Internal affairs
Brian Lees speaks regularly to his mentor, former US senator Edward Brooke, but he hasn’t picked up the phone and called him in the past few days. He hasn’t felt the need to.
He knows his former boss well enough to know that he isn’t likely to want to talk about the revelation that he had an affair with Barbara Walters back in the 1970s.
Lees was Brooke’s right-hand man, his personal assistant in Washington, during his last Senate term. He says he did not know about the affair, though he didn’t seem shocked, either.
“I knew they were friends,” Lees said yesterday. “He took her to a dinner at the White House. I didn’t know the details.”
Walters’s announcement was timed to plug her memoir being published this week. The details will be discussed on “Oprah” today. I can’t speak for Lees, but I won’t be watching.
It was an odd way for Brooke, now 88, to reenter the public consciousness. The first popularly elected black US senator, he has mostly kept a low public profile since he lost his seat to Paul Tsongas in 1978. By political standards he is a very private man.
He broke that privacy last week, briefly and just barely. He released a statement saying that he has never believed in commenting on private matters and does not intend to start now. He otherwise ignored reporters’ calls to his home in Miami.
Perhaps inevitably, time has obscured Brooks’s accomplishments. He was elected attorney general in 1962, at a time when few blacks held any office in Massachusetts. He was elected to the Senate four years later, its first black member since Reconstruction. He is a Republican. It’s getting hard to imagine now, but in those days Massachusetts was legitimately a two-party state.
Brooke published his own fascinating memoir a couple of years ago, in which Walters did not figure. He recounted his early life in Washington, vividly recreated the lost Massachusetts political world of the 1950s, in which he admired a young congressman named John F. Kennedy, and made his way in a Republican Party that had long been the province of men with names like Cabot and Lodge.
The man freely admitted that along the way he had his share of fun. His marriage had unraveled early in his Senate years. While he remained married - divorce at that time was still a major undertaking - he lived an unencumbered existence.
One commentator, seeking to justify Walters’s obvious exploitation, claimed last week that Brooke had bragged about his exploits in his book. That charge is false. Brooke admitted, freely and unapologetically, that he is a man who admires attractive women. He did not go into detail. He did not name-drop to sell books.
Brooke’s political career unraveled in the wake of a very nasty divorce that ended in allegations of financial improprieties against the senator. He was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, but by the time that happened he was out of office. In truth, Massachusetts voters thought Brooke had lost touch with the state, not without reason. A new young reformer took his place.
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