Issue #10/91, May 25 - June 8, 2000   

A TALE OF TWO ASSHOLES

by Matt Taibbi

‘Twas a far, far better thing than Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight had ever done, when he laid his head on the public chopping block last week to preserve the life of his more fortunate twin-United States Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey.

In the world of celebrity, Hoosier King Bobby Knight fits into the role of Sydney Carton very nicely. Like Carton, he is a dissolute drunk. And like Carton, he’s no hit with women. Three NCAA championships notwithstanding, Lucie Manette wouldn’t have gone for Knight either— particularly if she’d seen the Connie Chung interview, in which Coach said, “I think if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”

Carton had no friends in the whole world; Knight has none outside of Bloomington, Indiana. The only major difference between the two men is that Carton had intelligence and sensitivity, but lacked ambition; with Knight, the reverse is true.

In any case, last week, America’s Sydney Carton had a meeting with the great guillotine of American public opinion. In the face of allegations that he’d choked one of his players in practice—the latest in literally dozens of weirdly violent and embarrassing public scandals connected with the famed coach—Indiana University fined Knight $30,000 and imposed a “zero tolerance” policy, essentially putting America’s most famous basketball coach on probation.

The national sporting press, which had long been salivating in anticipation of the hated Knight’s dismissal, reacted swiftly and harshly to news that Coach had kept his job. The white-haired, pink-faced Knight had long ago become an icon of American pop culture by virtue of his entertainingly psychotic on-court behavior (read: throwing chairs on the floor, slapping opposing coaches during games) and unchanging, decades-long devotion to a wardrobe of ugly red school sweaters and ill-fitting slacks; but in the time it took for him to become a fixture of the American consciousness, he also made himself an enemy of the mainstream, non-Indiana press. He called reporters chickenshit jerks to their faces, and pulled stunts like kicking his own son (who played for Knight at Indiana) on national television... and worst of all, from the reporters’ point of view, he got away with it! For almost twenty years now, grudge-bearing sportswriters from faraway places like new York and Los Angeles have been trying to get the old dinosaur fired, but have been unable to get it done, discovering time and time again to their great chagrin that only Indianans have any say in what’s good for Indiana.

This time, however, hacks around the country thought they had Knight nailed, after a videotape surfaced which appeared to show Knight in the process of choking player Neil Reed at practice. After all, numerous reporters pointed out, you can’t very well get caught on television choking a 19 year-old and hope to be allowed to remain employed in what is essentially a teaching position. Or can you? When the IU leadership decided that question in the affirmative on May 15, the national news headlines quickly rushed out in varying pitches of righteous hysteria. “Whitewash!” screamed the cover headline of Sports Illustrated, America’s largest sports magazine. “Coaching That’s a Far Cry From Perfect,” chimed in the Washington Post. “Did Indiana Make the Correct Decision?” wondered aloud the Sporting News. ESPN, meanwhile, devoted the first 16 minutes of its SportsCenter broadcast that night-an eternity in TV time— to the Knight story. The network also joined FoxSports in broadcasting the IU press conference on the matter on live national television, an unusual honor to bestow on so insignificant a figure as a college basketball coach.

There was not a single major-market newspaper in American which did not carry some version of the Bobby-Knight-Keeps-His-Job story on May 16. In fact, most of the big newspapers (including the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times) had a Knight story on the front of their sports sections. The Post actually ran no less than five Knight stories in the two days after IU’s announcement, including one on its editorial page. And the stories were not small; the May 16 news report by Post staffer William Gildea (the paper would not dream, of course, to leaving coverage of such a major story to the wire services) ran a full 1,285 words.

Overnight, Bobby Knight became a national pariah. You can be sure that if he slips up again, you will hear about it—no matter what part of the States you’re from.

