August 30, 2007
Larry Craig’s Antecedents III Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:00 PM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for bringing up the Walter Jenkins case, in which one of President Johnson’s closest associates was arrested for disorderly conduct in a restroom in October 1964. There’s an interesting Time magazine article from that month, available here, that addresses the incident in some detail. The article is interesting not so much for its analysis of the Jenkins scandal as for its illustration of mainstream concerns about homosexuality in 1964. One of Time’s conclusions is that Jenkins, as a man of indeterminate sexual orientation, may have been a security risk. “Walter Jenkins could at any time have laid his hands on the most closely guarded secrets of the U.S., including the workings of the most advanced nuclear weapons,” the article observes. “The Jenkins case raised new doubts about the effectiveness of U.S. security agencies. Are the FBI and the Secret Service, recently rebuked by the Warren Commission for their sloppy work before the Kennedy assassination, once again guilty of grave inefficiency?” Journalists at Time were not the only observers who raised alarming questions about Jenkins’s trustworthiness. Mr. Gordon is right that Barry Goldwater conducted himself admirably in the aftermath of Jenkins’s arrest and chose not to make it a campaign issue. Goldwater’s running mate, William Miller of New York, was less forbearing. He told a group of Chicago businessmen: “If this type of man [Jenkins] had information vital to our survival, it could be compromised very quickly and very dangerously.” Miller’s line of thinking, which held that non-heterosexuals were more likely to betray the United States or handle its secrets carelessly, was not unusual at the time. But the attempt to make Jenkins’s indiscretion a campaign issue in this way was disgraceful all the same. There’s an editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times that compares Larry Craig’s scandal to Jenkins’s and concludes that men like Senator Craig are stuck in a less tolerant time. There’s been progress in the last several decades, David Ehrenstein writes, and “it’s up to the I’m-not-gay(s) to discover the real freedoms fought for and won by the people they so fiercely claim they’re not.” This is a good point, but one might also contrast Jenkins and Craig and draw some more discouraging conclusions. In 1964, Jenkins was called a security threat by members of the political establishment. Today, similar political actors are condemning Larry Craig as merely “disgusting” (see here and here). I guess this is a kind of progress, but it’s certainly not as much progress as one might have hoped for in 43 years.
|
