Killing the Messenger Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  Newsletters

  Copyright Page

  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  To my colleagues and staff at Media Matters, American Bridge, Correct the Record, and the Franklin Forum

  Introduction

  Return to Little Rock

  The bar at the Capital Hotel serves Moscow Mules in copper mugs to the power brokers who run Little Rock. Set a block from the banks of the Arkansas River, it’s where lobbyists, legislators, and miscellaneous political operatives have gathered for decades to talk shop and hatch plots.

  “Rules,” the hotel bar’s website asserts, “are made at the Statehouse; laws are made at the Capital Bar.”

  I spent a lot of time at that hotel bar as a young man in the 1990s. But I wasn’t there to make laws. I was there to make trouble.

  And now, fifteen years after I’d last stepped foot in Arkansas, I was back to make amends.

  If you’d told the younger me that, a few blocks east of my old stomping grounds at the Capital Bar, there would someday stand the Clinton School of Public Service… just up the street from the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library… on President Clinton Avenue… I would have had a stroke.

  And if you’d told me that I’d someday find myself back in Little Rock to appear on stage at the Clinton School of Public Service as a guest speaker… I would have had another.

  When the United States won the Cold War, the right lost its raison d’être—its organizing principle and its most effective argument for why conservative ideas should hold sway and Republican politicians should hold power. Ronald Reagan was exiting the stage, and the young ideologues who had enthusiastically followed him into the conservative movement were left scrambling to define a cohesive vision for the country’s future.

  I was one of them. During my college years at the University of California, Berkeley, I’d become a right-wing iconoclast, a crusading campus journalist bent on destroying what I saw to be a corrupt, politically correct liberal establishment. After graduation, I moved to Washington, where I joined a generation of young writers who gained prominence as the ideological (and, in many cases, biological) heirs to modern conservatism.

  We inherited our predecessors’ clubby social connections, and, in many cases, their affectations (at twenty-five, I was known to stroll around the offices of the Washington Times, the crusading right-wing paper owned by cult leader Sun Myung Moon, with a pipe and even a walking stick).

  But while we all adored Ronald Reagan, reviled communism, and believed liberal was a dirty word, we never really got around to articulating what, exactly, we were for.

  Instead, we found agreement on what we were against. Or, rather, who. Absent a clear ideological end, the demonization of our opponents became an end unto itself. The politics of personal destruction wasn’t only something we did to further the conservative movement—it became the conservative movement.

  I wasn’t just a practitioner of this new kind of politics; I was a pioneer. In 1991, law professor Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, her former boss, of sexual harassment. My fellow conservatives and I couldn’t believe her. And, in fact, we made it our mission to discredit her—not just so that Thomas would be protected from what we saw as outrageously unfair and false allegations, but because we saw Hill as an avatar of the liberal effort to attack everything we stood for, whatever that was.

  Thomas, of course, was narrowly confirmed. But we still had a job to do: burnishing his legacy. And I was assigned to do it. I wrote a twenty-two-thousand-word article for the March 1992 issue of the American Spectator entitled “The Real Anita Hill,” in which I attempted to take apart Hill’s story, characterizing her as part of a liberal conspiracy to frame our hero, now Justice Thomas.

  It was a hit piece, full of explicit (and, often, unsubstantiated) details of Hill’s personal life, innuendo, and pure hearsay—all capped with a flatly racist caricature of Hill on the cover. Smugly labeling her as “a bit nutty and a bit slutty,” I used every nugget I could dig up, every allegation I was passed by Republican operatives in the Bush administration and on Capitol Hill, and a healthy dose of imagination to smear Anita Hill.

  The Spectator proudly published it as “investigative journalism.” I turned the piece into a lucrative best-selling book. Rush Limbaugh read from it on the air for three days straight. My career as a right-wing hitman was born.

  But even as I was making a name for myself on the right, the conservative movement found itself facing down a problem it couldn’t solve: a problem named Bill and Hillary Clinton.

  As Governor Clinton campaigned for the presidency in 1992, it quickly became clear that we couldn’t compete with his message of hope and optimism, much less his ambitious, positive agenda for the country.

  (Later, I would learn that right-wing animus toward the Clintons began even farther back in Arkansas, based in resentment among the rear guard of Southern racists over then governor Clinton’s early embrace of civil rights and stoked by the nerve of his wife to build a career and a public persona of her own.)

  All we had were scandals, real and invented, that we hoped would stop the country from taking a chance on a young, dynamic, progressive Baby Boomer—and his ambitious, brilliant, accomplished wife.

  It didn’t work. The American people sent the Clintons to Washington. In a democracy like ours, that should have been the end of it. He won, we lost; better luck next time. But now that we were out of power in addition to being out of ideas, conservatives worried that it would be the end of us.

