Call Me Mad
Call Me Mad Iwas not surprised that my longstanding feud with Michael Isikoff would end in the caviling abuse he wrote for your magazine ("The Secret Life of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard," Nov. 24). It...
...In most cases, that is true, but you misunderstand the reason why...
...Call me mad, if you will, or a conspiracy theorist, or a "blithering idiot...
...Two final points: First, as you point out, Judge Ware withdrew his nomination after admitting that he lied about being the brother of a black boy shot to death by white teenagers in Alabama in 1963...
...My book does not decide whether the death was suicide or murder, as Isikoff knows full well...
...Such grilling is reserved for nominees with known or suspected problems—nominees like Bill Lann Lee, whom Republicans subjected to the kind of searching analysis that you seek, and Judge Frederica Massiah-Jackson, who was questioned at the same hearing as Judge Ware...
...Over the years, I have come to regard Michael Isikoff as the chief propagandist for the permanent institutional government in Washington...
...Because of concerns raised by pre-hearing vetting, Judge Massiah-Jackson was asked a series of questions, which ultimately led six Republican senators (including myself) to vote against her in committee...
...Pete Wilson, and was nominated to the U.S...
...Somebody else said it, and in any case that person was referring to the cover-up rather than the death itself...
...Dick Armey's flat tax is a step in the right direction, some of the details have yet to be worked out...
...Jerry Parks was not the "Clinton campaign-security chief...
...He insinuates that she is one of the "oddballs, drug dealers, prostitutes, and borderline psychotics" who supposedly make up my list of sources...
...I never said that the "murder" of Vincent Foster "throws into doubt the durability of the republic...
...Second, you criticize Judge Ware's summary of the Adarand case, but he described the case accurately, using language almost identical to Justice O'Connor's statement of the holding...
...It asserts only that the death scene was staged, and that Kenneth Starr is too timid to deal with it...
...Advise, Consent, and Grill You complain in your editorial that nomination hearings are "largely pro forma affairs" ("Advise and Dissent," Nov...
...He suspects that the Office of the Independent Counsel in Washington—namely Brett Kavanaugh and John Bates—abused the grand-jury process by trying to discredit him— insinuating, falsely, that he was homosexual...
...He keeps thickening the brew for better effect...
...Kyl and his Republican Judiciary Committee colleagues have received for their handling of President Clinton's judicial nominees is false and unfair...
...Knowlton blames elements in the FBI, not the independent counsel, for his harassment, and he has filed a civil-rights suit against the bureau...
...Isikoff states that "whatever Strassmeir's ties to McVeigh (if any), there is absolutely nothing to suggest either one of them was in the government's employ at the time of the bombing...
...District Court by President Bush...
...I'm sorry I never got around to Carol Howe...
...I would prefer to make my judgment on the death of Vince Foster, for instance, by interviewing the crime-scene witnesses and paramedics who were present at Fort Marcy Park that day rather than by calling a friend at the Justice Department for a quick steer...
...What does Isikoff have to say about Carol Howe, the central figure of the 108-page section on the Oklahoma bombing...
...He simply ignores them, preferring to rebut allegations in a general way by embellishing them beyond recognition and then deeming them farfetched, scurrilous, and inherently unbelievable...
...I would have been happy to disclose my longstanding feud with Evans-Pritchard had I only been aware of it...
...Indeed, we do not want to be seen as insensitive to the middle class...
...I never said, of course, that Kenneth Starr orchestrated the intimidation of crime-scene witness Patrick Knowlton in the Vince Foster case...
...The editors did a very good job of showing that, while Rep...
...government, with over 300 family members in one suit alleging outright that the blast was a sting operation that went awry...
...That's fine...
...That was the thrust of our editorial...
...Isikoff chose not to mention that half of the victims of the Oklahoma bombing have filed lawsuits against the U.S...
...Thus most hearings consist of a round of questions intended to confirm that the nominee possesses a basic grasp of legal principles and will apply the law appropriately...
...Instead of confronting the evidence linking Strassmeir and his neo-Nazi friends to the bombing, Isikoff pretends that it does not exist...
...The passage attributed to me was reported speech...
...How does he explain the undisputed fact that Strassmeir, a former Navy officer, came to America with the purpose of working undercover for the Justice Department...
...It would be a preposterous allegation, which is precisely why Isikoff fabricated the claim...
...How does he account for the documents showing that the FBI muscled in to prevent the ATF from arresting Strassmeir on "terrorism/firearms" charges in February 1995, or for the fact that Strassmeir was allowed to leave the United States months after the bombing without being interviewed by the FBI...
...Sen...
...No reliable evidence ties Howe's friends to the activities of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols...
...He owned a company that provided security and janitorial services to the building in which the Clinton campaign was located...
...but my superiors at the "permanent institutional government" have ordered me not to, content to let the delusional rantings in Evans-Pritch-ard's letter speak for themselves...
...If Isikoff finds "absolutely nothing" in this, he is a most incurious journalist...
...Rethink the Flat Tax Igreatly appreciated your editorial "Second Thoughts on the Flat Tax" (Nov...
...It is quite fitting that he should review The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, because my book is, above all, an indictment of the leadership class that has risen to power in your country...
...Nor does he challenge the authenticity of the official documents cited in the text or reprinted in large numbers in the appendix...
...I could, of course, go on...
