Presswatch / Meeting the Enemy
Cony, John
Meeting the Enemy by John Corry Williams, after all, was appearing on television, where panelists are encouraged to blurt out provocations, especially on programs like "Capital Gang." Rowan,...
...The same week Lewis's column appeared, New York magazine was out with a large headline, "The UnAmericans," six of whom it pictured on the cover: Phil Gramm, Oliver North, Jesse Helms, and Pat Robertson, as well as Liddy and Limbaugh...
...Oliver Stone may be dismissed as an eccentric, but even respectable news organizations published fantasies about the October Surprise...
...I think there will be less tolerance and fewer cheers for that kind of rhetoric...
...The media assumed the Oklahoma atrocity could not have been the work of one, two, or three madmen, but was part of a large conspiracy...
...There had to be a conspiracy...
...Then he added: "Before there was any raid, there were dead federal law-enforcement officials on the ground...
...He is widely regarded as sober and thoughtful, but on the same day Rowan was blaming "the Gingriches and the Doles," he was blaming Rush Limbaugh...
...The Sunday after the bombing, the president displayed a stunning insensitivity toward the Waco tragedy in an interview on "60 Minutes...
...Four agents were killed, along with six Branch Davidians, when some seventy agents in commando gear stormed the compound to arrest David Koresh on a weapons charge...
...The fringe right has been a welcome guest at Newt Gingrich's party, just as the Black Panthers were at Lenny's...
...He turned up on all the news broadcasts, and media pickings would have been slim without him...
...On the contrary, Weisberg insisted, the "connection is far more specific and disturbing...
...It began when Bill Clinton said he had not meant to blame Rush Limbaugh and his like-minded colleagues for the Oklahoma bombing, although obviously he had, and everyone knew it...
...the "they" this time being members of "an amorphous, far-right populist movement of both armed militias and unarmed groups that harbor a deep distrust of government...
...The Washington Post heard about it and ran a story...
...Some of the early comment was merely frivolous, of course—knee-jerk reactions by journalists who simply had to say something...
...In fairness to Bernstein, though, it should be noted that the comparison was poorly drawn...
...An FBI affidavit in mid-May contained nothing to indicate that the bombing had been planned or carried out by anyone other than Timothy McVeigh and Terry and James Nichols, although the press had been suggesting otherwise...
...In the wake of the bombing, other commentators and columnists did the same...
...Two days later, columnist Carl Rowan, Williams's Washington Post colleague, wrote that "unless Gingrich and Dole and the Republicans say 'Am I inflaming a bunch of nuts?', you know we're going to have some more events...
...The next week Time asked, "How dangerous are they...
...the pious bombast of a Rush or a Newt had inspired a murderous rage in the Oklahoma bomber...
...Purnam's Sons...
...It is dangerous "to inflame twisted minds with statements that suggest political opponents are enemies," he wrote...
...As an example—its only one, actually—of how the talk-show hosts were edging, Time quoted G. Gordon Liddy, who fatuously had told his listeners how to stop federal intruders: "So you shoot twice to the body...
...Ideas have consequences...
...On CNN's "Capital Gang," Juan Williams of the Washington Post talked about "angry white men, sort of in their natural state," and connected this with not only the bombing, but also "the right-wing triumph over the agenda here in Washington...
...Rowan, meanwhile, had been attacking conservatives for years, and long tenure had left him ossified...
...But there were no dead federal agents on the ground before the raid...
...He lived with only his delusions...
...therefore, it is well to pay attention to what it says...
...McVeigh could not have been acting alone, or with only a few others, any more than Lee Harvey Oswald could have been the lone assassin...
...I am absolutely certain that the harsher rhetoric of the Gingriches and the Doles . .. creates a climate of violence in America...
...For two years, Rush Limbaugh described this nation as 'America held hostage' to the policies of the liberal Democrats, as if the duly elected president and Congress were equivalent to the regime in Tehran...
...Two weeks later, in a story that drew on the work of eleven reporters and a handful of stringers, the New York Times found that Timothy McVeigh had been seen at only a single militia meeting...
...The evening news broadcasts all led with his remarks—"They spread hate...
...Inexplicably, Gingrich was missing, even though New York insisted that "the right-wing paranoia exposed by the Oklahoma City bombing was fueled by the- outrageous rhetoric of mainstream conservative politicians...
...Chenoweth, Weisberg wrote, "is probably the most extreme member of the House gun club...
...And when that raid occurred, it was the people who ran their cult compound at Waco who murdered their own children...
...John Dingell's characterization of the agents as "jackbooted American fascists," which he made on the floor of the House last February, was offensive, too, but Dingell is an old liberal darling, and so hardly anyone noticed...
...When Bernstein threw his famous party for the Panthers—immortalized by Tom Wolfe in Radical Chic—he may have been pandering to thugs, but Gingrich and his allies were being accused of fomenting real violence...
...Afterwards Gingrich said he thought he had been misquoted, but that if he really had said "normal Americans" he was mistaken...
...Lenny, of course, was the late Leonard Bernstein, and presumably Weisberg had cited him to prove his impartiality...
