7/1/1997 Esquire
by David Brock
He pilloried Anita Hill, and all the conservatives cheered. When he made Troopergate a household word, he was ordained as the one who would bring down the Clintons. Then the author discovered the truth about his so-called friends. I kill liberals for a living. Or at least I used to.
On the day last fall that my book on Hillary Rodham Clinton came out, I retrieved a voice-mail message from a friend, Barbara Olson, a Republican lawyer who was working on Capitol Hill, investigating the firing of the White House Travel Office workers. A few months before, under a white tent in the leafy Republican suburb of Great Falls, Virginia, I had been a guest at the wedding of Barbara and Ted Olson, the Washington superlawyer who counts President Reagan and The American Spectator, the magazine where I work, among his clients. On hand was the entire anti-Clinton establishment, everyone from Wall Street Journal editorial-page editor Robert Bartley to Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
That Friday night, I was planning to go to another party at the Olsons’ to celebrate the end of the first session of Congress under Republican control in more than four decades. The cohost that evening was Ginni Thomas, a top aide to House Republican leader Dick Armey and the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, whom I had vigorously defended against Anita Hill’s sexual-harassment charges in my first book, The Real Anita Hill. That book, and my subsequent reporting of the Troopergate scandal, involving Bill Clinton’s use of Arkansas state troopers to procure women, was the source of my reputation as (pick one): “the Right’s chief hatchet man” (GQ); “that foul little right-wing reporter” (Molly Ivins); “one of the best investigative reporters in the country” (Bob Novak); “not only a sleazebag but the occasion in others for sleazebaggery” (Gerry Wills); “David Crock” (The New Republic); or “the Bob Woodward of the Right” (The Washington Post).
My being invited to the Olson event was fitting; I had drawn the same crowd of Republican lawyers, Capitol Hill aides, and conservative writers to two huge bashes celebrating the Gingrich Congress at my house in Georgetown, one on election night 1994 and another on the one-hundredth day of the Contract with America. My Hillary book was about to hit the stores, and it would be the subject of intense interest among the assembled conservatives. At Barbara and Ted’s wedding, former Bush White House counsel C. Boyden Gray joked that since it looked as if Kenneth Starr was not going to come up with the goods before the election, it was up to me to derail the Clinton juggernaut. A report in Newsweek that George Stephanopoulos was holding White House meetings on how to respond to the book only heightened expectations.
But in Barbara’s message, I discovered that as word filtered out that The Seduction of Hillary Rodham not only failed to deliver the deathblow to the Clintons that everyone had expected but was in some respects sympathetic to its subject, I was suddenly no longer welcome in my old circle. “Given what’s happened, I don’t think you’d be comfortable at the party,” she said. As only someone who has fallen from grace in Washington can know, it was a classic moment.
Barbara’s message was especially jarring, given that Ted Olson, a member of The American Spectator’s board of directors, had a thriving First Amendment practice. Despite Ted’s conservative politics, he had defended New York Newsday reporter Timothy Phelps, who broke the Anita Hill story, when Phelps was investigated by the Senate Judiciary Committee about leaked material that he had printed. Of all people, I thought surely Ted understood that my commitment to journalism outweighed partisan considerations. I would soon see that I was wrong not only about this but also about many of my conservative friends, about the character of the movement that had celebrated my work, and about how much room there is in conservative politics for honest journalism.
After playing Barbara’s message a second time, and then a third, I had a sense of deja vu. Back in 1983, at the University of California at Berkeley, where I was then a junior, I had been elected university editor of The Daily Californian, the main campus paper. My first signed op-ed column was an endorsement of the U.S. invasion of Grenada–not a terribly controversial position in the nation as a whole, but at Berkeley, where protesters were burning the flag, this was an act of heresy. Though I had gone to Berkeley because of its reputation for liberal activism rooted in the campus free-speech movement, the liberals turned out to be not so liberal after all. There was a campaign to recall me from the editorship, and I was shunned for the balance of my time on campus. This experience of having to fight to express my opinions–at Berkeley, of all places–marked my break with liberalism. I began to see an incipient conservatism as challenging a tired, lockstep liberal orthodoxy, and, like many of my generation, I moved further to the right in the 1980s.
