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Date sent: Fri, 01 Jun 2001 20:37:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: Peter Morgan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [CIA-DRUGS] OT: Karl Rove tricked the media into trashing the
messenger while ignoring the message
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Excerpt:
After G.W. Bush, Atwater and Rove created the Willie
Horton scandal that
scuttled Dukakis in 1988, Rove and Bush blindsided the
popular incumbent
Ann Richards in the Texas governor's race.
Online Journal - http://www.onlinejournal.com
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05-23-01: How Karl Rove tricked the media into trashing the messenger
while ignoring the message
By Sander Hicks
Publisher, Soft Skull Press
May 23, 2001
"They're heat! Furnace fodder!" snapped the vitriolic St. Martin's Vice
President Sally J. Richardson to the New York Times on October, 23, 1999.
I was doing maintenance work on my two buildings in New York's Lower East
Side that Saturday morning; drinking black coffee. I was reading the
entire national section of the Times to keep from having to start mopping.
This story on the bottom of page A12 caught my eye: "Citing Distrust of
Author, Publisher Kills Book on Bush." At first I laughed, imagining the
problems we publishers have with our prickly and precious authors. As the
head of a scrappy, fierce independent press, I had had authors thrown out
of their own readings at Barnes & Noble for showing up with urine samples
and drugs. I had had writers shout in my face, "Look, Sander, I am a
genuis!" when working with me as an editor. How bad could St. Martin's
writer be?
I read on. Reporter Doreen Carvajal was level-headed about the salacious
details: "The book's author, J.H. Hatfield, matched police photographs of
a felon convicted of hiring a hit man 11 years ago in an unsuccessful car
bombing of his boss. . . ."
That was a new one.
"Mr. Hatfield's book included claims from anonymous sources that Mr. Bush
. . . was arrested in 1972 on cocaine possession charges that were later
expunged by a judge as a favor to Mr. Bush's father." She then pointed out
that although St. Martin's did not recant or question any of the material
in the book, their chief counsel said they no longer viewed the author as
credible.
That week, I borrowed one of the rare, repossessed copies of the book from
a friend and read it on a bus trip to Washington, DC. As I traveled to see
my family, I used a pack of sticky notes to hit every page where I found
something relevant, newsworthy and under-reported about Bush's past.
Pretty soon, the book overflowed with the edges of sticky notes poking out
like the feathers of a peacock. Bush dodged the draft, was a C student at
Yale, lost a lot of other people's money in boom times in the Texas Oil
market, was investigated by the SEC for insider trading. What a garish
life of special favors, what a clear colorful pattern of cut corners, what
blurry values. This book was well-sourced, consistent and professionally
written. I came back to New York and maneuvered my company, Soft Skull
Press, Inc., to step in and acquire the rights to the book.
Meanwhile, Hatfield was in hiding. The tabloids were after him. Camera
crews camped on his front lawn for two weeks. The phone rang off the hook.
They all wanted to know who the confidential sources were who fed him the
story, but Hatfield stuck to his journalistic code. He had sworn to the
sources they would be talking to him under condition of anonymity.
Two months after the bloody October of Hatfield's public destruction, the
media kept up steady fire. With no sources revealed, the focus of feature
coverage in print and on television shifted fast from reporting on
Hatfield's Bush story to loud, loose talk about Hatfield's crime. The
major media tended to sing the same chorus: "How ironic, this Hatfield who
was involved in a dirty plot to kill his boss in 1987 is trying to verify
these rumors about young Bush being arrested for cocaine possession in
1972. But this story couldn't be true, of course, since Hatfield's a
criminal . . . right?"
I begged J.H. Hatfield to come to back New York, to set the record
straight in a taping of an episode for 60 Minutes. It was a crisp, sunny
winter day in New York City. Although Hatfield had the flu, he taped his
portion of the program early in the morning, and I went in later. After
the taping, we walked through the Lower East Side. I had taken Hatfield
and his lawyer to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. I needed to hold him to
his promise to share the sources with me; I needed to see the phone and
travel records. I needed to know the whole thing wasn't a big sick joke. I
needed to be 100 percent sure. Part of me already believed in Jim
Hatfield, because he had incredible heart, and hope. He believed in what
we were doing. He stood behind all his research. We were both mavericks,
just trying to do the right thing and not get killed.
