Hillary, Commie Martyr
This week my column earns
its name--though "strange bedfellow" might be a better title for something by
David Brock. Brock, in case you've forgotten, is that young, gay, conservative
investigative sex journalist who specializes in the reverse beatification of
liberal saints in the gay-baiting American
Spectator . After
making his name with a best seller arguing that Anita Hill had mixed up
Clarence Thomas with someone else, Brock became even more notorious by
breaking, in the pages of the Spectator , the lurid tale that came to be
known as "Troopergate." Though many of the "revelations" by Clinton's former
bodyguards were clearly baloney (Vince Foster groping Hillary Clinton in
public, Bill consuming whole baked potatoes in a single bite), the fantasy was
blended with elements of reality in an artful way. One product of the mixture
was the Paula Jones lawsuit, which was filed not only against Clinton but also
against one of Brock's own trooper witnesses, who alleged that "Paula" did not
flee the governor's hotel room as promptly as she recalls.
Given
that background, Brock's The Seduction of Hillary Rodham has been much
awaited, eagerly by the Dole camp, less so by the Democrats. The hype succeeded
in getting my hopes up, but not for long. Slate has gotten its hands on a
bootleg copy of the book, marked "confidential," and embargoed for Oct. 8.
Slate is woefully disappointed.
There are only four allegations here that even vaguely
resemble news:
1. While
running for Congress in 1974, Bill Clinton contemplated buying black votes in
order to steal the election, but ultimately did not.
2. In the
early '80s, Hillary hired a private detective to find out about her husband's
tomcatting.
3. In 1992,
the Clinton campaign hired another private detective to intimidate bimbos. This
detective obliquely threatened the life of Gennifer Flowers.
4. On the
morning of the inauguration in 1993, the Clintons had a frank exchange of views
on the steps of Blair house, trading such endearments as "fucking bitch," and
"stupid motherfucker."
These
nuggets all have the same problems. First, they are remarkably thinly sourced,
to 1) a disgruntled former consultant who was disbarred for bribery; 2) a
detective who had his license revoked by the State of Arkansas; 3) Gennifer
Flowers' ex-roommate; and 4) Park Police. Second, none of them implicates
either the president or first lady in anything that is actually or even nearly
illegal. It was the consultant, not the Clintons, who wanted to buy votes.
Campaigns hire detectives all the time. Profanity isn't a crime. But worst of
all, these bombshells aren't particularly juicy, and to find them, you have to
wade through 400 pages of stupefying rehash.
Possibly because he returned from Little Rock
without the goods, Brock takes a new authorial tack. He casts himself as a
fair-minded, quasi-objective investigator, appalled by the Hillary-hating
right. To do this, of course, he must distance himself from himself, and this
he does with aplomb. A Spectator piece of his about the travel-office
firings "was even accompanied by a facetious caricature of Hillary as a witch!"
he notes. Fancy that. The new, evenhanded Brock says Hillary is "neither an
icon nor a demon."
Actually,
he veers drunkenly between these two poles, now mocking Hillary for thick
ankles, dowdy outfits, and résumé padding, now excusing her involvement in
Travelgate and Whitewater. The troopers see Hillary as "an undesirable,
foul-mouthed harridan who had brought the mistreatment and neglect on herself."
Not so, Brock assures us, gallantly fending off the rogues. "It seems fairer to
conclude that Hillary's flaring temper was an understandable reaction to the
humiliation to which she was subjected on a regular basis."
Brock's disingenuousness is monumental, and takes place at
several levels. At the first, Brock, under the guise of fairness, slings enough
mud to drown a Bangladeshi village. His particular obsession is that Hillary
Clinton is, I kid you not, a Red. Carl Ogelsby, whose writings influenced her
at Wellesley, was a "Maoist or Marxist." Saul Alinsky, about whom she wrote her
senior thesis ("now under lock and key") was the mentor to "the socialist
agitator Staughton Lynd, who had gone to Hanoi with Tom Hayden in 1965 to meet
with North Vietnamese leaders." At Yale Law School, her revolutionary "uniform"
consisted of white socks, sandals, "and the loosefitting, flowing pants favored
by the Viet Cong." She studied the First Amendment with "Tommie the Commie"
Emerson and was seen around the "influential circle of Robert Borosage," later
connected to the Institute for Policy Studies which "promoted pro-Soviet
movements in the Third World at the height of the renewed Cold War." She spent
a summer working in Berkeley with lawyers Robert Truehaft and Charles Garry,
who were--you guessed it--Communists.
