Got this in the submissions inbox, and I like it:
Horns and Halos - Bush, Hatfield and Fortunate
Son
Two good quotes to use for headers:
What five adjectives would you use to describe
Bush? ?
"Fortunate, larcenous, lazy, petty, deceitful,
insensitive, stupid, manipulative, phony,
racist...oh, I'm sorry, you told me to only list five."
From an interview conducted with James Hatfield
shortly before his death, May 2001, copyright
BuzzFlash.com
"The book is just as edifying for the painful
history of its publication as it is for all that it
reveals to us about our unelected President."
Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Studies,
New York University.
-------------------------------------------------------------
On the 20th July last year, 43 year old James H.
Hatfield, journalist and author of 'Fortunate
Son', a biography of George W. Bush, was found dead
in his hotel room in Springdale, Arkansas, the
victim of apparent suicide.
Hatfield's story is tied to that of the book he
wrote, and through it to the career of the
President. It goes like this; Hatfield, a writer with a
somewhat chequered past, wrote a biography of
George W Bush - this was while Dubya was still
Governor of Texas. Amongst a host of bald and shocking
facts about him, it contained the allegation that
in 1972 Bush senior had arranged for a Texas
judge to have his son's conviction for possession of
cocaine expunged from the records, in return for
which Junior performed works of public service.
This last was already documented; the fact that he
worked for a while in the early seventies in an
outreach centre for teenagers in one of Dallas'
poorest districts has often been touted by
Republican publicists eager to round off some of their
leader's corners. Needless to say, it stands out
like a sore thumb.
The cocaine charge is the most sensational
allegation contained in Hatfield's book, but it's
hardly the most disturbing. From engineering the
seizure of other people's property under eminent
domain laws for use by his Texas Rangers baseball
team, to the millions he made in dubious insider
stock swaps off the series of ever-larger failing oil
companies he owned or directed over the years, to
his peripheral connections to the BCCI scandal,
Fortunate Son is a catalogue of sins. It is a
portrait of a man who routinely uses political
connections to further his business interests, and
likewise uses his business connections to further his
political career; to quote one of Jenny Holzer's
truisms, "Abuse of power comes as no surprise".
That Bush was corrupt before his political career
is similarly no surprise. After all, this is the
man who took control of the world's biggest
democracy in a bloodless putsch, and despite his sabre
rattling and the popularity boost he's received
courtesy of the War on Terrorism, the stink
surrounding the demise of Enron is still the biggest
news in town. Next to all that, Hatfield's
allegations of a youthful drug misdemeanour seem like
very small beer.
To preserve their anonymity Hatfield left his
sources for the drug story unattributed; it was an
omission that was to cost him a great deal. After
the story had broke on news website Salon about
George's partying past (it is important to note
that Hatfield was not the first to make the
allegation), his editors at St. Martins Press insisted
that he include it in a book that was effectively
already written and ready for the press.
According to Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media
Studies at New York University, they instructed him
to "put the story in a special afterword for
maximum effect, pushing him to make the prose more
lurid".
After publication, amid a media firestorm and
threats of possible lawsuits from the Bush campaign,
St. Martin's Press pressured Hatfield to reveal
the identity of his confidential sources. He
refused.
Next, the Dallas Morning News happened to
suddenly receive confidential information on Hatfield's
criminal past. Hatfield denied the allegations,
claiming that they had confused him with another
person of the same name He returned home to
Arkansas, to find camera crews camped out outside his
home.
Th truth soon surfaced. Hatfield had been
convicted in 1988 of paying a hit man $5,000 to murder
his former boss with a car bomb, and subsequently
served five years in a penitentiary. The intended
victim had escaped unharmed.
Hatfield had been guilty of a heinous crime; he
had paid for it with five years of his life, and
since had successfully reinvented himself as an
author. But the contents of his book were now all
but forgotten, as inquiries into Bush's drug
history were diverted into stories about Hatfield's
life. Less than a week after publication 70,000
copies of Fortunate Son were withdrawn and
destroyed, despite the fact that the book was at #8 on
Amazon's Top 100 within 72 hours of its publication
and #30 on The New York Times hardcover
non-fiction list. St. Martins Press promised to turn it
into "furnace fodder".
Let's leave aside the fact that burning books is
anathema to any democracy; this was a grotesque
over-reaction. Bush's predecessor Clinton was
shown no such favour when it came to allegations in
the press about him: In "Blinded by the Right -
The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative" published in
March this year, David Brock, one of the hounds
that ran his administration to ground, explicitly
admits that there was a right wing press
conspiracy to discredit Clinton, long before the former
President's philandering came to light. According
to former Newsweek Journalist Robert Parry,
"We've seen books written about Clinton that I think
are essentially made up". Parry goes further, "If
you're going to start burning every book that has
in it some disputed allegation, we're going to
burn every book in every library. I find that
troubling. I find it even more troubling that the
press has shown no concern about a book burning."
Importantly, the rumours of Bush's past cocaine
are almost certainly not unfounded. In an April
1998 interview with Houston Public News reporter
Toby Rogers, former President George Bush's Chief
of Staff Michael C. Dannenhauer admitted that Bush
"was out of control since college. There was
cocaine use, lots of women, but the drinking was the
worst". According to Dannenhauer, Bush's use of
cocaine started "sometime before 1977". He also
claimed former President Bush had told him that his
son had experienced a few "lost weekends in
Mexico". Bush Junior, no stranger to the taste of his
own feet, seems to have corroborated these
claims, blurting out at a press conference that he
hadn't taken drugs "since 1974".
