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But almost everyone is mortal and clumsy when scandal hits him on the blind side. In the past few years an interesting though not always persuasive variation has become popular with U.S. Congressmen: the alcoholic-deflective approach. Actually, it amounts to a plea of temporary insanity. Arkansas' Wilbur Mills began behaving strangely in public with an exotic dancer called the Argentine Firecracker. When he recovered himself for a moment, he told his constituents it all came from drinking champagne with foreigners. But then he landed with the Fire cracker at Washington's Tidal Basin in the middle of the night. Mills got hold of himself, acknowledged to himself and everyone else that he was an alcoholic, and sought treatment.
In some peculiar way, alcohol has become a convenient way to mitigate public embarrassments. Betty Ford, Joan Kennedy, Billy Carter and others have reported that their unsteady, occasionally weird behavior resulted from drinking. That sort of confession can be exemplary and thus publicly useful. But in others it can also be opportunistic. Maryland's conservative Congressman Robert Bauman pleaded not guilty to making homosexual advances to a 16-year-old boy; Bauman, with his stricken wife standing behind him — her eyes glazed with that I-am-not-here-I-am-actually-in-Chicago look — told a press conference that booze made him do it. Then in the formulation of media penance, in which a celebrity hears his own confession before lights and cameras and solemnly grants himself absolution, Bauman an nounced, "I do not have to elaborate. I have confessed my wrong doings to my God." If God has the case under advisement, who are we to pursue it?
Often it is not the act itself but the denial, the coverup, that wrecks a reputation. A suspicion will always linger that if Nixon and his men had not tried to cover up, his presidency would have survived; if only he had got up and confessed some thing. If only he had made what the Catholic Church calls a sincere act of contrition. It was not so much John Profumo's recreation with Christine Keeler that finished him as Britain's State Secretary for War. It was the way he lied about it.
Some people, of course, go to the other extreme and pro duce detailed confessions even when nobody asked them. The nation surely had no "need to know," as the White House says, but Jimmy Carter confessed to Playboy in 1976 that he had felt lust in his heart for women other than his wife. That robust literary charlatan Frank Harris went to the trouble of inventing all kinds of elaborate sexual adventures to confess; with both Carter and Harris, confession shaded into exhibitionism.