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 utty,
slutty David Brock is back. He's nutty in the sense that he seems
to have made journalistic self-flagellation his life's work, slutty
in the sense that he seems determined to climb into bed with the
very the Left-wing toadies whose sensibilities his reportage used
to offend, and he's back now to promote a book. His return, in any
event, provides a cautionary tale for conservatives.
So let's rewind
to Brock's poison-pen days of yore. It was in October 1991, as Senate
confirmation hearings for Supreme Count nominee Clarence Thomas
were winding down, that Anita Hill, who'd worked for Thomas for
years, came forward with allegations that Thomas had repeatedly
made lewd comments to her on the job. Thomas denied this, and the
he-said-she-said that ensued riveted the nation; Thomas's characterization
of the hearings as a "high tech lynching" became a catchphrase
for his defenders, while Hill's supporters produced bumper stickers
that read "Honk If You Believe Anita" and attended feminist
seminars titled "Women Tell the Truth."
Six months
after Thomas's narrow confirmation, Brock, then an obscure reporter
for Insight magazine, wrote a freelance article for The
America Spectator in which he coined the phrase "a little
bit nutty and a little bit slutty" to describe Anita Hill.
That article became the basis for 1993's The Real Anita Hill,
a savage attack on Thomas's accuser, shot through with innuendo
about her psychosexual motivations for slandering Thomas. The book
was, predictably, embraced by Thomas's supporters and rejected by
Hill's. Brock made a national name for himself on the controversy.
The next year,
Brock set his sights on bigger game with an investigative piece
for The Spectator about Bill Clinton's extramarital adventures
during his tenure as governor of Arkansas; Brock alleged that Clinton
had used state troopers — in effect, government resources —
to cover up his hound-dog ways. Thus was born the Troopergate scandal.
But then, in
1996, Brock's began skitzin' (as we say in the 'hood). His much
anticipated biography of Hillary Clinton turned out to be not the
red meat many conservatives had hoped for but rather an incoherent
pastiche of apologetics and psychobabble that painted the former
First Lady as a major campus radical in the 1960's and subsequently
a needier-than-thou victim of her husband's ambitions and infidelities
— both risible conclusions. By 1997, Brock had gone off the
deep end. He wrote a bizarre piece for Esquire called "I
was a Right-Wing Hit Man" in which he declared, "David
Brock the Road Warrior of the Right is dead." In 1998, he published
an open letter to Bill Clinton, also in Esquire, publicly
apologizing for the Troopergate story, which he characterized as
part of a Right-wing vendetta against the president.
The recantations
have continued apace ever since. Most recently, in the August 2001
issue of Talk magazine, Brock published an excerpt from a
forthcoming book-length mea culpa in which he confessed that
he'd intentionally trashed Anita Hill, indiscriminately trusting
even farfetched allegations about her personal life while pointedly
ignoring evidence damaging to Clarence Thomas's side of the story.
As for his Troopergate reporting, Brock admitted that in his determination
to track down Clinton's liaisons and tie them to abuses of political
power, he had paid off sources and conjured up dire scenarios out
of minor wrongdoings.
Brock explained
that he'd lost his soul.
All of which
brings us to the release of Brock's book, Blinded by the Right:
The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. By now, it's doubtful
he has many hairballs left to cough up. Still, Brock's odyssey is
worth lingering over. He is not the first or even the most notable
journalist whose neuroses and peccadilloes have insinuated themselves
with alarming intensity into his reportage — see: Rather, Blubbering
Dan. But Brock is an important figure for what he tells us about
ourselves. Certainly, he's no investigative journalist; that much
should have been apparent from the start. Investigative journalists,
as a rule, avoid phrases like "a little bit nutty and a little
bit slutty." Partisan hacks, by contrast, revel in them. That's
the species to which Brock properly, if erratically, belongs. The
fact that many folks on the political Right saw him as a kind of
latter-day counterpart to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein only underscores
the extent to which their hearts clouded their judgments. But of
course the same could be said for folks on the Left — who,
for example, a year before Sept. 11th, were touting a 500 page "exposé"
of Rudy Giuliani by The Village Voice's Wayne Barrett as
the definitive portrait of a racist megalomaniac. Typical of what
Barrett unearthed, however, was the scandal that the former mayor
had done pretty well but not great on his SAT's.
It's human
nature, in other words, to trust the intentions of whoever is telling
us what we want to hear. This is not worrisome in and of itself,
but our views must remain open to revision as more reliable evidence
emerges. Barrett's Rudy rant now seems, in the wake of Giuliani's
performance after the World Trade Center disaster, and with the
jaw-dropping accomplishments of his mayoralty in sharper relief,
not just petty and wrongheaded but downright ludicrous.
By contrast,
despite his questionable methodologies, Brock seems to have stumbled
onto basic truths about his subjects. Bill Clinton did in fact allow
his promiscuity to interfere with his job in the White House . .
. and he did, in fact, use government resources to cover his trail.
History has borne out Brock's surmise with regard to Clinton's character.
Nor was Brock
altogether off the mark in his assessment of Anita Hill. Regardless
of whether we accept the tentative conclusions of Jane Mayer and
Jill Abramson, two reputable journalists, who argued in their book
Strange Justice that Clarence Thomas probably lied
to the Senate when he denied Hill's charges in their totality, the
morality of Hill's actions remains forever calculable by what's
not in dispute. What's not in dispute is that Thomas never laid
a hand on her, never chased her around a desk, never requested sexual
favors, never even propositioned her. What's not in dispute is that
he wrote letters of recommendation on her behalf, counseled her
on her career, accepted her dinner invitations out of friendship,
and that she followed him from job to job. What's not in dispute
is that the sum of her accusations amounts to a middling case of
boorishness. Yet she never once voiced an objection to Thomas's
behavior — not even a "Gee, Clarence, I'd really rather
your didn't say stuff like that." What's not in dispute is
that at the very moment her mentor's life was subject to the glare
of a national spotlight, at the very moment his dream to serve on
the Supreme Court was within his grasp, Anita Hill came forward
with stories of Clarence Thomas cracking jokes about pubic hairs
on Coke cans. What's not in dispute, finally, is that she turned
him into a national laughingstock, the butt of late-night talk-show
jokes, and in so doing she ensured that someday his obituaries will
contain, along with a recounting of a distinguished career in public
service, and a long list of principled judicial opinions, the name
Long Dong Silver.
The fact that
Anita Hill is neither nutty nor slutty, in retrospect, only means
she has fewer excuses.
So what should
we make of the journalistic career of David Brock? Maybe just this:
There's nothing more gullible, or more desperate, than a politicized
heart.
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