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

1/13/1994   The Washington Post

by Howard Kurtz

In the last three weeks, David Brock has been assailed in the press as a liar, a smear artist and a woman-hater.

The conservative reporter is accustomed to personal attacks, having been roundly denounced by the left over his book skewering Anita Hill. Now, after disseminating a spate of salacious charges by Arkansas state troopers about Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Brock is being portrayed as a sleaze merchant who will stop at nothing to advance his ideological agenda.

The intensity of these attacks raises a thorny question: Just when are a journalist’s personal views and private life fair game for those who despise his reporting?

“Most people taking the Clinton line find that I’m an easy whipping boy because I’ve written some politically incorrect things in the past,” Brock said. “It’s easy to change the subject to make it look like a right-wing conspiracy. … It seems to me a kind of witch hunt to drum me out of the profession.”

One prominent liberal author says Brock has a point.

“If the principle is that we should not be writing about someone’s private life unless it affects their public life, then the same would apply to Brock,” said Ken Auletta, media critic for the New Yorker. “The kind of vitriol he generates on the part of our journalistic colleagues seems to me disproportionate. If we are outraged by some of the excesses of Brock, for reporters to turn around and commit some of the same excesses is transparently hypocritical.”

Still, separating the personal from the political is not so easy with a reporter like Brock, who writes for the aggressively conservative American Spectator, accepted conservative foundation money for “The Real Anita Hill” and makes no secret of his disdain for the liberal establishment.

For a controversial journalist to find himself the target of slings and arrows is hardly unprecedented. When CNN’s Peter Arnett was reporting from Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War, critics questioned his patriotism and Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) accused him of being a communist sympathizer in Vietnam. When Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio helped break the story of Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas, her detractors began publicizing a 19-year-old plagiarism incident.

But few journalists have been subjected to an assault as scathingly personal as that mounted last week by Frank Rich, the New York Times’s former theater critic and now an Op-Ed columnist for the paper.

Rich called Brock a “smear artist” whose “motives are at least as twisted as his facts.” Citing Brock’s writings on both Anita Hill and the Clinton story, Rich wrote: “The slightest sighting of female sexuality whips him into a frenzy of misogynist zeal. All women are the same to Mr. Brock: terrifying, gutter-tongued sexual omnivores.”

Brock, who is gay, strongly objected to the focus on his sexual views. He agreed to discuss the matter for the first time for this article.

“It’s ironic that those who say President Clinton’s sex life is irrelevant seem to find mine relevant,” Brock said. “My sexual orientation has never been a factor in my journalism and it never will be. Having said that, any sophisticated reader would interpret the Rich column as a thinly veiled outing. I think one has to look at the journalistic ethics of playing to anti-gay stereotypes and engaging in third-grade psychologizing.

“It’s particularly dismaying that the New York Times decided to publish such a vulgar attack, and it will be interesting to see if the mainstream media regard it as acceptable because it is aimed at a conservative.”

Rich maintained he had no ulterior motive. “I know nothing about David Brock’s personal life,” he said. “I purposely made it a point of not doing what he does, which is go into someone’s personal life. I simply worked with the public record. There are straight and gay misogynists, and I don’t know or care which kind David Brock is.

“It is fair game because the matter he’s dealing with is male-female relations in the broadest sense. His animus as revealed in his writing is relevant. To me, misogyny is as much an ideological bias as a liberal Democrat doing supposedly objective investigative reporting about a Republican.”

Brock, 31, has been an outspoken conservative since his days at the University of California at Berkeley. Drew Digby, a former reporter who clashed with Brock at the student paper, the Daily Californian, recalled a brash, bow-tied young man who loved to belittle the left.

Digby supplied a copy of a university release correcting four statements Brock made in a 1983 article about a physics professor who won a White House award, including an assertion that he was involved in designing nuclear weapons.

