The Petraeus e-mails, and mine

News item: Pentagon officials said the review [of e-mail messages between General John R. Allen, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, and the Tampa socialite/camp follower Jill Kelley] covered more than 10,000 pages of documents that include "inappropriate" messages. But associates of General Allen have said that the two exchanged about a dozen e-mails a week since meeting two years ago, and that his messages were affectionate but platonic.
A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, disputed that on Wednesday, saying that some of the messages were clearly sexual in nature. Investigators were confident that "the nature of the content warranted passing them on" to the inspector general, the official said.
—New York Times, November 15.

Uh-oh.

When you work in a virtual newsroom, as I do, you develop most of your relationships online. That means that the kidding, teasing and flirting that co-workers routinely engage in to relieve their otherwise dreary days— the waitress in the diner who calls the short-order cook "Doll baby"; the newspaper reporter who used to greet the office phone operator with, "Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite!"; or the checkout girl at DiBruno's who used to give me goose bumps just by saying, "Hi, honey!" whenever I appeared at her register— must now be performed by e-mail.

Boardwalk fantasies

My writers would find me a cold, heartless and boring editor indeed if I failed to leaven my stern editorial appraisals and hard-nosed financial bargaining with a soupçon of sexual innuendo.

Recently, for example, while agreeing to a pay raise for one of my male contributors, I remarked in an e-mail message, "I would have raised you sooner, but knowing you as I do, I feared you would blow the increase on liquor, cigars and chorus girls."

I also plead guilty to having exhaustively rewritten a female septuagenarian's manuscript with the explanation—also via e-mail— that "I'm accepting this piece only out of the memory of that wild night we spent together under the boardwalk in '63."

Of course redheads like me can't spend more than 20 minutes under a boardwalk. Every dermatologist knows that. But what would the inspector general say if my e-mails fell into his clutches?

Franklin's flirtations

Come to think of it, what would the inspector general say if he read the collected correspondence of Ben Franklin?

"You have spun a long thread," Franklin wrote in 1754 to Catharine Ray, when he was 48 and she was 24. "….I wish I had hold of one end of it to pull you to me."

Franklin followed up that letter with a note to Ray suggesting that the northwest wind brought him her kisses, mixed with snowflakes, "pure as your virgin innocence, white as your lovely bosom…"

Remember, Franklin was a married public official, just like Generals David Petraeus and John Allen. Should he have been forced to resign his diplomatic post in Paris and his seat in the Continental Congress?

The French had a word for it

Married though he was, Franklin was famous for sending amorous missives to sweet young things who crossed his path. For centuries thereafter, serious historians presumed from such evidence that Ben was conducting multiple adulterous affairs.

Not until 1975 did the scholars Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert reach a more sophisticated conclusion: Franklin, they wrote in The Private Franklin, was merely practicing what the French call amitié amoureuse— that is, venturing "a little beyond the platonic but short of the grand passion."

Note to BSR's board of directors and the inspector general: This is just what I've been doing with my writers! Really! You've got to believe me!

Petraeus and Allen have been ridiculed for sending thousands of e-mails to married socialites in Tampa when they should have been fighting the Taliban. I say: If they can relieve their battlefield tensions by writing lascivious e-mails— as opposed to, say, torching women and children, the preferred outlet for military stress during the Vietnam War— go for it.

A sticky legal challenge

When I worked in Chicago in the 1960s, the powerful law firm of Kirkland & Ellis encountered a bizarre legal challenge. Kirkland & Ellis had been founded in 1908 by Weymouth Kirkland and Robert McCormick. When the latter became publisher of the Chicago Tribune in 1920, the law firm acquired the Tribune as a client, and consequently it also picked up most of the major Chicago corporations that wanted to stay in the Tribune's good graces.

By the 1960s most of those companies had gone public, but their founding families remained active as executives and major stockholders. One day, a Kirkland & Ellis lawyer received a call from a member of one such corporate family with the news that a relative had dropped dead of a heart attack while masturbating.

"I don't care what you have to do," the caller told his lawyer. "Just keep this out of the papers."

The grand old man speaks

The mystified attorney— whose law school had failed to prepare him for such a crisis— sought advice from a partner, who turned to his department head, who turned to the managing partner. Eventually some half-dozen lawyers trooped down the hall to the office of Weymouth Kirkland, who by this time was in his late 80s, there to explain the problem and learn how this grand old man of the Chicago bar would handle it.

"Well, gentleman," Kirkland replied, I was later told by two lawyers who were present, "if that's what killed him, then we're all in trouble."

Exactly. And if flirtatious messages can bring down four-star generals, then we're all in trouble, too. Even Ben Franklin.♦


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