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Former CIA director and tabloid star David Petraeus will be teaching at CUNY come August, according to an announcement by the school.

He will serve as a visiting professor of public policy at Macaulay Honors College, teaching young men and women about topics like civil rights, abortion, and crime.

The announcement comes only a few short months after Dr. Petraus resigned from the CIA following news of his extramarital affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell.

CUNY didn't seem to mind the scandal.

“We are delighted that Dr. Petraeus has chosen Macaulay Honors College as his first undergraduate institution,” said Dr. Ann Kirschner, University Dean of Macaulay Honors College, in a press release.

“His extensive knowledge and experience will be great resources for our remarkable group of academically gifted students who represent the sparkling diversity of New York.”

Although his real-world experience and top-notch Princeton education are undeniable, the responsibility of an educator is to be not only a resource, but also a role model for the students in his charge. According to his biography, he's quite the guy.

In beguiling Gen. David Petraeus, biographer Paula Broadwell joins a select group of ambitious female scribes who have run away—literally—with their subjects.

Ms. Broadwell seduced the exercise-mad general in Afghanistan when she proved she could match his six-minute miles. She sealed the deal with a finished piece of hagiography called—no snickering now—All In, which she then went on to flog in evening dresses that revealed biceps to rival Michelle Obama’s.
Ms. Broadwell is in hiding now, but she’s in good company.

Female scribes may be at a disadvantage when it comes to good assignments and pay, but they enjoy certain benefits vis-à-vis male egomaniacs.

Both male and female reporters carry basic tools in their bag of tricks, including the ability to flatter, cajole, wheedle and bully a subject into answering questions.

But the most effective tool of the female journalist is often her ability to disarm. There’s that delicate, shell-like ear, tuned to him alone. Women are used to kvetching about this and that to their girlfriends. But Great Men have no one to confide in besides their spouses, and when a female reporter turns up with a recorder, while he may have the self-control not to reveal company secrets, the novelty of being listened to by a new woman is often an intoxicant.

If power is an aphrodisiac, the power reflected back to the Great Man through the dictation-taking pen of the female journalist is de facto doubly arousing. A wise Lois Lane knows that with certain subjects, the well-turned stiletto can add a frisson that brings forth the most provocative quotes. The same cannot be said for male journalists covering women, because most American women leaders take an oath of asexuality in order to survive.

Most of the time, though, Great Men aren’t all that interested in actually bedding grubby ink-stained wretches. It takes a particularly bold, adventurous and hot Brenda Starr to throw the subject of an interview under the desk for a shag—an act the general alluded to in emails to Broadwell.

Overachieving soldier-scholar Broadwell isn’t even a career journalist. She doesn’t hail from the same mousy and supposedly objective ranks as the rest of us, but that’s only because she could actually do it all. She grew up in North Dakota, was high school valedictorian, student council president, homecoming queen and an all-state basketball player, graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point with multiple honors, and has held positions in the U.S. intelligence community, U.S. Special Operations Command and FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

A buxom G.I. Jane, done up for recent television appearances in ruffled and silky sleeveless dresses, Ms. Broadwell apparently went way off the rez with anonymous emails to a third woman, Jill Kelley of Florida, who has insisted she is merely a friend, and not another Petraeus paramour.
The general must have known he was dealing with a loose cannon when Ms. Broadwell posted pictures of him with Angelina Jolie in his office on her Facebook page—before the pictures had been made public, which they might never have been, since Ms. Jolie was clearly in a part of the Langley building off limits to civilians.

Initial reports claimed Ms. Broadwell broke up with Mr. Petraeus when he became CIA director a year ago, but others suggest that the two actually started their affair after he was sworn in. Whatever the details, a woman who could match him in pushups and chin-ups must have seemed like his athletic soulmate, even the love of his life.

Those in-depth interviews conducted on endurance runs in Afghanistan, were “the foundation of our relationship,” Ms. Broadwell told Jon Stewart in a publicity appearance on The Daily Show before the scandal broke. She had taken the lead in promoting the book she co-wrote with Washington Post editor Vernon Loeb (a real ink-stained wretch who has been, so far, conspicuously silent on the activities of his co-author.)

It can’t be easy to be a Great Man confronted with a sexy hagiographer with glowing penmanship and a dab of perfume.

There are many such tales and some of them end well. The happily-ever-after standard was set by Suzy Wetlaufer, who was editor of the Harvard Business Review when she profiled Jack Welch, then CEO of GE, whose business wisdom was doled out in a best-selling book lapped up by middle-manager wannabes in airport bookstores across the land.

