In order to place the Checkers Speech within the context of American history, it is important to keep in mind, not only that Nixon took the unprecedented step of buying time on television  to defend himself against charges of financial impropriety, but also that he attempted to illustrate his political integrity by broadcasting intimate details about his family.   Thus, in addition to listing his personal assets, he trumpeted his starry-eyed affection for his wife and told a sentimental story about his daughters' dog.  In other words, in order to lend an air of authenticity to his highly staged performance, Nixon portrayed himself as a husband and father, inviting the nation judge him, not as a politician, but as an essentially private person.  The paradox here is that Nixon carefully crafted a false sense of intimacy in order to project an image of simple honesty.  Adopting a novel strategy that turned out to be highly successful, he maintained his footing on the public stage by seeming to reject political ambition in favor of the humble virtues of private life.

Now that this type of false familiarity has become an ordinary feature of American politics, it may be somewhat difficult to appreciate the novelty of the Checkers Speech.  More specifically, in keeping with the transportation of political discourse from the relatively formal atmosphere of the public forum into the recesses of American living rooms, Nixon introduced a level of triviality that would have been impossible to achieve in an earlier age.  Like the television advertisers who constantly assure us that "Little things mean a lot," Nixon seems to have known instinctively that bathetic commentary on his wife's coat and his children's cocker spaniel would carry well over the air waves.  Taking a page from the saccharine dramas that would soon begin to dominate nightly programming, he shamelessly vowed to hold on to the family pet even if it spelled the end of his political candidacy.  Thus, by rejecting lofty declarations about democracy and justice in favor of vapid anecdotes about his personal affairs, Nixon shrank the political process to proportions that were appropriate to the new world emerging from the spread of television, that is, the world in which political communication takes place inside the home. 

 While Nixon's awkward evocation of family values weakened traditional distinctions between public and private, those boundaries seemed to vanish altogether in John F. Kennedy's grandiose exaltation of his sexual power.  Kennedy's telegenic confidence was apparent in the debates that led to his election and seemed to remain undiminished right up until the moment when his assassination was caught on film.  However, even in JFK's highly visible career, it would be hard to imagine a more  expansive display of self-assurance than the star-studded celebration of his forty-fifth birthday party at Madison Square Garden in 1962.  Marilyn Monroe, whose rendition of Happy Birthday is now remembered as the high point of the evening, appeared on stage with Jack Benny, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Lawford, Peggy Lee, Miriam Makeba, and Jimmy Durante, as well as  other celebrities, and over seventeen thousand people paid up to $1,000 each to attend the festivities.(5)  Despite the price of admission, the size of the crowd, and the rehearsals beforehand, the occasion seems to have been relatively informal, an impression that may be due to the fact that Lawford and others appear to be somewhat intoxicated.  In any case, Lawford's bantering efforts to kill time when Monroe failed to appear on cue, as well as her late arrival, contribute to the feeling that this was a private party rather than a carefully planned event.  More pointedly, the breathy sexuality of Monroe's performance, not to mention her skin-tight and nearly transparent dress, adds even more to the sense of intimacy that distinguished this fund-raiser from traditional political functions.  Indeed, at least to those of us who were raised by Irish Catholic women of Kennedy's generation, Monroe's over-the-top delivery makes it seem almost rational to exclaim, "Thank God Jackie wasn't there!" 

Although Kennedy's now widely reported affair with Monroe was not mentioned in public while either was alive, her tremulous version of Happy Birthday makes explicit disclosures of the actual relationship seem beside the point.  Whether they had an affair or not, Monroe and Kennedy appear to be sharing some sort of private moment; it just happened to take place in a public arena at an event that included television cameras, countless reporters, and thousands of guests.  Likewise, if there were any distance left between text and subtext in this extravaganza, it was entirely dissolved in Kennedy's ostensibly inside joke about Monroe's "sweet and wholesome" singing.  Kennedy was, in effect, winking at his viewers, encouraging everyone to marvel at the sexual perks that come with wealth, good looks, and political power.  Since, of course, most of us do not want to be seen as spoil sports, we all join in and, thereby, gain emotional entrance to Kennedy's glamorous inner circle.   In this context, it is clear that Kennedy's sexual adventures with Monroe were not first exposed to public view when reports began to surface decades later.  The multitudes who had, in effect, attended the President's birthday party and helped him to celebrate his virility hardly needed public confirmation of his sexual proclivities since they had already spent considerable time behind the scenes.  The analogy here is not that photo arrays, gossip columns, and televised reports gave the people front row seats to a public spectacle, but that these means of cultural production provided everyone with a back stage pass.  Like the Checkers Speech, Kennedy's birthday bash extended the borders of the private sphere.  However, whereas Nixon configured himself to fit into a suburban family den, Kennedy moved the line in the opposite direction.  Rather than shrinking his political persona to accommodate the contours of the average American home, JFK invited the public into the dazzling compass of his private affairs. 

