Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1997/10/15/why_did_reich_lie.php
Wednesday, October 15, 1997
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is a Dartmouth graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, a former professor at Harvard's Kennedy School and currently a professor at Brandeis University. Since their days at Oxford, he has been a full-fledged Friend of Bill (FOB). Yet in his new and very readable book Locked in the Cabinet he has told one uncheckable untruth after another and precipitated a rolling scandal the likes of which would mean the expulsion from college of any undergraduate. His behavior fully justifies a line such as this in the June 9 Weekly Standard: 'Robert Reich learned at least one thing from Bill Clinton: a total disregard for the truth.'
Following the publication of Locked in the Cabinet, an account of his experiences as Labor Secretary, the outrage began to erupt from all quarters.
Former AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland published a searing letter in the Forward demonstrating how Reich's account of their meetings was a travesty of the truth. A member of the National Association of Manufacturers began distributing a substantial record showing that Reich's account of a meeting with that group is full of demonstrable untruths.
As the outcries went up there then appeared in the May 29 Slate on-line magazine a devastating piece of investigative reporting by Jonathan Rauch that documented numerous examples of Reich's manufacturing of things that never happened and quotations that no one ever spoke. Excerpts from this were published in The Washington Post, along with a 'reply' from Reich, who really had little to say for himself against the mountain of evidence.
Take that NAM meeting. Reich depicts himself as being surrounded by cigar-puffing capitalists who hiss at him so loudly that he has to shout in order to be heard. 'They plan to carve me up in small pieces. There isn't a lady in the room. All men, in dark suits. They've finished lunch. Some are smoking cigars. Others are quietly smirking. Ready for the kill.' Reich says the cigar smoke is making his eyes water, he feels dizzy, and someone shouts, 'Go back to Harvard,' and much more of the same.
Unfortunately for Reich, a transcript of that meeting exists, plus other evidence. It turns out to have been a breakfast meeting, not a luncheon as Reich says. About one-third of the guests were women. Witnesses saw no cigars. Smoking at such meetings is against NAM rules. The transcript shows that none of the abusive remarks fabricated by Reich actually were made.
Unfortunately for Reich again, a C-SPAN tape was turned up by Rauch of Reich's testimony on Feb. 22, 1995 about the minimum wage before the Joint Economic Committee. 'The Republican attack machine is gearing up,' records Reich, 'and I'm one of the targets.' Then in the scene he describes, the committee Chairman, Rep. James Saxton (R-N.J.), interrupts his testimony saying things like, 'Where did you learn economics, Mr. Secretary?' and jumping up and down yelling, 'Evidence! Evidence!'
Rauch consulted the transcripts of these events and also the C-SPAN tape. What Reich claims happened, didn't. There were no interruptions. Rep. Saxton was 'decorous and polite.' He 'did not impugn Reich's education. He did not shout Evidence! Evidence! He did not jump up and down.' Rauch concludes, 'Most of the lines that Reich attributes to Saxton... appear never to have been said at all.'
In 1995, after failing to settle the baseball strike, Clinton and Reich held a press conference. Reich depicts the press as asking numerous aggressively hostile questions: 'Mr. President, why did you invite the players and owners to the White House in the first place?' 'If you can't even get these parties to agree, what hope do you have in Bosnia?' And so on and on.
Mr. Rauch finds that none of the hostile questions Reich 'records' was actually asked. None. Rauch concludes that Reich wanted to confect a scene in which piranha journalists were out to humiliate him and Clinton, and so served up his fictional press conference.
Rauch demonstrates in his original analysis of Reich's book that such misrepresentation occurs again and again.
Joseph E. Persico, who recently published a biography of Edward R. Murrow, commented as follows in The New York Times of July 2 regarding Reich's performance: 'Quotation marks should mean something. They should announce: Between us stands a good-faith effort to get a person's words right.'
An author who purports to describe real events in public — or even private — life also has an obligation to history. Any future historian who depended upon Reich as a source for the history of our period would be depending upon a corrupt source. It's a good thing historians do not depend upon Reich for evidence about, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But how could such an individual as Reich permit himself this shabby and disgraceful performance?
It is odd that he did not reflect that things such as transcripts, C-SPAN tapes and multiple witnesses actually exist. You would think that mere prudence, if nothing else, would have deterred him.
This may remain a final mystery, but I have two reflections on the whole thing.
First, there is an unmistakable consistency in the fabricated and distorted episodes.
They all depict Reich, pure of heart and noble, being bullied by big, powerful stage-villans who shout, smoke cigars, exclude women, wear dark suits, have dollar-signs on their capitalist vests and one foot firmly planted on the necks of workers and minorities.
For Reich, politics is not debate, economics is not subject to differences of opinion. No, the whole thing is a moral comic strip inspired by the imagination of Herbloc.
Reich, who is close to the Clintons, also appears to share a prominent feature of the Clintonian sensibility. People of this sort are so persuaded of their moral purity and good intentions that they feel free of the ordinary moral constraints.
Because their hearts are spotlessly pure, they can misrepresent, lie, traduce others, do just about anything they wish, all because their hearts are in the right — that is the left — place.
I really do hope that Professor Reich is enjoying the royalties from Locked in the Cabinet. At this point, that is about the only thing he can enjoy about the book. And, of course, he will have to excuse himself from any Brandeis disciplinary committee looking into dishonesty in student work.