I wasted three hours this weekend reading Brock. In the interest of keeping others from doing same, here are the highlights. I do not guarantee that any of them are true:
p. 24: "... respected conservatives like Arnaud [de Borchgrave]... and GOP Senator Orrin Hatch... who had gone so far to call [Washington Times owner Reverend Sun Myung] Moon's theology 'a religious alternative to Communism,' had made the judgment that in the war against Communism, one couldn't pick and choose one's allies.... There were no other moneybags on the scene clamoring to lose $50 million a year to underwrite an unprofitable conservative newspaper."
p. 32: "As... Michael Lind noted... our group produced no great thinkers or writers, no classic books or landmark articles, no successors to the elder Buckley or Kristol or Podhoretz. The most successful among us would one day end up as top functionaries in right-wing Australian tycoon Rupert Murdoch's media empire, or as hosts of cable TV chat shows..."
p. 42: "... I learned... that... he was, in fact, one of those who 'knew' I was gay and, golden boy or no, he and a few other conservatives had many laughs ridiculing me behind my back at the Eberstadt's salon. Nick was in on the gay bashing..."
p. 44: "For my conservative friends and me, the lessons of Iran-contra were twofold... turning opponents into criminals was remarkably effective... respect for the rule of law and constitutional principles... could be sacrificed."
p. 49: "We called [George H.W.] Bush a 'squish'... and seethed as we watched him.. endorse a range of liberal legislation from an affirmative action bill to new environmental restrictions..."
pp. 56-7: "A litany of [Limbaugh's] serious factual errors--from his claim that no one had been indicted in the Iran-Contra affair, when in fact there had been fourteen indictments, to his suggestio that Congress had opposed the American use of force in the Persian Gulf, when both houses had authorized it.... With the notable exception of William Bennett, who called Limbaugh 'possibly our greatest living American... extremely sophisticated, extremely smart... very serious intellectually,' the Republican establishment was slow to embrace Limbaugh's routine..."
pp. 62-3: "Rush Limbaugh... was not who he seemed to be... in the otherwise celebratory Spectator profile... one discordant note, describing Limbaugh as 'an unlikely conservative warrior'... denounc[ing] 'lifestyle liberalism'... [while] 'twice divorced with no children... does not go to church'."
p. 63: "Gingrich... I was enough of an insider to see that Newt didn't seem like the kind of guy who would impose a fundamentalist view of morality... another member of the decadent and hypocritical conservativbe elite... rhetorical flourishes to inflame cultural animosities in the right-wing base... a product of the permissive culture he was attacking... marijuana, avoid[ing] service in Vietnam... divorced his first wife... an unfaithful husband to his second wife, Marianne..."
pp. 73-4: "...even within the [conservative] movement many concluded that foreign money corrupted the scholarly work Heritage put out on foreign policy..."
p. 74: "Heritage... the least efficient bureaucracy... three requisition forms.. before I could get a replacement bulb for my desk lamp..."
p. 74: "At Heritage... [George H.W.] Bush was regarded with suspicion if not contempt.... In one celebrated incident, a Heritage executive, Ben Hart's wife, Betsy, had presided over a meeting where a replica of [George H.W.] Bush's head was presented on a silver platter."
pp. 98-99: "... no respectable publication, not even the [American] Spectator, had ever seen the likes of the sexist imagery and sexual innuendo I confected to discredit Anita Hill.... The editors weren't careful with the magazine's reputation, much less mine. Wlady, the managing editor, hardly questioned a word I filed. All women were 'emotional' and thus prone to fabrication, Wlady said."
p. 111-2: "I took up the issue of another witness and ex-Thomas employee, Angela Wright, who never testified in the public hearing.... The discrediting of Wright was seen by the Thomas loyalists as perhaps the most importnat part of my book.... [T]he FBI file contained information that could be used to undermine Wright's credibility. Though disclosure of the file was potentially criminal, Mark [Paoletta] seent me to John Mackey at the Justice Department... an aide to Senator Strom Thurmond... Terry Wooten.... had copies of several pages from Wright's raw FBI file.... The FBI file, which contained unfiltered and unverified information, enabled me to do to Wright what I had already done to Hill..."
p. 113: "Of course it had been none other than Judge Silberman who gave me the false information on his colleague Pat Wald...."
