"David Brock - Blinded By The Right" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brock David)

Tuesday, February 26, 2002; Page C01


David Brock is a liar.

And a character assassin.

And a turncoat.

And a partisan hatchet man.

And a lonely, tortured soul.

And a practitioner of malicious journalism.

And a bizarre guy.

That, at least, is how he describes himself.

The reporter who savaged Anita Hill and told the world about Paula Jones has written a book about his seduction and eventual excommunication by the conservative movement. Brock is hard on himself in "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative," but he also snipes at many people who were his friends, sometimes mocking their private lives in the process.

Sitting in the living room of his antique-filled, 19th-century Georgetown home, the one he bought with all the muckraking money, Brock, 39, wrestles with the obvious questions: How does anyone know he's telling the truth now? Hasn't he shredded his reputation beyond repair? Why did he go negative on himself?

"I was just sort of devastated," Brock says. "Every time I felt I'd gotten to the nub of things, there was another layer to peel. The only way I could understand what happened to me was to write it down.

"I probably could have skated by. No one forced me to make these disclosures. No one caught me in a fabrication. . . . I just didn't want to live with that on my conscience."

Now, he says, he's a liberal Democrat who voted for Al Gore -- and is bent on exposing what he sees as the excesses of his former political allies. In the process, he has produced a chilling portrait, if it can be believed, of a partisan attack machine.

It would be easy to conclude that Brock's new career is renouncing his previous career. He has, after all, been apologizing for some time. In a 1998 Esquire piece in which he was photographed shirtless and tied to a tree, he apologized to President Clinton for Brock's "Troopergate" article on alleged sexual high jinks in Arkansas. Last June, after a Talk magazine excerpt from the new book, he said he was sorry to Anita Hill.

Back in the early '90s, of course, Brock doggedly defended his work against those who called him a smear artist. But now, he says, "I wasn't really functioning as a journalist. I was functioning more as a political operative using a journalistic forum."

Missions to Destroy
From the time he arrived in Washington in 1986, Brock sought refuge in the bosom of the conservative movement. Smart, ambitious and tightly wound, he struggled to balance his life as a closeted gay man with the friendships of political and media warriors -- some of whom, he says, would make anti-gay remarks.

When his career imploded and the right abandoned him, Brock lost more than his professional footing. The social life he had constructed for himself unraveled.

"I didn't understand how much of my identity was wrapped up in being a right-wing hit man, that the repercussions would affect my entire being," he says.

But there may have been other motivations behind his slashing approach. "There was a very important part of him that really wanted to make money," says Ricky Silberman, a conservative activist and close friend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who did some of the editing on Brock's book "The Real Anita Hill." "He always talked about what publishers wanted, what would sell."

One thing is clear: Brock has long felt like an outsider.

As he came to grips with his homosexuality, he was ridiculed at his Paramus, N.J., high school for being different. At Berkeley, where he was editor of the Daily Californian, the previously liberal Brock moved right while rebelling against the school's left-wing culture. He barely survived a recall effort -- but not before getting caught in an embarrassing lie about a made-up complaint from a university official. (Later, when he was living in Washington, Brock broke up with his boyfriend after being caught lying about the fact that he was adopted.)

He began his Beltway career at Insight, the conservative magazine affiliated with the Washington Times, followed by a stint at the Heritage Foundation. Next stop was the American Spectator, the conservative monthly that Brock now describes as having been "aggressively homophobic."

"I felt too gay for my straight right-wing peers," he writes. "And I was too closeted and too right-wing to allow myself to connect with almost anybody else, gay or straight, which meant no real friends, no dating and only furtive sex."