Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (53 page)

Broadly the facts were these: A conservative billionaire, Richard Mellon Scaife, grandnephew of the legendary Andrew Mellon and major financial backer of Richard Nixon, had used his money—among other things—to fund a number of bodies, newspapers, magazines, news agencies, and research foundations to attempt to discover and publish material damaging to the Clintons. The group Accuracy In Media, whose Cliff Kincaid we found earlier in this chapter trying to turn up the heat on President Obama over his birth certificate, received nearly $700,000. AIM’s then head and founder, Reed Irvine, ran many stories supporting the idea that Vincent Foster had not committed suicide. So too did Joe Farah’s Western Journalism Center, which in 1994-1995 benefited from $330,000 in donations from Scaife. When Christopher Ruddy’s time at the
New York Post
came to an end, possibly because of his continued fixation on Foster, Scaife employed him on his own paper, the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
.

The most controversial Scaife initiative was the so-called Arkansas Project, in which, from 1993 to 1997, $2.4 million of Scaife money—channeled though the charitable foundation linked to the conservative
American Spectator
magazine—was spent on digging up stories in Arkansas, where Scaife and his associates seemed to believe there would be
the
story that would destroy Bill Clinton. The editor of
The American Spectator
, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., subsequently described how the idea for the Arkansas Project emerged, on a fishing trip in Chesapeake Bay in late 1993, with Scaife’s right-hand man, Richard M. Larry, a conservative PR man, and a Washington lawyer. The last two had links to people in Arkansas who, for various reasons, loathed Clinton and who were willing to pass on the rumors that percolated the state.
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With their eyes on the various political and journalistic prizes that publishing unprecedented scoops on Clinton misdemeanors might bring, those involved set about employing private detectives (one of whom, Rex Armistead, received more than $350,000 for his efforts), chasing down “witnesses,” flying indiscreet state troopers to rendezvous in Washington, and generally doing everything they could to attract every gold-digging story manufacturer in Arkansas. The long-term result was disaster for
The American Spectator
, which did not uncover any real scoops, ran at least one story on drug-smuggling that was described by staff as “an embarrassment,” lost circulation, and eventually, after running a review hostile to Ruddy’s book on Foster, lost Scaife’s money, too. By mid-1997, the Arkansas Project was stopped, leaving a residue of Internet stories, pointless congressional inquiries, urban legends, and the impression among many on the right that the supercriminal in the White House had somehow escaped justice.

However dubious the methods of those behind the Arkansas Project, the problem with describing their actions as a “conspiracy” is that they were not carried out in secret. Those funded by Scaife made no effort to hide his largesse, or to deny what it paid for. More problematic was the willingness of Kenneth Starr’s prosecutorial team to use one-to-one press briefings to insinuate stories about the Clintons. Dan Moldea gave an example of this in an interview with
Salon
magazine in the spring of 1998. The week after the Lewinksy story broke, while he was researching his Foster book, Moldea spoke to an unnamed source in Starr’s office. Moldea offered the opinion that there was nothing substantial in the rumors of an affair between Foster and Hillary Clinton. He went on:

I was not asking a question; I was making a declaration of fact. His response was, “I can’t comment on that.” I said, “I didn’t ask you a question.” He said, “I would be violating a statutory responsibility if I said something about that.” I said, “I didn’t ask you a question. What are you telling me, here? ” He said, “Let us just say that is in play.”
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This is a dark art at work, but hardly a conspiracy. Almost everything had happened in plain view, even if people dazzled by Clinton rumors couldn’t see it.

Wagging the Dog

When it was all over, and Clinton had left the White House and the second Bush had entered it, a few people had a little time to analyze what had happened. Clinton’s aide Sidney Blumenthal, himself once a youthful conspiracist, reflected on how the “pseudoscandal” of Whitewater had come to dominate the presidency despite the fact that “there never was anything to it, in the beginning, middle and end.” And yet it led to perpetual investigation of the president, numerous stories together hinting at massive personal corruption, and a soured memory of an entire decade. Blumenthal concluded that the origins of the Whitewater pathology lay in Old South opponents of his New South boss, who had been active in campaigns to unseat segregationist Democrats, and that the scandal “was traceable to conflicts in Southern history over race and power.”
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But to Gene Lyons, who had watched appalled as his state was traduced as a kind of Haiti without the compensating beaches, there were much more mainstream culprits than the manipulative leftovers of bad-old-days Jim Crow politics. He was aghast at “how the right-wing sleaze campaign eventually succeeded in dictating mainstream news coverage.” Mainstream media had, in his view, latched on to chronically unreliable sources and, in its story lust, lost sight of any notion of fairness. Lyons cited cases of respected reporters passing on salacious gossip to other journalists that their own editors wouldn’t print, and noted a determination to create a story out of Whitewater, which led to a lack of discrimination about the sources and a willingness to run stories that were speculative.

In some cases, well-respected editors or columnists had allowed themselves to engage in or recycle innuendo that strengthened the view that there were conspiracies brewed up at the White House. In the
New York Times
, William Safire wrote a series of pieces in 1993 and 1994 that certainly hinted that all was not what it seemed when it came to Vincent Foster’s “apparent suicide.” On August 2, 1993, the famous conservative columnist pointed out that “the discoverer of the body remains unknown and no gun license has been found,” but that “assuming no crime, the question remains: Was Vincent Foster irrationally morose because of criticism of his office’s abuse of the F.B.I. in ‘Travelgate’—or was the President’s closest legal confidant dreading the exposure of malfeasance yet unknown?”
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Safire offered no evidence for this speculation.