The seemingly intimate relationship that Kennedy carried on with the American people may have marked a milestone in the privatization of the political process, but the triumph of the private over the public reached an apotheosis during the Clinton years.  Clinton had, after all, such an intense personal bond with the masses that he claimed not merely to sympathize with our suffering but to actually feel our pain.  However, rather than lamenting Clinton's co-dependence, I want to focus on a moment from his four hours of testimony before the Starr Grand Jury when he took time out to reflect on the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings.  While Clinton carefully emphasized that his situation had nothing to do with sexual harassment, he attempted to explain the discrepancies between his view of his sexual dalliance with Monica Lewinsky and her grand jury testimony by observing that Thomas and Hill had provided similarly contradictory recollections of "a shared set of facts."  Clinton was certainly trying to waste time, and his remarks on Thomas were obviously designed to rile the "vast right-wing conspiracy"' that he perceived at the heart of the Whitewater inquiry.  However, his assertion that Hill and Thomas had both believed that they were telling the truth, along with his contention that sexual matters are simply too mysterious to describe in any rational fashion, deserves serious attention.  Without pretending that Clinton's ideas exemplify prevailing approaches to sexual impropriety, it is reasonable to give his statements some weight.  He was, I must point out, trained as a lawyer and speaking under oath, not to mention the fact that he was President of the United States.  It is, moreover, important to note that Clinton could have used up the time reserved for his testimony by dilating on a myriad of topics.  However, he chose to clarify his perspective by pontificating on the Thomas/Hill affair.

Seen in this light, his suggestion that sexual issues are so unfathomable that people cannot provide rational accounts of their own behavior represents a fairly dramatic breakdown of faith in our ability to see ourselves clearly, a capacity which is generally accepted as fundamental to the rule of law.  More specifically, in Clinton's world, the collapse of the public into the private has apparently reached a point where, at least in cases involving sexual misconduct, it is hard to imagine how public authorities could ever effectively intervene.  Incidents of sexual misbehavior could be subjected to exhaustive investigation and become the focus of public revelation, but psychological relativism would undermine definitive claims to the truth.  While these observations might seem somewhat extreme, they do describe precisely what happened in the Hill/Thomas hearings, as well as the Clinton/Lewinsky affair.

One of the conclusions we can draw from this distasteful chapter in American history is that the distinction between public and private does not necessarily depend on what the public can or cannot see.  Instead, as evidenced in the constant barrage of presidential popularity polls after it became clear, contrary to his famous finger-wagging denial, that Clinton did "have sexual relations with that woman," the question at issue was whether the public would tolerate the fact that the President had procured sexual favors from one of his underlings.   This is, I should emphasize, not my interpretation, but Clinton's.  In his testimony before the Starr Grand Jury, in answer to a question about why it was appropriate for him to find a job for Lewinsky, he emphasized that he was "not trying to buy her silence," because he knew that she would eventually publicize their encounters.  According to Clinton,

I formed an opinion early in 1996, once I got into this unfortunate and wrong conduct, that when I stopped it...she would talk about it.  Not because Monica Lewinsky is a bad person.  She's basically a good girl.  She's a good young woman with a good heart and good mind.  I think that she is burdened by some unfortunate conditions of her, her upbringing...But I knew that the minute there was no longer any contact, she would talk about this.  She would have to.  She couldn't help it.  It was, it was part of her psyche. (6)

In keeping with his insistence that he was never actually alone with Lewinsky, Clinton was not concerned with the revelation of certain aspects of his personal history, but with popular reaction to their apparently inevitable publication.  What makes this perspective important is that it enables us to comprehend more fully how the expansion of the private realm has served to paralyze serious political discourse.  Unlike earlier moments in American politics, when explicit discussion of sexual matters was designed to promote a greater degree of freedom for marginalized members of society such as gays and lesbians or people with AIDs or victims of domestic violence, political talk about sex in the Clinton era served no liberationist purpose.  The raunchy details were dished out in response or anticipation of market demand for prurient materials and, however much Clinton's enemies hoped to gain from the deluge, it failed to advance any specific political goals.  Thus, whatever the members of the House of Representatives hoped to achieve when they dumped Starr's three thousand-plus page report on the Internet, the document was immediately judged according to its aesthetic value and, in line with the limitations of its authors, it was generally panned as a particularly repellent piece of smut.  (7)