At the time, Lisa DePaulo wrote in New York magazine that good things almost instantly came to life when these two overachievers crossed paths. Ms. Wetlaufer was then “a vivacious 42-year-old Harvard M.B.A., Baker Scholar, novelist, mother of four, and Sunday-school teacher—with a penchant for Prada and Chanel and fabulous shoes,” Ms. DePaulo wrote.

Ms. Wetlaufer had interviewed most of the nation’s top CEOs, and getting picked up in a corporate jet was all in a day’s work for her. But the 66-year-old Mr. Welch’s charms knocked her off her objective game.

Weeks after the fateful interview, Mr. Welch asked if he could spend the holidays with Ms. Wetlaufer and her four kids. She happily agreed to have the private jet deliver him to her Yuletide hearth.

Mr. Welch’s wife of 13 years, Jane, a lawyer who had ditched her career for the Great Man, angrily confronted Ms. Wetlaufer on the phone. The Harvard Business Review was soon without an editor, and Ms. Wetlaufer and Mr. Welch are, as far as is known, living in connubial bliss to this day.

The benchmark for disaster in the sexy Boswell game was set by videographer Rielle Hunter, who signed onto John Edwards’s campaign, allegedly to document the Great Man in action. The action, of course, continued after the director yelled cut. Ms. Rielle ended up not just sacking Mr. Edwards’s career, but getting him a federal indictment for illegal campaign contributions, conspiracy and making false statements in connection with a cover-up of his affair.

From the other side of the Atlantic, in lands un-encumbered with American Puritanism and J-school objectivity training, the seductive female scribe swaggers through public life, often trailing wrecked high-profile marriages.

Young Anna Wintour, in her salad days as a newspaper editor in swinging ’70s London, once disappeared with Bob Marley for a week, according to biographer Jerry Oppenheimer. Mr. Oppenheimer wrote that Island Records founder Chris Blackwell introduced the fashionista to Mr. Marley and got her a backstage pass to one of Mr. Marley’s shows in New York. She immediately “fell for” the sexy Rastamon. She was “riveted” and acted as if she’d “met God,” Mr. Oppenheimer quoted one friend as saying. While the story is impossible to confirm, Ms. Wintour has never explicitly denied that headboard notch.

The greatest female journalist-seducers prowl deeper in the euro zone, in, bien sûr, Paris, the setting for the romance of Anne Sinclair and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Ms. Sinclair was an accomplished and beautiful national television journalist when she met the dashing Socialist leader and twice-married (at the time, still-married) DSK in 1989. His advisers had sent him to meet with her not to be interviewed but so that he might pick up some media politesse. According to a report in Time, DSK “fell for her immediately, calling her several times a day.” They kept the affair secret for a while, but married in 1991.

France’s current first lady is former Paris Match journalist Valérie Trierweiler, a Brenda Starr lookalike down to the trench coat and cascading auburn cheveux, who first met socialist François Hollande when she was in her 20s and he was a leather-jacket-wearing, open-married lover of Ségolène Royal, the mother of his four children. By 2005, they were having a secret affair. She now sleeps in the Elysée Palace.

Along the way, her very French exploits have included reports that Mr. Hollande shared her with a Sarkozy government minister while all three were still in other relationships—in a fabulous ménage à six. This year, Ms. Trierweiler engaged in a notorious Twitter catfight with Ms. Royal during the French campaign season.

The French, of course, expect women to be catfighting over Great Men. But no self-respecting French woman over there would have sicced the authorities on an rival, as Ms. Kelley is said to have done after Ms. Broadwell’s threatening emails, kicking off the scandal that accomplished what neither Al Qaeda in Iraq nor the Taliban could engineer.

editorial@observer.com

Paula Broadwell and David Petraeus together on a plane. (Photo: PaulaBroadwell.com)

Slate's Fred Kaplan reports that David Petraeus resigned as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency after he had an affair with one of his biographers, author Paula Broadwell. Ms. Broadwell co-authored a glowing portrait of Mr. Petraeus titled, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.

According to the biography of Ms. Broadwell on the website of her book, she is a "a research associate at Harvard University's Center for Public Leadership and a PhD candidate in the Department of War Studies at King's College London" who spent most of a year in Afghanistan with Mr. Petraeus working on the book. Her site, which was deleted sometime this evening, described the book as having built on her two-year doctoral dissertation, which was "a study in transformational leadership and organizational innovation influenced by U.S. Army General David Petraeus."