  The problem with the Clintons wasn’t so much who they were as what they represented. They were a threat to the established political and social order, serious agents of change who, if allowed to succeed, could make us look even more ideologically bankrupt, even more hopelessly irrelevant, than we already were.

  So conservatives defied two hundred years of American history and set the stage for a coup. The Clintons barely had time to unpack in the White House before the threat of impeachment was being quietly bandied about in my circles. The right was determined to take down the Clintons. All they needed was an excuse. And I was sent to Arkansas to find one.

  The Spectator’s publisher, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, believed Robert Penn Warren’s famous line, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption, and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” And he knew that if we were going to find that something, or, quite frankly, create that something, it was going to take a lot of money. So, long before the era of SuperPACs, this one lone billionaire was willing to shell out millions to propagandize the nation and wreck the Clintons.

  His magazine—my employer—launched what became known as the Arkansas Project, a dirt-digging operation into the Clintons’ past that eventually encompassed a kitchen sink full of allegations ranging from financial fraud to drug running and even murder.

  That was how, as a young muckraker on the make, I found myself in Little Rock, downing cocktails at the Capital Bar and swapping stories with a cast of eccentrics. On one trip, I was introduced by a Republican operative to a group of Arkansas state troopers who had served on then governor Clinton’s security staff and who wanted to go public with stories scandalizing Bill and Hillary Clinton.<
br />
  They painted a picture of the president as nothing short of a compulsive womanizer: picking up women at hotels, ushering conquests into the governor’s residence for “personal tour[s] of the mansion,” and even receiving oral sex in the parking lot of his daughter’s elementary school.

  As for Hillary, the troopers described her as cold, calculating, and cruel, a woman with a “garbage mouth” who “hated Arkansas” and “liked to intimidate men.” The Clintons’ marriage was, in the troopers’ eyes, one of political convenience: “If he was dead politically, I would expect a divorce in 30 days.”

  If that strikes you as a little too perfect for the caricature of the Clintons the troopers were trying to draw, well, it struck me that way, too. As we talked, I became suspicious of the troopers’ motives. I knew they wanted to use my article to cash in and sell a tell-all book. And, of course, I couldn’t be sure if what they were saying was true.

  But I had a job to do: Get dirt into print. So I did. I took the troopers at their word and published all of the above, plus plenty more, in the pages of the Spectator.

  Nothing was too inflammatory to make it past the tissue-paper-thin fact-check at the magazine:

  The troopers speculated that Hillary tolerated this behavior much as eighteenth-century aristocrats maintained marriages of convenience to suit the social and material needs of both parties. Hillary herself was intimately involved with the late Vincent Foster, a partner at the Rose Law Firm and later deputy White House counsel. Foster killed himself in July under circumstances that remain murky. “It was common knowledge around the mansion that Hillary and Vince were having an affair,” said Larry Patterson, though he conceded that the evidence for this is more circumstantial than his first-hand knowledge of Clinton’s behavior.

  And nothing was too petty to be judged worthy of ink; even the Clintons’ cat didn’t escape unscathed (Socks, I revealed, “apparently retches with alarming frequency”).

  My “reporting” became national news, and the mainstream media soon followed up. This was no accident; turning the more respectable outlets against the Clintons was part of the goal of the Arkansas Project, and it worked. Soon, the troopers’ allegations were printed in major newspapers and repeated on national television. The “scandal” even got a name: Troopergate. And the press now had license to chase all sorts of stories, even stories that were thinly veiled attempts to smear the Clintons for partisan purposes.

  Troopergate, of course, was just such an attempt. On closer examination, it turned out that the lurid stories the troopers had told me belonged on the fiction shelf.

  Other reporters, following up on the story for outlets that, unlike the Spectator, had fact-checking protocols in place, found gaping holes in the troopers’ accounts. The troopers claimed that security gate logs had been destroyed as part of a cover-up; it turned out those logs had never been kept in the first place. The troopers described watching via surveillance camera as Governor Clinton and a supposed paramour engaged in sexual activity in a truck; it turned out that this was physically impossible, as the camera was incapable of capturing a clear image from inside a vehicle. The troopers recalled that Vince Foster had fondled Hillary at an event; it turned out that the event had never taken place.

  The poisonous fruit from the tree of lies that I had planted by identifying a “woman named Paula” in my Troopergate piece prompted Paula Jones to come forward, she said, to clear her name, subpoenaed as part of Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit against President Clinton the troopers would reverse themselves, denying under oath much of what they had asserted to me in our interviews. Those depositions established that the troopers used their proximity to the governor to procure women for themselves.

  It got worse: I later found out that an operative close to would-be House speaker Newt Gingrich had paid the troopers to talk.

