Examining the ethics of a disappearance

The facts are few and simple. Chandra Levy, a 24-year-old graduate student interning at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, disappeared April 30 from her Washington, D.C., apartment without a trace, leaving behind everything including her credit cards.

Two months later, U.S. Rep. Gary A. Condit, D-Calif., has finally admitted to the police that he had an extended affair with her.

Like twin electrodes arcing in a vacuum, these two facts have set off a surge of sparks that fascinates the media, frightens the politicians, and flummoxes the public.

What is this story about? And why has it seized the headlines?

The second question is easier to answer. The five major drivers of headline news, especially along the tabloid-and-cable-channel axis, are wealth, fame, power, sex and violence. Any one of them is enough for a sensational headline. Combine them, and the headline quotient escalates.

So far, this is a story about three of them: power, fame and sex. It edges toward a fourth, wealth, in that the Levy family, while not super-rich, lives well enough to push them beyond the means of most Americans. And while there’s not yet any indication of the fifth, there is concern that this could yet become a tale of violence.

But what’s the story all about? It’s not about adultery in high places, since (sadly enough) that’s not so rare as to make news. It’s certainly not about the media’s lust for the prurient – nothing new in that. Nor is it simply about a powerful older man taking advantage of a relatively powerless younger woman, nor the Clinton effect seeping into other politician-and-intern relations, nor the loss of privacy of a congressman who is not a suspect in the case, nor the District of Columbia police.

No, it’s really about a disappearance. Take that fact out of the mix, and you’re left with a routine tale of the tawdry. Add it in, and everything changes. Two months of silence about an amorous dalliance is one thing. Two months of silence when a life is at stake is something altogether different. Sexual relations between consenting adults, while deplorable in these circumstances, is not illegal. Deliberately impeding an investigation, in what could turn out to be a case of kidnapping or murder, certainly is. Pursuing business as usual as a love affair breaks up is natural. Disregarding the poignancy of a young friend vanishing is irresponsible, disrespectful, and unethical.

In the end, then, it’s a story about character – not hers, but his. To have practiced, for so many weeks, the smooth public deception that refused to acknowledge an intimate relationship in such a high-stakes case is, quite simply, a first-intensity failure of integrity and honesty. In that sense, it out-Clintons Clinton; Ms. Lewinsky, after all, never disappeared. And it’s hard to see how Condit’s actions can be undone or excused. We fervently hope that Chandra Levy will turn up hale and hearty. But even if she does, her most plausible excuses won’t erase this lapse of moral character on his part. In that fact, he may be joining a litany of cases, from Watergate to Monica, where the real crime is not in the act itself but in the cover-up.

Why did he act that way? The worst case, of course, is about that fifth driver: violence. But putting that aside – since nothing but sensational speculation links him to any malicious plot to make her vanish – what chip was missing from the moral motherboard?

Perhaps it’s nothing more complicated than a flawed sense of moral awareness – an inability to recognize the moral content of the issue at hand, foresee the ethical pitfalls, and act appropriately. That capacity used to be called wisdom – knowing how to sense distinctions between the common and the crucial, and having the perspective to see when the one had become the other and the moral courage to act on that insight.

In the high-pressure world of Washington politics, with temptations toward corruption lurking at every turn, that’s an essential survival skill. Lacking it, what ballast is left to keep one upright?

Already, Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., has called for Condit’s resignation. More significantly, as the Los Angeles Times reported over the weekend, some of his fellow Democrats are growing impatient with his lack of full disclosure. If there are arguments for his resignation, or for his defeat in the next election, they should not be arguments about revenge, or disgust or outrage. They should be about the most important qualifications for public service: the wisdom to spot ethical issues as they are developing, and the courage to act upon them selflessly and with integrity.

Rushworth M. Kidder is the founder of the Institute for Global Ethics in Camden.