Lives of Our Leaders: Low Self-Esteem

Jim R Bounds/Associated Press

JFK got it on with Marilyn Monroe (and who the hell knows else). Not Bad. Bill Clinton gets himself impeached for having fellatio with an overweight intern who doesn’t bother to remove the incriminating evidence from her dress, but it’s nothing compared to John Edwards who ends up facing a stiff jail sentence ("Waiting for an Edwards Verdict, and Getting Acquainted With Greensboro," NYT, 5/22/12) for misuse of campaign funds to support Rielle Hunter who turned out to be better at making babies than videos (the job for which she was originally hired) as a Kim Severson pointed out in the Times ("Candidate, Philanderer, and Juggler, Too: Edwards Trial Shows Deception's Strains," NYT 5/20/12) On the other hand there does seem to be a double standard here. Americans are forgiving of the Aristocratic JFK who is merely exercising the droit du seigneur, but they are far less tolerant of their own good 'ole boys who spill the beans or knock up chicks and get them pregnant. Teddy Kennedy’s political career survived Chappaquidick and when you look at it the offense, which involved the loss of life, was a lot more egregious than misuse of campaign funds. While America doesn’t have a hereditary aristocracy, we make exceptions. We apologize for the randy Camelot inhabitant when he’s out on the hunt. Come on. Bill and John could have done better than Monica and Rielle. Both were attractive men with good credentials who would definitely have gotten almost any girl they wanted were they working the East Side Bar scene, but they apparently were insecure enough to end up with the kind of troubled personalities who, at least in Rielle’s case, like to take hostages. Neither the would-be president’s now deceased wife, nor the former president’s wife (and our current secretary of state), were too happy when they found out about their respective husbands’ shortcomings— though there are some who might argue that neither Clinton nor Edwards should be held accountable and that the kind of low self-esteem and compulsivity that both exhibited were symptoms of a disease.

Stand Up and Be Counted!

How many times have you picked up a book or gone to a movie and read about or watched a character and said, “That is me,” or better yet gone to a museum and looked at a portrait or a sculpture, say Michelangelo’s David or Rembrandt’s portrait of his son Titus, and said, “Yup, that’s me”? Are you Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, are you Alyosha Karamazov, are you David Copperfield? Are you Sherman McCoy from Bonfire, are you Jamie from Bright Lights, Big City, are you Gatsby, or Dick Diver from Tender is the Night? Are you Yourcenar’s Hadrian, are you Bardamu from Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, or better yet are you Robin Vote in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood? OK, let’s get to the point, are you Jake Barnes or Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises, or a little of both? Are you Casaubon or Humbert Humbert, Ulrich from The Man Without Qualities, or Franz Biberkopf from Berlin Alexanderplatz? Are you Hans Castorp from Zauberberg or Leverkuhn from Doctor Faustus? Alas, are you Swann? Are you Vronsky or Levin from Anna Karenina? Come on, tell the truth. Are you Pierre or Andrei from War and Peace? Eventually you’re going to have to make a choice. Are you Molly, Leopold or Stephan from Ulysses, or Gabriel Conroy—yes everybody, man, woman or beast, has a little bit of Gabriel Conroy in them. Isn’t that Joyce’s achievement? Just like there is a little bit of Odysseus returning home unrecognized by all except his faithful Argos in all of us who have ever left and returned. Have you ever dreamt you were Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, Antoine Doinel from The Four Hundred Blows, John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman, or James Dean’s Cal in East of Eden (and even Health Ledger’s Joker if we’re being totally honest)? There’s a little bit of Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan in all of us (who hasn’t given some thought to holding a .357 magnum?), a touch of Meryl Streep’s Silkwood, and naturally we all want to stand up and be counted like Marlon Brandon in On the Waterfront. Or maybe you just want to accept the benign indifference of the universe like Estragon, who inaugurates Waiting for Godot with his famed pronunciamento, “Nothing to be done.”