“I was born in East Baltimore, on Chester Street. I lived there
for three years, then we moved out to Pimlico and for the rest of
my adult life until I got married I lived there on Oakmont Avenue
about four blocks from the racetrack…”
Those are the opening words of former Maryland governor
Marvin Mandel’s memoirs, I’ll Never Forget It, but he
didn’t write them down. I did. There is nothing wrong with that,
nor is there anything wrong with me telling you. Politicians strike
different deals with their ghostwriters. Ours placed my name on the
cover of the book (“with Jeremy Lott”).
Politicians exercise various degrees of control over their
ghostwritten material. Richard Nixon was a notorious control freak
who would drastically rework the chapters that his research
assistants produced for him. Everything that went out under his
name had to sound exactly right to him.
Ronald Reagan was much less hands-on with his
ghostwriters. At the press conference introducing his ghostwritten
post-presidential autobiography An American Life, he
quipped “I hear it’s terrific. Maybe someday I’ll read it.” The
crowd loved the line but I’ve heard that his publisher did
not.
Four years ago, during his first campaign for the GOP
nomination for president, Texas congressman Ron Paul came under
fire for incendiary words that appeared in his newsletters. We can
chew on the substance of those words some other time. Suffice it to
say that they are not defensible statements, that many of them are
racist or racially-tinged, and that Paul himself has expressed deep
regret for ever letting them go out under his name.
Right now, I am concerned with the latest effort to fan
the old flames of controversy to blaze by folks insisting that Paul
really did write those words, or played an active role in editing
and producing those newsletters. The simple truth is that, no, he
didn’t write or edit the newsletters in question. Usually, he
didn’t bother to read them until well after the fact.
We learned all of this in the last election cycle, but
critics are trying to make old charges new again. The website
Conservatives Network has splashed pictures of the newsletters up
in a post titled “Who Wrote The Ron Paul Newsletters? Ron Paul
Wrote Them — Clear Proof.” The site’s “clear proof” consists of
helpful red arrows and circles that highlight the use of the first
person in the newsletters, a mimeographed signature, and the fact
that Paul was listed as editor.
All of those things are true and beside the point. Paul
says that he did not write the words in question. He published four
different newsletters over the years: “Ron Paul’s Freedom Report,”
“The Ron Paul Political Report,” “The Ron Paul Survival Report” and
“The Ron Paul Investment Letter.” For some time, he took an active
interest in writing and editing them but in the early nineties,
newsletter production was farmed out to ghostwriters who were given
de facto free rein. At that point in his life, Paul was out of
politics and working crazy hours to reestablish his medical
practice as an ob-gyn after he had torched a whole year of his
medical life to challenge George H.W. Bush as the Libertarian
Party’s nominee for president.
Paul has declined to name the ghostwriters for a couple of
reasons. One, anonymity was part of the deal that he struck with
them. Two, he professes genuine ignorance of who wrote what
specific words, and he may have a point there. After an
investigation, Reason magazine fingered former Paul
congressional staffer Lew Rockwell and a few of his colleagues that
he had farmed the ghost-ghostwriting out to as likely
culprits.
We should note that nearly every single fair-minded person
who has looked into the matter believes Paul didn’t write the
offending newsletters. The words in question simply do not sound
anything like Paul’s message or delivery. The question that critics
such as The American Spectator ‘s own Jeffrey Lord are now
pressing is, Well, OK, he didn’t write those words, but he knew
what his ghostwriters were doing in his name.
To that poisonous end, Lord
cites the words of embittered former Paul staffer Eric Dondero.
Dondero is an interesting and erratic character who, like Lord, has
very serious disagreements about Paul on foreign policy. Dondero
once founded an organization called Libertarians for Lieberman,
which makes about as much sense as Marxists for Tax Cuts. Dondero
charges that Paul “did read them, every one of them” and signed off
on the newsletters “before they were published.”
When I put these charges to Paul’s presidential campaign
spokesman Gary Howard, he was a bit exasperated. His first e-mail
read, in full, “Eric Dondero is a disgruntled former staffer who
was fired for performance issues. He is not a valid source.” I kept
prodding. In a follow up, Howard, who is black, said, “Congressman
Paul has said many times that he didn’t know about these terrible
writings, and did not sign off on them.”
That may not be the end of the matter. There are all kinds
of questions stemming from the newsletters, especially the issue of
Ron Paul’s executive competence. (Paulistas will no doubt rejoin
that he learned something from the debacle.) But the unsmoking gun
here is Paul’s authorship and creative control of those
newsletters. If this were a reality TV show, we might call it
“Ghostwriters Gone Wild.”
