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How I almost brought down the president...
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
David Brock
Tuesday March 12, 2002
The Guardian
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.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
End<{{{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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