C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

  She’d later be applauded for not standing by her man, but then she dutifully did so until Jack gave her permission to try another strategy. A shock, he decided, was what Sanford needed in order to refocus. Jack arranged for a temporary house for Jenny and the boys in Annapolis, where the Coes lived (“Jack” may well be a Coe, Doug or David or Tim, the men who typically handle the most delicate spiritual situations, angry mistresses, and angry wives). She canceled her plan only when Mark learned of it and declared that he still wanted to go to Argentina. Jack knew what to do. He advised Jenny to put aside her anger, her accusations, and her tears, and to retire to the family’s $3.5 million beach house, inviting Mark to join her. No pressure. He could be Christ, and she would play church, the doors always open, waiting for his return.

  But that wasn’t what Sanford wanted anymore. For fifteen years, he had pursued service, by which he meant power, but the irony is that he never felt like he had any. He’d been into living with what is. He’d been a gyroscope, and he’d needed something to keep him going: Ayn Rand, then Jenny, then C Street, then Cubby Culbertson. But he was tired of spinning.

  So he ran. Someone found surveillance footage of Sanford’s last trip to Argentina, and the news broadcast it in a loop, played for laughs and something deeper, too—a warning, because the video itself is a scarlet letter in the image of Sanford in rumpled madras, head down and big beak pointed forward as he hoofs it through a deserted airport alone, dragging his suitcase behind him.

  Run, Sanford, run.

  One needn’t endorse adultery to recognize that this grim-faced man is not a hound but a soul in transit between two worlds. And one needn’t be a conservative to forgive him for wanting to flee the political one, the pious one, where “love” is defined as what is, not what could be. He wanted to live in a world where love is a tractor at dawn and glorious tan lines, not a principle but a desire. Which would you choose?

  There are, of course, the children. But if conservatives’ tolerance for the secret libertinism of their champions is the height of hypocrisy, where on the ladder should we place those liberals who bemoaned the damage done to the sanctity of marriage? They canonized Jenny Sanford—more conservative than her husband—and asked why he could not have resisted love “for the sake of the children,” the rhetoric used for decades by fundamentalists who’d like to make divorce illegal. “ ‘Hypocrite!’ they didn’t quite thunder,” wrote JoAnn Wypijewski, a columnist for The Nation who enraged liberal readers by defending Sanford. “Christians thunder; liberals sneer, but it amounts to the same thing, counting sins.”

  The real scandal of Mark Sanford was not his departure but his return. Here was a man walking away from power. Clumsily, selfishly, but headed in the right direction. He wasn’t leaving responsibility behind—Gov. Bug Lamp, vetoed into irrelevance within South Carolina by his own party and courted for the national stage precisely for his ability to say nothing a teenage Randroid couldn’t imagine, fulfilled no real public responsibility. He was a false front, a prop for American fundamentalism’s status quo religion. But now he was leaving C Street behind—letting go of his own empty paternalism.

  Instead, he came back. To Jenny, to Cubby, to C Street. He didn’t quit power, he praised it. He praised himself: I’m like King David, he said, I’m chosen.

  The Republican Party no longer thought so. Sanford’s political career is dead, even as newly single mother Jenny’s began rising (she has campaigned for Tea Party candidates with Sarah Palin). But what if Mark hadn’t slipped past Cubby to make that last flight to Argentina? What if Jack from C Street and his brothers hadn’t been busy handling payoffs for Ensign? What if there had been time for one more round of soul surgery before he made his confession? Perhaps then he would have been chosen the Republican Party’s next savior, and the public would be none the wiser. “I can only imagine,” laments Jenny, “where I would be this very moment and what our family and future would be like if Mark had listened to and respected the advice of his dear friends instead of following his ‘heart.’ ”

  The tragedy of Mark Sanford is that he did listen to the advice of his “dear friends” (a term that surely deserves scare quotes more than “heart” does), only it was too late—C Street couldn’t redeem him. Nor could they use him. He wasn’t King David, after all. He was unchosen.

