STONEWALL, MR. BUSH

It was 1948, and Harry Truman, who assumed the presidency on the death of
FDR three years before, was running as the Democratic nominee for
president. It was a tough, close race. His opponent, and the favorite, was
New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, a more or less liberal Republican and a man
of such compact tidiness that Alice Roosevelt's description of him--"He
looks like the little man on the wedding cake"--clung to him forever.

You probably remember what happened in that campaign, which was painfully
low and dirty. Dewey's operatives floated the rumor that in the 1920s, when
Truman was a young man in Missouri, he had regularly frequented
speakeasies. This was during Prohibition, so if it was true young Truman
had broken the law.

The rumors spread like fire. One said he regularly sipped whiskey with Mike
Pendergast in the speakeasy on 12th Street and Vine. Another said no, that
wasn't Mike Pendergast, that was Harry's wife, Bess. (Republicans were very
rude in those days.) Anyway, for weeks it was all anyone could talk about
in Manhattan and Washington.

Truman at first refused to respond to the rumors, saying it was all part of
an attempt by the conservative newspaper establishment to darken his
reputation. But the press persisted, and the peppery Truman finally lost
his temper. Out on a morning constitutional along Pennsylvania Avenue, he
stopped, turned toward the small band of reporters who were following him,
pointed his cane in the direction of the White House and spat out what came
to be known as the Whiskey Statement. "We are in the middle of a serious
contest over who will live in that house and lead our country the next four
years, and all you people want to know is whether I drank whiskey as a
young man. Joe Stalin is taking over Eastern Europe, and you want to know
if I drank whiskey. The Negroes of the Southern states are asking for an
equal place in our schools, and you want to know if I drank whiskey. We've
got charges of communists stealing the A-bomb, and you want to know if I
drank whiskey. Well let me ask you--Mr. Rogers of the Herald Tribune
there--did you drink whiskey during Prohibition?"

"No," said Rogers firmly.

There was silence, and then Rogers cleared his throat.

"I was a gin man," he said. Everyone laughed.

"I liked a Gibson now and then," said a voice from the back of the pack. It
was Mr. Reston of the Times.

"It was more than now and then," laughed Walter Lippman, who offered that
while he rarely went to speakeasies, he always carried a flask. "In fact,"
he said, "I still do."

He took it from his back pocket, and it shone like bright money in the sun.
The burnished silver carried an inscription: "To Walter, with affection
from Eleanor and Franklin."

"Let me see that," said Truman. He opened it, sniffed, and winked.

"To the Republic," he said as he took a drink.

"To the Republic," the reporters said as they passed the bottle.

"And now let us talk of the challenges that threaten the peace of our
country," Truman said as he led them back to the White House. "Let's keep
it high and worthy. And let's never discuss that other again."

And you know, they didn't.

And Truman won.

Oh dear, I appear to have made that up. Which is very wicked of me, as
alcohol isn't drugs, and of course alcohol is now legal and drugs are not,
so it doesn't quite compare to . . . today, and our latest drug story
involving a candidate for office, Gov. George W. Bush.

And of course the story I made up could never have happened, because
reporters in Harry Truman's day wouldn't have considered it a story that
young Harry broke the law and went to a speakeasy. They wouldn't think it
implied anything. And not because President Harding, during Prohibition,
drank whiskey in the office while playing poker. That wasn't the reason.

The reason, I think, was that things were a little more human then, back in
the old America. Human beings seem to have had more space for normal
failings. They were allowed to smoke cigarettes even though everyone knew
they were bad for you; they were allowed to drink, and to be eccentric, and
to wear woolen suit jackets in the summertime.

They were like the people you see in old movies starring Humphrey Bogart
and Spencer Tracy. Recently Tracy's "State of the Union" was on, and one of
the great things about it was that Tracy, who plays an independent
candidate for president, is rumored to be having a fling, as they used to
say, with his press aide, played in a really deadly
this-is-really-Clare-Booth-Luce way by the young Angela Lansbury. And the
fling, though gossiped about, doesn't become public even though everyone
knows about it, because it was simply understood people are imperfect and
do not-wonderful things.

I guess I should note here that Tracy and Ms. Lansbury were having what
used to be called a love affair. It wasn't a story about some sick
manipulator being serviced in the hallway, or having phone sex when he
knows that foreign governments might be listening in. Back in the '40s and
'50s they made a lot of good horror movies but no one would have dreamed
that up.

In those days, they were more sophisticated. They had a more easygoing
sense of what humans are and what they're allowed. We think of ourselves as
sophisticated, but we're less sophisticated as a people than we were. We
have stranger perversions, we act up, we're odd; but we're prissy in a way
that people didn't used to be. We're more sinful and less
sophisticated--what a combination!

What changed the climate? Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart and Bill Clinton. Mr.
Kennedy by carrying on to such an extent that The New Republic finally
tagged him on it in the early '80s, a first, and written in memorable prose
by a woman. Mr. Hart by having a social life that was simply too
interesting for those who knew of it, reporters, not to talk about it and,
when he dared them to find the evidence, to do so. And Mr. Clinton
because--well, you know.

Suffice it to say that for years after Caligula, the Roman leaders who
followed were probably all asked, over and over, if they had ever dated a
horse, or killed their sister. Likewise, Mr. Clinton's actions, and Mr.
Hart's, instituted the Sexual History Frisk from the press. And naturally
it was followed by a Drug History Frisk.

I miss the old days, which I am nostalgic for even though I wasn't there. I
miss the old tolerance--a real tolerance that wasn't officially enforced by
ideologues but that bubbled up from an old shared knowledge that we're all
human, and damaged, and strange.

Which gets us to W. I guess he messed up with that Clintonesque parsing of
I haven't done anything bad in seven years (or 15 years or 25 years). And I
guess he messed up before that by violating his own privacy to announce
that he'd never been unfaithful to his wife. But I hope he quiets up now
and says nothing. Because no one who knows him or works with him or reports
on him says he has a drug problem. They say that if he did something, it
happened way back there on 12th Street and Vine. Which is where it ought to
stay. And I hope he remembers, and the press realizes, that an admired man
who runs for office will not be helping the country if he issues a nice big
public confession that will be deconstructed by kids to mean "I took coke,
and I'm your next president--so go take some coke!"

I hope he stonewalls. Because if he does, in time it will be like every
Clinton scandal: it will go away.

I hope this one does.

To the Republic.