C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

  Which brings us to the details of Pickering’s affair, with a telecom executive named Elizabeth Creekmore Byrd. But “affair” is too dramatic a term; Pickering seems to have merely substituted one woman for another. Pickering has five young sons, and for that reason he’s barely said a word about what happened. His wife, Leisha, is hardly more forthcoming. When Chip filed for divorce in 2008, she resisted, even though by then she knew about his other woman. Perhaps the pain was lessened by the fact that his secret lover was not a stranger, like Sanford’s mistress, or her best friend, like Ensign’s. What Elizabeth Creekmore Byrd had been, Leisha may have believed, was a closed chapter in her husband’s life: an Ole Miss girlfriend with whom he’d broken up before marrying Leisha after graduation. And it was easy to think that the Elizabeth Creekmore of Chip’s college years was just a status match. Her family, like Chip’s, was one of the wealthiest and most influential in Mississippi. Their relationship was surely not so much a romance as a merger. And then Chip fell in love with Leisha.

  Elizabeth Creekmore Byrd—she married a doctor named Byrd—was “cute,” a pixie-like brunette with rosy cheeks and a thin-lipped smile. Leisha was stunning, a blue-eyed blonde with a broad-boned face that seemed like a canvas for powerful emotion. Creekmore was an heiress; Leisha was of more modest means. Creekmore went into the family business—Cellular South. Leisha did church work. Not the C Street kind, but the little-heralded, feed-the-hungry sort of labor. Creekmore went to Washington, cashing in on telecommunications consolidation; Leisha cofounded a nonprofit called HANDS, Helping Americans Needing Disaster Support; after Hurricane Katrina, it became one of the central clearinghouses for Mississippi relief. She wasn’t a saint, she was a congressman’s wife. If she was far removed from her husband’s Washington work, she shared his convictions and his conservatism. But such was the nature of the woman that, when she was in trouble—when Chip tried not just to leave her but to leave her poor—even Democrats rallied to her defense.

  The first divorce, though, was Creekmore Byrd’s, in 2007. That fall, Chip’s old boss, Sen. Lott, abruptly resigned—because, he said, he wanted to spend more time with his family. (As it happened, his brother-in-law Dickie Scruggs was about to be indicted on a charge of trying to bribe a judge, in a case that came perilously close to Lott’s name.) According to the lawsuit Leisha would file, Gov. Haley Barbour offered Chip Lott’s seat, the one everyone already thought would one day be his. Barbour, who denies such backroom maneuvering, is a great white buffalo of a man, a Washington lobbyist before he became governor. He and Pickering Jr. went way back; Barbour and Pickering Sr. went way, way back. Senior converted to Republicanism; Barbour was one of those rare Mississippians born into the party, political from boyhood and a force in the state GOP since 1968, when he was barely out of high school. He’d run campaigns for Pickering Sr. and Jr.; his nephew Henry had been the strategist who’d walked Chip into Congress with a fat money roll. Getting Chip into the House had been easy enough, but making him senator? Barbour could do it just by signing his name.

  But then Chip surprised everyone: he said no. What’s more, he announced he wouldn’t be running again the next year. Why? Because he wanted to spend more time with his family, of course. But which family? According to Leisha, the one Chip planned on building with Creekmore Byrd. To do that, he needed to get rid of Leisha, and to get rid of Leisha, he needed to be out of the public eye. Leisha says quitting Congress, at least for a while, was Creekmore Byrd’s idea—which she presented to Chip along with an ultimatum: give up the Senate seat, since remaining a senator would have required that he stay married, or give up her. It’d be sweet to say Chip chose love over politics, but it’s probably more accurate to say that he hoped to have both. He finished out his term, and signed on as a Washington lobbyist, representing Creekmore Byrd’s Cellular South, which also happens to be one of the major members of Largent’s industry association.

