MONICA LEWINSKY IS ALIVE AND WELL, and Chandra Levy, one must now fear, is most likely neither, but these two young women seem to have a lot in common. What most stands out is that neither seems to have benefited from any controlling moral authority, or to have been well served by the adults in her life. They were not cold or cruel; they were just non-judgmental. Almost no one in whom Lewinsky confided—her mother, her aunt, her therapist—warned her that she was being a fool. No one, including Lewinsky’s father, seems to have been greatly put out by the news that the 24-year-old intern had been servicing the very married 50-plus president in his off moments, or as he discussed troop movements with congressmen. Similarly, Chandra Levy’s aunt was told last Thanksgiving by her 24-year-old niece that she was all but living with a married congressman 30 years older, that he insisted on complete and fanatical secrecy, that he went out with her in semi-disguise, and that she planned on five years of living like this before “getting married, having a baby,” and settling down. The aunt’s response was not the normal one, which would have been something like “Are you out of your senses?” Instead, as the Washington Post has reported, she advised the girl to “get a terrarium” for his apartment (he liked cacti), “make dinner…be helpful. Organize his closet…color-coordinate everything.” Lewinsky and Levy both come from well-to-do California Jewish families and have physician fathers. Both confided in an aunt, and the aunts were first to learn of the affairs. Chandra Levy’s confidante was Linda Zamsky. Monica’s was Debra Finerman (the sister of Marcia Lewis, Monica’s mother), who sometimes was a bridge between the two. As the Starr Report noted, “Finerman advised that Marcia Lewis knew about Lewinsky’s relationship…Finerman told Lewis about the physical relationship. Lewis may not have known the details before Finerman told her, but she knew Lewinsky was emotionally involved.” Finerman was told in detail of only one sexual incident between Lewinsky and Clinton, to which she “responded by saying something to the effect of ‘yuck.’” That aesthetic recoil is as close as we get to a judgment in either of the intern sagas. These, of course, are all well-meaning people, and the Levys are suffering terribly. But they seem to be victims of the prevailing cultural winds, according to which trying to discipline, judge, or even guide one’s young charges is wrong. The grown-ups want to be cool; they want to be hip; they want to be with it; they want to be friends with their children; they want to avoid being prudes. As Kay Hymowitz writes in Ready or Not, her 1999 book on how not to raise children, “That generation…hoped that by escaping Puritan hangups…their kids would have ‘healthy’ sexual attitudes. They hoped that their daughters would no longer experience the fear and shame that had once shadowed the girl who had ‘done it,’ and that they would be confident enough to admit it….This generation hoped that they would demystify sex, free it from the control of the church ladies….In this world, sex would be better, and so would kids.” There’s nothing worse than being called “square” by your children or neighbors. They might think you’re not being their friend. Lewinsky père, who should have wrung Clinton’s neck, was as compliant as any father at the court of Charles II or Louis XIV. Lewinsky mère, who showed concern mainly in retrospect, was angry only at Clinton aide Evelyn Lieberman, who for good reason threw Monica out of the White House. When Lewinsky told her aunt she was trying to return to a job at the White House, Finerman did not seize the chance to get her to reconsider. “I didn’t discourage her,” she said. “I didn’t say anything.” Spoken like a pal. But the problem is that young people have enough pals. They need parents—or some well-meaning older person—to impart the lessons of experience and then set some limits, and rules. As Hymowitz reminds us, “Children are ignorant. They look to those who have been here a while to tell them what they should do and how to make sense of the world. . . . Children do not naturally know how to shape their lives according to their own vision. . . . The sense of adult purpose that was inspired by these truths is largely lost.” Lost indeed, these dewy things were allowed to drift into their amours with their lying and long-toothed Lotharios, without a chorus being raised by their elders to tell them that what they were doing was not only wrong—perish such stuffiness—but also short-sighted and stupid and dangerous. Wrong because a culture makes rules for good reasons, that should not be crossed without other reasons that are overpowering. Wrong because they might some day be 53-year-old women, seeing their husbands go off to the office. Stupid because this compulsive Don Juan is likely to have sequential affairs, and even concurrent ones. Stupid because the hard-faced blonde wife will stay with and defend him, to protect their arrangement, to which she is accustomed. Stupid and dangerous, because when you pose a threat to someone with a great deal to lose, you become expendable. Your privacy, your reputation, or you yourself may disappear. Exactly how dangerous this has been to Chandra Ann Levy is something we may soon discover. It is at this point that her story diverges from the Monica channel—an intern used by an aging roué, who then lies repeatedly—and heads down a track far more sinister. She starts to sound a lot less like Monica—now peddling handbags in lower Manhattan—and a great deal more like Anne Marie Fahey, the object of a sex-politics-and-missing-person story that was a media sensation in the latter part of 1996. For awhile, you could not drive down the I-95 corridor between New York and Washington, especially in the Delaware area, without passing through a forest of posters showing pictures of Fahey, like Levy a pale-faced young woman with the same curly mass of black hair. Levy vanished from her apartment in Dupont Circle taking her keys but leaving her purse and her credit cards; leaving clothes in the bedroom, and dishes and food in the sink. Fahey vanished from her apartment in Wilmington, taking her keys, but leaving her purse and her credit cards, leaving clothes and groceries about. Levy’s case is being pushed by her parents, who have sought out the media, distributed posters, and pressed relentlessly on the man they think holds the clues to solve her mysterious disappearance. Fahey’s parents were dead, but her five siblings relentlessly did the same things. Connections to politics drove these stories: Levy, as the world now knows, had an affair with a congressman. Fahey was the scheduling secretary to Tom Carper when he was governor of Delaware. (He was at one point suspected, as her diary referred to an older, married “Thomas C.”) Fahey had an affair, not with Carper, but with Thomas Capano, a very rich, well-connected, Wilmington lawyer and businessman, who had multiple mistresses and fairly strange tastes. Like Levy, Fahey at first blush was starstruck, but later came to see her older swain as a “controlling, manipulative, insecure jealous maniac.” She decided to dump him. After a tense dinner date, though, he talked her into coming back briefly to his house, where, during an emotional quarrel, he shot her once in the head. He dumped her body from his brother’s boat 60 miles out in the Atlantic: The body was never recovered, but the ice chest that carried it was. According to journalist George Anastasia, in The Summer Wind, his book about the crime, police from the start thought that Fahey was dead and Capano had killed her, but it took two years to find the evidence to make the case. In 1999 Capano was convicted of first-degree murder. He is now on death row. As Anastasia writes, “Before it was over, Capano, the well-regarded lawyer and local celebrity, would be unmasked as a philanderer who had cheated on his wife almost
from the day they were married, as a libertine who enjoyed watching his mistress have sex with other men, as a control freak…and as a self-centered individual who wouldn’t take no for an answer….Somewhere along the way, like many other politicians, sports figures and celebrities, he came to believe that the right thing was whatever he chose to do.” Two years from now, we may still be discussing Chandra Ann Levy. And does this sound like people we know? In view of this, and the less dire fate of Monica, the time to be judgmental has surely arrived. It is time to tell children—and young adults—that the rules of the culture are there for a reason; and that some things are wrong and foolish and dangerous. It is time to remember that the real role of guardians is to warn and train children, and not to watch as they do as they please. It is too soon to know what befell Chandra Levy, what happened to her and why. It is not too soon, however, to realize that the kind of affair that she entered into has led to a situation in which both murder and suicide seem plausible outcomes. It is not certain that anyone could have talked her out of it. But it seems now that no one really tried. Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
