Clinton's Apologist

...That's five articles for $500,000, making Brock arguably the highest-paid journalist in the history of political magazines...

...Nor could he return the Croesian book advance—it had already gone into his growing real-estate holdings...

...In his Esquire article, Brock either ignores those other reporters, or insults them...

...The publishers expected to make such a packet, in fact, that they paid Brock a staggering $1 million advance...

...Off-camera after a TV appearance last year, Brock laughed to another journalist about how he was making half a million over three years for doing virtually nothing...

...they retrieved mountains of transcripts from congressional hearings and bales of documents from Hillary's health-care task force...

...Clinton: "My frank intention was to butcher my prey...

...The crash schedule was cash-driven...

...Brock craved interviews with those who could tell him Hillary's secrets, but nobody would talk to him...

...He merely repeated that he could no longer "stand by the story...

...No wonder Brock prattled on about the social snubs, some real, mostly imagined, he suffered at the hands of those nasty old conservatives...

...G. Gordon Liddy wouldn't have me on his radio show...

...It was accurate and thorough...

...Isikoff's appearance on the Letterman show must have been particularly galling...

...Over the weekend, the Times team learned why the Clintonites had gone into a four-corners defense: The notorious Clinton fixer Betsey Wright triumphantly delivered to their hotel an advance copy of Brock's Spectator article...

...But as the months wore on, that was all he had...

...In 1996 he contributed one article to the Spectator—an excerpt from his Hillary book...

...With the profits from the Anita Hill book, Brock had bought a grand, three-story townhouse in Georgetown, an imposing redbrick job with a desirable N Street address...

...He didn't take a leave of absence...

...Certainly Neel Lattimore must have...

...Now he was turning his back on that phase of his career, and getting lots of TV airtime in the process...

...The worst of it, though, is that Brock now accuses the troopers of wanting to cash in...

...No one who is serious about political biography would think of doing such a project in the space of a year, let alone the few months that Brock had to work with...

...The way Brock tells it, he merely followed the facts where they led...

...If some piece of paper had Hillary's name on it, Brock had it in his files...

...After the Troopergate story, Brock devoted three years of his life to rooting out Clinton sex scandals and came up with zilch, while his mainstream rival, Isikoff, broke new ground in the Paula Jones story, uncovered the story of Kathleen Willey's groping by the president, and with his reporting on Linda Tripp's tapes of Monica Lewinsky earned the fame Brock so coveted...

...To light a fire under the Times, Jackson introduced the troopers to Brock, correctly guessing that Brock would not waste time on independent corroboration...

...The two were in Washington trying to get a response from Clinton to the facts they had learned...

...Grover Norquist called me names...

...The week before Brock's American Spectator article was to appear, Rempel and Frantz were ready to publish any day, poised to beat the Spectator into print...

...Brock was the star investigative reporter for the American Spectator...

...To illustrate that point, Esquire unsubtly photographed Brock lashed to a tree, his bodice torn, one nipple exposed just so, and up to his ankles in kindling...

...He got it: Over the next three years Brock was paid half a million dollars, a sum almost unheard of for a reporter at a political magazine...

...Brock wouldn't have caught a typo," says Rempel...

...Before that, he had published the bestselling The Real Anita Hill, defending Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas—a book that made Brock a hero to many conservatives and a villain to the Left...

...Nobody ever accused Brock of that...

...This time, he was largely on his own...

...From the get-go, Brock said he had planned to vivisect Mrs...

...So he got an extension from the Free Press and tried to figure out what sort of book to write with the time he had left...

...No one even remotely in the first lady's orbit would have anything to do with him, let alone dish him the good stuff...

...he was a victim of the latent neo-Stalinism of the Right, a martyr to Truth...

...The Washington Post had once labeled him "the Bob Woodward of the Right," and it was a title he reveled in...

...Once upon a time Brock was happy to milk his Troopergate triumph for cash...

