Did General Petraeus have to resign? He opened himself as head of the CIA to
blackmail, which is a major security breach. So the argument goes. But surely
once he admitted the affair, he presumably couldn’t be blackmailed any
more.
And yes, I know there are many facts as yet unknown, like this
mystery second woman who complained about email harassment.
But for now,
Petraeus seems to have resigned over marital infidelity. If so, did he have to
leave his position? Why, because he displayed personal weakness? Years of
counseling unfaithful husbands and wives has taught me that private failings do
not necessarily indicate public faithlessness. Those who say that a man who
cheats on his wife will cheat on the country forget how many privately moral men
have been publicly immoral, and vice versa. As an example, there was never a
suggestion that Richard Nixon even looked at a woman that wasn’t his wife.
Neither did Jimmy Carter, and he was the worst president in
memory.
Conversely, my issue with Bill Clinton’s presidency was not
Monica Lewinsky, which does not interest me in the slightest, but rather his
moral failure to stop the Rwandan genocide, which is utterly unconnected with
his marriage. Thomas Jefferson was one of the great public men of the past
thousand years, but he was replete with private moral failings, as were FDR,
JFK, and LBJ.
It is my own opinion that an American hero like David
Petraeus who served his country with distinction and honor deserved better than
to leave his post in humiliation and ignominy, even if his own immoral actions
brought it upon himself.
A few weeks ago, at the height of my campaign
for Congress, a fellow Republican candidate got into hot water locally for
comments she made about Martin Luther King, whom she criticized a few years back
as a womanizer. Two days later I gave a speech in which I explained that
Christian morality demands perfection because Jesus is perfect. But Jewish
morality is based on the idea of struggle, that people are human, have many
failings, and their righteousness rests in the courage they show in wrestling
with their nature to choose the good amid a predilection to do
otherwise.
Not one person in the Hebrew Bible is perfect. That and the
Jewish emphasis on communal redemption over personal salvation – that what we do
for others matters more than how personally virtuous we are – would have us
acknowledge Martin Luther King as the greatest American of the 20th century
despite his personal failings.
No other American did more to restore this
great nation to its founding ideals of the equality of all of God’s children
than King.
Similarly, few men have done more to combat terrorism and save
human life in our generation than Petraeus. As the author of America’s
counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and commander of the surge, he took a war
being waged by terrorists that was claiming the lives of thousands of civilians,
and humiliating the world’s foremost force for good in the world, the American
military, and reversed the situation. As someone who proved that terrorism could
be defeated when so many Americans had given up, he is owed a debt of gratitude
by this and every other civilized nation.
Still, there are important
lessons to be learned from the Petraeus tragedy.
The first is the
admonition of the ancient rabbis on the need for a certain alertness in even the
everyday interactions between men and women, a notion that is scoffed at in
modern society that wants to pretend men and women have melded into some sort of
unisex gender. In an interview with Jon Stewart of The Daily Show this past
January, Petraeus’s biographer and the woman he is alleged to have had the
affair with, Paula Broadwell, said that the general had helped her in what she
described as a mentoring relationship and that, given their shared passion for
fitness, he took her running from time to time in Kabul. “That was the
foundation of our relationship. For him, I think it was a good distraction from
the war.”
Now, take a soldier who is away from his wife for lengthy
periods of time, put him around an adoring female fellow member of the military
for long stretches, and you have a potential problem. The same seems to have
allegedly been the case with Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower and his
British driver Kate Summersby during the Second World War. Men and women can, of
course, be friends. But that presupposes they respect the natural attraction
that adheres in most situations and safeguard against conditions that foster
inappropriate intimacy. As the sage Hillel said, “Do not believe in yourself
until the day you die.”
Then there is this: Having counseled many men who
were unfaithful to their wives, I discovered that the principal reason men cheat
is the desire to be desired, to feel special and extraordinary, to counter the
effects of a broken ego and low self-esteem by feeling wanted, especially by an
admiring woman. How would this apply in the case of someone like Petraeus who
was so universally admired? I’m not sure, and it might not. But the biography
now appearing about the General says he has always been driven, always been
highly ambitious, and more often than not, ambition is fueled by the need and
desire to prove oneself. The New York Times reported that Petraeus wanted to be
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but the Obama administration, afraid of a
highprofile rival, pushed him in the direction of the CIA posting, with the
concomitant lower, more secretive profile that was out of the press limelight.
The same New York Times says that the affair began in earnest after he had taken
his new posting. Did he miss the public acclaim? Did he begin to feel somewhat
overlooked amid the immense power of his lower-profile role? Again, this is all
mere speculation.
But the lesson for the rest of us mere mortals is that
if someone with the iron discipline of General Petraeus can err this big, we all
need to be on our guard – men and women alike – to get ego boosts from those
things which are wholesome, holy, and healthy, rather than what is harmful,
however hot.
The writer, whom Newsweek
and The Washington Post
call “the
most famous Rabbi in America,” is the international best-selling author of 29
books, and will shortly publish The Fed-up Man of Faith: Challenging G-d in the
Face of Tragedy and Suffering
(Gefen). His website is www.shmuley.com. Follow
him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.