, or Hart's elaborate system of internal deflectors.

It was a buried anger, maybe, that ricocheted around in Hart, a dybbuk of compulsion. One sensed in him a territory of ignorance about himself. On the evidence of recent weeks, Hart has moments when he is overtaken by a denial of reality, a trait that might be dangerous in the Oval Office.

Nixon always brusquely refused to discuss himself, his character, his emotions. In a 1983 interview, his onetime aide Frank Gannon asked Nixon, "Do you consider that you've had a good life?" Nixon replied, "I don't get into that kind of crap." Gary Hart doesn't either.

What troubled one about Hart's behavior had nothing to do with sex, really. It was something deeper. Powers of light and of darkness are at war in everyone's soul. Life struggles with death. Hart dramatized the conflict more vividly and, because of his line of work, more visibly, than most of us do. Part of him aspired to great achievement, to ideals. But a self-subverting demon was furiously at work as well. A pre-emptive annihilation of self: Hart describes what a great President he would have been, and then -- poof! -- is gone. The fantasy makes reality in the air, and then annihilates it. Hart as Prospero.

If Hart wanted so much to create a new America, to enact a new vision, why ^ did he roll grenades under his own tent flaps? There is something in his Arctic eyes, his rhetoric, that gives a chill.

In November of 1962, after losing the California gubernatorial race to Pat Brown, Nixon held a "last press conference" in which he told reporters, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." Last week, with infinitely more grace, Gary Hart told reporters basically the same thing. Of course, one must remember that six years after the last press conference, Richard Nixon was sworn in as President of the U.S.