The Knight story broke on May 15. Eerily, it turned out to be not the only story to hit the news that day which concerned a tyrannical white-haired autocrat with a loose-cannon temper who’d gotten violent with his own troops. That was also the day in which the New Yorker ran its long-awaited expose on retired army general Barry McCaffrey, now the U.S. Drug Czar. The report, written by famed muckraker Seymour Hersh (who made his reputation in 1970 for his expose about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam), alleged that McCaffrey had essentially committed a war crime by launching an unnecessary post-ceasefire attack on a column of retreating Iraquis during the Gulf War in 1991.

This was a serious accusation, and a serious piece of journalism. At 25,000 words, it was the longest article the New Yorker had published in seven years. It contained on-the-record verification from a remarkably varied group of sources—from army officials ranked as high as General, to American army scouts who’d actually come under friendly fire during the alleged March 2, 1991 attack. It quoted two different officers who recalled hearing McCaffrey say prior to the attack, “We’ve got to find a way to kill these bastards.” According to the report, McCaffrey’s 24th army division probably destroyed up to 700 tanks and other vehicles (killing or wounding an unknown number of people) in a caravan of Iraqis that were in full retreat and heading due north— and all this in response to no more than two shots fired by the Iraqi side, with the existence of even those shots, according to Hersh’s sources in McCaffrey’s officer corps, in serious dispute.

Bobby Knight is a basketball coach. He is many thousands of places below acne on the list of potentially serious threats to overall human wellness. Barry McCaffrey, on the other hand, is almost certainly one of the 100 most dangerous men in the world. As the director of the White House’s Office on National Drug Control Policy, he is the driving force behind the effort to draw America into its next foreign military adventure, in Colombia, on the pretext of fighting the drug war there. He is at the top of an anti-drug crime-fighting structure that is responsible for the sentencing of the nearly one million nonviolent criminals currently in jail in America. He was also recently the initiator of a White House program which induced network television shows like E.R., mass-market newspapers like USA Today and other media organs to insert anti-drug messages into their programming and editorial sections, setting an extremely dangerous precedent for government violations of free speech rights. And on top of that, he not long ago retired as a four-star general, one of the only army officers ever to reach that rank in peacetime. He is in short, a powerful representative of both the U.S. military and its law enforcement community, as well as an influential member of the Clinton White House’s political inner circle. As such, his potential effect on world history at the outset of this century is profound, given America’s influence around the world.

Bobby Knight got five stories in the Washington Post after the May 15 IU press conference. Guess how many McCaffrey got on the same day? 475, and all of those in a page 22 wire-service story (“McCaffrey Defends Gulf War Actions in Face of Officers’ Quotes” ). That’s right; when one college basketball player named Neil Reed complained to reporters that his coach hit him, the Post assigned a staff writer to the story and gave him a full column to write in. But when America’s most storied print investigative journalist alleged that a key member of the Clinton White House during an illegal attack shot at not one but a great many of his own troops, as well as at lots of other people, the Post suddenly professed itself understaffed.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the actual AP wire story the Post did run (which the story most major dailies in the States ran) was an obvious whitewash job. In the typical rhetorical format of these sort of pieces, the article opened with a lead that focused not on the Hersh piece itself, but on McCaffrey’s denial of the charges in the piece:

“Retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey and journalist Seymour Hersh clashed yesterday over charges that troops led by McCaffrey used unnecessary force in a battle with Iraqi troops after the Gulf War cease-fire.”

The article then followed with three short paragraphs outlining the charges in the Hersh article. These charges, however, were quickly dismissed using the tried-and-true narrative news technique in which the “winning” argument is always allowed to come last, which achieves the same end that courtroom lawyers seek when they send the jury home thinking about some dramatic revelation made at the end of that day’s proceedings. In this case, charges by retired General James Johnson junior that “there was no need for anybody to be shooting” on March 2, 1991, and that the Iraqis “couldn’t surrender fast enough”, were countered by three rebuttal paragraphs ending with the following sally from the White House:

‘White House spokesman Joe Lockhart emphasized that McCaffrey has President Clinton’s full support and called the article “false,” labeling Hersh “a journalist who thinks if you throw enough stuff up against the wall, maybe something will stick.”

