"David Brock - Blinded By The Right" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brock David)

Along came the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings in which Thomas defended himself against Hill's charges of sexual harassment. Brock allied himself with Silberman and other Thomas supporters -- including officials in the first Bush White House -- and set out to demonize Hill in the Spectator as incompetent, "kooky," "perverse" and, most famously, "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty."

Socially, he craved "the kinship that the Thomas camp seemed willing to provide me as a way of filling my tortured need for friendship and affection and acceptance." His view of the Thomas-Hill clash was "black and white, good and evil."

The article made a huge splash, leading to Brock's book trashing Hill. He found himself being quoted by Rush Limbaugh, invited to fancy parties and dinners, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Robert Novak, Fred Barnes, Bill Kristol and Arianna Huffington. Brock reveled in his sudden fame. He was "bouncing out of bed in the morning on a mission to destroy the left," he says. "I was thrilled to be embraced by the conservative establishment. I was fairly young and ambitious. I thought I was happy."

One of Brock's conservative sources put him in touch with four Arkansas state troopers who alleged that they helped procure women for Bill Clinton when he was governor. Brock was wary of their tawdry tale but wrote it anyway for the Spectator, complete with every disgusting anecdote he could collect. "I did what was politically useful," he says. Clinton "was a Democrat, therefore he was a target."

The Clinton sex wars had begun. Brock's 1993 piece mentioned an Arkansas woman named Paula, who one trooper said had offered to be Clinton's girlfriend. This prompted an angry denial by Paula Jones, who eventually sued Clinton. Brock himself had trouble believing Jones's account but says that "if I could get any credit for discovering Paula Jones, I was happy to get credit." The Spectator, whose circulation was zooming from 30,000 to 300,000, boosted his salary to $125,000.

But the man who was exploiting the alleged sexual misbehavior of others was still struggling with his own sexuality. He was "scared stiff" when gay newspapers threatened to disclose his homosexuality. He decided to emerge from the closet in a series of interviews with this reporter in 1994.

His method was to vilify New York Times columnist Frank Rich in the process. Rich, who knew nothing of Brock's sexuality, had assailed Brock as a "misogynist." Brock, fortified by a few shots of vodka, acknowledged his sexuality while accusing Rich of conducting a "thinly veiled outing."

Brock now admits he was unfair to Rich, seizing "an opportunity to turn the tables on the liberals and try to portray myself as having been a victim and try to rally conservative support. And it worked." Brock became "a kind of gay right-wing poster boy."

He slid further into the journalistic gutter by mounting an attack on two reporters, Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer, when they published a competing book on the Thomas-Hill imbroglio. For one thing, he tried to bully a friend of Thomas's into retracting her story (of having seen a Playboy pinup in Thomas's kitchen) by threatening to reveal derogatory information from an old divorce case.

Brock also tried to knock down Abramson and Mayer's report that Thomas had frequented an X-rated video store. Brock says that Thomas confirmed the video store rentals through Mark Paoletta, a former Bush White House lawyer. Paoletta has called Brock's account "simply not true."

Despite what he believed about Thomas and pornographic videos, and knowing this made Hill's testimony more plausible, Brock dismissed the charge. "I put a lie in print," he says.

Brock later got a photograph from Thomas, signed: "To David, With admiration and affection, Clarence."

Brock's new book includes a eureka moment in which Brock spoke by phone with his friend Ricky Silberman after the Abramson-Mayer account of Thomas's movie-rental habits. "He did it, didn't he?" Silberman is quoted as saying.

That, says Silberman, "was made up out of whole cloth. I never in a million years could have, would have or did say what he said I said." When she heard Brock was writing a book that would castigate conservatives, she says, "it never occurred to me that he would try to get me. I just don't understand it."

Loss of Faith
Riding high and full of himself -- his answering machine message said, "I'm out trying to bring down the president" -- Brock was drawn into the Spectator's "Arkansas Project." Financed by conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife, the $2.5 million effort used private eyes and dubious Arkansas sources to dig up dirt on Clinton, with some charges as wild as drug-running and murder and using prison inmates for sexual gratification.

Brock thought many of the charges were baloney. But by now he had a new and more lucrative target: Hillary Rodham Clinton. His earlier notoriety had helped him land a $1 million book contract to investigate the first lady. But Brock was shaken by his loss of faith in Thomas, conflicted about producing another hatchet job. He spent months in a "drunken funk." He developed a bad case of acne. He crashed his Mercedes. Still, he soldiered on.

"I wanted the million bucks," he admits.

Depressed and losing weight, Brock produced a somewhat sympathetic Hillary biography in 1996 that bitterly disappointed his friends on the right. Disgusted, he found himself denouncing another book by former FBI agent Gary Aldrich, who alleged -- apparently based on nothing but a convoluted conversation with Brock -- that Clinton was sneaking out for late-night trysts at the Marriott.

Conservatives were appalled. The party invitations vanished. Scaife wanted Brock fired, and the Spectator eventually dropped him.

New York Post columnist John Podhoretz, who had given Brock his first job at Insight, called him a "disgrace" who was engaged in "almost boundless hypocrisy."

Silberman counseled against his planned apology to Clinton in Esquire. "David, you don't want to write this story so focused on how your feelings are hurt," she recalls telling him. "It's just not serious."

A New York Post gossip columnist suggested Brock had apologized because he was having an affair with Hillary Clinton's former press secretary, which he wasn't. The former peddler of junk journalism now felt like the target of a hate campaign.

Brock felt used, but he realized he had used his former pals as well. He soon defected to the other side, striking up a friendship with Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal and trying to help prevent the president's impeachment -- an effort that had been set in motion by Brock's reporting on Paula Jones. The right, he now believed, was abusing the political and legal system.

Brock is angry, as the book makes abundantly obvious, though it's less clear why he includes little digs about one commentator's extramarital affairs and another's talk of preferred positions in bed.

It all seems so long ago now -- the nutty and slutty business, the endless sexual allegations, the impeachment, the anger, the grand juries, the screaming cable matches -- which is perhaps why few of Brock's former friends want to talk about him.