"Richard Jewell and Other Tales of Heroes, Scoundrels, and Renegades" by Marie Brenner

Above: Richard Jewell and Other Tales of Heroes, Scoundrels, and Renegades - Marie Brenner - 334 Pages

To some extent, the 2019 book under the new title is a bait and switch.

I completed reading this book today.

This was an impulse purchase at Barnes and Noble in Sugarhouse. I had been a follower of Marie Brenner's writing in Vanity Fair in the '90's. And, I had seen publicity about Clint Eastwood's new movie about Richard Jewel. In the wake of the Jewell film's publicity, I had watched the two faced, oleaginous, #metoo Tom Brokaw give a "too little too late" mea culpa about his rushing to judgement to publicly condemn Jewell, who turned out to be an innocent man.

But, when I started reading the book, I found out that the segment on Jewell was only 82 pages of the 334, pages long book. Thumbing forward in the book, I learned that the book was a compilation of Marie Brenner's Vanity Fair articles during the 80's and 90's about various... as the cover page of the book says... "heroes, scoundrels, and renegades." The book was originally published in 2018 as "A Private War."

To some extent, the 2019 book under the new title is a bait and switch. Brenner's reasonably benign mid-90's Vanity Fair piece on Donald Trump, based on numerous interactions she had with him over the course of twenty years, was updated in this new, retitled, 2019, edition's preface, with an anti-Trump diatribe. This "diatribe" preface was not in the original 2018 version of the book, "A Private War." What made you change your mind Marie? He's the same Trump today as the one to whom you gave better treatment twenty five years ago. It is obvious that Brenner had retitled, and reissued the book, to capitalize on the Jewell movie's publicity, and to sneak in some nasty digs about Donald Trump.

And I bit!!!

Notwithstanding, the book was very informative about people whom I had forgotten, or in the case of Marie Colvin, had never heard of. Notwithstanding the deceitful legerdemain, I'm glad I read it.

Richard Jewell
Richard Jewell was a thirty year old security guard, living at home, in Atlanta, with his mother. In today's lingo, we might call him a deplorable... a basically honest guy, living by his wits, working hard at a low paying job, and playing life by the rules.

In the early morning hours of 27 July 1996, three pipe bombs exploded at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, killing two people and injuring 111 others. Hundreds more potential casualties were prevented by the vigilance and quick actions of security guard Jewell, who uncovered the bombs and began evacuating the area.

But, desperate for a lead, investigators and journalists pursued Jewell as a potential suspect in the case, painting him as an obvious match for the infamous "lone bomber" profile, After a month's long investigation found no evidence against him, the U.S. Attorney finally cleared Jewell's name. Yet, Jewell would not be fully exonerated in the eyes of the public until the actual bomber confessed in 2005, just two years before Jewell's premature death at the age of forty-four.

Brenner chronicles Jewell's ordeal as the story of an ordinary man whose life was shattered by a false narrative...MSM Fake News in its infancy... that's the underlying message... the growing dishonesty and lack of integrity of the main stream American media. Its good to be reminded that media perfidy is not a recent phenomenon. And, Trump's exposing ongoing media dishonesty is doing all Americans a great service, whether they realize it or not.

Marie Catherine Colvin
Marie Catherine Colvin was a British/American journalist who worked as a foreign affairs correspondent for the British newspaper The Sunday Times from 1985 until her death. She died while covering the war in Syria in 2012, Colvin was raised middle class in Queens. She graduated from Yale. Intrepid, daring and resourceful, she joined UPI out of college and moved, a year later, to become the Middle East correspondent for the London Sunday Times.

Among many other "firsts," she was the first to interview Colonel Muammar Gadaffi after operation El Dorado Canyon. Colvin reported that Gaddafi said reconciliation between Libya and the United States was impossible so long as Ronald Reagan was in the White House. "I have nothing to say to him (Reagan)", he said, "because he is mad. He is foolish. He is an Israeli dog." Of course, Reagan got the last laugh.

Colvin lost the sight in her left eye while reporting on the Sri Lankan Civil War.

Specializing in the Middle East, Colvin also covered conflicts in Chechnya, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and East Timor. In 1999 in East Timor, she was credited with saving the lives of 1,500 women and children from a compound besieged by Indonesian--backed forces. Refusing to abandon them, she stayed with a United Nations force, reporting in her newspaper and on television. They were evacuated after four days.

Where is Christiane Amanpour when you need her? I mean, Colvin really out did CNN's Amanpour, which wasn't really hard, I guess, considering Amanpour is a leftist political hack. Brenner points out that Amanpour and Colven knew one another as they were assigned by their respective institutions to cover the same news.