“I never believed a word he said,” said Digby, now a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago. “In his reporting, he would sometimes have a kernel of brilliant truth and he would embellish it with things he would make up. He was a good investigator, but he always spoiled it by adding in things that weren’t really there.”

Brock said he does not recall making anything other than minor errors at Berkeley and that Digby’s comments are motivated by personal dislike.

Brock moved here in 1986 and worked for Insight magazine, the Heritage Foundation and the Washington Times. “He was clearly a prodigy,” said journalist John Podhoretz, who hired Brock at Insight. “He was a very quiet, sober, responsible, serious, well-read person.”

Podhoretz said it is “insane” to suggest that Brock hates women. “David is a political conservative,” he said. “The notion that that makes him suspect as a journalist is something I find wildly offensive.”

When the Arkansas troopers first approached him, Brock said, he worried about developing a reputation as a journalist who traffics in sleaze. But he decided the charges against Clinton were serious enough to be published.

Several liberal columnists denounced the 11,000-word Spectator piece, which did more than detail Clinton’s alleged extramarital exploits as governor of Arkansas. The article also said Clinton could scarf down a baked potato in two bites and depicted a foul-mouthed Hillary Clinton who once ordered state troopers to fetch her feminine napkins. (Brock says the piece contained “elements of satire.”)

Michael Kinsley of the New Republic accused Brock of “dishonesty,” “fundamental bad faith” and “comically sleazy” journalism. E.J. Dionne Jr. of The Washington Post wrote that “Brock simply repeats verbatim charges and dirty stories … the slimier and more prurient the better.” Joe Klein of Newsweek said Brock is “on an ideological mission” and that his portrait of Hillary Clinton “seems a Neanderthal fantasy of what feminists are really like.”

Brock said his critics conveniently ignore the fact that the Los Angeles Times and CNN also reported many of the troopers’ allegations. He said the pundits “with the most at stake in Clintonism” are trying “to deflect attention from the substance of the allegations against Clinton.”

“I wasn’t trying to deflect attention from the allegations,” Kinsley replied. “I was very careful to write about the allegations.”

Dionne said his main point was that Brock seems to be among those conservatives “who are willing to do anything to bring Clinton down. … For years we’ve been hearing conservatives talk about all the terrible, irresponsible things that get into print about conservative political figures. Suddenly the rules change when the people in power change.”

But Brock said there was no such revulsion when journalists reported Anita Hill’s equally graphic and equally uncorroborated allegations. “That’s considered a scoop. … The line here is, how dare the mainstream press pick up David Brock’s tabloid sleaze, that I should be ridden out of town on a rail. Did anyone make an issue of what Bob Woodward thought of Richard Nixon personally? … Why is the New York Times so threatened by me? It seems they consider me more dangerous than Rush Limbaugh.”

Brock, like Limbaugh, has infuriated his critics by making provocative statements on the air. Describing an allegation that a woman was smuggled into the Arkansas governor’s mansion, Brock said on CNN’s “Crossfire”: “Hey, Bill Clinton is a bizarre guy.”

Despite the personal criticism, Brock has no second thoughts about his handling of the story. “Should I have withheld the feminine napkin anecdote? No,” he said. “If that anecdote was about Nancy Reagan, the cultural elite would have taken it as a highly significant detail.”

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-870777.html

4/1/1998   Esquire

by David Brock

I started it by introducing Paula Jones to the world. Now I’m trying to stop it.

Dear Mr. President,

My mind keeps drifting back to that paragraph about “Paula” and to the memory that her name wasn’t even supposed to show up in print. Back in December 1993, when I broke the Troopergate story in The American Spectator, neither of us could have predicted its consequences–for you, for me, and for the country. In the piece, Arkansas state troopers alleged that they procured women for you when you were governor. One of the women was remembered only as Paula. Soon after the piece was published, Paula Jones shocked the world by identifying herself as the woman in question and by suing you for sexual harassment. And, of course, Paula Jones begat Monica Lewinsky. Surveying the wreckage my report has wrought four years later, I’ve asked myself over and over: What the hell was I doing investigating your private life in the first place?

