With the trial of Ingmar Guandique for the 2001 slaying of Chandra Levy well underway here in DC, former California Congressman Gary Condit has been back in the news. This past week we learned two things: that the FBI found his semen on a pair of Levy’s panties following her disappearance, and that Condit is working on a book about what his son calls the “bad deal” his father got from the police and the press in the months before 9/11 swept the scandal from the national headlines.
I’m struck by the juxtaposition of those two pieces of information.
The broad outlines of the case are well known: Attractive Washington intern goes missing. It then turns out that her home district’s (married) “man in Washington” was in fact servicing his much younger constituent. Washington, DC, police focus almost exclusively on Condit as the suspect in the intern's disappearance rather than the young Salvadoran with the criminal record who’d assaulted other women in the park that is the primary search area. The congressman is hounded by police, vilified in the press and ultimately booted from office by his constituents.
On Good Morning America the other day, Chad Condit lamented to host George Stephanopoulos that his father “didn’t deserve what happened,” and complained that the Condit family has been “dealing with [this] for 10 years.” When Stephanopoulos asked whether the former lawmaker perhaps had contributed to his woes by consistently declining to speak publicly about Levy, Chad Condit said no. His father had cooperated fully with police, the son said, but had felt the details of his relationship with Levy were irrelevant to the criminal investigation and need not be shared with the public.
“We hope people will understand that in this country you are entitled to certain level of privacy,” the younger Condit said. “If we lose that, we’re going to lose the very essence of what we are as a country.” Well, it seems to me that what the Condit boys would do well to understand is that, had the congressman in 2001 shown a fraction of the concern for and interest in Chandra Levy’s fate that he’d shown for his own reputation and hide, he might today be seen as a sympathetic figure, rather than as just another disgraced politician who’s now out to make a buck from his infamy. Condit’s philandering still might have gotten him kicked out of Congress, but his name might not now be synonymous with “self-centered ass” by those of us who remember the angry vehemence with which he sought to distant himself from the missing and presumed-dead young woman with whom he’d been amorously linked.
I followed the story closely in the local news in 2001, and what I saw in Gary Condit then was a righteous indignation so consuming that he scarcely could bring himself to concede he’d known Levy, let alone slept with her. Though the police consistently described the relationship as sexual, Condit never would publicly confirm that. He clearly hated being asked about Levy, or even mentioning her name. At one point, as I recall, he managed a perfunctory, lip-service expression of concern for her fate and sympathy for her parents. But when the Levys—not knowing what to think, and having been egged on by the bungling DC cops—themselves began questioning Condit’s innocence, the rage in his face implied that he now hated them nearly as much as he seemed to hate their daughter for having ruined his life by disappearing in the first place.
What both Gary and Chad Condit still don’t seem to get—although to his credit, the son expressed more genuine sympathy for the Levy family’s grief in five minutes this week than his father has in the past nine-plus years—is that, while a rush to judgment on the parts of the police and the press unquestionably made Condit’s life miserable for a while, he never was the real victim in the Chandra Levy affair. It was Chandra Levy who was murdered in Rock Creek Park, after all. And it was she who was slandered in a way by Condit, whose stonewalling about the relationship only solidified her public image as simply another foolish young woman who’d bought into a married man’s promise of divorce. What I truly despise Gary Condit for—and I suspect I’m not the only one—isn’t so much the abuse of power that facilitated the affair as the utter lack of any tenderness, any grief, any acknowledgement on his part that this tragedy was about Chandra Levy, not Gary Condit. Had she meant anything at all to him, other than the obvious? It’s there that his silence was, and still is, deafening.
Now that his renegade semen has been cited in official court testimony, Condit presumably will at last cut the crap in his book. If he’s smart, he’ll say some nice things about Chandra Levy, portraying her as a real flesh-and-blood woman who had feelings and attributes—as more than simply a quick you-know-what. But it will be up to readers to parse how much of that is heartfelt and how much is belated damage control. Regardless, Condit’s history suggests that Levy still will be little more than a bit player in the bigger story of how a stellar lawmaker was grievously and outrageously, if you'll pardon the expression, screwed.
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