Sex, Politics, and the Psychobiographer, With Remarks on the Case of Jefferson

Inquiry into the lives of important leaders is bound to come across information and speculation about the sexuality of its subjects. This raises the question, When and how is a politician’s private sexual conduct relevant to his public performance?

For the psychobiographer, there is little doubt on the matter: patterns in the sexual behavior of public figures often give clues to the motives and methods of political behavior. Revelations of

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Eisenhower’s sexual inhibitions, Kennedy’s promiscuity, and Clinton’s indiscretions all help to explain formerly ill-understood features of their political style and values. Eisenhower’s romance with his wartime driver is related by her in elliptical terms: the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces found himself unable to consummate their sexual relationship. (Kay Summersby Morgan, Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1975, pp. 132-140) John Kennedy’s insatiable, risk-defying sexual predation (Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, 1981, pp. 5-35) was part of a frantic response to his father’s sexual competitiveness and continual challenges to his sons to be hyperactive. At the same time, reports of the nature of his actual sexual encounters suggest a longing to play the passive role that had won him signs of tenderness from father and mother when he was a sick child. (Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, 1987, pp. 310-314) Clinton’s dangerous self-exposures in yielding to sexual temptations had an air of challenges to Fate: his repeated successes in extricating himself from their consequences may have reaffirmed his belief that Providence smiled on the needs of the child who had early been deprived of a father’s protection.

Each of these patterns of sexuality helps illuminate political strategies: Eisenhower’s fear of his destructive power—particularly strong where subordinates were concerned—was channeled effectively toward wartime targets. (On childhood experiences that seem to have shaped these fears, see, by Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell my Friends, 1967, pp. 57-88.) The Presidential style that he crafted, by avoiding direct confrontation (Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader, 1982), served at once to restrain his own rage and to confound and divert partisan attacks on his policy directives. One of

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John Kennedy’s recent biographers considers his sexual behavior “reckless in the extreme” with a “potential for disaster,” especially because of criminal connections of some of his lovers. Yet Reeves observes that these “did not apparently interfere directly with the broader issues of peace and prosperity.” (Thomas C. Reeves, A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy, 1991, p. 327) Certainly it is true that in the short time that Kennedy held the Presidential office he was able to resist making highly aggressive responses to what he felt as personal challenges from Khrushchev and others to “test” his “backbone.” As for Clinton, it may be that his many narrow escapes from sexual adventures gave him the reassurance he needed to seek approval from the public through the conciliatory strategies that his critics described as “waffling” and that he considered generous and statesmanlike. Intimate details may be important sources of clues to how personal needs play a part in the politician’s performance.

For the past few years I have been working on the Virginia “founders”—that small group of exceptionally closely linked leaders who were instrumental both in achieving American independence and in shaping the new republic. Information on the sexual behavior of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Marshall holds special interest because of the light it throws on their common early experience in a very distinctive Southern milieu. Knowing about their sexuality is one way to gain understanding of all their social relations. How good a way it is, compared with others, depends on the kind of data available. This varies greatly amongst them, and of course has been most investigated and discussed for Thomas Jefferson.

A quarter of a century ago interest in a certain aspect of Jefferson’s private life was revived by Fawn Brodie. Her Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974) resuscitated rumors of the third American President’s extramarital affairs that were originally circulated publicly in 1802, just after Jefferson’s first inauguration, by a disaffected journalist, James Callender. These included a report of a long-term sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves.

Informed by psychoanalytic study and experience, Brodie was able to discover and interpret aspects of Jefferson’s childhood development that helped explain his “affection for power” and his “hunger for affection and esteem,” assuaged partly, as she saw it, by his “fantasies of what constituted his duty to the state.” (p. 470) The popular success of the book was owed to the central place she gave in it to Jefferson’s sexual relationships.

It was not prurience that inspired Brodie’s investigation of the alleged Hemings affair. She was interested in it exactly because of the political significance she thought it held. An ardent champion of civil rights, Brodie saw Jefferson’s connection with Hemings as evidence of the weakness of racial barriers in Jefferson’s affective perspective. She reconstructed a sexual liaison between the all-powerful planter and his slave as a romantic relationship that implied an intense unconscious conflict on Jefferson’s part. Brodie was able to cite utterances from Jefferson that professed a horror of slavery and a wish to see it ended, but the Great Man’s actions, throughout his life, were utterly inconsistent with his equalitarian professions. He himself owned several hundred slaves and freed almost none of them. He rejoiced in the increased capital that their multiplication brought to the plantation owner and he approved the extension of slavery westward in 1820. Moreover, he was notorious for talking out of both sides of his mouth: the same book that denounced slavery, his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), condemned miscegenation as unnatural and as corrupting to the dominant race on the grounds that African-Americans are congenitally inferior on almost every score.