But in publishing a biography of Hillary Clinton that went against the conservative grain, I felt I had come full circle. In concluding that Hillary was not the corrupt, power-mad shrew of conservative demonology (a caricature that any reasonably competent biographer would have rejected), I ran up against the same intellectual intolerance and smug groupthink that had sent me on a conservative trajectory more than a decade before. Looking at my friends, I now saw the other side.
The age of reporting is dead. In the era of television punditry, all you have to do is pronounce. Substance takes a backseat to spin, and there is no place for someone who steps out of bounds. Perhaps as a writer of political books, I should have expected as much. But at thirty-four, I found I still had a lot to learn about what’s really behind things in Washington, where the crucial distinction between political and journalistic or intellectual standards isn’t recognized.
“In Washington, we think that the `news’ on the front page of The Washington Post is what Kay Graham wants us to believe, and we expect the same thing of the [conservative] Washington limes,” David Boaz of the Cato Institute offered by way of a postmortem. “People who hate the Clintons are supposed to write books about how evil they are. If you don’t find any evil, you’re not supposed to say you found no evil. You just shouldn’t write the book.”
That a self-professed conservative and the lead investigative writer for the aggressively anti-Clinton American Spectator wrote the book anyway confused just about everyone. Both liberals and conservatives–and the political press in the middle–were wedded not only to their images of Hillary but also to an image of me as a right-wing hit man. With the exception of journalist James B. Stewart, who wrote in The New York Times, “In substance and style … [Brock] has tried to do his subject justice in the broadest sense,” everyone had a story written before the book came out, and once it did, no one seemed able to accommodate a different reality. When an advance copy of the book went to Newsweek, the sound of air going out of the balloon was almost audible. “The editors are in tears that you don’t have Hillary in bed with Vince [Foster], or at least someone,” I was told.
For a while, I confess, I was confused, too. I first gained notice in the spring of 1993 with The Real Anita Hill, a fierce assault on the credibility of Clarence Thomas’s accuser and on the liberal special interests, feminist groups, and media that sponsored her. At a time when the conservatives had been consigned to oblivion by Bill Clinton’s election, and a Democratic agenda, in the form of Hillary’s health-care plan, was on the march for the first time since LBJ’s Great Society, the book raised a flag all conservatives could rally around and became a best-seller.
Eight months later, during Christmas week, I launched the print equivalent of poison-gas canisters on the Clinton White House with the Troopergate story. Perhaps the most humiliating portrait of a sitting president and his wife ever published, the piece detailed graphically Clinton’s history of extramarital affairs and exposed the culture of petty corruption, deceit, and cover-up that this behavior engendered.
Suddenly, media interest in the muck of Arkansas scandal was reignited, and the conservative attack machine was hitting on all cylinders. Within two months Paula Jones (identified in my piece simply as “Paula”) had stepped forward to make her unprecedented sexual-harassment claim against Clinton, and an independent counsel had been appointed to investigate the Whitewater affair. After Iran-Contra, the defeat of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and the bloodying of Clarence Thomas–the defining political moments for my cohort in Washington–I viewed Troopergate not only as a good story but as an eye for an eye. When Harvard University’s Neiman Reports critiqued the piece and dubbed me “the Right’s Road Warrior,” I was never prouder.
Especially for younger conservatives like me, it was easy to get caught up in the heady zeal of Clinton bashing and the smashing GOP victory that followed. Three months after the Republican takeover of Congress, I sold a proposal for a book on the most tempting target I could think of, Hillary Clinton, to Simon & Schuster’s Free Press division, which had published my first book. The only question a top executive at the company asked me m our presigning meeting was whether I thought Hillary was a lesbian. I got paid 51 million. My frank intention was to butcher my prey.
Then a funny thing happened. For the first time in my experience, my partisan prejudices were substantially dispelled, rather than reinforced by the fruits of my investigation. Though I had criticized Republicans like James Baker and Jerry Falwell in print, I had always been able to satisfy my journalistic standards while: generally serving the conservative cause. Now the two were in conflict. To the extent that I was programmed to believe the worst of Hillary, the far more nuanced picture I was piecing together knocked me off my foundations.
