The Central African Republic was originally a French possession: unlike most colonies in that part of the world, which tended to be either Belgian or British. It achieved official independence from France in 1960, having been effectively autonomous for years before that date. At first there didn't seem much to distinguish it from any other African pigsty. In 1966 its president, David Dacko, was kicked out by his rival Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who tore up the country's constitution. But this was, and is, pretty much par for the postcolonial African course. Certainly France - which retained close economic ties to the Central African Republic - didn't think Bokassa would be unmanageable. Millions of francs in French taxpayers' money went on propping up Bokassa's regime, Giscard being especially enthusiastic in this area once he became France's ruler in 1974.

At this stage, Bokassa had already given the first blatant danger signal by declaring himself President for Life.   In 1976 he decided that even this title was no longer good enough for him. He changed the Central African Republic's name to the Central African Empire, and in 1977 he had himself crowned Emperor Bokassa The First.

At his insistence, the ceremony was televised worldwide; and if you've ever seen footage of it, you'll recall what a chilling spectacle of egomania it was. He based the order of events on Napoleon's enthronement, and his government spent $20 million American dollars on this lavish coronation, at a time when the average breadwinner in his country earned the equivalent of 120 American dollars per year.

As Emperor Bokassa The First he grew crazier and crazier, until in April 1979 the country's schoolchildren took to the streets. He'd passed a law requiring them to wear school uniforms made by a company which one of his own relatives owned; and the schoolchildren weren't having any of this. Thousands of them were thrown into gaol. At least a hundred of them were murdered on his orders and in his presence. In fact, he himself thrashed a good many of them to death. Even this might not have outraged case-hardened African public opinion all that much, but then it was announced that several of the childrens' corpses had ended up in his refrigerator for subsequent re-heating and consumption. The thought of young kids being turned into Fried Central African appears to have been considered a bit over the top even by late-20th-century standards, and in September 1979 Bokassa was overthrown while on a visit to his friend Colonel Gaddafi. (The man who led the uprising against him was none other than David Dacko, whom he'd deposed thirteen years earlier.)

Bokassa fled to France, but returned to his homeland in 1986, expecting that his grateful countrymen would jump at the chance of returning him to power. Instead, he was put on trial for murder and alleged cannibalism, found guilty, and condemned to death. Afterwards the sentence was commuted to life in prison, though he served only seven years behind bars before being released. The last I heard of him*, he was writing reproachful letters to Giscard, whining about the fact that his wife had become Giscard's mistress, and deploring Giscard's lax morals.[*Editor's note: "Bokassa died on 3 November 1996, of natural causes, after the print version of this article had gone to press."][Index]

Juarez, who promptly made himself President for Life, mixed conventional republican power-lust with a spite that was all his own. Once he'd ordered the killing of Maximilian, he refused for months to return his victim's corpse to the grieving relatives in Austria. He wanted the satisfaction of seeing the Habsburg family representatives go down, quite literally, on bended knees.

After Juarez's death in 1872, and for the next 39 years, the dominant politician in the Mexican republic was President Porfirio Diaz, an engaging squandermaniac millionaire; getting through a gigantic fortune in less time than it would take you and me to fill out a Lotto coupon. He was not without intelligence and shrewdness; he once provided the perfect desciption of his own country's problems, when he said: "Alas, my poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the USA." And at least his electoral fraud and judiciary-stacking had the merit of keeping Mexico at peace - sort of - over a span of decades. However, in 1911, he'd made so many opponents within the armed forces (as well as among the powerful farming lobby) that his goverment collapsed, and he was forced to flee abroad.[Index]

Predictably enough, once the revolutionaries had destroyed the regime of Diaz, they turned and sank their knives into each other. For 20 years, Mexico was in a state of civil war interrupted only by the occasional dictatorship. The best account which I've been able to find of this period is one written by the Mexican novelist and journalist Jorge Ibarguengoitia, as the preface to his book `The Lightning of August'. He's summarising the revolutionary leaders, all of whom had a habit of posing for photos in the stupidest-looking sombreros, thigh boots and droopy moustaches that it's possible to imagine; and he says of them:

"These men were the fathers of a new military generation whose main concern, between 1915 and 1930, was self-annilhation. [President] Alvaro Obregon defeated Pancho Villa, who still had faith in cavalry charges; Pablo Gonzalez ordered the assassination of Zapata; [President] Venustiano Carranza was shot down when he was running for his life; it has never been proven whether this was by direct order or merely with the blessings of Obregion who, in turn, died when a young Catholic drawing teacher pumped seven bullets into him. Pancho Villa met his end in an ambush prepared by a man who wanted to settle some unfinished business. Traces of arsenic were discovered in the intestines of Benjamin Hill, Secretary of War and the Navy; [Vice-President] Lucio Blanco's body was found floating in the Rio Grande; General Dieguez died by mistake in a battle he had nothing to do with; General Serrano was shot on the road to Cuernavaca and General Arnulfo R.Gomez was shot in the State of Veracruz. General Murguia led troops from across the border and penetrated a thousand kilometres into Mexico without being discovered; when he was discovered, he was shot. Etc., etc., etc."

