Petraeus Affair

[PassedOut]

I graduated with my math degree in 1969 and immediately started in the corporate world as a computer programmer. After five years I moved into management. In my experience, evaluations and promotions were based on job performance, not on a person's private life. In the 1970s (before the AIDS epidemic) lots of folks "committed adultery," and even though things calmed down a bit later, I'm sure it's never been uncommon. Work is where you spend lots of time with people, and some relationships are bound to arise from that. I don't remember any adulterer being held back on that account.

 

My recollection is, rather, that some things that should have been taken into account as part of job performance tended to be swept under the rug back then, particularly things such as repeated unwelcome sexual advances. I've been free of the corporate world for decades now, but I gather that such matters are dealt with more effectively these days.

[mike777]

Perhaps the notion of having a "private life" is also becoming outdated.

 

 

I hear that employers are looking at internet stuff in hiring...and promoting

 

 

Young will have to change names to escape 'cyber past' warns Google's Eric Schmidt

The private lives of young people are now so well documented on the internet that many will have to change their names on reaching adulthood, Google’s CEO has

 

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7951269/Young-will-have-to-change-names-to-escape-cyber-past-warns-Googles-Eric-Schmidt.html

[kenberg]

I'm not sure how much attitudes have changed toward adultery. Perhaps there has been some commonsense understanding that whatever the men were doing, it required women to do it with. And not just one or two very busy women. In the 1940s Kitty Wells sang "It's a shame that all the blame is on us women. It isn't true that only you men feel the same.". There has always been a battle between the ideal and the actual. I don't imagine it will ever be different.

[kenberg]

Speaking of plus ca change, which actually no one was, I learned from reading Ken Follett's Winter of the World that Sumner Welles, Undersecretary to Cordon Hull and a major foreign policy adviser to FDR, eventually (and it was pretty eventual) resigned over charges that he solicited sex from two porters on Roosevelt's train. Of course Senator Joe later explained this, the man was a Communist.

[blackshoe]

From wikipedia: In September 1940, Welles accompanied Roosevelt to the funeral of former Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead in Huntsville, Alabama. While returning to Washington by train, Welles solicited homosexual sex from two African-American Pullman car porters.[36] Cordell Hull dispatched his confidant, former ambassador William Bullitt, to provide details of the incident to Republican Senator Owen Brewster of Maine. Brewster in turn gave the information to journalist Arthur Krock, a Roosevelt critic, and to Senators Styles Bridges and Burton K. Wheeler. When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would not release the file on Welles, Brewster threatened to initiate a Senatorial investigation into the incident. Roosevelt was embittered by the attack on his friend, believing they were ruining a good man, but he was obliged to accept Welles' resignation in 1943. FDR particularly blamed Bullitt.

 

In 1956, Confidential, a scandal magazine, published a report of the 1940 Pullman incident and linked it to his resignation from the State Department, along with additional instances of inappropriate sexual behavior or drunkenness. Welles' explained the 1940 incident to his family as nothing more than drunken conversation with the train staff.