Brock Again for More
Chronicles of a politicized heart.

By Mark Goldblatt, a writer in New York & author of Africa Speaks
March 4, 2002 1:40 p.m.

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.