The Gentleman from Maryland

...His attempted comeback in 1982, now estranged from his wife and somewhatdisingenuous about his current lifestyle, was a predictable fiasco...

...Most conservative reviewers of ex-Representative Bob Bauman's The Gentleman from Maryland have felt constrained by the fact that the author is a fallen friend...

...Perhaps this is inevitable...

...I hope what I now write about him is fair...

...All this is very sad and deserves sympathy...

...at the very least, I mistook symptoms for causes in my snap judgment of the man before his fall...

...But the compulsive quest for outer trappings was symptomatic of something I had missed—Bob Bauman's self-loathing based, from what he now tells us, on a wretched childhood and a sense of alienation rooted in a homosexuality that drove him long before he knew its name...

...He did this, again and again, while still posing as a loyal husband and father, occupying an office of public trust, and claiming to be devoted to a religion, Roman Catholicism, that flatly condemns the practice of his particular indulgence as a major sin rather than a peccadillo...

...They stem, instead, from a reluctance even to appear to deride a person I never liked THE GENTLEMAN FROM MARYLAND Robert Bauman/Arbor House/$17.95 Aram Bakshian, Jr...

...He bemoans his loss of wife, wounding of family, and fall from public grace...

...What I had seen had been there—the movement zealotry, the zest for puerile political game-playing, the incomplete or damaged man driven to achieve not only acceptance, but authority in the outer, political world to fill a yawning internal void...

...Although undeniably bright, ambitious, and, at that time, one of the most promising members of the House of Representatives, he struck me as a rather crass, one-dimensional man-onthe-make, someone who happened to be on my side of the political fence but was an otherwise uninteresting character...

...But, while one senses that he would like to be a good husband, a good father, and a political leader again, he also wants us to take him as he is, sexually, in a way that cannot be reconciled with the religion, ethics, and morality of the things—personal, social, and political—he would reclaim...

...One hopes he can build a new life for himself and find some measure of internal peace after all the years of self-loathing that led up to his humiliating political self-immolation...

...Without making a personal judgment on the man, I think these opposite reactions to the twin sources of his tragedy tell us something about what, in the last analysis, is really most important to him...

...He spares himself nothing, he asks for no pity, and most readers should come away from his book with a measure of respect for what he has tried to say and do in the aftermath of an undeniable tragedy...

...it is a tribute to his book that, fair or not, having read The Gentleman from Maryland, I can write about him with a deeper degree of understanding and compassion than would have been the case befom irst, a few positives...

...Bauman is altogether different, a serious man who has lost, through a flaw—or fluke—in his character, most of what he once thought dearest to him...

...especially someone like Bauman who, if still wrongheaded on certain points, has shown courage and, latterly, more candor than one might expect, in the course of a sordid ordeal...

...While this is quite true, it is a little too much like the common complaint of all apprehended culprits that they were only doing what other people get away with every day—be they Peeping Toms or axe murderers...

...early 1980—Bob had always struck me as one of those all-too-typically zealous workaholics one comes across in every "movement," not least the conservative...

...But, much as he loved the things he destroyed or wounded, they seem to have meant less to him, to have been less a part of him, than something else...

...B ut it is still not clear what Bob Bauman is and what he is capable of becoming...

...my own problem is that I felt a vague distaste for the fellow in his salad days, on grounds having nothing to do with his subsequent public disgrace...

...He recognizes the fact that his homosexual behavior and alcoholism were the cause of his degradation, the former as underlying force, the latter as symptom and catalyst...

...More of a cold fish than a noble—or tormented—soul...

...For years, if not forever, his political ambitions have been dashed and, as he acknowledges, he has left deep scars on a family he loved...

...but not an abstainer...

...If Bob Bauman had taken the same attitude toward his alcoholism that he takes toward his homosexuality, he would still be a drunk...

...perhaps not...

...This being the case, until either he or society change their values, Bob Bauman will remain a brave but misguided outcast from the milieu he aspired to—a worthy man in many ways, but a flawed exile, whether of his own making, society's, or, what is more likely, both...

...it no longer drives him...

...Instead, after a struggle, he gave up alcohol...

...the outsider compelled to become someone in the eyes of the crowd because he is nothing in his own...

...Politically, he represented a constituency whose moral and ethical values, in principle if not in application, were also at odds with his sexual practices...

...He remains an alcoholic, but his alcoholism has been mastered, or at least contained...

...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 after that person has fallen on hard, not to say evil, times...

...By his own lights, Bob Bauman has written a brave and painfully honest account of his life...

...As a conservative active in Republican politics, I met Bob Bauman on numerous occasions over the years, beginning in the 1960s...

...At the height of his public career, Bob Bauman, who now says he was always a latent homosexual, became what in heterosexual terms might be called a drunken philanderer, buying sex from male prostitutes, sometimes minors, in the course of alcoholic binges...

...He is neither a villain nor a campy figure of fun like the late Tom Driberg, a flagrantly faggoty member of Parliament—and a Marxist to boot—of whom Winston Churchill remarked he was the sort of fellow who brought buggery into disrepute...

...He has mine...

...While I had no inkling of the personal problems that would come to light not long after our last meeting—as members of a discussion panel on the GOP vice presidential nomination held on Capitol Hill in Aram Bakshian, Jr., a former aide to three Presidents, writes frequently on politics, history, and the arts...

...To judge from his book, Bob Bauman also remains a homosexual...

...As it turns out, I was quite wrong...

...In 1980, after his exposure, but pleading that he was undergoing rehabilitation, Bauman was only narrowly defeated for re-election in his conservative Maryland congressional district...

...He also resents the fact that a number of practicing homosexuals in high elective and appointive office continue to enjoy a protective blackout from the liberal media that was denied him...

...Hence my qualms in commenting on his memoir—in a review I was asked to write, rather than one I sought out—are not due to any lingering affection for an old comrade in arms...

...That the wounds were the result of his own actions makes the case all the more poignant...

...Today, Bob Bauman has paid a high price for his transgression, whether one considers it a violation of the law, a betrayal of trust, a mortal sin, or merely a breach of good taste...

...Quite rightly, Bauman doesn't complain about the outcome so much as the cruel—and sometimes hypocritical —treatment he received at the hands of some reporters and politicians along the way...