Facing the enormous expectations of both my conservative audience and my own press notices, I questioned whether to push on into uncharted waters or to abandon ship. With my publisher’s blessing, I was faithful to my reporting. If the image of Hillary as a greedy influence peddler was confounded by the evidence–she made about twenty dollars a month on the controversial representation of her Whitewater partner Jim McDougal–that’s what I would write. If the paper trail substantiated Hillary’s much-doubted claim that she had little involvement in sham deals at the Castle Grande trailer-park development, a conclusion McDougal has subsequently verified, so be it. (There was no dirt down the lesbian trail, either.)
Led by a front-page article headlined SAINTHOOD FROM A HILLARY CRITIC in The Washington Times, where I had worked as a reporter and editor for several years, the conservative press panned the book as a whitewash and questioned my motives for writing it. National Review charged: “Brock hates being trapped in the role of a partisan conservative journalist, and this book is his misbegotten attempt at escape.”
On C-SPAN, New Right leader Paul Weyrich, whose National Empowerment Television had pushed the Anita Hill book and the Troopergate story, brushed off questions by saying he didn’t trust my work. Talk-radio hosts like Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy–who also had vigorously promoted my earlier writing–wouldn’t book me on their shows. Bay Buchanan, Pat Buchanan’s sister and the cohost of CNBC’s Equal Time, confided that if only I had taken “the right perspective” on Hillary, the conservatives would have helped me sell the book. (At least Bay was honest!)
Yet the criticism that I was “soft” on Hillary was false. On the contrary, the book accepted and expanded on the predominant conservative view of Hillary as a committed leftist, ardent feminist, and hard-nosed operator willing to compromise her ideals, cut ethical corners, and defend a flawed marriage for power. But for the conservatives, this wasn’t enough. They wanted red meat, not a serious biography. As Weekly Standard reviewer and noted neoconservative intellectual Midge Decter lamented, “Perhaps one day … David Brock will return to his proper calling, the unearthing of dark secrets.”
Though it may be difficult for those outside my circle to fathom, most conservatives have come to so revile Hillary Clinton and everything she represents that they have lost their moorings, forgetting that they had opposed Hillary in the first place on political grounds, not out of personal loathing, which really transcends politics. On this score, I had myself partly to blame: Those expecting Hillary in witch’s garb–as she famously appeared on the cover of the Spectator in an illustration for one of my articles–were bound to feel let down.
I’d run up against this mind-set before. When The Real Anita Hill was published in 1993, television networks imposed a virtual blackout. Bookstores posted a Molly Ivins column–titled “Save Yourself $24.95”–beside displays. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who called the book “sleaze with footnotes,” conceded in private correspondence that he had only “breezed hastily” through it before trashing it. And writing in The Nation, Deirdre English changed the subject to “the Real David Brock,” whose work, she said, couldn’t be trusted because it was underwritten by right-wing foundations.
Following Troopergate, New York Times columnist Frank Rich described me as “prim” and charged that my journalism was motivated by an “animus” toward women. Whatever Rich’s intent, the column put my homosexuality in the gossip mill, and I soon acknowledged in The Washington Post that I was gay.
Still, attacks from the other side are just part of the Washington game. When fellow conservatives maligned my book, impugned my motives, and engaged in the personal sniping and pettiness of movement politics, I was deeply disturbed and felt hurt.
Conservative activist Grover
Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and a key ally of Speaker Newt Gingrich, represents a powerful feature of conservatism, one that I had woefully underestimated: the premium on loyalty. More than any other conservative I know, Norquist has taken it upon himself to fight a rearguard action against dissent in the ranks. Every Wednesday morning, the fifty leading conservative activists in Washington, many of them close associates of mine through the years, gather in Norquist’s Dupont Circle offices to plot strategy. At a recent meeting, I was nominated in absentia for the Kevin Phillips Award, so named for a Republican who makes a living “helping the other team.”
I’d already had cause to be disillusioned with my conservative allies three months before The Seduction of Hillary Rodham even hit. The controversy last July over the book Unlimited Access, by FBI-agent-turned-author Gary Aldrich, was a powerful signal, placing in question the integrity of my friends and the value of the reputation I enjoyed among them.
