Of Lies, Targets and Mentors
The name left out of  60 Minutes' Stephen Glass story
Plus: Mike Hersh fills in a few blanks
by Tamara Baker

May 12, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (apj.us) -- I spent part of Mother's Day Sunday watching 60 Minutes interview Stephen Glass -- the liar in journalist's clothing who used to be employed at The New Republic from 1995 to 1998.

As I watched the interview, something struck me with the force of a hammer blow:

Young Mr. Glass, to judge from his storytelling habits, apparently knew how to pick his targets. He apparently knew, for instance, that he could say anything he wanted about President Clinton and Clinton's associates and get away with it. (And in fact, it wasn't any of his lies about the Clinton Administration that brought him down, but when Forbes magazine was trying to do a follow-up report on a story he did about hackers.)

I watched in shocked fascination as he described, in tones that did not seem in the least remorseful, how he slandered Clinton's friend and advisor Vernon Jordan as "lecherous" with allegations -- and "anonymous sources" -- invented out of thin air. I watched as it was revealed that he invented a totally fictional story about Monica Lewinsky condoms.

How could Glass do such things? How could he think he could get away with it for so long?

One reason might be the man who was his mentor: the late Michael Kelly, the well-known conservative writer who was the editor of TNR from 1996 to 1997.

As anyone who has followed his career knows all too well, Kelly's hatred of Clinton and Gore led him to mangle and shade the truth on numerous documented occasions (see http://www.dailyhowler.com/h040399_1.shtml, http://www.dailyhowler.com/h111500_1.shtml, and http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2000/evilgore.html). He also used his editorial positions at TNR and the Atlantic Monthly to push his anti-Clinton, anti-Democratic agenda, through his own writings or by promoting those writers whom he liked -- such as one Stephen Glass.

Glass, in other words, was just another of a long list of persons, not all of them in journalism, who have discovered that so long as they pick the right targets (namely, Democrats and any other politically-liberal types), they can be as intellectually lazy as they like, and no one will ever call them on it.

Just as FBI agent James Smith and his GOP-fundraiser/Chinese-spy girlfriend Katrina Leung found that they could create a Clinton-Gore "ChinaGate" scandal in 1996 to distract from their Red China spying and be believed by the highly partisan GOP operative Louis Freeh, Stephen Glass could say whatever vicious and untrue things he liked about Bill Clinton and his friends and Michael Kelly would eat it up unquestioningly. Glass' mistake was in writing a non-political story that was bogus: If he had accused the Clintons of being hackers, he'd probably still be at TNR.

Mr. Glass had forgotten to properly pick his targets.

Sidebar

From: Mike Hersh
To: Tamara Baker
Re: Michael Kelly
Date: 5/11/03

Tamara

I researched Kelly's hatred of Clinton and came up with this, which you
can include in your AmPol piece. If you use a lot of it, please list me
as contributing researcher or something? Thanks!

