How I almost brought down the president...(David Brock alert)

For years David Brock was one of the rightwing journalists who hounded Bill Clinton with allegations of sexual impropriety, abuse of power, even drug-running. Then he changed sides. Here, for the first time, he reveals who was at the heart of the conspiracy to destroy the president

The recent machinations of the American right - blaming Bill Clinton for the terrorist attack of September 11, comparing Senate majority leader Tom Daschle to Saddam Hussein, exploiting the war in Afghanistan for domestic political gain, trying to spin Enron as a scandal for the Democrats - are all examples of the kind of political tactics pioneered by the Republican right wing in the past decade. People want to say this is politics as usual, but it's really an outgrowth of a singular transformative event that began when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992. That was when the conservative movement turned American politics toxic, as its members plotted to disrupt and destroy the Clinton presidency.

From the moment he was elected, the right regarded Clinton as an illegitimate usurper and dedicated itself to preventing him from being president. As the leading scandal reporter for the rightwing monthly the American Spectator, I had a ringside seat to this unprecedented effort. My story - being published in book form this month in America as Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative - is the first insider's account of the well-organised and heavily financed anti-Clinton attack machine that ushered in a decade's worth of vicious culture-war politics. When Hillary Clinton referred to this political operation as a "vast rightwing conspiracy," she was widely ridiculed in the American press. But I can say with certainty that a conspiracy was, in fact, at work. I was in on it from the beginning. The only problem with Mrs Clinton's description was that the group was not terribly "vast". Nor was everyone who helped spread the tales of Clinton's alleged improprieties part of the conspiracy: some were simply running with what looked like a good story, others jumped on the bandwagon for their own political reasons.

After stints as a brash young conservative at the Rev Sun Myung Moon-owned Washington Times and the rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation, I made my name on the American right in 1993 with the publication of a book-length attack on the credibility of Anita Hill, the law professor who accused US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. Promoted by the rightwing radio show host Rush Limbaugh, The Real Anita Hill was an instant bestseller - and a forerunner of the blunt, tabloidised and slipshod allegations that the right, including yours truly, would later unleash on the Clintons.

While researching the Anita Hill book in the fall of 1992, I received a telephone call from a rich Chicago investor who had seen my slashing attacks on liberal icons in the Spectator and wanted to meet me. After breakfast in Washington with Peter Smith, who identified himself as one of the main financiers of Congressman's Newt Gingrich's political action committee, Gopac, Smith paid me $5,000 (£3,600) to track down a rumour in Arkansas that Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton had fathered an illegitimate child by an African-American prostitute. Smith hoped to derail Clinton's election with the supposed bombshell. An eager recruit into the scheme, I grabbed the money, made some calls, but soon concluded the story was fake. By November 1992, Smith had spent $80,000 (£58,000) in private funds trying to dig up similar dirty stories on the Clintons, all to no avail. (Smith denies any involvement in a right-wing conspiracy claiming "people with common thoughts and goals" tend to work in the same direction.)

He stayed in hot pursuit of his quarry. Smith's bounty journalism panned out a year later, with Clinton in the White House, when he called me again to offer another tantalising lead. According to Smith, a group of Arkansas state troopers who worked for Clinton while he was governor wanted to go public with tales of Clinton's womanising. The troopers were being stage-managed by a man named Cliff Jackson, a Little Rock lawyer and vociferous Clinton hater. Jackson and Clinton had been classmates at Oxford; when they returned to Arkansas, he watched Clinton's political career soar. Now, Jackson aimed for nothing less than getting Clinton "impeached", as he told me. I stepped off the plane in Little Rock with a copy of the Washington Post under one arm, James Bond-style, so that Jackson would recognise me. He whisked me off to a clandestine meeting with four troopers who had served on Clinton's security detail in the 1980s.

