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David Brock / AP
BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
September 14, 2015 5:00 am
Liberal activist David Brock, whose latest book takes on the supposed “right-wing plot to derail Hillary,” is considered one of the Clintons’ top backers and runs the Clinton-supporting Super PAC Correct the Record. But his first book on the Clintons, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, published in 1996, contained searing attacks on Bill andHillary’s characters.
Brock, a former conservative writer who underwent an abrupt political shift to the left in the late 1990s, still says his work on the book helped turn him into a Clinton supporter.
“As I did my reporting [for Seduction], I came to see what Hillary Clinton’s admirers saw in her, what I think we all see in her today: a steadfast commitment to public service and a deep desire to affirm the good and the virtuous in politics,” said Brock during a speech in Arkansas in 2014.
And during a 2008 speech in Arizona, Brock said he “approached the Hillary Clinton book much more as a journalist than an ideologue.”
In Brock’s 2002 book, Blinded by the Right, he claimed most of his previous reporting as a conservative journalist was inaccurate, but still defended Seduction.
“It felt amazingly good to have acted freely [while writing Seduction], I was stronger for having endured the controversy, and I had no regrets about the editorial decisions I had made,” wrote Brock. “Aside from conservatives, on the whole, reviewers had found Seduction to be fair, well-balanced, and accurate.”
“I was proud of the book,” he added.
But the book also portrays Bill Clinton as a “fundamentally weak person” who lacked integrity and sabotaged his wife’s political career. Below are 10 of the most unflattering accusations Brock leveled against Clinton in Seduction.
1. ‘Bill was weak to begin with’
[Richard] Nixon said a strong wife could make a husband ‘look like a wimp.’ Hillary, Nixon continued, ‘pounds the piano so hard that Bill can’t be heard.’ But the problem was not, as Nixon formulated it, that Hillary made Bill look weak; the real problem was that Bill was weak to begin with. The Eleanor-and-Franklin analogy would never suffice in the case of the Clintons because, unlike Bill, FDR was a leader in his own right. The same could never be said of Bill. [p. 263-264]
2. ‘Lacked a firm core’
Bill’s reliance on his wife was not a reflection of his strength, but rather a reflection of his fundamental weakness. Bill Clinton would be perhaps the weakest chief executive since Warren Harding. Left to his own devices, he might have floundered, just as he did during his first term as Arkansas governor. Even Clinton’s friends were the first to concede that his desire for acceptance and approval undermined his ability to make decisions and stick with them. While Clinton, a political organizer who had risen to the presidency, had the ambition to be president, he didn’t seem to have the convictions to carry it off. He appeared uninterested in exercising the powers of his office. Even Ronald Reagan, an ex-actor who had been widely derided as a great pretender, possessed a firm core that Clinton lacked. [p. 289]
3. ‘Fundamentally weak person’
Bill and Hillary not only complemented each other in a remarkable way: over time they came to seem eerily necessary to one another, as though neither can really exist or succeed on their own. Rather than two-for-one, the truth is [Bill and Hillary were] more like two-as-one. Thus did the co-candidacy contain the seeds of its own demise. For when a fundamentally weak person by Bill relies on a ‘moral compass’ that itself becomes askew, the results can be tragic. In placing so much responsibility on Hillary’s shoulders, Bill relied on someone who believed she was simply too good to do wrong. [p. 417]
4. Corruption in Arkansas
The heart of the Whitewater scandal was Clinton’s apparent willingness to use his public office to help his private business partner and political supporter…There is little question but that the McDougals received the kind of protection and favoritism that was common under Clinton’s gubernatorial administration, where people who loaned the governor money or contributed to his campaigns received state jobs, state business, special consideration by regulators, or favorable bills signed into law. [p. 199]
5. ‘Hillary had married the mob’
Indeed, by now it was becoming clear that Hillary’s main problem in Arkansas was not her own unseemly indiscretions, sleazy associations, or grave character flaws, but those of her husband: In a figurative sense, she had married the mob.
6. ‘Dirty’
Though she did not appear to violate any laws or conflict-of-interest rules (except perhaps the appearance-of-impropriety standard), Hillary had become inextricably linked with the least savory aspects of the Arkansas political system through her marriage and political partnership. When one’s partner is dirty, there is inevitably guilt by association. [p. 215]
7. ‘Wayward child’
For that, we must look to [Hillary’s] marriage and political partnership with Bill Clinton – ‘the greatest seducer who ever lived,’ as David Watkins had called him – extremely talented, intellectually facile, an unparalleled campaigner, organizer, and silver-tongued orator, but also a wayward child, requiring continual emotional support and moral supervision. [p. 416]
8. ‘Bill seemed to drag Hillary down and ruin everything’
What Bill has gained from the partnership is painfully obvious. Yet the question remains: Why was an outstanding and to all appearances remarkably independent young woman like Hillary susceptible to Bill Clinton in the first place? Every time Hillary appeared on the verge of independent accomplishment, Bill seemed to drag her down and ruin everything. [p. 416]
9. ‘Cold and uncaring’
Still, Bill could be cold and uncaring, which is how she recalled his reaction to a violent altercation between herself and another campaign staffer. Mary Lee also began to feel that Bill was taking advantage of her and her husband. Having taken a leave of absence from the university to run for Congress, Clinton, who had no income, pestered Mary Lee to call her parents back in Virginia for money, even after the Frays moved into their own apartment. ‘Bill couldn’t keep a checkbook. He never paid his own electric bill or his phone bill. He thought I was going to cook for him and pay the grocery bill. He would promise you the world and then forget about it.’
10. ‘Using Hillary’
Mary Lee thought Bill was using Hillary as well, asking her to write his state convention speech and even putting her to work selling sandwiches at the convention itself to raise money for the campaign. ‘She had feelings,’ Mary Lee said. ‘And she was hurt that he wasn’t calling her his fiancée. He never did that. Her father and brother were down here working for him. He could have paraded her around at the state convention that year, but he didn’t care.’
The book also includes harsh allegations about Hillary Clinton.