In addition to her studies of Mr. Petraeus, the book site describes Ms. Broadwell as having "graduated with academic and leadership honors from the United States Military Academy at West Point." It also notes her devotion to physical fitness and outdoor activities saying she, "graduated at the top of her class in physical fitness" after running on the prestigious military academy's outdoor, indoor and cross country track teams.

Paula and Scott Broadwell in Paris. (Photo: Facebook)

Ms. Broadwell's book site also identifies her as being married to Scott Broadwell, an interventional radiologist with whom she has two children.

"They love to run, ski, and surf together," the site says of the couple.

In a reading at a Washington, D.C. bookstore in February, Ms. Broadwell described how she met Mr. Petraeus while a graduate student at Harvard:

"He came to Harvard University where I was a graduate student and wanted to speak with students about the merits of [the] counter-insurgency approach to fighting the Iraq War, which we were losing at the time....I went up to him and said I'm writing my thesis on negotiating with terrorists and I think it could help your team win and you should really read it and he was kind of enough to indulge me and take the paper and give me his business card. We kept in touch via email for a couple years, and I was still a graduate student. Two years later, I reached out to him if he would speak to students at Harvard...He agreed to do a video teleconference from Baghdad. I asked him if I could use him as a case study in my doctoral dissertation, and he agreed."

At that same interview, Ms. Broadwell said that, while writing her book, "I got to know his family." Mr. Petraeus' wife, Holly, became the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Office of Servicemember Affairs. In that capacity she works to protect members of the military and their families from predatory loans and financial scams. They have two children together, Stephen and Anne, who writes a food blog where she often discusses her family.

In a February, 2012 video interview with Arthur Kade [see below], Ms. Broadwell went into greater detail about her military background. She also described the process of writing her biography of Mr. Petraeus, which involved extensive interviews, phone conversations and emails.

"It's not a hagiography, I'm not in love with David Petraeus, but I think he does present a terrific role model for young people, for executives, for men and women. No matter what, there's a great role model there," Ms. Broadwell said in her interview with Mr. Kade.

Though Ms. Broadwell refuted the notion her book was overly flattering, it certainly presented a complimentary picture of Mr. Petraeus. Daily Show host Jon Stewart noted this fact when Ms. Broadwell appeared on his program in January.

"The most controversial thing is--I would say that the real controversy here is, is he awesome or incredibly awesome? It's very--it's a nice portrait," Mr. Stewart quipped.

"I have a detail I can share with you, he can turn water into bottled water," Ms. Broadwell responded.

In that same interview, the television host asked Ms. Broadwell if Mr. Petraeus, who had been rumors as a potential running mate for Mitt Romney, would ever consider running for president himself.

"My husband wants me to say he is, cause it will sell more books," Ms. Broadwell said. "I'm sorry honey, I couldn't do it."

The Associated Press reported Friday evening that the alleged affair between Ms. Broadwell and Mr. Petraeus came to light during an FBI investigation into her knowledge of the former general's email correspondence. The Observer has called phone numbers listed to the Broadwells and Ms. Broadwell's co-author Vernon Loeb, but, as of this writing, we have yet to receive a response.

Additional reporting by Colin Campbell 

 Updated with additional information 8:18 p.m.

David Petraeus (Central Intelligence Agency)

Former four-star general and current director of the CIA David Petraeus has tendered his resignation to the president. Wire services are still sorting out the details, however NBC is reporting that Mr. Petraeus resigned due to an extramarital affair.

Mr. Petraeus, once touted as a potential candidate for president, played a crucial role in the Iraq war prior to resigning his Army commission to head the Central Intelligence Agency. Republicans and Democrats alike were pleased with his appointment, unanimously approving the choice.

Only the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, which has been viewed by some as an intelligence failure, called his leadership into question.

From the White House, President Obama's statement on the resignation:

David Petraeus has provided extraordinary service to the United States for decades. By any measure, he was one of the outstanding General officers of his generation, helping our military adapt to new challenges, and leading our men and women in uniform through a remarkable period of service in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he helped our nation put those wars on a path to a responsible end. As Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he has continued to serve with characteristic intellectual rigor, dedication, and patriotism. By any measure, through his lifetime of service David Petraeus has made our country safer and stronger.

Today, I accepted his resignation as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. I am completely confident that the CIA will continue to thrive and carry out its essential mission, and I have the utmost confidence in Acting Director Michael Morell and the men and women of the CIA who work every day to keep our nation safe. Going forward, my thoughts and prayers are with Dave and Holly Petraeus, who has done so much to help military families through her own work. I
wish them the very best at this difficult time.

Rumors reported via social media that Mr. Petraeus had an affair with an aide to Massachusetts Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren were false.

