-Caveat Lector-
In an interview with Michael Isikoff, Condit fumes about the media
frenzy surrounding him
>From Bad to Worse
Rep. Gary Condit finally broke his silence, talking to media outlets
including Newsweek.
But his evasiveness only added to his political woes-and suspicions he
knows more than he's saying about Chandra Levy's whereabouts
By Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 3 issue - It was a little bit like being led to the lair of a
famous fugitive. A NEWSWEEK reporter was not told where he was going,
just that he was to be ready at his hotel at 1:15 p.m.
The driver who picked him up kept checking his mirror and at one point
veered into the parking lot of a funeral home to make sure no one was
following.
THE MOOD INSIDE the congressman's hideaway, a condo somewhere in the
central-valley city of Modesto, Calif., was beleaguered. "We're worse
off after the interviews than before the interviews," an aide morosely
declared. After being grilled by ABC's Connie Chung on national TV the
night before, as well as by a variety of local reporters and scribes
from People magazine and Vanity Fair, Gary Condit himself seemed numb.
"I'm on kind of like autopilot," he told NEWSWEEK.
The weary, stony-faced congressman stirred himself to be sympathetic to
the family of Chandra Levy-genuinely so, it seemed. He recalled being
"horrified" at hearing from Chandra's father, Dr. Robert Levy, that the
24-year-old intern was missing. "The tone of his voice even scared
me.... Just his hurt and pain," said Condit. "I do have kids and I
know I would say and do about everything to get them back." He described
an affectionate relationship with Chandra, though hardly the hot romance
described by Chandra's aunt Linda Zamsky, who said Chandra talked about
having children with Condit. In Condit's version to NEWSWEEK, the
conversations were casual and ran more to federal-prison policy and
Modesto politics. Toward the end of the hour-and-45-minute interview,
Condit's anger at the media circus boiled up again and he grew bitter
and sarcastic. "The press has sort of made this into a soapbox
scandal... to keep their ratings up," said Condit. "I sat there the
whole time waiting for Connie Chung to ask me something other than a sex
question."
'DISTURBING AND WRONG'
The Chandra Levy story had been slowly fizzling before Condit spoke out
last week. Why did he bother? The media criticism of his performance
with Chung and the other interviewers was unrelenting, and the public
reaction wasn't much better. One NBC poll showed that only 2 percent
believed that Condit was motivated mainly by his concern for Chandra,
while 93 percent said he was protecting himself politically. Not very
successfully: House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt in effect dumped
Condit, calling his colleague's lack of candor "disturbing and wrong."
In Condit's home district, some voters sympathized with his sullen
effort to preserve a shred of privacy, but others agreed with Seth
Medefind, 20, who told NEWSWEEK: "He seemed to be saying that everyone
was lying but him."
The roundelay of Condit interviews, hyped to an almost ludicrous degree
by the cable news networks, shed no light on the disappearance of
Chandra Levy. The spectacle seemed staged mostly for the benefit of
lawyers, PR advisers, reporters and media executives. Chung's interview
on the evening of Aug. 23 was watched by about 24 million viewers.
But twice as many viewers tuned in to see Barbara Walters interview
Monica Lewinsky in 1999. Indeed, by the weekend the dish on Condit
tasted slightly stale, like warmed-over takeout. Condit was defensive
and self-pitying in the manner of Bill Clinton (or for that matter any
other serial adulterer caught in the glare), but he is an obscure
congressman, not the president, and his political survival is not all
that significant to the fate of the republic.
The gamesmanship between Condit and his pack of pursuers was interesting
mostly as an exercise in how to survive-or perish-in the
permanent-scandal culture of Washington. According to Condit's
handlers, the congressman failed to stick to the script. He was
supposed to begin his interview with Chung by expressing his sympathy
with the Levy family. But sources at ABC tell NEWSWEEK that network
producers anticipated a "filibuster" from the congressman. So, before
he could launch off a prepared speech, Chung hit him with a series of
tough questions, bang-bang, culminating with "Did you kill Chandra
Levy?" Condit could only force a creepy grimace and utter, "I did not."
