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The New York Times
the TV watch
Humiliation, if Not
Candor,
From Senator on the
Defensive
By ALESSANDRA
STANLEY, nytimes.com on the Web, October 17, 2007
Senator Larry E. Craig told NBC’s
Matt Lauer that he was too “embarrassed” to tell his wife, his lawyer, or his
aides about his arrest for solicitation in an airport bathroom. But with
his wife, Suzanne, seated at his side, the Idaho lawmaker didn’t flinch as he
watched Mr. Lauer drag one polished brown shoe across the senator’s living room
carpet to re-enact the alleged misstep that brought him to this point.
The senator’s dogged, spirited eagerness to make his case was perhaps the most
painful element in last night’s hourlong exercise in political hubris and
humiliation. Mr. Craig found no question too petty or too probing to
answer, and Mr. Lauer asked him about the movement of his right hand reaching,
palm up, under the divider into the next stall. “So again, the fact that
this — that these motions seemed to replicate a well-established sequence of
signals for soliciting anonymous sex, it’s a coincidence?” Mr. Lauer asked.
After Mr. Craig, a conservative Republican, gave a long, detailed account, Mr.
Lauer posed a question that seemed to dismiss the senator’s entire story.
“Are you technically not a homosexual?” Mr. Lauer said. “Is it possible
you’re bisexual?”
Mr. Craig replied quietly, “It’s no to both.”
People watch for a reason. These semiconfessional jags are riveting
theater because they come with a built-in mystery. Viewers try to solve
the riddle of what really happened by looking at the clench of the subject’s
jaw, the blinking of the subject’s eyes, the directness of the subject’s gaze:
is the person persuaded by his or her own fabrications and half-truths? Is
this a televised ritual of obfuscation or a spectacle of self-denial and
self-delusion? Could it be that this embattled public figure is actually a
bold-faced truth teller?
Richard M. Nixon delivered the Checkers speech to deflect accusations of
corruption. Bill Clinton denied having an affair with Monica S. Lewinsky
to salvage his presidency.
Mr. Craig’s misadventure was no less scandalous, but so much more trivial; he
and his wife went on national television to discuss what he did — or did not do
— in an airport men’s room.
Mrs. Craig, wearing a television-friendly red sweater set, was a pillar of
unconditional support, but she, too, inadvertently suggested that Mr. Craig’s
version of events seemed implausible. After the news broke in August, she
told Mr. Lauer, she wondered whether her husband might be hiding a gay secret
life after all, saying she did a lot of “soul searching” when she learned
everything that her husband had withheld.
“Did I miss something?” Mrs. Craig recalled. “And I honestly believe my
husband has always been faithful to me in every way.”
Her words were supportive, but Mrs. Craig has been at her husband’s side
confronting charges that he had a secret life before. She described
reporters coming into her house to ask about a man who claimed to have had sex
with the senator at Union Station in Washington. “And I knew immediately
it was not the truth, because the description he gave of Larry in some areas
that only I might know about were wrong on three counts,” she said forthrightly.
Public figures come to these excruciatingly embarrassing interviews to reclaim
their dignity. But the circumstances that lead them into the chair make
that just about impossible, and their defiance seals the deal.
They are not showing that they are willing to come clean. They are selling
the illusion that they have not been broken, when the viewer knows — and they
too, must, at some level know — that the game is long over.
“I’m a fighter,” Mr. Craig said, not long after he admitted he pleaded guilty to
a lesser charge to make his career-threatening men’s-room mistake “go away.”
The lower the stakes, the more candor is expected, because viewers are realistic
about the aftermath. They do not expect full disclosure if there are
sheriffs waiting in the wings with handcuffs. But this is a confessional
society, as Ellen DeGeneres demonstrated with a meltdown on her talk show on
Monday; viewers expect a mea culpa with as much culpa as mea. (Former Gov.
James E. McGreevey of New Jersey trumped his gay sex scandal by shocking people
with the truth.) If there isn’t an appearance of real candor, then the
interview is an exercise in prolonging damage, not damage control.
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