Political Booknotes
Political Booknotes Murdoch. William Shawcross. Simon & Schuster, $27.50. There is emerging a General Formula by which the quality of a media book may be calculated before reading it: the greater...
...in fact, Allbritton decline to buy the paper in 1982, and in 1991 it was sold to longtime Murdoch rival Robert Maxwell...
...Then there's just plain dim-wittedness, as when Shawcross—in an apparent attempt to provide a telling tidbit for his British and Australian readers—says that Murdoch lackey Steve Dunleavy "would sometimes spend the night drinking in bars in the fish market area of New York (the sort of place where one is apt to hear Frank Sinatra played on the juke box...
...Admittedly, it's difficult to capture Murdoch's simultaneous global deals in a straightforward narrative...
...One of the few times his narrative breaks out of its tedious recitation of fact is his account of Murdoch's establishment of Wappins, a union-busting bunker Murdoch secretly constructed in 1985 and 1986...
...Frank Sturgis, one of the hapless Watergate burglars with a shady anti-Castro past...
...Consider, then, William Shaw-cross's Murdoch, already the subject of scorn in Tina Brown's Vanity Fair Weekly, once known as The New Yorker...
...At the same time, the authors provide a useful overview of some of the more colorful debacles of the last 30 years, plus an entertaining peek inside perhaps the stupidest one of all: the decades-long effort to overthrow and, occasionally, kill Castro...
...It would seem, based on their book, that much of what has gone wrong in American life can be laid at the feet of...
...All that began to change when a CIA-linked anti-Castro group tried to provoke Russia by shelling a Russian merchant ship...
...Thunder's Mouth, $21.95...
...Moreover, since the seventies, some far-right terrorists trained by the CIA have killed civilians...
...Their argument goes like this: as CIA chief in the mid-seventies, Bush tried to block the prosecution of about 70 spies for assorted overseas dirty tricks...
...the CIA has been associated with drug dealers and murderers...
...After more than 400 pages of such details, even the most skeptical reader is expected to crumble and say, "Yes, there is an evil anti-Castro/Mafia/CIA conspiracy to rule the world...
...These shards of fact and guesswork all raise intriguing questions, but Deadly Secrets falls far short of providing definitive answers...
...In doing so, they show just how widespread and expensive these anti-Castro activities were (at least $500 million a year), how extensive press cooperation was {Life purchased ship-to-shore radios for commandos) and how dangerously close we came to provoking a war with Russia...
...They contend that a melange of anti-Castro Cubans, CIA operatives, Mafiosi, and fanatical anti-communists played a major role in everything from the Bay of Pigs on: the Kennedy assassinations, Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, and more...
...In reading Murdoch, one gets little sense of a writer who's engaged firsthand with his subjects, or even one who understands them completely...
...Their breathless journalese adds spice, but it also requires the readers to remember an intricate procession of unsavory characters: "In the Bahamas on Invasion Eve, Lansky lieutenant Joe Rivers waited with a satchel stuffed with gold for the word to rush in and take charge of the dark casinos...
...Eric Alterman's assault on the punditocra-cy, Sound and Fury, suffered not, as prominent reviewers huffed, from one-sided political bias, but from an acute allergy to any kind of media theory...
...The Mob, in turn, was outraged at Bobby Kennedy's increasing pressure on organized crime...
...Such resume-dumping typifies Shawcross's "prose" style, as well as his ham-fisted sense of structure...
...Richard Clurman's book about Time Inc., To the End of Time, sucked for reasons entirely separate from the Liz Smith-inspired theory that Robert Sam Anson plagiarized the manuscript in Esquire...
...Until I see a photo of George Bush on Dealey Plaza with a gun in his hand—and you can be sure that someone is touting a fuzzy picture showing just that—I'll have to wait for a clearer, better-documented case for a one-size-fits-all conspiracy...
...Along the way, though, tantalizing hints of a grand conspiracy are unveiled...
...Shawcross tries by breaking down his chronology into subheadings: "New York," "Hollywood," "London," etc...
...But certainly not because of excessive toadying toward Murdoch, or because of its discussion of Evans, a bit player who comes off as a grousing idealist...
...By the time we're done with this loosely argued book, we've been shown the purported connections between ex-CIA director George Bush, Latin American drug traffickers, and the killers of Orlando Letelier...
...They're on firm ground documenting the Secret War, but their arguments become more tenuous the farther they drift from well-documented anti-Castro attacks...
...There are quick cuts from one suspicious incident to another-—why was the supposedly pro-Castro Oswald meeting with the anti-Castro Guy Bannister (played by Ed Asner)?—but there's no coherent argument linking the events...
...To judge from his footnotes, however, even that drama is borrowed from other books...
...The first chapter—the first!—ends with this cliffhanging description of Murdoch's father Keith: "He was also a generous and discerning patron of the arts...
...In a short salvo months before the book's American debut, a writer called Shawcross a Murdoch "hagiographer" and said that the Aussie baron "has found his Boswell...
...There's a strong reliance, for instance, on Jim Garrison's mix of speculation and hearsay, On The Trail of the Assassins, based in part on the statements of pathological liars and the clinically insane...
...Art Levine...
...this subtlety of clout eludes Shawcross altogether...
...President Jimmy Carter badly wanted Murdoch's New York Post to endorse him over primary rival Ted Kennedy, and although an 8 percent loan was approved, and the Post endorsed Carter, Shawcross concludes that there was no quid pro quo...
...Warren Hinckle, William Turner...