His lawyer and my co-worker at Soft Skull went back to our basement
office. Hatfield stopped on the corner of Ludlow and Rivington and turned
to me in the bright light. His hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of
his Navy peacoat. He looked tired, but determined. He looked down the
street.
"You've got to take this information with you to your grave. You've got to
swear."
I swore not to repeat it to anyone.
But I also knew that the truth is bigger than one person. We would both
choose to reveal the sources publicly when the time was right, when we had
no other choice. When we no longer had anything left to lose.
"The Eufaula Connection? That was Karl T. Rove. The other top Bush advisor
was Clay Johnson. The Bush confidante source, was his minister, Mayfield.
Now you know. Remember, you've got to swear now. . . ."
J.H. Hatfield had just identified Karl T. Rove, the Bush campaign's senior
advisor to me personally as the primary source for the G.W. Bush cocaine
arrest story. It took me that whole year to understand why Rove would do
such a thing.
How Rove Made Hatfield the Target to Take the Heat Off Bush
When the media stumbled upon the story that George W. Bush was arrested
for cocaine possession in 1972, it was through an anonymous tip reported
by a columnist at Salon.com ("Bush Up To His Arse In Allegations!
Sharp-Toothed E-Mail, Killer Bees and Bags of Worms. Will This Hound
Hunt?" by Amy Reiter.) Hatfield's book was in final proofing stages when
this hot story broke on August 25, 1999. The piece was the first to state
that Bush had been arrested in the early '70s, and that he "was ordered by
a Texas judge to perform community service in exchange for expunging his
record showing illicit drug use," according to the source. To make matters
worse that August, Bush went out on his own on the campaign trail and
improvised on camera about his drug past. With his handlers out of town
ghost-writing his 'autobiography,' he blurted out at a press conference
that he hadn't done drugs since 1974. The media crowed at the spectacle.
For instance, USA Today gushed, "Bush has admitted something, but he
refuses to say what."
Hatfield, who long suspected something was awry in young Bush's playboy
days, went back to his Texas sources to corroborate this story through
Clay Johnson and Karl Rove, his regular sources of information. According
to Hatfield, Rove and Johnson explained the cocaine arrest on the phone,
under condition of anonymity. Rove had earlier taken Hatfield on a fishing
trip to Lake Eufaula, OK, to discuss Bush, so his pseudonym in the
Afterword became the cloak-and-daggeresque "The Eufaula Connection."
Why choose Jim Hatfield? Hatfield had committed his 1987 crime in Dallas,
where longtime Bush schoolmate and friend Clay Johnson was an associate.
Johnson was friends with Hatfield's employers Larry Burke and Kay Burrow.
He would have heard about the violent workplace conspiracy that stemmed
from an illicit affair Burke was having with Burrow. Burrow had tried to
blackmail Burke, and Hatfield took the fall for the attempt he arranged on
Burrow's life at his boss Burke's request.
Rove and Johnson further ensured they could discredit Hatfield by feeding
him flawed information. They altered key facts in the cocaine arrest
story, and thus raised the burden of proof for future reporters. At one
point, Hatfield was told that the arresting judge was a Republican, a
falsehood which, although easily detected, served to damage Hatfield's
credibility. After St. Martin's rushed the cocaine arrest story into the
book as an Afterword, suddenly The Dallas Morning News received the
private, criminal record of J.H. Hatfield's felony in Texas. The News
published an article about Hatfield's felonious past and it was all over
for the Bush cocaine arrest story.