As an authority on the subject, I want to tell you how it all began. I didn’t go searching for the story. It found me one steamy August morning, when I received a telephone call from a man I barely knew, asking if I would fly to Little Rock to meet with Cliff Jackson, your Arkansas friend turned nemesis who accused you of lying about your draft record in the 1992 campaign and was apparently still out to get you. I had met the man on the telephone–who I later learned was a major contributor to Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC–once before, in a meeting on Capitol Hill a few weeks prior to the 1992 election. It was my introduction to the gothic world of anti-Clintonism. You appeared headed for victory, and the Republicans were frustrated and desperate: I was being importuned to follow up on a story in a supermarket tabloid that suggested you had fathered a child with a Little Rock prostitute. A mysterious source who identified himself only as “Mr. Pepper” was supposed to help me track the story down. After several furtive telephone calls, he never delivered.

Now, eight months into your presidency, the dirty war was on again. Cliff Jackson, my caller said, could hook me up with several state troopers who claimed to have knowledge of, and even to have helped arrange, extramarital affairs you were said to have had. The call came out of the blue, but I was a natural for the mission, and I jumped at it. I was perhaps the only self-proclaimed conservative journalist devoted to digging up stories rather than writing editorials. A few months earlier, I had published a best-selling attack on Clarence Thomas’s accuser, Anita Hill, and I was the star reporter at the Spectator, the crusading anti-Clinton magazine.

The man from GOPAC, Jackson, and I conspired to damage you and your presidency by exposing what your political enemies have always seen as your main point of vulnerability: your so-called zipper problem. I had no idea how wildly successful we’d be.

A nervous Jackson met my plane in Little Rock–I was told to hold a copy of the Washington Post under my right arm so he would recognize me, and I gamely played along. He took me to a nearby Holiday Inn. Holed up for two days, I listened to four state troopers as they told salacious stories of sexual shenanigans–late-night trysts at the governor’s mansion, oral sex in parked cars, even your alleged statement, which later became famous in the Monica Lewinsky case, that oral sex was not adultery according to the Bible. For a reporter, it is incredibly rare to get a politician’s bodyguards to tell you what he ate for breakfast, much less graphic sexual details of the sort the troopers were retailing. Were these guys and their far-fetched story for real? I wondered as I flew back to Washington. I told no one about the trip as I tried to figure out how to reel in the wary troopers while checking out their story further.

I returned to Little Rock in mid-September, carefully reinterviewed the troopers–one by one and in different combinations–to test their accounts for inconsistencies. I transcribed the second set of interviews and compared them with the first. By now, I was convinced that either the troopers saw what they said they saw or they had spent months rehearsing one of the most sensational lies ever told about a sitting president. My gut told me they were telling the truth. The level of detail seemed too hard to make up. Only later did I allow for more complicated possibilities.

The story was now in my sights. The question I then grappled with–the same question that would vex the press in the Monica Lewinsky case and that has haunted me ever since–was, When, if ever, are allegations about a politician’s personal life newsworthy? For reporters, there are no bright lines, no set rules, on how to handle these stories. For many years, politicians’ personal peccadilloes were considered out of bounds in what was known as the “gentlemen’s agreement” with the White House press corps. Then came Gary Hart, John Tower, Clarence Thomas, and Bob Packwood. Even George Bush was faced with press questions about a long-rumored extramarital affair.

And during the Gennifer Flowers controversy, polls showed that 25 percent of the electorate would not vote for an adulterer. Personally, I was not part of that group. But I had evidence about your private life that went well beyond what Flowers had claimed, and I wasn’t sure what I should do with it.