Ten days later the columnist was asking about the Foster note, and particularly “the missing 28th piece, a triangular piece of the puzzle where the signature would have been” (in fact there is no reason why there should have been a signature on this note, and no reason to believe that there was one), before asking yet again, “Was dread of further scandal a triggering cause of the apparent suicide? Was there anything else Foster was working on, in Arkansas business dealings involving Clinton friends or in intelligence matters, that bears on his state of mind?”
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Again there was no basis for such a contention. Yet for some reason, when it came to Clinton, such stuff was all right. The crazy tail had managed to wag the sober dog. Arguably, a decade and a half later, as CNN’s Lou Dobbs championed the case for President Obama to present his long-form birth certificate to the world to establish that he was born where the
Honolulu Advertiser
in 1961 had said he was born, something similar was happening. The fringe had, temporarily, taken over the show.

Back After a Long Vacation

What is noticeable when comparing the Clinton conspiracies with the Birther movement is how many of the same people and organizations are involved. True, there are some like Philip Berg, the Truther and Birther who discerned conspiracies from all points on the political spectrum. But the Birther charge has been led by Joseph Farah at WND, Christopher Ruddy at NewsMax, and by Accuracy In Media, making use of the Internet and right-wing radio and cable television shows. It is as though they had been on vacation through the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, only to rediscover, on arriving home, that there was yet another slippery liar in the White House.

It would be easy to dismiss Farah and company as cynical pols, who are interested only in dragging down Democrats. But they seem rather to belong to the old populist tradition in American politics, ever vigilant, almost pathologically sensitive, to the possibility that the true Republic is in danger from those who wish to change and undermine it. In different ways, both Clinton, the flower-power-generation president with the feminist wife, and the cosmopolitan and black Obama have represented unwanted change from their imagined paradisaical United States.

In 1996, a former FBI man in the White House, Gary Aldrich, published a book outlining what a chamber of horrors the place had become under Clinton. Aldrich’s work is a classic example of a book that reveals far more about its author than its subject, as the former agent devotes page after page to his horrified reaction to the new generation of staffers. On page 30, Aldrich observes that “there was a unisex quality to the Clinton staff that set it far apart from the [George H. W.] Bush administration. It was the shape of their bodies. In the Clinton administration, the broad-shouldered, pants-wearing women and the pear-shaped, bowling-pin men blurred distinctions between the sexes. I was used to athletic types, physically fit persons who took pride in body image and good health.” And later: “Hillary . . . had an affirmative action program that favored tough, minority, and lesbian women, as well as weak, minority, and gay men. . . . If you compared the staffers of the Bush administration with those of the Clinton administration, the difference was shocking. It was Norman Rockwell on the one hand and Berkeley, California, with an Appalachian twist on the other.”
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Aldrich’s book sold 150,000 copies, mostly, one suspects, to people who shared his sense of disgust at such gender-bending. To Aldrich, the Clinton White House was truly an abomination.

Evans-Pritchard ended his 1997 book on Clinton with an Aldrichian aesthetic. “The American elite, I am afraid to say,” he wasn’t afraid to say, “is almost beyond redemption. Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong.”
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This is a conservative’s lament in a changing world. So it is interesting that the latest poster boy of the conservative media, Glenn Beck, has sold his book
Glenn Beck’s Common Sense
on the argument that his fellow countrymen “know that something just doesn’t feel right.” The something is change, and that is also how Farah thinks of Obama, now that the changers are back in power.

Strange Symmetry: Birthers and Truthers

It occurred to some pollsters and analysts in 2009, as they pondered the figures showing how many Republicans believed that Barack Obama was in fact a secret foreigner, that they had seen these statistics before, but in a different context. In some polls, up to 58 percent of Republicans were skeptical about Obama’s right to be president. And in a 2006 Scripps Survey Research Center poll (see page 234), 54 percent of Democrats had agreed with the proposition that people in the federal government had either assisted the 9/11 attacks or taken no action to stop them because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East. In other words, people were quite likely to believe conspiracy theories supposedly involving the other side—when that side was in power—but disinclined to accept those aimed at their own side.

Just as the implications of this were being digested by those who think about such things, one of President Obama’s main advisors, the Harvard law professor and author Cass R. Sunstein, produced a book that seemed to speak to this precise condition.
Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide
is a series of observations based on studies carried out by Sunstein and associates on group polarization—the phenomenon by which people become more extreme in the company of the like-minded. Two Colorado groups, for example—one in liberal Boulder and the other in conservative Colorado Springs—were given the same information about certain topics and then asked to discuss them. Among other findings: “Mildly favorable toward affirmative action before discussion, liberals became strongly favorable toward affirmative action after discussion. Firmly negative about affirmative action before discussion, conservatives became even more negative about affirmative action after discussion.”
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Sunstein found that a predisposition in a particular direction would be exaggerated, sometimes substantially, when people were in a group with others who shared the predisposition. And this would be as true for a group of judges as for a group of plumbers. One could add that such groups might easily exist in disembodied form as an Internet forum, the users of and posters to interlinked websites and news sites, the listeners to Web radio and watchers of YouTube. Once you decide what your predisposition is—Birther, Truther, or indeed, skeptic, there are myriad places to have it confirmed and then enhanced.

CONCLUSION: BEDTIME STORY

We’re academics and we’re rational, and we really believe Congress or someone should investigate this. But there are a lot of crazies out there who purport that UFOs were involved. We don’t want to be lumped in with those folks.

—DAVID GABBARD, EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION PROFESSOR AND 9/11 SCHOLAR
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