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Abigail Thernstrom reviewed the Stuart Taylor/KC Johnson Duke story -”Until Proven Innocent.”
Privileged, rowdy white jocks at an elite, Southern college, a poor, young black stripper, and an alleged rape: It was a juicy, made-for-the-media story of race, class and sex, and it was told and retold for months with a ferocious, moralistic intensity. Reporters and pundits ripped into Duke University, the white race and the young lacrosse players at the center of the episode, and the local justice system quickly handed up indictments. But as Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson show in “Until Proven Innocent”–and as the facts themselves would show when they finally came to light–it was a false story, a toxic controversy built on lies and bad faith.
There was plenty of wrongdoing, of course, but it had very little to do with Duke’s lacrosse players. It was perpetrated instead by a rogue district attorney determined to win re-election in a racially divided, town-gown city; ideologically driven reporters and their pseudo-expert sources; censorious faculty members driven by the imperatives of political correctness; a craven university president; and black community leaders seemingly ready to believe any charge of black victimization.
“Until Proven Innocent” is a stunning book. It recounts the Duke lacrosse case in fascinating detail and offers, along the way, a damning portrait of the institutions–legal, educational and journalistic–that do so much to shape contemporary American culture. Messrs. Taylor and Johnson make it clear that the Duke affair–the rabid prosecution, the skewed commentary, the distorted media storyline–was not some odd, outlier incident but the product of an elite culture’s most treasured assumptions about American life, not least about America’s supposed racial divide. …
… Richard Brodhead, the president of Duke, condemned the lacrosse players as if they had already been found guilty, demanded the resignation of their coach and studiously ignored the mounting evidence that Ms. Mangum’s charge was false. He was clearly terrified of the racial and gender activists on his own faculty. Houston Baker, a noted professor of English, called the lacrosse players “white, violent, drunken men veritably given license to rape,” men who could “claim innocence . . . safe under the cover of silent whiteness.” Protesters on campus and in the city itself waved “castrate” banners, put up “wanted” posters and threatened the physical safety of the lacrosse players.
The vitriolic rhetoric of the faculty and Durham’s “progressive” community–including the local chapter of the NAACP–helped to intensify the scandal and stoke the media fires. The New York Times’ coverage was particularly egregious, as Messrs. Taylor and Johnson vividly show. It ran dozens of prominent stories and “analysis” articles trying to plumb the pathologies of the lacrosse players and of a campus culture that allowed swaggering white males to prey on poor, defenseless young black women. As one shrewd Times alumnus later wrote: “You couldn’t invent a story so precisely tuned to the outrage frequency of the modern, metropolitan, bien pensant journalist.” Such Nifong allies–unlike the district attorney himself–paid no price for their shocking indifference to the truth.
Evan Thomas reviews the book for Newsweek.
On March 28, 2006, the four co-captains of the Duke lacrosse team accused of gang-raping an exotic dancer met with university president Richard Brodhead. One of the captains, David Evans, emotionally protested that the team was innocent and apologized for the misbegotten stripper party. “Brodhead’s eyes filled with tears,” write Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson in their new book on the case, “Until Proven Innocent” (420 pages. Thomas Dunne Books. $26.95). Brodhead “said that the captains should think of how difficult it had been for him.” The misbehavior of the players, said Duke’s president, “had put him in a terrible position.” Listening to Brodhead, Robert Ekstrand, a lawyer representing the captains and many of their teammates, “felt his blood starting to boil,” write Taylor and Johnson. “Here, he thought, is a comfortable university president wallowing in self-pity in front of four students who are in grave danger of being falsely indicted on charges of gang rape, punishable by decades in prison.”
It is possible to feel sympathy for Brodhead (who in an interview with Taylor denied he was tearful or self-pitying at the meeting). The president of a modern, elite university must be careful not to cross his politically correct faculty. Brodhead had already lost face with some professors (who dislike the admissions break given to athletes) by appearing to kowtow before Duke’s iconic basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski, to stop him from jumping to the pros. Brodhead had to worry about potential riots if he were seen as an apologist for the lacrosse players. They were white and the alleged victim was black; Duke is seen as a bastion of white privilege in its racially mixed hometown of Durham, N.C.
