by Jack Cashill
Ayers knew what he was saying. Whether Obama did is another question.
CONSPIRACY COMMERCE
In 1997, the Clinton White House so feared what Hillary Clinton would label the “vast right-wing conspiracy” (VRWC) that it put out a 332-page report specifying how the conspiracy worked. In its unblinking paranoia, the Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce recalled nothing so much as the final days of the Nixon White House.
According to the document, well-funded right-wing think tanks and individuals underwrote conservative fringe publications, whose stories were passed along on the still-mysterious Internet, where they were picked up by the right-wing British press, then passed back across the ocean to semi-respectable conservative publications stateside and from there into Congress, “finally to be covered by the remainder of the American mainstream press as a ‘real’ story.”
In late 2009, on Meet The Press, NBC’s David Gregory raised the specter of conspiracy with former president Clinton. “As you look at this opposition on the right to President Obama, is [the VRWC] still there?” Gregory asked with a straight face. “Oh, you bet,” said Clinton. “Sure it is.”
A few weeks earlier, Gregory and his guests—Tom Friedman of the New York Times and NBC’s anchorman emeritus Tom Brokaw—were fretting openly about the VRWC’s communication stream. In lamenting the fate of former “green jobs” czar Van Jones, whom the conspirators had exposed as a believer in the 9/11 “inside job” theory and other mumbo jumbo, Gregory worried, “You can be a target real fast.”
“A lot of people will repeat back to me and take it as face value something that they read on the Internet,” cautioned Brokaw. “And my line to them is you have to vet information.” Not to be out-preached, Friedman countered, “The Internet is an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information, left, right, center, up, down, and requires that kind of filtering by anyone.” And my wife wonders why I refuse to watch Sunday morning TV?
To be fair, the mechanics the White House’s Communication Stream described in 1997 were not entirely fanciful. The Clinton White House failed to address, however, what Gregory and pals failed to address twelve years later: namely, were these stories true and, if so, why was so circuitous a stream necessary?
While doing research for my books, I have stumbled across any number of eye-popping media oversights. As I learned from reading a roll of the Waco dead, for instance, more than half of those killed during the misbegotten tank attack in 1993 were racial or ethnic minorities, 39 out of 74 to be precise, six of them Hispanic, six of Asian descent, and a full 27 of them black, ages six to sixty-one. The Clinton White House, aided and abetted by the media, shielded black America from the bad news.
The Waco dead did not commit suicide à la Jonestown in 1978. Neither did about a third of the Jonestown dead commit suicide à la Jonestown. Three-year-olds typically don’t know how. Authorities dumped the bodies of more than 250 of these children, almost all of them black, into a mass grave in Oakland’s Evergreen Cemetery. There they lie to this day, unsung and unmourned because their death serves no useful political purpose. Their killer, Jim Jones, a self-professed “communist,” commanded a two-thousand-strong bloc of ballot-stuffing automatons. Every relevant Democrat from Harvey Milk to Walter Mondale had courted him. This is not a story that bears retelling.
When it has been newsworthy, I have tried to share my info with the major media—occasionally at high levels and sometimes in person—but their reporters tend to resist stories that imperil the fortunes of the Democratic Party, especially those stories that threaten the party’s hold on black America.
For instance, in reading the twenty-two-volume U.S. Air Force report on the 1996 plane crash that killed black secretary of commerce Ron Brown and thirty-four others, I learned something that had never been reported: Clinton had dispatched Brown to Croatia to broker a sweetheart deal between the country’s neofascist president and the Enron Corporation. Even when Enron topped the news, this fresh angle attracted the major media not a whit. To the best of my knowledge, no media outlet had even bothered to request the USAF report, including the New York Times, one of whose reporters died in the crash.
In their coverage of the Obama campaign, the media undid whatever was left of their reputation. Their refusal to probe their man’s shrouded past was becoming obvious even to themselves. Given my own research, I was less curious about the much-discussed birth certificate than I was about Obama’s SAT scores, his college theses, his LSAT scores, his college grades, his Illinois bar scores, anything that spoke to his abilities as writer or scholar.
An impressively incurious media, alas, were not asking to see any of this. Although I had a helpful contact at the New York Times, I had no reason to believe that she could—or anyone else in the media would—pursue a story with what Remnick calls so much “diabolical potency,” namely the possibility that Ayers helped Obama write Dreams.
Fortunately, I had a platform, specifically a weekly column in WorldNetDaily. WND’s publisher, Joseph Farah, was among those cited in the 1997 conspiracy commerce report and was still bristling for a good fight. A New Jersey native of Arab descent, Farah came up through mainstream ranks, first as executive news editor at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and then as editor of the Sacramento Union before launching the Western Center for Journalism in 1991. The Clinton years proved fruitful for those keen on doing actual reporting, and in 1997 Farah spun out WorldNetDaily from the Western Center’s side. Thirteen years later—an eternity on the Internet—WND remains profitable and widely read. If there is an independent online journal of longer standing, I do not know what it is.
