Confidential Memorandum Scandals & Scoundrels

Subject: Until Watergate, the media Blinked at 200 years of capital Shenanigans

Synopsis:

It's doubtful we will ever know the true nature of Congressman Gary Condit's relationship with Chandra Levy. Maybe it was simply a fling for him that turned into a nightmare when his "good friend" disappeared, the victim of a random crime. Or maybe it was something far more sinister, a fatal attraction in more ways than one. While Levy's situation is a tragedy, Condit finds himself a part of the latest Washington sex scandal.

Condit is old enough to remember that the news media once ignored or killed information about the sex lives of public officials before these stories became political scandals. This may explain why he is so outraged at the media's pursuit of his sex life. In fact, I discovered that from the late 1890s until after Watergate, in 1974, there was near silence in the Washington press corps and the national news media about the peccadilloes of Washington officials.

For more than 70 years the news media went out of their way to avoid reporting on sexual indiscretions. They reported on indiscretions only when they were impossible to avoid. Thus, when one of Utah's first two senators, Arthur Brown, was fatally shot by his mistress in a Washington hotel room in 1906, the press couldn't avoid her trial for murder. However, the proceedings in the courtroom were far more lurid than anything in the newspapers. Likewise, the press overlooked President Warren Harding's extramarital affairs until after his death and, even then, much of the mainstream press ignored the book by his mistress Nan Britton, published in 1927.

This reticence to report private matters left countless Washington sex scandals buried. They might never have been exhumed from their archival resting places had Watergate not triggered a change in the rules. Others wiser than me can decide if our history is truly better off digging out details of FDR's affairs with Lucy Mercer and Missy LeHand, Eleanor Roosevelt's relationships with cigar-smoking lesbians Nancy Cook and Lorena "Hick" Hickok, Ike's impotence with his pretty World War II Irish jeep driver, Kay Summersby, (continued on page 196)Scandals(continued from page 78) and JFK's sexual athleticism.

In Washington, D.C. during the late Fifties and early Sixties, when I was in graduate and law school, I noticed the latitude given the personal foibles and weaknesses of powerful officials. At the time, I was dating a girl whose father was a senator who had a serious drinking problem. The most feared muckraking columnist in Washington then was Drew Pearson, who was a friend of this senator. Repeatedly, Pearson warned the senator that if he didn't get his act together he was going to have to write about it. But Pearson never did, nor did he have any intention ofdoing so. He told the senator's wife he was merely bracing her husband, trying to help him by frightening him, for he saw a man with a brilliant mind wasting it with the sauce. Sadly, the threats didn't help.

When Senator Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, I turned down a job in the campaign to finish law school. The senator's son was my good friend, so I followed the race closely. The only issue that ever threatened President Lyndon Johnson's election was a sex scandal that surfaced briefly before election day. It was the first sex scandal in a presidential campaign since Grover Cleveland fathered a child out of wedlock, which was an issue in the 1884 presidential contest. Initially, all the Washington newspapers agreed to disregard the 1964 story--but the president's aides forgot to ask United Press International to kill it. When UPI broke the story, other news organizations reported as well that White House chief of staff Walter Jenkins, who was married with six children, had been arrested for engaging in homosexual activity at the YMCA a few blocks from the White House. The story fizzled quickly, however, when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover spiked it with a report that no national security problems had arisen, and Jenkins was said to be in the hospital.

In the mid-Sixties, when I worked as the minority counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, I saw how Congress dealt with sexual misconduct by one of its members. When the Congress convened in January 1967, a move was launched to deny Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell his seat in the House. Powell had been investigated earlier for abusing his payroll and expenditures. He was hiring his ladyfriends and entertaining them lavishly at government expense. When Powell was cited for contempt of a New York court after refusing to pay a default judgment (he had carelessly ignored a defamation case that started when he accused a constituent of being a bag lady), the earlier House investigation of "financial irregularities" and the fact he was evading the New York authorities came to a head. Not sure how to handle New York's first black congressman, particularly at a time when Congress was writing significant new laws in response to the civil rights movement, the House created a select committee to make further inquiry.

The Reverend Powell's womanizing was legendary. Tall, trim, strikingly handsome and always elegantly dressed, he was a powerful force to be reckoned with. Because several members of the House Judiciary Committee were appointed to the select committee, and they used the Judiciary Committee's hearing room for their meetings and proceedings, I became privy to, and indirectly involved with, the undertaking.