From the point of view of other psychobiographers the weakness of Brodie’s evidence connecting Jefferson’s sexuality with his politics lay in her failure to substantiate any feelings of guilt on his part that would support her proposition of an inner conflict between his ideals and intimate connections and his public policies and pronouncements. More plausible is the unconflicted, less than romantic, interpretation put on Jefferson’s sexual practices by Conor Cruise O’Brien: they were merely the typically exploitative ones of the privileged Virginia planter of his time; though repelled by intercourse between black men and white Virginia women, Jefferson “had nothing against his miscegenation” and there was “no valid reason to suppose that he disdained the sexual perquisites available to his caste.” (The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800, 1996, p. 23)

Indeed, as in most psychobiographical problems, sexuality is one of several aspects of the subject’s orientation: understanding its motives and forms adds to understanding the whole personality, just as following the development of personality from its earliest stages helps to understand the

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psychological function performed by sexual practices.

In studying Jefferson’s case it becomes clear that certain early deprivations produced a narcissistic pattern in which he gratified an intense demand for love and protection by imagining the world around him as objects that supplied his needs. (See Erik Erikson, Dimensions of a New Identity: The 1973 Jefferson Lectures in the Humanities, 1974, and E. W. Marvick, “Thomas Jefferson’s Personality and His Politics,” The Psychohistory Review, 25, 1997, pp. 125-164.) In this light he was perfectly capable of enjoying Sally Hemings as a non-person, without guilt or conflict, just as he was able to construct the French Revolution—or any other political events—to suit demands of his imagination.

In any case, the absence of new evidence confirming the Hemings-Jefferson liaison, and the sentimental theme that Brodie injected into her interpretation gave more conventional historians—mostly Jefferson admirers—the basis to express outrage and skepticism at her work.

In 1998 the results of a DNA analysis were published that were consistent with Thomas Jefferson having fathered, at the age of 64, a child born to Sally Hemings. Joseph Ellis, whose very successful biography of Jefferson had come out the year before, appeared alongside the scientific report to recant his earlier judgment that “the likelihood” of Jefferson’s “liaison with Sally Hemings is remote.” (American Sphinx, 1997, p. 305)

Ellis’ reasons for his original disbelief were of a kind that the psychobiographer is used to meeting from “orthodox” historians. They rest on ad hoc constructions of character—the subtitle of American Sphinx is The Character of Thomas Jefferson—that owe little to systematic understanding of personality development or dynamics.

The first reason Ellis cited for his disbelief was the fact that Sally Hemings’ last two children were conceived years after James T. Callender publicized the rumor of Jefferson’s long-term affair with her. “It is difficult to believe that Jefferson would have persisted in producing progeny with Sally once the secret had been exposed and the Federalist press was poised to report it.” (Sphinx, 1997, p. 305) This “circumstantial evidence,” as Ellis called it, against the liaison, seems based on a conception of Jefferson as prototypical “Political Man” in whom rational political calculations easily trumped the impulse to sexual gratification.

Ellis’ second “reason” must be dismissed out of hand: it does nothing to explain Jefferson’s behavior and it is not based on fact. He claimed that Jefferson’s political enemies, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, did not find “it possible to believe that Callender’s accusations were true.” (Ibid) Contrary to this, however, there is evidence that Adams did believe the Hemings story (see David McCullough, John Adams, 2000, p. 581) and, so far as I am aware, none whatever that Hamilton did not. Hamilton’s father-in-law and other correspondents certainly did and Hamilton did not demur at their assumptions. (See H. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, Vol. 26, pp. 36 & 141.) Nevertheless, in Ellis’ rewritten discussion of the affair he repeats this misstatement, though more circumspectly: “His enemies doubted the charges.” (American Sphinx, 1998, p. 366)

The third reason Ellis gave for his disbelief in the Jefferson-Hemings story was that Jefferson wasn’t sexy enough to have lusted after Sally, much less to have consummated his desire. In Jefferson, Ellis claimed, “the palpable realities of physical intimacy were routinely sublimed [sic] to safer and more sentimental regions.” (Sphinx, 1997, p. 306) This is squarely in the scholarly tradition that Fawn Brodie called an “essentially passionless, monastic, and ascetic” view of Jefferson. (“The Great Jefferson Taboo,” American Heritage, 23, 1972, p. 51) Nor has it disappeared, despite the recent embrace extended to the idea of a Sally-Tom miscegenational relationship. For example, a new “character study” of Jefferson by E. M. Halliday concludes that Jefferson did not succumb to the attractions of prostitutes because he would have considered such contact “reprehensi-ble.” (Understanding Thomas Jefferson, 2001, pp. 16-20)