I had been writing a regular column for WND since 2005 and semiregularly for five years before that. As I had seen firsthand, the Internet represents a radically new—and potentially superior—journalistic model. The writer no longer depends on the support of a newsroom, but rather on the support of a potentially vast community of participants, many of them with direct knowledge and/or useful expertise. Once I went public with my suspicions about Dreams, I knew others would join in the hunt. First, though, I wanted to see what I could learn about the book’s genesis. To that end, a 2006 article by publisher Peter Osnos proved very helpful. More recent sources have helped flesh out this account.
As Osnos relates, a 1990 New York Times profile on the Harvard Law Review’s first black president caught the eye of hustling young literary agent Jane Dystel. Dystel persuaded Obama to put a book proposal together, and she submitted it. Poseidon Press, a small, now-defunct imprint of Simon & Schuster, signed on and authorized a roughly $125,000 advance in November 1990 for Obama’s proposed memoir.
With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago, where the University of Chicago offered him a stipend, benefits, and an office to help him write what Obama told the administrators would be a book on race and voting rights. When he switched topics to pure memoir, Remnick reports, the university law school brass were “unfazed.” They were mostly just glad to have Obama in their midst. Some of his new colleagues at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, the town’s leading civil rights firm, were less than thrilled to see their young associate, feet up on his desk, doodling on his memoir on company time. The named partners, however, indulged him.
Writes Remnick, “His intelligence, charm, and serene ambition were plain to see.” If I may digress, Remnick makes more references to the intelligence of his subject, Obama, than Walter Isaacson does to the subject of his recent bestseller, Albert Einstein. Count them.
In the spring of 1992, on top of his existing obligations, Obama was offered the opportunity to head up Project Vote, a nonpartisan voter-registration effort designed to herd thousands of fresh Democrats to the polls come November. If Obama accepted the offer, he would have still another excuse for not being able to meet his June 15 manuscript deadline despite the generous eighteen months he had been allotted. He took the job and missed the deadline. Simon & Schuster extended it.
In October 1992, he and Mi
chelle married. After their honeymoon, in order to finish without interruption, Obama decamped to Bali for a month. Nothing happened. Those in Obama’s circle have been at pains to excuse his inability to honor his contract. Intimate friend Valerie Jarrett would tell Remnick, “He had to come to terms with some events in his life that some people pay years of therapy to get comfortable revealing.” She adds, “The writing went slowly because everything was so raw.”
There is a simpler explanation. The writing went slowly because Obama was not a writer. During the 2008 presidential campaign, the Times ran an article on what psychologists call the “impostor phenomenon.” To measure it, they ask test subjects to respond to statements like “At times, I feel my success has been due to some kind of luck” or “I can give the impression that I’m more competent than I really am.”
Although the article had nothing to do with Obama, he would surely have scored off the charts had he responded honestly. He was a reasonably bright guy but not nearly as “brilliant” as white liberals thought him to be. His “luck” derived from the fact that he grew up almost exactly as those liberals had but in the body of a black man. Hearing him they heard themselves. Seeing him say what he said surprised them, validated them, delighted them with its freshness. Although they would be the last to admit it, they suffered conspicuously from what George W. Bush has called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
In speaking of Obama in early 2007, Joe Biden framed those expectations with dunderheaded clarity. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American presidential candidate who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Not to be outgaffed, Senate majority leader Harry Reid found comfort in Obama’s having “no Negro dialect.” The always-observant Shelby Steele, writing before anyone doubted Obama’s credentials, summed up the phenomenon: “Blacks like Obama, who show merit where mediocrity is expected, enjoy a kind of reverse stigma, a slightly inflated reputation for ‘freshness’ and excellence because they defy expectations.”
That reverse stigma has encouraged the faithful to think their man a much better writer than he ever was or would be. “Obama had missed deadlines and handed in bloated, yet incomplete drafts,” Remnick tells us. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not produce. He was surely in way over his head.
Simon & Schuster lost interest. After it closed its Poseidon imprint in the summer of 1993, the publishing house ditched those books that showed little promise, Obama’s prominent among them. According to Christopher Andersen, the publisher allowed Obama to keep the advance on his unfulfilled contract when he pled poverty due to “massive student loan debt.” At the time, the combined salary for the still-childless Obamas ranged well into six figures.
As Osnos tells it, Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Books, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of forty thousand dollars.
During this same period, Obama was working as a full-time associate at Davis Miner, teaching classes at the University of Chicago Law School, and spinning through a social whirl that would have left Scarlett O’Hara dizzy.
Writes Remnick, “He and Michelle accepted countless invitations to lunches, dinners, cocktail parties, barbecues, and receptions for right minded charities.” Obama had also joined the East Bank Club, a combined gym and urban country club, and served on at least a few charitable boards.
If these distractions were not burden enough, Obama’s Luddite approach to writing slowed him down all the more. “I would work off an outline—certain themes or stories that I wanted to tell—and get them down in longhand on a yellow pad,” he would later relate to Daphne Durham of Amazon. “Then I’d edit while typing in what I’d written.”