Smith approached me because I was a well-trained character assassin for the right wing who had shown an ability to garner attention in the mainstream media with my journalistic exploits. Like Jackson, Smith seemed to believe the trooper story might topple Clinton. Every day Clinton remained in office, Smith said melodramatically, the nation's security was at risk. Three months later, in December 1993, I published the troopers' salacious stories in the Spectator, and the scandal known as Troopergate was born. The troopers' portrait of Clinton as a sex-crazed sociopath, and of Hillary Clinton as a foul-mouthed, power-mad shrew, fit the rightwing prejudice against the Baby Boomer first couple who had come of age in the 1960s that had been fomented during a presidential campaign that focused on such cultural flash points as Clinton's draft record, his alleged affair with Gennifer Flowers, and the feminist Hillary's scorn for cookie-baking. The Clintons now were indelibly branded as moral monsters.

The brutal invasion of the private life of the first family meant it was open season on the Clintons for the seven years they remained in the White House, not only with rightwing organs but also with a newly sensationalised mainstream press that was now following their lead. Troopergate led the evening newscasts, and it reignited media interest in the failed Arkansas land deal, known as Whitewater, in which the Clintons were partners. Political pressure from congressional Republicans, who concluded that scandal politics was the only way to beat Clinton, soon led to the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Whitewater.

The trooper story turned out to be seriously flawed, though few seemed to notice besides me. Years later, when the troopers were put under oath on the matter, two of them denied having any first-hand knowledge of Clinton's womanising, contrary to what they said in interviews with me; the other two stuck by their accounts, but they were discredited by receiving money from Smith. (He said he gave them checques for $6,700 each because they had suffered financial difficulties.) But no matter: my Troopergate story ended up doing maximum damage anyway.

Buried deep in my article was an anecdote about a woman the troopers had identified only as "Paula". I had removed the full names of several women the troopers linked to Clinton to protect them from exposure. "Paula" slipped by me because she had no last name. It was a fateful oversight. According to the story, Clinton, having eyed "Paula" in a Little Rock hotel lobby, asked one of the troopers to arrange an assignation for him in a room upstairs. The trooper's version of the story - and thus the one I printed - suggested that Clinton and "Paula" had consensual sex in the room. Yet once the piece was published, Paula Jones suddenly came forward at a Washington meeting of conservative activists, identified herself as the "Paula" in my article, and said she had been harassed by Clinton in the hotel room when she refused to have sex with him.

Jones said that all she wanted to do was clear her name. Normally, if a published story cast someone in a false light, the writer might be on the hook for libel. But I soon learned that Jones had been advised by her conservative advisers that if she sued the Spectator, she would lose conservative-movement backing. Neither the magazine nor I ever heard from her. The conservatives were trying to manoeuvre Jones into suing Clinton.

Richard Mellon Scaife, an eccentric rightwing billionaire from Pittsburgh, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune and a seminal figure in modern rightwing politics, was at the centre of the anti-Clinton movement, heavily bankrolling thinktanks, legal foundations, and media watchdog groups. Scaife, who declared that he was waging a "war over American values", was also the main benefactor of the American Spectator. My salary was paid though his foundations by a special grant. He was the Daddy Warbucks of the radical right.

As the Jones suit ground on, Scaife pumped $2.2m (£1.6m) through the foundations under his control into a smear campaign against the Clintons run by the Spectator known as the Arkansas Project. The project was the brainchild of Richard Larry, custodian of Scaife's charitable coffers. Scaife later explained that he had funded it because he did not believe that the mainstream press was properly investigating the "scandals of the Clinton White House". With his money, the magazine promoted the unsupported claims of convicted con man David Hale, independent counsel Kenneth Starr's main witness against Clinton in Whitewater. It also hired private investigators and informants, to try - in vain - to link the Clintons to drug-running and murder. Spurious Arkansas Project material was pumped into the Spectator and then flowed through the right's extensive network of propaganda mills, from talk radio, to internet sites, and some right-leaning mainstream newspapers including the Sunday Telegraph.