By about 1930 the worst of Mexico's political violence was over, so the surviving Mexican revolutionaries - who'd already formed their own political organisation, the lnstitutional Revolutionary Party - needed another scapegoat. They found it in Mexico's main landowner, the Catholic Church, which they determined to wipe out. Since approximately 95% of Mexicans attended Mass each Sunday, this was never going to be a simple task, but what the revolutionaries lacked in numbers they made up for in homicidal mania. They ensured that religion became almost as dangerous to practice in Mexico as it was in the USSR. Every now and then, nevertheless, foreign travellers in Mexico at this time (such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene) would still see a priest occasionally. He was always easy to recognise, because he would be dangling by the neck from a telegraph pole, or else he was riddled with bullet holes from a firing squad and vultures would be enthusiastically circling overhead. If ever one needed proof of the ignorance of P. K. and T. K. this proof lies in the fact that they always seem to imagine that republicanism means better conditions for Catholics .[Index]

Today, Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party is the longest-surviving regime in the world. Thanks to a uniquely successful gerrymander, it has won every Federal election since 1928. Until the late 1980s it had also won every single State and municipal election, but then the party wised up to the fact that with the economy going totally down the gurgle-hole it would look a bit better in the eyes of foreign investors if there was at least a pretence of opposition at these levels of government. Whereas party leaders used to sanction the bumping-off of their enemies with no questions asked, nowadays -- having in many cases gone to Harvard Business School - they prefer to achieve victory by computer fraud rather than old-fashioned gangsterism.

Still, old-fashioned gangsterism continues to have its place. During the last two years alone a Presidential candidate and the party's Secretary-General were both assassinated once they started sounding serious about fighting corruption. The Secretary-General's murder has been attributed to a brother of former President Salinas. And so we say farewell to wonderful civilised Mexico, another fun republic.

Update Note: During the year 2000 Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party actually lost office. The opposition candidate in 2000 was Vicente Fox, who is the current President.

The Australian National review December 1996-January 1997. An edited selection. [Index]

No presidency in the world has been the subject of more determined mythologising than the thousand days of John F. Kennedy's rule. All political candidates in the Western world who have come after Kennedy are, in a sense, Kennedy's heirs. His father, Joseph Kennedy, said it all when, in 1960, he announced the way he was going to get JFK made president. There would be no nonsense about issues, ideologies, philosophies: oh, no. As the old man put it, We are going to sell him like a packet of soap flakes." They did exactly that.

Joseph Kennedy, deprived of supreme political power himself, vowed to achieve it by proxy through his son. In his character snivelling, social climbing, Jew-baiting, mendacity and genuine self-deception were so closely allied that it's now impossible to tell where one ended and the others started. He was a full-time sex maniac, and a business tycoon merely as a hobby, although this hobby made him a millionaire by the age of 35. Like most American moguls he achieved his wealth not through anything so vulgar as inventing a better mousetrap, but through shuffling papers on Wall Street, plus in his case extensive bootlegging during Prohibition. As chief executive of the RKO movie studio - among many other enterprises he was ruthless in enforcing the strict industry censorship codes against anything which might corrupt family values. Meanwhile his own family values consisted of keeping Gloria Swanson as his regular bit on the side, while bedding as many Hollywood starlets as possible, including those who were his sons' girlfriends. (It's comforting to be able to report that he didn't use condoms, because that would have been sinful.) However, he did love his offspring, in a sense; it's true that he compelled one of his daughters to have a lobotomy, but hey, we all make mistakes. The first apple of old Joe Kennedy's eye was Joe Kennedy Junior. Unfortunately Junior was killed during World War II, and so the mantle of fatherly ambition fell on John Fitzgerald Kennedy, better known as Jack.

