Toward the end of her astonishing review of
Susan McDougal's book
"The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk" in the New York Times Book Review,
Beverly Lowry condescends to give the author some advice. A novelist and
professor of creative writing at George Mason University, Lowry thinks
McDougal
ought to have sought professional help writing her memoirs, "an editor
or writer
...who would have persuaded her all she had to do was tell the story straight."
This is big talk from a reviewer who couldn't even summarize the book's
basic facts competently. According to Lowry, Kenneth Starr's Whitewater
investigation "came up with pretty much of nothing, beyond a felony conviction
for McDougal on charges of obstruction of justice and criminal contempt."
In reality, Starr's failure to convict Susan on precisely those charges
provides
the book's triumphant climactic scene. As Judge George Howard read the
jury's
"not guilty" verdict on the obstruction charge, McDougal writes, "a cheer
went up
in the courtroom...We had taken on the most powerful prosecutor in the
country,
an organization with an unlimited budget and incredible resources, and
we had
beaten them soundly. But as much as I enjoyed being a part of the victory,
I was
not naïve enough to believe that the verdict was about Susan McDougal.
The entire
trial was a referendum on Kenneth Starr, and we had succeeded in showing
just
how corrupt his investigation was."
A waspish reviewer might sneer that Susan's triumph over her tormentors
has a
cornball "Erin Brockovich" meets "The Pelican Brief" quality. It would
be mean and
stupid, but a defensible opinion. Lowry, however, seems completely oblivious
that in
the end, Susan McDougal did finally talk. She testified for several days
in open court
during the aforementioned trial. So did three of Starr's prosecutors. The
jury believed Susan.
Here at Unsolicited Opinions, Inc., we too have reviewed a bunch of books
over the
years and have also taught writing to college students. At the expense
of pedantry, we'd
like to offer our esteemed colleague at George Mason this advice:
"Yo, Beverly. Next time, read the damn book."
Assuming minimal competence, Lowry simply cannot have done so. She appears
to have skimmed the opening chapters for information confirming her own
loopy notions
about "girl children from the Deep South"--she's the kind of Professional
Southerner who
peddles moonbeams to Yankees--then winged it. Her summary of what Whitewater
was
supposed to have been all about is filled with preposterous errors. Joe
Conason exposes
a half dozen howlers in Salon.com.
Part of Lowry's problem is simply bad writing. Check this out: "The future
president was
governor and the McDougals owned a bank and a savings and loan and were
buying and
selling land and, like a lot of other people they knew, making money
hand over fist.
Unquestionably, the Clintons took part in Whitewater and irrefutably they
and the McDougals
trampled on some rights and bent some rules along the way. But they were
on a roll, life was
good, Arkansas sheltered them, and nobody thought life would ever go any
other way."
The syntax is murky, but if that's supposed to mean the Clintons made money
on Whitewater,
the fact is they irrefutably lost $43,000. As for trampling rights and
bending rules, if Lowry's
review were a sophomore's paper, I'd write "BE SPECIFIC" in the margin
in big red letters.
Which rules? What rights? Even the independent counsel's final report stipulates
that the
Clintons had no knowledge of Jim McDougal's monkey business, which didn't
involve
Whitewater anyway. The phrase "Arkansas sheltered them" would rate a big
"EXPLAIN,"
because insofar as it means anything, it implies improprieties not in evidence.
True to the moonbeams and magnolias school of bad Southern writing, Lowry
speculates
that Susan must have been in love with Bill Clinton, a notion her book
lampoons, portraying
the former Chief Executive as a glib horn-dog who looks awful in jogging
shorts. Lowry also
questions if "we" can trust McDougal, given what she calls bizarre charges
of "embezzlement
of $150,000 brought by the orchestra conductor Zubin Mehta, and his wife,
Nancy."
Unfortunately, Lowry neglects to mention that the California jury that
acquitted Susan of
embezzlement in the Mehta case held a press conference denouncing the prosecutor
for
accusing her without a shred of credible evidence. Several jurors then
came to Little Rock
to support her in her final showdown with Kenneth Starr. Once again, it's
all in the book.
To raise such issues without saying so isn't quite as reckless as falsely
accusing somebody of
two felonies, but it definitely comes under the heading of not "telling
the story straight."
As for the New York Times, what is there left to say? The cover-up continues.
Mention the
Clintons or Whitewater, and the nation's single most influential book review
metamorphoses
into The Drudge Report. Have its editors no standards of professionalism
and intellectual
honesty whatsoever?