I once met the ruddy-faced Scaife, a recovered alcoholic, for lunch at a hotel in downtown Washington to receive an Arkansas Project assignment directly from him and a top aide. My boss, R Emmett Tyrrell Jr, a screeching conservative satirist who had founded the Spectator in the late 1960s as a bulwark against the counterculture, was in attendance as well. Though he vigorously denounced the Clintons as morally irresponsible, Tyrrell declared after his own bitter divorce: "Lose a family, gain a nightclub." Scaife wanted me to investigate Clinton's first mentor in politics, the ageing Arkansas Senator William J Fulbright, and expose him as an agent of communist influence for opposing the Vietnam war. Tyrrell promised that I would get right on the story, but it was too far-fetched even for me, and I quietly dropped it.

From the inside, the effort to nail Clinton often seemed farcical, but it could also be menacing. In the fall of 1997, months before the Monica Lewinsky scandal surfaced, Republican representative Bob Barr of Georgia introduced a resolution in the house to open an inquiry of impeachment against Clinton on charges of malfeasance. The Wall Street Journal editorial page ran an op-ed headlined simply, "Impeach". And Tyrrell published a book, The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton. At a Spectator dinner that fall at a French restaurant near the Capitol, a couple of dozen key conservative-movement operatives and publicists met with Barr to drum up support in the ranks for the impeachment drive. Journal editorialist John Fund, a close political adviser of house speaker Newt Gingrich, announced to the group that impeachment was not a matter of evidence of wrongdoing but of "political will" by the right.

For Gingrich and his aides, the anti-Clinton investigations were also a welcome distraction from the speaker's own ethical problems. Notes of a meeting of the Gingrich high command made by his political consultant Joe Gaylord included tactical manoeuvres such as "indict the Clinton administration", "change the battlefield to one where Democrats are on the defensive", "bring back to life Dem ethical problems", and "show why Gingrich is different from the dirty Democrats of the past". The assault was undertaken partly to block an investigation by the house ethics committee of Gingrich's own ethical improprieties, which found that Gingrich violated tax laws in using tax-exempt foundations for political activities and misled Congress in sworn testimony. (When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Gingrich said he would use the word "Monica" in every speech. Only conservative insiders knew Gingrich was having an affair with a young congressional aide the entire time.)

As the conservatives schemed behind the scenes, planning what would amount to a political coup d'etat, the Paula Jones sexual harassment case wound its way through the courts. Jones's lawyers of record were assisted by a cadre of young anti-Clinton lawyers, all of them tied into the rightwing legal group the Federalist Society, another Scaife-funded entity devoted to a libertarian agenda. The lawyers called themselves the "elves". They were "elves" because no one outside the tight circle of Jones advisers - including Jones herself - knew of their involvement. I was well acquainted with these lawyers because I had defended their hero, Clarence Thomas, against what the right wing claimed were unsupported charges of sexual harassment. The elves were now delighted to fling the same sort of charges right back at Clinton.

One elf was George Conway, a $1m-a-year lawyer for tobacco interests, who was obsessed with every real or imagined detail of Clinton's sex life, and the size and shape of his genitalia. When Troopergate aired on the ABC Evening News, I was coincidentally with Conway in his New York office. He leapt from his chair and raised his fist to the sky as the words "oral sex" flashed on the screen. (Jones had said that as proof of her claim she could identify a "distinguishing characteristic" in Clinton's genital area, though she was ultimately unable to do so). Another elf was Jerome Marcus, a Philadelphia lawyer who had written that Clinton was a "cancer" on the presidency. The third was Ann Coulter, the blonde, tart-tongued TV pundit who moonlighted as a lawyer at the Scaife-funded Centre for Individual Rights. Coulter referred to Clinton as a "horny hick", and called Hillary Clinton "a prostitute". Coulter's private conversations were also punctuated by a virulent anti-semitism.

Through George Conway, two Federalist Society legal heavyweights also coached the Jones team: failed supreme court nominee Robert Bork, and the current US solicitor general, Theodore Olson. Olson, an establishment figure who led a kind of double life as a consigliere to the hard right, was also a central player in the Spectator's Arkansas Project. Though they typically backed the powers and privileges of the executive branch, Bork and Olson helped the Jones lawyers convince the supreme court that an unprecedented civil suit against a sitting president could go forward - so long as he was a Democrat. Earlier, before he was named independent counsel, Olson's friend Ken Starr considered filing a friend of the court brief in support of Jones. Starr did not file the brief, but he, too, offered pro bono advice to the Jones team.

