Sex and Politics
It's been going on since the Ice Age of the Republic, when Thomas Jefferson laid siege to what was gallantly assumed to be Dolly Madison's virtue.
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He'd spoken to me only twice before—"Hidy, hah-yew, boy,"—and I had seen him once in his 1948 campaign when, hovering from his helicopter over a Central Texas crowd, he'd sailed his Stetson hat out a side window. There were two fellows with him whom I knew at least by reputation: Joe Phipps, a radio announcer, and Terrell Allen, an ex-UT footballer. Alighting from the 'copter, Johnson recited a litany that somehow matches in poetry his famed (1960) Culpepper, Va., railroad benediction ("Bobby, turn off that goddam Yella Rose!") In the '48 campaign, there were fewer distractions, and Lyndon said it repeatedly: "Terry, fetch my hat—Joe, you tell 'em about me."
And now (in 1956) I was confronted with still another fragment of enigmatic Johnson rhetoric/repartee. Hard-peckered boys? There were perhaps a half-dozen of us, all in our twenties, all newcomers to the Austin staff, sitting and smarting off recklessly, when, with shattering unexpectedness our office door swung open and the Great Pumpkin himself stood there sizing us all up like so many genetic failures from experimental livestock auctions.
"Now what the hell you hard-peckered boys think you're doin'?" he said, and abruptly pulled the door shut. We all looked at one another wondering if anyone dared to laugh. Hard-peckered boys? We were all of us very young, as I said, and desperately dumbass—and for a time I even seriously interpreted it as the rather melancholy sour grapes of an aging coronary case, no longer fully operational.
But no way. Though it took a while to reject the notion. And a while longer than that to realize that hard-peckered boys was heady stuff, at once accolade and expectation. The Senate was, in fact, a profoundly sexual place even down to the hierarchies and pecking-order machisimo factors by which members related one to another. Intelligence, integrity, intuition and energy were understandably vital to success, but the great, unacknowledged intangible was seldom ignored for long.
Johnson himself, in his interminable negotiations, often as not quite simply out-manned his fellows. And he frequently appeared to place an almost irrational and unfair premium on possessors of raw, ruthless sexual energy. His contempt for men such as Adlai Stevenson stemmed as much from sexual dynamics as any real or imagined dispute over issues. "What the hell would you know about it?" he once railed at Stevenson. "You have to sit down to pee." Obviously, there was something sissified and perhaps worse with Eastern intellectuals.
Once, he told me that Price Daniel and Ralph Yarborough were old ladies—and that Allan Shivers, despite their political enmity, was a man to be reckoned with: "A mean sumbitch who'd cut my nuts off in a minute and send 'em in a box to Lady Bird." Invariably, Johnson was awed by anyone seemingly more ruthless than himself.
All of which admittedly propels us into certain murkier precincts of sexuality, not to mention the musty histrionics of hill country sub-culture. Whatever happened to the real, procreating, old-time Acts of Darkness, full of beastliness and charm and the wrath of Old Testament prophets? Let's see: there was Lyndon's own father-figure, FDR, who gave up a young mistress named Lucy Mercer early in his political career when Eleanor discovered the affair. And it was in Lucy's arms that Roosevelt died, in Warm Springs, Ga., April, 1945. And Estes Kefauver, of all people, was notorious in his needs, at least on the campaign trail. His advance men were routinely instructed as to what, precisely, the Senator from Tennessee might require when scuffling for the presidential nominations a long way from home.
George Smathers and Jack Kennedy were equally infamous, at home and on the hustings: One recalls countless evenings when Jack and George would catch Bobby Baker's eye on the Senate floor and Baker would finally indicate, with an imperceptible shifting of eyes, a smashing pair of prizewinners fixing their princes from the gallery—with LBJ looking on in undisguised merriment. The Democratic Leader himself, still husbanding his strength in convalescence, was reported (by guards outside his basement hideaway) to have taken an improbable number of naps during this period. Another Texas Senator was described by a Washington magazine recently as "the most lecherous man in the Senate."
Shortly after the 1960 elections, Kennedy Aide Ted Sorensen delivered a curious and belated campaign promise. "This administration is going to do for sex what the last one did for golf," he said, and whatever it was he had in mind, it plainly wasn't Camelot envisioned (Camelot being largely a post-assassination fantasy concocted by Jacqueline Kennedy and writer Theodore White), nor was anything remotely resembling Camelot delivered. The Court of Louis XIV, possibly, or Talleyrand's Back-40.