In late 1994, Obama finally submitted his manuscript for publication. Remnick expects the public to take an awful lot on faith: specifically, that a slow writer and sluggish student who had nothing in print save for a couple of “muddled” essays, who blew a huge contract after nearly three futile years, who turned in bloated drafts when he did start writing, who had gotten married, and who had taken on an absurdly busy schedule somehow suddenly found his mojo and turned in a minor masterpiece. Obama fans believe this to a person. No one else could.
Remnick quotes Henry Ferris, the Times Books editor, to bolster Obama’s claim to authorship. Ferris “worked directly with Obama,” Remnick tells us, but Ferris edited in New York while Obama wrote in Chicago. Ferris would have had no way of knowing just how much of the editing or writing Obama was doing himself. Osnos, too, offhandedly notes that the writing of Dreams was “all Obama’s,” which means only that, if the book had been doctored, the doctoring was done before it reached the publisher.
Andersen based his account of Dreams’ creation on two unnamed sources within Hyde Park. By any standard, it rings truer than Remnick’s. According to Andersen, Obama found himself deeply in debt and “hopelessly blocked.” At “Michelle’s urging,” Obama “sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.” What attracted the Obamas were “Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer” as evident in his 1993 book, To Teach.
On September 6, 2008, I sent an email to Dystel under the heading “Serious Inquiry.” In the body of it, I wrote the following:
Having written a book on intellectual fraud, “Hoodwinked,” and being something of a literary detective, I have some real issues with Dreams From My Father. I would perfectly understand if you told me to take a hike, but I promise total discretion if you care to talk.
I referred Dystel to the earlier article I had written on the subject and offered my cell number if she chose to call. I had some reason to hope Dystel would respond. As Osnos relates, Obama dumped her after Dreams took off in 2004 and signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney. In order to avoid congressional disclosure and reporting requirements, Obama inked the deal after his election but before being sworn in as senator. An honest liberal, Osnos publicly scolded Obama for his “ruthlessness” and his “questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday.”
And a major payday it proved to be. In 2008, Obama pocketed $1,512,933 for Audacity of Hope and another $949,910 from Dreams. In 2007, his book royalties had been $3.9 million; in 2006, $570,000; in 2005, $1.4 million. In sum, Dystel’s 15 percent would have netted her at least another $500,000 in royalties had Obama not forsaken her. Dystel did not return my email or my subsequent phone call. Nor has she spoken publicly on this subject with anyone else. Hell, I am told, hath no fury like an agent scorned, but Dystel, to Obama’s good fortune, has held her tongue.
BALLAST
Starting on September 18, 2008, WorldNetDaily ran a three-part series of mine with the speculative title “Did Bill Ayers Write Obama’s ‘Dreams’?” In the series, I highlighted the parallels in the lives of the two neighbors, their shared affection for postmodern concepts of truth and memory, the Osnos revelations, the lack of an Obama paper trail, and some comparable stylistic turns. Although my motivation was openly partisan, I had no interest in being wrong. To spread my research beyond the right half of the blogosphere, I would have to be accurate, and to prove my accuracy I would need lots of help.
The world did not stop spinning with this series. I did not expect it to. Although the preponderance of evidence favored my thesis, enough perhaps to win a lawsuit, I had not proved it beyond a reasonable doubt. From the emails I could tell that readers, though favorably disposed, had their doubts as well. They are much more discerning and demanding than schoolmarms Brokaw and Friedman choose to believe.
A few readers were intrigued enough to start digging on their own. Among them was Boston-area writer and composer Jay Spencer, who sent me a matched pair of sentences that struck me then and now as almost enough to convict. The first comes from Fugitive Days, when Ayers finds himself engulfed in an antiwar protest.
The confrontation in the Fishbowl flowed like a swolle
n river into the teach-in, carrying me along the cascading waters from room to room, hall to hall, bouncing off boulders.
The second comes from Dreams. While talking to his African relatives about his family history, Obama experiences a remarkably similar information overload:
I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents….
It is hard to ignore the parallels between these two sentences. Not only is the imagery the same—the flowing water broken by rocks or boulders—but so also is the structure. Each sentence begins with a standard verb phrase, embellished by a series of participles: tumbling, roiling, separating in the one; carrying, bouncing in the other.
These sentences reinforced a thread that I had already discerned. A particular sentence in Dreams had alerted me to it, and I led with the sentence in my regular WND column a week later: “A steady attack on the white race … served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair.”
I had highlighted this sentence on my first pass of Dreams because it was among those sentences that seem radical when taken out of context. After reading Fugitive Days, however, it took on a new significance. It seems that shortly before getting into the revolution business, Bill Ayers had taken a job as a merchant seaman. “I’d thought that when I signed on that I might write an American novel about a young man at sea,” says Ayers in Fugitive Days, “but I didn’t have it in me.”
The open sea can intimidate. Years later, Ayers would recall a nightmare he had while crossing the Atlantic, “a vision of falling overboard in the middle of the ocean and swimming as fast as I could as the ship steamed off and disappeared over the horizon.” Although Ayers has put his anxious oceangoing days behind him, the language of the sea has not let him go. Indeed, it infuses much of what he writes. This is only natural and often distinctive, as in an appealing Ayers metaphor like “the easy inlet of her eyes.”