p. 115: "Christopher Lehmann-Haupt... called my book [The Real Anita Hill] 'well-written, carefully reasoned, and powerful in its logic'..."
p. 119: "My book party... was one of the conservative social events of the year.... Everyone came--Senator Danforth, Judges David Sentelle and Larry Silberman, Judge Bork and his wife, the entire Kristol clan, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Boyden Gray, Charles Krauthammer, Brit Hume, Mad Dog Sullivan..." p. 139: "The troopers' wicked portrait of Hillary Clinton was a jumble of contradictions. In one scene, she was a man-hating feminist whose marriage... was a cynical pact for... power; in another, she was an anguished spouse, distraught over her husband's unfaithfulness..."
p. 146: "Though he was a sitting federal judge... Larry [Silberman] strongly urged me to go forward [with 'Troopergate']."
p. 159: "... no one in the major press ever culled the many errors in my piece into a comprehensive factual refutation. The problems surfaced in dribs and drabs.... Troopergate was described as tasteless and irrelevant, but it was allowed to enter the media ether as if it were true."
p. 166: "Questioning the value of a vaccine for AIDS, Norman Podhoretz, who published me in Commentary, wrote that it would permit homosexuals 'to resume buggering each other by the hundreds with complete medical impunity...'"
p. 170: "Having made my decision [to come out of the homosexual closet], I called Wlady to inform him. He tried to talk me out of it. When I wouldn't budge, he hung up. He called back soon to say that he had spoken to Spectator board member Fred Barnes, who advised 'stonewalling'"
p. 173: "Elliott Abrams... told my friend how dismayed he was that conservatives would give an open homosexual a rousing reception..."
p. 179: "I was tipped off to ongoing discussions within the Jones camp.... [T]he main reason I wasn't sued was that a conniving cadre of right-wing lawyers and operatives was secretly calling the shots in the Jones case to forward its own political agenda of undermining the Clinton presidency.... Cliff Jackson, Peter Smith... former Bush... official Richard Porter... Danny Traylor... the Landmark Legal Foundation... funded by Richard Mellon Scaife... Rush Limbaugh... Mark Levin, a former chief of staff to Ed Meese..."
p. 180: "... the Jones case, which [Ann] Coulter later described as 'a small, intricately knit right-wing conspiracy'"
p. 191: "Conservative insiders like the Silbermans and Sentelle knew that Starr, though he would pass muster as independent to the outside world, would prove to be a reliable anti-Clinton partisan..."
pp. 193-4: "Scaife and his top aide Dan McMichael... asked me to undertake an investigation of former Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright.... [McMichael] told me he beleived that Fulbright... had been an agent of the Soviet KGB and had recruited Clinton as a Soviet spy.... Bob Tyrrell... enthusiastically chimed in, promising I would get right on the story..."
p. 199: "David Bossie... close... to Newt Gingrich and... Dan Burton... landed a series of powerful posts as a Republican Congressional investigator.... In 1998 Bossie... would resign... after it was discovered that he had overseen the editing of tapes of... Webster Hubble... in a way that appeared to implicate Hillary Clinton in a criminal cover-up... take[ing] out portions of the conversations demonstrating that Hillary Clinton wasn't involved at all. The misleading tapes were released by Bossie to the press, which trumpeted the false allegations widely..."
pp. 203-5: "In one internal memo on the... Arkansas project... Wlady wrote... 'it never amounted ot anything concrete enough for a story.' Bob [Tyrrell] was adamant in order ing up an article.... When I declined... Bob turned to British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.... Of all the 'Clinton crazies' I would meet... Ambrose was the least cynical of the bunch, and perhaps the craziest.... Ambrose said [Clinton] compelled [Arkansas] prison wardens to make inmates available to him for his sexual gratification.... Ambrose drew the shades and asked if we had been followed... he believed his house was under surveillance by the Clintons' 'death squads'. A few minutes into the conversation, it was apparent to me that poor Ambrose had lost his grip on reality.... (Among Ambrose's admirers was conservative columnist Robert Novak, who gave his book a rave review.)"
pp. 205-6: "Wlady and I, and publisher Ron Burr, opposed the Evans-Pritchard article.... Ron encouraged me to sound out board members... for help. My first call was to Ted Olson.... Ted... told me bluntly... that while he believed... that Foster had committed suicide, raising questions about the death was a way of turning up the heat on the administration until another scandal was shaken loose, which was the Spectator's mission..."
