Newspapers
need “lead” stories, and it is often difficult to assess whether they are
really important stories or simply the closest thing to something important
that some editor could come up with on a slow day. Despite the fact that the United Nations
General Assembly was in session, this week’s blockbuster would seem to be the
criminal indictment of Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) on charges of various
acts of corruption.
In response to his indictment Senator Menendez has been vigorous in indignant denial. He immediately played the race card. I didn’t know that there even was a race card for Cuban-Americans, but I should have known. According to the Senator, he was being persecuted by unidentified enemies indignant at the achievements of an uppity, up-by-his-bootstraps Latino. Even my Menendez, Lyle Menendez, a former Princeton student of mine (presumably no relation to Senator Bob), a man of Cuban “heritage” who in 1989 murdered his own parents with a Mossberg shotgun fired at point blank range in the living room of their Beverly Hills mansion, didn’t try that one. (He went with paternal sexual abuse. And so far as I know even Representative Santos is not alleging anti-Luso-Americanism).
Are we to believe that the senator is really guilty? The time- honored presumption of innocence is a legal fiction that sometimes is very fictional indeed, as it seems to be in this instance. Senator Menendez himself appears to have pivoted from the preposterous theme of racial persecution to that of “rush to judgment,” which is nearly as preposterous given the average time elapsing between criminal indictment and trial jury verdict in well-lawyered cases. But is Menendez guilty as charged? Probably.
Everyone seems critical of trying cases in the newspaper, but that mode of proceeding does have one clear advantage over the regular judicial system. Unlike that system, it usually honors the guarantee promised by the sixth amendment to our Constitution that criminal defendants be provided with a speedy trial. The newspaper reports are practically billowing dark, acrid smoke. I doubt that the Times’s lawyers would have let the story be published were they not pretty certain of the blazing fire the smoke temporarily obscures. It’s been a while since such succulent corruption in which New Jersey specializes has appeared on the congressional crime blotter. George Santos (R-NY) has been more conspicuous in his mendacity, but Menendez wins the prize for the classiness of the evidence for the criminality involved, which includes gold ingots, a Mercedes-Benz convertible, and a strangle-hold on the halal meat concession for the whole state of New Jersey. There is also a cupidinous Lady Menendez, not quite up to Lady Macbeth standards, but apparently aspiring.
Several weeks ago, in a post praising Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), whose staff helped me get my passport renewed in time to allow our recent and wonderful trip to France, I wrote the following: Of course, in a state where the baseline for satisfactory senatorial performance is simply to remain unindicted, [Booker] would be a natural superstar under any circumstances. The exaggeration in that sardonic remark was meant to be humorous; but as a constituent who in my layman’s role was pretty sure that Menendez was guilty of the crimes for which he was tried and not found guilty in 2017, I certainly had him in mind when I wrote it. So if I failed as a humorist, give me credit as a prophet. And Senator Schumer (D-NY), leader of his party in the Senate, reminds us that “Bob Menendez has been a dedicated public servant and is always fighting hard for the people of New Jersey. He has a right to due process and a fair trial.” One can certainly get behind that second sentence. And for all I know evidence of Menendez’s agonistic efforts on behalf of “the people of New Jersey”—even those not trying to corner the market in halal meat—may actually exist somewhere. But one doubts somehow that the people of New Jersey for whom this dedicated public servant is always working hard are the intended beneficiaries of the $480,000 in cash discovered by investigators in the Menendez domicile, “ ‘much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe’. Agents found envelopes of cash inside jackets bearing Menendez’s name.” I honor the distinction between conviction in a criminal court and the appearance of impropriety, even here where the circumstances stink yet worse than they look. The Democratic governor of our state, along with two Democratic senators and six out of nine of the New Jersey Democratic House members (who outnumber their Republican colleagues three to one) have “rushed to judgment".* Caesar divorced Pompeia for allowing herself even to fall under suspicion.
Power tends to corrupt, said the great nineteenth-century historian Lord Acton. The corruption of politicians is ageless, international, and in our own country among the last remnants of the genuine bipartisan spirit. The more the power, the more importunate the temptations and the higher the stakes for the powerless. Menendez has been the chair of a very important Senate Committee, that on Foreign Relations, Among the suggestions arising from his latest indictment is that he may have influenced American policy toward Egypt from corrupt personal motives.
I know this isn’t really very funny, but as with so much of the political life of the country in recent years, one has to choose between tears and chuckles, and the latter are probably better for one’s health. I thought that American policy in the Middle East was complex and challenging enough even without having to factor in a senator’s wife’s lust for a convertible. Mr. Menendez has resigned from the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee but is for the moment emphatic in his denial that he will resign from the Senate.
Among the most famous lines in literature is Francesca’s lament in Dante’s Inferno: “There is no greater sorrow than to recall our time of joy in wretchedness”. But to an extent it works the other way around as well: “wretched” events, if you are not too close to them, can invite happy memories. The committee chairmanship from which Menendez has at least temporarily stepped down has been filled by some distinguished senators from both parties. Indeed it was long held by the only senator I have ever known personally, and someone I long admired. I refer to J. William Fulbright (D-AR), who died in 1995 at the age of ninety. Fulbright was very interested in higher education, and especially in the many dimensions of international study. He was in his day the youngest college president in America, and his name lives on in educational circles in the Fulbright Scholarships, designed for Americans wishing to study abroad.) He himself had been a Rhodes Scholar in the 1920s, and he took a special interest in Rhodes Scholars-elect from Arkansas, the most famous of whom was Bill Clinton in 1968, but the most grateful of whom must surely have been I myself, in 1958. It was through Fulbright that I got a patronage job in the summer of that year, before sailing for Europe in the fall. The job, working as a clerk in the Senate Document Room, was a bit more than a sinecure but hardly high stress. I doubt that the Senate Document Room still exists, but in those pre-computer days every bit of proposed legislation originating from either legislative house was printed in all its successive amended versions and was available for distribution upon request by any legislator’s office. There was a significant volume. A single proposed bill could go through ten or even twenty versions in successive amended forms. The documents were identified by branch of origin (HR or S) and number. The phone was always ringing with requests, which would usually be handled immediately by dispatch in interoffice mail, which was sent out several times a day. Now and again an importunate congressional staffer would show up to fetch a document personally. The business was fairly brisk at times, but there were a lot of semi-official “breaks”. The physical location of the Document Office was very near to the door of the entrance to the Public Gallery, where we all spent plenty of time and whence as an observer I gathered a lifetime supply of anecdotes involving the lords of the Senate. It was the heyday of William Knowland (R-CA) and Lyndon Johnson (D-TX).
There were a lot of “temps” like me working in the Senate Document Room, but also a certain number of full-timers who greeted each summer temp with a riddle upon our arrival. Why is it, went the question, that in the House of Representatives there is a Committee on Foreign Affairs and in the Senate a Committee on Foreign Relations? I had no clue, of course. The supposedly hilarious answer was that the senators, who as a cohort tended to be considerably older than the representatives, lacked the sexual vigor to conduct affairs and had to be satisfied with occasional relations. Even though the mustard-cutting capacities of our aging leaders continues to be a lively topic, that’s not what you might call a really great joke—nor as offbeat in its humor as getting rich through the certification of halal meat.
*I wrote this yesterday afternoon (9/26). As I slept, apparently, the dam of damnation was bursting, and many other legislators are now calling for Menendez’s resignation from office. Crucially among their number is the soon-to-be-promoted junior senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker. Well, I was in need of a catchy title.
