When It Comes to Sex, Will Public Forgive, Forget? : <i> No. 8 on David Letterman’s Top Ten things revealed in Newt Gingrich expose: “Will make love to wife only after she says, ‘I yield to the congressman from Georgia.’ ” : </i>

When the sex lives of American leaders aren’t making headlines, they’re making one-liners. Yet from the moment Thomas Jefferson beckoned slave Sally Hemings to the instant convicted Illinois Rep. Mel Reynolds exulted, “Did I win the Lotto?”--over the prospect of a three-way with a Catholic girl--voters have been dumbfounded as to why these guys take such risks.

Some say it’s a sense of entitlement that comes with public office, certainly several levels graduated from getting a free parking space at Washington National Airport.

Others say it is the jungle’s alpha-male complex, where the primary chimp wins the right to any female in the pack.

“The whole point of being the alpha male was being able to screw in public,” says Robert Hogan, professor of psychology at the University of Tulsa. “Otherwise it’s just sneaky sex.”

Still others plumb the psyche of a Sen. Bob Packwood and blame his alleged female fondling on a mother who didn’t love him and a pair of Coke bottle-sized eyeglasses. Both, Packwood critics contend, contributed to a rotten self-image as a child.

Why these peccadilloes of the mighty find fertile ground in Washington may be due to something Rep. Barney Frank once said: “If you’re here full time, it’s easier because what you’re worried about is exposure back home,” the Massachusetts Democrat told Newsweek during a 1989 interview where he admitted paying for the services of male prostitutes. “Washington is a city without constituents.”

In the final analysis, politicians may simply be representative in every sense of the word.

“This is human nature,” says former Maryland Rep. Robert Bauman, bounced out of office by voters in 1980 after the Republican tried to buy sex from a male prostitute. “We’re all humans with the imprint of original sin.”

Except that for some, the imprint is more like a tattoo.

Gary Hart, former Colorado senator and 1988 presidential hopeful, used to frolic clandestinely, deny it publicly and challenge the media arrogantly to follow him around and get bored. Reporters promptly found Hart playing skipper to Miami model Donna Rice aboard the good ship Monkey Business, and his career in politics slipped beneath the waves.

Now the Democrat is exploring another run for the Senate, past indiscretions be damned.

“He has about as much chance of becoming senator as Joey Buttafuoco,” says Bob Ewegen, political columnist for the Denver Post.

But what broils Ewegen and others is this sense that some in power keep one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for everyone else.

“I think what you find is that members of Congress are so pampered and treated almost like sun kings that what you’ve got is a class of people who feel they’re entitled to anything,” says Frank Smist, a former CIA intelligence officer-turned-Senate-staffer-turned-Jesuit-college-political- science-professor. “I mean there’s a headiness, a sense of power.”

The result, critics say, is that you’ll have Ohio Rep. Wayne Hays place Elizabeth Ray on the payroll as an office worker. But she can’t type. Or Warren Harding will invite a White House maid into the closet. But she doesn’t do any dusting. Or Grover Cleveland will father an out-of-wedlock child.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was never involved in scandal. But he had an intimate appreciation of sex and influence, boasting that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” as he escorted beautiful actresses to global soirees.

For Kissinger, it wasn’t that power begat sex, but sex--or rather, sexual glamour--that begat power, according to Walter Isaacson, Time magazine editor and author of “Kissinger” (Simon and Schuster, 1992).

“He realized that glamorous women and celebrities enhanced his visibility,” Isaacson says. “In a colorless Nixon Administration, he was glamorous, and that enhanced his power.”

Perhaps an alpha male?

“Way down deep, these people have a desire to let other people know what they are doing,” says Tulsa psychologist Hogan.

This might explain that famous birthday party for Jack Kennedy.

“Think of Marilyn Monroe, in her sewn-on dress, singing her delicious birthday tribute to the President on national TV,” wrote Washington Post Style reporter Marjorie Williams in a 1991 piece. “It wasn’t like an act of sex--it was an act of sex.”

But there was a time in history when the public simply averted its eye. At the time, the press didn’t dare explain that Franklin Delano Roosevelt suffered his fatal hemorrhage while visiting erstwhile mistress Lucy Mercer Rutherford. And Dwight D. Eisenhower’s assignations with Army chauffeur Kay Summersby Morgan during World War II lay unreported until long after his death.

Today the media and the public stare long and hard. Ten years ago, Packwood received a “Good Guys Award” from the bipartisan National Women’s Political Caucus for contributions to the women’s movement. Now, with sexual misconduct charges involving 19 women, the group wants the Republican kicked out of the Senate if disciplinary action is deemed warranted.

In his defense, Packwood apologized but didn’t specify what for; copped to being an alcoholic, while conceding that booze wasn’t a factor in every episode; and offered up what some call the “Li’l Abner” defense.

