Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Poll Track: "National Polling On Release Of Presidents' Medical Records" (9/30/04) · Opening Argument: "Santorum On Sex: Where The Slippery Slope Leads" (5/05/03) · Social Studies: "Privacy Is An Innocent Victim In The Chandra Levy Case" (7/20/01) · National Journal: "Everyone's Foul Game Now" (9/19/98) · National Journal: "Capital Lies" (8/22/98) · Opening Argument: "Why Monica Is Good for America" (9/12/98) · Talking Heads: "Precedent For Prying Eyes?" (4/6/98) [an error occurred while processing this directive] Additional Resources On The Web Wired: "Hillary: The Privacy Candidate?" (1/24/07) · Health Privacy Project: "Presidential Health: Do We Have a Right to Know?" (4/1/04)

By Carl M. Cannon, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, May 25, 2007

Sixteen years ago, as she helped her husband run for national office, Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to establish a "zone of privacy" for presidential candidates and their families. The context of this gambit was Bill Clinton's acknowledged reputation as a ladies' man, but with the romanticized Camelot of the Kennedys having long since passed, Bill and Hill weren't allowed to be Jack and Jackie. By 1994, in a rueful acknowledgment that modern occupants of the White House have precious little private space, the first lady confided to a friend, "I've been rezoned."

She hadn't seen anything yet.

A month after Hillary was chagrined by press photos showing her slow-dancing in a bathing suit on a Caribbean beach with her husband, an official investigation would be launched into the president's truthfulness regarding his relationship with a White House intern. That inquest, which resulted in Bill Clinton's impeachment and disbarment, was led by a special prosecutor who felt compelled to document the graphic nature of the president's extramarital activities in the Oval Office on Easter Sunday in 1996, as well as where the president and his wife and daughter had attended church and gone for brunch a few hours earlier.

By the time the Clintons vacated their digs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, White House press secretary Mike McCurry had been asked publicly if the president had a venereal disease, a sample of the president's semen had been lifted from a dress belonging to the aforementioned intern and analyzed by the FBI, and the sexual harassment allegations of a former Arkansas state employee had prompted a Washington newspaper to speculate in print that Bill Clinton suffered from Peyronie's disease (if you don't know what that is, consult a medical dictionary).

Rezoned, indeed. Now, as another presidential season unfolds, the scrutiny is beginning again -- and not because Hillary Clinton is one of the top candidates. The 2000 and 2004 campaigns had their tabloid moments -- an old drunk-driving beef against George W. Bush, and a faux sex scandal that John Kerry easily put to rest in two days -- but the political class was lulled into complacency by the relative probity of the last three major-party nominees (Bush, Kerry, and Al Gore).

The 2008 race promises to be different.

For starters, it is a wide-open field with some 20 announced and unannounced candidates, a group replete with enough messy divorces, troubled marriages, second (and third) marriages, estranged children, cancer survivors, head cases, and binge dieters to satisfy any soap opera. The race is going to be special -- in a "Desperate Housewives" way -- for another reason as well. The gaggle of 2008 candidates will be acting out their various pathologies in a technological environment more suited for entertainment than for serious policy discussion. YouTube, the blogs, and an unfettered cable culture did not exist in 1988 and 1992, the years that the privacy barriers came tumbling down. They do now.

The upshot is a combustible mix that is prompting political observers to wonder whether the process will dissuade good people from even bothering with politics -- or whether that has already happened.

"We keep raising the costs of entering government service," said George C. Edwards III, a political scientist at Texas A&M University and the editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly. "First, it was the grinding permanent campaign to win office. Next, it was raising enormous sums to compete in elections. Now, it is the ever-more-intrusive invasions of privacy. It is not difficult to understand why many capable and honorable people avoid anything to do with politics."

'Nothing Is Private'
Privacy, although unmentioned in the Constitution, is a concept so embedded in the American identity that the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, in a 1965 case striking down state birth control laws, referred to a right to privacy "older than the Bill of Rights -- older than our political parties." Liberals celebrate Douglas's reasoning because that decision paved the way for legalized abortion, but conservatives also cherish the concept of privacy, if not this particular thread of case law. In her 1943 novel, "The Fountainhead," conservative icon Ayn Rand portrays privacy as an essential component of an enlightened society. "Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy," she wrote. "The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe."

If that is true, U.S. presidential campaigns are exercises in barbarity. In everyday American life, the most private of matters concern our health (particularly cancer); body weight; mental well-being; drug and alcohol habits; sexual histories and practices; and the intricate relationships between spouses, and parents and their children. Yet, as the 2008 presidential campaign heats up, all those issues have arisen with the current crop of candidates, with more details sure to come. Film at 11.