And on it
goes. The Legal Services Corp., on whose board Hillary sat, was a hotbed of
Marxists and folk singers. She later joined the New World Foundation, on whose
senior staff was Adrian W. DeWind, "who during the 1970s was a member of the
Committee for Public Justice, founded by Lillian Hellman." Mrs. Clinton's
mentor Marian Wright Edelman was "at the height of the 1980s U.S.-Soviet
tensions ... a member of the board of SANE/FREEZE, a leading disarmament group,
and she has been affiliated with the Washington School, a project of the
Institute for Policy Studies." After the election, the first lady responded to
a congratulatory note from the National Lawyers' Guild, "which had been founded
in the 1930s as an adjunct of the American Communist Party." She thought about
appointing as secretary of education Johnetta Cole, a member of a committee
"connected to Cuba's intelligence forces and to the World Peace Council." Even
the detective hired by the Clinton campaign in 1992 to intimidate bimbos was a
"People's Detective"!
Robert Truehaft actually was a Communist--long
before his association with Hillary; "Tommy the Commie" was a McCarthyite
nickname for a Yale professor who never was. In either case, so what? Brock's
anachronistic redbaiting resembles the fashionable game "Six Degrees of Kevin
Bacon," in which it is shown that the actor can be associated with any other
actor in the world in a series of short steps. He then makes a laughingstock
out of himself by accusing right-wing "critics" of practicing "smear" tactics
and "guilt by association." When it comes to such subjects as lesbianism,
drugs, and witchcraft, Brock's technique is slightly different. He retails
various "suspicions," then assures us that they are "contemptuous." I think he
means "contemptible," but you get the idea.
The
second level of falsity is that Brock defends Hillary only to elevate his own,
proprietary scandal. As he indicates, he thinks the media focused on Whitewater
and Travelgate in 1994 as higher-minded alternatives to Troopergate. His agenda
is to convince us that James McDougal doesn't matter, but that Paula Jones
does. If he has to grant immunity to Hillary to prosecute her husband, so be
it. Deep down, he assures us, Hillary is a good person. Bill is not. Unlike the
virtuous Hillary, the president's late mother "slept around," he tells us,
without any further elaboration. She even "ministered to call girls," whatever
that means. William Blythe, whom Clinton "claims as his natural father," was
with a different woman every night. Clinton, to Brock, is an empty vessel, or
at least a vessel with his wife at the tiller. He has always been a parasite on
her political acumen, her intelligence, and her income.
At the same time, Brock undermines his fainthearted defense
by arguing that Hillary is a closet revolutionary cadre, a committed radical
who takes as her creed Saul Alinsky's admonition that the struggle to help the
poor is a struggle for power in which the ends always justify the means. He
even describes her journey to the White House as a Maoist "long march." This
theory demands a certain creative use of evidence. When Alinsky offered her a
job after college, Hillary turned him down, saying in a letter that she
disapproved of his methods and preferred to work inside the system. But to
Brock, this only enhances the point. Her chance to foist socialism on America
finally came with health-care reform. Never mind that lefties hated her
managed-competition plan. Never mind that she didn't even try to stop her
husband from repealing the welfare entitlement. She is a "Trojan horse," making
tactical concessions in the name of the ultimate radical millennium.
Though Brock's primary theme
is Hillary's clandestine pursuit of her own idea of justice, he intersperses it
with his own titular one about how a good person was "seduced" by an amoral
husband and the seedy realities of Arkansas political life. Unexplained is how
one can be a dedicated revolutionary and a sellout to the status quo at the
same time. But then, conservatives need to have it both ways about the
Clintons. Bob Dole still hasn't decided whether his opponent is a "closet
liberal" or a chameleon. You can make either case, but you have to make up your
mind.
