Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (6 page)

But it still had some basic problems. When I discovered the Internet, I needed it to be
faster
. Seth was right—my ADHD-tempo mind needed information fast, fast, fast, with no delay. I turned the “Images” function off the browser so that slow-loading GIFs and animations wouldn’t monopolize my surfing time. Even though I didn’t have a lot of money then, I hated the slowness of the Internet so much that I bought an ISDN line for my apartment. It was an extravagance, in hindsight—nobody else had an ISDN line. I didn’t care—the 28K-baud slowness of the Internet was making me insane.

But the slowness of the Internet at the time had an upside for me. Because I needed the information all the time, without pictures—I needed text—I found the alt newsgroups. I was soon obsessed: alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater, alt.showbiz.gossip, alt.fan.artbell, alt.fan.farrahfawcett, and a bunch of others. The Clinton alt group was my favorite, and it really exemplified what the early Internet was all about.

There were two regulars who were really vocal on the alt.Clinton group. One was some guy named Wayne Mann, who hailed from a place called Arroyo Grande. I signed up for his e-mail list. Every day, he would send out these massive e-mail files of articles that compiled all the data that was available about Clinton, whether related to Whitewater or Casa Grande or any of the other myriad scandals cropping up around Bill and Hillary at the time. For every possible Clinton scandal, Mann was accumulating information and then distributing that information. It was obsessive and incredibly detailed, a political digest with one focus. Taking into account the number of recipients of this information this one guy had signed up by e-mail, it seemed just an unprecedented operation.

The other person dropping his ideas into this alt group (and many others) was somebody named Matt Drudge. He had a news digest he called the Drudge Report. It wasn’t a single-issue focus like Mann’s—it was more one person’s exotic mishmash, his vision of what the news world was or should be. Drudge would have articles about the latest political scandal alongside articles on the upcoming election right next to articles on behind-the-scenes Hollywood business news, undercover contract talks, early revelations of box office data… all juxtaposed with earthquake and hurricane data. It was like a tour of one man’s short-term memory.

Perhaps because of the inherently hyperactive nature of the report—being able to jump pell-mell from one short news item to the next—it was the Drudge Report that really grabbed me. I read it and I read it and I read it every day. It wasn’t hard to find: it had been posted in virtually every alt group I visited. It was just fascinating, unique, and worldly, while also being oddly uncynical.

Maybe it was this lack of cynicism that most captured me. My generation had embraced Kurt Cobain and late-1980s stand-up comedy and
Spy
magazine—we’d embraced irony as our badge of hipness. And for some reason, I was getting over it. It was weird—I was usually the best in the room at using that weapon, was comfortable being Joe Irony. But it was just starting to bore me. I was sick of the same sitcoms, I was sick of the same songs, I was sick of the same cookie-cutter everything. I felt myself moving past this defensive irony, toward that least hip of beliefs: values. With the Drudge Report and the Internet, I thought,
Here, at least, is something that takes itself seriously.
I was gaining nourishment from something outside of humor and cynicism; I’d found that reading about big issues and listening to other people’s thinking about
conservative ideas and morality and societal standards was actually fulfilling.

I guess I was looking for authenticity, and when I started reading Drudge’s stuff, it rang in a more authentic and original voice. He mashed together extreme weather with Jerry Seinfeld’s request for a million dollars per episode with the announcement that Bob Dole was going to pick Jack Kemp as his running mate (Drudge broke that story), and it was just interesting—it seemed to just capture the culture, the zeitgeist, so well. And that was the underlying feel, that this was a guy who was interested in the world and in life, and that the world and life weren’t sucky, cold, and depressing, but in reality they were endlessly fascinating, and worth reporting on and talking about.

At the very end of the digest on the alt group website was a link that said, “Click here to subscribe.” I clicked on it and started receiving Drudge’s digest in my e-mail inbox. The digest also had a link to his website:
www.lainet.net/drudge
(don’t bother searching for it—it’s been wiped away by the sands of time). That alone showed his creativity. In those days, when you got your first ISP, one of their gimmicks was to give you five megabytes of disk space to create your own webpage. Drudge’s personal webpage was the Drudge Report, which was a supplement to the newsletter he was sending out (remember, this was when “the Internet” didn’t just mean the World Wide Web). It was a creative use of a free space.

