Like many people, I’ve been following the story about the disappearance of Chandra Levy and her relationship with Congressman Gary Condit. I’ve been trying to make up my mind if it’s just another media-driven Capitol sex scandal or perhaps something larger, a Greek tragedy playing out before us.
My initial reaction was that he perhaps was one of the world’s unluckier adulterers who, when Levy vanished, immediately became by default either a very important material witness or, despite the D.C. cops’ reluctance to say so, a prime suspect.
When the situation is examined, how could he be anything but a prime suspect? An older man in the public spotlight has an affair with a younger woman. There’s some suspicion, or even evidence, that she loves him and could even possibly be pregnant and may want him to leave his wife and marry her. She’s young, headstrong and not very cautious.
He, on the other hand, is a bit of a strange duck. He’s apparently a man who lives two very separate and very contradictory lives. At home in Modesto he is, by all appearances, Mr. Straight Arrow: a minister’s son, a dutiful family man, a beloved public servant, doesn’t drink or smoke, a religious political conservative who is a major force in San Joaquin Valley politics, which is the epicenter of where the fight for political control of the state often takes place. He’s the governor’s “Go To” man in Congress and often serves as a middleman between the Capitol Democrats and Republicans. And, to date, there’s no scandal out of the Modesto side of his life, although that could change.
The other side of his life is in Washington D.C. But before that he served in the Legislature in Sacramento, and there are still lots of people there who know him and talk about him. And the guy they describe in Sacramento doesn’t even remotely resemble the guy the folks knew back home in Modesto. The Sacramento Condit was the party animal. He was a man who liked women, went to all the hot nightspots, hung out to the wee hours and had a reputation for living life very much in the fast lane. He was also very much a major political player. He and four other relatively conservative Democrats challenged the Assembly leadership of Speaker Willie Brown and came very close to ousting him, which was a very risky thing to do. The man obviously likes and needs big risks.
However, it’s been reported that he was very paranoid about his other self being discovered and had his ladies go through all sort of stratagems to try and avoid detection.
But, despite his paranoia, the one thing he never did was stop. He’s also a guy who introduces legislation to post the Ten Commandments in all public buildings, and the first democratic congressman to admonish President Bill Clinton for his behavior with an intern. At the same time, he’s practically living a life out of the Clinton playbook.
How do you reconcile these contradictions?
Some people have described him as hypocritical, but I sense it goes way, way beyond that. This guy has every appearance of being a house divided against itself. He’s driven by drives he can’t control, that take him right to the edge of the abyss. And, if you overlook my cheap psychoanalysis, I believe those drives scare the hell out of him.
Is this a guy that would commit murder if his world were threatened? I don’t know the answer, but I doubt that there isn’t a homicide detective in the world who wouldn’t put Condit at the very top of his suspect list.
So what next?
If the D.C. homicide people are doing their job, and I’ve got to believe with all of this pressure they are, they’re going through his life and Levy’s life with a proverbial fine tooth comb.
My guess is they started with the records. Her cell phone records, credit card records, medical records, date book, address book, e-mails, computer hard drive, tape rentals, book rentals, hotel and motel receipts, records of the area cab companies and every take-out restaurant near her home that delivers. Then, to where she did her internship and repeat the process. Since she was a Bureau of Prisons intern, perhaps there are other people she had contact with who could be suspects.
Then her personal life: roommates, family, friends, lovers, co-workers, colleagues, law enforcement people, guards, prisoners, and on and on.
Then, the same for him, plus his notebooks, calendars and the paperwork of his entire staff. Tapes of congressional hearings, pictures of his clothing, plus blood, urine, DNA samples. And when they’re through, they should be able to plot his every move, almost minute by minute, during the critical time periods.
Even if they do everything possible, we may never know, but I’d guess that, if she were murdered, somebody, somewhere, saw or heard something and will come forward. Then perhaps we’ll know if this is just a sordid mess or a Greek tragedy.