  But: what if? What if he had kept running? Dropped his suitcase in the airport and sprinted, his loafers pumping, madras flapping, those long legs opening up across the tiles, so fast not even the camera would be able to catch him?

  Or: What if he had followed his heart, to Argentina and back again, to call a different press conference?

  What if he had said: “I’m sorry, South Carolina, I’ve learned the hard way that the heart wants what it wants—no, not Woody Allen’s stepdaughter, just love and recognition and maybe a living wage—and so I’m going to take that seven hundred million dollars, to start with, and share it among the poorest of us. I’m raising taxes, too, but only on people like me, rich people, and the proceeds are going to go to schools. Sex ed and tango lessons. And then I’m legalizing gay marriage, because I’ve been thinking about tan lines, and about my mother, and, yeah, that sounds a little complicated, but so is love. It’s complicated, but it’s not a sin. I love my boys and will always be there for them, but I’m not sorry for loving Maria, here, standing with me today. She’s my soul mate. I think. I’m not sure, South Carolina, because the truth is, I don’t know a lot about myself. Which, I get it, is ironic, because I’m very, very, very selfish, I’m kind of a creep, or maybe, I don’t know, a boy in a man’s body. Cut me some slack, y’all, I never really got past The Fountainhead.

  “Which is why, beloveds, my darlings—is it okay for a guy to say that? Man! I just feel like I can say fucking anything now!—which is why, darling South Carolina, I’m resigning. I have some reading to do. I’m going to start with the Bible, because I’m beginning to think I may have been given some bad information. Solomon, I think, that pretty song”—and here the governor would hiccup, his eyes would go wide, his mouth would begin moving as if by a force not his own, he would be speaking so rapidly we would just barely be able to make out his beautiful words—“Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies, thy two magnificent parts, and the roof of thy mouth is like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those who are asleep to speak—” Sanford would stop, awestruck. “Cubby never had us read that!” The press corps would realize they had witnessed a miracle, a true gift of tongues. All of South Carolina would forgive him, even as they were glad Gov. Bug Lamp would soon be leaving. Rolling out for Buenos Aires in the tractor at dawn, just Mark and Maria in the vibrant pink, listening to the hum of the huge diesel engine, maybe Toby Keith on the radio singing “You Shouldn’t Kiss Me Like This.”

  Last and least, John Ensign, an ordinary man with extraordinary hair, the only one of the C Street philanderers to remain married. Pickering carried a torch, and Sanford longed for a “heart connection,” but Ensign, it seems, really was just messing around. Not because he was a hound—he was a prude, in fact, who called for Clinton’s resignation even before Ken Starr—but because he could; because she, the mistress, was there. In the same house as his wife.

  His best friend and one of his senior aides, Doug Hampton—a giant, bear-shaped man with a soft voice, who would take his woes to the media before going silent in the face of a Justice Department investigation—lived with his wife, Cindy, in the gated community across from the Ensigns’ gated community. In December 2007, their house was burglarized. “We were asked to go over and stay with the Ensigns,” Hampton would say. “We’re close, really close. Close friends. We’ve been close friends for a long time. Very close while we live here in Nevada. While living in the house, Cindy and John got together.”

  The irony is that John and Doug had long been a different sort of couple: Promise Keepers together, C Street brothers. Ensign was a residen
t of the house on Capitol Hill and Hampton a Family man for many years, appointed by Ensign in 2006 to his staff—with a salary of $160,000, nearly as high as permissible despite Hampton’s lack of experience—to help him follow Christ in Washington. “Walk alongside in whatever capacity possible,” Hampton would explain. “Same kind of model that Jesus exhibited in the Bible.”

  What made Ensign betray him? Nobody knows, not even Hampton. Cindy had a history with Darlene Ensign, the same interests, the same style. Both are brunettes, fit, strong-jawed, with nearly identical smiles. They are both devout Christians. Cindy worked for Ensign, and she seemed more excited by Washington than Darlene; but that was likely because it was new to her. If cheating on your wife with a close friend is more awful than dancing in the open air in Argentina, it’s also a lot more common. There was nothing unusual about Ensign’s transgression except for the way it ended.