As an aside, Ed Martin, who was my ski instructor circa 2005, fought with Australian Special Forces during the East Timor campaign. He was a fantastic ski instructor. For that alone he should have earned a double tip. But, my reason for doubling his tip was in recognition of his combat experience with Aussie forces in East Timor.

Malala Yousafzai
Brenner gives a first had account of the emergence of Malala Yousafzai, also known as Malala. Malala is an activist for female education and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate. She is known for human rights advocacy, especially the education of women and children in her native Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, northwest Pakistan, where the local Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Her advocacy has grown into an international movement, and according to former Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khagan Abbasi, she has become "the most prominent citizen" of the country.

Poignant in Brenner's account are tales told by Malala's father about the intimidation to which the family was subjected as Malala, intrepid and brave, risked her, and her family members' lives numerous times to put forward her beliefs.

Considering Malala's youth, I was wont to compare her to Greta Thunberg, another youth vying for world attention to promote her climate change agenda. I saw no legitimate comparison, though. Where Malala risked life and limb to promote something laudable, women's education in a violent, patriarchal society, Greta is nothing but a marketing prop, being used by agenda driven climate alarmists.

Donald Trump
Brenner recounts impressions gained from a number of personal interviews of Donald Trump during his rise to public prominence in the '80's, to his financial problems, and recovery in the late '80's, to his emergence as a media/television celebrity in the late 90's.

Brenner contrasts Trump's audacious persona to that of his more restrained, albeit, successful father. Dad, at first, was critical of Donald's foray into the rough and tumble Manhattan real estate market. After all, the Trump family had done extremely well with post war residential subdivisions in the outlying New York City boroughs. The father, in essence, admonished the young Donald, to stick to the family knitting. Trump, however, took his cues from Napoleon. "L'audace, toujours, l'audace." He made it work. In the end, Donald's father bragged about his blue collar roots son's success in white shoes Manhattan.

Brenner's bait and switch preface piece on Trump is a not so thinly veiled hit piece. "As I write in October of 2019, America and the world are in the grip of a political and cultural civil war, ramped up by the machinations of a president who appears untethered from any sense of legal reality, respect for our institutions or moral core."

This is wrong, in my opinion. Trump was the only American politician to discern a wave of nationalism and tribalism sweeping the entire world. He grabbed his board and caught the wave and so far remains upright as the wave gains momentum. Trump's demise will not stop the wave. Trump is not the cause of the wave.

The wave won't subside, even if Trump is defeated in November. There are still too many forgotten Americans, most of them people who play by the rules, that have "come out" in support of Trump's restoration of American economic growth and jobs, his rebuilding the military, and his buttressing of traditional American institutions... the Supreme Court for one. These citizens, with the newfound confidence given them by Trump, will show a higher level of political activism, Trump or no Trump.

Only the minus-UK EU kicks against the pricks in resisting the move to nationalism. But, what Briton started, is likely to be finished by others.

Tribe is in our genes. And, some tribes are more successful than others. Inter-tribal competition is the unavoidable, inevitable, and necessary nature of the beast. Without intertribal competition is "The Borg," torpor and decline. With tribal competition is progress.

Brenner also includes a post script in the book, also not in "A Private War," about the relationship between Trump and his 80's/90's handler Roy Cohn, which she wrote in 2017. Cohn rose to fame as Senator McCarthy's attorney during the Army McCarthy hearings in 1954. There's some interesting stuff in here including the story of the legendary Cohn's bringing into the Trump fold, Roger Stone.

France's Scarlet Letter
This is a wonderfully insightful piece on rising anti-Semitism in Europe and the denial of same at the highest levels of government.

Read:
"Anti-Semitism in France had been considered a right-wing phenomenon that historically had its roots in the Vatican and the libel of the greedy Jew as Christ-killer. It had fueled the crowds howling "Death to the Jews!" in the streets near L'Ecole Militaire during the Dreyfus Affair in 1895, and seethed through Vichy with the deportation of seventy-=six thousand French Jews to the death camps. The new form of anti-Semitism, Weill-Raynal understood, was different: It was coming from the left, part of the movement known in France as le neo-gauchisme, and it was connected to the country's socialist politics and the difficulties of assimilating the large French Muslim population."

In 2001, Mr. Z3 and I visited The Marais district of Paris, traditionally the area where most of Paris' Jews resided. We visited Jo Goldenberg's Deli. Through a serendipitous set of circumstances, over eggs, a buttered bagel and coffee, we were joined by Jo Goldenberg himself.