I realised that the Jones team had hijacked the US legal system for partisan political ends when, in a moment of candor, George Conway told me flatly that he did not believe Jones's claims against Clinton. "This is about proving Troopergate," the lawyer said, explaining that the Jones case was a vehicle that would allow the elves to scoop up every rumour about Clinton's sexual past and to confront him with what they found when they took his deposition testimony. Though the right usually opposes broad interpretations of the sexual harassment laws, Conway personally wrote a brief in the case arguing, successfully, for the introduction of information about Clinton's private consensual behaviour. In other words, the Jones team sought not to convict Clinton of sexually harassing Jones, but to set a perjury trap by catching him lying about consensual sex.

At this juncture, Peter Smith, the Chicago financier behind Troopergate, re-entered the picture. Smith and a Republican lawyer who worked in the Chicago office of Ken Starr's law firm, Richard Porter, made sure that the Jones elves were passed information on Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky before they deposed Clinton. This information did not come from Starr's investigation; Smith and Porter were in touch with New York literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, who had urged Linda Tripp to secretly record conversations with her friend Lewinsky in which Lewinsky talked of her relationship with Clinton. In her Washington apartment, Ann Coulter played the Tripp-Lewinsky tapes for her fellow elves before the Clinton deposition.

Thus was the perjury trap set - just weeks before the Jones case would be thrown out of court in Arkansas for lack of merit. The elves took news of Lewinsky to a Federalist Society friend working for the independent counsel, triggering the Starr criminal investigation into the Lewinsky affair. (Starr's office maintains that there was no collusion between the independent counsel's office and the Jones team.) After spending tens of millions of dollars probing Whitewater, Starr had come up empty-handed. Now he saw the chance to vindicate his flagging operation by impeaching Clinton for a sex lie. In a reprise of Troopergate's leering obsession with sexual details, Starr reported graphically on the Clinton-Lewinksy relationship. Clinton was impeached by House Republicans on a party-line vote but acquitted in a Senate trial.

My second thoughts about what I was involved in had been gathering force for some time. Just before the 1996 elections, I published a biography of Hillary Clinton that was widely expected to be a hatchet job in the mold of The Real Anita Hill. But my research in Arkansas led me to conclude that the charges levelled against her by conservatives and in the media were wrong. When I published a book saying that Mrs Clinton's explanations of her involvement in the various Clinton scandals were backed up by the factual record, the rightwing excommunicated me virtually overnight.

By the time of the impeachment in 1998, I had come to see that I had been fighting on the wrong side of the culture wars all along. It was a moment of truth. The sexual witchhunt that I had helped launch was about attaining power for an ideology I no longer supported. Because my trooper story had led directly to the perjury trap Clinton fell into, I publicly apologised for my scandalmongering in an open letter to Clinton. I also privately briefed Clinton aides and other journalists on the background of the Arkansas Project and the existence of the Jones elves, doing my own small part to help Clinton resist the forces that had once toasted and underwritten my work. Then I set down to write my book, in the hopes that when the history of the Clinton years is written, the malicious role of the rightwing conspirators won't be forgotten.

TheAmericanProwler.org	Print Article Close Window
Copyright © 2002 TheAmericanProwler.org. All Rights Reserved.	Print Article Close Window

Communism With a Conscience

Published 3/7/02 12:02:00 AM

The Current Crisis

Washington -- My literary reputation is made! This week in the New Yorker magazine I am likened to a member of the Communist Party U.S.A. You might remember that not so many years ago for a writer or actor to be recognized as an American Communist by the "New Yorker" was to be recognized as very progressive. If you were a writer it went without saying that you were an exquisite writer and probably a humanitarian and advocate of early child schooling. All that talk about Soviet prison camps and general repression was presumed to be a lot of anti-Communist hysteria. Communists were essentially soft-hearted folks or "liberals in a hurry," as the phrase had it. So now it is official; I am a moral and literary colossus.

