Don't Quote Me

The Boston Phoenix
December 2 - 9, 1999

[Don't Quote Me]

Sex and sensibilities

The Hillsdale College scandal reveals rifts on the right. Plus, Net radio boosts do-it-yourself media, and George W.'s dirty trick.

by Dan Kennedy
Happy conservatives are all alike; each unhappy conservative is unhappy in his own way.
Forgive the Tolstoy reference, but it befits the deadly scandal that has engulfed Hillsdale College, a small liberal-arts institution in rural Michigan that has long been a favorite of movement conservatives. The college became a darling of the right for refusing to accept federal funds and for combatively eschewing academia's "dehumanizing, discriminatory trend" (to quote Hillsdale's Web site) toward multiculturalism.
Hillsdale's troubles began on October 17, when Lissa Roche, the daughter-in-law of the college's charismatic president, George Roche III, committed suicide. The tragedy was a shock on campus, where Lissa Roche had worked closely with her father-in-law, editing the monthly newsletter Imprimis. Soon came a bigger shock: evidence that the two had been having an affair for 19 years. Roche "retired" immediately. The college itself is struggling to right itself, with officials vacillating between acknowledging the scandal and disparaging the dead woman's memory with a despicable nuts-and-sluts assault on her character.
The whiff of sex and suicide proved irresistible to the media, for whom hypocrisy on the part of God-and-morality-spouting conservatives has an overpowering appeal. Thus it was hardly a surprise that a number of leading papers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, ran expansive features devoted mainly to noting that Roche has joined such notable right-leaning sexual hypocrites as Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, and Henry Hyde -- not to mention the libidinous president of the United States, who may have looked into the camera and lied about having had sex with "that woman," but who, to his credit, has never evinced much hypocrisy about sins of the flesh in general.
Far more interesting was what the Hillsdale scandal's aftermath revealed about the state of the fractured conservative movement. Twenty years after Ronald Reagan's first successful presidential campaign brought a united political right to the promised land, the movement has fallen apart. Neither George W. Bush nor John McCain, the Republicans' leading presidential candidates, is a favorite of the right (though both would appear to be conservative enough by any normal person's measure). In such hard times, Hillsdale College's troubles quickly came to be seen as a symbol for conservatives, although the meaning depended on what sort of conservatives were doing the interpreting.
It was fitting that the scandal was blown wide open not by the mainstream media but, rather, by the two magazines that speak the loudest within the conservative movement: National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1950s, and the Weekly Standard, begun in 1995 by Republican strategist William Kristol (with Rupert Murdoch's money). The former is serious, ponderous, content to dominate its own small corner of the intellectual universe; the latter is loose, irreverent, and so obsessed with influencing the mainstream that it publishes self-congratulatory ads every time a congressman or senator makes a public reference to one of its articles. James Miller broke the story on the Review's Web site and, later, published a fuller version in the magazine. The Standard's Tucker Carlson and Andrew Ferguson weighed in with a cover story two weeks ago, and Carlson published a follow-up last week. As National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser put it in the New York Observer: "This is how the media food chain of the vast right-wing conspiracy works when right-wingers are at fault: We deal justly with our own."
Perhaps the most immediate effect of such enterprise was that it stopped liberal punditry in its tracks. Few left-leaning pundits have written about the Roche affair, which may have more than a little to do with the fact that conservative journalists have already aired their own dirty laundry, washed it, folded it up, and put it away again. As Slate's Timothy Noah observed in the "Chatterbox" column, "The mop-up operation occurred so swiftly and efficiently that the liberal press never got a chance to make opportunistic use of the incident, as it has been doing with the lurid details of the Gingrich divorce."
More important, though, are the dramatically different approaches taken by the Review and the Standard, and what those approaches say about the state of conservatism. The Review's piece, though not shying away from the sheer ghastliness of Roche's alleged conduct, is respectful and admiring of Hillsdale's go-it-alone stance in the world of higher education. Indeed, Miller's article is accompanied by an introductory note from Buckley himself, who writes, "It is predictable that there will be moral and ideological clucking by those who scorn the very idea of Hillsdale, a college firmly oriented to reverence for the Western intellectual canon, and to American ideals of freedom and individual responsibility. . . . Mr. Roche has had a distinguished career, he is a practicing Christian, and like his brothers in the faith he is a sinner; perhaps, even, he has sinned here." Buckley has also criticized conservative activist William Bennett, who quit Hillsdale's presidential-search committee (on which Buckley also serves) and publicly blasted college officials for illogically forcing Roche to resign while proclaiming his innocence. Bennett's entirely reasonable question: which is it?
In stark contrast to Buckley, Carlson and Ferguson's piece in the Standard denounces Roche as something of a "cult leader," and mocks Hillsdale as part of the "incestuous world" of conservative institutions -- "a parallel universe with its own magazines, publishing house, newspaper, television network -- and of course, in Hillsdale, its own college -- all of them untainted by the `dominant liberal culture.' " The difference, to oversimplify, is that Buckley wants to retreat from that dominant culture; Kristol wants to engage it. This journalistic dispute reflects the broader debate going on within the conservative movement -- a debate given voice earlier this year, after the failed impeachment drive, by long-time activist Paul Weyrich, who called on his fellow right-wingers to retreat from the "ever-widening sewer" of American life.
Oddly, the writers of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the hard right's most important soapbox, have been almost silent on the Roche affair. There was a tiresome piece by Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion, on the virtues of hypocrisy. But the only editorial the Journal has published on the matter appeared in the Friday "Weekend Journal," which is run by a different editorial staff; that effort merely hailed the right for taking Roche's misbehavior more seriously than the left ever took Bill Clinton's.
Finally, there was right-wing columnist Don Feder's piece in this past Monday's Boston Herald. As always, Feder did not disappoint connoisseurs of the truly weird. His so-called point was that conservatives have nothing to be ashamed of because Woody Allen, an exemplar of the "liberal sexual ethic," had sex with his stepdaughter. Well, of course. Q.E.D.

