by Peggy Noonan
The affair lasted a few months and was over by 1962. But there was a letter. And there were rumors. They surfaced in Parliament, where the Labour Party smelled blood.
When Profumo was caught, he panicked—and lied. That’s what did him in. And his lie was emphatic: He’d bring libel charges if the allegations were repeated outside the House.
Nearby, as he spoke, sat Harold Macmillan, glumly hoping or believing in his minister’s innocence. When Profumo, on the urging of his wife, came clean, Macmillan was left looking like a doddering Tory fool, a co-conspirator in a cover-up, or at least a bungler of a major national-security question. Mortally wounded, he considered resigning. His government collapsed a year later.
Profumo—humiliated on every front page as an adulterer, a liar, a man of such poor judgment and irresponsibility that he mindlessly cavorted with enemy spies—was finished. Alistair Horne, in his biography of Macmillan, wrote of Profumo after the scandal as a “wretched” figure, “disgraced and stripped of all public dignities.”
Everyone hoped he’d disappear. He did.
Then, three years later, he declared himself rehabilitated. In the midst of a classic Fleet Street scrum—“Do you still see whores?” demanded a hack from the Sun—Profumo announced he’d deepened and matured and was standing for Parliament “to serve the public.” Of course, he said, “It all depends on the voters, whether they can be forgiving. It’s all in their hands. I throw my candidacy on their mercy.”
Well, people didn’t want to think they were unmerciful. Profumo won in a landslide, worked his way up to party chief and 12 years later ran for prime minister, his past quite forgotten, expunged, by his mounting triumphs.
Wait—that’s not what happened. Nothing like that happened! It’s the opposite of what happened.
Because Profumo believed in remorse of conscience—because he actually had a conscience—he could absorb what happened and let it change him however it would. In a way what he believed in was reality. He’d done something he thought terrible—to his country, to his friends, to strangers who had to explain the headlines about him to their children.
He never knew political power again. He never asked for it. He did something altogether more confounding.
He did the hardest thing for a political figure. He really went away. He went to a place that helped the poor, a rundown settlement house called Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. There he did social work—actually the scut work of social work, washing dishes and cleaning toilets. He visited prisons for the criminally insane, helped with housing for the poor and worker education.
And it wasn’t for show, wasn’t a step on the way to political redemption. He worked at Toynbee for 40 years.
He didn’t give interviews, never wrote a book, didn’t go on TV. Alistair Horne: “Profumo… spent the rest of his life admirably dedicated to valuable good works, most loyally supported by his wife. At regular intervals, some journalist writing ‘in the public interest’ would rake up the old story to plague the ruined man and cause him renewed suffering. His haunted, unsmiling face was a living epitaph to the ‘Swinging Sixties.’”
In November 2003, to mark the 40th anniversary of his work, Profumo gave an interview to an old friend. “Jack,” said W. F. Deedes, “what have you learnt from this place?” After a pause for thought, Profumo said: “Humility.”
He was president of Toynbee by then, respected, but nothing quite said what needed saying like what happened at Margaret Thatcher’s 70th birthday party, in 1995. To show their countrymen what he’d done—and what they thought of what he’d done—they invited him, walked him through and put him in a particular place. They seated him next to the queen. People wonder about the purpose of establishments. That is the purpose of establishments.
When he died in 2006, at 91, the reliably ironic Daily Telegraph wore its heart on its sleeve. “No one in public life ever did more to atone for his sins; no one behaved with more silent dignity as his name was repeatedly dragged through the mud; and few ended their lives as loved and revered by those who knew him.”
* * *
So what are we saying? You know.
We’re saying the answer to the politician’s question, “What is the optimum moment at which to come back from a big sex scandal, and how do I do it?” is this:
“You are asking the wrong question.”
The right questions would go something like: “What can I do to stop being greedy for power, attention and adulation? How can I come to understand that the question is not the public’s capacity to forgive but my own capacity to exercise sound judgment and regard for others?
“How can I stop being a manipulator of public emotions and become the kind of person who generates headlines that parents are relieved—grateful—to explain to their children?”
And of course the answer is: You can do what John Profumo did. You can go away. You can do something good. You can help women instead of degrading them, help your culture and your city instead of degrading them.
You can become a man.
“Oh Wow!”
The Wall Street Journal: December 24, 2011
The great words of the year? “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”
They are the last words of Steve Jobs, reported by his sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, who was at his bedside. In her eulogy, a version of which was published in the New York Times, she spoke of how he looked at his children “as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.” He’d said goodbye to her, told her of his sorrow that they wouldn’t be able to be old together, “that he was going to a better place.” In his final hours his breathing was deep, uneven, as if he were climbing.
“Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them. Steve’s final words were: ‘OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.’”
The caps are Simpson’s, and if she meant to impart a sense of wonder and mystery she succeeded. “Oh wow” is not a bad way to express the bigness, power and force of life, and death. And of love, by which he was literally surrounded.
