Merely from the whines and howls of his numerous enemies on the
right, you can tell that Sid Blumenthal has drawn blood in his book, "The
Clinton Wars," within which many pages are spent detailing what his pal
Hillary Clinton famously referred to as "a vast right-wing conspiracy." The
only word I'd quarrel with here is "vast," since the prime players seem to
have numbered under 20. And, of course, these days, Senator HRC rather
strongly resembles a largish right-wing conspiracy herself.
Blumenthal's is an awfully long book, but the chapters that I
have thus far worked my way through do make a pretty good case in
buttressing HRC's claim. Blumenthal's chapter on the Hitchens affair is
vivid, too, on the latter's disgusting behavior.
Prime among the whiners and howlers is the right-wing agitator
(and, long ago, former leftist) David Horowitz, who lashes out at "Sid
Vicious." I have to say that the endless claims on the right that Sid
Blumenthal is some sort of heavy, or thug, have always made me laugh. I
don't know him that well, but Sid has always reminded me more of Bernie
Wooster's descriptions of Gussie Fink-Nottle.
Horowitz says plaintively that Blumenthal has been beastly to
him ever since Horowitz and Collier staged a "Second Thoughts" conference in
Washington in the fall of 1987, designed as a sort of ideological hospice
for renegades in the same stage of transition from left to right as
themselves.
Horowitz charges that it was Blumenthal who urged left-wing
bullyboys such as myself to attend and then to deride the proceedings in
print. I can't speak for the others, but in my case, Horowitz has it all
wrong. I was visiting Washington, D.C., and had better things to do with my
time than go to the Second Thoughts affair but got dragged along by
Hitchens.
When I entered the hall, Horowitz was delivering the keynote to
a sparse crowd of 200 and was visibly nonplussed at the sight of potential
hecklers. He lost his train of thought, rambled inconsequentially, then
plunged back into his childhood, recalling the upbringing of his sister and
himself in a Communist family, where as so often happened the children
observed and resented the long hours their parents spent away from them
doing "party work."
"My sister will never forgive them," Horowitz wailed to the
audience of some 200, then depicted the abyss of his own deprivation. He had
never been allowed to go to Doris Day and Rock Hudson movies, but rather was
forced to sit through uplifting Soviet features.
If only he'd been allowed to watch "Pillow Talk" ... And of
course, among the ironies is that Horowitz and Hitchens are now
pillow-talkers themselves, tucked up in the same ideological four-poster.
Horowitz mentions what he calls Blumenthal's "vindictive" libel
suit against Matt Drudge, who had published the charge that Blumenthal was a
wife-beater and then failed entirely to sustain this damaging libel.
Blumenthal sued. Horowitz continues, "I have myself once or twice used the
threat of a suit to deter particularly scurrilous charges and to avoid the
kind of damage that libel suits were made for. Alex Cockburn, for example,
spent a lot of time at cocktail parties in the 1980s spreading the rumor
that I was a CIA agent. In fact, I have never had contact with a CIA
official or operative to my knowledge, or worked for any government agency
or -- with three exceptions -- any outside employer for that matter."
Now, it's true that in May of 1989 Horowitz did send me a
letter accusing me of making "false and malicious statements," but it had
nothing to do with the CIA. I can imagine the Agency being capable of almost
any infamy or folly, except that of hiring Horowitz as an agent. It's
curious that Horowitz should have misrepresented, or misremembered, why he
was jumpy enough to threaten legal action.
If he looks in his files, or consults page 101 of his copy of my
1995 diary of the Reagan/Bush/early Clinton years, "The Golden Age Is In
Us," he'll find he sent me the following epistle: "Dear Alexander Cockburn,
It has come to my attention that you have been making false and malicious
statements about my interviews with the late David Kennedy. I have consulted
counsel about this matter and advise you to stop doing this. I am sending
this letter to you to serve notice to you that if you intend to publish
this, you and your publisher do so at your peril. Sincerely, David Horowitz,
Los Angeles."
Nothing here, as you can see, about the CIA. So far as I can
recall, Horowitz had formed the impression that I had repeated a story going
the rounds at the time among friends of the Kennedy clan that this same clan
entertained a particular loathing for Horowitz and Collier on the grounds
that while researching their book on the Kennedys, they had helped satiate
David Kennedy's craving for drugs, in return for inside stories about the
Kennedys. An obviously outrageous and baseless charge, as I'm sure all will
agree.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