  “I chose to bring in some really close friends of ours,” Hampton told Las Vegas television host Jon Ralston. He decided to go public after an estimate that the damages inflicted by Ensign equaled $8.5 million—so that the Hampton family could be “made whole”—netted only $96,000 (from Ensign’s parents, in bundles of $12,000, to avoid tax reporting requirements), and a lobbying job that went nowhere. Hampton turned to the Family. “Men that we’ve known for a long time, ten plus years. Tim Coe. David Coe. Marty Sherman.” And, especially, Sen. Tom Coburn, who, according to Hampton, carried his requests to his fellow C Streeter. (Coburn denied, then acknowledged, then denied having done so.) “They’re great men,” Hampton said. “They’re a part of the men who live at C Street.”

  But as time wore on, and more details emerged about what appeared to be a blatant violation of congressional lobbying laws by Hampton and Ensign, Hampton grew more critical of his C Street brothers. What was their initial advice, asked Nightline’s Cynthia McFadden, in an interview that constituted Hampton’s second salvo against Ensign and his first against the Family. “Be cool.” “Cover it up?” she asked. “No, no, not initially,” Hampton answered. The behind-the-scenes men, the Coes and Sherman, told him they needed “power” to confront Ensign; they decided to make Coburn their “hit man.” On Valentine’s Day 2008, they confronted Ensign at C Street; they even stood over the senator as he wrote a letter to Cindy at their direction, ending the affair—“God never intended for us to do this,” he wrote—and then drove him to the FedEx office to overnight it.

  The payment by Ensign’s parents to the Hampton family constituted a cover-up, ethically if not legally. But the real trouble for John Ensign is what followed. He fired Hampton and then slotted him into a Nevada lobbying firm with the promise that he’d arrange clients for the lobbying rookie. And he did. (Former staffers say Ensign knew he was breaking the law.) It wasn’t enough, financially or emotionally. Hampton was close to losing his house; he was broke; his marriage was a shambles; he’d lost his best friend. He needed more money. Ensign’s allies would accuse him of extortion; he’d say he wanted justice, that he understood now the danger to democracy presented by the corruption he’d been victim of and party to. Most people thought he was just out for vengeance; he’d probably try to write a book like Jenny Sanford’s. He wasn’t a man with a lot of friends left in Las Vegas, and he had almost none in Washington. And then C Street turned against him. They understood the money, and they’d even helped him with his negotiations. That made sense, biblical capitalism. Damage had been done to Hampton’s property, his marriage, his headship; compensation must be made. It wasn’t the principle but the amount that eventually divided them. Hampton wanted more than they could win him. And when C Street couldn’t help him, he broke its cardinal rule: he talked publicly.

  If there had been doubts about Ensign, Hampton’s betrayal erased them. They doubled down on the senator. “[They] think the consequences don’t apply,” Hampton charged. “This is about preserving John, preserving the Republican Party, this is about preserving C Street. These men care about themselves and their own political careers, period.”

  C Street helped destroy the Hampton family. It remains to be seen whether it can save John Ensign. As I write, Justice Department lawyers are in Las Vegas, sitting at a table in a Marriott off the Strip, interviewing potential witnesses in the case against John Ensign. It’s a reluctant parade of men whose fortunes depend not on luck or dice or cards but on hedging their bets with money spread around the system; on knowing the right people; on winning contracts, not games. They’re not gamblers, they’re businessmen; nothing sinister about them. There is nothing sinister, really, in the story of John Ensign, from beginning to end. If it is sleazy and rotten, a story of personal betrayals and democracy subverted for the sake of “relationships,” it is considered notable within the Beltway only for the fact that it’s playing out in public. That’s ironic, given the fact that if Ensign is indicted (there is more than enough evidence, say legal observers; whether there’s the will is another matter), the cover-up executed in part by the Family will come close to the actual definition of “conspiracy,” a word routinely misapplied to C Street and its parent organization.

