McGrath’s principle of exclusion went so far as to ignore a series of extremely important books on Soviet espionage in America. Two of these were part of Yale University Press’s Annals of Communism series by Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, which used materials from the recently opened Soviet archives. The Secret World of Soviet Espionage (1995) and The Soviet World of American Communism (1998) were not reviewed, although (or perhaps because) they revealed extensive, hitherto undocumented evidence of broad Soviet manipulation of members of the Communist Party of the USA, and they named names of Americans who were on the KGB payroll.
In the immediate post-9/11 period, McGrath drew the lines on correctness ever more tightly. The TBR refused to review Oriana Fallaci’s European blockbuster, published in the United States as The Rage and the Pride, which attacked radical Islamic terrorism and much of Islam itself for being antidemocratic, misogynistic and violent. (According to Fallaci, “to believe that a good Islam and a bad Islam exist goes against all reason.”) Instead, the TBR reviewed Noam Chomsky’s anti-American screed Hegemony and Survival, published about the same time as Fallaci’s work. Samantha Power, a left-wing human rights scholar from Harvard, complained about Chomsky’s “glib and caustic tone,” but added respectfully that “his critiques have come to influence and reflect mainstream opinion elsewhere in the world,” and closed her review by insisting that Chomsky was “right to demand that officials in Washington devote themselves more zealously to strengthening international institutions, curbing arms flows and advancing human rights.”
That the TBR would give so much space to someone whom Arthur Schlesinger Jr. referred to as “an intellectual crook” was striking. But the real scandal of Power’s Chomsky review is what she left out. Although she herself was the author of The Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (which won a Pulitzer Prize), she failed to mention Chomsky’s support for the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, or his role in denying Pol Pot’s systematic slaughter and starvation of between two and three million Cambodians.
In 2004, when the Times chose Sam Tanenhaus as McGrath’s successor, many conservatives were surprised, and elated, because Tanenhaus was not identified as a leftist. He had written a well-reviewed book about Whittaker Chambers and was working on a biography of William F. Buckley Jr. Not only was he fluent in conservative ideas, he seemed at first to sympathize with some of them. Tanenhaus assigned reviews of some conservative books, including Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which earned a mixed review from David Oshinsky. Fred Siegel’s Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life appeared on the front page.
It was not long, however, before the bloom was off the rose. James Piereson’s book about the ideological impact of the JFK assassination, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, was savaged in a sneering review by Jacob Heilbrunn. More and more, Tanenhaus simply ignored conservative titles. Like his predecessors, Tanenhaus continued to snub Regnery books, even when they were riding high on the Times’ own best-seller list, such as America Alone by Mark Steyn, Power to the People by Laura Ingraham, and A Slobbering Love Affair by Bernard Goldberg. Likewise books from the publisher of this book, Encounter, which in June 2008 ran an open letter on its website declaring that it would no longer be sending review copies of its books to the Times. Two Encounter books had been on the Times extended best-seller list that month and yet no reviews were forthcoming. The TBR redlined books by conservative authors with provocative arguments that would have added much to the national conversation. One of these was Mark Krikorian’s The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal, which received spectacular advance praise by people ranging from neoconservatives like William Bennett to the neoliberal super-blogger Mickey Kaus. Also ignored were books on Islamism, such as Andrew McCarthy’s Willful Blindness (2008) and The Grand Jihad (2010), both of which made the Times’ extended best-seller list.
Meanwhile, the TBR ran reviews of such fare as Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America, Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, and The Surrender, a paean to sodomy by a former ballerina.
Bill O’Reilly’s Culture Warrior got a review, but it was by Jacob Heilbrunn, who dissed O’Reilly as “an expert at making mountains out of molehills” and as a reincarnation of Joe McCarthy and Father Coughlin. After five previous best-sellers, Ann Coulter finally got her first TBR review, for Godless. But it was by a self-proclaimed liberal, Liesl Schillinger, who wrote that the book was “loaded with recorded sound bites of conservative vitriol from the venomous vixen herself.”