...No, the problem is that somehow the writer who made his reputation by trashing Henry Kissinger has turned as juicy and froth-inducing a subject as Rupert Murdoch into an arid literary equivalent of kitty litter...
...Unfortunately, the mere piling-on of details doesn't prove that the conspiracy exerts the powerful influence the authors claim...
...Still others look to those old standbys, the Jews...
...and when Vice President Bush headed up President Reagan's War on Drugs and War on Terrorism, contra leaders and Manuel Noriega escaped prosecution for drug dealing...
...But Murdoch purposely scheduled his meeting so he could announce to the bankers that he was on his way to dine with the president...
...We're expected to see a clear-cut connection between all the nefarious doings, but weak arguments and sometimes dubious documentation undermine their particular conspiracy theory...
...Yes, it is curious that a Dallas lawyer thought he saw someone who looked an awful lot like Oswald meeting with Jack Ruby or that Oswald wrote down the espionage word "microdots" in his notebook...
...Sometimes Shawcross's errors are in judgment: he completely misses the point of a famous story in which Murdoch went to Washington in 1980 to plead for a quick, cheap and vital loan from the Export-Import Bank...
...Given such highly visible invective, the General Formula predicts that Murdoch is an unreadable disaster— which it is...
...Shawcross's defenders— notably John Le Carre—counter-claimed that Brown was merely avenging the book's less-than-flatter-ing treatment of her husband, onetime Murdoch editor Harry Evans, an assumption the couple denounced, in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, as "sexist...
...But Warren Hinckle, formerly a co-editor of Ramparts, and William Turner, a former FBI agent, have claimed to find their own mother lode in Deadly Secrets...
...The key chapter reads like a rejected script for Oliver Stone's JFK...
...Many conspiracy buffs have long searched for their own Holy Grail, a secret cabal that can be blamed for all the scandals and evils of modern America...
...As the authors tell it, the efforts to topple Castro that began just prior to the Cuban revolution of 1959 had nasty and enduring repercussions...
...To some right-wing extremists, it is the Trilateral Commission...
...Off the north Cuban coast two gambling pals of Frank Sturgis [emphasis added], Georgie Levine, and Sally Burns, along with Pennsylvania Mafia boss Russell Bufalino and henchman James Plumeri, bobbed on the seas in a syndicate-owned boat with a CIA man aboard...
...Kennedy responded by ordering a crackdown on Cuban exile activities, and that angered some militants enough to want to kill him, the authors say...
...Similarly, their efforts to tar George Bush as connected to drug dealing and assassinations is conspiracy-monger-ing at its worst...
...In the repeated incidents of massive newspaper layoffs or firing for example, Shawcross almost never quotes anyone but an editor or financial expert...
...Generally speaking, it's been the trade unions which have suffered for Murdoch's greed or blunders, but their plight gets scant attention here...
...Shawcross's obtuseness on such points is clearly the result of his distance from the material...
...Ultimately, the authors' argument that the "Secret War" against Castro is the Mother of All Conspiracies comes off not as a solidly reasoned case but as an exercise in flinging an assortment of names, incidents, and scandals against a wall with the hope that they'll stick...
...to some left-wingers, it is a "secret team" directed by the military-industrial complex...
...Ergo, what was Bush really doing in Texas back in 1963...
...For instance, George Bush's name was found in the telephone book of a mysterious, wealthy White Russian with CIA ties, George de Mohrenschildt, who had befriended Lee and Marina Oswaldl Just coincidence—or something sinister...
...Some of his mistakes are factual, such as when he claims that The New York Daily News, after Murdoch considered buying it, was sold to Joseph Allbritton...
...The authors mix grade-B melodramatic prose with investigative assertions in telling the story of the covert attacks on Castro's Cuba and its consequences...
...Murdoch is drearily written, clumsily organized, and—like too many Simon & Schuster volumes—badly in need of genuine editing...
...As a moderate believer in conspiracy theories (I think JFK was killed as part of a Mafia plot, but I draw the line at ex-Nazis and alien space beings), I was disappointed to find that the book doesn't provide the definitive solutions its title promises...
...James Ledbetter Deadly Secrets...
...But that's a long way from documenting that Oswald was a CIA agent, let alone proving there was an active conspiracy involving the CIA, the Mafia, and anti-Castroites to kill Kennedy...
...But the effect, paradoxically, is that each section ends up being both insufficient and redundant...
...But when it comes to tying it all together, the book simply fails...
...They do a serviceable job describing the various assassina60 The Washington Monthly/January/February 1993 i i r< tion attempts of mobster John Rosselli, including the sending of sniper teams to Cuba, the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, the CIA's funding of Operation Mongoose, anti-Castro guerillas, and all the bungled sorties against Cuba, many launched even after the Cuban Missile crisis in October 1962...
...There is emerging a General Formula by which the quality of a media book may be calculated before reading it: the greater the pre-publication pseudo-controversy the book generates, the worse the book actually is —but never for the reasons that made the book "hot...
...There's no real attempt made by the authors even to say who planned and executed the assassination...
...Like too many January/February 1993/The Washington Monthly 59 contemporary chroniclers, Shawcross seems to have spent months trying to understand the intricacies of business deals, without realizing that all this leaves you with is a series of unreadable sections that end with "It was a fabulous victory for Murdoch" or "It was a crippling defeat for Murdoch...
...The jacket copy says that "Shawcross has proved his reporting credentials again and again," but the claim is in little evidence in this book...
...I would be shocked to find a bar anywhere in New York where you can't hear Sinatra on the juke box...
Vol. 25 • January 1993 • No. 1