This month, CBS journalist Mike Wallace asked Republican candidate Mitt Romney on-camera if Romney and his wife, Ann, had engaged in premarital sex. Even if they had -- Romney said they hadn't -- we'd be talking about premarital sex between consenting adults who together have five sons and 10 grandchildren, and have been married nearly four decades. "Nothing is private anymore," says Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor and the dean of students at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. "Politicians, journalists, bureaucrats, CEOs -- all have to constantly watch what they say and do anywhere outside the four walls of their home."

Sometimes even that is not enough. What took place inside the family home, presumably, is what prompted Andrew Giuliani, the 21-year-old son of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to go public with the news -- carried prominently in The New York Times and on ABC's Good Morning America -- that he would be too busy golfing this year to pitch in on his dad's presidential campaign. "There's obviously a little problem that exists between me and his wife," the son added helpfully, a reference to Judith Nathan, the third Mrs. Giuliani.

When New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, arguably the Democrat with the best resume, announced his intention to run for president in February, he granted an interview to an influential home-state newspaper, The Albuquerque Tribune. The ensuing Q and A, posted on the paper's Web site, includes his response to questions about "rumors that you're either rude to women or too chummy with women." In case Richardson missed the point, the journalists asked point-blank whether he had "a bimbo problem." They also queried him about his recent weight loss, a mole he had removed, his daily alcohol intake, and whether he has had his teeth straightened.

"Watergate and the Vietnam War changed everything," says veteran Republican activist Roger Stone, who was an aide to President Nixon. "Prior to these events, reporters and the public believed in their government and their political leaders, and gave them the benefit of the doubt. Now we assume all politicians are lying and hiding something." To Stone, the sign of the privacy apocalypse was when President Reagan had "to show photos of the last five feet of his small intestine to prove he was healthy."

Candidates' advisers loudly denounce prying of this nature, and at a series of seminars at Harvard University this spring, the campaign managers for six top-tier candidates complained that the media routinely treat them like leg men to dish dirt on their rivals. This assertion induced eye-rolling from journalists in the audience, who figured the gripe would carry more weight if the campaigns weren't always trying to spread anonymous accusations to slime opposing candidates. But spreading gossip has proven irresistible for the simple reason that it works. Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden, who is running in 2008, was forced from the 1988 presidential derby when a rival campaign (Michael Dukakis's) peddled a videotape showing Biden plagiarizing the speech of a prominent Welsh politician. In the same campaign, Democratic front-runner Gary Hart was derailed after he was ambushed outside a Capitol Hill townhouse by journalists who had received anonymous phone calls tipping them off to a possible tryst.

In 2008, the candidate for whom all the conceivable privacy issues come together is not Richardson but Giuliani. If it's not the three wives, the suspected adultery while living in Gracie Mansion, the prostate cancer (which he used as a shield to deflect the adultery accusations), or the estrangement from family, it's Giuliani's disquieting habit of questioning his adversaries' sanity, and doing it so obsessively that critics question Giuliani's own mental health and speculate about medication he may be taking. As Giuliani emerged as the front-runner in polls of the 2008 GOP presidential candidates, New York media critic Michael Wolff, writing in Vanity Fair, reprised Giuliani's strident and abusive response to a ferret owner who had called in to the mayor's weekly radio show to express displeasure at the city's ban on ferrets as pets.

There is something deranged about you.... The excessive concern you have for ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist.... There is something really, really very sad about you.... This excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness.... You should go consult a psychologist.... Your compulsion about -- your excessive concern with it is a sign that there is something wrong in your personality.... You have a sickness, and I know it's hard for you to accept that.... You need help.

Some thought that this response demonstrated that it was the mayor who needed help, and Wolff suggested, in apparent earnestness, that two magazine writers who had interviewed Giuliani recently were remiss in not asking the candidate "the obvious question," i.e. "whether he's on antidepressants or any other pharmacological mood stabilizers."

Like Pulling Teeth
The health (including mental health) of a president or a presidential candidate would seem a qualitatively different subject than his or her sexual peccadilloes, but once the barriers of taste and decorum are breached, it has proven impossible to repair them. It's also difficult to draw clear lines, which, as any etiquette expert could explain, is one of the reasons for good manners anyway. Ostensibly, Mara Liasson of National Public Radio was asking Mike McCurry a question about the physical health of the president during the 1996 campaign when she grilled the White House press secretary about Clinton's refusal to release his medical records. It led to a memorable exchange.

Q: "Does he have a sexually transmitted disease?"

