Scooter Libby and Me

By Nick Bromell, The American Scholar. Posted January 16, 2007.

When I say that the conservative lacks principles, I do not mean to suggest that he lacks moral conviction. The typical conservative is indeed usually a man of very strong moral convictions. What I mean is that he has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. -- F. A. Hayek, Why I Am Not a Conservative

Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us that the history we're moving through finds its ultimate significance within us: "We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them here."

Certainly this has been true for me. As I've looked out upon the public history of the past six years, my eyes have beheld the same ribbon of events everyone else has seen.

But the meaning of this history has been strongly shaped and intensified by a purely accidental twist in my own private experience. I went away to boarding schools in the early 1960s, and at one of these my best friend was a boy named Scooter -- Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- who grew up to become Paul Wolfowitz's protégé, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and one of the Bush administration's strongest advocates for the war in Iraq.

Life is doubtless peculiar for anyone who has a childhood or college friend go on to become stupendously successful and powerful. How can you not judge yourself by the standard of his monumental achievement? How can you not feel small and unworthy in comparison?

In my case, these feelings have been further complicated by my being deeply opposed to the Bush administration, which I regard as dishonest and dangerous. But there's still another fact of my private life that colors the way I see the world: The reason I went to boarding school is that my father and mother were living out of the United States, posted to American embassies in Arab capitals like Baghdad, Amman, Kuwait, and Cairo.

This means that for me, Scooter and his neoconservative colleagues have not only set the nation on a disastrous course, they have also destroyed my father's lifelong effort to make U.S. policy in the Middle East more responsive to the realities on the ground.

And there's one last consideration, which has to do with what my father actually did in those embassies -- something that gives the outing of Valerie Plame a personal, not just a public significance.

So, for six years I've been obsessed with Scooter. Every time I read a newspaper, I see Scooter and me hunched over a game of Stratego (which he usually won), or I see him faking right before hooking left so I can hit him with a pass in the end zone.

Walking my dog through the woods around our house, I chant the mantra of questions I literally ache to ask him: How could you work for an administration that denies global warming and supports tax breaks for large SUVs? How could you work for an administration that cuts funding for birth control to the poorest people in our country and the world? How could you so brazenly exaggerate the threat of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, and how could you so foolishly imagine that American troops would be welcomed in Baghdad with cheers and flowers?

I still fling these questions into the silent woods. They are personal questions, private questions, and no one but me ever hears them. Yet at the same time they are public questions, asked by millions of Americans, and they vent the anger and the anguish that have marked the public history of a deeply divided nation.

Eight years ago I was appalled by the viciousness of Republican attacks on Bill Clinton. Now, I am ashamed that I thrill to equally vicious attacks on George Bush. But what can I do? If fundamentalist Christians are outraged by the prospect of gay marriage becoming legal, how can I be less outraged by their denying the humanity of my gay friends?

In my hotter moments -- I have fewer and fewer cool moments these days -- I ask Scooter whether his political identification with homophobia is distinguishable from a political identification with racism or anti- Semitism. And convinced that it is not, I sit down at my desk to do it: to write the letter telling Scooter that I can no longer be his friend, not even in the rather distant way we have been friends for all these years.

Today, my old friend is under indictment for obstructing justice by lying about his knowledge of the Valerie Plame affair. His trial begins today. He will face the distinct possibility of public disgrace and a career-terminating jail sentence. So what should I hope for, I ask myself: my old friend's acquittal or his conviction?

The window of my study faces north. If our house stood on higher ground, I could see 15 miles up the winding Connecticut River to the squat bulk of Mount Pocumtuck. Forty years later, Scooter surely remembers our old school song as well as I do:

Eaglebrook, upon your mountain

Still across the valley gaze,

Where we worked and played together,

In our boyhood's merry days.

We met in a dorm of cubicles -- cubies -- on our first night at Eaglebrook, in September 1961. Scooter was in the cubie next to mine, and because the walls stopped a foot short of the ceiling, we could easily talk to each other after lights out. We probably whispered, Where are you from, what does your father do, what sports do you like?

See more stories tagged with: scooter libby

Nick Bromell teaches English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His essays have appeared in The Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Harper's, and The Sewanee Review.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »