Читать книгу Texas Confidential - Michael Varhola - Страница 17

IN 1976, JOHN ANDREW YOUNG (1916–2002) had been a career politician for three decades and was on his eleventh term in the U.S. House of Representatives when a woman who had worked for him accused him of pressuring her to have sex with him. Even worse, she said, the married father of five had compensated her at taxpayers’ expense by giving her substantial pay raises.

Colleen Gardner, a young woman who had, as it were, worked on the Democratic congressman’s staff since 1970, said she had reluctantly had sex with her boss on numerous occasions after giving in to his relentless advances.

Gardner was, in fact, suspiciously well paid for someone who had admitted that “maybe four days out of the week I had nothing to do.” When she began working in Young’s office, Gardner received an annual salary of $8,500, good for a novice staffer, but before long had it increased to $25,800. To put that in perspective, only 27 of the 464 staff members of the Texas congressional delegation earned more, and most of them were senior personnel like chiefs of staff.

Woefully underemployed, Gardner asked for more work, and Young cheerfully obliged, making her primary duty sitting with him in his private office and chatting “about sex for hours and hours.”

Talk is cheap and Young decided to kick it up a notch, and the two reportedly met at nearby motels—where Young registered under the assumed name of “George Denton”—at least thirty-two times over a sixteen-month period.

“I’d deny it if it were true, but the fact is, I didn’t,” Young said in response to the pay-for-play allegations. But, unable to refute a messy paper trail that led straight from Capitol Hill to multiple sleazy motel rooms, the senior congressman had no choice but to admit both that he had rented them and used a false name to do so. He claimed he had done so, however, in pursuit of his official duties—namely, for purposes of meeting with Department of Defense employees who wanted to give him confidential information about illicit activities at the Pentagon.

A Department of Justice investigation concluded before the end of 1976 failed to prove a connection between Young’s affair with Gardner and her exorbitant pay.

Young’s wife, Jane, however, was not quite as concerned with the technicalities of the case as were the federal government investigators and, on July 13, 1977, fatally shot herself in the head.

Ever the trooper, Young worked through his grief and ran for reelection in the June 1978 primary but was defeated and left the office he had held for twenty-two years in 1979. He thereafter worked as a consultant until his death in early 2002, upon which he was buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., in Arlington, Virginia.