Scooter Libby's wife, Harriet Grant, a lawyer, sat in the front row of his perjury trial last week, listening to hours of tape recordings of her husband's quite messy - disputed by about a half-dozen witnesses - grand jury testimony (audio here, and here) ... thinking what?
This is testimony so implausible at times that it generated spontaneous laughter in the media room.
Multiple court observers have described Libby's changing vocal qualities during the taped questioning, his oh-so-measured choices in anything related to his boss, VP Cheney. No wonder, they say, Libby's lawyers fought so hard to keep the revealing tapes from being played.
Harriet Grant, like all wives, knows her husband's vocal and verbal mechanisms better than anyone, and ... she's thinking what?
Libby's defense seems to be that he was too busy with pressing matters to remember things ... things which, ample court evidence indicates, were pressing matters at the core of his boss's primary obsession. How likely is it that a fellow with a faulty memory about matters central to his boss's preoccupation - with war and the (now discredited) case that boss made for war - would be chief of staff for a veep famous for Extreme Secrecy Measures? Secrecy requires memory. Period. Top job requirement. So the wife, who certainly knows the nature of her husband's memory is sitting through this ... thinking what?
And when they talk about this at home, in low voices, after making sure the boys are sound asleep, she says ... what?
Flashback: the reprehensible swift-boating of John Kerry - those unhealed Vietnam vets acting out their own self-loathing by attacking with the weapon of lies someone who symbolizes their better part. It was such a sorry display, a thing of deep sickness. More sickening is anyone who would exploit this for personal gain - like the president. After one of GWB's many slippery, self-serving answers to a question about swiftboating-become- dirty-word, I turned to the Greek, "If you were doing what he's doing and I were first lady, I would say to you, 'You make this right, buster. You call it what it is and you put an immediate end to all of these lying ads right this minute (as the leader of the free world could have easily done in a heartbeat, let's not kid ourselves). If you don't, I will walk to the nearest mic and call it what it is myself. And I will accept the torrent of interview requests that follow, and when they ask me the obvious question, I will answer, 'Yes. Yes, I am deeply, deeply disappointed that my husband is unwilling to tell the truth about this. I begged him to, but he refused. I would like him to believe he could win without resorting to lies and destruction, because, to my mind, this is the first principle of patriotism.''"
The next day, Laura Bush did an interview in which she actually defended - in the same slippery way - those swift-boaters. Ah, Laura ... all the surface trappings of quality that money can buy, but so little of its soul. It's amazing how people will settle for an empty costume and cosmetics.
There's a scene in All The President's Men, when Woodward and Bernstein show up at the home of Hugh Sloan. Meredith Baxter, playing Sloan's pregnant wife, has that wonderful line (taken, I believe, straight from life): "This is an honest house."
I believe in honest houses. That means standing up to all manner of lies and denial.
In what now feels like ages ago, I lived for a while with a man who hated women. Before I figured out that last part, I suffered many mean nights that sent me down to the kitchen, alone with a book. I can describe the nightshirt I was wearing (Ralph Lauren via Marshall's, blackwatch plaid), the old quilt I was wrapped in (rustic wool squares, black, blue, green with red yarn ties), and the exact time on the clock (3:04 AM) the autumn night I read these words by a wise crone:
"In every relationship between a man and a woman, it is the woman who holds the power. Power is that which heals. Truth is at the heart of healing. If the woman embodies and maintains truth as a sacred trust, things unfold well and for the highest good. Where she does not, damage is done. The great tragedy is how many women refuse this trust."
The words struck like bullets, stirred deep energies, sent me out for a middle-of-the-night walk on the beach. I had never thought of it this way before, though it made all the sense in the world. Inside each of us, we carry equal measure masculine and feminine - but even when balanced, it is the feminine aspect - wisdom, far seeing, deep sensing ... the place that holds the whole picture - that keeps us on course ... that hauls us back inside for clearing when something has gone out of whack. This is healing. This is power. This is She Who Must Be Obeyed. Well yes, in a world of yin deficiency, why wouldn't women carry more responsibility for maintaining this essential power? At the very least in their own homes.
When Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's right hand guy, finally came forward to speak long choked-down patriotic truth, note who he credited: "My wife said to me: 'You have two choices, my man. You can think more about him*, or you can think about your country. I suggest you do the latter.' "
Now there's a wife who gets it. But of course we all get it ... somewhere, if only in what bubbles up in dreams that wake us with a shudder.
Small wonder Laura Bush is known for fits of zeal, scrubbing her house top to bottom with Clorox. Compensation for her more profoundly unclean house?
If Harriet Grant knows what I suspect she knows, I can't help wondering how she compensates.
The wives of "powerful" men have a particular responsibility to maintain an honest house. They owe it to the men. It came with the ring.
They owe it to us, too. It comes with the territory.
* Colin Powell, he of twisted loyalty notions.
