The New York Times 3/24/2002 By Frank Bruni
BLINDED BY THE RIGHT
The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.
Few journalists, if that is the right word for him, brimmed with the kind of bile that David Brock did. He was a serial assassin of character, an unhappy man on a cruel mission: to tar the identified enemies of conservatives by whatever half-truths or hyperbolic accusations might be necessary. He was ruthlessly good at it, even poetic in a perverse fashion. It is to Brock that we owe the printed assertion that Anita Hill returned students’ exams with pubic hair on the pages, and it is to Brock that we owe the infamous line that Hill was ”a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”
Now he is taking all of it — or at least most of it — back. ”Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative” is less a memoir than a supposedly anguished mea culpa, a public act of political atonement. Brock wants us to know that he did people wrong, and that he recognizes it. He wants us to understand that he was chasing fame and fleeing personal demons, and that the velocity of those efforts distracted him from the unwarranted damage he caused. And he wants us to believe him.
But can we? That is the abiding frustration and ultimate limitation of ”Blinded by the Right,” which encompasses the ugly political warfare of the 1990’s, from the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas through the impeachment of President Clinton. Brock unavoidably taints his testimonial with his admission of a past willingness to twist facts and a habitual tendency to see the world in black and white. So while he has switched tribes, decamping from the right to find a new appreciation for the left, it is impossible to know whether he has switched tactics. Brock seems as exercised by the mendacity of conservatives as he once was by the machinations of liberals, and as eager to settle scores. His critique of his former allies is withering. The credibility of that critique is anyone’s guess.
Certainly, some of Brock’s book is trustworthy, because he simply adds abundant detail to what other, less suspect journalists have also chronicled: the millions of dollars that Richard Mellon Scaife poured into indiscriminate efforts to bring down Bill and Hillary Clinton; the hypocrisy of conservatives who espouse traditional moral values despite personal histories including abortions and extramarital affairs; the smear campaigns that were driven as much by a lust for power as by principle. Brock, who was once deep inside the conservative movement, is in a position to convey all of this, even if he is not the most reliable messenger.
As he tells it, he lurched to the right during his student days at the University of California, Berkeley, where he encountered the left’s sometimes oppressive political correctness. His new political affiliation was cemented by his desire to be accepted by a tightly bound circle, which was what he found when he went to Washington and began to mingle with conservatives there. Failing to grasp that their bellicose certainty was simply a mirror image of what he despised among liberals, Brock relished and embraced it, a decision he attributes partly — and in a manner that is perhaps too pat — to his homosexuality.
”After all, I was in the closet, alienated from myself, and I was also a social misfit,” Brock writes, adding, ”The apocalyptic ‘us versus them’ paradigm was gratifying, for it held out the promise of assuaging my insecurities and giving me a sense of finally belonging.”
His first big show of fidelity came with his decision to savage Anita Hill in the pages of The American Spectator, the magazine for which he wrote, even though he says he reflexively believed her testimony about Thomas’s sexually inappropriate office behavior. ”I took a scattershot approach,” he writes, ”dumping virtually every derogatory — and often contradictory — allegation I had collected on Hill from the Thomas camp into the mix.” A muckraking article in 1992 led to a best-selling book, ”The Real Anita Hill,” and to a determination to maintain his newfound celebrity at the expense of a next target. So Brock absorbed and circulated patently suspicious stories from Arkansas state troopers about Bill Clinton’s sexual shenanigans during the time when he was the governor of that state.
Looking back on it now, Brock berates himself and ridicules the prominent conservatives who shared his zeal, drawing on a smorgasbord of firsthand experience to ladle out tasty tidbits about Arianna Huffington, Laura Ingraham, Kenneth Starr and Ted Olson, now the solicitor general in the Bush administration. Brock says that while Olson did not doubt that Vincent Foster, a Clinton aide, had committed suicide, he nonetheless encouraged conjecture that Foster might have been murdered. For committed Clinton bashers, Brock explains, this was an effective strategy for ”turning up the heat on the administration until another scandal was shaken loose.”
Why did Brock break ranks? He says the process began with the publication of a later book about Hill and Thomas, ”Strange Justice,” by Jane Mayer, who now writes for The New Yorker, and Jill Abramson, now the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times. ”Strange Justice” debunked much of ”The Real Anita Hill,” and Brock discovered that he could not honestly and successfully debunk ”Strange Justice” in return. Thus began a re-examination of his methods and a readjustment of his moral compass, culminating in a vote for Al Gore in November 2000.
That, at least, is Brock’s own take on his arc, which ends with a man awakening at long last to the concept of integrity. A less charitable interpretation might be that Brock wanted a new act, and found it in self-flagellation. For a photograph that accompanied a 1997 article in Esquire in which he first began to confess his right-wing sins, he let himself be tied to a tree and surrounded by kindling, the pose of a heretic on the precipice of immolation. He subsequently wrote yet another confessional for Esquire. ”Blinded by the Right” is only his latest stab at a rather theatrical brand of contrition.
THE book is consistently articulate and very funny from time to time. It undeniably holds the reader’s interest. But it is also disconcerting in unintended ways. Brock brings a strange boastfulness even to passages in which he is supposedly raking himself over the coals, and he litters the book with derogatory comments about other men’s appearances that have ambiguous relevance to the narrative at hand. He variously describes the characters he meets as ”chubby, spectacled,” ”bald, cherub-faced,” ”fat, pockmarked,” ”roly-poly,” ”plump,” ”white-haired, red-faced,” ”sweaty, corpulent” and ”misshapen, unkempt and seemingly unshowered.” He also lets it be known that he did not lack for amorous attention, and that he began working out with weights as he put his postconservative life together.
For all of that, ”Blinded by the Right” is valuable in its vivid depiction of a take-no-prisoners era — perhaps in retreat, perhaps merely in quiescence — when genuine political debate took a back seat to playground bullying and much of journalism, not just Brock’s, descended to a gossipy and lascivious low. Brock flourished in that muddy gutter, which is why it clings to him still.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/24/books/sorry-about-that.html