May
21, 2002 9:45 a.m. Another
Brock Lie?
Additional
information.
im Noah posted another
important piece on Slate late last week raising doubts about David
Brock's veracity. I may be able to contribute something here. Noah shows
that several of Brock's claims about a key incident in his shift to conservatism
turn out to be false. The shouting down of Jeanne Kirkpatrick during a
speech at Berkeley in February of 1983 helped to push Brock to the right.
Brock claims to have been the "cub reporter" assigned to cover
the Kirkpatrick speech by the Daily Cal, but Noah shows that Brock
was not a "cub reporter" (he'd been at the Daily Cal
for some time), and did not write the story on the Kirkpatrick speech
for the paper. Then Noah suggests that Brock may not even have been at
Kirkpatrick's talk, particularly because Brock mentions an incident with
fake blood that none of the other press stories report. That would be
a much more serious lie, and it's something I can comment on. I've
written about the Kirkpatrick talk for NRO.
The
shouting down of Jeanne Kirkpatrick was definitely a major turning point
in my own gradual shift to conservatism. I didn't see the speech, but
I was appalled when, in the weeks following the speech, not simply a few
radicals, but major sections of the Berkeley campus — faculty members
included — expressed approval of those who silenced Kirkpatrick.
I once raised the Kirkpatrick issue in a speech I made at a college. Afterwards,
a member of the audience approached me and said that she herself had been
at Kirkpatrick's speech. She denied that Kirkpatrick had been shouted
down, because Kirkpatrick had finished her speech, and had even taken
questions.
A few weeks later,
I ran into Jeanne Kirkpatrick herself and told her what I'd heard. Kirkpatrick
told me that she had in fact finished her talk, but that the speech had
been a fiasco, with much of it drowned out, and her friends and supporters
appalled at her inability to be heard. She had obviously soldiered on
so as not to let the protesters win, but the disruption was real. After
all, the Berkeley community wouldn't have argued about it for weeks afterwards
if a profound disruption had not occurred. But the point is, in Brock's
description of the talk, as reported by Noah, Kirkpatrick didn't finish
her talk, but instead, "turned on her heels and surrendered to the
mob..."
Of course, everyone
here is working on 20-year-old memories. It's possible that my informant
was wrong about Kirkpatrick having finished her talk, and that Kirkpatrick
herself was confused by my recitation of my old acquaintance's claim.
But if my informant and Kirkpatrick herself remember her finishing her
talk, while Brock says Kirkpatrick stopped her talk and left, then we
do have some reason to believe that Brock may have lied, not only about
being a cub reporter assigned to the story, but even about being present
at the event.
Still, Noah seems
to have checked out the press coverage of the Kirkpatrick talk, and doesn't
himself mention a discrepancy with Brock's claim that Kirkpatrick gave
up speaking and left. So the upshot of this is not entirely clear, but
deserves to be further checked out. In particular, we need to know what
the press stories say about whether or not Kirkpatrick finished her speech.
And by the way, the whole Kirkpatrick incident would be worth a serious
magazine piece. It was one of the first key cases of campus political
correctness, and the early response to it from all sides is therefore
of some historic interest.
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im Noah posted 
