Oh, no, not another nubile intern in Washington attracted to older men in power who gets into secret affair de coeur with one of them and ends up precipitating a major-league scandal.
Usually when that happens, the intern goes on to become famous, writes a book about her salacious experiences and, like you know who, produces her own brand of designer handbags; whereas the hapless politician goes on to deny all until the pressure builds and the weight of the revelations comes tumbling down on him like a ton of bricks.
Except, in this case, the intern is not likely to become a celebrity, and the politician’s day of reckoning is not quite at hand. Not yet. This case, alas, has a tragic dimension to it, since the intern in question has vanished without a trace and the police, who are convinced she is dead, want to know where to locate her body. And since they have ruled out suicide (based on a personality profile of the victim), the case is being investigated as a homicide.
Chandra Levy was her name, a 24-year-old California girl, a graduate student who came to Washington eyeing a career with the FBI but ended up being the smitten sweetheart of 53-year-old Democratic Rep. Garry A. Condit, a married man with grown kids, elected five times to the House by her home state. When she disappeared on April 30, Condit’s overconfident press representatives, consultants and lawyers, professionals who earn their living guiding clients in the ways of Washington scandals, denied all: Condit and Levy were just friends, no sex, honest.
This did not squelch the speculation in the media (and the media loves scandal like misery loves company); nor did it satisfy the police, who went on to question Condit on three separate occasions. It was not till the third interview with district police last Saturday that the California congressman acknowledged that an affair with Chandra Levy had indeed gone on, thereby dramatically reversing the position that he and his aides had adamantly maintained since the case broke in early May.
All that the police would say at this point is that Condit “is not a suspect,” an interesting way of putting it, so interesting in fact that, in effect, it gave the story legs and insured that it would travel beyond the confines of the Beltway, bringing heightened national scrutiny, TV stakeouts, reporters with microphones and commentators spinning the story whichever way.
What drives these philandering, middle-aged men, who wield so much power and have so much at stake, to risk it all? Is it a visceral need for admiration on their part? Is it that that they are baby boomers who came of age in the permissive sixties, when to do that sort of thing was both cool and passe, who still believe that, heck, what was good enough in the sixties should be equally good four decades later? What, for example, drove a seemingly intelligent man like Bill Clinton to pursue a tawdry affair with a young intern, and follow that by lying to the nation (“I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky”) and suborn justice by perjuring himself, thereby precipitating impeachment hearings against him?
Don’t these people get all the gratification they need from the power - with its attendant prestige and adulation - that their positions confer on them? Or is there something inherent in power itself that drives the powerful to self-destruct, as in the hackneyed maxim, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”?
If you think this is mere wanton psychologizing, then consider one of the most famous of such cases, from the summer of 1961 in Britain, that involved John Profumo, the secretary for war, who was disgraced as a result of his relationship with the 19-year-old Christine Keeler, a party girl who was also simultaneously having an affair on the side with Eugene Ivanov, a KGB spy at the Russian Embassy in London. That case too morphed into a political sex scandal that began for the Cabinet minister (whose family motto was Virtue & Work) as an extra-marital fling, but, driven by powerful forces in British politics at the time, turned into the notorious Profumo Affair.
No question about it: Rep. Garry Condit has gotten himself into a pickle, for the case of Chandra Levy is serious business. Sure, it is still officially identified as a missing-person case. There is no victim and no body, and no one can say for certain that there has been foul play. And Condit “is not a suspect.”
But it was the stonewalling (a term that reporters first used breezily to describe Richard Nixon’s Watergate evasions) that has hurt the congressman the most. A politician who dances around the truth is inviting the press to play “gottcha” with him. He lies about one thing, and people will wonder if he is lying about everything. And finally when he decides to come clean, to be up front about everything he knows, he finds himself as Condit does today, mired in what appears to be a murder investigation.
Before Garry Condit got himself into this mess, he would have done well to have checked in with that other Garry, Garry Hart, another married man, whose monkey business with a young lady in 1987, about which he also stonewalled, cost him his party’s potential nomination for the presidency. For Gary Condit, however, the cost may turn out to be a devil lot more exorbitant and a devil lot more dreadful.
After the scandal, Garry Hart found that he had to confine himself behind the walls of his house in his state of Colorado, with his political career behind him. Garry Condit may, just may, end up finding himself behind bars.