In his best-selling expose on the Clinton White House, Aldrich reported as fact a wild rumor about Bill Clinton sneaking out of the White House to a Marriott hotel to meet women for trysts. Because Aldrich had been assigned to the White House during the first two years of the Clinton presidency, I had asked him about this piece of gossip, which I’d heard while I was digging for damaging material for my own book. He told me then that he knew nothing about the rumor. So when this “revelation” made sensational front-page headlines, Aldrich was grilled by Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff and let on that his source was a journalist. Since the clique of reporters following the Clinton scandals is small, it was no surprise when Isikoff immediately called me and asked what I knew. I responded viscerally, not realizing that by telling the truth I would cause some conservatives to conclude that they had a traitor in their midst. Just to be sure, I called Aldrich, who verified that I, in fact, was the sole source for his supposed scoop
My public comments, other glaring holes in the hook, and Aldrich’s loopy tales of X-rated ornaments on the White House Christmas tree led the mainstream press to deep-six Unlimited Access. But as someone who tries hard to practice credible journalism from a conservative perspective, I was outraged when conservative outlets like The Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and talk radio–not to mention right-wing publisher Regnery, which brought out the book–let Aldrich brazen it out and perpetrated a hoax on the public by celebrating Unlimited Access as legitimate and well researched. At The Washington Times, editors went so far as to delete from their own reporter’s story references to my statements challenging the Marriott tale.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the most influential conservative voice in the country, also made a grotesque error in judgment and then compounded it by refusing to admit to the error Editorial-page writer John Fund rushed an excerpt of Unlimited Access to print, and when the hook’s credibility began to crumble, Fund became Aldrich’s point man When he and I were scheduled to appear on CNN’s Larry King Live, he telephoned me at home and asked if we could coordinate our stones before the broadcast, an overture I rebuffed When Fund was asked on the Charlie Rose Show about the evidence for Aldrich’s “allegation” that former Democratic congressman Tony Coelho had used quaaludes, he referred to an article from The Washington Post that mentioned the daily doses of phenobarbital Coelho took for his epilepsy For the first time ever, I found myself rooting for Fund’s sparring partner, Clinton spin doctor James Carville. This was, as Carville said, stuff from the “scum bucket.”
Fund had good reason to sweat. I later learned that on the day before the excerpt was scheduled to run in the Journal, Fund was told directly by one of Aldrich’s sources that it contained factual errors (unrelated to the Marriott problem which had yet to surface) Rather than hold the piece and further investigate Aldrich’s credibility, Fund excised the material he knew to be false and let the balance of the article go out to two million readers. A few months later, as the November election approached, Fund saw to it that the Journal ran a column by Aldrich, accompanied by the likeness of a campaign button that read, I BELIEVE GARY ALDRICH.
Was this the sort of conduct Beltway conservatives expected from their journalists? Apparently it was. Almost as soon as I had spoken with Aldrich, I received the first of several tense phone calls that weekend, warning me to keep my mouth shut The president of the Landmark Legal Foundation and former chief of staff to Attorney General Edwin Meese, Mark Levin, my friend as well as Aldrich’s, told me flatly “If he goes down, we all go down” Levin said that I should have stonewalled Isikoff and told me to leave town to avoid the press I was floored.
For the first time since I’d come out in 1994, I learned that my sexual orientation was being used by some conservatives to discredit me When I made the decision to come out, I made a leap of faith that my conservative friends were not the bigots portrayed by literal typecasters. It was to be quite a test There are a handful of openly gay moderate Republicans, but the homosexuals working in high-level posts at the Republican National Committee, for conservative members of Congress, or in conservative lobbies and think tanks belong to a secret society I was a minority of one as the only openly gay person identified with the conservative movement and inhabiting such hard-line precincts as The American Spectator
For more than two years, I had suffered no repercussions. In the Aldrich affair, however, my conservatives flunked the test. As long as I was on the team, my anti-Clinton credentials apparently checked any latent bigotry about my personal life, but it came rushing to the fore as soon as I broke ranks Trying to undermine my criticism, Aldrich’s PR people put out the word among conservatives that my real problem was not the book’s truthfulness but Aldrich’s antigay rhetoric. Soon enough, a leading conservative columnist called, seeking a response to the humiliating suggestion that “the gay thing” had turned me against Aldrich. At the time, I hadn’t even known of Aldrich’s claim that Hillary had adopted a hiring policy that favored “tough, minority, and lesbian women” and “weak, minority, and gay men.