The AP article failed to mention here that Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize for his My Lai story. In the face of a slanderous charge like this by a White House spokesman, some discussion of Hersh’s credentials would have been appropriate.

The article ended on a note which suggested that the charges leveled against McCaffrey by his fellow officers had been borne of petty professional jealousies:

‘The magazine noted that there were occasional “bitter disputes” between McCaffrey and other generals over such things as the perceived hoarding of fuel by McCaffrey, whose division performed the famed “left hook” maneuver that blocked the retreat of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.’

And that’s it. The story went nowhere from there. No investigative follow-ups anywhere from any of the major papers. No follow-ups at all after two days. Phillips, Andover and West Point grad McCaffrey, just like the French Aristocrat Charles Darnay, was out of the Bastille.

Worse still, it subsequently became known that McCaffrey had gone to extraordinary lengths to discredit the story. On May 17, the Associated Press reported that the ONDCP, on McCaffrey’s initiative, had mass-faxed letters to 30 major human rights organizations (including Amnesty International) bluntly asking to help “discredit the New Yorker article”.

The idea of a government official asking private humanitarian organizations for help in discrediting a journalist is astonishing enough. That McCaffrey assigned the resources of the White House to address a story that had nothing to do with the White House, and had only to do with his own career and reputation, is even more shocking. It is, one would think, almost certainly prosecutable, and at the very least censurable. But would anything come of it? No, of course not. In fact, the story about the ONDCP letter only appeared in three newspapers in the entire United States-in a column by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, in the Hartford Courant, and in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

The Star-Tribune piece, incidentally, appeared as a note in the paper’s “Variety” section. It’s hard to get much a buzz from that kind of coverage.

It goes without saying that none of these three stories about this latest effort by McCaffrey to use government resources to discredit critical journalists mentioned McCaffrey’s previous experience in this area. Not even the Courant story, which ran on the front page, mentioned the fact that McCaffrey’s ONDCP had just months before sent letters to the Salon.com website demanding that its editors “disclose” the pro-drug bias of its journalist, Daniel Forbes. Forbes was the reporter who broke the ONDCP-hidden-messages story, revealing that six networks and six magazines had agreed to put out anti-drug messages in return for airtime and print ad space the government normally claims for public-service messages.

McCaffrey was neither censured nor subject to further investigation as a result of Hersh’s piece. He also won’t suffer as a result of his bullying, overtly unethical reaction to the article, in which he misused government resources to protect his own career. His behavior proves that an important enough person can act with perfect impunity in the United States, so long as he doesn’t offend anyone who really matters. It’s the same with Bobby Knight, in a way. He can do whatever the hell he wants, so long as he keeps the Indiana University trustees happy. And there’s nothing any of us can do about it, any more than we can keep our generals from committing war crimes.

Our newspapers do a great job on meaningless issues. But when something’s at stake, don’t hold your breath.

Generally Offensive
Bobby Knight	Barry McCaffrey
Began coaching career at West Point in 1965	Graduated from West Point in 1965
Left hooks	“Left hook maneuver”
3 NCAA championships	3 Purple Hearts
Head of prematurely white hair	Head of prematurely white hair
Once said he wanted to be buried upside down “so my critics can kiss my ass”	Buries stories and demands that reporters kiss his ass
Wedgie	Withered arm
Chokes his own players	Shoots at his own troops
Slapped Kentucky coach Joe B. Hall on back of head during game; called Michigan coach Bill Frieder a “chickenshit son of a bitch”; ejected for screaming at Illinois coach Lou Henson, who called him a “classic bully”	Publicly quarreled with fellow generals John Yeasock, James Johnson and Ronald Griffith, who accused him of stealing supplies and lacking proper fire discipline
Arrested for assaulting policeman in Puerto Rico	Wants to invade Colombia
Isaiah Thomas: “Coach Knight demands total loyalty from his players”	Colonel Edward (Butch) Brennan: “The no. 1 thing for McCaffrey is loyalty”
For suspected abuse of players, fined $30,000	For suspected war crimes, promoted to full General

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