Caveat lector

MCMURTRY SPEAKS (PART 3)! Flowers’ tale didn't seem to be true. Not that there’s anything wrong with it!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2003

NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH IT: How shaky a witness was Gennifer Flowers? In January 1992, she told the tale of her 12-year affair in the pages of the tabloid Star. (She was paid $150,000, with much more to come. At the time, her salary as an Arkansas state worker was $17,000.) But uh-oh! One week after her story appeared, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter noted some problems with Flowers’ credibility. Among them: “Flowers claims she met Clinton at the Excelsior Hotel in 1979 or 1980. The hotel didn’t open until late 1982.” Another: “Flowers claims to have been Miss Teen Age America, 1967. She wasn’t—that year, or any other.” In The Hunting of the President, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons went into more detail about this shaky messenger:

CONASON/LYONS (page 25): Musicians and club owners who had worked with Flowers described her as manipulative and dishonest. Her resume falsely proclaimed her a graduate of a fashionable Dallas prep school she’d never attended. It also listed a University of Arkansas nursing degree she’d never earned and membership in a sorority that had never heard of her. Her agent told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that contrary to her claims, Flowers had never opened for comedian Rich Little. A brief gig on the Hee Haw television program had come to a bad end, the agent would later confirm, when Flowers simply vanished for a couple of weeks with a man she’d met in a Las Vegas casino—and then concocted a tale about having been kidnapped. She had never been Miss Teenage America. Even her “twin sister Genevieve” turned out to be purely a figment of Flowers’ imagination.

And now, someone else is peddling her tales—rough-talking, half-witted Larry McMurtry, who (through ample use of his favorites, the F-, D- and P-words) assures misused readers of the New York Review that “the brash boy from Hope…kept right at it with Gennifer, kept at it for more than a decade” (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 10/14/03). No actual evidence has ever suggested that this tale is actually true. But McMurtry seems too stupid to know it, and his editors—we’ll rattle their names off tomorrow—seem much too empty to care.

McMurtry, of course, pretends to review Nigel Hamilton’s new Clinton biography. As noted, he criticizes the book for its tawdry, tawdry focus, but never shows the slightest sign of doubting the book’s pleasing facts. Readers of the New York Review are therefore presented a flowery tale: Clinton kept at it for more than a decade; his later relationship with Monica Lewinsky was “a pale shadow of what went on with Gennifer.” These facts are asserted in McMurtry’s own voice although, presumably, they’re also found in the book which he’s reviewing. McMurtry never voices a doubt about that book’s credibility.

But are the book’s spicy accounts really true? If we too may employ the rough talk of real men, Hannity and Colmes didn’t give a rat’s *ss when they let Flowers toy with her sick murder lists, and McMurtry’s editors didn’t much care when they put his “review” into print. But luckily, someone at the New York Times was also reading Hamilton’s book, and this reviewer had quaintly retained the values of a lost, bygone era. In her own review of Hamilton’s book, Michiko Kakutani actually wondered if Hamilton’s statements were actually accurate. Her conclusion? Let us again use the rough talk of men: She said that this book is pure horsesh*t.

“A pasted-together compendium of recycled news, familiar observations and base gossip, Nigel Hamilton’s new biography of Bill Clinton represents a sleazy new low in the chronicling of presidential lives,” she began. (Her review appeared on September 23.) “It regurgitates the most scurrilous and unsubstantiated rumors about Mr. Clinton and his wife.” Ah yes, “rumors” and “gossip!” Kakutani explained where they’d come from:

KAKUTANI: [Hamilton’s book] is heavily indebted to secondary sources, ranging from credible ones like David Maraniss’s “First in His Class” to rabid conspiracy-minded ones like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s “Secret Life of Bill Clinton”; from thoughtful, analytic memoirs like George Stephanopoulos’s “All Too Human” to panting, pulp romanesque ones like Gennifer Flowers’s “Passion and Betrayal.”

But let’s sing paeans to rumor and gossip! They ruled human life at the dawn of the west, and by the time we saw Flowers being dragged out on Hardball, rumor and gossip were again sacred values. Half-wits like Hannity raced to promote them. Now they rule the slick NYR too.

TOMORROW: “The fight, if it happened, was probably no big deal.” McMurtry toasts “rumor” and “gossip.”

RUBES ALONG THE MOHAWK: In today’s Times, Michael Winerip presents his latest report on the New York state testing debacle (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/25/03). Here’s the kicker paragraph:

WINERIP: Now the experts are looking at New York differently. “I’m stunned,” said Mr. Hodas. “Frankly, I thought they were professionals.”

Make no mistake—when states began devising their own testing programs, many incompetents were put in charge. You should be very skeptical of testing programs and results—and you should keep reading Winerip’s articles.