T A B L E_.T A L K

What stories don't get reported by the mainstream media -- and why. Pontificate on the shortcomings of news coverage in the Media area of Table Talk

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Search BarnesandNoble.com for books about Thomas Jefferson
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R E C E N T L Y

Liberté, Egalité, Versace!
By James Poniewozik
The new fashion media focuses on the frocks populi.
(12/08/98)

Ahoy, mates!
By Susan Lehman
Warring contributors to the Nation magazine bravely set sail together on a Caribbean cruise
(12/04/98)

Game over
By James Poniewozik
Keith Olbermann is bemused as hell and he's not going to take it anymore
(12/01/98)

Democracy on life support
By Steve Erickson
The cynical Starr hearings were to their Watergate precursors as Jack Kevorkian is to Mother Teresa
(11/25/98)

What kind of woman reads Playboy?
By James Poniewozik
After 45 years, your grandfather's skin magazine is trying to be all things to all groins
(11/24/98)

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s e c r e t_.A.m e r i c a

______WHEN THOMAS JEFFERSON DECLARED WE
______HAD THE RIGHT TO "LIFE," HE MEANT
______ONE IMMUNE FROM THE PRYING EYES OF
______THE MEDIA AND THE STATE.

 
BY STEVE ERICKSON

Near the end of the new film "Enemy of the State," Jon Voight says, "Someday the only privacy left will be the one inside your head," and then adds, "Maybe that will be enough." "Enemy of the State" really doesn't have as much on its mind as this sounds; while the blitzkrieg of Tony Scott's direction is well-suited to the obsessive, technological vertigo of his subject, and while the film resolves itself more cleverly and with more wit than most comparable thrillers, it's interesting how -- given that Will Smith is one of our most likable actors and Gene Hackman one of our most reliable -- the two have absolutely no chemistry at all. But for all its hyped-up electronic paranoia, there's a visceral ring-of-truth about the movie's portrayal of the assault on secret America presently waged on any number of fronts, President Clinton's sex life being only the most tiresome.

As it happened, the night after I caught a matinee of "Enemy of the State," "The McLaughlin Group" was taking up the matter of another presidential libido whose mysteries have been laid to rest by a recent, well-publicized DNA test -- except for those who won't let it lay to rest, including the boisterous Mr. McLaughlin. By now the rest of us have moved on from the question of whether Thomas Jefferson really slept with his slave Sally Hemings to what was always the more profound point anyway: why it matters so much to us. Over the decades the main argument Jefferson historians like Dumas Malone have made against the alleged Jefferson-Hemings liaison was that Jefferson simply wasn't the sort of man who would do that sort of thing, even as he should also have been the sort of man who wouldn't have owned slaves in the first place. But since this ownership was never something anyone could dispute, of course, it was long ago excused by the context of the time, while the idea that Jefferson might have actually had with an African-American woman a personal relationship that lasted many years remains, to use McLaughlin's word, a "besmirchment."

Since the recent DNA test that proved the relationship, Joseph Ellis, the author of a fine 1997 book on Jefferson called "American Sphinx," has revised his earlier doubts, as only an intellectually honest historian could do. So it now seems rude to take to task the case he originally made, given that he's taken it to task himself -- but for the sake of making a larger point, we'll do it anyway. Ellis' original skepticism was a more convincing version of the Jefferson never would have done that sort of thing variety, made not on the basis that it was morally incomprehensible given Jefferson's general wonderfulness, an argument Ellis tacitly acknowledged as absurd, but that it was psychologically incomprehensible -- that Jefferson simply wasn't wired to indulge the carnal appetites the Hemings relationship presumably entailed. In fact, a different reading of Jefferson could lead one to believe he was exactly so wired: a highly-repressed man bound by a deathbed promise to his departed wife not to remarry, torn between his obviously irreconcilable populist ideals and aristocratic life, constantly trying to idealize and refine his most basic yearnings. Almost invariably, such determinedly rarefied men harbor darker yearnings inside them somewhere, though whether they ever have the opportunity or nerve to act them out may be a different matter.

The point is that the man who created the open America is also the man who created the secret America, the America where everyone is a state unto himself or herself, absolutely sovereign on the terrain of his or her imagination, including the sexual imagination. Jefferson was the first great American with the first great American secret, a secret that went right to the heart of what America was supposed to be about, as opposed to what it was really about. Assuming the DNA test is conclusive, it's telling that after the Hemings story broke in 1802, while Jefferson was president, he apparently continued the relationship, since a number of other children -- virtually all of whom later insisted Jefferson was their father -- were born to Sally. Even more telling, and the single thing that was always the most compelling evidence the story might be true, was the silence. "Jefferson denied the affair!" an increasingly distraught McLaughlin bellowed at his stupefied audience a week ago; in fact, over the 24 years that the story hounded him, Jefferson is on record as having denied it exactly once, very early on and then in a vaguely Clintonian fashion -- a denial directed less at the rumor itself than at the political foe who spread it. After that, Jefferson said nothing. His daughters by his deceased wife said nothing. The years passed in which nothing was mentioned in all his voluminous papers, papers in which he wrote about anything and everything else under the sun -- nothing in all the letters or correspondence among his family and friends. It became the Great Unmentionable of Jefferson's life.

N E X T+P A G E | A democratic America requires a secret America