The TBR under Tanenhaus has continued to ignore the work of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, specifically their blockbuster Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB, where they indisputably established that I. F. Stone was a paid agent for the KGB, along with numerous other Americans. While icing Spies, the TBR instead reviewed a pro-Stone biography, The Life and Times of I. F. Stone by David Gutterplan, which weakly challenged the evidence that Stone “worked closely with the KGB in 1936 and 1938,” and then went on to paint a mostly positive picture of the journalist.
The Times’ hostility to the architects of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy could be seen in the review of Jacob Heilbrunn’s book on neoconservatives, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (2008). Once considered a member of that set, Heilbrunn used the book as a way to distance himself from it. Reviewing the book, Tim Noah of the liberal webzine Slate affirmed Heilbrunn’s argument that neocons had an “uncompromising temperament” and an “artificial clarity” about the world.
But something unexpected and ultimately embarrassing to the TBR came along during Heilbrunn’s effort to reinvent himself. A British critic, Corey Robin, noted in the Nation that Heilbrunn had lifted language and ideas in several places from his own work and that of others. The charge of plagiarism was echoed a year later, again in the Nation, when the paperback edition of Heilbrunn’s book was issued with minimal changes in the area of concern. The plagiarism went unnoted in the pages of the TBR, which often relays gossip about the literary-industrial complex.
The nasty edge that Tanenhaus had allowed to creep into reviews of conservative authors grew nastier. When another former conservative, Damon Linker, reviewed two books about Norman Podhoretz in 2010, he closed by describing “the Brownsville Wunderkind” as an “embittered, paranoid crank, standing by and for himself alone.” Surely a man who has a large body of important writing and editing behind him deserves more civility than that.
Meanwhile, over in the section of the daily paper dealing with literary matters, the Times has aided and abetted at least two major frauds. One of them involved the literary persona of JT LeRoy, a 25-year-old alleged former transvestite truck-stop prostitute and drug addict who became an underground cult novelist, with celebrity admirers like Madonna, Courtney Love and Bono, and literary luminaries like Michael Chabon, Tobias Wolff and Mary Gaitskill. In 2006 it was disclosed that the cult novelist whose books include Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things had not been a cross-dressing truck-stop hooker, did not come from West Virginia, had not been rescued in San Francisco by a bohemian couple with connections to a prominent psychiatrist, and had not overcome his past through years of therapy to “shed the Warholian wig and sunglasses” that had become his public mask—all of which were reported as true in a Times story by Warren St. John, published in November 2004 and headlined “A Literary Life Born of Brutality.” This piece was built around an interview with LeRoy conducted over an expensive sushi lunch in broad daylight, during which St. John apparently thought “she” was a “he,” a mistake that people in New York have been known to make but usually after midnight. So it must have been embarrassing, once LeRoy’s cover was blown, for St. John to have to write in November 2006 that LeRoy was not a man but a twenty-something woman pretending to be a transgendered man. Her half brother had enlisted her to play the public persona of LeRoy, while his girlfriend, with whom he concocted the scheme, did t
he writing.
The other literary hoax centered on Love and Consequences (2008), a memoir by Margaret B. Jones. The author claimed to be part white and part Native American, and to have been sexually abused and removed from her family at age five, then shuttled through a series of foster homes, eventually coming to live with a black family in South Central Los Angeles headed by a tough but loving grandmother named Big Momma who worked two jobs as her grandchildren dealt and used crack. The author wrote about becoming a member of the Bloods and getting a .38 for her birthday, and once making crack cocaine to help pay the household’s water bill. She also described how her older brothers were sent to prison, and how friends and family were brutalized both by gang violence and by the police. Jones managed to pull herself out of this unpromising situation and went to the University of Oregon on scholarship, graduating as an ethnic studies major.
