By Peter JacksonContributing Writer
First came Katie Couric. Then came the House ethics panel. Now, everybody’s just hoping subpoenas aren’t next.
For Northwestern students who served as congressional pages in the past, the weeks since news broke of Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-Fla.) inappropriate contact with former pages have seen a whirlwind of activity. Foley resigned from Congress Sept. 29 after sexually explicit messages he sent to a former Oklahoma page were unearthed.
Two weeks ago, CBS Evening News interviewed Weinberg sophomore Blake Yocom. Last Wednesday, Weinberg sophomore Will Hamlin popped out of class to check his voicemail and heard his congressman’s chief of staff asking if he’d ever had inappropriate contact with a House member. Demetrius Harrison, also a Weinberg sophomore, spurned several requests from media organizations in hopes it would lessen the chance he will be subpoenaed in the Ethics Committee’s ongoing investigation.
All three were congressional pages between the fall of 2003 and the fall of 2004, meaning they served right after several pages that have alleged Foley contacted them inappropriately. And while Harrison said the revelations surprised him, Yocom said he was less than stunned.
“I thought the instant-messaging was awkward at the time,” Yocom said. “It’s creepy. Only two or three members actually care about the pages. You question the genuineness of his motives.”
Yocom said he didn’t know anyone that had performed sexual acts with Foley but that he did know several pages who kept in contact with Foley after the program ended. It was widely believed among pages that Foley was gay, he said, but no one discussed the possibility he might be making sexual advances toward pages.
He said pages routinely exchanged e-mail addresses and instant-messenger screen names with Foley and traded addresses with Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.), an openly gay member of the chamber, to a lesser extent. Before graduating from Northwestern in 1965, Kolbe, too, had been a page.
Kolbe, whose camping trip with former pages in 1996 has come under scrutiny, usually takes the pages on a tour of the Capitol rotunda before snapping a photo with each of them on the building’s steps.
Yocom said that insofar as both lavished pages with attention, Foley and Kolbe’s actions were similar. Hamlin called Kolbe’s actions completely benign.
“He’s just a friendly, nice person,” Hamlin said. “There was nothing inappropriate.”
Yocom spent his entire junior year in page school, as it’s known, whereas Harrison was only there for the second semester. Both worked on the Democratic side of the aisle. Hamlin worked as a Republican page immediately thereafter, in the summer of 2004.
All three lamented the scandal because it portrayed the page program in a bad light.
“I felt completely safe while I was there,” Yocom said. “This is just an individual creep – I don’t know how you prevent something like that from happening.”
Though the scandal has brought media attention and unwelcome questions, the three former pages said they relished the opportunity to reconnect with old friends from the program.
Yocom said some of those conversations led to the inevitable subject of subpoenas, but he, unlike Harrison, hasn’t denied media inquiries.
“We sort of warned each other that (subpoenas) might happen,” Yocom said.
So far only Hamlin has been contacted by the ethics Committee, albeit through his congressman’s chief of staff.
The committee sent an e-mail to Hamlin and other former pages asking that they bring forward any communications they had with Foley. The current page class testified before the panel as recently as last Friday in a basement chamber. A House page locker room was just down the corridor.
Reach Peter Jackson at [email protected].