>From then on, he seemed angrily defiant. It was obvious that Chung
would ask him about other romantic dalliances.
Condit was supposed to say that they were "irrelevant" to Chandra's
disappearance. Instead, he defied credulity by denying a relationship
with Anne Marie Smith, the United Airlines flight attendant who has
described a 10-month romance with Condit to two cable-TV talk shows and
reportedly offered graphic details to investigators. Last June a lawyer
working for the congressman urged Smith to sign an affidavit denying any
relationship with Condit-a claim that has drawn the scrutiny of federal
prosecutors. Condit has said that he was unaware of the proposed
affidavit, and that his lawyer wrote on the document that Smith should
feel free to edit it any way she wished.
DEFINING 'RELATIONSHIP'
In his interview with NEWSWEEK, Condit was positively Clintonesque about
Anne Marie Smith. "In my opinion, we did not have a relationship," he
said. Asked how he could square his "opinion" with Smith's detailed
description of the affair, he responded, "It would probably be her
definition of a relationship versus mine." Condit was more forthcoming,
and more sympathetic, in describing his relationship with Chandra.
"We were close," he said. "I've never made any bones about that."
Introduced last October by a friend who was interning for Condit,
Chandra and the congressman "hit it off well," said Condit. "I found
Chandra to be full of life and very energetic, very focused on her
career in politics, very intelligent, very charming, all those things,"
Condit said.
Phone records obtained by NEWSWEEK show Chandra's calling Condit every day
during one week in early April, but Condit insisted the calls were neither
"heavy" nor contentious. "We never had a cross word," he said. He denied
reports by the aunt that he had taken Chandra to out-of-the-way restaurants
to avoid being seen.
"We didn't go out to restaurants," he said. "We never had a conversation
about marriage or a future or children," he added. "She understood her
boundaries very well." They talked about the upcoming executions of
Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh and drug trafficker Juan Raul Garza. "She
seemed to have a lot of interest in those two things," said Condit, "a lot
more interest in them than I did." The last time he saw her, Chandra
unexpectedly rang his apartment buzzer on the morning of April 24 or 25.
She had lost her internship at the Bureau of Prisons and was heading back
to California, but she wanted to come back to Washington to work. In any
case, "there was never a thought that we weren't going to stay in contact
or see each other... We were going to maintain the friendship, no matter,"
said Condit.
The Condit story is not going away, though Condit's supporting cast may
change. Some of the blame for Condit's poor performance last week
inevitably fell on his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, an old hand at the
Washington-scandal game but possibly too aggressive for the delicate
business at hand. His PR advisers are essentially throwing in the towel.
One said that the NEWSWEEK interview would be Condit's last.
"Frankly, there's nothing more we can do," the adviser said.
Condit's family is sticking with him: wife Carolyn, looking thin and
wearing dark glasses, gave him a kiss on the cheek just before he began
his interview with Chung. Hometown Modesto, meanwhile, remains an
unlikely media central, its low-rise skyline dotted with
satellite-hookup towers. The locals are becoming wise to the strange
rhythms of all scandal, all the time. A hotel clerk offered a visiting
reporter a wake-up call midafternoon, "just in case you need a nap
before your stakeout begins."
And the Levys? The grieving couple and their teenage son live behind
closed drapes, their every move recorded by a network "pool" crew
waiting outside about 14 hours a day.
Several weeks ago, when there were reports that police were searching
for a body buried under a parking lot on a Virginia military base, Susan
Levy woke up in the middle of the night.
"It was 4 a.m. and the first thing I did was to walk outside and see if
the [TV] trucks were there," she told NEWSWEEK. They were gone. For a
few hours, at least, the Levys' nightmare belonged only to them.
Mark Hosenball in Washington and Karen Breslau and Bob Jackson in
Modesto
================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh,, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
================================================================
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
