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 easonable
people can certainly suspect Rep. Gary Condit of doing away with
his lover Chandra Levy. Every passing day makes it more likely that
she came to harm; Condit had a possible motive — the fear of
exposure — while both his conduct of his affairs and his stonewalling
of the police show him to be controlling, secretive, and dishonest.
But even if he did her no harm — an equally plausible scenario
— Congress should be rid of him. His colleagues should call
for him to resign, and if his behavior becomes yet more egregious,
they should initiate the process of expelling him.
By denying his affair the first two times the D.C. police spoke
to him, Condit impeded their investigation, and guaranteed that
important terrain in Levy's life would be unexplored until her trail
had grown cold. Condit may also have suborned perjury by urging
another girlfriend, stewardess Anne Marie Smith, to swear falsely
that they were not lovers. Condit's spinners and some addled press
watchdogs have criticized the media and the Levy family for hounding
Condit. To be sure, they had divergent motives: The media were after
viewers and readers, while the Levys were concerned for their daughter.
But the pressure of both was required to make the shifty congressman
speak. Not that he has been notably forthcoming. Condit's self-administrated
lie-detector test was a particularly shabby evasion. Condit should
be speaking to a grand jury.
Condit has also made himself a security risk — not a desirable
thing in a member of the House Intelligence Committee. The guidelines
for access to classified information note that "sexual behavior
is a security concern if . . . it may subject the individual to
undue influence or coercion, exploitation or duress, or reflects
lack of judgment or discretion." Security clearances are always
given as a matter of course to the relevant congressmen. But with
privilege comes responsibility: They must not make themselves sitting
ducks.
Is adultery — in Condit's case, apparently, compulsive adultery
— additional grounds for Condit to leave public life, as Sen.
Trent Lott suggested? One must tread carefully between laissez faire
and counsels of perfection. It is not true that all politicians
do or have broken their marriage vows, but it is also not true that
only bad politicians behave badly to their wives and families. Alexander
Hamilton jumped headlong into a honey trap set by a husband-and-wife
team of blackmailers, and Gouverneur Morris, the draftsman of the
Constitution, was a bachelor rake who specialized in unhappily married
women. (When Morris lost a leg in an accident, his friend John Jay
wrote that he might better have lost "something else.") George Washington,
no party guy, valued both men.
History affords other examples. But as society becomes more egalitarian,
it becomes more important that its leaders uphold the ethic of sexual
republicanism — one to a customer. When they fail to do so,
we get the worst alternative — a covert patriarchy, with powerful
men behaving like sultans while pretending to be ordinary liberated
guys: men like Gary Condit and Bill Clinton. Such a world, defended
as consensual, frequently shades into harassment and rape, as Paula
Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick can attest. Let us
hope that Chandra Levy will not show us that it shades into something
worse.
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