Jo, speaking in French, recounted how on 09 August 1982 a shooting and bombing attack was carried out on his restaurant by the Abu Nidal Organization, a group that splintered from Fatah. Two assailants threw a grenade into the dining room, then rushed and fired machine guns. They killed six people and injured twenty two others. Jo pointed to the areas of the since restored restaurant where the bomb went off and the shooters stood.

Goldenberg told us, in French, confirming the narrative of Marie Brenner, that left driven anti-Semitism was on the rise in France. Most of the prominent Jews of the Marais, he said, had migrated to Israel or the United States. On a paper napkin he mapped out a walking tour for us to see the important sights of the Paris Jewish quarter, including a nearby synagogue.

Mr. Z3 and I took that walk around the Marais, following Jo's map. It was from that point that I appreciated, first hand, the point later made by Marie Brenner in her account of the rise of left wing driven anti-Semitism in France. Sadly, the same trend, anti Semitism emanating from the left, has migrated to the United States, where Jew hating US Congressional Representatives make outrageous anti Semitic remarks with nary a sanction or admonishment from their leaders.

Goldenberg's Marais deli closed in 2006 and Jo Goldenberg died in 2014.

Constance Baker Motley
Constance Baker Motley was an African-American civil rights activist, lawyer, judge, state senator and Borough President of Manhattan, New York City. She was the fist African American woman appointed to the federal judiciary, serving as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. She was an assistant attorney to Thurgood Marshall arguing the case Brown vs. Board of Education.

Brenner wrote this piece in 1994 when Judge Motley was seventy two years old. It is a short biography of this famous civil rights leader of the fifties and sixties. One anecdote...Motely grew up upper middle class in New York City. Her first real exposure to southern black rural poverty was when she accompanied Thurgood Marshal to Selma coincident with the Brown versus the Board of Education case that resulted in the desegregation of public schools. "It sort of knocked me over," she said. On the flight back to New York, she recalled, her euphoria over the Brown decision faded, and she felt lost, with no idea what lay ahead.

Motley keeps a copy of a letter written by James Meredith on 26 January 1961 to Thurgood Marshall:

"I am submitting an application for admission to the University of Mississippi, I am seeking entrance for the second semester which begins the 8th of February. I am anticipating encountering some type of difficulty with the various agencies here in the State which are against my gaining entrance into the school... I am making this move in, what I consider, the interest of and for the benefit of (1) my country (2 my race (3) my family, and (4) myself. Very Truly Yours, James Meredith."

Reading the Meredith letter gives me chills. Meredith was the lynch pin that triggered Brown. I was sixteen years old at this time... I remember the headlines. I would learn of the civil rights movement from Time magazine, our family's main source of national and international news. Reading Brenner's account of here interviews with Constance Baker Motley added a lot of texture to my "outline" understanding of the Civil Rights Movement. No "victim" politics in those days. Constance was a high achieving black. She wanted the opportunities she had enjoyed for all black people. She, like MLK, would have been appalled to see how the victim oriented racial politics of today inhibit progress of the black race.

Jeffery Wigand
Jeffery Wigand is an American biochemist and former vice president of research and development at Brown and Williamson in Louisville, Kentucky, who worked on the development of a reduced-harm cigarette and in 1996 blew the whistle on tobacco tampering at the company.

From the point of view of Brown and Williamson, they screwed up when they hired this guy. He was a loner, had a history of trysts outside of marriage and was widely known as belligerent in demeanor. Not the template for a loyal employee. From the point of view of the public, he is a hero, having exposed the perfidy of the tobacco companies in their quest to keep under wraps the harm, of which they were well aware, which comes from smoking.

The article is good source material for understanding the outing of tobacco company misdeeds.

Bishop Summation
For a number of years I was a regular reader of Vanity Fair. I remember reading some of Brenner's pieces. I was an avid fan of Dominique Donne and his true crime write ups. And, OK, I liked the "My Stuff" page.

Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair from 1992 to 2017, coincident with the presidency of George W. Bush, evolved the magazine into a partisan, anti Bush, anti conservative propaganda organ. I let my subscription lapse circa 2011, though I have "liked" Vanity Fair's Facebook page and, accordingly, continue to read the occasional free article.

If you have the time, Brenner's pieces in this compilation are well written, by and large, non partisan pieces, on some seminal American people and culturally important happenings. Read these and enjoy. The hyper partisan anti Trump stuff in the book, consistent with the modern evolution of Vanity Fair, to a left wing propaganda sheet, has been fed into the book, bait and switch, via Brenner's recently written preface and post script.