SOME MEN are perfect jailers of
Only the meanest in this community feel no sympathy for Mr. Frawley, who recently pleaded guilty to two drunken-driving offenses committed within 36 hours last April in Fairfax County and Fredericksburg. Yet in a Sunday commentary in The Washington Post, Mr. Frawley painted Fredericksburg, which two falls ago fêted him at his inaugural like an ascendant prince, as the Town Without Pity--or at least UMW as the College Without Pity.
Mr. Frawley laments that Mary Washington's governors fired him "with no salary or benefits, no severance, no tenure." Admittedly, this is
After his local arrest, Mr. Frawley spent fully six days in the hospital in what seemed, at least in part, an attempt to pull the covers over his head. During this period the board, like the public at large, was a baffled Mystery Theater audience regarding their president's bizarre conduct. Two days after his discharge, as he writes, Mr. Frawley addressed the visitors, but evidently the lawyers on both sides had counseled against a fully candid conversation--criminal charges loomed--and Mr. Frawley made no satisfactory mea culpa. One of those--which would have served the public interest--rather than the circumlocution urged by attorneys--which aimed to serve only Mr. Frawley's--might have salvaged some of the amenities the president sought.
"My April meltdown," writes Mr. Frawley, "was of my own making, as I've repeatedly acknowledged and publicly regretted." But the dominant tone of his comments, from his first public peep after discharge to his Post commentary, has hardly been one of humble repentance. On the contrary, Mr. Frawley has worked assiduously to medicalize what in great part was a volitional failure of self-control.
Originally, Mr. Frawley blamed his ills on an overdose of cough medicine. In the Post piece, he transformed that substance, Messiah-like, to wine--which, he suggests, mixed disastrously with his allergy prescription. Mr. Frawley, a linguist, in the Post uses the vocabulary of the health profession--"no apparent consideration for my illness," "undiagnosed depression," "[n]ew heart problems and allergies," "stress," "my history of Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, an electrical problem of the heart," "[my] still-sedated state," "the feeling that I was about to have a breakdown or a heart attack," etc.--to evade personal responsibility for his reckless actions.
Even his two dramatic car accidents he half writes off to mere misfortune: (1) In Fairfax, on a strange, winding road, "I went off a curve and flipped the car," while (2) approaching Fredericksburg, "I hit a pothole and blew a tire but continued on, sleepless and disoriented." No mention that being high as a kite on vino--he registered a BAC more than 21/2 times the legal limit in Fairfax--might have precipitated the mishaps.
In his essay, what's more, Mr. Frawley says hardly a word about the harm his "meltdown" did to UMW, which holds dear a reputation forged by devoted leaders over decades, and which now, amid a search for a new president, is described by a past one in a leading American newspaper as an institution governed by Captain Blighs. What's more, it was the people of Greater Fredericksburg that Mr. Frawley both served and ill served, not those of Dulles and Cabin John. Why did he not make his case in these pages?
Mr. Frawley holds an English degree and was an arts-and-sciences dean at George Washington University. He must know the Greek tragedies, all of which boil down to a single moral, an ineluctable lesson from which none among our all-fallen race is exempt: Character is destiny.
Let us earnestly hope that Bill Frawley, a brilliant man who has suffered hellfire, is destined for higher things than the blamesmanship of a lesson unlearned.