  The Family is not a conspiracy. A conspiracy is a secret agreement to break the law. The Family has no intention of breaking the law. It is not interested in law. God-led government is not a specific agenda but rather a perspective through which all decisions, personal as well as political, should be evaluated. That is what the Family aims to provide, that is the gift it sees itself as providing at C Street. Subsidized rent, maid service, mistress management—these are all incidental. Its concerns are of another kingdom. The Family is not a conspiracy but a religious worldview, one that works through the “kings” spoken of in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Family’s list of Eight Core Aspects, and those the Family sees as their modern equivalents. The Family believes it values the “least of these,” the poor; which is why it must serve the powerful, those blessed by God with the authority to dole out aid to the deserving.

  The congressmen and businessmen of American fundamentalism’s elite—not just the Family, but the upper crust that funds the entire movement’s crusades—are fond of paraphrasing Luke 12:48: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required.” A fine sentiment, at first blush; but, stripped of context, divorced from its Gospel and presented as a maxim—the stuff of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, not scripture—it is disingenuous. The idea that the powerful are powerful because they have been “given” their rank and position—that they did not grasp for it, that they did not politick—is as deceptive as “noblesse oblige,” a moral sleight of hand that exists to preserve social class. So, too, its corollary, that the poor should be grateful for whatever blessings trickle down to them.

  In 1994, John Ensign, a casino heir working as a veterinarian, told his friend Steve Wark that he ran for office because God called him. He didn’t want the power; God wanted him in Washington. Why? Socialism. He’d taken to watching C-SPAN late into the evening. It made him furious. What he saw was an insult to everything he’d learned about charity from church and about the market from the casino. The government, he believed, was playing God. The government wanted to make us all the same, to take his money and give it to a poor man, rather than letting Ensign make the gift himself, as God and his church led him. How could he be good if government decided for him?

  Some are rich, and some are poor, and to each God gives a calling. Ensign concluded that his was to help the weak. And the calling of the weak? Well, they were there to be helped by Ensign. He got to be a good man; they got to eat. Everybody won. Thus God’s economy.

  As a representative from 1995 to 1999, and then as a senator from 2000 to the present, Ensign has been the Republican Party’s faithful servant, a money machine for its economic royalism. His first year in Congress, he set a record for fund-raising. It was his simplicity, say his allies in Nevada: without much of a mind for details, he never muddies issues. Or the issue, really: aside from lending a
id to fellow Family men on moral fronts here and there—fighting the distribution of condoms in Uganda, trying to keep Playboy out of prisons—Ensign has been a consistent man of principle in Washington for one overriding cause: free markets, under God.

  Where do the “gifts” given to Hampton’s family by Ensign’s parents fit in that market? Charity? Payments for services rendered? What was the exchange? Did the senator, with the help of C Street, try to bribe his way out of a scandal? If he did, it seems doubtful that he had any sense of moral transgression. Certainly the C Street brothers who helped negotiate payments made to Ensign’s mistress and her family are not so afflicted. The sin in their eyes was the sex; everything else, the money and the cover-up, was for love, that of brother for brother. Democracy, they believe, pales by comparison.

  3

  THE CHOSEN

  IN THE wake of the sex scandals, “C Street” entered the American vernacular as shorthand for pious hypocrisy. Liberal bloggers attributed almost any conservative initiative they didn’t like—especially those that smacked of self-righteousness or lunacy—to the “C Street band,” a pun on Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Sen. DeMint’s determination to make health-care reform Obama’s “Waterloo”? C Street. (Not true.) Birther bill? Total C Street. (Also not true.) Any politician who’d ever strayed beyond his marriage vows, went the thinking, had probably shacked up at what one blogger called “the Prayboy Mansion.” Could it really be a coincidence that the DC madam who tended to Sen. David Vitter’s diaper fetish called him “David from C Street”? (It was.) Cartoonist Garry Trudeau dedicated a week and a half of Doonesbury comic strips to the plight of “Senator X,” led by God to “The House of the Fallen Sons,” at 133 C Street, where he learned the leadership lessons of Hitler and Mao. “I have sinned,” says the senator, standing on C Street’s stoop. “But I’m special.” “You’ve come to the right place,” says a faceless voice from within the building.