I discussed my dilemma with two Washington wise men who had been mentors of mine, and the verdict was split. Significantly, perhaps, they were both conservative Republicans with no training in journalism. Significantly, too, in the way of Washington careerists, they focused only on how the piece might affect me personally. No thought was given, by any of us, to how baring the most intimate details of your sexual conduct by a politically hostile writer might dramatically alter the way political battles are fought in Washington. One adviser told me flatly that I was sitting on perhaps the most devastating portrait of a president ever to be published–the biggest story of my career. The other warned that the allegations, even if proved, would be dismissed as tabloid trash and could therefore hurt my reputation as much as yours. They both turned out to be right.

In the end, I decided that the allegations met several tests that made them relevant to public character. If they were true, the behavior described was chronic and exploitative. Using the troopers to procure women was an abuse of power and certainly showed a reckless willingness to allow yourself to be compromised by their knowledge of your private conduct. The troopers also claimed that you lied about Gennifer Flowers in the 1992 campaign, which raised concerns about whether your word could be trusted. When one of the troopers told me that you had called him as I was reporting the story to express concern about my inquiries and dangled a federal job in front of him, my instinct was that you probably weren’t calling from the Oval Office about idle gossip. That tipped the scales.

But to be honest with you, these “tests” were something of a charade, more an attempt to fashion defenses for myself against charges that I was a “tabloid” journalist than they were a neutral set of journalistic principles. I wasn’t hot for this story in the interest of good government or serious journalism. I wanted to pop you right between the eyes. Test or no test, the story was going, and I would have found some way to dress it up ex post facto.

I think a similar disingenuous exercise went on with the Lewinsky story in Newsweek. When it broke, the reporter, Michael Isikoff, and his editors said that the involvement of independent counsel Kenneth Starr made your alleged affair with a White House intern major news. But we soon found out that Isikoff had been working on sex stories long before there was any connection to a criminal investigation. If a reporter is determined to make a name for himself by publishing a sexual expose, he can usually find some high-minded reason to do it. The pieties of the press know no bounds.

In my case, there was an open political agenda at work as well, which must have colored my judgment at least at the margins. I never felt the visceral hatred toward you that many of your detractors harbor, but I did regard you, the first Democratic president in my adult life, as an ideological threat. Ironically, I had just finished a book in which I argued strenuously against the use of personal scandal for partisan advantage in the Thomas-Hill case. In contemporary Washington, I lamented, it was no longer enough to defeat your opponent fair and square on the issues; you had to destroy him as a human being. The hypocrisy involved in what I was about to do to you didn’t strike me until after the deed was done.

In the next three months, as I worked to convince the troopers to go on the record and put their names to the allegations, I ran on an adrenaline high. Two troopers peeled off, refusing to go public, and the other two began suffering bouts of cold feet. Meanwhile, two investigative reporters from the Los Angeles Times were chasing the same story, and I was so focused on getting it first that I didn’t really think about the stakes or the consequences.

The big stumbling block was the troopers’ insistence that their story was worth money. When I told them that no reputable journalist would pay sources under any circumstances, there was talk about how to structure a future book deal, and there were several rounds of negotiations between Cliff Jackson and the GOPAC moneyman about guaranteeing the troopers income and legal expenses if they were fired from the state police after the piece was published. At one point, as the talks faltered, my last two troopers wanted out and came to my hotel room, demanding that I turn over the tapes of our interviews. I told them it was too late and hopped a plane back to D. C.

At this juncture, I brought the editor of The American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell, into the loop. I reached him over Thanksgiving weekend at a vacation home in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. When I described the reason for the delay, he screeched into the phone: “How much do they want? I’ll write them a check!” Not much help there.

I spent the next few weeks alternately threatening and cajoling over the telephone. Jump in the pool with no protection, I warned, or you’ll Flowerize yourselves. You need to do this for no other reason than the good of the country, I pleaded. How much I believed this, I’m still not sure. But as’ Christmas approached, my pressure tactics worked.

