Prudery and Prurience Are Astride the Same Horse : Reagan book: There’s a direct line between demands for private morality in our public figures and the explosion of lurid tabloid-style gossip.

Opinion-makers have pronounced themselved disgusted with Kitty Kelley’s encyclopedia of damning stories about the private life of Nancy Reagan. Critics deplore Kelley’s judgment. People said to have participated in events described in the book challenge her facts. Alleged sources deny they ever talked to her.

But Kelley’s book is far from being some sort of aberrational excrescence or extraordinary descent into gutter journalism. Instead, the sort of reporting she has done stems naturally from our avid pursuit of financial and sexual virtue in politics over the past 15 years.

Vietnam and Watergate were said to demonstrate the morally corrupt nature of this country’s national leadership, and since Watergate, the federal government has gone through contortions to free itself from the influence of private financial interests. New laws and regulations have put tighter controls on campaign fund-raising, forced public officials to cleanse themselves of any possible conflicts of interest and tried to ensure that ex-officials do not profit from their public service.

An expanded corps of federal investigators works to ferret out wrongdoing. Federal prosecutors and congressional staffers, many harboring grand ideas about their role in preserving the integrity of the political system, join enthusiastically in the scandal hunt. The press, of course, has grown less likely to give politicians the benefit of the doubt and more eager to put names on the front page.

The same thing has happened with sex, only more so. The private sexual practices of politicians are increasingly treated as part of the “character issue”--important indicators of an individual’s fitness to hold office. In matters of both sex and money, investigators and critics demand full disclosure of past sins, major and minor. All concealment, panicky misstatement or shading of the truth is called “coverup,” a crime tantamount to assault or bribery.

Oddly enough, during the same 15 years in which government was being shoved and hauled toward a higher ethical plane, personality journalism and its titillating style grew in importance. People magazine and its emulators treated us to intimacies about public figures’ lives--their past drug use, their financial trials, their spouses’ jobs and assets, their miscarriages and their troubled children. Such reporting edged toward the style of the National Enquirer because it necessarily relied on anonymous disaffected sources, from ex-employees to political enemies.

Yet it was no accident that prudery and prurience should ride in tandem through our public life, for the high-minded piousness of the one legitimated the low-minded nosiness of the other. Under the new rules, press scrutiny of Carter aide Hamilton Jordan’s dress, drinking and sexual habits ultimately put him under financially ruinous criminal investigation. Vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro had to answer for the alleged and rumored organized-crime connections of her father, who died when she was 8 years old. The Senate used FBI reports on the late John Tower’s personal habits to deny him confirmation as secretary of defense, even though much of the material was never subjected to critical examination.

So why is anyone shocked to see Kitty Kelley apply these techniques and justifications in investigating Nancy Reagan? If Mrs. Reagan’s first child was conceived before marriage, goes today’s logic, shouldn’t this fact bar her from espousing conservative values decades later? If the First Lady spent much time designing the new White House china, does this not make her a flaming symbol of Reagan-era greed and demonstrate that her professed concern for the drug problem in the inner cities was fraudulent? If she had bad relations with her children, doesn’t this disqualify her from ever speaking about the virtues of a strong family?

Certainly Kelley thinks this way: Nancy Reagan and her husband, Kelley explains, “set the tone for the ‘80s” and “mortgaged the presidency in much the same way the corporate raiders leveraged productive assets to bleed them dry.”

The rationale may be self-serving, yet it is the argument used by countless modern critics to justify an ever more exacting scrutiny of public figures. And it is easy to cluck over the tastelessness of Kitty Kelley, but let’s not kid ourselves: Though taste-makers may deplore her concerns and style, her book simply mirrors our self-imposed era of political moralism.