Jenny Sanford, wife of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.
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BELINDA LUSCOMBE
South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was cheap, terrible at giving presents, attention-hungry, unsettled and ultimately not true to his ideals. Oh -- and he cheated on his wife. The last part we know from his overwrought confession on national TV. The rest we know because the wife he cheated on tells us about it in her new book, Staying True.
But Jenny Sanford is not one of those scorned wives spewing bile all over her former spouse. She strives to put the unflattering revelations in context. Her soon-to-be ex-husband was ambitious and also restless because his father's death at youngish age taught him that life was short. He was frugal because after his father died, Sanford went through a colossal struggle to save the family's land. He became an attention junkie after his come-from-nowhere-win made him a media darling and a party hero. And staying true to his ideals was almost impossible in Washington, where he spent three terms in Congress -- and where horsetrading is the only way to get things done.
If it's possible to dish with dignity, Mrs. Sanford does it. Early in their romance, he invited her to fly down and visit him in South Carolina. Instead of picking her up at the airport that evening, he left her a car (stick shift) and directions to his family's remote farm, 50 miles away. When she got there, he'd already left for a party. She rationalized that he wanted an independent, can-do woman, which as a vice president at investment bank Lazard, she was.
She recalls that Sanford more or less decided to run for office before she even knew which party he belonged to. But she knew his core belief: the government should be parsimonious with voters' money. His abhorrence of spending led to him sleeping in his D.C. office on a futon, buying her a used bike as a combined birthday-Christmas present, and returning a diamond necklace he'd purchased sight unseen -- through a friend -- because he ultimately decided it wasn't worth what he'd paid. Of course, none of this quite explains why he rarely remembered her birthday (Sept. 11) until after 2001.
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