  Had it ended there, Pickering might be a happy man today, collecting big paychecks, married to Creekmore Byrd, biding his time until the retirement of Mississippi’s other longtime senator, Thad Cochran. Raised a prince of the New South, his father’s word law, every job he’d ever held handed to him, Pickering thought he could play a populist at home while collecting corporate cash in Washington, father five boys by a beautiful woman and then leave her for a rich woman. He left Leisha and rented a house not far down the street from his lover’s, on a street called, appropriately, Heritage Hill Drive, and stepped back from power. He waited. He was deregulating, applying the invisible hand, a laissez-faire economy of love and life that would allow him to consolidate, to merge, to grow bigger than his father’s name.

  And he might have, too, had he let Leisha keep her dignity. Instead, he filed for divorce in a court under the shadow of his powerful family. The judge didn’t need to be told what to do: she shut Leisha up, she shut Leisha’s lawyer up, she even tried to stop Leisha and her lawyer from talking to one another. “I can’t think of a single instance where a client is prohibited from talking to his attorney,” says Matt Eichelberger, a Mississippi public defender and legal blogger who’s been following the case.

  But Leisha had a secret weapon. Mississippi is one of the few states to have retained an arcane statute that allows a spurned wife to sue for alienation of affection, a “tort of outrage.” In other words, to sue not her husband, but her husband’s mistress, in another court, doubling the legal battleground on which Leisha’s lawyers could maneuver. They took advantage of a law from Charles Pickering Sr.’s Mississippi, an artifact of chivalry and sexism, but Leisha’s lawyers turned it around to push the prince of Mississippi out of the court of his home county and into Jackson, Mississippi’s closest approximation of a big city. What’s more, Leisha claimed to have proof of her husband’s sins: a diary. A record of his meetings with his mistress, telling when and where: C Street.

  Pickering and his old flame; the congressman from Mississippi and his telecom lover.

  And there the story stalled. Leisha threatened to release the diary, seven years’ worth of records; the divorce court judge ordered it returned to Chip; Leisha had to take out a restraining order against her own lawyer to stop the lawyer from complying with the force of the Pickerings; and then the other judge, the one in Jackson, said, Wait. And so it has, locked up from the public in an unusual decision by the divorce judge, the missing link in the seemingly unending case of Pickering versus Pickering.

  What Leisha wanted was a decent settlement for her five sons. The C Street diary was what she had to bargain with. What Pickering wanted was what he’d been promised by God, a family and a calling. The C Street religion was his justification. Ensign’s and Sanford’s hidden affairs, pursued in Vegas and Argentina, had been, by their own accounts, sin. What Pickering had done, under the sanctified and tax-exempt roof of C Street, with the knowledge of at least some of his “brothers,” was of God: his love life and his lobbying life converging; a broken marriage, ethics restrictions, and telecom regulations all falling away, Pickering born again, again. Pickering did not repent, Pickering did not weep for the camera, did not speak of a “heart connection.” He sued. He sued the mother of his five sons: the woman he’d betrayed. That’s conviction, more powerful than public confession. Belief.

  Belief in what? The preposition, in, doesn’t matter. What matters is the verb, believe. Belief covers for business; business covers for belief; they are equal, the yin and yang of an American fundamentalism that mistakes the market for democracy, sex for sin, the dollar for the cross.

  “When they say ‘Christ,’ ” a North Carolina businessman named Chip Atkinson says of the Family, with which he broke after decades in 2000, “they’re talking about themselves. Two thousand years of history”—the whole of the Christian tradition, its crimes and splendors—“and they don’t look at anything but themselves.”

  When Jenny Sullivan looked, what she saw was a dead man. It was 1984, the days of “greed is good.” The future Jenny Sanfor
d was a recent Georgetown grad intent on proving herself as an investment banker at Lazard Frères. One day she was in the company library, high above midtown Manhattan, when she heard a whoosh. The corner of her eye caught sight of something falling. “I pressed my face to the window,” she’d remember, “… and trembled when I saw a figure imprinted on the roof of a car.” A stock trader; a casualty of the life to which she aspired.

