THE PROFUMO CASE
61
in vain for the dry note of self-deflation one had been used to
ascribe to the British in public crises. Like a man who loses his
business and learns he has a fatal illness, only to come home and find
that even his wife has betrayed him, England seemed to regard
the Profumo case as final proof of her inability to hold her own in
the world. Whether it was the London
Times
thundering its opinion
that the issue in the case was moral, of cosmic, even theological
dimensions, or the news commentators reveling in each disclosure
as new evidence of the national degradation, the public response was
everywhere undue, a cacophony of moral ostentations.
In the midst of the clamor, Ward quietly committed suicide but,
it is important to note, after, not before, he stood trial. The fact that
he waited to end his life until the moment between being tried and
convicted-the verdict was foregone-represented something in the
nature of courage, and gave retrospective dimension to his slim
testimony. On the stand he had sounded mechanical, even rehearsed
-my knowledge of the case comes only from the newspapers-like
someone who had too often gone over the main outlines of his
story, although perhaps not so much to make it a plausible legal
defense as to try to extract its bare communicable meaning. The
attempt to peel away the layers of distracting detail in order to reach
the kernel of content was doomed to be unsuccessful; his story, after
all, was not of a kind that easily yields its secret. There had never–
theless remained from his effort a clear moral, or perhaps pedagogic,
intention. Here, Ward seemed to be saying of himself, stood a man
who was patently guilty of violating certain of the moral standards of
his society. But what about this society; what about this society in
relation to
him?
Had it not made him a promise of moral tolerance
which it was now failing to redeem? What had gone wrong, how
had the train gone off the rails, for a private life to become so
suddenly and completely a public outrage? For surely it must have
been clear even to Ward himself, and despite the specific legal charges
he faced, that it was not his financial dealings with his girls that
had run him afoul of society but the whole pattern of his sexual
behavior. But was not enlightenment-sexual enlightenment no less
than political or cultural enlightenment-the very cornerstone of
modernity? And what did enlightenment consist in if not the ability
to accommodate values different from our own: the values of our