The Times’ star literary critic Michiko Kakutani offered high praise: “What sets Ms. Jones’s humane and deeply affecting memoir apart is not just that it’s told from the point of view of a young girl coming of age in this world, but also that it focuses on the bonds of love and loyalty that can bind relatives and gang members together, and the craving after safety and escape that haunts so many lives in the ‘hood.’” Although some of the scenes could seem “self-consciously novelistic at times,” Jones had an “eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist’s eye for social rituals and routines.”
Following soon was an adulatory feature by Mimi Read, describing the author’s now-quiet life at home in a 1940s bungalow near the University of Oregon in Eugene, where she was raising her daughter. While sitting for her profile, Jones pointed to a picture she identified as a dead brother “back when he was in juvie,” and told Read that she was no longer an “active member” of the Bloods but was in contact with her former homies, including one she called “Uncle Madd Ronald,” who was now in prison.
Days later, Margaret B. Jones was unmasked as a fraud. Seeing the Times profile with its accompanying photo, the real-life sister of “Jones” called the publisher to say that the memoir was totally untrue. Once again, the Times was forced to admit it was had. In a feature story, it reported that “Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.” When confronted by the Times, Seltzer began crying and said she had pieced together the “memoir” from the experiences of friends and hoped to do good by humanizing the plight of various people she talked to in L.A. coffee shops.
A postmortem by the public editor, Clark Hoyt, asked how the Times could be gulled so easily. The answer, he said, lay in “risky assumptions and warning signs that were not looked for or were ignored.” Hoyt claimed that a quick online search would have revealed that Margaret B. Jones did not own a house in Eugene. He also noted that a check with Los Angeles County “would have determined that Jones’s description of being taken from school and never seeing her family again was improbable.”
The paper’s “takeaway” was not reassuring. If the Times couldn’t find ways “to check key facts, names, graduation claims, etc.,” an internal memo advised, “we should hold the story until we can verify them, and if we can’t, we should be suspicious.” The memo concluded: “Live and learn . . .”
The Times’ taste for radical chic in arts and letters is matched by its esteem for radically chic countercultural figures, past and present. In part, this penchant stems from sixties-era reporters, or those who identify with them. In part, it’s a provocative shot across the bow of the bourgeoisie. There’s also an element of curdled idealism in the perception that American society has been ungrateful for such things as the role of journalists in bringing down Nixon, ending the Vietnam War and reining in the CIA.
The classic case in point was a profile of the former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, which had the misfortune to appear the morning of September 11, 2001. The piece by Dinitia Smith centered on Fugitive Days, a memoir that Ayers had written about his life in the radical organization and his time spent underground as a result of his terrorist activities. Headlined “No Regrets for Love of Explosives,” it said that although the long locks on his FBI Wanted poster were now shorn, Ayers still had the rainbow-and-lightning Weather Underground logo tattooed on his neck and still had “the ebullient ingratiating manner” that had made him “a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.” According to Smith, Ayers was hardly penitent about his part in bombings of New York Police Department headquarters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972, as well as nine other bombings that the Weathermen took credit for. Smith blithely reported him as saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs.... I feel we didn’t do enough.” Asked if he would do it again, Ayers said he didn’t want “to discount the possibility.”
Given that day’s events, the Ayers profile would go down as certainly one of the most ill-timed articles ever published by the Times, and one of the most criticized. But after Barack Obama was elected, the Times gave Ayers, who had been linked to him during the campaign, another chance when it printed an op-ed by the former Weatherman, in which he tried to deflect the national loathing that he and his former terrorist comrades had engendered. Ayers admitted that the Weather Underground did in fact “carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism” in order to “convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam War.” But he piously insisted that all they did was “plant small bombs in empty offices,” and that they tried to “respect human life.” Ayers failed to discuss the bomb that blew up a Greenwich Village townhouse, killing three of his Weathermen comrades; it had been intended for a noncommissioned officers’ dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and would surely have killed dozens had it been successfully planted and exploded.
