Editor's Letter

The Pirates of Penance

In 1963, John Profumo, Harold MacmilIan's minister of war, was caught having an affair with Christine Keeler, a highticket call girl who also happened to be seeing a Soviet spy at the time. Profumo resigned his Cabinet post, disappeared from public life, and spent the next 30 years working with the poor in London's desolate East End. Flash forward a moral millennium. Dick Morris gets caught with a prostitute, is discovered to have a mistress and an illegitimate child, and still has managed to find the time to betray the president's confidence by keeping a secret diary throughout the campaign for a book to come out shortly after the election. He disappears for about, oh, three seconds, and ends the week with a $2.5 million book contract and all sorts of interesting lunch invitations. "The story of Dick Morris's fall from grace has a comic aspect," says V.F. contributing editor Marjorie Williams. "It is almost a parody of current social mores."

Williams was already working on a Morris profile when the Star magazine revelations of his dalliance made the front page of the New York Post, and so she was somewhat less surprised than the rest of us that the president's chief campaign adviser was such an unprincipled lowlife. In fact, her reporting on Morris and his relationship with Clinton— which has spanned most of the president's political life—makes clear that both the scandal and its aftermath were the logical conclusions to "a mutual tango of betrayal." Williams has profiled other Clinton advisers for Vanity Fair—Vernon Jordan and George Stephanopoulos—and each article has done double duty, first as a portrait of her subject and then as a mirror of the president he served. The Morris who emerges in Williams's report this month, "Day of the Jackals," on page 64, is a political idiot savant, utterly amoral, and blindly arrogant. The Clinton he reflects is a president trapped in indecision and reaching for someone to allow him to make the expedient choices. It's a tough call as to which is the less attractive picture.

Two weeks after Morris's book contract was announced, the papers were filled with the obituaries of another White House casualty. Spiro Agnew, who resigned from the Nixon administration one step ahead of impeachment in 1973, disappeared, like Profumo, from public life. It is a sorry day when an American political figure is held up to the ghost of the late vice president, and found wanting.