Did David Betray Us?

2009 Defense Department official portrait of Gen. David Petraeus, downloaded from Wikicommons.

Boy, in the old days, we knew how to have a scandal.

Richard Nixon formed a creepy CREEP prior to 1972—a Committee to Re-Elect the President—that included a shadowy “plumbers” unit, that, among many other things, burgled the national headquarters of the Democratic Party.

To cover up, Nixon and his cronies went to many lengths, including, apparently, doctoring evidence. As far as I know, they never went so far as assassination, but little else seemed beyond their low scruples.

Watergate—the abuse of executive power, the testing of the Constitution’s limits on the President, the field testing of Nixon’s loathsome notion that anything the President does is legal as long as it is the President who is doing it—there was a Scandal.

Gen. David Petraeus, who resigned as head of the CIA, doesn’t even come close. He cheated on his wife with the hot younger biographer who was hanging around, hanging on his every word and, apparently, not stopping there.

The scandal leaves me more than a bit sad, partly because it seems a bit, honestly, unnecessary. From all that I have read, including this excellent article on the Atlantic’s web site, Petraeus was a brilliant general, and probably would have been a brilliant CIA director.

If he couldn’t keep his rocket in his pocket, it does not mean he didn’t rock it as a commander and leader.

In this day and age of 24-hour news cycles, here are some lessons from this sad affair:

• E-mail is not private. Frankly, neither are cell phone text records. E-mail tripped up Bill Gates in the 1990s and a very, very bright CIA director at the dawn of the new millennium. It’s a point I make to communication students all the time. If you type it into a computer, it’s out of control and can go anywhere.

• Nothing else is private, either, and that’s a shame. Dwight Eisenhower could not command the U.S. Army or be elected president today. You can’t sleep with your driver nowadays, as you could in the old days. And that’s not a good thing. No, I don’t advocate powerful men playing around—it’s too destructive of them, their mates and the younger women they mess around with—but we have an odd attitude that everything is everybody’s business. I really don’t like that David Petraeus slept with his biographer, but it’s also really nothing to do with me. Good men, and good women, are flawed humans who make mistakes. This error in judgment should not have ended the career of a valuable American leader. And was David the hunter or the hunted? Again, I’m not sure it matters, but one of the blogs I read has interesting points on that issue and what it means to be betrayed.

I don’t know what the answer is. I am not advocating going back to the chummy old days when the Washington press corps knew Kennedy was after anything cute in a skirt and didn’t care—but surely our new reality is not healthy, either. Nor do I like a European attitude that says fooling around is just what powerful men do and we should just get over it. Fidelity, it seems to me, is more important than that. But it is also a private matter.

David certainly betrayed his wife, and shame on him, but then again, if you ship people overseas for months at a time, this sort of thing will happen. Whether his wife can forgive him is up to her. As an American citizen, I say, David, watch the e-mails. And try to walk the straight road from now on. But, really, what you did didn’t hurt me, and I don’t care about it that much. You’re forgiven.

Well, David did betray us. When he resigned. I wish Obama had just said “no.”