Some committee members were reluctant to have congressional pages carry sensitive material to or from Powell, and felt that several of the tasks should be handled by an attorney. My office adjoined the hearing room, so I was dispatched, by default, to deal with Powell. I found it a pleasure, actually one of my more memorable experiences in government service, because we quickly hit it off. We had both gone to Colgate University. He was a fascinating man, and his office was a delight to visit. He employed some of Capitol Hill's most beautiful women, and his friends in the entertainment industry--Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr. and Lena Horne, to name a few--were often arriving or leaving.

Ultimately, the House of Representatives went far beyond the recommendations of the select committee and refused to seat Powell. He took his case to the Supreme Court and won. Powell's sexual activities, which underlay much of the inquiry (his hiring beauty pageant winners as staff and flying them to and from his retreat in Bimini), weren't used to deny him his seat. But sex was certainly a part of the subtext. And the record (later sealed and buried) was filled with private sexual information, none of which was ever leaked to newspeople (or left the confines of the investigative committees). Powell was quite conscious of what was not being said. In his own inimitable way, he once said to me: "All those white guys must be worried I'm going to screw their wives. That scares 'em, so we don't talk about that." Powell accused his detractors of hypocrisy and claimed they had concocted charges against him they were guilty of themselves. In time this would prove to be prescient, for Ohio Congressman Wayne Hays was one of the key behind-the-scenes players to oust Powell. "I've not done a damn thing they haven't done. And I can prove it," Powell protested to me.

I can still see him thumping his index finger on a copy of Washington Exposé by Drew Pearson's partner and successor, Jack Anderson, which had just been released. The book contained the hottest inside account of misconduct in the nation's capital. I recently checked, and found that the 486-page Washington Exposé, published in 1967, has absolutely nothing to say about sex, not a word. In those days, even the toughest muckrakers stayed away from peccadilloes and dalliances.

Probably the best example of this laissez-faire attitude toward illicit sex involved J. Edgar Hoover's efforts to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After Hoover convinced Attorney General Bobby Kennedy that King was a communist, he began wiretapping and bugging him, particularly his hotel bedrooms. Soon Hoover was dispensing copies of tapes, transcripts and photos of King's sexual activities with a number of women at the Willard Hotel in Washington. Hoover's distribution list included Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Atlanta Constitution and The Augusta Chronicle. All refused to use the material. So Hoover tried passing out his material on Capitol Hill, but no one there wanted it. Exasperated, Hoover finally had copies of the tapes sent anonymously to King's wife. What amazed me when I first picked up bits and pieces of this story was that no one in the media dared blow the whistle on Hoover. Clearly, they were afraid of him.

By the time I served as counsel to the president at the Nixon White House in the early Seventies, I was aware of the rules of permissible and impermissible sexual conduct, and what was fair game for the media. As with my predecessors and successors, one of my responsibilities as White House counsel was to squelch potential problems. Rumors of JFK's reckless sexual exploits and LBJ's sexual boasting were well known in Washington--yet still not reported. But this was not the type of problem I faced. In fact, I could not envision my president, Richard Nixon, having sex with anyone, though it had apparently happened at least twice, for he had two daughters. Many years after Watergate I was approached by two reporters about alleged Nixon affairs with women. Neither of them produced even a hint of questionable sexual activity, however. It was my colleagues in the White House who were my concern.

For example, Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman once instructed me to investigate one of the president's speechwriters. He was running down a rumor the president had received. While Haldeman was not opposed to hiring homosexuals, he told me, he simply wanted to know if the writer was gay. He did not buy the thinking of the pejoratively entitled congressional report (circa 1950) on "Employment of Homosexuals and Other Perverts in Government," which claimed that homosexuals were susceptible to recruitment as communist spies.

I read the speechwriter's FBI background investigation and also talked with him during the course of business. I even visited people who had known him for many years. I was relatively confident he was not homosexual. To this day that seems the case; he's simply a confirmed bachelor.

J. Edgar Hoover, who in the Seventies was living in the Forties, had a fixation about homosexuality. He once sent a report to the White House of a rumor that Haldeman had a young male secretary, plus several young men as his aides. That had supposedly raised eyebrows. Hoover claimed that someone on Capitol Hill had asked the FBI if there might be a nest of homosexuals at the White House. When I mentioned Hoover's report to Haldeman, who had been aware of it long before I arrived at the White House, he roared with laughter. "Christ, I wish I did have a few working for me. I'll bet they'd be better than these young guys who have to run home to their wives every night."

Occasionally, the problems were potentially more serious. Like learning that Life magazine's senior investigative reporter, William Lambert, had a story about a White House official and a high-level State Department officer being involved with a high-class prostitution operation in New York run by Xaviera Hollander. Lambert, however, wasn't investigating Nixon administration officials. He was just giving us a heads-up, letting us know that a New York City police informant, Teddy Ratenoff, had obtained a copy of Hollander's john book, and Ratenoff was looking for a book deal.