Not only is there equally persuasive evidence that Jefferson took a quite personal interest in the availability of prostitutes, but also, so far as I can tell, most Jefferson biographers have ignored other evidence on Jefferson’s sexual predilections. During his lifetime he deftly warded off obloquy by confessing to having attempted, as a bachelor, to seduce his best friend’s wife in her home, but offered nothing to refute her claim that he had renewed his efforts during a later visit with his wife to the same place. Lucia C. Stanton, a leading authority on Jefferson, discovered Jefferson’s contemporary reputation for promiscuity among his

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slaves, including a report that he was in the habit of accosting a certain slave washerwoman for sexual favors on his own plantation. (See “The Other End of the Telescope: Jefferson Through the Eyes of His Slaves,” William & Mary Quarterly, 57, 2000, pp. 139-152)

Nevertheless, Ellis thought to support his original “weak libido” conception by citing Hamilton’s observation of Jefferson’s “feminine” temperament—a point quite different from the notion that Jefferson’s “urge to remain oblivious [to the ‘meaning of both sex and slavery’] was considerably stronger than his sexual drive.” (Sphinx, 1997, p. 306) The haphazardness of such attributions of motives and psychodynamics is pointed up by their inconsistency: On the one hand, according to Ellis, Jefferson could have been regularly copulating with Sally before Callender’s exposure, but conscious calculations of political risk would certainly have caused him to desist after 1802. On the other hand, any sexual impulses Jefferson might have felt would have been suppressed by unconscious aversions. Ellis reports arriving at these rather random examples of what he calls “plausible conjecture … in the spirit of responsible speculation” after five years of “mulling over the … evidence.” (p. 305) If the original speculation had really been responsibly anchored in a clear conception of the Jeffersonian personality, however, Ellis would not so readily have veered to an opposite, extreme conclusion in 1998: “A long-standing sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings … is now proven beyond a reasonable doubt.” (Sphinx, 1998, p. 398; repeated in Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, 2000, p. 98) Even the geneticists who made the findings go no farther than to make “modest probabilistic interpretations” (E.A. Foster, et al, Nature, 396, 1999, p. 397), and the limits of the new evidence have been acidly pointed out by Philip Ranlett of Hunter College in the William & Mary Quarterly (57, 2000, p. 728).

Ellis’ revised view of Jefferson’s sexuality is not based on new insight into the processes that shaped the adult politician. In the new edition he remarks, “I have changed my mind on the Sally Question, but not on Jefferson. He emerges … as more of an American Sphinx than ever before, more complicated and inscrutable.” (Sphinx, 1998, p. xx) To him, the lustful post-DNA Jefferson is just as mysterious as the chaste one of 1997. As in the case of many biographers without a clue to the springs of psychodynamic structures, there is no problem in simply re-imagining a Jefferson doing what he was formerly thought incapable of doing.

Little has changed since Fawn Brodie’s 1972 indictment of the near-unanimous denial of the Hemings-Jefferson affair by white Jeffersonian biographers of her day “whose sense of identification with their subject is almost total.” (“The Great Jefferson Taboo,” p. 50) What is different is that the lineaments of subjects considered worthy of identifying with have changed. Historians now put positive valuations on interracial and multicultural contacts, including sexual contacts.

I have recently been asked what I make of the revival of interest in the founders and my answer has been that one would have to see actual numbers to be convinced that “revival” is what it is. Writing on “those who made the revolution and the new republic” has been a growth industry from the very start, beginning with Parson Weems’ hagiographic treatments of George Washington in many editions tailored to suit the changing times. I suspect no decade has been without several best-sellers on the subject and the most recent are not necessarily the best. Navel-gazing and self-congratulation—or muck-raking and finger-pointing—about the “Fathers” has always been an American delight. Depending on their own personal histories and needs, today’s biographers, like yesterday’s, cast their subjects—Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, or John Adams—in a favorable or unfavorable light.

Either way, the Jefferson that today’s historians relate to is a different Jefferson than Dumas Malone’s, or even Merrill Peterson’s, but his treatment by biographers is likely to tell more about them than about how Jefferson got to be the man he became and what kind of a man that was. That is the vocation of the psychobiographer.

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