THE PROFUMO CASE
73
now, between American McCarthyism and British socialism? The
questions are provocative, to be sure, but they were provoked.
. And in raising them here, perhaps what is most worth remarking
is the reluctance of England's very articulate section of public opinion,
her writers of the Left, to raise them itself.
Alongside the drastic incoherence with which the Labour party
operated in the affair, there was something appealing in Macmillan's
consistency of behavior, which we had been used to taking only
as evidence of a dreary limitation of public view. Throughout the
scandal Macmillan had only one recourse: the traditional code of a
gentleman. When information against Profumo had been brought
to him, he had asked his Minister of War whether what was being
said was so; assured the accusations were unfounded, he had entirely
accepted Profumo's word as the word of another gentleman like
himself. Poor Macmillan, no one would seem to have told him
that the time had come when, like Profumo, one could be a gentle–
man and a political conservative and still play by strange new rules.
No one had even told him, what was most perplexing, that in a
world in which gentlemen's agreements are still relied upon in
business, they cannot be relied upon in government and that one
must put no more trust in a colleague's fidelity to truth than in his
faithfulness to
his
wife. It was reported of the Prime Minister that
under Labour's attack in Parliament he suddenly appeared old and
shaken. We know now that, in addition to facing the collapse of his
career, Macmillan was ill; but we can also assume that he was as
much undone by the confrontation with this new
ad hoc
morality
which he met on every side of him as by bad health and the threat
to
his
political power.
As
for the more direct victims of the case, even apart from
Ward who was to carry the heaviest, the fatal burden of social
opprobrium, there was of course Profumo, too, who was for all public
purposes ruined. While such is his accidental place in the drama
that it is entirely fitting that Profumo be allowed to slip from
memory, we hesitate to ring down the final curtain on him as a
public figure without some last small attempt to understand why
he did indeed lie to Macmillan; for even
if
we accept the hypothesis
that nothing in his life of privilege had prepared him for an act of
moral bravery and that, in the absence of moral intransigence,
