Power: The Ultimate Aphrodisiac. (Political booknotes: naked ambition).

POWER:
The Ultimate Aphrodisiac
by Dr. Ruth Westheimer
and Dr. Steven Kaplan
Madison Books, $22.05

FOR THOSE TOO YOUNG TO remember, the prime of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the tiny, genial Germanic psychosexual therapist occurred in the 1980s, when she rose to celebrity advocating the position that sex is good. How and why, after several millennia of nearly universal human copulation, this position came to be regarded as noteworthy would itself seem to be an appropriate subject for a book. Suffice it to say that with her pixieish charm and her seemingly unique ability to speak plainly about commonplace, everyday mammalian functions (a talent rendered apparently even more exotic by her grandmotherly age), she presented sex as something sweet and fun. This was a winning approach during a decade when, between cocaine, AIDS, movies like Fatal Attraction, and the grunt-filled grindings available on the newly opened home-video porn market, sex was generally seen as something dark and dangerous. Dr. Ruth was able to position herself as a name brand.

For name brands to exist, of course, they need to be affixed to products; otherwise, they go a-glimmering. Dr. Ruth's latest product is a book called Power: The Ultimate Aphrodisiac, written with Dr. Steven Kaplan, who teaches at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. They have collaborated before, though one can only speculate about their relative contributions; if it's any indication, Dr. Steve's name appears on the cover in a rather smaller typeface. The book is an eclectic survey of the stories of prominent political figures throughout human history, knit together with observations on the role that different mating habits had on the acquisition and exercise of power. Dr. Ruth meanders painlessly, but not captivatingly, through rulers, such as Jefferson, FDR, Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great, and extra-political elites, like Madame de Pompadour, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and Yang Guifei, a concubine to an eighth-century Chinese emperor.

All this range is not the same thing as breadth, however; the studies seem like solitary billboards along a road in big, flat Kansas. If you don't know much about the people or circumstances she's writing about, this book may be most useful in inspiring you to seek out lengthier treatments. If you do know something about the people she writes about, you realize she has missed many details and subtleties, barely scratching the surface of some of her subjects. It seems to be the kind of book that could be appreciated best by, say, an old ladies' reading group located someplace where they never get The National Enquirer or even Time magazine, or perhaps by a very bookish 11-year-old whose hormones are beginning to percolate.

For example--to take only the cases where I felt up on the reading--Dr. Ruth looks at the relationship between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. She writes that Franklin not only had live-in girlfriends who worked for him as secretaries. She also notes that Eleanor had not only girlfriends, but a boyfriend of sorts, her bodyguard Earl Miller, with whom she had an intimate, romantic, and perhaps sexual relationship. She ignores the juicy detail that Miller had an affair with one of Franklin's girlfriends, Missy LeHand. This suggests the merry image of the nights when the hallways of the White House were filled with people in their nighties and PJs, scampering (or rolling) from room to room with the doors slamming behind them as though in a French farce. Of course, this omission doesn't detract from her larger point--that many of our proudest moments as a nation were presided over by people who shared unusual domestic arrangements. But this is not exactly breaking news.

In a similar way, Dr. Ruth manages to cover the by-now well-masticated highlights of JFK's sex life. (Let's see: Marilyn, check; Jayne Mansfield, check; Fiddle and Faddle, check ...) But she is vague in what she concludes about his behavior. "It should be noted," she writes, "that whatever Kennedy's failings may have been on a personal level, there is little indication that they were reflected in the way he formulated policy or conducted his administration." Then she immediately argues that they did have a bearing, correctly pointing out that Kennedy "was unable to replace J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI for fear that Hoover might retaliate by releasing embarrassing information" and that his relationship with Judith Campbell involved him with organized crime. Well, yeah! And what were the implications of that? She does not mention that shortly after Hoover helped put the kibosh on a Senate hearing in which it may have been revealed that Kennedy had slept with a prostitute who had previously worked for the head of East German intelligence--an American Profumo Affair, except bigger--Bobby Kennedy signed off on Hoover's request to bug Martin Luther King, Jr.'s bedroom activities. Dr. Ruth ends up saying revelations about Kennedy's behavior led to "an erosion of trust and the development of a deep cynicism about politics and politicians." She doesn't say it led him to abuse power.

But the real problem with this book is not its superficiality; it's Dr. Ruth's inexplicable decision not to discuss anyone living. "In an era of `kiss-and-tell memoirs', I thought it was about time for a `kiss-and-reflect' approach," she writes. Fine. It's not like I'm longing to keep recapping the pathetic and farcical images of the Lewinsky saga. But let's be real. In the last quarter century (by unofficial count), there have been at least 38 Washington sex scandals, ranging from Wilbur Mills and the Argentine Bombshell and Wayne Hays and the doxy on his payroll, to Gary Hart and Monkey Business, Barney Frank and his entrepreneurial boyfriend, Chuck Robb and his backrubs, Clarence Thomas and Long Dong Silver, to the vaporization of Gary Condit. Clearly, we as a people have an abiding interest in their stories, even though they always play out in the same predictable way: Some guy in Washington gets caught in the act of fulfilling his urges, and the media finds some conveniently larger question--abuse of the government payroll, a threat to national security, sexual harassment, recklessness, fitness to serve--to frame the discussion. At that point, we beat the guy like an old rug.

It would have been more interesting to hear Dr. Ruth, a fairly canny observer of human sexuality and cultural norms, discuss why we are (or act) shocked and surprised and treat sex (or pretend to treat it) as if it's not simply part of the variety of human behavior. Her all-too-brief comments on the theme are provocative. She argues that while we were once content to be led by our superiors, we now expect leaders who are human and approachable. Knowing about their sex lives, she says, renders them about as basically human as you can get. "Sometimes bringing someone down seems to be the only way to bring them closer," she writes, in perhaps her most insightful, least grammatical sentence.

But why do we want to bring these people down? Sometimes, clearly, it's partisanship: The left didn't like Clarence Thomas; the right didn't like Clinton. In other cases, though, it seems like the public and the media comprise a permanently floating lynch mob. There they sit disgusted by the spin and imagery and partisanship and soft money with which modern politicians protect themselves and ready to pounce on any politician who betrays a human weakness or even a human urge. This seems like an ineffective and dysfunctional way to monitor our leaders.

The more interesting book Dr. Ruth could write awaits.

JAMIE MALANOWSKI is a New York writer.