Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics.

In the mid-1930'S, rumors spread around America like a forest fire, whispering that Franklin Roosevelt was mentally deranged. Some claimed to have heard shrieks and laughter emanating from the windows of the White House, and others solemnly explained that the bars on the president's windows were there to keep him from throwing himself out onto the lawn in a maniacal fit. Tongues began wagging faster as the gossip caught on: His polio had spread to his brain, he was discovered cutting out paper dolls instead of working, he had been seen breaking into fits of uncontrollable laughter during press conferences, and now he was babbling all sorts of entertaining nonsense during meetings.

When a journalist finally got up the nerve to inquire directly about the president's mental status, FDR, holding his cigarette holder and leaning back in his chair, began to laugh a loud, healthy laugh. Newsweek reported: "Back to the roomful of correspondents he tossed the question. How did they think he looked? `Okay from here.'"

These rumors about the president, New York Times editorial writer Gail Collins tells us in her lively new book, flourished so successfully because they contained a thread of truth: a genuine public fear about the president's health. While most Americans at the time knew that FDR suffered from polio, very few had actually seen him, and many could not bear to imagine their president, a paragon of strength and leadership, as an invalid. Since FDR made special efforts to conceal his disability, and since reporters rarely depicted the president in his wheelchair, much of the public remained in the dark as to his real condition. Gossiping about his health was a way to release pent-up concerns about the president, under the umbrella of dramatized, embellished entertainment.

Gossip, Collins argues, "provides an insight into what's bothering Americans -- maybe not as precisely as a random cross-sample poll of the voting public, but with a little more flavor." From Civil War rumors that President Lincoln had "Negro blood" and was nicknamed "Abraham Africanus the First," to stories of Prohibitionist Americans angrily pointing fingers at Teddy Roosevelt's drinking habits, Collins' book traces the history of American gossip through the eyes of the public. She gives us all the sordid details and all the delicious rumors from the safe seat of the talker instead of the talked-about. With humor and insight, Collins offers every view of the truth, the almost-true, and the too-juicy-to-be-true. The real essence of the book, however, lies not in the titillating tales about what happened to whom in what room, but in Collins' discussion of the social context that allows rumors to run wild.

Collins argues that gossip "really does need some kind of context to give it meaning." Take, for example, the current allegations of presidential philandering. Collins attributes gossip's ability to spread so quickly and so out of control to the speed of our high-technology era, in which a rumor zooms from people's mouths directly into e-mail gossip loops, before it even hits MSNBC. Though similar rumors about presidents occurred in the past, technology has given our era a whole new power to catch the hall running.

Today, with easy access to TV and computers, the media would find it almost impossible to shield us from FDR's illness. Rumors about Honest Abe would also be dead on arrival because the question of whether the president has some interracial ancestry is no longer at the top of our concern list. Truly effective gossip -- the kind that results in huge headlines and around-the-clock coverage -- has to strike larger cultural chords in order to take root. Only if the rumor is relevant to our era, explains Collins, will it take off As in a Rorschach test, the American public brings all of its anxieties, neuroses, and projected fears to the gossip arena. The ink blots of political figures cannot be judged objectively without our timely concerns right there in the front row, cheering us on.

Political figures, she makes clear, can be hurt by gossip only when it is out of sync with our view of their character. Gary Hart portrayed himself as an upstanding husband, which is why, when the media caught him frolicking with Donna Rice, the public exploded. Clinton's public ratings are still high, Collins claims, because he has done nothing inconsistent with the image the American public formed of him back in 1992.

Collins remains agnostic on the question of Clinton's alleged misbehavior. But she does end with a question about what will happen to gossip if public standards of behavior -- and of privacy -- continue to erode. "It's impossible, after all, for people to speculate about who is breaking the rules behind closed doors when there are no rules left that matter."

Eliot Sloan is an editorial intern at Harper's magazine.