Why and When and Whether to Confess

By LANCE MORROW

It was the most aggressively competitive series of confessions since Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like a sinner who does not want to miss any bets, Billie Jean King made the rounds of the major churches and synagogues of press and television last week. She unburdened herself to ABC'S Barbara Walters, the one woman in America officially empowered to hear confessions and grant absolution. She went over the scandal with Rona Barrett. She spent ten hours with an old friend from PEOPLE.

Well, in the words of every high school football coach and that famous felon John Mitchell: When the going gets tough, the tough get going. King was bouncing back from public humiliation better than any similarly poleaxed public figure in a long time. She had slipped only briefly at the start of the whole ridiculous business. When her former secretary Marilyn Barnett for "palimony," a lesbian relationship with King, Billie Jean first responded with a denial.

Then she got very smart, very fast. Her instinct for competitive public relations, as shrewd and sure as her court sense, told her that you only win if you control the game. She knew that the story was shaking loose, and that more denials would only put reporters into a feeding frenzy. She knew that if Barnett had to prove the sapphic connection in court, she could organize a parade of witnesses who would keep the tabloids happy for weeks. So King decided that she herself must manage the stagecraft of her public humiliation. Her parents on one side, her husband Larry on the other wearing an expression of indecipherable calm, she faced a press conference and admitted the lesbian affair; was, she said, a "mistake." The homosexual rights movement may have curled its lip just then. And feminists, if they thought about it, might worry about the almost cynically unliberated way that Larry later took the rap for his wife's affair, saying that it was his long absences on business that drove her into the arms of another for consolation, like a sulking housewife. Never mind. Billie Jean practiced first-class damage control and won the grace-under-pressure award for this month. She managed to transform an ugly and preposterously public embarrassment into something else: an affectingly human little drama about Billie Jean King in trouble.

Perhaps her athlete's instincts told King that when the ghastly truth splits open like a suitcase, one's moves must be fast and sure. Public figures rarely have that aplomb: when someone abruptly turns on the light and catches them, they bunk in astonishment and guilt or reach their palms out desperately to cover the lens of the minicam.

What is the best strategy to adopt when the undignified or even incriminating truth comes out? Reactions are always a matter of personal style and self-possession. The possibilities range from stonewalling ("Never apologize, never explain," as the British classicist Benjamin Jowett said) to full disclosure. Within that range there are as many subtle variations as there are shades of the truth.

Indifference is an impressive but somewhat risky ploy. Rarely do public figures command the easy Gallic disdain of French President Valery Discard d'Estaing. When Le Canard Enchaine reported that Giscard had accepted $250,000 worth of diamonds as gifts from the Central African Republic's butcherous Emperor Bokassa, Giscard's reaction was roughly, "So what?" Of course, the French have a tradition of Non, je ne regrette rien. Across the channel, the Duke of Wellington once displayed something of that spirit when an old mistress (a Frenchwoman) threatened to publish all kinds of lurid details about his grace. "Publish and be damned!" the Iron Duke responded, or words to that effect. Grover Cleveland ("Ma, Ma, where's my pa?/ Gone to the White House--ha ha ha!") also managed a show of imperturbability about an illegitimate child who turned up.

The Fifth Amendment allows citizens to remain silent. But it looks bad. Emanations of a man's guilt, as Freud once put it, "ooze from all his pores." Even the hard, grim stonewall of the Nixon White House eventually crumbled. Richard Nixon, in fact, is a fascinating case study in the psychology of confession. The "Papyrus of Nu" from the 18th dynasty of Egypt records what scholars have come to call the negative confessions. Therein the Egyptian advises the gods of all the crimes he has not committed during his life ("I have not polluted myself... I have not carried away milk from the mouths of children" and so on) and concludes in an ecstasy of self-exoneration: "I am pure. I am pure." During the 1952 campaign, when he was running for Vice President, Nixon was accused of having an improper $18,000 slush fund set up for him by California businessmen. Eisenhower thought seriously of throwing Nixon off the ticket. Nixon responded with the masterfully corny Checkers speech, in which he pharaonically denied wrongdoing and told the nation about his wife's "respectable Republican cloth coat" and his daughters' pet dog. It worked; the country loved it; Ike kept him. Years later, his painful writhings during Watergate were ultimately unavailing, but there was some echo of the Papyrus of Nu in Nixon's "I am not a crook!"

