In the uproar over Florida Congressman Mark Foley?s behavior, the media?s recollection of earlier sexual predators on Capitol Hill has overlooked one particularly egregious case and its interesting aftermath.
Twenty-six years ago, practically to the day of Foley?s downfall this month, former Maryland Congressman Robert Bauman, also a staunch Republican and prominent advocate of family values, answered charges in Washington that he had solicited sex from a 16-year-old male stripper at a gay bar in the capital.
The two cases are similar.
Foley has acknowledged alcoholism and a tendency toward homosexuality. Bauman also blamed his troubles on alcoholism and acknowledged that while he was drunk, he cruised gay bars and the streets of the capital in search of young men.
Both said they were molested at an early age: Foley by a priest when he was 12, Bauman by a 12-year-old when he was 6.
There is a difference in what we know about their adult misbehavior. Foley is said to have had inappropriate ? “disgusting,” they say ? e-mail exchanges with congressional pages. Bauman?s case was far worse.
But there is a striking difference in the political fallout.
Foley has resigned and disappeared. The GOP leadership vehemently denounced him.
Bauman did not resign. He announced that his priest and his family had forgiven him and he vigorously campaigned for re-election. “I have confessed my sins, as my religion requires, and I am in the state of grace and will remain so with the help of God,” he said.
Bauman was denounced by the conservatives whose cause he championed. But Republican National Chairman Bill Brock did not criticize him. “I?d like to support his congressional race in any way I can,” Brock told The Washington Post. “He?s a very able person.”
Royden Dyson, a conservative Democratic state senator from the Eastern Shore, beat Bauman that year. The defeated congressman and his wife later broke up. He worked as a lawyer in Washington and eventually wrote a book, “The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative.”
These days, Bauman is prominently involved with a group called the Sovereign Society, devoted to the offshore protection of American wealth. The society?s Web page says Bauman offers advice on “practical ways to defend your liberty and wealth againstan increasingly invasive government.”
But hardly anyone remembers him.
But political scandal and weirdness seemed endemic to the Eastern Shore district, as Dyson?s own career in Congress ended up being covered in its own scandal and notoriety.
In 1988, The Washington Post ran a front-page story detailing inappropriate goings on with the congressman?s staff, which the story said was effectively controlled by Dyson?s top aide, Tom Pappas. The Post quoted former Dyson staffers as saying that they were ordered by Pappas not to date for a year after joining the staff and that Pappas had told one staffer he would have to “perform a strip tease” at an office retreat.
Pretty tame stuff by today?s standards, but Pappas jumped to his death from a window of a New York hotel May 1, 1988, the day the story appeared.
Dyson almost lost his seat that year. Then, in his 1990 election campaign, The Baltimore Sun reported on an FBI investigation into his relationship with lobbyists involved in a Defense Department bribery scandal.
Dyson denied any wrongdoing and he was not prosecuted, but Republican Wayne Gilchrest beat him that year and that might have been the end of his political career.
But seven years later, Eastern Shore voters ? forgetful or forgiving up to a point, or both ? sent Dyson to his old seat in the state Senate, where he sits today.
G. Jefferson Price III recently retired from a 35-year career at The Baltimore Sun, where his assignments included Maryland political reporter and later state editor.
