Man with a Past

For a long time now, I've known that I could never be President of the United States. This is very sad, because all Americans, and particularly the children of immigrants, are brought up believing that the Oval Office is within their reach. The advent of Ronald Reagan only underlined such gaudy ambitions. After all, if Reagan could become President, anybody could.

But even if that hope had burned within my rib cage (and it never has), the job would be forever barred to me. I hold membership in that huge fraternity of the damned, whose future is permanently limited. Membership in that group prevented Douglas Ginsburg from ascending to the Supreme Court. It has ruined others. It haunts millions of Americans who did not honor the boy scouts' oath in the Sixties, people who smoked dope, joined campus riots, beat the draft: those whose lives were so painfully re-examined after Dan Quayle was chosen by George Bush as a candidate for Vice-President. Like all of them, I'm a man with a past.

To be sure, in my case, the past is not all that terrible. I never murdered anyone. I didn't embezzle millions from a bank. I traded no secrets with an enemy. But in the peculiar country in which we now live, my past is enough. It is certainly more serious than smoking a few joints.

The story is a simple one. Late one night in 1956, when this magazine was barely out of labor, I went to a street in Mexico City named Calle de Esperanza. This was December eighth, on the eve of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, an enormous holiday in Mexico. I was in the country as an art student on the GI Bill, and my companion of the night was a chicano from Los Angeles named Manny. In the spirit of religious exaltation, we were heading for a whorehouse.

We found about two dozen of them on Calle de Esperanza, which was beyond the Avenida San Juan de Letran, on the wild side of town. In those days, the cheap working-class bordellos were at street level, with large doors opening into a parlor and windows without panes cut into the doors. The customers--and there were dozens of them that night--walked the length of the street, perusing the women before bartering their ten pesos for a little ecstasy. Manny and I looked through the windows into the parlors, where girls of various ages and weights sat on worn sofas or funeral-parlor folding chairs, like so many drawings by Pascin. The Mexicans called them las mujeres de la vida galante--the women of the gallant life. Some smiled. Most read comics. In the corner of each parlor, you could see a small altar with a glorious lithograph of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint. There were paper flowers before the sacred image, each altar decorated with silver foil from cigarette packs, shaped by the Mexican genius for the baroque.

I remember walking the length of the street, while tinny mariachi music warred with love songs by the Trio Los Panchos. And in one of the parlors, I saw a frail young woman who aroused my sentiments. I passed her place, made another reconnaissance of the street and returned. I leaned through the window and asked in my dreadful Spanish for her name. She never answered. One of the older women of the gallant life heaved a pan of water at me. I don't know why. Maybe she'd had a bad time with gringos the week before or had lost a great-great-grandfather in the Mexican War or was honorably defending the Spanish language from the barbarians. For whatever reason, she threw the water. And I reacted. At the time, I was 21, a barely civilized mug from Brooklyn, and I had grown up believing that if you shove me, I shove you back. So in a reflex action, I shoved back, ramming my shoulder against the window frame.

The door came off its hinges and fell into the parlor, with the water-throwing whore under it, and I charged forward. Poor Manny was alarmed. Gringos were not advised to brawl in whorehouses in those days in Mexico. I stood on the door and the gallant woman under it began to scream. The other whores attacked, battering me with pocketbooks, ashtrays and at least one tray of tacos. I instantly retreated. Manny took my arm. "Let's get the fuck out of here," he said. And we started to leave the Calle de Esperanza.

We went two blocks on foot and then ran into a few other gringo pilgrims. They had a car and when we blurted out our tale, they offered us a ride. We climbed into their car and the driver started going fast down darkened streets. Suddenly, in a small plaza, we were cut off by a taxicab. From out of the cab came two of the whores and two policemen.

"Eso es!" one of the whores said, pointing at me. "Este cabron, eso es!" And then the cops were pointing guns at us and ordering us out of the car. Manny, who spoke good Spanish, did most of the talking, but he wasn't very convincing. The cops ordered us back into the car and climbed in after us. One of them sat on my lap in the back. The cops started giving directions--left here, right there, a la derecha, a la izquierda--while the whores went off in the taxicab. Manny was in front with a cop between him and the driver. The two other gringos were beside me. Obviously, we were under arrest. All of us, though I was the guilty party. Still, it seemed like a small thing. A broken door, that was all. We'd settle it at the police station, hand over our cash and go home.