They are the two biggest opposing trends in media. On the one hand, about a half-dozen enormous corporations control most of the country's television and radio stations; broadcasting and cable networks; film, television, and music studios; and newspaper-, magazine-, and book-publishing companies. On the other hand, the Internet is making do-it-yourself media cheap and easy for the masses, guaranteeing the continued existence of independent, if obscure, projects.
Now comes the next big step for independents: Internet radios, cheap ($200 or less), hassle-free devices that you plug into a phone jack. According to reports by CNet and the Freedom Forum, two companies -- Penguin Radio and Kerbango -- will bring out Internet radios early next year. The radios will pull in any of the thousands of stations that are on the Internet, and they reportedly will be as easy to use as standard AM/FM units.
Of course, you can listen to radio stations on the Internet with a computer, and many people do. But computers make for rather awkward and expensive radio receivers. A dedicated Net radio makes more sense for a host of reasons.
Perhaps the best thing about Internet radio is that it's an end run around the oppressive regulatory regime that keeps small, independent, community-oriented radio stations off the AM and FM dials. Advocates of community radio -- including, locally, the Citizens' Media Corps, formed after the Federal Communications Commission shut down the fledgling Radio Free Allston in 1997 -- are petitioning the FCC to loosen its prohibition against low-power stations. The FCC is expected to act soon, but it's unlikely to license enough stations to satisfy all tastes and needs.
But who needs the FCC when you've got the Internet? If Net radio works as advertised, and if someone can find a way to break the phone-line tether so that it can be portable, no one will ever have to apply for an FCC license again. And the National Association of Broadcasters, the powerful industry group that has kept small stations off the air, will suddenly realize that its legislative muscle is worthless.
Coming up on the outside track: Internet television.

As best as I can tell, Scott Shuger, who writes Slate's "Today's Papers" column, was the only commentator to glean a bit of news from Admiral James "Who Am I? Why Am I Here?" Stockdale's New York Times op-ed last Friday in defense of John McCain's sanity. Like McCain, Stockdale is a former prisoner of war who suffered horribly in the custody of the North Vietnamese.
The news, as Shuger points out, was in Stockdale's assertion that "a few weeks ago I received a call from an old friend who is also close to the George W. Bush campaign soliciting comments on Mr. McCain's 'weaknesses.' "
Granted, there have been a few media reports about a whispering campaign concerning the state of McCain's mental health. But this isn't a whisper, it's a scream; and now we have a reliable source indicating where said scream is coming from.
W.'s father was elected president in 1988 with the help of Lee Atwater-inspired dirty tricks against the Dukakis campaign, including insinuations that Kitty Dukakis was unpatriotic and that Michael Dukakis was unstable. (By contrast, when Dukakis campaign manager John Sasso got caught whacking out Joe Biden for plagiarism and trying to blame it on Dick Gephardt, he was fired immediately.) In 1992, with Atwater dead from a brain tumor, Bush tried again: his campaign attempted to smear Clinton with charges that he had sold out American interests during a trip to the Soviet Union when he was a student at Oxford. That may be the only accusation ever lodged against Clinton that was actually untrue.
It would appear that money isn't the only thing Bush the younger inherited from his father. The question is whether anyone in the media will follow up on Stockdale's tantalizing tidbit.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.

Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here