I wondered, too, after reading the eulogy, if I was right to infer that Jobs saw something, and if so, what did he see? What happened there that he looked away from his family and expressed what sounds like awe? I thought of a story told by a friend, whose grown son had died, at home, in hospice care. The family was ringed around his bed. As Robert breathed his last, an infant in the room let out a great baby laugh as if he saw something joyous, wonderful, and gestured toward the area above Robert’s head. The infant’s mother, startled, moved to shush him but my friend, her mother, said no, maybe he’s just reacting to… something only babies see.
Anyway, I sent Ms. Simpson’s eulogy to a number of people and spoke to some of them, and they all had two things in common in terms of their reaction. They’d get a faraway look, and think. And if they had a thought to share, they did it with modesty. No one said, “I think I can guess what he saw,” “I know who he saw,” or “Believe me, if he saw anything it was the product of the last, disordered sparks of misfiring neurons.”
They were always modest, reflective. One just said, “Wow.”
Modesty when contemplating death is a good thing.
When words leave people silent and thinking, they are powerful words. Steve Jobs’ last words were the best thing said in 2011.
* * *
The unexpected cinematic gift of the year? “The Iron Lady,” the movie about Margaret Thatcher, starring Meryl Streep, that’s opening in this country on Dec. 30.
When words leave people yapping and not thinking they are often political words, but there isn’t much that is, really, political about this film. Its makers don’t seem that interested in the development of character, thought they had seized on a great one, and were right. It’s a well-meaning and at times deeply moving meditation on old age and the enduring nature of love. It is good, not great, and contains within it a masterpiece.
&nb
sp; “The Iron Lady” locates class as an important and largely ignored element of Mrs. Thatcher’s struggle. The leftist intelligentsia of her day, which claimed loyalty to and identification with the poor and marginalized, was shot through with snobs and snobbery. Underneath their egalitarian chatter was (and to some degree still is) a hidden, hungry admiration for and desire to be associated with the well named and well connected. The top of the right, the Tories, who said they stood for tradition, the rights of the oppressed middle and the greatness of England, was heavily populated by a more familiar kind of snob, those who took more overt pleasure in their titles and pedigree, and wealth. They were not eager for change.
Both left and right looked down on women, especially styleless grinds and grocers’ daughters who thought they were the equal of the boys. The movie suggests Mrs. Thatcher’s defiance of the snobs while depicting her defeat of the snobs.
Mrs. Thatcher’s political views are never granted any sympathetic legitimacy, though the movie subtly allows there may have been some legitimacy. Perhaps the great flaw is that it has too great a fear of exactly locating her greatness, and the meaning of her greatness. This is not so much a political as an aesthetic flaw: In the classic movies about Elizabeth I, for instance, you knew why you were watching the movie, why she was its subject and how she changed history.
And yes, the film descends at the end to a bit of the “Devil Wears Prada,” as the prime minister berates her cabinet. I’ve actually seen her upbraid people. It was softer and sweeter and all the more cutting for that.
The masterpiece is Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Mrs. Thatcher, which is not so much a portrayal as an inhabitation. It doesn’t do justice to say Ms. Streep talks like her, looks like her, catches some of her spirit, though those things are true. It’s something deeper than that, something better and more important. She tried to be Margaret Thatcher, and there’s a real tribute in that.
* * *
The left in America has largely thrown in the towel on Ronald Reagan, but in Britain Thatcher-hatred remains fresh. Why?
Because she was a woman. Because women in politics are always by definition seen as presumptuous: They presume to lead men. When they are as bright as the men they’re disliked by the men, and when they’re brighter and more serious they’re hated. Mrs. Thatcher’s very presence was an insult to the left because it undermined the left’s insistence that only leftism and its protection of the weak and disadvantaged would allow women to rise. She rose without them while opposing what they stood for. On the other hand, some of the Tory men around her had been smacked on the head by her purse often enough to wish for revenge. What better revenge than to fail to fully stand up for her to posterity?
And so her difficult position. But one senses that is changing.
* * *
Final note. We are at a point in our culture when we actually have to pull for grown-up movies, when we must try to encourage them and laud them when they come by. David Lean wouldn’t be allowed to make movies today, John Ford would be forced to turn John Wayne into a 30-something failure-to-launch hipster whose big moment is missing the toilet in the vomit scene in “Hangover Ten.” Our movie culture has descended into immaturity, deep and inhuman violence, a pervasive and flattened sexuality. It is an embarrassment.
In Iraq this year I asked an Iraqi military officer doing joint training at an American base what was the big thing he’d come to believe about Americans in the years they’d been there. He thought. “You are a better people than your movies say.” He had judged us by our exports. He had seen the low slag heap of our culture and assumed it was a true expression of who we are.
And so he’d assumed we were disgusting.
Credit, then, to those who make movies for grown-ups. I end with words I never expected to say: “Thank you, Harvey Weinstein. WELL DONE.”
