Christopher Michel/Wikimedia Commons
Bret Stephens in 2008
Amnesty International’s report accusing Israel of practicing “apartheid” continues to make news, albeit not in America’s most influential news source. American Jewish leaders recently took credit for discrediting the report both nationally and internationally in advance of its appearance. The executive director of Amnesty’s Israel office criticized the language of the report, albeit without taking issue with any of its evidence. Paul O’Brien, Amnesty’s executive director, told reporters that he thought Israel should not exist as a Jewish state, which led all 25 Jewish members of Congress to condemn him.
The New York Times did not mention anything about the reaction to Amnesty’s report. Had it done so, of course, it would have had to explain what it was in the first place. Loyal Altercation readers may remember that I noted my surprise that the Times chose to ignore both the 278-page, 1,559-footnote report and the enormous reaction it engendered entirely. Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha’s explanation, published here the following week, was that “it is not our practice to cover every report published by NGOs.”
Our email conversation continued, however. I noted in my response to her note that, during the same month the Times had no time for either the Amnesty report or the enormous reaction it inspired, it ran four stories inspired by Whoopi Goldberg’s opinions on the Holocaust. (If the Times had published one article on the Amnesty controversy, then it would have deemed Whoopi four times as important as Amnesty International, but since it published zero, that number is infinity.)
My new inquiry to the Times concerned a different matter: the dark-money Maimonides Fund that is paying Times op-ed writer Bret Stephens as editor of the right-wing Jewish journal Sapir. In my email to Ms. Rhoades Ha, I noted that the Fund does not anywhere reveal the identity of its donors. I also noted that the Israeli government has committed many millions of dollars to secretly funding publications and institutions that support its views, as, without exception, Sapir happens to do. I cannot know—nor can anyone—who is behind this funding, but there was a model employed by the CIA during the Cold War of secretly subsidizing the publication of intellectual journals like Encounter. Irving Kristol, who edited the magazine with Stephen Spender, insisted to his grave that he had no idea that he and his contributors were being paid by the CIA for their pro-American stance, but the controversy dogged his entire life, right up through his Times obituary.
To be clear, I am not leveling any accusations against anyone, and would not do so without evidence. But here is my question: Does The New York Times allow its employees to receive compensation—and to have side jobs—when that compensation comes from institutions that refuse to identify their funders? I know the paper has strong rules about potential conflicts of interest or even situations that lead to their “appearance.” This one strikes me as clearly falling into that category.
Ms. Rhoades Ha replied: “This outside work was approved by editors in advance. Bret’s participation in the journal is consistent with his long-held view on Israel, and editors do not believe any disclosure is needed. Bret has not written about the Maimonides Fund and does not intend to.”
I hardly need to note that I do not believe that this response addresses the problem. If you or I were receiving funds from a dark-money foundation and wrote a regular column on the Times op-ed page, we would not write about it either. That is, my friend Jane Mayer will tell you, the whole point of dark money. And if you or I were in the business of handing out millions of dollars in secret funding from the Israeli government to promote its views in the U.S. and elsewhere, well, an anonymously funded conservative journal that calls for the bombing of Iran would make a mighty attractive recipient. And while it’s true that the journal’s views are consistent with those of Bret Stephens, I can say from more than 30 years of experience, there is a great deal more to being a columnist than what actually appears on the page.
It’s true that ever since it gave the former PR exec-turned-Nixon speechwriter William Safire a column in 1973, the Times has always had at least one op-ed columnist who would defend Israel at all costs. (I visited Safire at his country home in Harpers Ferry one weekend around 1991, and he excused himself to go to his backyard working tent—replete with hammock and fax machine—to take a call from Israeli Premier Yitzhak Shamir, who all but dictated Safire’s next day’s column.) When former Times Executive Editor Abe Rosenthal was fired and given the consolation prize of an op-ed column (after having turned into a “crazy person” in the estimation of his son, former Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal), he attacked Israel’s critics in pretty much every other column he wrote. William Kristol’s brief tenure as Times columnist was also characterized by unbending admiration for the Jewish state. Stephens is the newest iteration of a time-honored tradition you can read about in my first book, 1992’s Sound & Fury. The new twist is that he is also being paid by anonymous Israeli sources. Again, I make no accusations save for a decided “appearance of conflict of interest” and what so far strikes me as a surprising lack of curiosity about it from the Times.
Returning to another previous Altercation, the one on Jeopardy! (sort of), I noted a question recently about the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident which insisted that Vietnamese boats had, in fact, fired on U.S. ships. It made me nervous at first, because the famous “second Gulf of Tonkin incident”—the one that provided the excuse for Lyndon Johnson’s disastrous bombing of Vietnam—almost certainly never happened (as readers of 2004’s When Presidents Lie are well aware). Thankfully, the date given was August 2, 1964, which was the date of the “first” incident. Anyway, felicitations to the Jeopardy! staff for that.
What remains a source of confusion to many, however, is the barely known “third Gulf of Tonkin incident.” It was this one that led Lyndon Johnson to proclaim, “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there,” a quote that is almost always misattributed to Johnson on the occasion of the alleged “second” incident. I discovered this after I made the same mistake in a New York Times op-ed and quickly received a letter from former Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy, who actually wrote Congress’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution well before either incident in preparation for just such an occasion. Congress passed Bundy’s handiwork on August 10 in response to Johnson’s hyping of the literally imaginary second incident. Johnson was so eager to make an announcement about the imaginary August 4th incident in time for the 11:00 news that he gave the North Vietnamese sufficient warning to shoot down the plane of U.S. pilot Everett Alvarez, who ended up being held prisoner for the duration of the war.
Today, the Gulf of Tonkin experience strikes me as worth remembering, as so many reborn Cold Warriors are demanding ill-considered military action in Ukraine based on facile and inappropriate historical analogies and inviting potentially ruinous consequences. (See, for instance, this guy.) Jacob Heilbrunn’s New York Review piece offers a useful primer.
Speaking of all of the above, the Brookings Institution Press recently published a biography entitled The Last Gentleman: Thomas Hughes and the End of the American Century, by Bruce L.R. Smith. Hughes played a key role in the Johnson administration’s foreign policy in a variety of roles. He personified as well as anyone the now defunct “American Establishment.” I got to know Hughes back in 1983 when I was an intern at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; he was its president, and it was my job to organize speakers to give lunchtime talks. He once told us a story about Harvey Hollister Bundy, who succeeded John Foster Dulles as Carnegie’s chair in 1952. Bundy was the father of both William and McGeorge Bundy, two of the key architects of U.S. policy in Vietnam. He reared back and smiled as he observed: “If Harvey Bundy had really cared about ‘international peace,’ he would have stayed home and paid more attention to raising those boys of his.” (He may have been quoting someone else, but if so, it was a great quote.)
My friend Rosanne Cash recently tweeted this great story: “My dad would have been 90 today. Several yrs ago I was at his house on his birthday and a huge bouquet arrived. ‘Who are those from?’ I asked. He rolled his eyes. ‘Elizabeth Taylor. We were born one day apart & she sends these every year to remind me I’m a day older than her.’”
Here are Johnny and Rosanne singing together, and here is just Rosanne doing “Ode to Billy Joe.”