My sudden literary recognition in the venerable "New Yorker" comes in an adulatory review of David Brock's new book, "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative." The reviewer is Hendrik Hertzberg, who rose to literary prominence many years ago as a poet in President Jimmy Carter's speech-writing stable. Jimmy is the fellow who campaigned on the slogan, "If I ever lie to you don't vote for me." He presided over an administration that saw American international prestige and American economic vitality sink to a post-World War II nadir while he transformed the presidency into a soap box. Naturally the American people thought he was lying and did not vote for him in 1980; electing, instead, Ronald Reagan, a man whom Hertzberg and the other Carterites will still tell you was a dreadful failure.

From the literary plateau of the Carter White House Hertzberg has vaulted from literary Himalaya to literary Himalaya, and now at the "New Yorker" he is touting Brock as heir to Arthur Koestler, author of "Darkness at Noon," and a writer in the vanguard of the anti-Communist literary movements of the 1940s. In our day Brock himself is in the vanguard of our era's cutting-edge literary movement. He stands with Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, Michael Bellesiles, winner of the Bancroft Prize for history, and -- I would guess -- scores of other writers in employing such heretofore uncelebrated literary techniques as plagiarism, fictitious citations, made-up reportage, and bold fraud. Brock's fraud begins in his book's title, in the phrase "The Conscience of …." So replete is his book with fabrication that Brock obviously has no conscience.

Hertzberg, writing in his usual spumoni of confusion, is not all that clear as to whether it is he or Brock who has likened me to a Communist, but I am not alone in receiving this gratifying accolade. His "New Yorker" review likens ALL conservatives and most Republicans to members of the Communist Party U.S.A. That means nearly half the citizens of the United States are Communists. Who says the Cold War is over? We Reds may win yet. "Yuppies, you have nothing to lose but your chains."

There is more confused writing in Hertzberg's testimonial that touches upon me personally. For instance he claims that "The American Spectator's" "Troopergate" story (which along with a "Los Angeles Times" story quoted Governor Bill Clinton's bodyguards as having pimped for the Governor) is now "discredited." This weasel word may mean many things, but "discredited" does not mean refuted. In fact, Clinton's subsequent behavior has only validated Troopergate's gravamens that he is a sexual predator and abuser of power. His perjury, obstruction of justice, contempt of court, and abuse of the pardoning power came later.

Hertzberg's confusions continue. In the "New Yorker" he seems to be saying that at "The American Spectator" I commissioned "the story" that White House deputy counsel, Vincent Foster, "had been murdered by or at the behest of the Clintons, who were orchestrating a monstrous cover-up." I never commissioned or published such a story. The piece is a concoction of Brock's literary art. Both he and Hertzberg are misrepresenting a 1995 review by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's report on Foster's death. Evans-Pritchard's actual piece concludes thus: "It is not the purpose of this article to explain what happened to Vincent Foster on July 20, 1993. I do not have any answers." The American Spectator never claimed Foster was murdered and eventually lost the financial support of a major donor for ridiculing a book that argued that Foster was murdered.

Hertzberg, apparently still under Brock's spell, goes on to repeat Brock's equally fictional claim that the present Solicitor General of the United States, Ted Olson, wanted the nonexistent Spectator piece published, telling Brock that the imaginary piece "was a way of turning up the heat on the administration until another scandal was shaken loose, which was the Spectator's mission." Had Hertzberg asked Olson before publishing this balderdash Olson would have told him as he has said repeatedly of Brock's claim that as a lawyer it was not his responsibility to interfere with or second-guess the editorial judgment of the Spectator's editors.

Now, of course, Brock is a self-confessed liar. In fact, he is a self-confessed fraud, he boasts of having published fraudulent claims about Clarence Thomas. He is the first member of this rising literary movement to draw attention to his arty technique. Perhaps Hertzberg aspires to become the New Charlatans' Professor Lionel Trilling. His next rave review will be for Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose plagiarisms have stirred the country.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is editor in chief of The American Spectator.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.