Book Review
Blinded by the Right:
The Conscience of an
Ex-Conservative
review by Quentin Dunne
When future historians study the political climate of nineties America, one of the more baffling aspects they’ll confront will be the visceral hatred President Clinton evoked in much of the Republican Party. Clinton was not, after all, even a liberal; amongst other things, he supported the death penalty, balanced the budget, and signed historic welfare reform. Yet, the sheer contempt many powerful conservatives held him in played a key role in his impeachment.
The opening salvo in the kill-Clinton war was fired by journalist David Brock. It was Brock, working for the right-wing American Spectator magazine, who wrote the notorious 1993 Troopergate article, which alleged Clinton, while Arkansas governor, used state troopers to procure women for him. The article would serve as the genesis of the Paula Jones lawsuit and, later, the Monica Lewinsky debacle. Brock was, by his own admission, a right-wing hit man.
But something happened to the hit man. True to the book’s subtitle, he found his conscience and, eventually, repudiated the conservative movement and their smear tactics. Brock’s Blinded by the Right is, in part, an attempt to right (no pun intended) some of the wrongs from that era. It is also a vivid, fascinating, and ultimately depressing inside look at the workings of the right-wing sleaze machine that had the Clintons in their sights from day one. Having been a key participant in the culture wars (Prior to Clinton, Brock had turned his poison pen on Anita Hill.), he was privy to the right’s relentless, and well-financed, efforts to bring Clinton down.
The book’s moral center comes in Brock’s gradual realization that the anti-Clinton campaign was burdened by an entanglement of lies, hatred, and hypocrisy that far outstripped their target’s own flaws. And as a homosexual who came out at the height of his prominence on the right, he also could no longer stomach the rampant homophobia he was first witness to and later recipient of. In describing such ugliness, Brock is, thankfully, wise enough to sprinkle in some skillful touches of droll humor. He also lends the narrative a poignant quality in recounting his strained relationship with his father and their eventual shared understanding.
The book is not without its flaws. In describing his sometimes tortured emotional state, Brock's prose occasionally has a purple cloud looming over it, and his habit of describing his former colleagues’ physical shortcomings is a bit disconcerting. Nonetheless, Blinded emerges as a compelling combination of personal memoir, political expose, and heartfelt mea culpa. It is, in short, required reading for future historians - and present readers - seeking to understand the heated nature of the Clinton years. Blinded by the Right Copyright © by David Brock; Published by Crown Publishers, New York, New York.

Excerpt
The Andy Warhol Diaries
edited by Pat Hackett
Thursday March 31, 1977
Lunch with Victor ($16), then we walked over to the loft building on 19th and Fifth that Maxime’s moving into and that Victor is thinking of buying a floor in, too. I tried to discourage him, saying that it was really too small. It was. I can’t figure out why Maxime wants to go there, it’s no bigger than her apartment. She says, “I just want one big room,” but when she moves all her furniture in, it won’t even look or feel big at all. And it costs $32,000.
Victor and his boyfriend walked me back to the office. A fortune teller told Victor’s boyfriend that he would be hit by a cab. Then she said maybe that wasn’t right, that she’d better read the tarot cards too, so she did, and then she said, “It’s going to happen even quicker than I thought.” So now the kid is really worried. She charged him $5 and first he said, “I’m not going to pay you for telling me that,” and she said he had to so he did. How could a person do that! I mean, that’s the kind of thing that really really really stays in your mind. The reason the kid went there in the first place was because his friends had told him she was so good. To make him feel better all I could think to say was that maybe she could see he was a careless person and had told him that to make him more careful.
I was invited to Diane Von Fursten-berg’s dinner for Sue Mengers. Went home, glued myself together, cab to DVF’s ($2.25). It was a very heavy newspaper-reporter dinner. Mr. Grunwald from Time magazine, Nora Ephron - didn’t see her husband, Carl Bernstein, though - Helen Gurley Brown and her husband David, Irene Selznick, and DVF’s boyfriend, Barry Diller. I was feeling very talkative so I talked and I talked, but nobody listened to anything I said, they just ignored me. I know that Diller doesn’t like me, so I worked hard to change his mind but he was still awful to me.
Bianca was there. I thought she’d already left for Paris. She was saying out loud everything I was thinking- what two b**ches Dian Von Furstenberg and Sue Mengers were - and she said, “at least Sue can be funny sometimes.” Sue was on her way to Europe to meet her husband, who only lets her see him once every couple of months, I think.
I told Irene Selznick that I’d seen a great picture of her at George Cukor’s. I was raving about California so much that everybody thinks I’m moving here.