“When I was raised . . . it was the boy that asked the girl out. You filled the car with gas, you bought the movie tickets, you paid for the hamburger afterward,” he told Larry King on live television last year. “It was the man who made the first step.”

One of his alleged victims told the Washington Post, however, that Packwood’s first step with her amounted to an unexpected and uninvited open-mouthed kiss where she “could feel the tongue coming.”

Debate has been fast and furious over the Senate Finance Committee chairman’s conduct in the wake of his quasi-admissions. Critics have speculated about alcoholic blackouts or clumsy fumblings at romance.

Oregon journalist Mark Kirchmeier has his own theory, documented in his brutally critical new book, “Packwood, the Public and Private Life from Acclaim to Outrage” (HarperCollinsWest). Kirchmeier surmises that a young and very nearsighted Packwood had a drunkard father, Fred, and unloving mother, Gladys, who so ravaged his self-image that he could make up for it only by mauling women as an adult.

And the problem goes way, way back, Kirchmeier claims. “Packwood’s relationship with his mother was strained from the start,” he writes. “ ‘Bob was a very, very difficult birth,’ Gladys once said.”

There’s very little noise to be heard in support of the senator, except for maybe caller No. 8 on the Larry King show last year. “I’d like to remind you,” said the unnamed woman from Alexandria, Va., “to let those without sin cast the first stone.”

In a study titled “Lust and Avarice in Politics,” psychologists looked at scandals, sexual and otherwise, to determine whether the public ever forgives and forgets. It’s no shocker that they find sexual scandals tougher to explain away than, say, influence peddling.

Then-Sen. Dennis DeConcini of Arizona invokes the name of Mother Teresa and claims to be standing up for a key constituent when he allegedly intervenes with federal regulators on behalf of Lincoln Savings & Loan chief Charles Keating. The public seems to eventually forgive. (He lent credence to his claims by arguing that he was helping someone who employed 2,000 Arizonans.)

But Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate John Grunseth allegedly swims in the buff with naked teen-age girls and, despite his denials, he watches as his stock falls, finally dropping out of the 1992 race.

“Unfortunately, there are just some transgressions that are viewed as so blameworthy, so serious, that nothing the transgressor says is going to make a difference,” says psychologist Marti Hope Gonsales, one of the study’s authors.

A 1989 Gannett poll showed that 55% of the voters believe that officials who behave improperly in their sex lives should be punished or step down, and 95% claimed they wouldn’t vote for such people.

But critics say that gauging a fickle public’s view on sex is like nailing Jell-O to the wall. Two congressmen are brought to the floor of the House for public censure in 1983 after pawing underage House pages. One of them, Republican Daniel B. Crane of Illinois, is later turned out of office. The other, Democrat Gerry E. Studds, of Massachusetts, is there to this day.

Go figure.

A drunken Wilbur Mills, then-powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is pulled over by police in 1974 as his companion, stripper Fanne Fox goes splashing into the tidal basin. The Arkansas Democrat’s career fizzles.

But Virginia Sen. Chuck Robb enjoys a nude massage from beauty queen Tai Collins in a Manhattan hotel, and the Democrat wins reelection to the Senate, beating a Bible-thumping Oliver North.

“Most of those polls I think are a lot of crap,” says analyst Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution. “People vote on their own concerns, and their concerns are that they have food on the table and things like that.”

Bruce Kuklick, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies American presidents, takes it a step further. He suggests that politicians guilty of fleshly digressions--especially those who don sack cloth and ashes begging forgiveness--may actually seem more appealingly human.

Bill and Hillary Clinton may have struck such a chord on “60 Minutes” when they did a heartfelt minuet around flatly admitting that presidential candidate Clinton had a long history of infidelity.

“I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage,” Clinton would only say. “I think most Americans who are watching this tonight, they’ll know what we’re saying, they’ll get it.”

Added the woman who would be First Lady: “I’m sitting here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And, you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.”

It’s that old human factor. Martin Luther King Jr. said it was the intense strain of leading the civil rights movement that led him to stray from his marriage vows. Barney Frank said he was just plain lonely. “I knew it was wrong to be hiring prostitutes from time to time,” he said. “But I just couldn’t sit home.”

Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich may have said it best in a 1989 interview with Gannett newspapers. That was long before allegations surfaced in Vanity Fair about his extramarital athletics in car seats and on desk tops during the late ‘70s (which he has dismissed as ancient history).

But in the Gannett interview, Gingrich said: “You’re not going to a Congress of saints. You don’t want a Congress of saints. All of us have had moments in our lives that we’re glad weren’t videotaped and shown to our mothers. Human beings have weaknesses and do dumb things.”