A: "Good God, do you really want to ask that question? That is an astonishing question!"

The answer was yes, she most certainly did, McCurry recalled last week, "so off we went."

Compulsive sexual behavior supposedly raises issues of presidential judgment, and even soundness of mind. Or so claim defenders of the media's excesses, especially the hounding of Hart, then a senator from Colorado, in 1987, and the posthumous revisionists who chronicled the extracurricular exploits of John F. Kennedy. But for the paladins of disclosure, JFK is an iconic president for another reason: He lied about his physical condition, an area in which Americans do have a vested interest in being told the truth.

"When it comes to the presidency, the public doesn't want surprises," says Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University professor who took a dim view of impeachment proceedings against Clinton but who believes that presidential candidates are obligated to be forthright about their health. "Voters need to be confident that they know their candidates, and health is an important aspect of who candidates are; thus, medical issues are fair game. I am in favor of erring on the side of the tasteless question."

There's no guarantee that tacky questions will elicit straight answers, which creates a separate set of issues. Kennedy simply denied having Addison's disease, which wasn't true; but he was following a precedent in which occupants of the White House, along with their handlers, friends, and physicians, have hidden from public view bouts of depression, surgeries, life-threatening diseases, physical disabilities, and debilitating illnesses.

"I think we've gone too far in the other direction -- too much disclosure," said Robert Gilbert, a professor at Northeastern University and the author of "The Mortal Presidency: Illness and Anguish in the White House." "But there is this long history of hiding presidential conditions of one kind or another."

Grover Cleveland underwent two cancer surgeries on his mouth; the public was told that he had two teeth pulled. For the last year of his presidency, Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke that the White House initially described as "digestive upset." Suffering from depression brought on by his 16-year-old son's death, Calvin Coolidge all but stopped working 11 months into his presidency. Aided by a White House press corps that acceded to requests not to photograph Franklin Roosevelt in a wheelchair, FDR portrayed himself as having conquered polio. Dwight Eisenhower's massive 1955 heart attack was routinely characterized as "mild" or "moderate."

Lyndon Johnson remembered Ike's heart attack -- he had one of his own the same year -- and Gilbert postulates that the famous episode of Johnson showing off his gallbladder scar was not merely another example of LBJ being crude but instead was Johnson's way of dispelling rumors that he'd had another heart attack. Either way, this incident was a precursor of America's evolving sensibilities about privacy, even medical privacy, and of the media's transformation from complicity in White House concealment to unfettered intrusiveness.

Seeing the writing on the wall, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee discussed his cancer, non-Hodgkins' lymphoma, even before deciding whether he will enter the 2008 GOP presidential campaign. Announced Republican candidates John McCain (melanoma) and Sam Brownback (also melanoma) and Giuliani (prostate cancer) have already fielded questions on national television about the status of their conditions.

"In the inexorable, four-decades-long shrinking of the zone of privacy surrounding candidates, health confidentiality has been one of the first items to disappear almost entirely," says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. Sabato was so offended by the tabloid-style excess of the 1988 campaign that he wrote "Feeding Frenzy," in hopes of helping political journalists sort out extraneous personal issues from appropriate campaign coverage. But even Sabato defends the fixation with presidential candidates' health."The most powerful person in the world is certainly affected by his or her health and stamina -- and thus, so are we. The thinking goes that, as a result, we the people are entitled to know absolutely everything about the candidates' diseases, medical histories, and medications that could bear upon presidential performance."

A large part of the nation's memory for this lesson dates to President Roosevelt's fourth term. Roosevelt was terminally ill in 1944, and he would survive only months into the new term. But the White House did not tell the American people that FDR's health was failing; his vice presidential choice, Harry Truman, actively participated in the deception, a snow job that he defended as necessary because of the war.

One reason Americans thought Roosevelt could walk is that he stood while making public speeches. The president accomplished the feat with great effort: wearing 10 pounds of metal braces and leaning on a lectern that was bolted to the floor. One day in 1936 while FDR was speaking in Georgia, Gilbert recalled, the lectern gave way and the president fell on his face, the papers of his speech flying into the air. His aides quickly helped him up and gathered the pages of his speech, which the president went ahead and delivered. The punch line is that the press never mentioned this incident.

Contrast this tableau with the image of third-tier presidential candidate Gary Bauer falling awkwardly off a stage at a New Hampshire pancake-flipping photo op in the 2000 GOP race. Bauer was unhurt, but the scene was shown repeatedly on cable television, sometimes in slow motion. Imagine if we'd had YouTube.

