Sen. Larry Craig's interview with Matt Lauer

Senator Larry Craig , long subject to rumors about his sexual proclivities, was arrested for disorderly conduct and interference with privacy and suspected of soliciting sex in a men's room at the Minneapolis Airport. He says he is innocent and yet for two months after his arrest, he didn't tell anyone about it. Not his staff, not his lawyer, not his wife of 24 years.

Matt Lauer: Why didn't you--
Suzanne Craig: --about--
Matt Lauer: --tell her?
Larry Craig: It was a tough call, Matt, a very tough call … I was very, very embarrassed about it. I wrestled with it. I didn't want to embarrass my wife, my kids, Idaho and my friends. And I wrestled with it a long while. I sought no counsel. I made a very big mistake.
Matt Lauer: How would you describe emotionally your state of mind
Larry Craig: I went through I'm sure several stages of emotions. But finally I began to focus on how do I tamp this down? What do I do so that this goes away?

Senator Craig spoke to the prosecutor in Minnesota, and the prosecutor offered a deal: plead guilty just to the lesser charge of disorderly conduct.

Larry Craig: And he said, "Well, if you just plead to a misdemeanor and pay a fine, it's just a filing in the court." And it sounded like an easy way out of this, Matt.
Matt Lauer: So you didn't call a lawyer. You didn't tell a friend. You didn't tell a minister or a priest. You told nobody.
Larry Craig: That is correct. And it was a very, very big mistake.
Matt Lauer: That guilty plea, you know? August 1 you sent it in.
Larry Craig: Yeah.
Matt Lauer: Was there any sense of relief? Or was there a sense of dread?
Larry Craig: There was a sense of relief. I hoped it would go away. I wanted to avoid a media storm. I didn't. A media storm came.

But it took a few weeks. Senator Craig mailed in his paperwork. No one knew of his arrest and guilty plea until they were uncovered by Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper. Senator Craig realized the story was about to go very public. Only then did he tell his wife Suzanne.

Suzanne Craig: When Larry told me that the story was going to break and he hadn't told me about it before that, I felt like the floor was falling out from under me. It happened right here in this room. And I felt like-- almost like I was going down a drain for a few moments. At that point--
Matt Lauer: Why? Why, because you thought maybe you had been lied to or you were about to be put in a very white-hot public spotlight? Why did you feel you were going down a drain at that moment?
Suzanne Craig: Because Larry hadn't told me and because he always has told me. We've shared a lot of things through the years. And I didn't-- this was such an unusual thing for him not to tell me.
Matt Lauer: Did the fact that he didn't tell you, Suzanne, make you less likely to believe the story? In other words, if he had nothing to hide, why wouldn't he tell you the day that it happened?
Suzanne Craig: When I watched him tell his mother, listened to his conversation on the phone with her and our children, and I saw his agony at having to tell them that he had been arrested, I realized why he didn't tell us. He was terribly embarrassed. He's kind of always been the hero of our family, you know? And the head of the family. And-- it was just so difficult for him.
Matt Lauer: I'm curious, the night of that conversation, when he broke the news to you, albeit six weeks too late, were you pretty angry? Did-- did he sleep on the couch that night?
Suzanne Craig: Well, you see the length of our couch? No.
Matt Lauer: Did he curl up on the couch?
Suzanne Craig: There's not a-- there's not an issue of forgiveness. And no, there wasn't anger. There was great disappointment that he hadn't felt comfortable that I would know something about him that was so embarrassing … and we worked through it. When we had a quiet moment together at the family meeting with the children, then we talk-- we talked very openly about it. Some people would probably be very embarrassed to listen in on that conversation.

Matt Lauer: Suzanne-- did you ask him the tough questions?
Suzanne Craig: Absolutely.
Matt Lauer: Well, let-- let me just come right out and say, did anybody sit you down, senator, Suzanne or your children, and say, "Dad, honey, are you gay?"
Suzanne Craig: Yes.
Larry Craig: My kids ask tough questions. We've always had family meetings when there was a family crisis. And we've had a few … and-- and yeah, we're pretty frank and honest with each other. The kids have known me an awfully long while. And they looked at-- they looked their dad in the eye and asked the tough question.
Matt Lauer: And you asked that specific question? And you're comfortable with the answer?
Suzanne Craig: I did a lot of soul-searching along that when I had this information and asked myself if I'd missed something somewhere. And I have to tell you that-- I mean, we all can be naïve … and we all can live in our own world. And I thought, am I just out there somewhere being naive? And I honestly believe my husband has always been faithful to me in every way.