I found a review of the book by Brock who was on the political right. It was the book you told me
I shouldn't buy because you didn't want Brock to receive the royalties!
(LOL). Also, Costco has or had "Theodore Rex" for $19.99.
'Blinded by the Right': David Brock Takes it Back
New York Times Review of Books
March 24, 2002
By FRANK BRUNI
Few journalists, if that is the right
word for him, brimmed with the
kind of bile that David Brock did. He
was a serial assassin of character, an
unhappy man on a cruel mission: to
tar the identified enemies of
conservatives by whatever half-truths
or hyperbolic accusations might be
necessary. He was ruthlessly good at
it, even poetic in a perverse fashion. It is to Brock that we owe the printed assertion
that Anita Hill returned students' exams with pubic hair on the pages, and it is to
Brock that we owe the infamous line that Hill was ''a little bit nutty and a little bit
slutty.''
Now he is taking all of it -- or at least most of it -- back. ''Blinded by the Right: The
Conscience of an Ex-Conservative'' is less a memoir than a supposedly anguished
mea culpa, a public act of political atonement. Brock wants us to know that he did
people wrong, and that he recognizes it. He wants us to understand that he was
chasing fame and fleeing personal demons, and that the velocity of those efforts
distracted him from the unwarranted damage he caused. And he wants us to
believe him.
But can we? That is the abiding frustration and ultimate limitation of ''Blinded by
the Right,'' which encompasses the ugly political warfare of the 1990's, from the
confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas through the impeachment of President
Clinton. Brock unavoidably taints his testimonial with his admission of a past
willingness to twist facts and a habitual tendency to see the world in black and
white. So while he has switched tribes, decamping from the right to find a new
appreciation for the left, it is impossible to know whether he has switched tactics.
Brock seems as exercised by the mendacity of conservatives as he once was by the
machinations of liberals, and as eager to settle scores. His critique of his former
allies is withering. The credibility of that critique is anyone's guess.
Certainly, some of Brock's book is trustworthy, because he
simply adds abundant detail to what other, less suspect
journalists have also chronicled: the millions of dollars
that Richard Mellon Scaife poured into indiscriminate
efforts to bring down Bill and Hillary Clinton; the
hypocrisy of conservatives who espouse traditional moral
values despite personal histories including abortions and
extramarital affairs; the smear campaigns that were driven
as much by a lust for power as by principle. Brock, who
was once deep inside the conservative movement, is in a
position to convey all of this, even if he is not the most
reliable messenger.
As he tells it, he lurched to the right during his student
days at the University of California, Berkeley, where he
encountered the left's sometimes oppressive political
correctness. His new political affiliation was cemented by
his desire to be accepted by a tightly bound circle, which
was what he found when he went to Washington and
began to mingle with conservatives there. Failing to grasp
that their bellicose certainty was simply a mirror image of
what he despised among liberals, Brock relished and
embraced it, a decision he attributes partly -- and in a
manner that is perhaps too pat -- to his homosexuality.
''After all, I was in the closet, alienated from myself, and I
was also a social misfit,'' Brock writes, adding, ''The
apocalyptic 'us versus them' paradigm was gratifying, for it held out the promise of
assuaging my insecurities and giving me a sense of finally belonging.''
His first big show of fidelity came with his decision to savage Anita Hill in the pages
of The American Spectator, the magazine for which he wrote, even though he says
he reflexively believed her testimony about Thomas's sexually inappropriate office
behavior. ''I took a scattershot approach,'' he writes, ''dumping virtually every
derogatory -- and often contradictory -- allegation I had collected on Hill from the
Thomas camp into the mix.'' A muckraking article in 1992 led to a best-selling
book, ''The Real Anita Hill,'' and to a determination to maintain his newfound
celebrity at the expense of a next target. So Brock absorbed and circulated patently
suspicious stories from Arkansas state troopers about Bill Clinton's sexual
shenanigans during the time when he was the governor of that state.
Looking back on it now, Brock berates himself and ridicules the prominent
conservatives who shared his zeal, drawing on a smorgasbord of firsthand
experience to ladle out tasty tidbits about Arianna Huffington, Laura Ingraham,
Kenneth Starr and Ted Olson, now the solicitor general in the Bush
administration. Brock says that while Olson did not doubt that Vincent Foster, a
Clinton aide, had committed suicide, he nonetheless encouraged conjecture that
Foster might have been murdered. For committed Clinton bashers, Brock explains,
this was an effective strategy for ''turning up the heat on the administration until
another scandal was shaken loose.''
Why did Brock break ranks? He says the process began with the publication of a
later book about Hill and Thomas, ''Strange Justice,'' by Jane Mayer, who now
writes for The New Yorker, and Jill Abramson, now the Washington bureau chief of
The New York Times. ''Strange Justice'' debunked much of ''The Real Anita Hill,''
and Brock discovered that he could not honestly and successfully debunk ''Strange
Justice'' in return. Thus began a re-examination of his methods and a
readjustment of his moral compass, culminating in a vote for Al Gore in November
2000.
That, at least, is Brock's own take on his arc, which ends with a man awakening at
long last to the concept of integrity. A less charitable interpretation might be that
Brock wanted a new act, and found it in self-flagellation. For a photograph that
accompanied a 1997 article in Esquire in which he first began to confess his
right-wing sins, he let himself be tied to a tree and surrounded by kindling, the
pose of a heretic on the precipice of immolation. He subsequently wrote yet
another confessional for Esquire. ''Blinded by the Right'' is only his latest stab at a
rather theatrical brand of contrition.
THE book is consistently articulate and very funny from time to time. It undeniably
holds the reader's interest. But it is also disconcerting in unintended ways. Brock
brings a strange boastfulness even to passages in which he is supposedly raking
himself over the coals, and he litters the book with derogatory comments about
other men's appearances that have ambiguous relevance to the narrative at hand.
He variously describes the characters he meets as ''chubby, spectacled,'' ''bald,
cherub-faced,'' ''fat, pockmarked,'' ''roly-poly,'' ''plump,'' ''white-haired, red-faced,''
''sweaty, corpulent'' and ''misshapen, unkempt and seemingly unshowered.'' He
also lets it be known that he did not lack for amorous attention, and that he began
working out with weights as he put his postconservative life together.
For all of that, ''Blinded by the Right'' is valuable in its vivid depiction of a
take-no-prisoners era -- perhaps in retreat, perhaps merely in quiescence -- when
genuine political debate took a back seat to playground bullying and much of
journalism, not just Brock's, descended to a gossipy and lascivious low. Brock
flourished in that muddy gutter, which is why it clings to him still.
Frank Bruni is a Washington-based staff writer for The New York Times Magazine
and the author of ''Ambling Into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush.''
nytimes.com |