...Isikoff may not like my "conspiracy compendium," as he calls it, but I wish he had the honesty to get the conspiracies right...
...Jon Kyl Washington, DC The Editors respond: Much of the criticism Sen...
...I would suggest that his review be seen as the exhibit of a trickster at work, a cautionary warning for those who still harbor illusions about his professionalism...
...Problems are rare because the vetting process is thorough...
...It is true, of course, that most of my sources are ordinary Americans, without rank or influence, but I am proud of that achievement...
...But our point was that Adarand does not directly speak to the question Ware was actually asked...
...It was inevitable that he would retaliate, I suppose, after I called him a counterfeit on live radio, though I never imagined that he would overplay his hand with such gauche ineptitude...
...Indeed, in-depth questioning is rarely fruitful because, as you note, most nominees are well-coached and will not say anything objectionable...
...With these credentials, Judge Ware seemed to be one of President Clinton's finest nominees...
...Since Ware had no known problems, he was not extensively grilled at his hearing...
...You can tell when he is fibbing because he resorts to paraphrase instead of quoting directly from the book...
...His denunciation of me on "live radio" escaped my attention...
...His new contention that he is agnostic on the question of whether Foster was murdered or was simply the victim of a "staged death" suicide seems especially curious: Chapter 15 of his book is devoted to arguing that accounts of Foster's depression were "concocted...
...And it's true, as Sen...
...They took this drastic step because they obtained documents revealing that an undercover informant for the ATF named Carol Howe had infiltrated a bombing conspiracy among a neo-Nazi group in eastern Oklahoma with ties to Timothy McVeigh...
...Circuit Court of Appeals...
...Evans-Pritchard is correct that the line about Foster's death's throwing into doubt "the durability of the republic" belongs not to him, but to one of his allies, James Dale Davidson...
...We want to be seen as champions of the middle class and champions of the tax cut they rightly deserve...
...Omission, however, is Isikoff's chief instrument of polemic...
...Absolutely nothing...
...Nothing...
...Each nominee is examined by the White House, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Senate Judiciary Committee in advance of any hearing...
...Kyl points out, that Judge Ware gave a (more or less) accurate account of the Supreme Court's Adarand ruling during his confirmation hearing...
...None of the documents reproduced by Evans-Pritchard in his appendices or quoted in his book comes close to establishing the vast government cover-up he alleges...
...If a nominee survives the screening and is given a hearing, it is precisely because the chairman and most majority members are satisfied with the nominee...
...Yet there was no way to elicit this in the hearing...
...He ignores her FBI debriefing and the series of monthly reports written by her ATF case officer before the bombing, which indicates that a German named Andreas Strassmeir was instigating a terrorist campaign of "bombings" and "assassinations...
...Not a word...
...At least I was never a collaborator...
...Take that [the depression diagnosis] away," he writes on page 231, "and there is nothing left to sustain the ruling of suicide...
...But lots of crazy people talk about lots of things...
...My reference to the pharmaceuticals that helped Parkes's wife recover supposedly long-buried memories of Clinton's crimes was quoted from Evans-Pritchard's own words...
...ambrose evans-pritchard London, England Michael Isikoff responds: MMy apologies...
...Still, I am grateful he has refined his conspiracy theories in ways that are not at all apparent in his book...
...You focus on the nomination of Judge Virgil Ware to the Ninth U.S...
...One of the neo-Nazi ringleaders, Dennis Mahon, had targeted the Oklahoma City Federal Building for "destruction through bombing," according to a debriefing that Howe gave to the FBI two days after the blast...
...I notice that Isikoff does not challenge the specific facts in my book...
...Jerry Parks, the Clinton campaign-security chief who was murdered in Little Rock in September 1993, is reduced to a mere "private investigator," the victim of a local business dispute...
...A onetime Tulsa debutante who sported a swastika tattoo, she is certainly one of the "oddballs" I referred to in my description of Evans-Pritchard's sources...
...Hearings enable senators to ask about problems they have with the nominee's views or background...
...Is Isikoff not surprised by the refusal of the prosecution in Denver to release a CIA document on Strassmeir to the McVeigh defense team, in defiance of a court order...
...The episodes do not make sense because he willfully deprives them of sense...
...It is paraphrased approvingly by Evans-Pritchard and cited in my review as an example of the demented views endorsed in the pages of The Secret Life of Bill Clinton...
...Isikoff, with his trademark lack of gallantry, neglects to mention that the drugs are for multiple sclerosis...
...His complaint against Starr is very different...
...He is the amanuensis of those without honor...
...David A Pendleton Minority Whip House of Representatives Honolulu, HI...
...Nor does he mention the cable traffic from the U. S. embassy in Bonn to the State Department, days after the blast, discussing Andreas Strassmeir in relation to the Oklahoma bombing...
...This is not for lack of trying, I'm sure...
...His wife Jane is portrayed as a drug user, as if she were mentally unstable...
...even the FBI failed to discover Judge Ware's lie...
...This journalistic legerdemain of putting others' words into my mouth is so pervasive in Isikoff's review that it amounts to malicious distortion...
...Judge Ware once campaigned for President Nixon, was appointed to the Santa Clara Superior Court by Gov...
...She did indeed turn government informant for a while (after a falling out with her neo-Nazi boyfriend) and seems to have reported vague talk among her confederates about blowing up federal buildings prior to the Oklahoma City bombing...
Vol. 3 • December 1997 • No. 14