Mr. Petraeus may have had no choice but to resign. New York Magazine noted a Reuters report regarding rules of conduct for CIA employees in which an agency spokeswoman said, "CIA employees must take - and pass - a polygraph test as part of the process to receive a security clearance, and must regularly undergo reinvestigations to maintain that clearance."

Earlier this month, Newsweek published "General David Petraeus’s Rules for Living." Rule number five: "We all will make mistakes. The key is to recognize them and admit them, to learn from them, and to take off the rear­ view mirrors—drive on and avoid making them again."

In a statement this morning, Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King--who has frequently criticized the administration--applauded the move:

"I strongly support the President's planned nominations. Director Panetta has done an outstanding job at the CIA, and General Petraeus has distinguished himself as one of the great American military leaders. Both men currently play integral roles in our Nation's war against al Qaeda and its affiliates and will be instrumental as we continue to combat the terrorist threat.

Director Panetta has had important success in stabilizing the CIA workforce and played a critical role in indentifying and disrupting terrorist plots against the United States.

General Petraeus is a patriot who has served honorably and admirably whenever and wherever the President has asked."

King, who also serves on the Intelligence Committee, is so fond of Petraeus that he once floated him for president.

A “straightforward reported piece,” Time’s spokesman protested after an Observer investigation explored whether the shocking cover story constituted a questionable strain of advocacy journalism, compromised by bureau chief Aryn Baker's likely profits from NATO-enabled war contracts and ties to an Afghan minister's $100 million investment project. Last week Time's defense of its work as cooly objective seemed at odds with editor Richard Stengel's concession, in an Aug. 2 interview with CBS's Katie Couric, that the no-nose piece carried a “strong point of view.”

One team whose point of view will remain unshaken by the Bibi Aisha report are analysts for the CIA’s “Red Cell," an office created after 9/11 by the Director of Intelligence and charged with finding "outside-the-box" solutions to problems. The group's brainstorming sessions to shore up war support were exposed in last month's dump of 76,000 files by WikiLeaks hacker Julian Assange.

Aryn Baker, like a number of others in the embedded press corps, shrugged off the material in the leak. Writing in Time, she contrasted the WikiLeaks files with real war reporting, calling the secret memos unreliable. “The data are raw, unfiltered and unqualified,” she wrote in a Time piece exploring reports that the Pakistan intelligence service is working against NATO, and said that on this issue, “[t]aken as a whole, they are about as useful as Googling...”

Okay. But one item that Time has left you to Google for yourself — perhaps owing to its rawness — is the March 11, 2010 memorandum from the Red Cell problem-solving group. This time the issue at hand was faltering public support of the war and the solution was promoting women's horror stories. Subtitling their memo "Why Counting On Apathy Might Not Be Enough," the agents warned that sending more soldiers to Afghanistan threatened to outrage the French and German publics. “Indifference might turn into active hostility,” they wrote, especially if soldiers and civilians die. The fix? Instead of using generals in desert camo as the face of the NATO mission, use oppressed Afghan women. These victims could make “ideal messengers,” the analysts wrote, “in humanizing the ISAF [NATO International Security Assistance Force] role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory.” The report also urged that these stories be pitched to TV shows with large female audiences.

After the WikiLeaks dump, the Red Cell’s phone numbers given in the memo no longer worked and the Red Cell could not be reached for comment.

The CIA's past work with Time and other periodicals figured heavily in a 1977 Rolling Stone cover story by Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. During the Cold War, he reported, more than 400 journalists, including Time founder Henry Luce, had worked with the CIA. One senior CIA official, William B. Bader, had told senators visiting Langley in March 1976 that “there is quite an incredible spread of relationships...You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are Agency people at the management level.”

“From the Agency’s perspective,” Bernstein noted, “there is nothing untoward in such relationships, and any ethical questions are a matter for the journalistic profession to resolve, not the intelligence community.” Times have changed, of course (as has Time). But as Bernstein pointed out, when incoming CIA director George H.W. Bush pulled the plug on paid relationships with journalists, Bush noted that nothing was stopping reporters from volunteering free favors to the government — and that such aid would even be “welcome.”

Attention from Time helped Aisha win a trip from a Kabul women’s shelter last Thursday to Los Angeles, where she will undergo reconstructive surgery with help from the Grossman Burn Foundation. But Time’s “point of view” story, while perhaps the most strident in connecting her mutilation to NATO’s military enemies, was no scoop. Months earlier, Aisha had told her appalling story to The Daily Beast and ABC’s Diane Sawyer. While Taliban have refused credit for the young woman’s mutilation, it turns out the group’s spokesmen freely admit that their justice system includes other human rights abuses. Mullah Dahoud, a commander, made himself available to the U.K. Times to say of one woman, convicted of adultery, that the Taliban “whipped her in front of all the local people to show them an example. Then we shot her.”