At the time, my process of morphing into a conservative was being spurred on by talk radio and a new reading list; I was just discovering something unique about myself. For me to realize that there was another voice out there, and that he was doing something about the stranglehold of the Complex, was a revelation. Reading the Drudge Report was opening my eyes to the power of the individual to take on massive, entrenched power—in government, the media, everywhere. To borrow a phrase: Drudge was hope and change.

Then, on July 4, 1997, Drudge broke the Kathleen Willey story. “Coming just hours after the President ‘adamantly’ denies harassing Paula Jones,” wrote Drudge, “the DRUDGE REPORT has learned that NEWSWEEK ace investigative reporter Michael Isikoff is hot on the trail of a new development that threatens to ignite premature holiday fireworks at the White House. Reports have surfaced that Isikoff has been in contact with a former White House staffer who may offer ‘pattern’ evidence of improper sexual conduct on the part of the President.”
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Willey, a Clinton donor’s wife, claimed to have been fondled by the president when she went to visit him—and when she got home, she found that her husband had killed himself. The Willeys were having financial trouble, and so it was natural for the Willeys to approach Clinton. And because Clinton is who Clinton is, it was just as natural for Clinton to allow the meeting, because Kathleen Willey was an attractive woman. While Willey was there and in the process of telling Clinton that she and her husband were in deep financial straits, the classy gentleman that Clinton is allegedly put the moves on her in a special kitchen area off the Oval Office. According to Willey’s later interview on
60 Minutes
, Clinton “kissed me on my mouth and pulled me closer to him. And… I remember thinking—… ‘What in the world is he doing?’ He touched my breasts with his hand… and he whispered… ‘I’ve wanted to do this ever since I laid eyes on you.’ And… then he took my hand, and he put it on him.”
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A story that went all the way to the White House. Broken on Drudge. It was mind-boggling to watch how one outsider was frazzling the whole order.

A couple months later, on August 31, 1997, Princess Diana of Wales was killed in a car crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in
Paris. Drudge had the story up with the iconic “Drudge siren” on his site before cable news and the networks, in their frantic Paris-and London-based coverage, reported it.

The string of successes of man vs. media was starting to add up. Tons of media began profiling Drudge, the Internet started gaining attention as something other than a hobby, and—naturally!—members of respected journalistic institutions began slandering Drudge with charges they couldn’t back up, let alone prove.

He was not just a threat to the political order—he was also a threat to the business of the mainstream media.

By the summer of 1997, I had actually struck up something of an acquaintance with Drudge over the Internet, and it was in fact he who hooked me up with Arianna Huffington. Arianna had become interested in creating media-driven websites, and she was looking for help from someone who knew the landscape. So I went to her house, and we sat outside and ate spanakopitas and drank iced tea. I’d read about Arianna in
Vanity Fair
, and I thought she was one of those people who was larger than life, the type of person nobody like me gets to meet. She was already writing a column for the
Los Angeles Times
, the
New York Post
, and the
Chicago Sun-Times
. Before I could even get comfortable being in her picture-perfect estate, accepting her graciousness, eating her hors d’oeuvres, I was abruptly hired.

I immediately quit a disposable E! Online job, which I had gotten from the classifieds, and where I had spent most of my time teaching myself the technical basics of the Internet (the job also gave me access to their T-1 line, the equivalent of the Autobahn for the Internet in 1997). I guarantee you, E! did not lament losing
a key cog in their machine. I had learned all I needed to do basic HTML, and I thought,
Okay, I know what I need to know, and now I’m going to create websites for Arianna and see where it takes me.
With less than a formidable arsenal, I was about to become a website designer.

I’d be working out of Arianna’s house in Brentwood, not far from my apartment in Santa Monica. It fit my lifestyle all the way down to the bizarre and cloistered office she provided for me, which was hidden behind a huge painting. It was like a secret panic room situated above her office, accessible only by a spiral staircase, and which itself looked just like an old English study in the board game Clue.

The first day on the job, I went into her office and she sat me in front of her desk. She handed me a piece of paper that said on the top “Director of Research.” It had a small list of job requirements.

I asked, “What is this?”

She countered, “Which of these things can you do?”

I didn’t get it. “You want me to find somebody to become your researcher?”