Of course, my liberal critics were no slouches in this regard, either. Joe Conason, the reflexive Clinton defender at The New York Observer, lampooned my attack on Aldrich as a lovers’ quarrel between two twisted homosexual character assassins of the J. Edgar Hoover school. I had long ago learned to expect nothing but vicious caricature from this crowd, but I did think my own side had accepted me without prejudice Perhaps I had been kidding myself all along. Longtime conservative activist David Keene recently told me that suspicions about me in movement circles did in fact date to my coming out, which was seen as an effort to use my sexual orientation as a point to placate liberal critics. Apparently, I had been viewed as an outsider all along.
Plainly, my allies did not care whether the Aldrich book was true, and they would stop at nothing to salvage it All that mattered to them was inflicting maximum damage on the Clintons in an election year. (As Aldrich himself later claimed in a letter to me: “From what I hear, there is deep, deep disgust and hatred for what you tried to do to me.” And, of course, he was right.) I now had cause to doubt whether my conservative friends, any more than my liberal foes, were interested in anything but gaining partisan advantage. In political combat in Washington, I wondered, were the facts always the first casualty? Had they cheered The Real Anita Hill and Troopergate because they believed them to be true, as I did and do, or just because they were useful?
In March, I was passed over as an invited speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s annual meeting, which draws political activists from around the nation to the capital to hear the likes of Newt Gingrich, William Bennett, Jack Kemp, Phyllis Schlafly, and Oliver North, and, in the past, me, even as an openly gay man. One friend who attended this year’s CPAC planning sessions told me that when my name was considered for a panel on the Clinton presidency I was denounced as a turncoat. When I found out that my replacement was Gary Aldrich, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry How could they lionize Gary Aldrich the way they had lionized me?
Partisans of all stripes, of course, tend to value reliability over critical thinking. When Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff announced that he was against abortion, colleagues stopped speaking to him, and he was not reelected to the ACLU’s board. ABC’s John Stossel, who began his career as a consumer reporter and is now a critic of government regulation, has been denounced by former allies like Ralph Nader The New Republic has been inundated with complaints from subscribers protesting the tough anti-Clinton line Michael Kelly, the magazine’s new editor, has taken in columns on the Clinton campaign-finance scandals.
Still, there is no “liberal movement” to which these journalists are attached and by which they can be blackballed in the sense that there is a self-identified, hardwired “conservative movement” that can function as a kind of neo-Stalinist thought police that rivals anything I knew at Berkeley
As the beleaguered conservative movement tends to see it, the establishment media–the prestige papers and the television networks–are uniformly opposed to its political views and are waging war on its values. The few conservatives with a platform in the dominant media culture (the “DMC,” in conservative parlance) who break through are obliged to stay loyal to the cause. “There is a circle-the-wagons mentality among conservatives, but it is understandable,” says syndicated columnist Mona Charen, who has upset conservatives in columns critical of both Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. “You have a media in which any sin committed by a Republican is magnified a hundred-fold, and they think we conservative journalists should be bucking up our own side.”
When columnist George Will criticizes conservatives on ABC’s This Week, he can expect to be deluged with calls from irate conservatives, but Cokie Roberts, when criticizing liberals, would hardly elicit the same kind of emotional response from partisan constituents. Newt Gingrich writes personal notes to conservative columnists and magazine editors, denouncing one idea or another as “strategically counterproductive”–as though the journalists were adjuncts of the Republican National Committee. It’s difficult to imagine minority leader Richard Gephardt writing menacing notes to Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift or editors at Harpers.