Helen Gurley Brown sat at my feet and I talked to her about California. Bianca was talking about how boring all these people were to Mr. Grunwald, she didn’t know who he was, and then after he went away I told her. They were all two-faced people there, and Diane only invited me to pay me back for the Interview cover, and I mean, who cared. Diane is very skinny. Dino De Laurentis came late with his wife, Silvana Mangano, she was wearing a white Oscar de la Renta and said she was cold.
Egon Von Furstenberg came in with his girlfriend, the one that used to come to the Factory who I can’t stand, and I guess she finally realizes that I hate her, because she didn’t say anything to me. Her name starts with M, something like Marita. He’ll never marry her.
Bianca said she wanted to go dancing and called her answering service but there was nothing on it so she stayed. She was wearing a thrift-store dress that she got in California that was really beautiful. When the De Laurentises walked by to leave us she said, “They’re full of s**t.” I left alone. I had a horrible time.
- Reprinted with permission.
©1989, Warner Books Inc.

How Hip was Warhol in 1967?
by Zox
“Hi, I’m Andy. This is Nico. Say, ‘Hello,’ Nico.”
Nico was tall-thin-blond-any-girl’s-worst-nightmare beautiful. Striped bell-bottomed hip-huggers worn tightly and low flared in exaggerated tuba mouths at the ankle. Strung through large loops, a wide black belt with a distressed Puritan buckle cinched her trousers below the reach of the gauzy white pirate blouse carelessly, or perhaps, strategically, buttoned to reveal her braless sternum. Her hair was surf blond, straight and long. The bangs formed a platinum hood, creating a dark shadow over her already raccoon eyes.
“H...E...L...L...O.”
Nico spelled “hello” in a deep German baritone that occasionally dropped to sub-audible wavelengths. Nico, who would later have her own solo career, a child with Alain Delain, puff up to 300 pounds and OD on “Heroine” - a song title from the banana album - was hip in 1967. “Hip,” however, is not an on-off light switch, it is more, metaphorically speaking, a dimmer switch. Which is to say that there are degrees of “hipness” ranging from faint to blinding. In the movie Diner, Mickey Rourke and Kevin Bacon, two urban-savvy Baltimore guys, hit the road through the verdantly pastured estates of Maryland where they meet a beautiful and sophisticated young woman riding her horse. Attempts at charming her with their practiced Baltimore charisma result in league-defining rejections. Afterward, Kevin asks Mickey, “Do you ever get the feeling that there’s something going on that we don’t know about?”
Nico not only caused me to feel that there was something going on that I didn’t know about, but also that I was more than six degrees of separation from the hip world to which I imagined she and Andy belonged. Even before I could adjust myself from the coup de gras, my fragile hipness-based ego was suffering, I sustained another near-fatal blow. During a screening of what seemed like Warhol’s film sketchbook, including a guy eating an apple as he recounted his hitchhiking tales (while in the background a woman is being raped by a man dressed like a detective comic book bad guy), I saw Viva. I had never seen anyone like her. She had no armor, moving about with complete confidence and no evidence of self-consciousness. I was devastated. I was not worthy.
There were several other well-attended events where Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s director, described their methodology; Q&As where Warhol, on all questions directed to him, turned the mic over to Paul; movies of people sitting on a couch and others of people getting ready to make a movie. I was asking Paul some questions, as he was ready to drive off, when he asked if I’d be at the party. “Party?” He told me if I wanted to go I should hop in his car. At the party, I talked to Andy. Unlike in public where he barely made a peep, he chatted excitedly to me for an hour and a half, so radically different from people that I meet at parties today who seem like they’re distracted by something shiny. Andy had a marvelously focused attention span. His style was easy, and he seemed fascinated and amazed by everything. He told me that during his field trip to the San Diego Zoo, Viva had talked non-stop. Everytime she would speak, Andy held the mic from his portable recorder to her mouth, and she would clam up. Andy would shoot an occasional Instamatic flash photo while I was talking and then slip the camera into his pocket.
Even though everything seemed to be happening in the moment, Andy started making predictions about how he saw the future of film. He thought people would start making home movies and become so interested in seeing themselves and their friends and family that watching Hollywood stories and movie stars would start to lose luster. He thought that everything was “interesting,” a worthy film subject. People could film the most ordinary things around them, just doing what they do, and it would be so much better than TV that people would stop watching TV and watch themselves. He asked me all about myself, what I did, what I liked, where I’d been. He’d telescope into everything, wanting very specific details like what kind of drugs my father kept in the medicine cabinet. He wanted to know all the surfing terms and definitions. There wasn’t a single thing that he did or said to be cool, but he was so cool, and I felt so relaxed around him because the true quality that made him great was that Andy really was nonjudgmental.