“Just tell me what you can do on this list.”

The first requirement was the ability to type. “I’m a hunt-and-pecker.”

She said, “That’s okay.”

Requirement two: ability to write. “Okay,” I said, “I wrote for my college paper and a couple of local entertainment magazines.”

“Yes, darling, perfect.”

Requirement three was the ability to edit. “Uh, I guess,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know those weird book editor symbols, but I know basic grammar.”

At this point I was getting a little confused. I’d signed up to
create websites for a rich, conservative columnist and speaker, an easy job, and now this was feeling like a bait-and-switch.

But before my confusion could turn into anger, I saw requirement four: “Do you know how to use LexisNexis?”

And it hit me between the eyes that for all of my stumbling and bumbling, I had tripped over the perfect job for an Internet information junkie. LexisNexis was the key to satiating my cravings, a database aggregating virtually every article in the modern history of media, both mainstream and obscure. For a person organizing bookmarks of every newspaper, who wanted to find every piece of information that was out there, LexisNexis was the Holy Grail. This was before Google, and you can find a lot on Google today—but even now, LexisNexis is the greatest thing in the world, and having access to it was a dream come true.

I’d never felt so good to be duped in my life. At twenty-seven—gulp!—I felt like I might actually have the first job I wanted to keep.

Then it got even better. Arianna next informed me that there was a story she was working on, and that the source of the story was staying in her house while she wrote the piece. The source’s name was Norma Nicolls, and she was the personal secretary to a man named M. Larry Lawrence.

Larry Lawrence was the owner of the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, and he became the top donor to Bill Clinton; he was therefore rewarded with the ambassadorship to Switzerland. From 1991 to 1996, Lawrence gave $200,000 to Democrats. At the time, the world was just finding out the list of favors the Clinton White House was paying out for high-end donors, including overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom. A cursory investigation into Lawrence’s background showed that he had some suspect business relations in Detroit. Already I was getting excited—this was fun, interesting. The
layers of intrigue to the story involved sex, politics, and Bill Clinton, one of my personal chosen online investigative obsessions.

When Larry Lawrence died of cancer in 1996, Bill Clinton provided him a waiver to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was the first Merchant Marine to be given this sacred honor. In the 1990s, Larry and his fourth wife, Shelia, had spent a lot of their time running around to Merchant Marine and Clinton fund-raisers, giving their money and hoping to get goodies back in return. Goodies, apparently, like being buried in Arlington National Cemetery sacred land.

But that wasn’t the real story. The
real
story was that Larry Lawrence wasn’t even a Merchant Marine.

Norma Nicolls told Arianna that back in the early 1990s, Lawrence asked her to research the history of the Merchant Marine at a San Diego library. Then, Nicolls said, Lawrence started writing checks to the Merchant Marine. All of a sudden, the Merchant Marine started giving him awards, because he was giving them money. He started claiming that he had served aboard the USS
Horace Bushnell
, a Merchant Marine ship torpedoed during World War II, and that he had been thrown into the Arctic Ocean as the ship sank.

And Arianna was onto both scams: Clinton’s culpability in selling an Arlington burial slot, and Lawrence’s culpability in falsifying a pseudomilitary record in order to gain entrance.

On November 24, 1997, Arianna started revealing the story to Americans:

The more we delve into Larry Lawrence’s last years, the more he looks like the poster child of President Clinton’s Make-A-Wish Foundation for big-time donors….

Lawrence’s only military link was his service in the Merchant Marine during World War II. “I was surprised and
disturbed,” Norma Nicolls, his executive assistant from 1979 to 1993, told me, “to learn that Larry was allowed to be buried at Arlington. I was a Navy officer’s wife for 24 years, who lost many good friends in the Vietnam War. I believe that should be a privilege accorded only to those who have given up something for their country. I worked as his personal assistant for almost 15 years before he was appointed ambassador to Switzerland, and as far as I know, he never expressed a desire to have a military funeral.”

It appears that the driving force behind the effort to bury Lawrence at Arlington was his fourth wife, whose petit-bourgeois appetite for honors and distinctions seems to have no limit. Whatever the truth about his Merchant Marine service, can anything—other than political services rendered—explain multiple medal winners standing in line awaiting admittance to Arlington while Lawrence is allowed to cut ahead? Way ahead.
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