...When the surviving Davidians were brought to trial, the jury refused to convict any of them on the government's most serious charge: conspiring to murder federal agents...
...He claimed that what had happened in Waco did not excuse "the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that we're hearing all across this country...
...they disparaged the liberal Bernstein so that they might feel free then to trash the conservative Republicans...
...In the hunt for right-wing rhetoricians who would, as David Broder said, "inflame twisted minds," showman Liddy was a precious find...
...The Speaker of the House may not have made the cover, but the story inside, by Jacob Weisberg, insisted there was "a link between the revolutionism of 'Mark from Michigan' andthe 'revolution' demanded by Newt Gingrich...
...then came the sullen truce...
...the thought is father to the deed, and now men in camouflage gear were stockpiling weapons in sealed containers in the woods while they searched the skies for black helicopters...
...center of mass...
...Its deep distrust of government would be intensified...
...Indeed, Clinton had left no doubt at all, and much of the media immediately fell into agreement...
...On the other hand, there was also Post columnist David Broder...
...Weisberg's best proof for this was Gingrich's ties to the National Rifle Association...
...The liberal-left, however, looks for right-wing plots...
...The carnage was so great, and the horror was felt so deeply...
...He had said the Waco raid did not excuse the "inflammatory rhetoric we're all hearing," but his misrepresentation of what happened at Waco could only make the rhetoric worse...
...Conservative rhetoric, it seems, had gotten out of hand...
...He meant to say, he said, that Democrats were the enemy of "ordinary Americans...
...The day after his appearance on "60 Minutes," Clinton condemned the "promoters of paranoia" who speak so irresponsibly over the airwaves, but he was ignoring the fact he had done that himself...
...0 The American Spectator July 1995 49...
...Time also warned that "when politicians and talk-show hosts promote the idea that the Federal Government is one step away from 48 The American Spectator July 1995 breaking down your door, they edge toward what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously termed the paranoid style in American politics...
...Ted Koppel even took "Nightline" to Decker, Michigan, population 100, to interview F irst, there was the name-calling...
...M eanwhile, the list of right-wing suspects grew...
...Weisberg also noted, as did many others, that freshman Rep...
...As a repository for trendy liberal opinion, New York is unmatched...
...It also said that discussion of the Oklahoma bombing had been conducted "on such an abstract plane, one would think that all McVeigh and Newt shared was generalized distaste for broad federal authority...
...Say now that the pro-gun movement includes some extremely unattractive people, and that NRA characterizations of FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents as "jackbooted government thugs" are offensive...
...Helen Chenoweth had held a hearing in Boise in which she had deplored "excessive force" by federal agents...
...I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves"—and as Dan Rather pointed out, Clinton had left no doubt about "who's talking that talk...
...members of the Michigan Militia...
...The confrontation was inconclusive...
...The lineage was clear...
...John Corry, a former New York Times media critic, is the author of My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/G.P...
...Otherwise, the best he could do was Gingrich, who supposedly had said that Democrats were "the enemy of normal Americans," and Limbaugh, who had used the dread word "feminazis...
...n the aftermath of the bombing, the media went on alert...
...But as examples of inflammatory speech these weren't much, and in fact Gingrich had made the remark about Democrats not at a public gathering but in a private session before the election with lobbyists...
...Little is lost in provoking it...
...W hat could Clinton have been thinking...
...Time asked the week after the bombing—the "they" being "Timothy McVeigh and his right-wing associates...
...The Speaker, Weisberg wrote, had told the NRA that he would investigate both the raid on the Branch Davidians in Waco and the shoot-out in Idaho in which the wife and son of white separatist Randy Weaver were killed, along with a federal marshal...
...At the same time, Clinton's assertion that the Davidians killed their own children was grotesque...
...Who are they...
...When Anthony Lewis of the New York Times denounced "the drumbeat of right-wing rhetoric," he naturally quoted Liddy...
...The "amorphous, far-right populist movement" that Time described was sure to be aroused...
...It is impossible to escape the thought now that this was unlikely to bother the White House in the least, and that there had been an element of calculation in Clinton's remarks...
...If McVeigh believed, as he reportedly did, that the Army had planted a computer chip in his buttocks, he was beyond the reach of political rhetoric...
...Vaporings like that could be ignored...
...Nonetheless, the NRA, and Gingrich and Chenoweth, were surely more correct in their appraisals of Waco than liberal writers like Weisberg, or, for that matter, politicians like Bill Clinton...
...Politically and culturally, the amorphous right is the enemy of choice...
...By truckling to the gun lobby, condoning the apocalyptic visions of the Christian Right, and expressing contempt for government, conservative Republicans had hatched a monster...
...Broder's column was a marker for where liberal commentary would now find consensus: the Gingriches, Doles, and Limbaughs had not planted the bomb, but their incendiary preachments had inspired paranoia and malignant hatred among those who did plant the bomb...
...Two months after the first raid, some eighty people, including at least seventeen children, were either asphyxiated, crushed, shot, or burned to death in a misbegotten FBI attack sanctioned by Janet Reno...
Vol. 28 • July 1995 • No. 7