Sliding Toward Silliness
Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas put it this way when she lectured Kumar's students: "If someone wants to run for president today, they'd better make up their mind by the fourth or fifth grade."

Actually, Bill Clinton fit that description -- not that it did him a lot of good.

McCurry believes that neither the press nor politicians are effective at making policy debates interesting enough to captivate the average voter. The default position is an examination of character and personality. "So the debate can easily get hijacked by $400 haircuts and verbal gaffes and questions about premarital sex, pot smoking, and other sideshows," he said. "It has been a long, slow slide to silly, hasn't it?"

Long before McCurry's exchange with Liasson, the Clintonites came to realize the danger in even answering questions about these things. It's even truer now. In today's hypercharged partisan atmosphere, bloggers and political activists, and even some journalists, will take reluctance to respond to such queries as confirmation that the charges are accurate. On the other hand, denials can prompt truth-squadding news stories -- and woe unto the candidates found to have fudged factoids about their personal lives.

The latest to face this dilemma is Richardson, a Cabinet member in the Clinton administration, where the mantra was always to answer every charge immediately. And so he tried.

"There's this myth that somehow Bill Richardson likes to go to parties," the governor told The Albuquerque Tribune. "That's not the case. I hardly go to any." He fessed up to dieting, to having a mole removed, and to having a chipped tooth capped, and said in reference to alcohol: "Just for the record, I only drink wine, and I drink very little."

In that interview, Richardson termed the rumors about women "mean-spirited," adding that they have "no basis" in fact. He copped to making "mistakes as a human being" -- a Clinton-era code phrase for stepping out, but doing so a while ago -- and he pronounced his marriage "very strong," concluding that that was all he had to say on the subject.

Romney's initial response to Mike Wallace's premarital sex question -- as Bill and Hillary Clinton's was 16 years ago to rumors of infidelity -- was to not dignify overly personal questions with an answer. "No, I'm sorry," Romney told Wallace. "We don't get into those things." But then, as if he saw the headlines in his mind's eye, Romney quickly added: "The answer is no."

Such questions are supposed to be part of a larger narrative -- who the candidate really is -- and they do help fill that function. The problem with gotcha journalism, however, is that the very salaciousness of the subject matter often narrows the national discourse by crowding out more-salient biographical information about the candidates, to say nothing of more-important discussion of issues. The next president of the United States could well be a woman or a Latino or an African-American or a son and grandson of admirals who spent five and a half years in a POW camp where he was routinely tortured. Is that a story line less dramatic than philandering or illness? Are the arcane tenets of Romney's Mormon religion really more relevant than the fact that he figured out how to deliver health insurance to those without it, and that some two dozen states are following Massachusetts' lead? Is the soap opera of Giuliani's life more relevant than the anti-crime measures that made New York City livable again?

"I would love to see the same passion for the trivial and personal be rechanneled to policy," former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told National Journal in an e-mail exchange. "I think many have already said, 'Enough of politics,' or maybe more importantly said, 'I never want to get involved to begin with.'"

How could anyone blame them? As McCurry noted, the modern era evolved gradually, but there were dramatic turning points along the way. One of them came on May 6, 1987, in New Hampshire with Democratic presidential candidate Hart fighting to stay in the race. Days earlier, a clutch of journalists from The Miami Herald had staked out a Washington town house trying to catch Hart there with a beautiful young single woman. Appearing with his wife, Lee, at a frenzied press conference at the Hanover Inn, Hart was asked a simple, if fateful, question by Paul Taylor of The Washington Post:

"Have you ever committed adultery?"

Hart looked surprised by the bluntness, or perhaps the blanket nature, of the question. "Ah," he stammered, "I don't have to answer that question."

A painful parsing by both reporter and candidate followed. Hart did not respond with the only answer that William Safire later wrote was the right one ("Go to hell!"), and neither political journalism nor presidential campaigning would ever be the same.

And although Sabato's "Feeding Frenzy" became a best-seller, the lessons didn't take: The 1992 campaign was even harsher than the one four years earlier. That election began with the tabloid-orchestrated revelations that Bill Clinton had a lengthy affair with a woman named Gennifer Flowers. (By Election Day, Flowers had posed for Penthouse and granted the magazine an interview in which she described Clinton's anatomy and technique in graphic detail.) That summer, President George H.W. Bush was asked to respond to old gossip involving a longtime friend with a similar name, Jennifer. There was a qualitative difference; namely, both parties denied the rumors, no evidence existed to prove it, and no source claimed to have seen anything compromising. Nonetheless, CNN reporter Mary Tillotson put the question to the president directly. He tried the Safire approach, bristling and replying, "I'm not going to take any sleazy questions like that from CNN." But by 1992 the ground had shifted, something the Bush family quickly came to see. The next day, the president's oldest son, George W. Bush, called Tillotson with a direct denial.

