The world doesn’t work, and Ethics is always struggling to avoid losing ground. I collect stories that show why this is. Here is one from the obituary page, the saga of the departed Annemarie Huste, who was Jacqueline Kennedy’s private chef.
In 1966, the former First Lady moved to New York from Washington, D.C., and in need of a private chef—rich person, you know— hired Huste, a young German immigrant whose previous employer, theater impresario Billy Rose (of “Jumbo” fame!), who had just died, rendering her skills superfluous. Huste did the job to Mrs. Kennedy’s satisfaction, feeding the occasional hoards of family members who came to visit, accompanying the Jackie, Caroline and John-John to the Kennedy compound Hyannis Port, in the summers and playing with the children of JFK.
Then, in 1968, Weight Watchers Magazine approached her about cooperating in a feature called “Jackie Kennedy’s Gourmet Chef Presents Her Weight Watchers Recipes.” Huste dished about Jackie’s diets and dress sizes in the article, never asking for her famous employer’s permission or consent. Jackie Kennedy was horrified, and even tried to stop publication, something the Kennedy family was and is very good at. This time, it didn’t work.
A few weeks later, Huste gave an interview to Maxine Cheshire, then the “beautiful people” gossip columnist for The Washington Post and syndicated nationally. In return for inside-the-Kennedy-home details, Cheshire made Huste sound like the coming star of gourmet cookery, hinting that a television show, a cookbook, wealth and fame were just around the corner. What was really around the corner was unemployment: Jackie fired Annemarie Huste, who deserved it.
In an ethical world, where betrayal is treated as the major ethics breach that it is, Huste would have ended up working as an anonymous restaurant employee, or in another field entirely. What she did was to betray the trust of Mrs. Kennedy, who had given her a wonderful opportunity and a comfortable life. Huste was dishonest and disloyal; her motives were ambition and greed. Her fall should have been a cautionary tale about the consequences of unethical conduct in the workplace.
Instead, it taught the opposite lesson. Capitalizing on the Cheshire puff piece, Huste wrote “Annemarie’s Personal Cookbook” which reached bookstores just as Jackie Kennedy returned to New York after becoming the queen of the celebrity columns by marrying Aristotle Onassis. Enhanced by the interest in all things Jackie, even turncoats like Annemarie, the cookbook became a best seller, and she was famous.
Huste wrote several more cookbooks, became the executive chef for The Saturday Evening Post and Gourmet magazine, and opened a cooking school. She started the Great Take-Out, a gourmet catering shop, while turning the dining room of her house into “Annemarie’s Dining Room,” a pricey and prestigious private-party space for wealthy Wall Street clients. Never once did she express any regret for how she treated Jackie Kennedy.
Her betrayal worked, you see. “All of this publicity may help me!” she told Newsweek when she was sacked, and she was right.
This is one of the reasons the world doesn’t work. Machiavellians like Annemarie Huste ought to be shunned; the fact that society allows them to turn infamy and misconduct into self-promotion and wealth grantees that more betrayal will follow. Too many cynical, greedy and ethics-free people are willing to employ those who have deliberately harmed others for their own advancement, sending the message that done properly and carefully by someone with something valuable to sell, betrayal pays, and handsomely.
Meanwhile, upon Huste’s death, the New York Times honored her today with a light-hearted, uncritical 900 word obituary, which would never be lavished on a loyal, ethical employee who cared about and respected her employer’s privacy.
Ethics are for chumps, I guess.
Ethics Alarms 
I’d still prefer to be a chump. I have to live with myself.
It’s the Gresham dynamic; Just like bad money drives out good money, unethical behavior drives out ethical behaviorl unless, of course, there are sanctions.
I thought this over and the Gresham dynamic does not apply. It applies in competitive and market situations. This is individual behavior and not a situation where you are going to lose something to someone else by behaving ethically. The Gresham dynamic id not an excuse, or justification for unethical behavior. It is an explanation of why it occurs and the necessity of enforceable rules of ethics in the Professions. It is the absence enforceable rules that many famous people require none-disclosure agreements of their employees.
“Ambition” was her undoing. I guess that’s one word for it – I would choose others (disloyal comes to mind).
I’m proud to be an ethical chump.
Well, this one life’s story certainly validates what Steve-O-in-NJ has been saying in summarizing people. (The chump part follows naturally.)
There are still a huge number of ethics chumps out there. They may not even see it as an ethical stance: just the ‘right thing to do.’
But you’re right about ol’ Annemarie and the fallout from her behavior: it just proves — confirmation bias? — to already unethical people that unethical behavior pays. And just one more black eye for the mainstream media.
“[T]he fact that society allows [people] to turn infamy and misconduct into self-promotion and wealth guarantees that more betrayal will follow.”
Yes it does. Or as our cynical campaigner in chief is fond of saying, “Yes we can.”
We don’t live in a Christian society, we live in a Classical Greek society. To the victor go the spoils. The meek don’t inherit the earth because the strong take it. Nice guys finish last. And since Time Magazine declared God is dead around 1969 or so, there is no reason to fear the wrath of the gods the way the Greeks did. The chorus has been turned into a cheering section, a demographic, the media. This is the world where the Clintons and Trumps flourish. This is not the world of Eisenhower or Lincoln.
OB, I am an old guy, and it may be that my memory is faulty, but it seems to me like it wasn’t always so. I remember a time when Donald Trump as a Presidential candidate would have been laughed off of the stage, and Hillary Clinton would, indeed, have been arrested. This was a time when neighbor HELPED neighbor instead of shooting him. And it wasn’t all that long ago. Apparently, we have taken a wrong turn somewhere, and somehow, I’m not sure we can find our way back.
dd, I think that world still exists. We just have to find it among our friends and relatives, if possible. There are still lots of decent people in the world. I think they comprise the majority. The jerks get all the attention these days. One of my mother’s favorite expressions was “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”
But I’m just not sure the Classical Greek thing is such a recent development. Think of the Robber Barons, the Vanderbilts and Carnegies and Rothschilds of the world. They were flourishing a long time ago.
Sometimes the unethical people get their just desserts. An unethical former backstabbing colleague ended up murdered by her own daughter. Revenge is the Lord’s.