For a Leader, Which Matters More: Marriage Vows or the Oath of Office?

I have been musing lately about public versus private responsibility. After David Petraeus resigned from the CIA last month, many people questioned whether he should have stepped down, arguing that his value to the country should outweigh whatever was happening in his private life. I am in the camp of those who think that he absolutely had to resign because his ability to lead an agency of people who are trained from Day One to avoid any behavior that could expose them to blackmail and thus compromise national security was irrevocably compromised.

But I was struck that no commentary that I saw ever suggested that he had to resign because of his responsibility to his wife and children. He betrayed his marriage vows to his wife and jeopardized the very foundation of his family; as he himself said, he now has a great deal of work to do to repair the damage. I do not sit in judgment on his behavior. Many marriages have encountered and survived similar troubles, and affairs can happen even when the parties involved do not want or intend them. And I recognize the importance of some divide between the public and private spheres. But I still wonder why an individual's private responsibilities—responsibilities to spouse and family that married people pledge to honor before a community of family and friends on their wedding day just as public officials pledge to uphold the constitution when they took public office—do not seem to be part of the public calculus of value.

This question is raised even more sharply by a new film that I strongly recommend entitled The Man Nobody Knew, an account of the life of another CIA director, William Colby, by his son and documentary film-maker Carl Colby. We screened it at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton last week and then had a question-and-answer session with Carl Colby. The most compelling character in the film is Barbara Colby, who never fully knew what her husband was doing but who supported him fully and loyally over decades in the belief that he, and thus she, were working for a higher public cause. She stood by him through years of separation when he was heading up the infamous Phoenix program in Vietnam, a program that killed thousands of Vietcong often simply on the word of fellow villagers, and then through an intense and humiliating Congressional grilling over the exposure of CIA global activities after Watergate. Yet after he was fired by Gerald Ford in favor of political "loyalist" George H.W. Bush, he asked for a divorce, to her evident surprise, and married a younger woman. Carl Colby ends the film by revealing that when his father committed suicide (as he believes), he had on him a picture of Carl's sister Catherine, who died of epilepsy and anorexia at age 24. Carl reports that he only saw his father cry twice, once when his sister died and once at the fall of Saigon.

Read more at The Atlantic.