At this stage Jack hadn't actually distinguished himself at doing very much except grinning, picking up women, pathologically lying about his combat service, getting his fellow students to write essays for him, and discovering a pornographic cigarette case on which Snow White was portrayed doing naughty things with all seven dwarves. But most of the other Kennedy babies looked even worse bets, so Jack became Federal Congressman and Federal Senator. As such, he witnessed at first hand the constitutional crisis of 1955, when Eisenhower had such a massive heart attack that it looked for a while as if he might become a vegetable. American law, of course, makes provisions for what happens at a president's death, but at that stage it didn't make provisions (though it does now) for what happens when a president becomes incapacitated. Fortunately Eisenhower recovered, thus delaying Nixon's entry into the White House by thirteen years. But the lesson of Ike's heart attack wasn't lost on young JFK: if you're dangerously ill, then keep your mouth shut. This lesson proved very helpful when he became a drug user.

Meanwhile, he and Jacqueline Kennedy (nee Jacqueline Lee Bouvier) had begun what was known as a "marriage made in heaven." Neither party loved, or even liked, the other. Jackie despised Jack's low intellect; he, in turn, couldn't understand why she kept hanging around with goddam artists when she could be doing something useful, like snorting cocaine. When they went out together, Jack never picked up the tab. On many occasions he and Jackie went to a restaurant that his father owned, in which case the evening was on the house. The rest of the time, Jackie would have to pay for both of them: even things like taxi fares. When Jackie was discussing her marriage in a pre-recorded TV interview which has only recently been unearthed, the reporter told her something like: "You look as if you really love your husband." She blurted out the first words that came into her head: "Oh, no." [Index]

To console herself, Jackie went shopping. and shopping. And shopping. And shopping. Someone said to the great novelist Truman Capote that all Jackie's extra spending money as Mrs Kennedy might make her run up huge credit-card debts. Capote replied in his inimitable bitchy Southern accent: "Oh, no, Jackie is more of a cash-and-carry girl." This didn't stop her from projecting the persona of a woman with breeding. In fact, both she and her husband were obsessed with trying to behave aristocratically, and they took great pride in making fun of their opponents' humble background.

For instance, Jack's favourite contemptuous phrase about Nixon -- who'd made his own money instead of inheriting it was "No class." Presumably the Kennedy idea of class consisted of White House swimming-pool sex romps with two receptionists nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle, to name but one of Jack's escapades. (Similarly, Jackie doubtless considered that she was showing class when she lost her virginity while travelling in an elevator.) The Kennedy family's hatred for Nixon went well beyond the resentment of an ordinary politician towards his toughest opponent. In the famous 1960 TV debates between Kennedy and Nixon, millions of viewers noticed that the normally aloof Nixon was bathed in sweat. The reason he perspired so much was that Kennedy had got one of his goons to turn the TV studio's central heating on full blast whenever Nixon spoke, and to turn it back to its normal level once Kennedy resumed.

Just as Mr Keating when Prime Minister would drone on about his love for Mahler's music, so Jack organised cultural soirees at the White House. These were sycophantically reported by the mass media, which tactfully avoided mentioning that at these events the President would usually fall asleep. When someone complimented Jackie on her husband's musical knowledge, she apparently replied: "The only piece of music he recognises is Hail to the Chief" Alas, this comparatively trivial dishonesty was overshadowed in its impact by a much more systematic falsehood.

The truth is - as we now know, though it wasn't publicised until the 1980s - that Kennedy was a physical as well as a moral cripple. He suffered from Addison's disease, a rare and often fatal hormonal disorder which is both very painful to experience and usually impossible to cure. The preferred way of relieving its symptoms is by injecting cortisone, which was much more expensive in Kennedy's time than it is today. When the cortisone grew less and less effective (because his system was so inured to it), Kennedy supplemented it with vast doses of amphetamines: administered by one Max Jacobson, the man who originated the phrase Dr Feelgood." Before getting disbarred, Max Jacobson gave amphetamine shots to 30 or more patients every day. Often blood would be spattered over his white coat, although he was obliged to change his clothes before he injected Jackie. Thanks to Jacobson, Jack and Jackie were as high as kites for much of his presidency. Just what the world needs. A nuclear superpower whose president and First Lady are stoned on narcotics. It's impossible to avoid suspecting that drug use impaired Kennedy's judgement during the Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1961, and the decision to overthrow (in this case, a euphemism for "murder") South Vietnamese President Diem in 1963.