My predecessor at the Nixon White House had hired a former NYPD detective to investigate these sorts of problems. I dispatched the detective. Within a few days he reported that Hollander had two john books, with her "sensitive clients" in a book that had not been obtained by Ratenoff. But we still didn't know who might have a potential problem. So I simply began casually testing here and there. Most responses were, "Hey, I should be so lucky." But when I whispered the story to White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, his face went white as a sheet. "I'll deny it," he said quickly. In light of Ziegler's schedule and high profile, he was the last person in the White House I suspected.

That potential sex scandal never surfaced. Two decades later, however, I did learn it had been the State Department's chief of protocol and one of his assistants (who had once worked at the White House) who arranged such services when requested by visiting foreign dignitaries. Providing hookers for foreign bigwigs, paid for with tax money, was (and I don't doubt remains) a Washington sex scandal waiting to happen. As Clinton's former aide Dick Morris learned, Washington call girls do not always adhere to the code of silence.

Watergate, the scandal with which I became involved, was not a sex scandal. However, this fact has not prevented G. Gordon Liddy, Watergate's most decorated felon, from trying to make it one. Not surprisingly, Liddy wants to divert attention from his bungled burglary of the Democratic National Committee, an undertaking that demonstrated slightly less judgment than that of an average juvenile delinquent. Liddy now claims he really didn't know what happened during Watergate. He has been persuaded by the Watergate revisionists that it was a sex scandal. This revisionist history is based on one man--Phillip Mackin Bailley, who has spent much of his adult life in and out of mental institutions. Bailley has also claimed to be a serial murderer and an abandoned space captain from Alpha Centauri.

Bailley's sexual activities first came to my attention while I was at the White House. The Department of Justice advised me that a young woman they believed worked at the White House had been a victim of Bailley's efforts to extort women into prostitution. Two assistant U.S. attorneys were sent to my office to explain that Bailley, a young Washington attorney, had just been indicted for extortion, racketeering and prostitution.

This story surfaced in the local newspapers. Time magazine published a brief article about Bailley, but it never became a serious sex scandal. He was quickly and correctly perceived as a man who had serious psychological problems. His victims were primarily college girls and young professional women. After Bailley was released from St. Elizabeth's mental hospital in Washington--where a federal judge had sent him for observation--he pled guilty to one charge and was sent to prison. After his release, he invented the story that he was running a call-girl ring at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate, which was the real reason for the Watergate break-in. For decades he tried to peddle his story. He finally found a writer willing to believe any conspiracy theory about anything, including Watergate. His story is pure fiction.

Watergate had nothing to do with sex, but it did expose the underbelly of the Nixon presidency. As a result of the investigation, I learned about Nixon's effort to create a sex scandal for Senator Edward Kennedy. Nixon had special counsel Chuck Colson undertake the dirty deed. Colson hired a detective to follow Kennedy when he went to Paris in 1970 for Charles de Gaulle's funeral. Colson ended up with photographs of the married senator dancing until dawn with an Italian princess (one was even published in the National Enquirer). The mainstream media would not touch them. The year before, in an attempt to maximize the scandal after the accident at Chappaquiddick, Nixon had his own investigator try to uncover and leak information to the press. The effort failed, largely because other newspeople did not want a sex story. But Nixon kept Kennedy under surveillance whenever possible. As Haldeman later explained, Nixon hoped "to catch Kennedy in the sack with one of his babes." He didn't, and given the media's ethos at the time, if Nixon had uncovered such information, it would likely never have been published.

The rules of the media regarding Washington sex scandals have obviously changed. I have no doubt about what triggered the change, for I was sitting in a front row seat when it happened. The Watergate scandal's revelations, along with the culmination of the divisive Vietnam war, had a profound impact on journalism. The media gave Washington officials the benefit of the doubt before Watergate. Newspeople ignored the private lives of public officials--when Eisenhower lied about aerial reconnaissance flights, no reporter questioned him. When Johnson lied about events in Vietnam, he got away with it. After Watergate and Vietnam, however, journalists understood that they had missed Nixon's abuses of power, and had let several presidents mislead the American people about the war. By the time Nixon resigned in shame, the media had adopted its no-more-Mr.-Nice-Guy attitude toward all Washington officials. It has never been the same since.

