The Embassy of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina occupied a flat-faced futurist building near Twenty-First and E Street NW, not far from the US State Department. The neighborhood, Foggy Bottom, was a quieter part of town where the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century buildings now housed embassies and museums and hotels, as well as upscale residences, along the leafy streets.
I arrived near 3 p.m., wheeling my luggage with me because I had come straight from Dulles. Inside, grim-faced Bosnian security police treated me—like every other visitor, I’m sure—as a potential terrorist. After I passed through the metal detector, my luggage was impounded and my briefcase was searched. Without apology, my cell phone and tablet were removed for the duration of the visit, along with two pens. Roger had phoned last night to tell me that I couldn’t take notes during the meeting.
Over the years, my job as a lawyer had led me into confrontations with lots of supposedly important people—the Catholic archbishop in Kindle County, countless CEOs, the Senate Judiciary Committee that grilled me about my appointment as US Attorney. Yet minutes away from my interview, I found myself unusually nervous.
General Layton Merriwell had achieved that distinctive public profile lately referred to as ‘iconic.’ He was arguably the most decorated soldier of his day, and had been briefly—but seriously—promoted as a candidate for president of the United States. All that said, his notoriety had increased substantially when he joined the long march of American males of great power and achievement who wandered dick-first into disgrace.
When I was growing up, the popular image of a successful Army officer was Patton, someone who supposedly had balls the size of eggplants, who addressed God by first name, and who could inspire his troops to latitudes of courage they had never foreseen in themselves. Personally, I had virtually no firsthand experience with the US military, since I was of that social class which, in my time, didn’t get involved in defending their country, much like the five-hundred-plus members of Congress who had voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq and then as a group sent a single child to fight there when the war started. But over time, I’d developed the clear impression that the men and women who rose to the top in our armed services were far more nuanced figures than Patton.
Certainly that appeared to be the case with Layton Merriwell. He represented the fourth generation of his family to attend West Point, and he had graduated number two in his class before training further as an infantry officer and parachutist. Over the years, Merriwell had moved back and forth between the Pentagon, the field, and academic assignments, teaching Tactics at the Army War College and also spending semesters at MIT, where he was completing a doctorate in Game Theory.
His strategic views were not complex and had been often quoted: “Fight only when absolutely necessary, and then with overwhelming force.” His battlefield record was glorious: Grenada, Panama, Haiti. During Desert Storm, he was chief of staff to General Schwarzkopf, planning the hundred-hour ground operation that followed our unrelenting air assault.
All of that had led him to the Balkans, where he was the first commander of the US forces in the NATO Stabilization Force in Bosnia. He was reassigned after the peacekeeping mission was well established, but returned as supreme commander of NATO forces during the bombing of the Serbs in Kosovo and the ensuing pacification of that country and Bosnia. Finally, in 2004, on the recommendation of his friend Colin Powell, he was dispatched to lead the Central Command in Iraq. He had some success in neutralizing Al Qaeda, only to confront the Sadrite insurgency. After eighteen months he asked to be relieved, reportedly convinced that there was no near-term prospect of a democratic Iraq. Instead, he supposedly recommended to the president that we double our force to fully subdue and disarm the many malcontents, much as in Bosnia, and then withdraw.
Once he was back in the US, Merriwell took leave to finish his doctorate, while reports of his misgivings about the war circulated widely. Early in 2007, several prominent Democrats floated his name as a presidential candidate for the 2008 election, until Merriwell announced he would not leave the service. Three years later, in 2010, President Obama nominated Layton Merriwell to become the next chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Within forty-eight hours of that announcement, both the Washington Post and the New York Times published front-page accounts, probably based on leaks from Bushites eager to get even, of Merriwell’s long affair with his aide-de-camp at NATO. When the relationship started, Captain Jamie St. John, who was half the general’s age, was unmarried, a gifted West Point graduate, and the daughter of one of Merriwell’s academy classmates. Whatever this young woman had offered Merriwell proved to be something he was unwilling to forsake. He brought her with him to Iraq, but there the relationship foundered. She requested a transfer, which he’d tried unsuccessfully to block, while he continued to e-mail her, his messages growing more and more abject and profane. Finally, after her engagement to a fellow officer much closer to her age, he had sent a series of ridiculous threats—most composed late at night and admittedly under the influence of far too much alcohol—claiming he would end her Army career unless she returned to him.
Both the affair and the turbulent aftermath had been over for roughly four years by the time it became news; in the interval, Merriwell had apologized to now Major St. John in writing several times. Nevertheless, he resigned from the service the week the story broke, while his wife of forty years tossed him out of their house in McLean and his two daughters publicly spurned him. He was now the CEO of Distance Communications, a hi-tech manufacturer of the electronic components for various weapons systems, part of that immense gray world of military contracting where billions were made and little was publicly known.
Merriwell’s downfall had come as I was in the waning days of my marriage, and it fascinated me more than those of Bill Clinton or Sol Wachtler or Eliot Spitzer or the hundreds of other men of standing who’d been shamed this way in recent decades. The common understanding of all of them was that they were idiots who proved yet again that a male is just a human being chained to a maniac. But to me there was a deeper enigma: Why had each of these men found desire more powerful than their attachment to everything else in life they had struggled so long to attain? As a group, their behavior said, in substance, something that reverberated with me: With everything gained, huge success was still not enough. Something essential remained missing. Perhaps all humans feel like this and men of power simply have the means to follow the siren’s call. Or perhaps this phenomenon reflected the fact that the drive of big power guys was the result of a permanent lack of contentment.
Each case probably had its own answers, including that for many of these men the only thing new was that they had gotten caught. But the profiles of Merriwell included countless testimonials from friends who insisted that these events almost certainly had no precedent. And yet in his last desperate messages to Major St. John, Merriwell had promised to abandon his wife and to leave his Army career behind. Merriwell’s story was ultimately most striking to me, not because he felt such intense longing for something missing in his life but rather because he seemed to think he had found it.