Daily Telegraph, July 15, 2001
The congressman, the missing intern, his wife and his lovers By Mark Steyn
IF Gary Condit didn't kill Chandra Levy, he's the unluckiest adulterer in Washington. Until April, he was just another horny congressman, cheerfully nailing - as with many, if not most, of his colleagues - one of the town's vast herd of obliging interns.
Not his own intern, perish the thought, but some other fellow's: after all, three years ago, when President Clinton ran into a little difficulty intern-wise, Congressman Condit was one of the few Democrats to vote for the impeachment inquiry, so it was important for him to set an example and only screw around with young federal employees not directly under his authority.
In the two-and-a-half months between the disappearance of his "friend" and his belated recollection this week that, oh yeah, now you mention it, they were having sex, we have learnt nothing about the fate of Miss Levy, but an awful lot about America's most famous obscure congressman. To whit:
He has had at least seven other mistresses, some of them simultaneous with Chandra.
To ease pressures on his business and personal lines, Mr Condit has a special telephone number for his mistresses to call on. You dial up, get an answering machine that plays soft'n'easy favourites, and leave your message.
One mistress was the 18-year-old daughter of a Pentecostal minister and gardener from Modesto, California, in Mr Condit's home district. The congressman may have sired a child by her. The dates match and, on the birth certificate, the father's name is "withheld".
During his stint in the California State Assembly, he was known as "Gary Condom" and was such a prodigious legover maestro that female staffers planned a "Condoms for Condit" fundraiser to ensure that he would at least be able to practise "safe sex".
Except that he's into unsafe sex, according to another mistress, Anne Marie Smith, the "flame-haired flight attendant" with whom Gary was two-timing Chandra - or three-timing if you take his wife into consideration, which evidently Gary doesn't terribly often. Miss Smith says the congressman has sexual tastes beyond those of the "normal heterosexual male". She looked under his bed and discovered a string of neckties roped together, such as could be used to tie someone up.
Of all the interns in all the apartments in all the District of Columbia, why did his have to disappear? Why couldn't The Mystery Of The Missing Mistress have starred, say, fellow stickman Jesse Jackson? Against that, it has to be said that, since April 30, Gary Condit has been doing a superb impersonation of a guilty man, even before anyone thought there was anything to be guilty about. On May 3, Chandra's mother telephoned the
congressman to say she hadn't heard from her daughter in a couple of days and did he know where she was. "No," he said. "But would you like me to put up a $10,000 reward?" This seems a very curious reaction, given that Mrs Levy had not yet contacted the police and was not yet suspecting the worst. But Mr Condit was.
On May 5 or 6, well before Chandra's disappearance became news, the congressman told his other other woman, Miss Smith: "I'm going to have to disappear for a while. I think I may be in some trouble."
Mr Condit had also embarked on what would be two months of lies, big and small. Aside from lying to the police, he also lied to Chandra's parents about the date on which he had last spoken to his "good friend", subsequently justifying it with the
Clintonian explanation that he had thought the Levys meant "in person" rather than "on the phone".
In another Clintonian touch, he had his lawyers draft an affidavit for Miss Smith denying that she'd had an affair with the congressman. Miss Smith declined to sign and instead went to Fox News.
Mr Condit, in two months of perfunctory, evasive formulations, has nevertheless been eloquent on one point: he does not have a car. His public statements are at pains to point this out at every opportunity.
For example, take the official timeline that he provided for the weekend on which Chandra Levy was last seen: "Saturday, April 28: Carolyn Condit, the congressman's wife, arrives from California at 7.30pm ET. Rep. Condit, with a staffer because he has no car, picks her up at the airport. They go to a Xando coffee shop."
Sub-text: I couldn't have put the body in the boot of the car, because I don't have a car to put the body in. But, according to Miss Smith: "He does have a car here in DC." Whether or not he has an automobile, he seems noticeably short of several other essentials of modern political life. When police were finally admitted to his flat this week, they were struck by the absence of a home computer. They did take away some long dark hairs unlikely to have come from Mr Condit's grey thatch, and a piece of a blind that appeared to have blood on it.
