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It was the late, great Warren Zevon who first wrote and sang about “making out like Charlie Sheen,” long before we met the goddesses. Now we find out that Gen. David Petraeus, a military hero and the head of the CIA, thought he was allowed to make out that way himself.
Petraeus becomes another famous American who thought sitting behind a big desk meant you could act like a slob underneath it. It is rather amazing, historically speaking, that if you give a big guy the slightest opening, he will behave like Charlie Sheen. Sometimes in military khakis.
But does it mean he should have lost his job for exhibiting what even he called “extremely poor judgment”? Why, because he was the first in a position of authority to think that it was all right to have a girl on the side, in the general’s case an extremely frisky, married biographer?
Petraeus first met Paula Broadwell — her book about Petraeus would eventually be called “All In,” go ahead and make up your own joke — when he was still in Afghanistan. It happens to be the place where Petraeus established himself as a star of both the military and counterterrorism. Is his work in Afghanistan, and Iraq before that, now diminished because he clearly — and pathetically — started thinking of Broadwell, herself a West Point grad, as some kind of soul mate?
Petraeus obviously loses here. His wife, who deserves none of this, who has become a hero to military families herself, is humiliated because a man described in The New York Times as the “preeminent military officer of his generation” turned out to have the morals of a drunken cadet on a weekend furlough.
But if he was going to have the body of work with the CIA that he did in Iraq and Afghanistan, the country also loses with the resignation of David Petraeus.
And please spare me the instant yammering from those who now act as if somehow Petraeus was somehow putting national security at risk because of this affair. You can already see the conspiracy nuts lining up and taking numbers, as if Petraeus’ resignation, coming when it does, is a way to hide the real facts of what happened when four Americans were killed in Benghazi, including our ambassador there.
Right away you see and hear the narrative shifting on President Obama, whose opponents and enemies couldn’t defeat him last Tuesday. With congressional hearings about to begin on Benghazi, it is only a matter of time until somebody stands up and starts shouting about impeachment.
The last guy they impeached was William Jefferson Clinton. He not only had an intern on the side, he had her with him in the Oval Office. Maybe it figures that his middle name is what it is, since Thomas Jefferson supposedly had enough free time on his hands while shaping the future of the country to sire out-of-wedlock children with Sally Hemings.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had an affair, with a woman named Lucy Mercer. The married Dwight Eisenhower, the military hero of Normandy and a future President, had a great and good friend in Kay Summersby. And John F. Kennedy might have been the most noted political philanderer in American history.
If making a mess of marriages and a personal life in general disqualified you from being the mayor of New York, then Rudy Giuliani wouldn’t have even been on the job on Sept. 11, 2001.
This is no defense of David Petraeus or what he has selfishly done to his wife of 38 years, a child of the military herself, a woman who became a powerful voice for financial education for military families.
Eventually Holly Petraeus worked for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, operating the part of that bureau dedicated to consumer complaints from military families. You hope she soldiers on the way her husband does not.
Petraeus chose to resign, the President chose to accept his resignation. The CIA loses, and the country loses, an exceptional leader of men and a truly lousy husband.
Petraeus committed a crime against marriage, absolutely. But he also committed the crime of being this stupid and getting this caught in the modern world. Imagine what it would have been like for JFK in a world like this.
Petraeus now joins a long list — immoral leaders, all-time — that stretches back to the Old Testament, and the affair between King David and Bathsheba. All they did with the big guy in that dirty affair was write a Bible story about him.
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