After the party, Nico drove me home in a 1965 Mustang. Paul rode shotgun and, I sat in the back seat with Viva. Viva said that she had Mia Farrow’s Rosemary hair cut ages before Mia and cited many other examples to prove she did the coolest things so far ahead of people considered to be the coolest people, that she had moved on to cooler realms before they had ever begun. I noted how accurate Andy was in his description of Viva’s unending elaboration of her own mythos. When we hear something described that we have experienced, or we experience something of which we’ve only heard, there is a process that happens in which we compare the two. In most cases there is a similarity between the two, yet in other cases, the account has distorted the event in a discernable manner. What really made Andy so hip was that he was a very accurate reporter.
In retrospect, with unflinching certainty, to meet Warhol in the fall of 1967 was legendary. However, how cool was it then, at that point in time? When I started attending San Diego State in 1967, I was one of five guys - in a student body of 28,000 - who had long hair. Being an agent of the future in a town of military kids smack dab in the middle of the Viet Nam War, I was a peacenik feeling twinges of paranoia. The manner in which romanticizers of the era regard the late ’60s, would lead one to believe cont’d from page 36
it was a carefree, stony slide in the mud, a time to wallow in the mire. However, for me, every hard-won moment of bliss was paid for in hours of angst. In one such blissful moment, I had heard of Andy Warhol as one hears of the latest “wacky artist.” In today’s art scene, I’ve heard about an artist named Orlan, who has plastic surgery done on herself as an art piece, or another who infiltrates various social scenes - Chicana home girls, the Hampton set - and takes pictures of herself. I had heard that Warhol painted Campbell’s soup cans, made a 24-hour movie of the Empire State Building and filmed someone sleeping for eight hours. I had admired how the Warhol-designed yellow banana peel sticker peeled-off to reveal the inner fruit on my Velvet Underground album.
In 1967 I felt relatively hip even though I wasn’t in a band at the time. I had read “Howl,” Steppenwolf, Damien, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “The Wasteland,” Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, The Crying of Lot 49, Honey for the Bears, The Cat’s Cradle, the diaries of Salvador Dali and Catcher in the Rye. I had seen Fellini movies and spent time in Haight-Ashbury. My LP collection included but was not limited to: Beatles, Stones, Doors, Kinks, Love, Byrds, Donovan, everything Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Mamas and Papas, and Vanilla Fudge. During the Summer of Love (1967) I hitched to New York City, Montreal for the World’s Fair, back to New York, where I got a job helping put together the Electric Circus on St. Marks in the Village, flew to London, hitched all over Europe, hung in hippie hovels, met shady characters in windy bazaar-black-market-kasbah tents in Istanbul, and heard my first Jimi Hendrix 45 in Austria.
While I was working at the Electric Circus, sleeping in the puppet room, sweaty, dusty, and downright grim, Jerry Brant, the entrepreneur of the club, had his limo driver take me to his flat to shower. In his bathroom, he had a framed poster of Liz Taylor by Warhol. Redness escaped the perimeters of her oversized lips, orange skin glowed against a flat purple background, a graphic impact that was stylistically a jump ahead of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s cover. In terms of hipness, I assessed my position light years ahead of my Navy-kid compatriots at San Diego State.
In a grassy plaza formed by four old Spanish one-story buildings, Warhol was to have an informal meeting with the students of San Diego State. Of the 28,000 only ten others and myself attended.
Hip is elusive. No serious scholars have theorized “hipness” as of yet. Susan Sontag has written penetrating analyses of camp and kitsch. Walter Benjamin has done stunning critiques of “flaneur” culture. In a lecture I heard at the Getty, David Roman the theater professor at USC, theorized “freak” based on cont’d from page 23the works by John Leguizamo. In the subsequent Q&A, Joe Boone, English Professor at USC, suggested that perhaps “freak” might be conflated with “queer” theory and possibly just be another attempt to identify the “other.” Judith Halberstam, professor at UCSD, at a recent conference at USC on the relationship between artist and critic presented a brilliant analysis of “drag queen” performance and culture. To speak of “hip” we must speak without a formal critical precedence, yet to speak of Warhol, we must speak of “hip.”
Let us be clear from the onset: to formalize “hip” is “unhip.” Therefore “hip” is modernist in nature rather than post-modern, because it does not tolerate its own analysis. The word “hip” is a derivation of the bebop “hep” which meant to be in “the know,” to be of the cognoscenti, not only to know the location of “The Green Door” and to know the password, but also to know what lies behind “The Green Door.” In the realized Utopias of Disneyland, Vegas and American cinema, toward which the “culture” as a whole wantonly aspires, the modus operandi is to recognize, collect, defang, neuter and refine “hip” for mass consumption, resulting in a colonization of “hip” and subsequent dehipification. “Hip” refers to living culture in its native state, wild, feral and a danger to “Utopians.” Warhol was hip in 1967.