unfortunately the problem with Kennedy was not so much that he did not eventually admit his problems – and to be fair he didn’t do really bad stuff like seriously attack his partner or crash his car and injure others, but it was more the fact that he was not able to regain an acceptable level of performance in the required timescale.
He missed several important political debates because of his drinking and initially claimed this was due to other illnesses.
In any other profession this wouldn’t be acceptable, and politics demands the “best of the best” – after all, these people consider themselves fit to lead us and to decide how we should live our lives..
There is, whether we like it or not and unstoppable social trend towards “social responsibility” on both left and right of the political spectrum where everyone must judge for themselves how what they do affects others – or expect the state or their peers to make the judgement for them.
Churchill did indeed drink a fair amount; and was also propped up on (legally prescribed and administered) amphetamines; but I don’t think you can apply peacetime standards to a wartime leader (a real war we needed to fight as well, not one caused by our own greed like todays wars..)
He did do some strange things – but many were initially harmless. He made pets of all the animals at chartwell (including a sheep which he let in the house!) and once rose at 05:00 and wandered the housein his dressing gown –
Uunsurprisingly, his five pet cats all mewed at him for food – he gave the cats a lecture on shortages and how they could only have skimmed milk and no cream! The book in which I read this also mentions his drinking and drug taking habits – OTOH with that much amphet inside him I can’t blame him for drinking, the paranoia of war would have really messed with his mind.
This is an amusing and cute story to offset the horrors of war – but towards the end of Churchills life, he did indeed come out with some deplorable ideas; some of them as bad as Hitler.
As a Conservative he was a strong believer in the class system, and simply believed that lower class males should be sterilsed to prevent them breeding too much (many of the same generation who actually won that war :rant:) and was advocating ethnic cleansing of natives who did not want their countries taken over by the Empire. By that time, thankfully, him and his party were voted out of office.
Politics and power screw people up; its just that the timescales differ (why else do countries have regular elections and in some cases limits on how long an individual can stay in power?) Its a shame that Kennedy wrecked his potential before he had a chance to prove it; but he was judged by the same social norms that he have judged us by…
A worse scenario would have been him as a future PM in a Lib-Dem /Tory coalition, rolling back all the extended hours licensing and clamping down on alcohol and drugs – using his (and David Camerons) ‘personal experience’ as an excuse for doing so.