But then, as the cop ordered an izquierda, the driver took a derecha. The cop on my lap started cursing him. And then the guy beside me changed everything. He threw a punch at the cop in the front seat, the driver panicked, the car skidded, everyone was shouting and we spun to a halt. Since the cop on my lap could hardly miss, I pushed down on the door handle and he and I rolled out. I got up and started to run. I heard a pistol go off. I heard three bullets whiz past me. I ran.

And then, up ahead of me, there was a blue wall of police. The luck of the Irish had held: I'd chosen the street where the police station was located. The cops proceeded to beat the crap out of me.

Many days later, I was finally released on bail from the infamous Black Palace of the Lecumberri. I was charged with lesiones (causing cuts with punches), destruction of property (that whorehouse door), resisting arrest and stealing a policeman's pistol. Under the terms of bail, I was restricted to Mexico City and had to report to an office in the prison once a month. There were a few hilarious hearings before a magistrate, with the whores describing in exquisite detail their heroic resistance to the foreign invasion. The charge of stealing a pistol was dropped, because I had been arrested immediately and obviously hadn't been carrying anyone's pistol. The hearings were postponed month after month. And in May, when the school term was over and the legal process was still grinding slowly along, I left the country.

I've been back to Mexico many times since then; it remains the country I love most after my own. And years ago, I had some friends in the Mexican foreign service check the legal records to see if I was still wanted for lesiones and bail jumping. They told me there were no records of my youthful felonies; if they existed at all, they were rotting away in some forgotten warehouse. But I know that this episode, a kid's wild night, was never truly resolved. I committed crimes, including the open-ended one of jumping bail. And the night of December 8, 1956, lingers in my consciousness. If I ever had to submit myself to the scrutiny of a Congressional hearing, or the mass attention of the nation's press, I would be doomed.

That vulnerability to intense scrutiny is true of many human beings. In my own case, the night long ago in Mexico wasn't the only event in my life that would curl the hair of Sam Nunn. Any decent man with a past has committed more than one sin. When I was young, and still drinking, I had literally hundreds of bar fights, rolling around on the floor with people in Brooklyn and Pensacola, New Orleans and Jacksonville and a lot of places in between. None of those rowdy evenings were admirable and I am certainly not bragging about them. I hurt people. Some of them were hurt badly enough to go to hospitals, and none of that can be excused by saying that I was often hurt, too. Sometimes I was right, sometimes I was wrong. In every case, I was doing things that are not done by judges, Presidents or Secretaries of State.

And if youthful bar fighting would be a liability in my personal Congressional hearing, my days and nights with women would be even more treacherous. There, too, I am a man with a past.

I wish I could say that in every long relationship or brief encounter I ever had with a woman, I behaved impeccably: kind, reasonable, generous. Alas, that would be a terrible lie. The truth is that in my time on this planet, I have behaved the way many human beings do. That is to say, I was often capable of fierce angers, personal treasons, stupid jealousies, occasional cruelties. I was also sweet, loyal, trusting, polite and kind. I did few things that other human beings, male and female, had not done before me and will not do long after I've been tucked into the earth. But I would not like to submit my past to a grand jury, to sit and wait while the witnesses paraded in to testify under oath for the prosecution. Nobody would.

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I relate all this personal history because, as a card-carrying man with a past, I've come to believe that something dreadfully sad and terribly self-defeating is going on in American life. Somehow, we have come to demand perfection in our public men. And that trend is certain to make us a less vital nation.

In the past year, we have seen Gary Hart forever eliminated from American politics and Joseph Biden rudely shoved out of the Presidential race. Each was punished for present-day offenses, of course; Hart with a woman, Biden for plagiarism. But those mistakes will now be incorporated into their résumés; they will cart them around for the rest of their lives. The stories of their mistakes will be included in their obituaries. Each has become a man with a past.

