For weeks, Australian politics has been dominated by one of the silliest beat-ups imaginable: a political leader, decades ago, went to a party dressed in “offensive” costume. The leader in question is NSW premier Dominic Perrottet, whose 21st birthday party was themed on “Heroes and Villains”. Perrottet dressed as a Nazi.
Cue mass pearl-clutching from media-political left. Never mind that leftist darling Justin Trudeau dressed in blackface on multiple occasions. Nor that, at the time of Dom’s Party, in the early 2000s, deliberately offensive humour was at a peak, whether from South Park, Family Guy, or painful, tax-hoovering wokesters The Chaser, who variously crashed international events dressed as Osama bin Laden (that one was funny) or mocked terminally-ill children (not very funny).
But Perrottet has made the even more unpardonable sin of being something resembling an actual conservative in the modern Liberal party. Naturally, nothing less than his public decapitation will satisfy the baying left mob.
Which leads to the question: should politicians’ public careers live or die by their private conduct?
For Plutarch, it was clear: a public figure “must have his own house in good order who undertakes to order the affairs of his friends and the public,” for “ill-doings on the part of husbands to their wives” must inevitably detract from their public leadership. Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, was rather more sanguine: on being informed that a leading general was a drinker, he retorted, “Find out what brand of whisky he drinks and give it to all my generals!”
The answer surely lies somewhere in between. Because if history teaches us anything, it’s that some of the greatest men of history were decidedly flawed, to say the least, in their private affairs.
With the unveiling of a widely-derided monument to Martin Luther King Jr in Boston recently, it is worth remembering that King was not the saint many would have us believe.
January 1964. The historic Willard Hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue, just east of the White House. A group of men, including some ministers, gather in a room with young female parishioners. They discuss which of the women would be suitable for various sex acts, each more debased than the last. When one of the girls raises her voice in disapproval at the talk, a Baptist minister forcibly rapes her as another minister of the gospel “looked on, laughed and offered advice.”
The man who laughed was Martin Luther King Jr., according to author and historian David Garrow. Nine months after that alleged rape, on October 14, 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Garrow is no curmudgeonly right-wing hater: he’s a democratic socialist, Berniebro, and writer for publications including the New York Times. He won a Pulitzer for his 1987 biography of MLK. His 2019 book on King, though, has been hurriedly consigned to the Memory Hole.
In 2019, the historian published a discovery that rocked the foundations of the shrine he had helped build for King. Garrow found never-before-seen evidence of King’s extensive extramarital affairs with dozens of women and his presence in a hotel room when one of King’s colleagues, a Baptist minister, allegedly raped a parishioner as the civil rights leader “looked on, laughed and offered advice.”
Suddenly, the right-on media didn’t want to know Garrow. The Atlantic, Washington Post, Guardian and NYT all rejected an article based on the findings of his book.
There is no doubt worse to come to light yet. In 1977, all FBI electronic surveillance material on King was handed over to the National Archives and placed under a 50-year seal. That gag order expires on January 31, 2027. At which point, Garrow believes, “a painful historical reckoning concerning King’s personal conduct seems inevitable.”
In the meantime, we have the word of some of the as many as 40 women involved in free or paid liaisons with King.
One traumatized prostitute told investigators that King subjected her to “the worst orgy I’ve ever gone through.”
Contra
Does this invalidate the Civil Rights movement? Of course not.
And Dominic Perrottet’s bad-taste fancy-dress from two decades ago doesn’t invalidate his premiership, either.
