In the days after Patrick Fitzgerald read out his indictments of perjury and obstruction of justice against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby a year and a half ago, what drew my attention most was something an old friend of Libby's said about him to a reporter: that the vice-presidential aide's aim in life had always been to remain "so opaque you can't tell he is there." The strategy worked: Despite the central role Libby had in making the case for war in Iraq -- the spy novelist John le Carre called the operation Libby ran out of Dick Cheney's office "one of the great public-relations conjuring tricks of history" -- in October 2005, no one knew much about him.He was pulled to that side by Paul Wolfowitz in the early seventies at Yale; Wolfowitz, in turn, had been mentored by Wohlstetter at Chicago. David recounts the lineage of an intellectual strain that emphasized stirring hornets' nests in the Mid-East as a deliberate U.S. strategy -- a doctrine that began as a rogue intellectual notion in the mid-20th century and became, at the beginning of the 21st, official American policy. It's an article that is highly worth a read -- but only available to subscribers. If you aren't one now, sign up today.More than a year later, I sat in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., and watched as Fitzgerald removed layer after layer of the man's opacity. Why, I asked myself throughout the day, would a smart lawyer like Libby perjure himself to Fitzgerald, the most famous public prosecutor in America? And why would he lie to cover up a crime nearly impossible to prove -- that of knowingly blowing a CIA agent's cover?
Sitting next to me in court that day was Libby's college girlfriend. I had met her outside the courtroom that morning, standing in line waiting to be admitted. She had asked me to save her place in line and rushed over to Harriet Grant, Libby's wife. The two shook hands, and then hugged.
Once the woman returned, I asked her if she was a friend of Libby's. Yes, she said sadly, she had known him since Yale. "He was such a good person," she continued, in tears. I asked if they had been "involved." She nodded. "It's really painful to see him here," she said in a near whisper. She described the Scooter she had first met during the days of the student rebellion in the 1960s. He was a radical who organized antiwar demonstrations and ran around campus wearing a Malcolm X T-shirt. The two had gone to demonstrations together. "He was such a good person," she repeated. "He still is."
"So what happened to him?"
"The Dark Side," she told me with a sigh, had gotten to him.
--The Editors