They are not alone. Baseball fans will never look at Dwight Gooden the same innocent way they did in the first three glorious seasons he had with the Mets. Cocaine has made him a man with a past. The same has happened to Mercury Morris, Michael Ray Richardson, Steve Howe and dozens of others. Some have recovered and come back, but their sins still haunt them. Only his admission of cocaine use could keep Keith Hernandez out of the Hall of Fame. For some people, Norman Mailer will always be the writer who stabbed his wife. Edward Kennedy will carry Chappaquiddick with him to the grave.

To be sure, some people should never be forgiven; Richard Nixon did such broad damage to the nation that he deserves ostracism by his fellow citizens and the harshest judgment of history. And certainly, we must be rigorous in selecting leaders who will have in their hands the power to obliterate life on the earth. Character does matter. In the case of Nixon, for example, there was a long and tawdry precede to the Watergate scandals; from his entrance into politics, there was something smarmy and unreliable about the man. There were so many "new" Nixons that journalists gave up trying to define them, until he defined himself once and for all with Watergate. American politics and journalism were drastically changed by the realization that Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam disaster and the overlapping crimes that made up Watergate could be traced to the characters of the men who made the decisions.

But to equate Vietnam or Watergate to the smoking of some marijuana, as was done in the case of Judge Ginsburg, is absurd. And to bar human beings from public life because of their youthful follies is a waste of potentially fine talent.

Our present obsession with the purity of our leaders can be traced to a variety of factors. The lessons of Vietnam and Watergate are only part of the general pattern. On one level, we have never been able to completely shake the heritage of the Puritan tradition, with its Manichaean vision of human beings. That tradition insists that men are good or bad; there is no room for a warm shade of gray. In our worst periods, the puritanical obsession sends us in pursuit of various heretics: sexual, political or artistic. We insist on conformity to a common good as defined by the puritanical tradition. From the Salem witch trials to the era of Joe McCarthy, we have been too easily prepared to cast out Devils and condemn them to eternal damnation.

We have also been taught by the narratives of television and the movies (and their predecessors in pulp fiction and comic books) to believe in heroes. A mature man doesn't need heroes in his life; they should be for children, cartoons of real people serving as models for behavior. But the infantile hunger for heroes is hard to shake. And since there are so few heroes in human experience, we insist on their counterfeits. Alas, the heroes of most popular fiction are two-dimensional beings without flaws or depth. But Americans now insist that their politicians emulate these fictional beings, to live in the world without sexual desire, confusion, anger or fear.

Television has made the process even more simple-minded, because the form demands that all revelations of character fit into 20-second bites. Complex ideas must be reduced to one-liners. The mood must always be "up" or charged with just anger. Heat is preferred to illumination, conflict to analysis. Statements must include their own happy endings. It is impossible to imagine Lincoln or Jefferson or either of the Roosevelts confining himself or his ideas to such a rigid format. But today's political leaders have learned to play the modern game. They know that to be successful, they must somehow look like the image of Reagan in his TV commercials, riding a horse while bathed in the golden sun of the fabled American West. It doesn't matter that the image is a lie. It is a waste of time to point out that Reagan was never a cowboy and that the West of the pulps and the movies never existed. The important thing is that the lie is heroic. In the present tense of the television commercial, we are told that the man himself has no past other than that of the country he wants to rule. These boyish men of the eternal present are most often granted the prize of power; it is denied to any man with a past.

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I'm sorry: In the perilous world in which we live, I'd much rather be led by such a man. The boy-scout types who offer us their immaculate records for inspection are people with too many merit badges and not enough knowledge of the world. That's why they talk so much about being "tough." While they were grinding away at their perfect lifetime résumés, they had very little opportunity to display their toughness against real tough guys. One result: They go into the Presidency or the Senate or city hall trying to display cojones they never displayed in schoolyards or alleys when they were young.