Mike Hersh

                        - = - = - + - = - = -

>"Is there a legitimate reason for Clinton-hating? Yes...." -- Michael
>Kelly
>
>Michael Kelly wrote:
>
>Brock is by his own repeated confession a vile liar but on this he is
>right: during some months of reporting in Arkansas, in which I was
>trying to sift something of the truth about Clinton out of the great
>confusion of stories and allegations about him that were all over
>Arkansas in the first year of the Whitewater story, I did follow a lead
>that took me to a meeting with Parker Dozier. I spent a few hours with
>him, but found him and his accusations against Clinton to be of no real
>interest and certainly of no credibility, full of himself and little
>else.
>
>I chalked up my visit as the sort of waste of time that is common in
>reporting. I don't believe I even bothered to take notes on anything
>Dozier said. I didn't follow up on any of it or make any use of it. I
>never reported anything he said in any form.
>
>What I did report about Clinton appeared in the Times in a magazine
>cover story in which I wrote that Clinton's Arkansas political history
>showed him to be someone of very real accomplishments but also someone
>who had earned a widespread reputation, including among friends, aides
>and political allies as untrustworthy.
>
>The article, like all of my reporting on Clinton, concerned itself with
>his actions in the public, political, official sphere. Although I had
>heard, as all reporters had, many whispers about Clinton's sex life and
>all sorts of other alleged scandalous behavior, of the sort that
>Clinton's enemies spread, I never stooped to printing that sort of
>garbage.
>
>My work in the Times story, which you may judge for yourself, stands in
>this regard in very marked contrast to the gutter-gatherings of David
>Brock.
>
>Mike Kelly
>
>---------------------
>
>Contrast that against Kelly's attack pieces:
>
>
>Roger Clinton's beauty is not of the gaudy or showy sort. It is the
>beauty of a Platonic ideal who knows he is ideal and is content to be
>just that. Roger's brother, Bill, has always been a hopeless
>lily-gilder.
>
>http://www.jewishworldreview.com/michael/kelly062101.asp
>
>
>Bill Clinton. Core Democrats adore Clinton and accept his view of his
>disgrace--that he was the victim of what amounted to a right-wing coup
>attempt. [T]his majority's opinion of Clinton is closer to the
>Republican view than to the Democratic: He may have performed well as
>president, but he disgraced the office and shamed the country.
>
>http://www.jewishworldreview.com/michael/kelly110200.asp
>
>
>It is the unembarrassed nakedness of the cynicism, the sure confidence
>that this too can be gotten away with, that is astonishing. But not
>really, not any more. We are used to this now, because Bill and Hillary
>and Al have made us used to it. The great lesson that the Clinton-Gore
>people have learned is the lesson that springs directly out of the hole
>that is the soul of Clinton himself: Do anything, say anything, get away
>with it.
>
>That was the voice of Clinton-Gore and it was saying: So, what are you
>going to do about it, anyway? These people will never change. As long as
>they are trusted with power they will abuse power; as long as they are
>trusted by the people they will lie to the people; as long as they are
>trusted with the White House ("their house," spokesman Joe Lockhart
>miscalls it), they will trash the White House.
>
>http://www.jewishworldreview.com/michael/kelly092800.asp
>
>
>The subject here is corruption. In the view desperately favored by
>Clinton and Gore, scandal in the Clinton years should be viewed as
>essentially one (admittedly large) "mistake," involving one White House
>intern, an isolated event having nothing to do with Clinton's overall
>performance in office or Gore's potential performance.
>
>But of course, the scandalous nature of the Clinton administration (or
>Clinton-Gore, as they used to like to say) was not limited to Lewinsky.
>It was structural, systemic; and it was rooted in a deep conviction of
>the moral superiority of Democrats and in the propriety, therefore, of
>employing any means necessary to perpetuate Democratic power. The
>Clinton administration ran government as a permanent war room.
>
>http://www.jewishworldreview.com/michael/kelly081700.asp
>
>
>Conason and Lyons argue, as Lewis notes, that the essential story of
>Clinton's impeachment is of a "ten-year campaign to destroy Bill and
>Hillary Clinton." In this construct, Clinton is not so much a powerful
>and bad man brought low by his low acts as a relative innocent set upon
>by powerful enemies--enemies not only of himself but of the republic.
>This is Clinton's own argument, and it is the critical line of defense
>for those determined to write the story of his disgrace as one of
>relative triumph.
>
>To consider this question, let's first concede the truth of its premise.
>Clinton apologists such as Conason and Lyons are right to say that
>Clinton has long been pursued by people who hate him. These haters, to
>some degree, have worked together and indeed in some cases have
>conspired in their efforts to get Clinton.
>
>Where is the comparable reason in public action for so passionately
>hating Clinton?
>
>There isn't one. Clinton's ability to inspire hatred--the precise
>emotion for many is, I think, a mixture of fear and contempt--is about
>something else.
>
>Yet it soon became a widely held opinion in Arkansas that he was, in a
>fundamental sense, both contemptible and destructive: a Slick Willie, a
>man whose word was flatly no good on matters both personal and public,
>an abuser of power and of persons (female persons) and, in terms of the
>disjunction between his public character and his true self, a fraud. His
>wife, it was widely considered, was his partner in character.
>
>Is there a legitimate reason for Clinton-hating? Yes, and the reason is,
>as it happens, the other reason for Nixon-hating. Good liberals like my
>parents (who threw a party the night Nixon resigned) regarded Nixon as
>profoundly unfit for office because they believed that he was capable of
>abusing his powers, of abusing his office, of abusing the people, of
>abusing the truth, of abusing the law--of doing practically anything in
>the pursuit of power and personal desires. Watergate proved them right.
>
>Yesterday The Post reported that Kenneth Starr's successor as
>independent counsel, Robert W. Ray, is actively considering seeking an
>indictment of Clinton after he leaves office. "There is a principle to
>be vindicated, and that principle is that no person is above the law,
>even the president of the United States," Ray said.
>
>http://www.jewishworldreview.com/michael/kelly041200.asp