The Many Faces of Dennis Hastert

By Frank Bruni
New York Times
April 30, 2016

http://goo.gl/YGdK8u

FOR a lesson on the riddles of human nature, look no further than Dennis Hastert.

Go back to early 1999, when he became the speaker of the House of Representatives. Revisit the reason he got that job. His Republican colleagues were sick of provocateurs, had been burned by scandal and wanted a reprieve — an antidote, even. Hastert fit the bill. In their view he wasn’t merely above reproach. He was too frumpy and flat-out boring to be acquainted with reproach.

“Like an old shoe” was how one prominent Republican described him to a reporter at the time.

In the closet with that old shoe were skeletons, but no one around him knew it or could have guessed which kind.

And somehow Hastert wasn’t haunted by them, or at least had never been impeded by them. Despite a history of sexually abusing boys as a high school teacher and coach, the old shoe stepped into politics, a line of work that invites examination and raises the stakes of any revelation, ensuring the most public shaming imaginable.

Despite that history he accepted prominent positions on Capitol Hill. Was he fearful? He showed no signs of it. Was he abashed? Not outwardly.

He joined his fellow Republicans in publicly denouncing Bill Clinton’s behavior with Monica Lewinsky, calling the president “immoral.” He championed legislation to put repeat sexual offenders behind bars for life.

But perhaps Hastert’s history did inform his hesitation, as House speaker, to act on reports that Mark Foley, another Republican congressman, had sent sexually explicit messages to underage congressional pages. Or perhaps that hesitation reflected nothing more than Hastert’s passivity and docility. The old shoe never had much of a stride.

Last week, at 74, he appeared in a wheelchair in an Illinois courtroom, where he received a 15-month prison sentence for illegally structuring bank transactions in an attempt to conceal those decades-old instances of sexual abuse. It was his turn to be publicly denounced. The judge branded him a “serial child molester.”

But before we let this latest sad and infuriating story whiz past, before we file it under “fallen leaders” or “blatant hypocrisy” or wherever it best belongs, we should heed the important reminders and questions here. There are morals aplenty in this old shoe.

One is the quickness and frequency with which so many of us equate displays of religious devotion with actual rectitude. Will we ever learn?

Hastert described himself as a born-again Christian and had a diploma from Wheaton College in Illinois, which advertises itself as “explicitly Christian” and is an alma mater of Billy Graham’s. This was a factor in his colleagues’ assessments of him as safe, uncontroversial. This was a drum still being beaten by authors of letters urging the judge to treat Hastert leniently.

Tom DeLay, who served as the House majority whip and then the House majority leader under Hastert, was one of those writers. He told the judge that he, Hastert and a pastor would routinely read and discuss the Bible together in lunchtime sessions on Capitol Hill.

“We held each other accountable and we studied God’s word,” wrote DeLay, later adding: “He is a good man that loves the Lord. He gets his integrity and values from Him. He doesn’t deserve what he is going through.”

Doesn’t deserve it because he prays in what DeLay, also a born-again Christian, considers the right way, to the right divinity? Perhaps that will earn Hastert the most important forgiveness of all. But it’s no free pass for bringing pain into the lives of children he was paid to instruct and inspire.

The testimonials that Hastert rounded up from prominent Republicans demonstrate more than mercy and pity. They affirm the degree to which pacts rather than principle govern partisan politics today. His past is precisely the kind that Republicans in particular express such unyielding horror toward. But in rallying to his aid, they dismissed it as a blip in a life of selfless “public service,” to cite a phrase that his lawyer leaned on.

PUBLIC service: Many politicians believe genuinely in it. Many are also enriched by it — Hastert among them. His actions in Congress increased the value of his private holdings in Illinois. His work as a lobbyist after he left the House in 2007 also fattened his net worth. That’s how he was able to shell out more than $1.5 million in hush money. The old shoe had become a Ferragamo.

Did Hastert have a specific, discrete attraction to boys? Or was he a gay or bisexual man in a time, place and culture that discouraged him from acknowledging that, led him to repress it and prompted its manifestation in stealthy, impermissible and destructive ways?

The ages of his victims, who were close to being young men, raise this possibility, giving us cause to ponder the price of making people feel unnecessary shame and of pushing them into the shadows. Nothing healthy happens there.

But another question fascinates me as much. What was Hastert thinking?

I don’t mean when he touched teenagers who lacked the maturity to consent to it and the power within that relationship to resist and report him. I mean many years later, when he attended the funeral of one of those boys, who died from AIDS. I mean in recent months, when he asked a prominent Illinois Republican to intervene with the judge — though that man’s brother would subsequently come forward to say that Hastert had victimized him, too.

I mean when Hastert bowed his head and burrowed into Scripture with DeLay, pledging righteousness while burying sins for which he’d never properly atoned.

My guess: Hastert had tucked away whole episodes of his past and walled off whole parts of himself, so that he could buy into others’ notions of his decency, which weren’t just notions but truths — partial ones. He was indeed the kind, humble, milquetoast man that so many colleagues deemed him to be. That was a subdivision of him, coexisting with darker tracts.

Of all the abilities that human beings possess, perhaps none is as mysterious as our talent for compartmentalization. Each of us is multiple people, and different ones emerge in different circumstances and relationships. If we can never fully know somebody, it’s not simply because his exterior doesn’t match his interior. It’s because there are so many chambers inside, and a few are more hidden than others, even from the person himself.