After sex comes guilt. In a Talk magazine excerpt this month from his forthcoming book, “Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative,” Brock takes it all back. Actually, he started wearing the self-promotional sackcloth and ashes in Esquire in 1997 and 1998, when he apologized to Bill Clinton for the explosive 1993 American Spectator “Troopergate” story that introduced the world to Paula Jones. That story helped give us Newt Gingrich and, several turns of the screw later, impeachment. But now Brock, who says he apologized to Anita Hill by letter in 1998, has gone further: “To protect myself and my tribe from the truth and the consequences of our own hypocrisies, smears, coverups and falsehoods, I consciously and actively chose an unethical path. I continued to malign Anita Hill and her liberal supporters. I trashed the reputations of two journalists [Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer, authors of “Strange Justice,” a book about Thomas] for reporting something I knew was correct. I coerced an unsteady source. I knowingly published a lie. I falsified the record.”
Whew. The obvious question is why should we trust anything Brock says, including his own confession. One answer might be to let the liar retract his lies, but not believe any new information he offers. In this case, that would mean new credibility for Hill because Brock totally renounces his 1992 best seller, “The Real Anita Hill” (where he called her “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty”), and he renounces his attack on “Strange Justice,” thereby giving fresh credibility to their revelation that Thomas had a history of interest in pornography. But Brock’s sensational new claim that Thomas, after joining the Supreme Court, passed to Brock via an alleged intermediary negative personal information about a woman witness against him (a serious impropriety for a justice, if true) must be viewed skeptically. Consider the source.
The price paid for Brock’s shattered credibility was clear this spring when Ted Olson was confirmed as solicitor general. Olson himself was a pioneer of the politics of personal destruction, authoring (under a pseudonym) vicious American Spectator articles about innocent Clinton aides. But because it was David Brock–and not someone more credible–alleging that Olson had lied about his role in the “Arkansas Project” probing Clinton, Olson was a shoo-in for confirmation. Meanwhile, feminists shouldn’t have been celebrating last week over Thomas, given what their president–Clinton–did with Monica Lewinsky.
Where Brock’s book might slightly redeem itself is in explaining how today’s powerful conservative media operate. After watching his Anita Hill story get endlessly promoted by Rush Limbaugh and others, Brock realized he had “stumbled onto something big, a symbiotic relationship that would help create a highly profitable right-wing Big Lie Machine that flourished in book publishing, on talk radio and on the Internet throughout the ’90s.” Brock was thrown out of this tight-knit club when his 1996 book, “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham” (for which he received a $1 million advance), wasn’t negative enough. “Because I didn’t show her as a criminal, it was seen as a whitewash,” he said this week. Liberal rending of garments isn’t nearly as lucrative. The new book, he notes, fetched only $100,000.
The book-jacket copy for the memoir says it’s “in the tradition of [ex-communist] Arthur Koestler’s ‘The God That Failed’.” For another analogy, I went back to Whittaker Chambers’s brilliant book “Witness.” It’s a dispiriting comparison. The battles over communist infiltration could be petty and low. McCarthy-era baiting of Owen Lattimore (a Johns Hopkins China expert) was no better than Gingrich-era baiting of Neal Lattimore (a Hillary Clinton aide). But at least the political struggles of the postwar period were about something genuinely important. Francis Fukayama’s theory of “The End of History” doesn’t seem so outlandish when the national conversation moves from cold war to cold sore.
Even so, it’s important to remember that the line from Koestler to Brock is a descent in taste and seriousness but not in national condition. The tawdry sexual politics of the 1990s were a luxury afforded by prosperity–a peace dividend redeemable in history’s red-light district. The struggles were so bitter, as Henry Kissinger said of academic politics, because the stakes were so small, at least compared with other decades. Even bad sex is better than war.