In the weeks and months to come, like many of her professional colleagues in the war zone, she eventually accompanied Mr. Petraeus on a number of walk-along interviews as he strolled through the streets of the occupied city.

"He does the same thing every time," Ms. Tarabay recently told the Observer. "When he goes to a market area, the first thing he does is that he takes off his helmet and puts his soft cap on. There are a set number of things he does. He buys bananas, and he buys tea. If his aide has a soccer ball, he'll give the kids the soccer ball. He likes to talk to reporters as he's walking through the street. He doesn't like being filmed in front of blown-up buildings."

"He's very aware," she added. "He knows how to play the media."

In his new book, War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, (which the Observer reviewed this week), Richard Engel of NBC News puts it a slightly different way.

"Petraeus understood how to use the media," writes Mr. Engel. "He could boil down his thoughts to fifteen-second sound bytes, and always tracked the camera during interviews … He had what actors call 'camera awareness.'"

According to Mr. Engel, it was a drastic change from Mr. Petraeus' predecessor, General George Casey, who led the U.S. forces in Iraq from June 2004 to February 2007.

"Casey had no camera or media awareness at all," writes Mr. Engel. "Most reporters were completely shut out…When General Petraeus took command in February 2007, nearly every reporter, including journalists from tiny foreign television stations and even American college newspapers, could be guaranteed an on-the-record interview within a few days."

Some sixteen months later, a number of the seasoned TV reporters in Baghdad told the Observer that they continue to appreciate Mr. Petraeus' style of media engagement—i.e. less press conferences, more personal access, increased transparency, and the occasional banana in the market place.

"I'd say it's night and day compared to under Casey," said Terry McCarthy of ABC News. "Petraeus came in and he made it very clear that he wanted the media to see what was going on in Iraq."

"Not only is Petraeus quite accessible to the media, but he's managed to convey down the line to his colonels and captains that it's okay to talk to the media," added Mr. McCarthy. "Under Casey, they were really trying to spin us. In Petraeus' case, if it's a bad day, he'll say 'it's been a bad day.'"

"Petraeus is really well organized," said Courtney Kealy, a correspondent for Fox News in Baghdad. "He really wanted to engage the press with the surge. They made sure we were able to move around with them and get on embeds and see how it was working with our own eyes--which is the most important thing, rather than just give us press conferences."

"His administration is very pro-engagement," NBC's Mr. Engel told the Observer. "Part of it is that they have a good story to tell."

"I find the command of General Petraeus to be much more media savvy than his predecessors," said Michael Ware of CNN. "That could be said of their approach to the conflict in general. Their awareness of and inherent understanding of the requirements of counter insurgency lends itself by its very definition to a much more accessible approach to the media. That's not to say that the military does not continue to obfuscate, blur the lines, and to ignore certain realities."

"General Petraeus has a relatively refreshing approach towards the media," added Mr. Ware. "But by no stretch of imagination is it accommodating, nor simple. There is still somewhat of an adversarial nature by definition, because you're dealing with the military. It's almost ingrained to have distaste for the media. There has been an abject failure by the U.S. mission from the beginning of this war to fight a real information war. In many ways, in insurgencies, that's where the wars are won or lost--both here in the conflict and back home."

“I would not, no sir,” said Petraeus. When pressed, the general added, “It was not adequately planned or prepared.”

Hillary Clinton, seated to the left of Petraeus and Crocker, has her black-rimmed 3 a.m. phone call glasses on and a hand pressed against her forehead. John McCain, seated in the middle of the crescent of seated senators, is turning pages and leaning back in his chair.

Behind Petraeus, there are eight long tables, around which the members of the media, a dozen to a table, are crowded. Behind the press, is a gallery about ten rows deep, populated with stray press and war protestors. One young girl is holding pictures of a soldier. Several women are dressed as dead Iraqis with black headdress, blood on their palms and the names of killed Iraqis hanging from signs around their neck. The Senate police are watching them closely. As the press reads and the public watches and the senators listen and pose, Crocker says “Iran continues to undermine the efforts of the Iraqi government” and concludes by calling for more commitment from the American government.

“Looking ahead Mr. Chairman, almost everything about Iraq is hard,” he said, adding. “But hard does not mean hopeless.”

Here's the script for "She Changed."