A year later, in February 2009, the Times gave Ayers another chance for self-rehabilitation in a Times Magazine Q&A conducted by Deborah Solomon, which ran under the headline “Radical Cheer.” The interview was pegged to a new book that Ayers had written with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, also a former Weatherman, relating their “long struggle against racism and social injustice.” Lighthearted, even jokey in her questions, Solomon let Ayers get off a lot of glib one-liners even when the discussion turned to the subject of terrorism. Did he regret his “involvement in setting off explosions in the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol?” Solomon asked. Ayers replied, “Anyone who thinks what we did is despicable should look at the fact that the U.S. government killed three million people in Indochina between 1965 and 1975. That’s really despicable.”
Another former radical who got kid-glove treatment was Kathy Boudin, who had escaped the Greenwich Village townhouse when it exploded, then went underground for more than a decade, joining up with members of the Black Liberation Army. In 1981, she and her husband, David Gilbert, and several other comrades committed an armed robbery on a Brinks payroll truck, killing one of the truck’s guards and two policemen. After a contentious trial, Boudin pleaded guilty to armed robbery and second-degree murder, and was given a sentence of twenty years to life.
Boudin was denied parole several times, but in 2003 her supporters—led by her father, Leonard Boudin, a civil liberties attorney and former Communist—mounted a campaign to win her freedom. They acted from a subtle script, acknowledging the seriousness of her crimes and the suffering of her victims’ families but emphasizing her exemplary behavior in prison. The Times kept the story of Boudin’s parole hearing in the news, in a manner calculated to help win her release. It accented the fact that she hadn’t pulled the trigger in the Brinks holdup, and made her out to be just shy of Mother Teresa in the good works she performed while incarcerated. The paper quoted suppo
rters calling her “the perfect parolee,” and the former SDS president Todd Gitlin saying, “She represents the possibility for redemption.”
At the end of the parole coverage, there was a cutaway to Boudin’s son, Chesa, who at fourteen months had been left in the care of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn while Boudin was in prison. Now twenty-two years old, he had gotten a phone call from his mother announcing the parole board’s decision to free her. “It’s quite a birthday present,” he told the Times reporters Lydia Polgreen and James McKinley, who noted that he had recently graduated from Yale and been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. He quickly added that he and his mother were looking forward to beginning “the healing process” with the families of the men killed in 1981, although he did not mention the victims by name. Then he said, with incredible presumption and lack of self-awareness, “I also was a victim of that crime. I know how important it was for me to forgive.”
Shortly after Kathy Boudin’s release, the Times ran a front-page profile of Chesa, headlined “From a Radical Background, a Rhodes Scholar Emerges.” Chesa was part of the “radical aristocracy,” explained Jodi Wilgoren, and had overcome “striking challenges, such as epilepsy, dyslexia and temper tantrums.” His parents missed his “Phi Beta Kappa award, high school graduation, Little League games” because they were in prison. Even so, he wanted to walk in their footsteps: “My parents were all dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world. I’m dedicated to the same thing.”
Another enfant radical who got doting treatment is Ivy Meeropol, a granddaughter of the Rosenbergs who produced an HBO documentary in 2004 called Heir to an Execution: A Granddaughter’s Story. In his profile of Meeropol, Sam Roberts noted that the film “refuses to issue a definitive judgment about the legal guilt or innocence of the accused. Instead, it generally gives the Rosenbergs the benefit of the doubt, by dwelling on their unalloyed idealism.” But Roberts was not so hesitant to whitewash the Rosenbergs. He bashed the U.S. government’s case against them, even while acknowledging that Julius Rosenberg, as well as his brother-in-law David Greenglass, were “atom spies.” The government “framed a guilty man,” Roberts oddly declared. “It also cynically prosecuted Ethel on flimsy evidence to bludgeon the couple into confessing and implicating other Soviet agents.”
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