The new outlook became apparent when Congressman Wilbur Mills, who'd been stopped by police for speeding, was discovered with stripper Fanne Foxe at two A.M. at the Potomac River's tidal basin. The congressman had deep scratches on his face; Foxe had two black eyes. He was drunk, and she had to be pulled out of the water. While no arrests were made, the media chased this story like flies after garbage. Mills, the Ways and Means chairman who at that point had served in Congress for 36 years, couldn't sober up fast enough to figure out what had happened in Washington. A few months later, an intoxicated Mills followed Foxe to Boston, where she performed at the Boston Burlesque Theater as "the Tidal Basin bombshell"--with the media on the story. Mills would soon slide from office, first resigning his chairmanship, then retiring from Congress two years later. Little about this affair escaped coverage. Foxe signed a book deal, reviving the genre of the Washington mistress tell-all. Times had changed.

Washington old-timers didn't immediately notice the new media vigilance. As Wilbur Mills was falling from grace, Ohio Representative Wayne Hays was adding his mistress, Elizabeth Ray, to his congressional payroll. Two years later, when Hays married his Ohio office manager, he could not keep his mistress. Hays expected Ray (after he told her what the Mafia could do to girls who talked) to disappear. Fearing for her life, Ray went to The Washington Post to protect herself. She told them she worked as a secretary for Hays, but explained, "I can't type, I can't file, I can't even answer the phone." She said her only responsibility, for which she was paid the full salary of a congressional secretary, was to have sex with Hays.

At the time the Ray story broke, I was working on a story about the 1976 Republican Convention for Rolling Stone. I thought I would interview Ray. Her new book, The Washington Fringe Benefit, was causing a stir, because it implied she'd had sex with other members of Congress.

When I arrived at her high-rise apartment, she was wearing blue jeans and a tight red sweater that accentuated her best features. Her long blonde hair looked like it had just been washed. She was pretty. After a few warm-up questions to get comfortable, we got to the nitty-gritty. But it was soon clear that she wasn't going to name names, at least not on the record. I was curious as to how she'd gotten involved. She struck me as naive, almost innocent. "Do you know why you got involved as you did?"

"Sometimes I've wondered if I was really stupid or what. I've tried to analyze this, to see if I was the dumbest girl in the world to get into what I did. But I didn't think I had any choice. I was used for going out with other men, I mean, I was used in every kind of way." Her look left little to the imagination.

"So, if you had to advise other girls?"

"I would tell them to try not to get into that kind of situation. I'd tell them that it's not glamorous like I thought it was. It's not that way at all. You pay for every minute of glamour. You really pay, emotionally and physically, for every bit of the excitement of power," she explained with feeling. Elizabeth Ray had been looking for Prince Charming. She had decided there were no princes, and little real charm, on Capitol Hill.

I had gathered some titillating material (she had told me she'd had an affair with Vice President Hubert Humphrey), but I'd lost interest in the story. This woman had been exploited by enough men in Washington. It was time to leave. As I packed my tape recorder, she asked, "Would you like to see my pictures?" She batted her eyes coquettishly. I must have blushed, because she sighed and added, "You don't have to, of course. I just thought you might like to."

"Sure," I said.

She disappeared into her bedroom and reappeared carrying a large folder from which she pulled a 10"xl2" in-living-color photo of herself, nude. "This is the one Playboy is using," she observed. "Do you like it?"

"Why, yes," I said, feeling my face flush. Her body was lovely, sensuous and soft-looking. I doubted my wife was going to think too keenly about this phase of the interview.

"How about this one? Actually, I like it better," she said, pulling another revealing picture from her folder.

"You certainly photograph beautifully," I said, my embarrassment and guilt vying to see which would get me out the door first. Back at my hotel, I made a few notes in my diary about the interview, "Thanks to Watergate, Wayne Hays didn't have a chance." Earlier I had visited a friend, a seasoned Newsweek reporter. I closed my diary entry on June 28, 1976, thinking about that conversation: "John Lindsay is right. Washington is not a very pleasant place in the aftermath of Watergate."

Watergate changed the rules. Congressman Condit's outrage at the media's attention to his private life is misplaced. Newspeople are doing to him only what they have done to others for the past three decades.

In surveying 200 years of Washington sex scandals, looking particularly at those of recent vintage, one fact became evident to me: It's not the sex, but the lying about it that causes most of the trouble. That fact posed the greatest problem for Gary Condit. Just as those of us involved with Watergate at the Nixon White House provided a guide for what not to do with a president who abuses the powers of his office, Condit has written his own book on how not to handle a Washington sex scandal.

Writing more than 2000 years ago, Plutarch observed: "Statesmen are not only liable to give account of what they say or do in public, but there is a busy inquiry constantly made into their very meals, beds, marriages and every other sportive or serious action." Gary Condit ignored history at his peril.