...Last week, Brock was all over the TV talk shows again, promoting a new Esquire article, in which he ostentatiously apologizes to President Clinton for having written the Troopergate story...

...With one friend over drinks last year, Brock agonized about his career options, saying, "I don't know whether I should abandon my conservative base—it's so lucrative...

...he guesses darkly at Paula Jones's motives...

...Brock's other source of income was about to dry up as well...

...And so, as Brock sees it, by writing the Troopergate story, he personally is responsible for the Lewinsky affair, and he's really, really sorry about it...

...he throws a kidney punch at American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell, betraying the man who has been his most dogged defender and patron but who is now socially inconvenient...

...Clinton's Apologist The Bonfire of David Brock's Vanity By Eric Felten Just nine months ago, David Brock was promoting an article he had written for Esquire, in which he ostentatiously renounced his status as "Right-Wing Hit Man...

...In 1997 he stepped up the pace, turning out three pieces...

...Price-tag: $455,000...

...the motives of the Arkansas state troopers were bad (he called them "greedy" and "slimy...

...The trooper story mentioned a meeting in a hotel room between governor Clinton and a woman named "Paula," who would of course come forward in the article's aftermath to file her now famous sexual-harassment lawsuit against the president...

...The writer's change of heart may be in large part a change of the heart...

...But in his many public appearances last week—on Good Morning America, on the Today show again, on CNN's Morning News and Crossfire, on Rivera Live and Equal Time and MSNBC's Crisis in the White House—he said that he is convinced Eric Felten is a writer in Washington, D.C...

...Brock's self-serving mea culpa is a hypocritical outrage," Rempel says...

...In the fall, Brock met another friend and complained that he had spent most of his money on the houses in Georgetown and Delaware and the lease on his condo in Manhattan's West Village...

...The problem is that as best I can tell, he has found no significant new source or documentation on a major incident or event to explain his theory on the Clintons," Woodward wrote...

...The job would have been tough enough for any reporter...

...Brock's first prideful error had been to think that he—the genius of Troop-ergate...

...the scourge of Anita Hill!—could bring down Hillary with a year's worth of digging...

...Who's to contradict him...

...Not long afterwards, both the imprint's publisher, Michael Jacobs, and the editor of the Free Press and Brock's champion, Adam Bellow, were out the door...

...In 1994 he met with his bosses at the American Spectator to demand a sizable raise...

...As if Brock hasn't bared his soul enough, the new book will be the tell-all memoirs of his life on the right...

...they scoured Arkansas newspaper morgues...

...Brock refused to be interviewed on the record for this story and would answer only unilluminating yes-and-no questions off the record...

...But there was one review that was undeniably devastating—Bob Woodward's in the Washington Post...

...He was shut out of the sources he desperately needed to make the book," says one friend...

...After that performance, he's sure to owe enough apologies to keep him in business indefinitely...

...Though there were peripheral errors in Brock's story, ones that he could, and should have corrected—for example his lurid gossip about Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster—he didn't even try to set the record straight...

...In my cub-reporter days, Brock was for a short time my editor at Insight magazine...

...But Brock was at an added, disastrous disadvantage...

...It seems that Brock's apology to the president wasn't the first time the hit-man was a useful idiot for the Clintons...

...This has caused a lot of confusion...

...No doubt many of his new friends gave him grief for his right-wing views...

...This version of events provides Brock with a convenient and comforting explanation for why his book became a literary Edsel: Conservatives didn't want the truth about Hillary, they only wanted dirt...

...With both his previous triumphs, Brock had been handed all he needed to do his stories: Cliff Jackson brought him the troopers...

...This was a story that only had value if it wasn't tainted...

...But soon after he had a new pay scale at the Spectator, he signed his new book deal, thus launching a project that consumed all his time...

...And he's now convinced his own motives were just as suspect: "I wasn't hot for this story in the interest of good government or serious journalism," Brock writes in Esquire...

