DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

In 1982, the teen daughters of Nevada Governor Robert List and Attorney General Richard Bryan were classmates and good friends in Carson City. List was up for reelection and their fathers were gearing up to run against each other.

The two girls sat down and worked out their own arrangement. This thing, they decided, is between our fathers and we're not going to let it interfere with our relationship. It not only preserved their high school friendship but they later roomed together in college.

Not many knew it happened, but to those in the cynical world of politics who did, it was genuinely touching. Unfortunately, not all such families-in-politics stories turn out so well.

In August, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took some grief because his five sons have never served in the military. A founder of the antiwar group Military Families Speak Out said that before candidates support the war, they should ask themselves, "If this war is so important, why is it okay for you to support our loved ones fighting it but not send your own sons?" Of course, this assumes that adult children are adjuncts of their parents and can be ordered about by parents. (John McCain's son is stationed in Iraq, but McCain carefully does not make use of it in his campaign speeches.)

There are also, of course, the problems faced by political spouses, problems that are sometimes so difficult that Time magazine once ran a cover story, "The ordeal of political wives." It was October 1974 and the cover carried photos of Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, and Joan Kennedy. Ford and Kennedy both developed alcoholism trying to live up to the preposterous standard that politics expects of political wives.

A couple of years before that cover story came out, a Republican manual for candidates' wives leaked to the press. It instructed them to keep their eyes fixed on their husbands during speeches, not to talk about issues, cross their legs at the ankles while sitting, and on and on.

The pressure of being regularly on display and of possibly damaging a spouse's career by saying the wrong thing is terrific, to say nothing of whatever psychic cost accompanies being thought of as an appendage of a spouse. Jackie Laxalt, wife of Nevada's governor from 1967 to 1971, later said she developed a drinking problem in the governor's mansion.

Bette Sawyer, wife of Nevada's governor from 1959 to 1967, hated public life and enjoyed life much more after her husband's second term ended and they returned to private life. In 1974 Grant Sawyer had an excellent shot at the United States Senate and word went around that "If Grant files for senate, Bette will file for divorce."

To the pressure on wives, add the pressure on children. Imagine the horror of a child who causes problems for a beloved parent running for office. Any wrong word spoken, any childhood prank could cause problems. The normal pressures of childhood are sufficient without that.

In 1968 U.S. Senator George McGovern mounted a late campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to hold the supporters of the murdered Robert Kennedy together. After a dash of a campaign tour, McGovern and his family arrived at Chicago for a news conference. A photographer, David Douglas Duncan, noticed that the youngest daughter was stifling yawns "so she won't embarrass her Dad," throwing her head back to stare at the ceiling in an effort to stay awake, looking like an El Greco painting of a Spanish martyr. "Why drag the families along on these campaign junkets?" Duncan later wrote. "Why subject them to us press guys? Why make them sit there with nothing possible to say or do but look decent and worthy of being a candidate's family? ... Just because it's part of the good old American political custom to drag the family along at election time, to hell with it--let's kill THAT tradition and get along with examining the presidential candidates without any supporting cast."

I just found an entry on an Arkansas blog: "I have photos of the Clintons' visit to our city park in 1982. He was trying to regain the governor's office from Frank White. Hillary sat there with that same upward-to-Bill glazed look ... She never uttered one word from the gazebo. It was all his show. She has her own show now. Perhaps he can look at her in the same way." We'll see.