Just Win, Baby
Part of what is going on regarding presidential privacy, of course, is taking place in American society as a whole. The gates of the White House are no barrier to frailty, ill fortune, or just the vagaries of being human. The fame of the first families can be used to confront life's challenges honestly, and with grace.

A month after Betty Ford became first lady, she underwent a mastectomy for breast cancer, deciding on the operating table that she would discuss her cancer openly, a rarity for prominent women at that time. After leaving the White House, Ford wrote a book in which she described in detail her addiction to alcohol and pain medication, and she became a role model in substance-abuse treatment.

Although the Reagan administration was criticized for the slow federal response to the AIDS crisis, Reagan's friendship with Rock Hudson, the movie star who died as a result of the disease, helped quell the anti-gay prejudice that had greeted the onslaught of the epidemic. Later, Ronald and Nancy Reagan's openness in dealing with the former president's Alzheimer's disease touched millions of Americans coping with the same malady in their own families. In her autobiography, Barbara Bush recounted her struggles with depression. Mary Cheney, the vice president's lesbian daughter, recently announced that she was expecting her first child with her longtime partner, an event that America's gay couples have reacted to with expressions ranging from ironic to inspirational.

Candidates are joining this culture of confession. McCain has written about his bouts with depression stemming from his lengthy incarceration as a POW during the Vietnam War. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee responded to a diagnosis of adult-onset diabetes by losing 105 pounds. It's not the kind of thing you could hide -- and Huckabee didn't want to anyway. Earlier this year, one prominent Democratic political consultant privately said he imagined that Sen. Barack Obama would soon be cross-examined about his cigarette habit (actually, that had already happened) and that Hillary Clinton would be asked if she had gone through menopause. (In Iowa, a teacher blurted out to Hillary that she was going through menopause. Clinton laughed but did not reciprocate.)

Soon, it seems, those in public life will have no expectations of privacy. Perhaps this outcome won't be a big deal to the MySpace generation: To today's young people, personal privacy seems as quaint as spats and white gloves. In the meantime, the campaigns are preparing for battle. "People are sick and tired of the tit-for-tat nastiness in Washington," said Obama campaign press secretary Bill Burton, "and we're focused on making sure folks know about Obama's vision to change this country. But, if challenged, we are prepared to forcefully respond to any and all attacks."

Clinton campaign aides are quietly preparing for the possibility of "bimbo eruptions" (his, not hers), and are planning how to respond, yet again, to intrusive tabloid revelations. For veteran Clinton-watchers, the playbook is familiar: dismiss the allegations as "old" (even if they are not); attack the rumor-mongers for their partisanship (which often is the case); scour the claim for any minor inaccuracy so as to discredit the account altogether; change the subject to something Americans care more about, such as better health care.

Will it work again? Even in Hillaryland, they aren't so sure.

"You need two things: one, a consensus on what the rules are, and two, agreement on how they'd be enforced," says Ann Lewis, senior adviser to Clinton's presidential campaign. "Now we have neither. There are no gatekeepers."

All too true, but the gates of the new technological world of today swing both ways. Earlier this year, Clinton was ridiculed in cyberspace by a film clip that showed her singing the National Anthem -- horribly off-key. This not only flew around the Internet but also prompted various spoofs, including a clever YouTube-posted send-up by comedian Susan Deming as Clinton, complete with pearls, a pink suit, and a cackling laugh. Deming's character admits to being "completely tone deaf" and comes clean with other shortcomings ("I cannot play soccer, either," and "I throw like a girl") accompanied by footage depicting them. It also contains other scenes, including "Bill Clinton" looking up "Hillary's" skirt, "Bill Richardson" in drag, and, well, you get the point.

There is no way to prevent such material, but there might be a way to inoculate yourself against it: self-deprecating humor. The Clinton campaign seems to have been the first to apply this old remedy to the new medium. Last week, Hillary Clinton -- the real one -- appeared on her campaign Web site telling people she wanted their help in choosing a campaign song. Various songs were listed, and visitors to the site could vote; but the inspired aspect was that it cued to a brief clip of Clinton butchering the National Anthem (although not the worst part). Clinton (wearing her own pearls) then reappears to make a promise. "I won't sing it in public," she says, pausing a beat before adding, "unless I win!"

And there you have it. The perfect antidote to this abrogation of the rights of privacy: winning. How very American.

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