The Watchdog Press Slips the Leash of Propriety, Turns Rabid

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a womanizer who rationalized his behavior by noting that the leadership of the civil-rights movement put him under enormous emotional pressure. According to David J. Garrow’s Pulitzer prize-winning biography, “Bearing the Cross,” King defended his sexual athleticism as “a form of tension reduction.”

While King was subjected to merciless harassment for his sexual adventures by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the newspapers never touched the subject. Nor did they inquire into the many sexual liaisons of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s wartime affair with Kay Summersby Morgan did not come to light until the publication of her memoirs 30 years after the fact. Most journalists of the day never knew about the most durable of all presidential affairs--that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer Rutherford. Yet the Roosevelt affair produced a peculiar standoff at the time of the 1940 presidential election when word came to the Roosevelt campaign that the Republican nominee, Wendell L. Willkie, was romantically involved with a woman who was not his wife. Roosevelt’s campaign managers feared that the President’s own secret might be exposed if they raised the subject of his opponent’s infidelity.

Why did none of this information ever reach the public? The answer is found in the code of discretion that prevailed among journalists until very recently and that still causes some of them to be queasy about reporting the intimate details of the lives of public figures.

The code was a simple and straight forward one: If the private behavior of a public official was not criminal and did not adversely affect the conduct of that official’s duties, it was no business of the press to report it.

The dutiful watchdog, however, has lately been transformed into a snarling attack dog--or at least a dyspeptic bloodhound--that can be found rooting around in everything from Henry Kissinger’s trash can to Gary Hart’s driveway.

The transformation of the press from the attentive guardians of public rectitude into an unrestrained pack of yapping terriers came about because of changes both in politics and in journalism. The turning point probably came in the 1970s as a consequence of the Watergate scandal and the manner in which it was exposed and the quick succession of sensational revelations of Sen. Frank Church’s committee during its investigation of the CIA.

By this time, moreover, presidential politics had evolved into an exercise in marketing images on television--a development that challenged journalists to discover the real person lurking behind the mask fashioned by media advisers. Journalists were discovering the tools of aggressive investigative reporting about the same time that politicians were perfecting new techniques of presenting themselves to the public in the most flattering, even heroic, light. If politicians were going to parade around like white knights, the watchdog was going to need teeth sharp enough to pierce the suit of armor.

Rather than resulting in a nice equilibrium in which journalistic enterprise and skepticism balanced off presidential image-making, many reporters allowed themselves to be gulled by the electronic facades of Presidents or presidential candidates and to write adoringly of them. But at the first sign that the image they had so lovingly nurtured might be concealing a less noble reality, the reporters would be seized by distemper and go on a rampage.

What is distressing is how little of this new aggressiveness is directed toward policies that are advocated by the candidates and how much of it is just sneering and leering.

Politicians, foolishly, invite such probing. Jimmy Carter, with his smirking sanctimony, virtually dared the press to pick a hole in his coat, and then gave it the tool to accomplish that with his “lust in the heart” statement. Hart, with his challenge to news organizations to assign reporters on me,” was dangling a hunk of red meat in front of a Doberman, and couldn’t blame the dog for going after the toothsome morsel. Hart had been forthright with the press about the two separations from his wife, and made no profession of celibacy for that period. He was not trying to fob himself off as a plaster saint. There was no need for him to publicly model his chastity belt, especially if he were going to continue a pattern of behavior that suggested wickedness.

But the Hart scandal raises a larger question of just how much time serious journalists ought to spend at the keyhole on stories designed to cause the public to drool and slaver over politicians’ peccadilloes. The presidency is a special case, to be sure, but the Constitution does not require chastity of those who would aspire to the office.

If “womanizing” is fair game for the press, what about a longtime liaison between a candidate and just one woman? And if all we know of a negative nature about a presidential candidate is that he occasionally sleeps with a woman other than his wife, does it become a disqualifying flaw? Calvin Coolidge was faithful to his wife, and Franklin Roosevelt was not. Can anyone argue that the man who adhered to the conventional morality was a better President? Would unmasking Martin Luther King as a womanizer and hypocrite have enriched us in any way?

Before journalists slip the leash of journalistic propriety and tear off to sniff out the private lives of public people, they might consider a simple but fair standard of conduct: If it’s not impeachable, it’s not reachable.