Deep down, though, I knew that the good of the country was the last thing on the troopers’ minds. In fact, in these discussions, I came to realize that the reason they were willing to come forward at all (other than their palpable contempt for Hillary) was not moral principle or ideology but personal pique–they were pissed off at you. They had happily done your dirty work for years and stayed mum when reporters approached them in 1992. Only when you didn’t take care of them when you became president–no jobs, no perks, nothing–did they decide to become truth tellers. In other words, I felt the way Ken Starr must have when wiring up Linda Tripp: The troopers were greedy and had slimy motives, and I knew it. But that wasn’t going to stand in my way.

When the story hit, it made national headlines. The Spectator quickly sold out and went back to the presses several times. The Los Angeles Times ran a similar story based on its own interviews with the troopers. Officially, the White House stonewalled; the press briefing was canceled for two days. Behind the scenes, your aides were in full damage-control mode. One called CNN to protest the airing of the charges. Others dug up stories about the troopers’ involvement in an insurance scam to impeach their credibility and tried to solicit affidavits from the troopers denying the most damaging aspects of the story By week’s end, you called the stories outrageous, but you never denied them.

It was the week before Christmas. I gulped hard when I saw your mother arrive at the white House for the holiday–my first fleeting second thought.

Because it was so brutally invasive of your private life but drew no refutation from you, my work became part of what everyone just knew about you, penetrating the media culture and public consciousness completely across ideological lines. It was now open season on you: Anybody could say just about anything they wanted about the president. A virulent scandal culture was spawned that eventually drew in not only your conservative critics but also the mainstream press.

Politically, though, the revelations appeared to do you little harm and may have even inoculated you somewhat against the current sex charges. The story quickly faded. Washington was titillated, but the public believed that the events described had taken place before you were president, you had tacitly acknowledged an adulterous past in answering the Flowers charges, and, in any case, your private life had nothing to do with your ability to carry out your public duties. The press, meanwhile, characterized me as a bottom feeder in the pay of a right-wing rag and moved on to a less seamy scandal, Whitewater. Case closed.

Or so we all thought. Unknown even to me, there was a time bomb embedded in the piece.

In my interviews, the troopers had named several women they claimed you had had affairs with. I contacted the women, and, not surprisingly, they all declined to comment or denied it. But even if they had been involved with YOU, some of the women were married and had children, and, after Gennifer Flowers, none of them had any reason to throw themselves into a he-said, she-said contest with the president. I had decided that naming the women against their will served no journalistic purpose and scrubbed from the text the paragraph that named names.

“Paula,” however, appeared as an incidental character in a later section of the piece. One trooper recalled that, at your request, he had approached a woman he “remembered only as Paula” and escorted her to your room one afternoon at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock. When Paula left the room, the trooper said, she had told him she was willing to be your “regular girlfriend.” Presuming’ that there were hundreds of Paulas in Arkansas, I didn’t think that I was identifying anyone. If I had, I would have taken “Paula” Out, too. I should have removed the name. It was just an oversight. Surely, this will go down as one of the more fateful oversights in the history of your presidency.

One night a few weeks ago in Washington, my doorbell rang. Expecting the dog sitter, I swung open the double doors. “David Brock?” the process server asked as he thrust a subpoena into my hands. “Well, I guess you have a place in history,” he laughed, and walked off.

Almost four years since Paula Jones called a press conference and said she was suing you for sexual harassment to clear her name of the implication in my piece that she had had consensual sex with you, your antagonists are now mine. (That she sued you rather than me may have been an early clue to her motives.)

Twice before, Jones’s lawyers had contacted me on a friendly basis, asking for assistance with their case. They sought the notes and tapes of my trooper interviews. Presumably, the Jones team regarded me not as a journalist but as a political partisan eager to help the cause. I declined their overtures, and when the subpoena was finally served, I hired a lawyer to fight it on the grounds that my trooper interviews were protected by the First Amendment.

