NOTORIOUS NEW YORKERS
Dominique Strauss-Kahn had been all but anointed as the successor of French president Nicolas Sarkozy. But all that changed, writes Ambrose McGaffney, after an encounter in a Manhattan hotel room
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leafy neighborhood of old money and the kind of place where cartoonists might depict snooty poodles turning up their noses at lesser canines. Despite an upholstered upbringing as the son of a lawyer, whose practice took the family to Morocco and Monaco, DSK (as he became universally known) was a student communist, setting him on course for a successful career in the Socialist Party. Pictures of a young DSK show a thickly built man with a fashion sense that could only be described as bureaucratic. Yet he was blessed with a smile that could make an otherwise ordinary face handsome, his charisma was legendary, and he absolutely killed it with the ladies. Starting with a first marriage at the age of 18, he had four wives, countless affairs, and children on both sides of the blanket. Along the way, one French newspaper would forgivingly dub him “le grand séducteur”— the Great Seducer. The women who alleged he abused them, however, would probably phrase it differently. DSK’s political rise in the 1980s and ’90s included stints as a mayor and a member of parliament, as well as senior positions in the French
DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN: MICHEL CLEMENT/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Half the Way with DSK
T
he “great man theory,” as college undergraduates of a bygone era used to be taught, holds that history’s most important moments and institutions are shaped by heroic figures who show up at exactly the right time, and impose their will indelibly upon events. In this view, Western civilization is a relay race run by white men, with the baton being passed from Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar, and so on down the line to George Washington, Winston Churchill, and et cetera. Long discredited, the theory is at least interesting in that it suggests the racetrack of glory also has a gutter alongside, ready to collect those who stumble. One man’s seemingly assured road to the White House takes a wrong turn on a Chappaquiddick bridge, for example, or a king falls in love infelicitously and is forced into exile. For another striver, once seen as an all but inevitable president of the French Republic, his path to the Élysée Palace ended in a New York hotel room. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was born in 1949 in the affluent Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, a
OUI, MINISTER On the way up as France’s junior minister in charge of economics, finances, and industry in 1992.
AVENUE MAGAZINE | JULY—AUGUST 2021
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