The Royal Wedding
CBS News: July 28, 1981
Reporting now from St. Paul’s Cathedral—Christopher Wren’s masterpiece in the heart of London. At the Royal Wedding tomorrow Prince Charles and Lady Diana will stand before the altar of this great church. But there’s a story about what’s behind the altar. It’s the American War Memorial, a little place with a stained glass window that lets in the light. There’s a little area where you can kneel and pray. And there is a book, a big book. It contains the names of the 28,000 American men and women who served in Britain and died in World War II. And each day in this cathedral, they turn a page.
An American in London is continually struck by the ties that bind. The ties of bloodlines (Lady Diana is said to have 200 American ancestors, including George Washington) and ties of blood (those names in the book at St. Paul’s, where each day they turn a page). It is a romantic notion, but you could say that for centuries America and Britain have been giving each other some of their best. Winston Churchill’s mother was Jennie Jerome of Brooklyn, U.S.A. And when John Kennedy made Churchill an honorary U.S. citizen, the old man was moved to tears. Kennedy’s father, of course, was a U.S. Ambassador here. His son Joe died in World War II. And his name is in the book at St. Paul’s, where each day they turn a page.
Our connections are not always sad, of course. You remember Lady Nancy Astor, the American who married a title and became a Member of Parliament. She’s the one who married a title and became a Member of Parliament. She’s the one who had that famous exchange with Churchill—“Sir, if you were my husband I’d put poison in your coffee!”—“Madame,” said Churchill, “if you were my wife I would drink it!” Writers have been claiming that line as their own for years. England and America have been claiming each other’s writers for years.
Take a walk through Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey and you’ll see a bust of Longfellow. Near him is T. S. Eliot, born and bred in Missouri, educated at Harvard. On his tombstone it says “The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” Down the aisle from Poet’s Corner there’s a memorial to the civilians who died in World War II, and dominating that little corner is a memorial to the 32nd President of the United States. It says “Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1882–1945. A faithful friend of freedom and of Britain.”
There is another friend of Britain we think of when we’re in London. There is no statue to Ed Murrow here, no plaque in the West End, no little marker on a rooftop somewhere. But it was Murrow more than anyone else who brought the Battle of Britain home to the American people, and in a special way. When he wanted to show how the British could take it he didn’t say they were brave; he put a microphone on the sidewalk during an air raid so you could hear the quiet pat of footsteps as Londoners walked calmly to the Underground…
You can’t think of the things America and Britain gave each other without coming up against those clean and simple scripts that began “This is London.” When you heard that, you knew something was coming, something was going to be said. It’s a preface that lives in the language these two countries share, and in this profession. Which is why we think of it now and then, as each day we turn a page.
CHAPTER 4
America, America
I suppose America is the central intellectual subject of my life and I’m not wholly sure why beyond the obvious—if you know its history, with all its imperfections, why would you not love it and care about it? When I was a child I absorbed from my great-aunt, Jane Jane, a sense of love for this place she’d come to, that had rescued her from want and given her a job and many of the delights of life. When I was a young woman America was under siege and criticism—Vietnam, etc.—and I felt protective. That feeling of protectiveness accompanied me the rest of my life. This is a great project we’re in.
* * *
“Is That Allowed?” “It Is Here.”
The Wall Street Journal: July 7, 2012
There’s something Haley Barbour reminded me of called the Gate Rule. The former Mississippi governor said it’s the first thing you should think of when you think about immigration. People are either lined u
p at the gate trying to get out of a country, or lined up trying to get in.
It says something about the health of a nation when they’re lined up to get in, as they are, still, with America. It says, of course, that compared with a lot of the rest of the world, America’s economy isn’t in such bad shape. But it says more than that. People don’t want to come to a place when they know they’ll be treated badly. They don’t want to call your home their home unless they know you’ll make room for them in more than economic ways.
And so this July 4, a small tribute to American friendliness, openness and lack of—what to call it? The old hatreds. They dissipate here. In Ireland, Catholics and Protestants could be at each other’s throats for centuries, but the minute they moved here, they were in the Kiwanis Club together. The Mideast is a cauldron, but when its residents move here, they wind up on the same PTA committee. It sounds sentimental, but this is part of the magic of America, and the world still knows it even if we, in our arguments, especially about immigration, forget.
So, three stories of American friendliness, openness and lack of the old hatreds.
There was a teenager who came here with his parents and younger brother. They arrived in New York and got an apartment on 181st Street and Broadway. He spoke little English but went right into public school. The family needed money, so when he was 16, he transferred to night school and got a day job at a shaving-brush factory. He wore big, heavy rubber gloves and squeezed bleaching acid out of the bristles. Soon he went part-time to City College, and then he entered the U.S. Army.
This is a classic immigrant story. It could be about anyone. But the teenager went on to become an American secretary of state, and his name is Henry Kissinger. Here is another part of the story that is classic: how Americans treated him. The workers at the factory were older than he, mostly Italian American, some second generation. They wanted to help make him part of things, so they started taking him to baseball games. “It was the summer of 1939… I didn’t know anything about baseball,” he remembered this week. Now here he was in the roaring stands at Yankee Stadium.