The White House seems to have too many things rattling in its closet, and it seems quite unfazed by it.
SEX, nannies and home secretaries are synonymous. The nanny diaries are the White House’s (and 10 Downing Street’s) worst nightmare. Recall President Bush’s nomination of Linda Chavez as his secretary of labour in 2001. It got derailed because she had once upon a time hired a nanny who was an illegal alien living and working in the US.
History repeats itself. Except it gets murkier. The man nominated by Bush to keep illegal immigrants off US soil and catch and throw out the ones already in, that is the secretary of the department of homeland security, has stepped down because he too has a nanny in his closet whom he pays under the table as she has no legal status in America.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, at 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Tony Blair is battling his nannygate with his Home Secretary David Blunkett, who has had to resign because of an email he sent saying “no favours but slightly quicker” to fast-track a visa for a Filipino nanny for his former mistress, who is pregnant with the minister’s son.
Back in the US, a policeman by the name of Bernard Kerik outfoxed White House hounds on his scent. They were meant to scrutinize and vet the former jail warden with a third-degree black belt in tae kwon do and a background in anti-terrorism, who had worked as security guard for Saudi royalty. Later he was fired and deported after an investigation by the Saudi secret police, before becoming an undercover policeman in New York.
Kerik’s record was fine-tooth combed and given a clear pass for President Bush to tap him as his new secretary. Suckered into believing that the 49-year-old policeman, other than being a “colourful” guy, had no skeletons rattling in his cupboard, White House corps of fancy lawyers and wiseacres found him an ideal fit for the post of homeland security chief, who would keep America safe from terrorists, both at home and abroad.
What a comedy.
In broad daylight, the former New York police department commissioner — crowned hero for his commitment to bring normalcy after 9/11 — hid his financial, ethical and marital peccadilloes, serious enough to disqualify him for this sensitive cabinet post. He quietly buried his shady past under ground zero in the aftermath of the World Trade Centre collapse. Given a high security clearance by federal officials, including the FBI, which waived a background check on him, Kerik was considered as clean as snow.
Now, the White House admits that it “knew in advance about other disclosures emerging about Kerik’s background, including alleged extramarital affairs and reported ties to a construction company with supposed mob connections, but had concluded that they were not disqualifying.”
So suspicions about mob ties don’t doom a nomination, but hiring an illegal alien does! “Something is very wrong here,” Linda Chavez, the woman whose nomination got thrown out because of the nanny scandal, comments. She now has become a columnist.
Is the White House sexist? I would say so. Is it racist? May be.
While Linda the Latino was shooed off its premises when caught with an alien nanny in her portfolio, the bald, big, white man, Bernard, was a regular at the White House who thought of him as ‘this guy’s our guy.’ Only, because the fawning fellows manning the president’s office knew well that their boss had taken a shine to Kerik.
Some people argue that Kerik “carried enough personal baggage to sink a cruise ship”. How come the White House wore blinkers, and stranger still is that the ‘world’s policeman’ George Bush, who goes around with a danda to straighten out world leaders who step out of line, should have been licked by a policeman in his own backyard?
And what is most bizarre about this Kerik affair is that the White House now appears more like a house of cards than fortress America. It’s vulnerability, no call it gullibility, is an open book. How could it have handed over America’s defence to a man whose past reads like a third-rate X-rated novel dripping with sex, illegal gains and mob connections?
So who exactly is this man Kerik?
I first met him during those frenetic times when New Yorkers were still hurting from the terror attacks. Towering over everyone else, the man seemed to radiate confidence, touching those cowering souls whose lives had changed overnight. He was smiling a lot, cracking jokes and generally a jolly type of guy, far from looking the part of a policeman — dourly suspicious of everyone around.
He had just written a book about his horrible childhood and felt the need to bare his heart to the audience. “The trouble, the poverty and crime, these feel like dreams themselves. But this other dream is the one that haunts me. These vivid memories, of an abandoned boy, of a lost son waiting for his mother’s return ... this is my deepest mystery, a hole in the centre of myself.”
Kerik’s mother, 24, abandoned him when he was two. He never saw her again. And then, one day as the NYPD commissioner, he read with his own eyes how his mother had been murdered. The report was in police files. “When I first saw the report, it was stunning. I knew my mother had died when I was younger, I just didn’t anticipate that she was murdered. It was horrible.”
The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice became an instant best seller. The book helped Kerik investigate his own past, as he put it, looking inward and finding truth ... “There’s always been this thought in the back of my mind, ‘Where is my mother?’ and this anger as to why she never tried to find me.”
He said his parents divorced when he was two and his mother, an alcoholic and prostitute, was murdered when he was four. Today, he is a multimillionaire, the result of a lucrative partnership with former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and an even more profitable relationship with a stun-gun manufacturer.
“His relationship since 2002 with Taser International, manufacturer of stun guns, has by far been the biggest source of his newfound wealth, earning him more than $6.2 million in pre-tax profits through stock options he was granted and then sold, mostly in November 2004,” reveal newspaper stories.
And his extra-marital affairs? Well that’s another steamy story. Using the official police Battery Park City apartment as his secret love nest, Kerik was two-timing with Jeanette Pinero, his junior and mistress of 10 years and Judith Regan, the “stunningly attractive” head of her own book publishing company. Kerik is married with two little girls.
“Dramatically, each woman learned of the existence of the other after Pinero discovered a love note left by Regan in the (police) apartment.”
The British Home Secretary has a similar story. Blunkett entered into a passionate liaison with Kimberly Quinn, an American magazine publisher, while she was married to Stephen Quinn, managing editor of Vogue and GQ and earlier to the American investment banker Michael Fortier with whom she had a son. Now David Blunkett contends that he is the father of both the born and unborn boys and has moved the court for their custody.
The heavily pregnant Kimberly, meanwhile, has gone back to Stephen Quinn.
Many British newspapers allege that Mrs Quinn has passed on classified information to the press, which she got from her ex-lover “as part of her strategy in opposing Mr Blunkett’s legal petition” that claims he’s the father of her two boys.
Maybe there’s an irresistible link between sex and security. How else to explain Kerik and Blunkett’s sexual drive?
The White House seems to have too many things rattling in its closet, and it seems quite unfazed by it. 