  She achieved it, becoming a vice president of Lazard before she was twenty-seven. A big-eyed, thin brunette with sharp cheeks and a wide, strained smile, she was near the top of what was then very much a man’s world. But it was the dead man who worried her: the corpse on the car. By 1987 she was easing herself out of the career-ladder jobs. She no longer worked deep into the night. She was remembering what it felt like to be human, made of flesh and blood instead of numbers. “I was noticing different things,” she’d recall, “or at least I had more time to consider what I was really seeing.” She “looked up,” as she’d put it, and one day instead of the dead man she saw Mark Sanford.

  She was Catholic, from Chicago, a hard-driving woman; he was a Florida “Whiskeypalian” by way of South Carolina, the Episcopal Church filtered through the amber of good bourbon. He was getting a master’s in business at the University of Virginia and working for the summer at Goldman Sachs, a bright and earnest but soft-spoken man who drove out to the Hamptons for a vacation in a two-door Honda hatchback. Their romance didn’t exactly spark, and it nearly sputtered altogether when seven months later she accepted an invitation to join him at his family’s South Carolina plantation, Coosaw, for New Year’s Eve. He didn’t meet her at the airport. Instead, he left her directions to the hatchback, which he’d left parked outside, and for the fifty-mile drive through fog to Coosaw’s long, sandy drive, lined on both sides by moss-covered trees.

  When she got there, he practically ignored her. But then nobody had ever accused Mark Sanford of being a flirt. Years later, when he revealed his Argentinean affair, everyone who knew him was stunned. “If I had to name the top ten sins of Mark Sanford, women would not have been one of them,” says Gina Smith, a reporter on the Sanford beat. “I thought he was asexual,” says an aide who’d seen women come on to him in no-risk situations. Maybe Jenny Sullivan did, too. The memoir in which she lays out their early romance, Staying True, is a chaste book in every sense but one: it is a quietly, effectively vengeful testimony. Even her most cherished moments are recounted with an undercurrent of contempt. And who can blame her? That New Year’s Eve at Coosaw, Sanford kissed her at midnight and then deposited her, alone, in a cabin set apart from the main house. Lying in a cold bed, enduring an evening of chill after having won the warmth of one embrace, “the pride I felt from having passed the test fell away a bit and I began to wonder why I had to be tested at all.”

  A part of Mark Sanford had long felt the same. Why did he need to be tested? As a high school boy and then in college, he watched his father die of Lou Gehrig’s disease. The elder Sanford had been given six months and instead he lived six years, which proved to be a blessing and a curse. Imagine a sand castle, and then picture a slow tide, taking it away grain by grain until first a wall and then the whole edifice crumbles. So it was, too, with Coosaw, where Mark had summered as a small boy, and where he’d grown into a young man. The plantation was sold off in pieces until what was left was a wild, filthy farm—but still lovely, not so much hard-won as held on to only through struggle.

  It’s not surprising that Sanford would come to develop a sense of himself as rooted in these experiences. Or, rather, stuck there, his perspective reaching no further than his feeling of having been victimized by fate: “The tough decisions Mark had to make to save Coosaw,” Jenny writes, in one of her rare moments of sympathy, “made him the embodiment of someone who had lived through an experience like the Great Depression.” That’s what it was like during the Great Depression: many Americans almost lost their vacation farms.

  Jenny shared a similarly skewed financial perspective, describing herself as up from modest origins. It was true that her great-grandfather had risen from nothing by inventing the portable circular saw and starting the Skil Corporation, which her grandfather and then father developed into a global concern. “But I never thought of us as wealthy.” Her family had owned the Braves when they were in Milwaukee, but, she notes, their home in Winnetka, an affluent Chicago suburb, lacked air-conditioning.

  When Sanford first ran for Congress in 1994, by then married to Jenny and building his own small fortune in real estate, he had to struggle again, this time because he had money. His Democratic opponent “implied that if you are successful or of means, you are unfit to represent a congressional district,” writes Jenny. Not in the staunchly Republican district Sanford ran in; unknown before the campaign, he won with 67 percent of the vote. But the political career that followed was strangely suited to South Carolina, a very poor state with a memory—among the elite, at least—of riches. Sanford, says Chip Felkel, a Republican strategist, “is more libertarian than Republican. But the state of South Carolina is not wealthy enough to be libertarian. South Carolina is a socially conservative state, but not a fiscally conservative one. Everyone has a family member whose job was created by the government. They may claim to want less government, but the only constant in their lives is government.”

