(derekbaker)

A Look Back at the Page Scandal of the Early 80s

My last post here was made just as a scandal was breaking in Washington involving a Republican member of the House of Representatives who, it was alleged, had engaged in salicious e-mails and IMs with a congressional page.

That story soon grew to include the head of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, the Speaker of the House, the Office of the House Clerk, and an ensuing media maelstrom.

Foley was, apparently, a closeted gay Republican. And now, the only openly gay Republican in Congress -- although he understandably downplayed his sexual orientation -- Jim Kolbe, is being investigated for a camping trip he once took with his sister, National Park rangers, and -- wait for it -- two Congressional pages.

I wanted to write a post here about these scandals, but felt a personal barrier. My site doesn't receive that many visitors, but even among those who've visited, I'm not sure everyone who does knows the whole truth about me.

In this day and age, especially given the media coverage and exposure, it shouldn't be that big a deal.

But even still, some people may be yet shocked with the full background here, so I was reluctant to "come out," so to speak, in the middle of this scandal.

I realize, however, that in order to have any degree of integrity or credibility in talking about this issue, I need to first something reveal about myself, my background, and what I have in common with this developing news story. So -- deep breath -- here it is:



I was a House page, in the summer of 1981.

Now, when I was a page -- "back in my day, you know..." -- there wasn't even a dorm for pages. I lived in a boarding house on East Capitol Street that was owned by a man who worked for the Republican House cloakroom.

I was a Democratic page, because the member of Congress who sponsored me was a Democrat (James R. Jones, 1st District, Oklahoma -- back when Oklahoma elected Democrats). However, I was "on loan" to the Republican cloakroom as a page for my last two weeks. That really never sounded dirty until now.

The job, however, was the same: take an envelope from the floor to some House member's office. Pick up something else in that or a nearby office to go to another office. On occasion, take something over to a Senate office, or to an office in the Capitol building itself -- which only happened a few times a day, as I remember, because most offices are in the Cannon, Longworth, Rayburn House Office Buildings, or their equivalents in the Senate, not inside the U.S. Capitol building itself.

Regardless of which side I was paging for, I never had many encounters with members of Congress. (At the time, I remember a fellow page or intern describing Barney Frank as sounding like Elmer Fudd -- but this was even before he was outed as gay.)

In fact, I can only really remember two encounters with congressmen "up close and personal," compared to seeing them or talking to them in passing in the Capitol Building or one of the office buildings.

In one, I babysat for my own congressman's elementary-aged kids one night while he and his wife went to Tip O'Neill's house for dinner. I remember we went for a walk after their parents left so the older one could pick up some information about joining the local Boy Scout troop. In the other, Congressman Bill Whitehurst (R-Virginia) and his wife, the "incomparable Lady Jane Whitehurst," as he always referred to her, came to the boarding house where I lived with many other pages and interns for casual summer-evening dinner. We made chili, she brought a cobbler for dessert, and they regaled us with very tame gossip about other members of Congress.

I did, however, have one slight connection to that earlier page scandal that broke in 1982 and led to the censure of Reps. Dan Crane and Gerry Studds. That whole scandal actually came about due to false accusations.

Leroy Williams was from Little Rock. He started his pageship that same summer of 1981. Unlike me, though, he stayed on after the summer for a semester of the school year, too.

In March 1982, back in Arkansas, he told CBS News that while a page, he had engaged in sex with three members of Congress and had arranged an appointment with a male prostitute for a Senator.

That, and rumors spread by another former page, were what kicked off an investigation headed up by Joseph Califano, whom the House Ethics Committee had asked to perform the role of special counsel investigating what had become a sex-and-drugs-with-minors scandal. However, in the middle of all this, Leroy Williams failed a lie detector test about the charges that he had made and, later, he admitted making the whole thing up.

By that point, however, there were other pages and people coming forward, and a year later, Crane and Studds were censured in front of the full House of Representatives.

That scandal also led to a major overhaul of the page program. They upped the minimum age for senate pages (which had been as low as 14) and they built a dormitory for all pages, with a curfew -- which was a far, far cry from the wild life we lived as 16- and 17-year-olds in Washington, D.C., with no supervision during our off-hours and a a curiously incurious army of bartenders and waitresses serving drinks to people who barely looked 18, let alone 21, that summer.

I didn't really know Leroy at all, except that he lived in the same boarding house as I did, and so occasionally we would be hanging out with the same crowd. That's him on the far right, me in the dorky glasses on the far left.

Labels: history, personal

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