Take off the kid gloves - how Washington, D.C. society has managed to forgive ex-American University president Richard Berendzen's acts of sexual misconduct while he was still president - Column

National Review, Nov 1, 1993 by Andrew Ferguson

ONE REASON Washingtonians were so thrilled by the suicide of Vincent Foster, President Clinton's boyhood friend and deputy White House counsel, was that it confirmed their belief that Washington is a remorseless town, fatal to the faint of heart. The hometown paper pushed the theme relentlessly: a soft, sweet country lawyer tumbles into our cauldron of intrigue and succumbs in record time. You could almost hear the sighs of satisfaction.

This is fiction, of course, and shameless self-flattery, for the unspoken corollary to the town-without-pity myth is that those of us who live here and somehow manage to avoid killing ourselves are forged from finer metal than country lawyers and other ordinary mortals. But the opposite is more nearly true. Washington is an endlessly forgiving place, a mausoleum housing the largest collection of losers, coasters, and abject failures the world has ever known. Watergate veterans, Carter appointees, strategists from the 1992 Bush campaign, even Robert McNamara - all walk the streets undisguised and without fear. They spend their dotage lunching at Duke's, dozing in the Cosmos Club, and pinching interns at the Brookings Institution. It's nice work if you can get it.

Richard Berendzen understands this fact of Washington life as well as anyone. He is a savvy fellow. Throughout the 1980s, he served as the highly visible president of American University - a merciless raiser of funds, signer of petitions, holder of press conferences, and champion of issues, ubiquitous at cocktail parties, unavoidable at embassy soirees. His efforts transformed his university from a third-rate party school with a dwindling endowment into a third-rate party school with a large endowment. Washington officialdom stood in awe of his achievement until he abruptly resigned, in 1990, after he was snagged making obscene phone calls to women in suburban Virginia.

You'd think that a man who had survived such an affair would buy a one-way ticket to Madagascar. Instead, Berendzen, a true Washingtonian, appeared on Nightline. He then manfully accepted his punishment (two suspended sentences of thirty days each), enrolled in a program for sexual deviants, and negotiated a $1-million severance from the university. The severance was soon canceled, but Berendzen did return to his tenured faculty position, teaching astronomy to the coeds.

I still consider Berendzen's Nightline appearance a kind of landmark, a flawless distillation of the strategy employed ever after by celebrity miscreants seeking redemption. Under Ted's gentle probing the professor confessed, sort of, admitting that the calls were "inappropriate." (And how. In at least one of his calls, Berendzen fantasized about a four-year-old "Filipino sex slave," whom he kept in a dog cage and used as a "human toilet.") Apologizing, sort of, to those he "might have hurt inadvertently," he quickly donned the mantle of victimhood himself, revealing that he had been abused as a child. He brought along his shrink to grease his passage from scuzzball to martyr. And in closing he answered the call to service: Hence-forth he would devote himself to helping those who had suffered as he had.

It was inevitable that so masterly a performance would balloon into a book. Come Here, published last month, shows that Berendzen's touch remains sure. The book is tricked out like a social-service brochure, with lists of toll-free numbers of child-abuse organizations. An endnote informs us: "The author will donate a portion of his profits from this book to organizations that combat child abuse." (Can we see the receipts, professor?) He reprints "If," by Rudyard Kipling, "Who was abused as a child."

More remarkable is the text itself. His abusers, it turns out, were his mother and father. The father is dead and the mother is senile - lucky for them and convenient for him. The account of his own crimes is vague; he somehow neglects to mention the Filipino sex slave, for example. But he offers his exculpation in detail. He made the calls, he says, because "I was interested in finding information," soliciting from his (terrified) interlocutors the deepest causes of child abuse. "What might I learn? What happened in other families and why? ... I was data gathering." The ways of scholarship have never seemed so mysterious.

BORDERING as it does on selfparody, the book begs the question: Has Berendzen, at last, gone too far? A better question: Is that possible? Glowing accounts of the book appeared not only in the Washington Post and Washington times but in USA Today and provincial papers as well. His success proves that Washington's tradition of infinite redemption has been taken up by the country at large. None dare call him pervert. His publicists in the press prefer a more fashionable p-word. "It is a most gripping experience to listen to his pain," sighed Connie Chung, ignoring her own as the hook, line, and sinker slid down her throat.

"As an educator," says Berendzen, in one interview after another, "I feel that if you learn something, you have a responsibility to teach it."