p. 224: "Soon after the new Congress was sworn in... a dinner party to introduce me... to three members of the new GOP majority... Bob Barr... Ernest Istook... and Tim Hutchinson.... I was struck that virtually no conservative policy initiatives were mentioned during the evening's discussion. There was no Contract with America, just a Contract on Clinton..."
p. 225: "Barr had stated that he would do 'anything in his power' to stop a family member from having an abortion... the second of his three wives, Gail. said... that Barr had raised no objections... drove her to the hospital and paid for it.... While Barr has made defense of the 'family unit' a centerpiece of his career, Gail also charged Barr with committing adultery, noting that he married his third wife within a month of their divorce.... At dinner, Barr asked me what I thought about bringing the Arkansas state troopers before the Republican-led judiciary committee to testify about Clinton's philandering..."
pp. 225-6: "[Tim] Hutchinson, a Baptist minister.... Shortly after voting to impeach Clinton in the Lewinsky scandal, Hutchinson divorced his wife and married an aide..."
p. 226: "... John Fund of the Journal's editorial page was a close political associate of Gingrich and similary hypocritical. Though he took positions aligned with those of the Christian Right, Fund had not discouraged a young ex-girlfrined--the daughter of another Fund ex-girlfriend--from seeking an abortion he offered to pay for. 'I respect life, but I also make judgments and have different variations on that theme'..."
p. 226: "... Journal editorial page editor Robert Bartley, who had once said that in the United States 'there aren't any poor people, just a few hermits or something like that'..."
p. 238: "I would have expected Ricky [Silberman] of all people to share my opinion that Mayer and Abramson hadn't put a dent in [Clarence] Thomas's armor.... [But] she knew him, I didn't. 'Have you read it?' Ricky roared into the phone.... 'He did it, didn't he?".... The words burned through my being with the force of a blowtorch.... Was this the same woman who had assured me that Hill's charges were impossible? Who had marched on the Senate chambers as founder of Women for Judge Thomas? Who had testified under oath to his impeccable character? Did Ricky know something I didn't?..."
pp. 242-3: "Mark [Paoletta] said that he had posed my question about how to discredit [Kaye] Savage to [Justice] Thomas.... Thomas had, in fact, some derogatory information on his former friend Savage; he passed it along to Mark so that Mark could give it to me. Quoting Thomas directly, Mark told me of unverified, embarrassing personal information about Savage that Thomas claimed had been raised against her in a sealed court record of divorce and child custody battle more than a decade ago. Thomas also told Mark where Savage worked..."
p. 246: "... I crossed a line I had never crossed before. I shredded Mayer and Abramson.... When I wrote those words, I knew they were false. I put a lie in print.... The authors, I charged, had 'perpetrated one of the most outrageous journalistic hoaxes in recent memory.'.... Fred Barnes... called [my] review 'devastating.'... I was told by Judge Silberman that... Stephen Breyer... let it be known... that the review settled the case for him in Thomas's favor..."
p. 247: "... I told Mark [Paoletta] all I wanted for Christmas was a signed photograph of Clarence Thomas.... The photo arrived, Thomas in his black judicial robes, with the inscription 'To David, with admiration and affection, Clarence.'"
p. 250: "I was to construct for the right a book-length 'Hillary' timed to coincide with the 1996 presidential election. I attended only one short meeting with the publisher of Simon & Schuster, Jack Romanos, who asked me only one question befoer okaying the $1 million [advance]. Did I think Hillary Clinton was a lesbian? Romanos wanted to now. With a smirk, I assured him that if she were, I was just the man to find out."
p. 262: "I crashed my Mercedes into another car.... I called Mark [Paoletta] at home and told him what had happened. He suggested that I move my car to the lowest floor in the garage, backing it in to hide the dent, leave it there for ten days or so, then whisk it to a nearby auto body shop for repairs."
p. 280: "When I saw one of Ken Starr's deputies, Brett Kavanaugh... mouth the word 'bitch' when the camera panned to Hillary..."
p. 284: "... an alternative event to the Democrats' Renaissance Weekend.... Judge Silberman had coined the fitting name Dark Ages for our counter-weekend..."
p. 293: "... Why Olson... worked to cover up the Arkansas Project remains a subject of speculation..."