No matter how I felt about the case personally, as a journalist, I would never have compromised that important principle. And with the passage of time, whatever sympathy I may have had with the Jones “cause” is gone. And whatever place in history I may have, I’m not proud of it.

When I watched the media hoopla as you got hauled into a deposition by Jones’s lawyers, I had a sinking feeling. My ransacking of your personal life had given your political adversaries–who were now funding and fighting the Jones case–an opportunity to use the legal process to finish the job that I started. Worse still their effort to dig up sexual dirt on you was sanctioned by the Supreme Court, which in a landmark ruling has imperiled future presidents by making them vulnerable to character assassination in all manner of civil suits while in office.

None of this was supposed to happen. Now that I’m living through it, I’m sure it should not have happened.

I made Paula Jones famous. And whatever happens with her case, in a way, the people who hate you have already won, and we have all suffered not only from their malice toward you but also from their contempt for the office of the president. When one of Jones’s key legal advisers told me that he didn’t necessarily believe her story of sexual harassment, my worst fears were realized. “This is about proving Troopergate,” he told me gleefully.

I guess I should confess that as the author of the infamous piece, I think “proving Troopergate” may be a tall order. I was as sure of that story when I wrote it as any journalist can be of any story But in the years since then, the troopers have greatly damaged their credibility

I’m sure you remember that during the Senate Whitewater hearings, the troopers made fools of themselves with improbable claims about the circumstances of Vincent Foster’s death. One of the two troopers who went on the record with me, Larry Patterson, helped promote the infamous Clinton Chronicles, a crackpot video accusing you of drug running and murder. Patterson was also recently cited as a source for several wild allegations in the spurious book The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, by British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. So I’ve had occasional pangs of doubt: Is it possible that they took me for a ride, embellishing their account for fame and fortune?

Perhaps it was my own tortured experience as a muckraker that has made my reaction to Ken Starr’s attempt to find a crime in the Monica Lewinsky case so different from that of almost anyone I know in Washington. For your political opponents and most of the press corps, the story was like crack. But I was chilled. The spectacle seemed strangely and depressingly familiar. I had seen it all before: Filthy tapes. Too many details not to be true! An accuser whose credibility got shakier by the hour. Hidden agendas. Book deals. Friends betraying friends. Declarations of “war” and even talk of “killing” you by those who forced the sludge out.

Troopergate had come full circle. Watching Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff tell NBC that Linda Tripp’s tapes were too detailed not to be true, I saw myself. I recalled a time when the two of us–for a time, Washington’s leading Clinton sexologists–traded stories over drinks at the Four Seasons Hotel. That night, Isikoff shared with me the outtakes from his own groundbreaking Paula Jones reporting, done for The Washington Post in 1994. Isikoff, an intrepid reporter, had dug up some additional claims by other women that you had hit on them, but the Post decided they weren’t relevant to Jones’s claim of harassment. Isikoff passed them on to me, resident bottom feeder.

I wasn’t interested. I never intended to make a career out of Troopergate. But I didn’t have to. Soon enough, Newsweek would become The American Spectator.

I suppose I could have felt vindicated by the Lewinsky story. Sex is your Achilles’ heel, after all. But I was more wrong than right. Even if all the worst of the charges leveled against you are borne out, this still ain’t Watergate. You’ll be the first president impeached for orchestrating a cover-up of a blow job.

I don’t know what happened between you and Monica Lewinsky any more than I know how much of Troopergate or Paula Jones’s story is true. But regardless of how the drama plays out, as the first r&porter who leered into your sex life, I do know that I didn’t learn a damn thing worth knowing about your character. I also know that if we continue down this path, if sexual witch-hunts become the way to win in politics, if they become our politics altogether, we can and will destroy everyone in public life.

When I published Troopergate, I didn’t much care. Now I do, and many other people don’t seem to.

I’m thinking of getting out of Washington for a while.

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-20420828.html

12/29/1994   The New York Times