Still, some kind of change seemed long overdue: a running joke among State Department briefing officers at the time was that, at long last, it was possible to sit down with a U.S. President without the aging Chief Executive having to leap up every 20 minutes to evacuate his bladder. Meanwhile, the New Frontiersmen were moving in, and a remarkable number of female White House staffers were presently recognized as both long-time and newly-recruited Kennedy courtesans. One of them, a dazzling and intelligent National Security Council staffer, happened to be a good friend of mine, and she recounted some extraordinary adventures.
She had met the young Massachusetts junior Senator at a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Boston, her freshman year at Radcliffe, and Jack had wasted little time separating the young lady both from her escort prior to the dinner as well as from her virginity afterwards. "He just dragged me out of there and straightway to his townhouse," where, with little or no ceremony, there ensued what my friend described as "a goddam steeplechase. . . Honestly, I have never in my life been pursued round a drawing room like that. Up and over sofas, bolsters, chairs, end tables—everything. He literally ran me into the floor. I finally told myself, 'What the hell! Nothing's worth preserving intact all that desperately. Let him have whatever in hell he thinks he's getting.' "
Curiously enough, the relationship blossomed and JFK continued to call on his Radcliffe coed all through her undergraduate years, and somehow, inevitably, here she was in offices alongside the White House. And once every couple or three weeks a White House limousine, complete with Secret Service escort, was waiting at her Georgetown door.
Rumors of various mistress-ey memoirs have been circulating for years, involving American elected officials high and low. A simple willingness to admit or lay claim to feats of endurance or indiscretion is not generally regarded as ipso-facto justification for hard-cover legitimacy. Several years ago a somewhat tarnished South Texas debutante was known to be laboring over a hundred or so pages of her own true confessions involving just about every Texas politician who was willing, able, and of any distinction. Friendly critics who viewed the manuscript noted that while the names and numbers bandied about were extraordinary, the literary merit was regrettably abysmal.
Still, the phenomenon of record-keeping groupies persists. A secretary in the Texas House of Representatives is currently hard at work on a project to ambush and surrender herself to all 144 male House members, excepting only the Speaker. In her first 30 days of the session, she claimed to have scored with 36 rootin'-tootin' lawmakers. Of course a book is planned, and her co-authoress is a close friend who is only slightly behind schedule, recording 27 liaisons within the same period.
There was a time when any self-respecting Austin lobbyist was looked upon by legislators as a dependable—and often crucial—supplier of respectable-seeming ladies of the night. Nowadays, a younger generation of lawmakers and lobbyists reflect perceptible alterations in society-at-large—and the moment does not seem far off when influence is measured as much or more by the quality of a lobbyist's marijuana stash as by the availability of his liquor closet. One reason for the shift could be that today's elected officials are more generously supplied with larger and better-paid staffs. One Senator's aide, surveying a suiteful of beauties recently added to his boss's payroll, was asked if any of the ladies qualified as a secretary. "Well," he responded, "actually the Senator and I have to do a lot of our own typing."
"GIVE ME MY ROBE, PUT on my crown!" Cleopatra instructed her personal staff. "I feel immortal longings!"
The sentiment may not certify the Queen of the Nile as the first and best of the later, greater Groupies, but succeeding generations of similarly-inflamed ladies are sufficient in number and ardor to demolish any notion that the syndrome may be going the way of other collapsing social institutions. Arthur Koestler called it "going to bed with history," and so long as we can count on some semi-charismatic stud hoss (male or female) up there on Olympus making it, we are likely to find admirers hoping to share in those turbulent emotions by any sexual hook or crook.
And what indeed a curious adventure another person is! There are some, of course, who are lots more curious and venturesome than others. Often as not, they elect themselves to lead us. Matt Troy, a Queens County (NY) Democratic honcho, recently addressed himself to these sweet mysteries with uncommon candor: "My ego is immense or I wouldn't be in politics. . . Only egomaniacs are in politics. I love those guys who talk about serving the public! Listen, this business is about men kissing your ass and girls who—."
There will be masochists and martyrs, the inexhaustible and uncomplaining fetch-'n-carry regulars, forever desperate and willing to sacrifice themselves in exchange for a reasonable proximity to where the action is or might be. There will be harpies and schemers and quid quo pros for whom gamemanship is all, propelled by equal philosophic parts of Gloria Steinem ,and Vince Lombardi, bound for the playing fields of Sealy Posturepedic. They have decked their beds with tapestries and carved works and fine linens, incense and loco weed and Kama Sutra oil and aerosol bombs of Feminique. And there will be a few hopeless romantics, forever blazing up at the memory or anticipation of the Real Thang: the glitter and grandeur, the special flavor of wonder and reverence, the aura of awe and shuddering surrender. They might be regarded as the ultimate sexual-object losers, and yet with their illusions still improbably intact, they could just as easily prove to be the only winners.
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