  Sanford should not have been successful: he was serious about much less government, fanatically so. “Mark was an ideologue,” declares Jenny, and she means it as a compliment. “You know what he was?” says Kevin Gray, a civil rights activist who ran against Sanford for governor. “An Ayn Rand romantic.” Sanford won by making hard-hearted austerity sound like Christian compassion.

  Sanford credits the novelist with the development of his own antigovernment philosophy, if his commitment to saving money by slashing services for the poor can be dressed up as that. “He’s an old Southern blueblood who’s working his hardest to seem like an intellectual,” says Felkel. “The kind of person who’s got a lot of good books on his shelf but doesn’t know what’s in them.” For Sanford the books that mattered were Rand’s novels and the Bible—a seemingly odd collage, given Rand’s atheism and the Bible’s concern for the poor. It’s a fusion that is at the heart of the C Street religion: free-market fundamentalism justified and slightly softened by scripture, “the human needs we have for grace, love, [and] faith,” as Sanford would write, in a Newsweek essay titled “Atlas Hugged.”

  Sanford’s religion has always been mostly private, and so have his grace and love: matters of personal relations, not policy realities. But as a congressman, he joined C Streeter Steve Largent’s Bible-based weekly social gatherings. He may have slept on his office floor, but he’d refresh himself at C Street. He went for Bible studies but hung around for the camaraderie; besides, there was never too much Bible up for discussion, just a verse, or a “thought,” as the men would put it, and, on special occasions, leading questions from Doug Coe about what Christ might have to say about Social Security, or building roads, or any other government endeavor. Let go and let God—the popular evangelical catchphrase was transformed at C Street into a mandate for the transfer of public wealth into private hands, for our own good. In lieu of regulation, C Street preaches “reconciliation,” a process they put into practice by bringing politicians and business leaders together to declare to one another their earnest desire to do right by God and each other. “Self-interest by proxy” is how an honest free marketeer, Will Wilkinson of the conservative Cato Institute, describes the C Street brand of back-scratching biblical capitalism.

  Sanford proved himself effective not so much at the actual details as at the miracle of sales. He thought like a “Randroid,” as the author’s devotees are known, but talked like a prosperity preacher. “I feel absolutely committed to the cause, to what God wanted me to do with my life,” he’d say of himself. “I have got this blessing of being engaged in a fight for liberty, which is constantly being threatened.”

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��He’d be talking to a crowd of schoolteachers and their spouses and family members about how he stands for efficient government,” says a South Carolina Republican consultant, “and they’d be nodding their heads because it sounds good, without realizing that he was actively trying to eliminate their positions.” Jenny would put it in saintly terms. “Something he’d learned watching so many poor in India,” she writes of a free congressional junket during his last term, was: “ ‘Don’t be so attached to things.’ ” The rich man who can successfully preach this message to the poor man will go far, indeed.

  Sanford, one of the brightest stars of the nation-changing Republican class of ’94, left Washington to run for governor in 2002. His opponent, Democrat Jim Hodges, had the personality of a desk. But Sanford, says another longtime South Carolina political observer, “governed like a bug lamp. He would hope that his idea was big enough and that others would gravitate toward him.” If that sounds like a weak approach, it’s because it was. Constitutionally, there are few weaker governorships than that of South Carolina. “Sanford did what no one thought was possible,” says Felkel. “He made it weaker.” The office was designed that way following the Civil War, in case an African American ever won office. The irony is that the weak governorship has become a foundation for white southern politics, a high-profile position with low commitment cost, power without responsibility. As George W. Bush proved in Texas, another weak governor state, it’s a perfect platform for a national posture. Sanford got that; he understood that the next step wasn’t reform in South Carolina but ideology, broadcast from South Carolina. Even with a Republican legislature, he got almost nothing passed. But that wasn’t what mattered.