This style of disinformation follows the pattern set by all masters of
public opinion of the 20th Century. Karl T. Rove is an avid history buff,
and applies what he reads. In just two short months he surgically removed
the media's talk of the Bush drug arrest by feeding it to a biographer he
knew had a felony conviction in his past. Hatfield broke the story, and
then Rove broke Hatfield. The Bush Campaign's friends at the Dallas
Morning News broke a salacious, mesmerizing story about a car-bomb, a hit
man, a boss, a felony conviction, and the mass media's attention is
focused en masse on Hatfield, who can't take the heat, denies the
allegations and flees town. St. Martin's doesn't know what's going on, but
suddenly they are getting threatened by Bush campaign lawyers who are
"looking into" suing them. St. Martin's behavior becomes paranoid, they
announce that they are pulling 88,000 copies of the book from stores. So
much for America, so much for the Bill of Rights.
Rove, Atwater and Horowitz
Karl Rove met Lee Atwater in 1972, and shortly afterward was investigated
by the Republican National Committee for teaching "dirty tricks" to
college students.
After G.W. Bush, Atwater and Rove created the Willie Horton scandal that
scuttled Dukakis in 1988, Rove and Bush blindsided the popular incumbent
Ann Richards in the Texas governor's race. Rove learned this strategy from
Atwater -- use the scare-tactics of shocking TV ads and personal attacks.
Rove minimized Bush's public appearances and limited the spontaneous
public speaking of the tongue-tied Bush, a tactic Rove revived in the
recent race for president. Rove used Governor Bush's re-election campaign
in 1998 as an opportunity to portray Bush as White House material, even if
it meant falsifying data on minority voting. Rove made Bush campaign hard
to decimate his already weak opponent Gary Mauro. With the "landslide,"
they created the impression of a racially-diverse, popular mandate,
setting the stage for the superficially inclusive "Compassionate
Conservatism" two years later.
Rove is a tough, burly, folksy character, a self-educated historian who
never finished college. A life-long Republican strategist (and former
consultant to tobacco giant Phillip Morris), he is known for discipline
and hard-right ideological rigor. Yet, he is also known to burst
spontaneously into song. Like Bush, he speaks in the common tongue. On
television during the campaign, he was pugnacious, and taunting, calling
opponents (like Mike Murphy of the McCain campaign), "Man." This salty use
of late 60's youth culture slang belies Rove's identity as a leading
conservative intellectual and a highly disciplined right-wing politico.
Historically, Rove draws lessons from Machiavelli and Disraeli. He is in
the tradition of such contemporary thinkers as Myron Magnet, Gertrude
Himmelfarb, and James Q. Wilson, who shrink at the dynamism and inclusive
energy of modern thought, and instead call for various returns to bygone
eras.
After eight years of Bill Clinton, the Republicans were eager for blood.
Rove turned to ex-Marxist David Horowitz, biographer of the Rockefellers
and Kennedys, and author of Radical Son, the memoir of Horowitz's
transformation from 60's Leftist to neoconservative.
For Campaign 2000, Horowitz wrote a book called The Art of Political War,
in which he claimed that the left had a monopoly on strategy, aggression
and tactics. The Republicans would not reclaim the White House until they
crushed their opponent with the mercilessness of total war. Horowitz's
story is that of a generation of 60's radicals who rebelled against war
and imperialism, while simultaneously rejecting the Stalinist legacy of
the previous generation's Left.
Horowitz's parents were life-long devotees of the Communist Party, USA,
but Horowitz was a leading New Left communist until he witnessed violence
in his association with the Black Panthers. He was so shaken that his
politics veered off to the far right.
Today, he is best-known as the recent author of inflammatory ads in
college newspapers against slavery reparations for African-Americans.
Horowitz wrote The Art of Political War to call on New Republicans to
create a politics that appealed to the masses: the working poor, the
working families, gays, unions, etc. Karl Rove praised The Art of
Political War as "A perfect pocket guide to winning on the political
battlefield" in its cover blurb. It is recognized today as the genesis of
"Compassionate Conservatism" and is used nationwide by the Republican
Party Chairs in 32 states.
Copyright � 1998-2001 Online Journal. All rights reserved.
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