A double standard for secrets in Congress?

The congresswoman’s problem became public at 12:30 a.m. on Friday, March 21. As her colleagues debated President Bush’s tax cut, an inebriated Karen McCarthy, 56-year-old Democrat from Missouri, struggled to walk up the down escalator between two House office buildings.

Colleagues who had seen her earlier -- tired, anxious about the war in Iraq and eager to go home -- urged her to stay in a room for lawmakers off the House floor. Adamant about leaving the House chamber, she yelled and threw papers at an aide. Then as she negotiated the escalator, she slipped and struck her forehead. She was treated at a local hospital.

In the morning, having missed her chance to join Democrats in voting against the federal budget, which passed 215 to 212, she issued a statement: “I have hit bottom, and I realize I must take action to change. I am taking the initiative and will confront this disease and, like so many before me, I will win this battle.”

With that, she earned a dubious distinction: McCarthy, the divorced daughter of alcoholics, is the first female member of Congress to acknowledge a drinking problem. She requested a leave of absence from House leaders, checked herself into a rehabilitation facility in Arizona and stayed for a month.

For years, alcoholism in Congress was a secret kept in the “family.” Staffers and colleagues quietly helped inebriated lawmakers cast key votes and keep up appearances. Reporters usually looked the other way, hewing to the journalistic standard that private behavior was not public business unless it affected official performance.

In 1974, journalists covering the Wilbur Mills case broke the code of silence. After the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee was stopped in Washington by police for driving erratically and his companion, a stripper named Fannie Foxe, tried to dodge police by jumping into the water near the Jefferson Memorial, the wraps came off.

Soon, politicians started blaming alcohol for a host of sins, from womanizing to plowing into guardrails on the Beltway. It was the age of confession, and voters often forgave the foibles of public officials if they were contrite and sought treatment.

Although it has become routine for politicians to confess their sins, get help and move on, Karen McCarthy’s case seems to be striking a different chord with the press.

“I watched a couple of guys go through this, and they didn’t get the same scrutiny as Ms. McCarthy is,” said Rep. Jim McDermott, a liberal Democrat from Seattle who is the only psychiatrist in the House. “She’s got to be way stronger than Wilbur Mills.”

Since her return to Washington following treatment, her hometown paper has homed in. The Kansas City Star, which repeatedly has noted her high staff turnover, disclosed that she had paid a management consultant out of campaign funds -- an action some congressional officials said was a violation of House ethics. (McCarthy says she was told it was appropriate but now has corrected the practice.)

The Hill newspaper, widely read in the halls of Congress, reported that office morale sank after she asked her staff to hold hands and recite the Serenity Prayer. In the prayer, a recovering alcoholic asks God to “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” Her response: “Nonsense. I recited it once to tell them about my journey.”

McCarthy is concerned that the media are targeting her to keep a plot line going: “Somehow there needed to be a story about my going public with my disease,” she said. “Then it was, ‘Gee, how do we make that into a really juicy story? Let’s find something bad.’ ”

Still, she tries to remain philosophical. “It’s a challenge every day and, gosh, it makes it all the harder when people are kicking you when you’re down,” she said. “But part of the joy of going through recovery is you don’t blame others.”

Darrell M. West, a professor of political science at Brown University and author of a book about Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy (D-R.I.), who struggled to overcome a problem with narcotics, believes there is a double standard in how society views male and female drinkers. “Men engage in bad behavior and it’s them just acting like adolescents,” he said. “Women are seen as somehow irresponsible.”

In Congress, men have had the field to themselves for a long time.

Russell Long, the Democratic Finance Committee chairman from Louisiana, sometimes stumbled onto the Senate floor visibly drunk. Concerned colleagues bypassed him for a leadership role, but no one publicly acknowledged why.

Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, the anti-Communist crusader, died of hepatitis at age 48, but his well-known drinking habits went unmentioned in the obituaries.

“Joe McCarthy drank himself into the grave, yet the code of silence on alcoholism was so strong that of all the people who wanted to get the guy, no one said a word,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University who studies Congress. Sen. Thomas Hennings Jr., a Democrat from Missouri, “was gifted in many ways, but a hopeless alcoholic,” Baker said. “They’d drag him back to vote from the bar at the Quorum Club and raise his hand.”