...Every day they were promised an answer to their questions, if only they would wait...

...when he refused to make up lies about the first lady, conservatives trashed his book and shunned him socially...

...When it dawned on him that the hit he had promised wasn't going to materialize, Brock only had a few months to retool his operation for the new version of the book...

...If not, then certainly other impulses are at work, among them one revealed by Brock's nasty swipe at Isikoff—envy...

...Republicans from the Senate Judiciary Committee loaded him down with their boxes of opposition research on Anita Hill...

...Brock mused about how he wanted to make "real money" in the future...

...After the meeting and back in Brock's office to work the piece over, Brock griped that the editor "lacked the killer instinct...

...Since becoming a celebrity, Brock has moved in a wider social circle than most conservative journalists...

...It bothered him terribly...

...How could that possibly be enough time...

...He even, by way of apologizing to Bill Clinton, worries that "you'll be the first president impeached for orchestrating a coverup of a b—j...

...It was a tough realization for Brock...

...By his own account, David Brock is both a hypocrite and a lousy journalist...

...The Free Press took such a bath on the book that many pointed to it as the reason for the turnover that ensued there...

...He kicks the troopers while they are down and out...

...The idea that David Brock could somehow have spared Bill Clinton his present grief is a self-aggrandizing fantasy...

...The Spectator failed to renew his contract last fall...

...And they were facts: When a trooper told of Clinton's calling a particular woman time and again on his cell phone, the Times team went and dug up the governor's phone records and found that Clinton had indeed made the calls...

...In the glaring absence of any coherent journalistic principle to explain Brock's 180-degree turn, the obvious question is, What gives...

...But if Brock was to be burned at the stake, it was a bonfire of his own vanity...

...He knew the book wasn't adequate...

...But at least his new personal style did capture that elusive beast—a new book contract, albeit one with an advance in the six, rather than seven, figures...

...It was one of the best breaks the White House ever had—and they knew it...

...Cliff Jackson—Clinton's old friend turned nemesis—had brought the troopers to Rempel and Frantz first, but it was taking them a long time to produce the story...

...The Anita Hill book made him the man most hated by the Left...

...Paula Jones's lawyers helped to unearth Monica Lewinsky...

...With the fat advance for the Hillary book, he bought an extravagant beach house on the Delaware coast...

...He shouldn't have been surprised...

...In fact, Brock was hardly alone in reporting on the Arkansas troopers...

...So sorry, in fact, that he now denounces his original Troopergate story as "bad journalism...

...As the deadline loomed, Brock was trapped...

...But the one thing he doesn't seem to care about is the one thing a journalist should care about: the truth of the story...

...Brock denies, however, that his acquaintance with Lattimore is in any way responsible for his newly solicitous attitude toward the Clintons...

...Unable to advance the reporting on the first lady, Brock sets himself up as analyst and interpreter...

...Brock isn't sorry for getting the story wrong, but for getting the story at all: "I did kind of a cost-benefit analysis in my own mind about Troopergate and going down this path," Brock told Gibson, "and I really concluded that the costs outweigh the benefits...

...there were reviewers on the right who, though they tried hard to like the book, wondered what Brock could have been thinking...

...He knew the gravy train couldn't last—and it didn't...

...Rempel and Frantz waited day after day in their rooms at the Embassy Suites Hotel, while the White House stalled...

...But Brock still defended his earlier work: "My journalism was good journalism," he told the Today show's Matt Lauer...

...Even now, in the thick of his humility and contrition, the killer instinct comes through...

...It may be childish—in a Today show interview, Matt Lauer called Brock's complaints a "hurt-puppy rou-tine"—but it's easier than facing up to Woodward's damning judgment...

...Brock professes complete and total ignorance about whether his Troopergate story was true...

...I don't think I'll ever trust him," says one liberal editor in New York...

...I remember working on a campaign-finance scandal in 1990 and taking the story into an editorial meeting with Brock and the magazine's managing editor: Brock wanted to play it up for all it was worth...