Still, as unforgivingly portrayed in “Until Proven Innocent,” Brodhead appears weak-kneed. In their vivid, at times chilling account, the authors are contemptuous of prosecutor Mike Nifong, whom the North Carolina legal establishment disbarred for his by now well-documented misconduct. (Nifong’s lawyer, David Freedman, says “there are a number of people who testified at the state bar proceeding that [Nifong] was a very caring career prosecutor.”) But their most biting scorn is aimed at the “academic McCarthyism” that they say has infected top-rated American universities like Duke. …
… The authors make the Duke faculty look at once ridiculous and craven. For months, not one of the university’s nearly 500-member faculty of arts and sciences stood up to question the rush to judgment against the lacrosse team. So much for the ideal of the liberal-arts university where scholars debate openly and seek the truth. (“This book provides one interpretation,” says Duke spokesman John Burness.) The only group that shows any common sense in “Until Proven Innocent” is the student body. Aside from a few noisy activists who assumed the players were guilty, Duke undergrads mostly overlooked the political correctness of their professors.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit keeps the book reviews going with his post on The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration.
Excerpt:
It is unimaginable that Francis Biddle or Robert Jackson would have written Franklin Roosevelt a memorandum about how to avoid prosecution for his wartime decisions designed to maintain flexibility against a new and deadly foe. . . . Many people think the Bush administration has been indifferent to wartime legal constraints. But the opposite is true: the administration has been strangled by law, and since September 11, 2001 this war has been lawyered to death.
As I’ve said before, this war has been overlawyered, which is not to say it has been well-lawyered. Goldsmith notes that the Defense Department alone has over 10,000 lawyers, not including reservists. …
John Fund with a couple of shorts.
William Buckley reviews the new book by Norman Podhoretz.
… He quotes in his book Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum. Pipes is off to a rollicking and reassuring start in what becomes the deadliest paragraph in town. Begin with our military superiority, which would appear to make victory inevitable. “Islamists have nothing like the military machine the Axis deployed in World War II, nor the Soviet Union during the Cold War. What do the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? The SS or Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that matter, to Auschwitz or the Gulag?â€
A thoughtful answer to that question is sobering. The Islamists have:
A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western life.
A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism.
An impressively conceptualized, funded and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility, goodwill and electoral success.
An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from Lumpenproletariat to privileged, from illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians.†…
The Captain posts on how you can get to be a scoundrel in eight months.
If anyone wants a lesson in how to lose a reputation for diligence, honor, and honesty, all they need to do is get confirmed by Congress for a vital role in American security. Eight months after the Senate confirmed David Petraeus as commander of American forces in Iraq, the same Senators who voted for his confirmation have now begun a character-assassination campaign to discredit him: …
Agriculture is no longer the leading occupation of the human race – for the first time in 10,000 years.
… In recent years agriculture has lost its place as the main sector of employment and has been replaced by the services sector, which in 2006 constituted 42.0 per cent of world employment compared to 36.1 per cent for agriculture. As for the industry sector, it represented 21.9 per cent of total employment, which is almost unchanged from ten years ago. Although textbook theory suggests that economic development entails a structural transformation with a shift away from agriculture to the industry sector, this no longer seems to be reflected in reality. Instead of moving into high-productivity jobs in the industry sector, people are moving directly into the services sector, which consists of both high- and low-productivity jobs.
Therefore, it is unclear if the sectoral shift goes hand in hand with productivity increases and thereby a better utilization of the workforce. Agriculture is still the main sector of employment in the world’s poorest regions. Two-thirds of workers in sub-Saharan Africa and almost half of workers in South Asia and South-East Asia & the Pacific are in agriculture. …
Speaking of farming, can you guess what ethanol is screwing up now?
… Everywhere farmers grow corn, water is becoming a major concern as ethanol plants ramp up production at a startling rate and the threat of drought is ever-present. Rushing to help meet President Bush’s call to cut gasoline use by 20% over the next 10 years, the ethanol industry has projects under way that would nearly double capacity from the current 6.8 billion gallons of ethanol a year.
A 50-million gallon ethanol plant might use about 150 million gallons of water to make fuel. That’s more water than some small towns use, raising some local battles over placement of the plants. But farmers in Mr. Clements’s district alone pumped 62.6 billion gallons of water from underground in 2005. That’s why many water experts are more concerned about farmers growing more thirsty corn to meet the extra demand from ethanol than they are about the water used by the distilleries themselves. …