Robert Reich, labor secretary in the Clinton administration and now chancellor’s professor of public policy and government at the University of California, Berkeley, has an article in Newsweek about the violent shutdown of a scheduled speech at Berkeley by the provocative gay conservative and sometime Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos. As Reich notes, 150 “masked agitators” threw rocks and fireworks at police, smashed windows and threw Molotov cocktails that started fires. This violence resulted in no more than one arrest but, Reich notes, delivered “made-for-TV images of a riot.”
The incident and attendant publicity, Reich writes, “raises the possibility that Yiannopoulos and Brietbart [sic] were in cahoots with the agitators, in order to lay the groundwork for a Trump crackdown on universities and their federal funding.” In the article, Reich repeats his statement on CNN that he “wouldn’t bet against” this.
If this strikes you as a combination in some measure of paranoia and projection, you might want to check out, from the back files of Slate, Jonathan Rauch’s May 30, 1997, review of Reich’s memoir Lost in the Cabinet. Rauch, whose now long career has been characterized by integrity and thoroughness, catches Reich in one fabricated quotation after another. Rauch finds that Reps. Robert Michel (Republican), David Obey and Martin Sabo (Democrats) deny they said anything like what Reich puts in his book; their denials ring true to me and, I suspect, to any reporter who had contact with them.
Rauch’s clincher is when he quotes a transcript of a presidential press conference, testimony before the Joint Economic Committee (Slate provides a link) and a National Association of Manufacturers breakfast meeting. Rauch even tracks down the court reporter at the latter. In each case, Reich claims to have been viciously attacked or humiliated or both. Rauch establishes that nothing of the sort happened.
Rauch was scrupulous enough to confront Reich with this evidence, as he recounts: “I asked Reich what was going on in each of these cases. In reply, he pointed to his Note to the Reader: ‘I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions. This is how I lived it.’ He said that his notes accurately reflected how he felt and what he perceived. In the three cases cited above, he felt varying degrees of hostility. ‘I am not representing the book to be anything other than it is, which is my account of my experiences, my perceptions, what I saw and heard around me,’ he said. ‘That’s all I can say.'”
Those inclined to believe Reich’s speculation that Milo Yiannopolous and the Breitbart folks somehow hired the thugs that trashed Berkeley might want to read Jonathan Rauch’s review. It may make Reich feel better now to believe that his hometown was trashed by right-wing hirelings, just as it evidently made him feel better when writing his memoir 20-some years ago to imagine himself attacked viciously by White House reporters, an economic committee chairman and an all-male group of business lobbyists. But that doesn’t mean his speculation today has any more connection to reality than the fake quotes in his memoir.
Sad!