And, though there's no stained dress, they did find a stained pair of trousers with a noticeable red spot, which the congressman's ferocious high-rent lawyer, Abbe Lowell, refused to let them impound. Possibly it is an old ketchup stain arising from Mr Condit's small part in the 1978 film Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes.
The congressman had strict rules for his girlfriends, one of which was that, whenever they were in his flat, they were to have no ID on them whatsoever. Miss Levy disappeared, leaving all her ID - driver's licence, credit cards, etc - back at
her place.
Even the news on Friday that Mr Condit had passed a polygraph test hasn't helped. A "lie detector" is, more accurately, a nervousness detector, which is why the fluttery tickertape is inadmissible in court.
A guy who has successfully held off the DC cops for two months is anything but nervous, and, in this instance, the polygraph test was administered not by the police, but by a private expert hired by Mr Condit's lawyer and included only three
questions relevant to Chandra, with no follow-ups. Abbe Lowell's announcement that it proved his client's "innocence" provoked the police into their strongest criticisms of Mr Condit yet.
Indeed, the only thing to be said in his favour is that Mr Condit is behaving so guiltily that, if this were a Hollywood movie, he'd be the guy you assume did it until five minutes before the end, when, in a stunning courtroom coup de theatre, Perry Mason reveals that the popular Democratic congressman was, in fact, framed by an embittered Republican opponent.
Real life is duller: the obvious suspect is usually the guy who did it. If he's not a killer, there's a prima facie case of obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury. As we know from impeachment days, for Democrats such piffling offences don't "rise to the level" of high crimes.
With Bill Clinton, the defence was that it was only about sex; but, with Mr Condit, it's not only about sex, it's about possible murder: Monica Meets OJ, in tabloid-speak.
Yet, throughout two long months of obvious lying, Democrats have been in full Clinton mode, or, as the House Democratic Leader, Dick Gephardt, told AP: "Gary is co-operating in every possible way with the police investigation. He's doing what he's been asked to do."
Even as Gephardt was blandly standing by his man, federal officials were opening a criminal investigation into whether the congressman had obstructed justice. What does a Democrat have to do to get disowned by his party? In public, some
Dems deplore the intrusion into Mr Condit's "private" life. In private, a couple have cited his sleaziness as the best evidence of his innocence: why would he kill this mistress when he's never killed any of the others?
So what if, as some reports have it, she was pregnant? He didn't mind when the 18-year-old preacher's gal got knocked up. And, naturally, everyone understands that Gary lied because he wanted "to protect his family". If he had a "romantic relationship", that's his business.
"Romantic" hardly seems the word. As Chandra's aunt tells it, her young niece had to spend much of the day alone in Mr Condit's apartment waiting for him. The best that Auntie could advise to while away the hours was to try to please him by
arranging his shirts according to colour.
Let us do as we should and presume the congressman's innocence. He nevertheless encouraged behaviour that could lead a young woman into danger. Gary Condit persuaded Chandra Levy to compartmentalise her life - to conduct a secret affair, behind closed doors, her driver's licence, her purse, her formal identity left behind at home. Suppose she started doing that with someone else, too?
Congressmen are not like MPs, wedged on to the benches of the Commons, sharing offices and one aged secretary. A member of the House of Representatives has multiple offices and a vast professional staff, and all the time in the world to "mentor" as many interns as he wants.
The received opinion says that we must be careful to criticise Gary Condit only for his stonewalling of the police and not for his multiple affairs. But the one led to the other. Seedy deception, droit du seigneur, an enabling staff and uncritical colleagues: that's the world Gary Condit lives in and, in some furtive corner thereof, Chandra Levy may well have died.
As long as Democrats insist that it's OK to screw interns, stewardesses and teenagers just so long as you don't kill 'em, the Condits and Clintons will flourish. And, whatever happened to Chandra, there's plenty more where she came from.
Or, as the announcement on Gary Condit's website, put it: "Intern Opportunities. Whether interning in Modesto, Merced, or Washington D.C., working in one of Rep. Condit's offices can be an extremely rewarding experience."
