Roosevelt's girlfriends.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Tilting at Windmills - Brief Article

Back to the relationship of a politician's sex life to his public role. I remember being on NBC's "Meet the Press" one Sunday in December 1998 with William Satire, Sally Quinn, and Tim Russert. My fellow panelists took a stern view of President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky and his lies about it. I said that unfortunately lots of otherwise good people committed adultery and lied about it to protect their wives, children, and themselves. As I looked around the table, it occurred to me that Safire, before becoming a columnist, had worked for years in public relations in New York, a world that did not abound in innocence. Quinn's friends, I knew, were drawn from the world of fast-track journalism in Washington and New York.

During my own college and post-graduate years, my friends in New York were mostly in the fields of the arts and entertainment, neither of which is noted for putting a high value on sexual morality. Russert may have grown up an altar boy in Buffalo, but he later had high-level political jobs in Washington and New York before joining Sally Quinn in...