The nail in the coffin was the deposition process: Wolfowitz and Riza's last chance to curry favor with the men and women on the ad hoc committee who would, with their final report, decide Wolfowitz's fate. Chairman Herman Wijffels, like Melkert a balding Dutch politician, emphasized that he was presiding over a fact-finding, not an adversarial, proceeding, but the presence of stenographers and defense counsel (permitted to attend but not to speak) and the relentlessly negative thrust of the interrogation left little doubt about the nature of the inquest. Common sense dictated that the vilified lovers not antagonize their jurors, but Wolfowitz and Riza had other ideas -- or maybe they just couldn't help themselves.
Thus when Wijffels commenced Riza's deposition by saying sympathetically, "We understand how painful this whole episode must be for you," the witness interrupted, "Do you?" When Wijffels asked if she was ready to answer questions, Riza sniffed, "If I don't have the answers, there's not much I can do about it." She complained about the steady stream of leaks -- violations, all, of the bank's fabled rules and codes -- and snapped, "I hope to God you will be dealing with this issue as well." And she challenged the panel members to "have the courage to admit" they had handled the various cases of lovers and spouses "arbitrarily and without clear guidance." Exhausted by the end, Wijffels thanked the witness and deadpanned, "Your position is fairly clear."
A more experienced witness, Wolfowitz started out dry, factual and nonconfrontational, but this facade of equanimity cracked almost immediately after he concluded his lengthy opening statement. He lapsed into expressions of impatience -- "I'd just say it a dozen times," "I will say it 100 times" and "Look, I repeat" -- then made the short leap into open quarreling. "Stop looking for some rule that was violated," he commanded the panel. "If people keep trying to pin blame on me, it's going to damage the institution, and it's going to damage the institution much more than it will damage me." There were also bursts of self-righteousness and bitterness: "I really resent deeply all the smears about this [having been] a corrupt transaction designed to pay off my girlfriend.... I didn't take this job for money."
Small wonder the ad hoc committee concluded Wolfowitz had violated bank rules and reserved the question of punishment for the full board -- a move designed to give the president time to realize he must resign. This would be his final act of public service at the bank, the means by which he could stanch the deluge of reputational risk drowning them all. Bennett negotiated the final deal. Wolfowitz agreed to resign effective June 30, following an exchange of public statements in which he, across five pages, claimed credit for a string of policy successes, and the board, in a single page, said it "accepted" Wolfowitz's assurances he "acted ethically and in good faith." The combatants initially refrained from public appearances, as though all were relieved to see the thing simply die.
On May 21, however, Wijffels suffered a seizure of candor and told a Dutch newspaper that Wolfowitz was hounded out of the bank not for the Riza transfer but because of his "disastrous manner of leadership." "If he had otherwise been a good leader," Wijffels conceded, "this may not have come so far." Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show nine days later, Wolfowitz acknowledged that "we had gotten to the point where it was really not possible to be effective." When Rose sought some explanation of the scandal, "so we can understand it from you," Wolfowitz demurred. "I don't want to go into every gory detail," he said. Undaunted, the host probed for some sign of whether Wolfowitz and Riza were still together, and Wolfowitz suggested they were:
ROSE: Must be tough for a relationship to do this kind of -- go through this.
WOLFOWITZ: It's not been easy. But she's quite a remarkable, wonderful person.
"Someday I'll write a book," Wolfowitz promised, presumably to include a chapter or two on what he termed "the so-called ethics issue." Rose wondered if the whole thing weren't, as Bennett privately believed, a European backlash to the Iraq war. "Maybe if it weren't me and somebody else doing it," Wolfowitz started to say, referring to his efforts to reform the bank's bureaucracy and promote stringent anticorruption criteria for its lending decisions. "Somebody who's not an architect of the war and all that," Rose interjected. "I'm not an architect of anything," Wolfowitz snapped, "but somebody who is not so closely associated with a controversial Iraq policy, yes."