But when police stopped Chairman Mills with a stripper, it was “so notorious, so public, so lurid, no journalist could leave it alone,” Baker said. Even though he confessed -- “I now realize that I had developed a severe drinking problem” -- the admission did not save his career. It did, however, pave the way for a generation of politicians who were able to confess to their hard-drinking ways and recover personally and professionally.

In 1995, Rep. Jerry Kleczka (D-Wis.) was arrested for drunk driving in Alexandria, Va., and was forced, as part of his sentence, to pick up trash. First elected in 1984, Kleczka’s recent ballot challenges have come as a Democrat running in an increasingly Republican suburb of Milwaukee.

In March 2000, friends and fellow lawmakers cornered Rep. Philip M. Crane, an Illinois Republican, and urged him to get help for his drinking problem. Crane said he started drinking heavily after his 31-year-old daughter Rachel died. After the disclosure, he lost a bid for chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee.But insiders did not attribute the loss to his drinking. Instead, they said, he lost because of a perception that his opponent, Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield), would be more aggressive in pushing the GOP’s agenda and candidates.

A classic story of confession and redemption comes from Jim Ramstad. In July 1981, Ramstad, then a Republican state senator in Minnesota, woke up in a jail cell in Sioux Falls, S.D., to find himself charged with disorderly conduct, stemming from an alcoholic blackout and drinkers’ brawl.

“It was my first year in office, and this was on the front page of the newspapers and the lead on TV news,” Ramstad said. “I was so humiliated and embarrassed. I wanted to be dead. I thought for sure my political career was over. Instead, people embraced me, rallied around me. It was a lifesaving experience.”

He won election to Congress in 1990 and has been reelected easily ever since.

Not all who came before Karen McCarthy fared so well. John Tower, a former Republican senator from Texas, was denied confirmation as secretary of Defense under the first President Bush largely because of his drinking.

McCarthy, who attends meetings in Washington and in Kansas City to reinforce her commitment to not drink does not cast blame for her problem. But she does wonder about proximate causes -- her family history of alcoholism and the stresses of a post-Sept. 11 world.

When McCarthy was 22, starting her first job as a teacher and about to be married, her mother died from alcohol-related causes. Her father also was alcoholic. “He lived longer, but the dysfunction of his life was translated into his four children, all girls,” she said. “We were all adult children of alcoholic parents. My oldest sister grappled with alcohol and gave it up, just stopped drinking. She and I were very close. She came to visit me during family week when I was in treatment.”

McCarthy said she began drinking heavily -- usually wine -- after Sept. 11. “It was a marker of when I sought more solace in white wine than is appropriate to my body type,” said McCarthy, who weighs only 120 pounds. “A couple of glasses and I had a buzz.”

She also has been frustrated by new political realities in Washington. Funding priorities have shifted toward war and homeland defense, which has left McCarthy, a liberal activist, unable to successfully champion issues such as arts funding. “I came here to accomplish certain things, and in the last few years those battles are always lost,” McCarthy said. “There’s a cumulative angst over the way public policy is going, away from people in need.”

Elected to the Missouri House at age 29, McCarthy, who does not have children, was the first woman to be president of the National Conference of State Legislators -- elected by a one-vote margin. In fact, McCarthy frequently won tough elections. In her first run for Congress in 1994, when incumbent Alan Wheat retired to run for the Senate seat he eventually lost to John Ashcroft, she won 41% of the vote in an 11-candidate, open primary and won the general election with 57% -- a notable feat in a year when the Democrats lost control of the House.

Politically, McCarthy’s Kansas City district is the second most Democratic in Missouri, and some observers doubt her disclosure of a drinking problem will hurt her at the polls. When the president of the United States has in his background an arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol -- during the 2000 presidential campaign he admitted he had pleaded guilty to drunken driving in Maine in 1976 -- it gives a certain political cover to those below him.

“After Clinton and Bush, what problem could you possibly have that you couldn’t confess to?” Rutgers’ Baker asked.

Three months after her problems with alcohol became public knowledge, McCarthy says she goes home to Missouri almost every weekend and reports that constituents greet her warmly and offer support for her struggle. “I think so many individuals are touched by a family member or loved one who has grappled with a disease of addiction,” she said. “There is a great deal more sensitivity.”