As if this weren't enough evidence of a death-wish on Kennedy's part, his erotic life was a blackmailer's heaven. He frequently found it far too much trouble to find out the name of his current companion, and the next morning: he would refer to her merely as "sweetie" or "kiddo." Besides, whatever we may think of the bedroom antics of Prince Charles, at least he - unlike JFK - doesn't share mistresses with mobsters. One of Kennedy's few long-term relationships was with CIA messenger Judith Campbell, who bounced between his bed and that of Mafia Godfather Sam Giancana. It was Giancana and his front man, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who were mainly responsible for doctoring the votes in Illinois so that Kennedy would become president. After the election, Giancana used to say to Miss Campbell, "Listen, honey, if it wasn't for me your boyfriend wouldn't even be in the White House." Kennedy was so besotted with Miss Campbell that it seems he even contemplated marrying her after getting a divorce from Jackie. J. Edgar Hoover duly confronted Kennedy with evidence of Miss Campbell's two-timing and CIA links, and indicated that he was quite prepared to blackmail the president over the security risks in the affair. (Not that Hoover himself was exactly a cleanskin, given his penchant for poncing around his FBI offices in women's clothes.) All in all, the surprising thing is that Kennedy actually lasted a thousand days before Lee Harvey Oswald got to him. [Index]

It might be asked what relevance all this scandal has to judging the merits of a president. Wouldn't it be better to leave well alone? Isn't it hypocritical to condemn voyeuristic journos training telephoto lenses on raunchy royals, while being prepared oneself to dish the dirt about raunchy republicans! No, it isn't. I conclude this for two reasons.

If one cares about history - and if you didn't care about history, you wouldn't be here today - then one has a special obligation to place the virtue of historical honesty above the virtue of niceness. Otherwise, one's no more intellectually respectable than than those Communist apparatchiks who totally rewrite history every two or three years: for whom Stalin is at one minute the Great Proletarian Hero, and the next minute The Revisionist lmperialist Fascist Butcher Of The Workers. As Quadrant columnist Peter Ryan put it:

"A passion for truth is among the feeblest of all human emotions. Yet we are damned in our souls if we abandon strict historical truth, so far as it can be found; we are damned if we settle for the easy lies of current modishness, and the conventional 'truths' of ideology and political correctness."

There's another, and possibly deeper, reason why the ethical failures of presidencies need to be hammered home, no less than the ethical failure of individual royals like Di and Fergie. It's this.

All three of the republics I've been discussing have been ones where, if there are elections at all, the president has almost absolute power and is chosen by the general public. However repellent Kennedy and successive Mexican presidents were, no-one can really claim that they were unrepresentative of the popular will. They catered, indeed they pandered, to all the basest instincts of homo sapiens: the instincts of the thug, the instincts of the crook, or (in Kennedy's case) the instincts of the adolescent male on heat. Above all, perhaps, they pandered to the instincts of the moron, for whom it's simply too much of a mental effort to distinguish a product from its fancy packaging. The moron, by definition, has no concept of long-term strategy. He cannot understand that a particular political decision might be both necessary and unpleasant. To a moron, the smarmy posturings of a JFK are not only the perfect substitute for deep thought; they are deep thought.

The whole structure of the modern presidency (and in particular the modern elective presidency, with its doltish slogans and its 30-second TV sound-bites) is conducive to moronism. Much of Britain's and Australia's present governmental corruption exists precisely because in both countries, administration has become increasingly Americanised over the last two decades, increasingly given over to the spoils system, increasingly enslaved to the spiritual standards of Madison Avenue. Very, very occasionally in recent American history, a presidential candidate - an Adlai Stevenson, a Barry Goldwater, a Pat Buchanan - has attempted to buck the system. He's attempted to inculcate into the public some vague notion of what it needs, rather than merely what it wants. He has said, in effect, "The party's over. You've been living in a fool's paradise. Here is the bill that you and your children will have to pay."

What invariably happens is that he's either crushingly defeated in the election itself, or else (like Buchanan) forced out of the running by a media witch-hunt before the election even occurs. The result is entirely predictable: in America, and increasingly in Britain and Australia also, almost no-one with greater ethical stature than the average polecat is going to run for public office at all. Seventy-six years ago, Clemenceau - that great republican who had the courage of his convictions - summed up the safest policy for voters in a republic at presidential election time: he said "Vote for the stupidest."

So there you have it. That's what it comes down to. From a republican who knew what he was talking about, who didn't have the smallest love for monarchical systems, we get the advice: "Vote for the stupidest." In other words, do exactly what you're pretty much obliged to do anyway, but do it with all the extra burden of political and civil risk that republicanism entails. What a great recipe for freedom. [Index]