THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 17, 1995 TAG: 9512160053
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
ONCE AGAIN we have a political scandal involving a woman wronged, but this time the woman is not the long-suffering, silent wife of a philandering governor, senator or president. This time, the woman herself is the tainted politico: the apparently blinded-by-love, but otherwise-tough-as-nails Enid Greene Waldholtz, first-term Republican congresswoman from Utah.
From what I read about Waldholtz, with whose politics I generally disagree, I feel that I know and understand her. I've met her many times. Intelligence, education, money and power notwithstanding, a woman can be undone by her false hopes for what Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown once touted as ``having it all.'' And love and marriage figure prominently into the ``all.''
Unfortunately, the woman who ``has it all'' does not exist. Those who appear to are often steeped in emotional contradictions that women such as Waldholtz know - or should know - only too well.
Last Monday in a 4 1/2-hour news conference from Salt Lake City, the 37-year-old congresswoman, with her accountant and lawyer close by, tearfully implicated her high-rolling husband of three years, Joseph, 32, as a con artist who had not only defrauded banks, embezzled money and violated federal election laws, but had stolen from his ``mother . . . his grandmother . . . from everyone who loved him.''
``I don't know what goes so wrong in a person,'' she cried of her estranged ``teddy bear'' husband, now in seclusion in Pennsylvania, reportedly trying to work a deal with the feds.
Among his many misdeeds, Joseph Waldholtz allegedly kited $1.5 million in checks and left a two-year trail of unpaid bills and false campaign finance reports while his smart lawyer wife claims she innocently stood by. His family says he even bilked his Alzheimer's-stricken grandmother out of $600,000.
After months of evasion, Enid Waldholtz now acknowledges that a crucial influx of $1.8 million into her come-from-behind 1994 campaign came illegally from her father, who allegedly was defrauded by her husband. (Federal law limits campaign contributions to $2,000 per person.) She testified Friday before a grand jury.
How does a ``superwoman'' like Waldholtz, a woman who took her 13-day-old baby to work, suddenly become so neglectful of her personal and campaign finances? How does she not notice that the $5 million gift from her bridegroom never materialized? That he is not the man he pretended to be?
Well, there's romantic love, and then there's plain exhaustion.
One thing that Enid Waldholtz said at the press conference rings loud and true for me. She entrusted her finances to Joe, Waldholtz explained, ``because I was weary of always being the strong one. . . . This is the one area of my life where I completely let down my guard.''
Many strong, bright, successful career women, attentive to both the needs of the workplace and the home, will recognize this lament. Love and marriage would seem to lighten the load, or so many of us would like to believe. Sometimes, though, they just aggravate our contradictions. And, frankly, Superwoman doesn't have it that good.
Ordinarily, I would chastise a woman of Waldholtz's wealth and position for being so gullible, at the least, or for being negligent, at the worst. Ordinarily, I would demand strict accountability. But for now, I'm standing by the contradictory Enid.
Why? Because I'll stand by any blinded-by-love woman - even one desperately trying to save her political skin - who doesn't stand by her man after she knows he's a cad. I've seen too many smart, accomplished women make excuses for caddish behavior and somehow blame themselves. Failed romance can make an otherwise confident, in-control woman more than slightly irrational.
It's that curse of perfectionism, which we, in part, bring on ourselves by not only allowing ``society'' to demand perfection of us, but by delivering it.
Shortly after Joe Waldholtz went on the lam Nov. 11, Enid toughly pronounced his desertion ``unacceptable'' and filed for divorce. Not only did Joe leave his wife with a mess of debts and tricky campaign finance questions to answer, but he abandoned the couple's 3-month-old daughter, for whom Enid now seeks sole custody.
A no-nonsense corporate litigator, she took what seems like no-nonsense action to me.
It is possible, of course, that Waldholtz has me deceived. After all, she is no babe in the political woods. Knowingly or not, she signed false financial disclosure statements and repeatedly ignored warnings from campaign officials.
And it would not surprise me to learn that the congresswoman is actually stinging from other ``unacceptable'' behavior by Joe, say of a sexual, rather than a financial, nature. For a woman supposedly head over heels in love, she acted quite decisively and swiftly in purging her husband. Still, I'd like to believe she has such resolve. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is an attorney and book editor for The
Virginian-Pilot.
by CNB