Circling the Wagons ‘Round Gary Condit

The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis has paid for his lies. After years of regaling undergraduates at Mount Holyoke College with fabricated accounts of his combat experiences during the Vietnam War, Ellis was exposed by the Boston Globe. A faculty committee at the college has decreed a harsh penalty: Ellis will suffer a one-year suspension without pay and the loss of his endowed chair in history and is barred from ever again teaching a course on the Vietnam War.

No one working in the American university system can contemplate the unfortunate case of Ellis with anything but sadness. Yet teachers and scholars also can feel a grim pride in their profession.

In an era in which standards are ever malleable, in which “mistakes are made” but seldom paid for, a malefactor has received a punishment commensurate with the offense.

The Ellis case sets in stark relief another egregious example of professional misconduct in the United States today; not the sordid behavior of Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres) but the utter refusal of his colleagues to discipline one of their own.

Presumably, a federal lawmaker should be held to a code of professional conduct at least as strict as that of a university professor. Yet with a handful of exceptions, Condit’s colleagues in the House have condoned his lies to the public and the parents of the missing woman and his dissembling to the police. The voters in his district are the final arbiters, they say. Look to Modesto, not Washington, to pass judgment on Condit.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Republican Leader Dick Armey and Democratic Leader Richard A. Gephardt all have declined to criticize Condit.

The sense of the House seems to be that unless a body is discovered in Condit’s congressional office, his conduct is a matter of supreme indifference to his colleagues.

How to explain the reluctance of Condit’s colleagues to clean house? Are they merely exhibiting the same self-interested tactics of lawyers, doctors and other professionals who circle the wagons to protect a colleague under siege?

Just as cops maintain a wall of silence and doctors ignore the malpractice of their fellows, the first instinct of the elite political class is to clam up and look away.

Or perhaps members of Congress share the widespread confusion about two distinct categories of culpability, the criminal and the professional. Condit’s criminal culpability, if any, will be settled as a matter of law. On this, his colleagues rightly withhold judgment.

But they already know more than enough to condemn his professional malfeasance as a lawmaker, as a representative of the people, as one of their own. The voters may elect Condit, but his colleagues in Congress determine his committee assignments and, in extreme cases, his fitness to sit among them.

Thus far, they have been almost as silent on the matter as Condit himself.

The backfire from that other case involving a politician and an intern has surely contributed to the institutional paralysis.

During the impeachment of President Clinton, congressional Democrats accepted the principle that lying about sexual impropriety with an intern, whether to the public or under the law, is acceptable.

And the House Republicans seem terrified of getting tagged again with that most dreaded of modern epithets: being judgmental.

If Condit were a police officer, he would have been suspended from duty pending the outcome of the investigation.

If Condit were a high school teacher, he would not be back in the classroom for the fall semester.

Yet when Congress reconvenes after Labor Day, Condit is free to return to the House with all the rights and privileges of his high office.

Apparently, to his colleagues in the profession, he remains a member in good standing.