...Not surprisingly, there was massive resentment among the Spectator's rank and file, who labored for modest salaries...

...And if Brock is as confused about the facts as he claims, he ought to talk to the two L.A...

...In 1995 he wrote one article for the Spectator—a defense of his Anita Hill book...

...Brock put a small army of young research assistants to work...

...When he inked the book contract in early 1995, he was so confident of his own muckraking skills that he agreed to an impossible deadline for the book: In 12 short months he would research, report, and write the whole thing...

...our boss sensibly urged caution and extra care with the facts...

...You can hear it in Woodward's disappointed tone: Thought that boy had talent...

...The Los Angeles Times had the story, too...

...Any manuscript...

...After the Hillary disaster, there was little chance Brock would get any million-dollar advances in the future...

...The Free Press expected to make a killing if they could just get Brock's devastating portrait of Hillary into stores before the '96 elections...

...He had to turn in a manuscript...

...Those who have known Brock—including me— think he is an odd candidate to become a poster boy for journalistic ethics...

...It is a measure of Brock's newfound ethics that he glibly dumps on the ruined men who made his fortune...

...He couldn't very well turn in a manuscript excoriating Hillary if he didn't have the goods...

...Price-tag: $550,000...

...Not the sort of track record to get publishers to line up with their checkbooks...

...A perplexed Charlie Gibson on Good Morning America urged Brock to point out any one detail about Troop-ergate that he had gotten wrong...

...But more important, Rempel and Frantz were doing the time-consuming work of checking the story out...

...Compared with the trooper expose in the Times, Brock's article was sloppy, self-important, and meandering...

...Brock's second error had been to think that, when the hit-piece fell apart, he could fake a serious biography on the fly...

...He had written the huge 1993 article on "Troopergate"—17,000 words of salacious stories about Bill Clinton as told by the Arkansas state troopers who witnessed them...

...Brock even bragged to friends that he had once run into Woodward on the streets of Georgetown and was told by the great man that he was "the only respectable one at the Spectator...

...Times reporters who were competing with him, Bill Rempel and Douglas Frantz...

...Lattimore, until recently the spokesman for Hillary Rodham Clinton, struck up a friendship with Brock about a year ago, and since then they've become good friends...

...I wanted to pop [the president] right between the eyes...

...Guess I was wrong...

...Their editors were understandably leery of the subject and kept putting up roadblocks...

...Who knows whether the Esquire publicity will bring the desired riches...

...There were reviewers on the left who dismissed the book out of hand as the work of a fascist cretin...

...It only brought them infamy and poverty...

...Some apology...

...Once upon a time Brock wanted to hurt the president...

...But as much as Brock's turnaround can be explained as a heady mix of new friendships and old animosities, the overriding reason for his transformation appears to be a more calculating one: He needs the money that his newfound celebrity may bring...

...They ran up huge Nexis bills at the American Spectator...

...The spectacle of a journalist publicly professing that his work is "good," and then less than a year later proclaiming that same work "bad," is unusual, to say the least...

...But the comparison set the bar high: Woodward always got spectacular access at the highest levels—and Brock had none...

...To the extent that I was programmed to believe the worst of Hillary," Brock wrote in his first Esquire piece, "the far more nuanced picture I was piecing together knocked me off my foundations...

...The key moment came in 1996 when Brock's political biography of the first lady, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, hit bookstore shelves . . . and stubbornly stayed on them, unsold...

...He has picked up a few choice assignments with the glossies, but most publications don't seem to be breaking his door down for copy...

...and he gratuitously trashes Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter who was the first journalist to hear the Monica tapes...

...What about the many other journalists—serious, talented, self-respecting profes-sionals—who have reported equally damaging stories about the president...

...The troopers didn't make money by coming forward," Rempel says...

...now he wants to help the president—and neither impulse is a journalistic one...