The question is, to what extent does Hatfield's
own criminal past discredit Fortunate Son?
Certainly Hatfield was flawed, fatally so, but the hard
facts the book contained should have stood on
their own two feet. For a while it looked like they
wouldn't, but in early 2001 salvation came in the
shape of Sander Hicks, Chief Editor of Soft
Skull, a New York alternative and left wing publishing
house.
They produced a run of 45,000 copies, and this
time, with Hicks as a mouthpiece, Hatfield did not
spare the anonymity of his sources. "I know that
Sander Hicks, my publisher, has stated in
interviews and in the introduction to the new, updated
second edition of "Fortunate Son" that (Karl) Rove
was one of my sources, but I cannot personally
deny or confirm."
And so we get to the alleged villain of the
piece. Karl Rove, ex-Nixonite and Bush camp
spin-doctor, described by Hatfield himself as "the ultimate
dirty trickster". Also implicated was Clay
Johnson, advisor and long-time friend to Bush. Hicks'
and Hatfield's version goes like this: when Bush
made his hasty admission and the media seemed
ready to pounce, Rove realised he needed to find a
way to remove discussion of Bush's drug past from
the national debate so thoroughly that even Bush
himself couldn't bring it up again. Right around
August 1999, when Bush made that press conference
blunder, J. H. Hatfield's biography Fortunate Son
was in its final stages with St. Martin's Press.
According to Hatfield, during the writing of
Fortunate Son he had contacted Rove and Johnson and
interviewed them at length. Hatfield mistakenly
assumed that Johnson and Rove weren't aware of his
1988 conviction for solicitation of capital
murder. Rove and Johnson realised that, in Hatfield,
they had found their solution to Bush's drug
problem. A flawed witness.
Despite the resurrection of his book, Hatfield's
economic circumstances were approaching critical.
He had a family to support, his daughter born the
very month Fortunate Son had initially been
published, and work was becoming impossible for him to
find. His depression and paranoia were spiralling
out of control. He had, he claimed, received
death threats levelled at him and his family from
prominent and important right wingers. In July 2001,
a month after the new edition hit the
bookshelves, he ended his life.
Predictable conspiracy theories were doing the
internet rounds within a few days of death: this
from a commentary by Dan Brown in the American
Politics Journal, "After all, for a CIA-trained
attack squad well-versed in pulling off assassinations
... how hard is it to whack somebody staying in a
rinky-dink hotel in Bumfuck, Arkansas and make it
look like suicide?"
Tempting though that kind of postulature is, the
hand that ended James Hatfield's life was almost
certainly his own. However, ultimate blame for
his death lies elsewhere, on Capitol Hill and in
the hands of the editors and publishers who
blackballed and discredited him.
He has a monument though; despite Hatfield's
suicide, despite the efforts made to discredit him,
the skeletons he dragged out refuse to return to
their closet. Fortunate Son was re-published in
the UK this February (£10.99, Vision Paperbacks);
it's also the subject of a new documentary, "Horns
and Halos," produced by husband and wife team
Suki Hawley and Mike Galinsky. Currently doing the
International Film Festival circuit to
considerable acclaim, their film chronicles the history of
Fortunate Son and the tragic toll it took on the
author. The title refers to Hatfield's avowed
belief that a biographer should present both the good
and bad sides of a subject without favour. He
himself participated in the making of it; his
presence adds a special significance to what is
effectively his own obituary. According to Hawley,"
Towards the end of the film, we did a really intense
interview with him, where it becomes obvious that
he is unravelling. We shot that a month before he
died."
I contacted David Cogswell, left-wing media
analyst, journalist, author and close friend of James
Hatfield's. I asked him which parties he feels
are most culpable for James' death, the right wing
manipulators or the media who 'rolled over' for
the politicians and took his career from him.
"That's a very hard question. It's very hard to
separate the two. It's also very hard to assign
guilt. Jim was certainly not without guilt himself,
in his earlier life, and he made many mistakes
along the way that contributed to what happened to
him, but nothing he did and nothing else
justifies what happened to him, and nothing justifies the
behaviour of the parties you mention."
I asked Cogswell if he thought James had realised
the vehemence that his book would be met with by
the establishment.
"No. He had no idea. He said it himself and he
proved it in his behaviour. He was clearly taken by
surprise when the press turned against him and
when his criminal record was unearthed and used to
discredit the work he did on the biography. He
said he would have never tried to write the book if
he had realised how it would have played out. And
I think it utterly destroyed him.
When he wrote the book, he had every reason to
believe it would be judged by its content. Since he
was doing work that practically no one else was
doing at the time, looking into things and
reporting things that certainly no other biographer was
doing and none of the mainstream press was
getting into, things that were urgently important as
Bush was being lifted effortlessly into the
presidency, he could reasonably expect that he was
moving forward into a successful writing career, and
doing his patriotic duty at the same time. He
deserved to be highly respected and rewarded for what
he did.
I think he was naive enough to believe what most
Americans like to believe about America, that
democracy still means something here, that the truth
will get a hearing, that evil when exposed will
be brought down."
Fortunate Son is to be published in Britain later
this year by Vision Press.
See more about the documentary 'Horns and Halos'
at wwww.hornsandhalos.com
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