Four years ago, a man known to the residents of Indiana as the “Speedway bomber” surfaced in the press with a story that really intrigued Garry Trudeau, the Doonesbury guy. As a drug dealer in the early 1970s, Brett Kimberlin claimed, he had sold marijuana on a number of occasions to a college student named Dan Quayle. Kimberlin made the charges from his cell in federal prison, where he was serving a 51-year sentence for marijuana smuggling, as well as for blowing off most of a man’s legs with a homemade bomb in the Indianapolis suburb of Speedway in 1978. Kimberlin and his supporters (among them Clinton friend Cody Shearer), however, had another explanation for his imprisonment: Kimberlin, they insisted, was a “political prisoner,” locked down by a Bush administration eager to silence one of its most potent critics.
Vaporous though Kimberlin’s charges were, they were nonetheless used as ammunition by the Clinton campaign, then struggling to overcome its candidate’s admitted drug use, and were swallowed whole by many in the press. Among those taken in was a reporter at the New Yorker named Mark Singer, who dutifully wrote a pro-Kimberlin, anti-Quayle piece before the 1992 election. “I believed that he was telling the truth about Quayle,” Singer wrote recently, though he had no evidence. Plus, Singer admits, “Ardently, inordinately, I wanted the Democrats to win the election.”
Four years later, Kimberlin is back, released from prison and living in the Washington area. And so is Mark Singer, who has just written a second Kimberlin story for the New Yorker, a complement to his forthcoming book on the subject. Singer’s findings? Brett Kimberlin is a criminal sociopath who probably never even met Dan Quayle, much less sold him nickel bags. The writer reached this conclusion only hesitantly, years after it had become clear to just about everyone else around Kimberlin — including his drug- dealer friends, none of them hampered by the deep insights that beset investigative reporters that the man was utterly delusional. Still, Singer is not willing simply to eat crow and apologize. His new findings about Kimberlin, Singer concludes, don’t “negate what I wrote four years ago — which, to this day, remains largely true.” Which leads us to the following question for Mark Singer: In what way can reporting be “largely true” if it is actually based on the lies of a mad bomber?