After Chappaquiddick, in 1969, Edward Kennedy practiced what might be called the pre-emptive deflective confession. The idea was to assume the guilt in one large abstract gulp in order to silence any further specific inquiries. It did not work well for Kennedy. He spent a full week in a fortress of silence while the reassembled talents of Camelot labored over a text for him. Then he went on national television to take the responsibility of a young woman's death unto himself but also, simultaneously, to leave himself in a state of dazed blamelessness. His biggest mistake--all penitents beware--was to soak the speech in a disagreeable self-pity.

But almost everyone is mortal and clumsy when scandal hits him on the blind side. In the past few years an interesting though not always persuasive variation has become popular with U.S. Congressmen: the alcoholic-deflective approach. Actually, it amounts to a plea of temporary insanity. Arkansas' Wilbur Mills began behaving strangely in public with an exotic dancer called the Argentine Firecracker. When he recovered himself for a moment, he told his constituents it all came from drinking champagne with foreigners. But then he landed with the Fire cracker at Washington's Tidal Basin in the middle of the night. Mills got hold of himself, acknowledged to himself and everyone else that he was an alcoholic, and sought treatment.

In some peculiar way, alcohol has become a convenient way to mitigate public embarrassments. Betty Ford, Joan Kennedy, Billy Carter and others have reported that their unsteady, occasionally weird behavior resulted from drinking. That sort of confession can be exemplary and thus publicly useful. But in others it can also be opportunistic. Maryland's conservative Congressman Robert Bauman pleaded not guilty to making homosexual advances to a 16-year-old boy; Bauman, with his stricken wife standing behind him -- her eyes glazed with that I-am-not-here-I-am-actually-in-Chicago look -- told a press conference that booze made him do it. Then in the formulation of media penance, in which a celebrity hears his own confession before lights and cameras and solemnly grants himself absolution, Bauman an nounced, "I do not have to elaborate. I have confessed my wrong doings to my God." If God has the case under advisement, who are we to pursue it?

Often it is not the act itself but the denial, the coverup, that wrecks a reputation. A suspicion will always linger that if Nixon and his men had not tried to cover up, his presidency would have survived; if only he had got up and confessed some thing. If only he had made what the Catholic Church calls a sincere act of contrition. It was not so much John Profumo's recreation with Christine Keeler that finished him as Britain's State Secretary for War. It was the way he lied about it.

Some people, of course, go to the other extreme and pro duce detailed confessions even when nobody asked them. The nation surely had no "need to know," as the White House says, but Jimmy Carter confessed to Playboy in 1976 that he had felt lust in his heart for women other than his wife. That robust literary charlatan Frank Harris went to the trouble of inventing all kinds of elaborate sexual adventures to confess; with both Carter and Harris, confession shaded into exhibitionism.

For sheer gratuitous detail in confession, for self-revelation that slips across the border into self-abasement, few can compete with former South Carolina Congressman John W. Jenrette Jr. and his wife Rita. Charged with taking bribes in the Abscam case, Jenrette denied his guilt. But then his life and marriage began to unravel. The Jenrettes went in for full public disclosure -- and then some. Rita appeared in a spread of nude photographs for Playboy. She revealed how the Jenrettes, the most fun couple in town, had copulated on the steps of the U.S. Capitol one night. It was ultimately sad, a spectacle of self-destruction that seemed almost ceremonial, like a samorai's hara-kiri after a public shame.

In the somewhat sleazy pathology of their case, the Jenrettes forgot the mam purpose of confession for public figures: to get the truth out, to have the embarrassment aired and cleared away as soon as possible, and then to begin repairs on one's dignity. Once privacy has been invaded, confession is very often the only means to control the way that the truth emerges, to script and stage-manage it.

But as Roman priests and Viennese psychoanalysts know, confession is also good for the soul. It purifies the conscience, discharges guilt and enables new beginnings. Psychiatrist Theodor Reik explained the clinical mechanics this way: "To suffer the anxiety of confession and the act of confession, which itself is felt to be painful, is that partial gratification of the need for punishment which we claim for the confession." Most confessions are privately made -- to friends, priests, bartenders, spouses, psychiatrists. When they are publicly done, the penitent must pay the price of being a temporary entertainment to the world; that is the punishment, the penance of indignity. But all confession is a drama of accounting, a settling of disturbances, a way of making peace. Sometimes, as with Billie Jean King, it implies an odd and sidelong kind of redemption and even a curious assertion of our community with one another.

--By Lance Morrow

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