"Her “expressive green eyes” (The Daily Beast) and “tight shirts” and
“form-fitting clothes” (The Washington Post) don’t. And the anecdotes
and chatter that implicitly or explicitly wonder at the spidery wiles
she must have used to throw the mighty man off his path are laughably
ignorant of history, which suggests that mighty men are all too ready to
tumble, loins first. Wiles factor less into the equation than
proximity.
Sure, the spotlight these men have attracted and the altitude they’ve
reached should, theoretically, give them greater pause. But they’ve
either become accustomed to or outright sought a kind of adulation in
the public arena that probably isn’t mirrored in their marriages. A
spouse is unlikely to provide it. A spouse knows you too well for that,
and gives you something deeper, truer and so much less electric.
It has to be more than mere coincidence that Bill Clinton had an affair
with a White House intern; Newt Gingrich with a Congressional aide (now
his wife); John Edwards with a woman who followed him around with a
camera, creating hagiographic mini-documentaries about his presidential
campaign; and Petraeus with a woman who made him the subject of a
biography so worshipful that its main riddle, joked Jon Stewart, was whether Petraeus was “awesome or incredibly awesome.”
These mighty men didn’t just choose mistresses, by all appearances. They
chose fonts of gushing reverence. That’s at least as deliberate and
damnable as any signals the alleged temptresses put out.
Petraeus’s choice suggests an additional measure of vanity. Broadwell
exercises compulsively, as he does. She’s fascinated by all matters
military, as he is. “Petraeus once joked I was his avatar,” she told The Charlotte Observer a while back. So by his own assessment, he was having an affair with a version of himself.
And yet it’s the women in these situations who are often subjected to a
more vigorous public shaming — and assigned greater responsibility.
The Web site Business Insider posted an interview with an unnamed former
colleague of Petraeus’s who knew Broadwell and characterized her as “a
shameless self-promoting prom queen.” The colleague all but exonerated
Petraeus by saying: “You’re a 60-year-old man and an attractive woman
almost half your age makes herself available to you — that would be a
test for anyone.”
The headline of The Washington Post story that weighed in on Broadwell’s
wardrobe asserted that he “let his guard down,” a phrase that portrays
him as passive, possibly even a victim. The story notes that his former
aides considered him “the consummate gentleman and family man.”
It goes on to say that Broadwell was “willing to take full advantage of her special access” to him.
An article in Slate asked “how could he — this acclaimed leader and figure of rectitude — allow
such a thing to a happen?” The italics are mine, because the verb is a
telling one. “She went a bit ga-ga for the general,” the article later
observes, adding: “She may have made herself irresistible.”"