  This, then, wasn’t just a false story. It was a setup, a deliberate and organized fraud perpetrated on the American people by wealthy conservatives and the Republican political establishment. It was, as Hillary Clinton was widely mocked for suggesting, the beginnings of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

  In the immediate aftermath of my Spectator piece, the mainstream media, suddenly transfixed by Arkansas, revived an old “scandal” from the 1992 Clinton campaign, one about quid pro quos and conflicts of interest involving a money-losing land deal called Whitewater that the Clintons had invested in. The feeding frenzy over Whitewater in Washington was such that President Clinton felt compelled to call for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the matter. Eventually, a right-wing judge, Ken Starr, took over the inquiry and proceeded to go very far afield from his original mandate, probing the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, through which he found a former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, with whom Clinton had had a consensual sexual dalliance.

  After spending several years and $70 million investigating the Clintons, Starr turned up no wrongdoing. But the story of the president and the intern was enough for the GOP to open the impeachment proceedings in Newt Gingrich’s House of Representatives that the right had lusted for since the Clintons came to Washington.

  It was, in short, everything I went to Arkansas to achieve.

  By then, six years into the Clinton presidency, I was disgusted with what I had wrought.

  After the trooper story broke, a publisher commissioned me to write a book about Hillary Clinton, expecting a hit job that would be published on the eve of the 1996 elections. And why not? In addition to characterizing the president as a sex-crazed sociopath, conservatives thought they could gain political advantage by portraying his wife as a conniving, shrewish, unstable Lady Macbeth. And they were willing to pay me a million bucks to do it.

  So I spent two years researching and writing, retracing every step of Hillary Clinton’s life, doing more than a hundred interviews, and going back twenty years collecting virtually every piece of paper that had her name on it.

  Contrary to what my patrons expected, I found no silver bullet that would stop the Clintons. What I did find was a woman with a steadfast commitment to public service, a clear political vision, and a deep well of personal integrity. I couldn’t write the book conservatives wanted, not without betraying the facts as I saw them—and betraying myself in the process.

  You see, in the aftermath of publishing my Anita Hill tract, while writing a review of Strange Justice, a competing book on the Senate hearings by Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer that provided fresh evidence for Hill’s charges, I learned from my own trusted sources, the people who knew Clarence Thomas best, that they never believed he was innocent, despite what they had led me to think when I was reporting my book. Now I was part of their club, and these seasoned Washington players could let me in on their secret: Defending Thomas was never about bringing the truth to light; it was all about partisan politics. Thomas, not Anita Hill, had lied, just as Strange Justice suggested—in fact, he had perjured himself to get on the court.

  And, for my part, I had been sold a bill of goods, which made me complicit in the monumental lies of Thomas and his supporters, even though I wrote my book in good faith. I made a private vow that as I reported on Hillary, I would not be used by the right again.

  So I resisted the conservative spin on Hillary, sticking to the facts and being as fair as I could to my subject. And in struggling to find Hillary’s humanity, I gradually found my own. I didn’t turn into a progressive or a Democrat overnight, but this period did mark the beginning of a political awakening that would play out in the years to come.

  I ended up publishing a nuanced portrait of Hillary that exonerated her on the long list of charges that I concluded had been manufactured by her opponents: Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate—there was nothing to any of it. And I also reached an affirmative judgment, based on my study of her prodigious talents, strong character, and bedrock American values: Hillary, I wrote, had the potential to be “an even more historically significant figure than her husband.”

/>   Predictably, the right wasn’t interested. Their campaign of character assassination would continue without me. And by the time that campaign culminated in an unconstitutional power grab—the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton—I was ready to do everything in my power to help Clinton stay in office by blowing the whistle on the machinations of my ex-colleagues.

  My divorce from the conservative movement came in a long piece I wrote for Esquire magazine, “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man,” and, later, a book called Blinded by the Right, in which I exposed what I had been involved in—a wrongful scheme to thwart a twice-elected president by throwing sand in the gears of progressive governance.

  I apologized for smearing people. I confessed my sins to the public. And, in the years that followed, I’d find a way to make a different kind of impact on our political discourse, one that promoted honest debate and served to ferret out the kind of lies I’d once peddled.

  But it took fifteen years for me to come back to Arkansas.

  It was hard not to feel a bit like a rehabilitated convict returning to the scene of the crime.

  I was nervous. And why not? The room felt more like a press conference than a college talk. Many of the reporters who had built careers at major national publications covering the “Clinton beat” flew down from New York and Washington, a mini-reunion of their own. Once again, my take on the Clintons would make headlines (including on the front page of the New York Times). And, of course, this being 2014, the press was also live-tweeting my remarks.

  Also in the room were many of the Clinton associates I’d long done battle with, some of whom I’d even attacked personally. Up in the balcony, I could see Bruce Lindsey, a trusted counselor to the former president who had been on the front lines of the White House’s legal defense efforts against the parade of phony scandals and Republican witch hunts.