Liars and Thieves, but No Tramps
On Tuesday, Larry Summers -- who has been under siege for two months for offending women -- became the first Harvard president to suffer a vote of no confidence. Still, Harvard’s governing board resisted efforts to force him to resign. So how did Summers survive?
My answer is sex -- or the lack of it.
Had Summers been involved with one particular woman, instead of insulting all of us as a group, he’d be polishing his resume right now, sick that Paul Wolfowitz had scored George W. Bush’s endorsement for the plum World Bank opening.
Sex is behind the quick and brutal heave-ho of Boeing Chief Executive Harry Stonecipher, who was summarily executed when a six-week affair with a female executive not directly in his line of command became known. Boeing is a case study in how you can get away with corruption -- which does grievous harm to the public -- much longer than you can get away with adultery -- which does grievous harm privately to a few.
The aerospace giant’s top brass moved like molasses to act in 2002 when two executives now in jail were greasing the palms of a Pentagon employee in exchange for getting jet orders. But when a tattletale came to Boeing Chairman Lewis Platt with purloined e-mails from Stonecipher revealing the consensual affair, Platt leaped into action.
Someone could get rich devising a spam detector for e-mails composed in the throes of infatuation.
Stonecipher, 68, was foolish. But he wasn’t bribing officials at the Pentagon. Yet Platt axed old Harry without so much as a fig leaf of “resigning to spend more time with his family.”
Sex also explains why Eason Jordan, CNN’s vice president and chief news executive, resigned under pressure so quickly. It wasn’t for off-the-record and offhand remarks he made at a conference at Davos, Switzerland, about journalists being targeted by the military in Iraq. Surely he could have apologized for such stupidity (and did, by the way). He’d written much worse when he confessed in an article that CNN went soft on Saddam Hussein to keep its Baghdad bureau open. Jordan was already on thin ice for allegedly having an affair with Mariane Pearl, the widow of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Jordan subsequently left his wife and children. He compounded this performance by taking up publicly with Sharon Stone, who became a risible figure at Davos herself for passing a basket to collect loose change to combat poverty. That was one liaison too far.
The lack of sex helps explain the survival so far of Tom DeLay, the subject of numerous investigations. How much easier it would be to bring down DeLay if he were cheating on Mrs. DeLay instead of just allegedly cheating the public. It’s taken months, and will probably take years, to get to the bottom of whether his Texas political action committee took illegal corporate donations for DeLay’s pet project of redistricting Democrats out of their seats, and even longer to show how a casino lobbyist allegedly channeled Indian tribe money to him, including funds for a $40,000 trip to play golf in Scotland.
Sex will always do you in faster than graft and bribes on Capitol Hill. After being called up on financial violations before the House ethics committee, Newt Gingrich was quickly dispatched once his affair with a staffer became public.
Sex destroys more quickly in part because the media are quick to grasp it. With sex, there’s no infinite chain of causality that involves accounting rules. It’s easier to report on the U.N. scandal involving sex crimes in Africa than to sort out the financial crime in the “oil for food” program. Punishment for the former has come quicker than the latter. We’re also a newly aroused Puritan culture, voting on moral values and insisting that halftime at the Super Bowl be G-rated.
The pity is that there isn’t a new wave of business ethics instead of the Washington version, which holds chastity higher than honesty and religion over morality. No taxpayer is better off because DeLay holds Bible study or Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) convenes a Catholic doctrine class, because Ken Starr sang hymns on the banks of the Potomac or John Ashcroft covered up wardrobe malfunctions on statues at the Justice Department.
Likewise, no shareholder or employee is going to be protected because the board of directors starts enforcing the commandment against adultery if it ignores the one about stealing. So far, the New York Times reports, not a single executive has yet disgorged a bonus awarded for hitting his numbers, even when it’s been determined that he faked the numbers. I’m not wild about Harry, but I’ll take him over Ken Lay any day.