In this atmosphere, any serious examination of significant political issues was displaced by disclosures about neckties, cigars, and dress stains, minutia which proved to be sufficiently titillating to keep the public tuned in and sufficiently disgusting to ward off any thoughtful reflections on gender-based imbalances of power.  As a result, people who found it distressing that the president would take sexual advantage of a White House intern, especially one who was, as Clinton put it, "burdened by some unfortunate conditions of her upbringing," were accused of helping to promote Ken Starr's conservative agenda, a charge that proceeded from the assumption that political principles were irrelevant to the narrative.  Meanwhile, people who focused on the way that Clinton and Lewinsky acted out their social disparity--e.g., Lewinsky on her knees while Clinton chatted on the phone--were either advised to get their minds out of the gutter or dismissed as overly naive about the realities of sex in the workplace.  In the end, the countless hours of news coverage and media analysis turned out to be as pointless as Clinton's impeachment.  Questions that might have been raised in a public forum such as how the behavior of elites in this case might affect ordinary victims of sexual coercion or how  fellow workers can suffer when one employee benefits from sexual favoritism were ignored because the drama turned, not on any question of ethical standards or legal responsibility, but on a purely personal challenge, namely, whether the constant coverage of Clinton's sexual conduct would undermine his ability to keep his numbers up.  

Despite its remarkable vulgarity, the private world exposed during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal was, at least from an historical perspective, substantially familiar.  In its suffocating banality, the story reproduced important aspects of the prison of privacy from which feminists of the 1960's and 70's hoped to liberate themselves.  Gender inequality in post World War Two American society, according to second-wave feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Freidan, degraded women's quality of life not simply because they were denied access to education and professional careers, but also because they were confined to a brainless existence built around the kitchen, the bedroom, and the supermarket, overcome by anxieties about insignificant problems or, as Freidan put it, "food and things." (8)  Similarly, when the Clinton/Lewinsky affair dominated the news, hours of puerile conversations were meticulously transcribed and broadcast, trifling gifts were confiscated and catalogued, what the players wore on specific dates was described in full, and exactly which part of Clinton's person came into contact with Lewinsky's body became the subject of interminable rounds of grand jury testimony.  In short, the story evoked second-wave feminist critiques of American society, not only because Lewinsky conformed so completely to the stereotypical image of the eagerly submissive sexual object, but also because the preoccupations of the leading characters were so relentlessly superficial. 

During the 1960's and 1970's, as evidenced in films such as The Stepford Wives, social critics, feminists, and other countercultural types assumed that people who embraced this level of inanity would never enjoy any degree of political recognition or relevance because their preoccupation with purely personal questions would preclude them from participating in any serious discussion of social problems or political ideas.  But, unfortunately, in our era of unabashed disclosure, the figures within the private realm are neither silent nor unseen, as the women's liberationists who hoped to escape it once complained.  On the contrary, within the increasingly vast and visible landscape of the private sphere, Bob Dole sings the praises of Viagra, the Bush twins are rearrested, Gary Condit admits to his affair with Chandra Levy, Linda Tripp undergoes additional plastic surgery, and Monica Lewinsky struggles to lose a few more pounds.  While the cultural boundaries that frame these personal matters include more explicit sexual information than would have been recorded in the 1950's, the terrain in which we find ourselves corresponds precisely with the topography of the profoundly shallow universe mapped out in the Checkers Speech. (9) 

In order to summarize the implications of the ascendancy of the private sphere in American politics, it is helpful to look more closely at the traditional feminist critique of the public/private divide.  On one hand, feminists argued, the exclusion of women from public activities proceeded from the conviction that women are essentially irrational, primarily biological beings, incapable of the impartial judgment required to participate in politics.  On the other, they observed, the confinement of women in the private realm left them vulnerable to sexual intimidation, coercion and violence.   In either case, the assumption was that becoming visible in the public sphere would raise women to the status of free and equal citizens and, consequently, provide a recourse from oppression in both private and public life. (10)  However, judging from Bill Clinton's musing on the mysteries of sexual behavior, along with our apparent slide into a tell-all and, just as quickly, forget-all culture, it seems that neither women nor men can turn to the state to find meaningful relief from injuries inflicted in the private realm. (11)  In a society in which people cannot be trusted to testify in public about their own experience, none of us has access to the rational authority that used to be associated with the public sphere. (12)  At the same time, since the development of mass communications, especially in the form of television, has personalized the content of political discourse, the notion that citizens could meet in a public forum to solve their common problems has become increasingly difficult to sustain.  In other words, since our preoccupation with private activities has overwhelmed old ideas about the purpose of public discussion, the belief that democratic principles could actually govern our behavior has come to seem patently naive.  After all, from the avalanche of personal information about public figures such as Nixon, Kennedy, and Clinton, it seems much more plausible to conclude that politics is driven, not by any rational aspirations, but by blind ambition, deep-seated neuroses, and/or insatiable addiction.   In short, now that men are routinely reduced to the irrational status that was once the burden of women, we must  wonder if it will ever be possible for anyone to realize the degree of freedom that the "personal is political" was originally designed to achieve.