Politics & Power Quote by Pierre Salinger

Power is being laundered into stamina here. Salinger doesn’t defend the ethics of a president keeping “mistresses”; he reframes the offense as a scheduling problem. If the job is punishing enough - “14 to 16 hours a day” is the kind of detail meant to sound factual and incontestable - then any private indulgence becomes evidence not of corruption but of superhuman capacity. The punch line, “what the hell difference does it make?”, is a rhetorical trap: answer it and you’re suddenly the prude, the scold, the person policing bedrooms instead of bombs.

The intent is crisis management by re-prioritization. As a Kennedy-era press secretary turned public spokesman, Salinger is speaking from a culture where “character” scandals could detonate presidencies, yet Cold War governance demanded a public willing to overlook messiness for perceived competence. His argument smuggles in a hierarchy of harms: policy is real; sex is noise. That’s not neutral; it’s strategic. It asks the audience to trade moral clarity for the comfort of a functioning state - and to accept that the powerful live under a different set of expectations because the stakes are higher.

Subtext: the presidency is so all-consuming it deserves exemptions. Context: a media ecosystem mid-shift, still capable of discretion but newly tempted by sensationalism. Salinger’s line isn’t just permissive; it’s a blueprint for modern scandal triage, where performance becomes the only metric that counts.