Take Abraham Lincoln. He, too, was the subject of a book arguing that he had male lovers. James Buchanan, America’s only bachelor president, has been the target of similar chatter since the 1850s. Yet there is almost no way to prove — or disprove — alleged intimacies from so long ago.
Then there is J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary FBI director, who has been described as having attended orgies with teenage boys while wearing a red skirt, a black feather boa, lace stockings, high heels, a black curly wig, makeup and false eyelashes. (Summers, the author who was Fulsom’s source that Nixon pal Rebozo was gay, also dug up this far-fetched tale.)
Although the Hoover-in-drag rumor has been widely discredited, it has nonetheless entered popular folklore — poetic retribution against the homophobic G-man whose sex-filled dossiers terrorized Washington for half a century. Even the sympathetic Clint Eastwood incorporated a sanitized version of this yarn in his recent “J. Edgar” biopic.
Film directors, publishers and writers produce such stories because they sell, often handsomely. And the public craves them because they are entertaining and help people feel better about their own messy lives.
Gossip — whether over a neighbor’s picket fence, in books and movies, or online — helps define social norms as we tut-tut about what behavior is acceptable and what is out of bounds. Rumor-mongering even performs an important leveling function in a democratic society, giving the lowliest of citizens the subversive power to sully even the most exalted reputations.
Conspiracy theories often fuel pathographies. The Kennedy family alone has generated a cottage industry of authors, screenwriters and producers peddling fiction as history. Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been devoted to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. (In his new book, Fulsom recycles an outlandish rumor that Nixon conspired with the mafia to have JFK killed.) Other tracts have linked the Kennedys to Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, which some writers claim was actually murder by poisoned enema.
It’s almost impossible to refute such tales. After all, contradictory testimony can easily be dismissed as part of the conspirators’ diabolical cover-up. No telltale bullet casings recovered from the grassy knoll in Dallas? Well, that must be because the second gunman removed every scrap of evidence as part of the nefarious cabal.
Still, conspiracy theories, like pathographies, serve a purpose. Big events seem to demand big explanations, real or imagined. Conspiracy theories offer coherent causes for complicated and scary incidents; they reassure that life isn’t random and chaotic but planned by larger forces. They supply enemies to hate.
Most of all, as New York Times columnist Gail Collins points out in her book “Scorpion Tongues,” gossip — conspiratorial or otherwise — reflects what is troubling our culture at the moment: from alcohol or racial mixing to immigration or gender roles. It is no accident that the recent frenzy of historical gay “outings” — whether of Lincoln or Hoover or Nixon — is taking place when homosexuality has come out of the closet and same-sex marriage has become a prominent part of the legislative agenda in many places.
Historical revisionism does have its place. New facts — such as DNA evidence strongly suggesting that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings — can crucially change our understanding of events. “Every generation of historians has its distinctive worries about the present,” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. observed in 1986, “and consequently its distinctive demands on the past.”
The problem comes when revisionism is oblivious to facts, when profiteering trumps proof. Then, this kind of history resembles pornography, exciting and titillating, but debasing to the audience and subject alike.
Even Richard Nixon deserves better than that. He may have been queer, but not that kind of queer.
outlook@washpost.com
Mark Feldstein, the Richard Eaton professor of broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland, is the author of “Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture.”
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