It becomes very easy, then, for a slick paladin such as Elliott Abrams, who missed Vietnam, to sit in an office in Washington, his hands clean and his nails manicured, and show how tough he is by signing papers that get people killed in Nicaragua. It becomes easy for a President who spent World War Two making training films out of the Brown Derby to send Marines to Beirut, where they end up getting blown to pieces. When I went to Vietnam as a correspondent, I always looked for a man with a past--some tough noncom who had fought in Korea and whose ideas of warfare had not been formed by the movies. I wanted to stay alive and I sought out men who knew how to do that. None of them looked like Rambo. They didn't show off the steroid toughness of the Nautilus machine. But they were tough in the way that prize fighters are tough: They didn't brag and they didn't boast, because they knew themselves and respected their enemies. A man who has had the crap beaten out of him, who has been afraid on a battlefield, who knows what physical pain is like won't very easily send kids off to die.

Physical courage is not, of course, the only measure of a man. Moral toughness is even more important. But, once again, I prefer the scarred brows of the man with a past to the man who has never had to struggle toward the right decision because he has made no decisions at all. A man who decides to live his life instead of merely performing it is a man who makes choices every day. If Gary Hart had been free of the constrictions of religion when he was young, and sown his wild oats in those years, he might have handled the affairs of his maturity with more grace. His self-destruction wasn't about sex; it was about his cowardice in the face of the conventional pieties. Hart clearly felt that if he admitted to having had sexual relations with a woman other than his wife, the country's wrath would fall upon him. So he lied. And the country's wrath fell upon him anyway. He was instantly transformed from a man with a future into a man with a past.

That is a dreadful and stupid waste of a talented man, even if his wounds were self-inflicted. Just once, I'd like to hear an American politician admit that he was sleeping with a woman who was not his wife and then ask what that had to do with his ability to end homelessness, control inflation, repair the infrastructure of roads and bridges or deal with foreign enemies. Just telling the bald truth might make him the most popular politician in the country. In one stroke, he would deal a mighty blow to the prevailing hypocrisy. Many would admire his candor. Others would feel a kinship to the man and sympathy for the woman. A loud minority of preachers would thump the drums of the sacred against this instance of the profane and, in the best religious spirit, take up some extra collections. But there would be many who would feel, as I do, that a man who was savoring the delights of the earth would be unlikely to blow it apart.

Hart, alas, graduated into manhood without the education that comes from having a rowdy past. There are far too many others like him--tight, controlled, driven men who form their goals when young and move along a smooth, polished corridor without the deviations that make us all human. That is worse than sad; it is dangerous. As this country moves toward the 21st Century, we will be weaker, less worldly, more dangerously innocent if the ludicrous insistence on the immaculate becomes dogma. I don't want leaders who love humanity and know nothing about people. I don't want judges who are icy neuters retailing the abstractions of law; I want judges who understand how human beings can fall because they have fallen themselves. The insistence on perfection is based on a desire for Utopia. And the Utopian impulse has killed millions in this century.

In war or politics, I would much prefer to cast my fortunes with the man with a past. He has tested academic theory against his own experience, measured the grand abstractions against the squalid realities of the world and has usually arrived at what used to be called wisdom. By living a life, he understands other lives. He is never rigid. He suspects all dogma. He is skeptical without being cynical. He is almost always more compassionate than other men, more thoughtful, more forgiving of himself and others. He has embraced life instead of holding it at arm's length and, thus, always has time for loving women, raising children and smelling the flowers. He looks at death without fear, knowing that its certainty only makes more urgent the duty to love life.

In these last years of this dreadful century, Americans seem more bored and unhappy than at any other time in my years on the earth. Millions of them prefer the stupefaction of drugs to the lucid delights of seeing the world plain. Millions choose not to vote. Millions knock themselves stupid before television sets instead of exploring the darkness on the edge of town. But in their insistence on human perfection, they have only themselves to blame for the malaise. Just once before I die, I'd like to vote for a man who admits to a roaring youth spent getting drunk, getting laid and getting in trouble. Just once, I'd like to meet a politician who had caroused on a bad midnight through the Calle de Esperanza. Just once.

Alas, I fear I never will.