A deeper problem is the conservative movement’s obsession with the supposed hidden agendas and dark motives of anyone who dissents. It employs an entire lexicon to describe any move from the party line as pandering to the liberal press. When GOP politicians do it, they have “grown in office” or won “strange new respect.” No conservative political figure, not even Ronald Reagan, who was said to have sold out his Soviet policy for the sake of impressing liberal historians, has been immune to this line of attack.
Conservative frustration is understandable to anyone familiar with the dynamics of the American media. While liberals have no obvious career incentives for criticizing Democrats or moving to the right, the same can’t be said for conservatives who criticize their own side or move left. All conservatives know that the surest way to be published on the op-ed page of The New York Times is to attack other conservatives.
Still, the presumption that any deviation from the conservative line is always a calculated career move, rather than a stand on principle, is a weak, unfair, and ultimately self-destructive way of conducting an intellectual or political argument. During the 1996 campaign, conservative grumbling that early critics of Bob Dole such as Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and syndicated columnist Arianna Huffington were opportunists seeking personal power or media stardom at Dole’s expense led conservatives to dismiss the crucial point they were making–that Dole couldn’t win.
This tendency to close ranks is especially worrisome now, as the era of Republican hegemony and unity has collapsed. As social conservatives and libertarians wage open warfare and the flaws of the leader of the GOP revolution lie exposed, this should be a time for ferment in conservative ranks, not loyalty oaths. But self-criticism and introspection are not the order of the day for people clinging to power.
When National Review’s Kate O’Beime wrote earlier this year that Gingrich should step aside as Speaker to concentrate on clearing himself of pending ethics charges, her own magazine distanced itself from her comments. And when Huffington made the same point, the Wall Street Journal editorial page hissed, “A taste for intellectual exhibitionism gets Arianna Huffington’s name in the news.” The Washington Times, which runs Huffington’s column twice a week, went the Journal one better: The conservative daily spiked several of her columns. When I discussed it with a conservative editor friend, he asked me incredulously: “Why would you expect the conservative press to behave any more honorably than the liberal press?”
That, I guess, is the rub, occasionally, someone plays it straight and reports what he finds. Remember when Bob Woodward discovered that Dan Quayle wasn’t so dumb after all? But too many political journalists seem to have their scripts prepared before they make the first phone call. One wonders how many even believe what they write, so long as it gets them on Crossfire. And when the same person says that Anita Hill lied and that Hillary Clinton is an admirable person, Washington blows a fuse.
As I’ve said, that was not my intention. National Review was dead wrong in concluding that The Seduction of Hillary Rodham was my attempt to escape my reputation as a “partisan conservative journalist.” On the contrary I liked my world, relished that label, and did not wish to be tested in the way I have been. When liberals attacked my credentials as a journalist and stigmatized me as a hired gun for the right wing, I charged ahead because I knew it was baloney. But conservatives appear to have concurred all along with the liberal smear that I wasn’t a “real” journalist–I was bought and paid for, an asset of the conservative movement. Because they had partied at my house, I was expected to parrot their prejudices and cover up their secrets.
Now I do want out. David Brock the Road Warrior of the Right is dead. I’m not comfortable in either partisan camp, and both camps seem uncomfortable with me. My side turned out to be as dirty as theirs.
My conservative views have not changed, and, personally, I’m still at home at The American Spectator Though The Washington Post recently reported that conservative donors have been agitating for my dismissal, any such pressure has been resisted by the editor, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. Founded as The Alternative in 1967, the magazine “was born wayward and determined to be skeptical,” as Tyrrell put it in his memoir, The Conservative Crack-up. Tyrrell and I have agreed to disagree about Hillary: one bright spot in an otherwise bleak conservative landscape.
A couple of years ago, when the new conservative magazine The Weekly Standard was staffing up, one of the editors told me that all the wide-eyed aspiring conservative journalists who interviewed there wanted to be me. With that in mind, I’ll say to young David Brocks everywhere: I’ve seen aspects of the conservative movement that make me regret having ever associated with it. And I participated in a scandal-fueled war against the Clintons that produced Gary Aldrich; if that is what our conservative case boils down to, we’re doomed. Oh, and don’t be fooled: In a way that is perhaps unique to Washington, your friends are never your friends. Now, go out and make a name for yourself.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-19532393.html