Copyright 2000 The
Washington Post
Posted
here under provisions of fair use.
The Washington Post
March 19, 2000, Sunday,
Final Edition
SECTION: STYLE; Pg.
F01
LENGTH: 5226 words
HEADLINE: UNFORTUNATE
SON; The burglary, the embezzlement, the conspiracy
to murder? All in the past. That more recent fit
of lies? Hey, he was under a lot of stress. Jim
Hatfield wants you to know it's okay to trust
him now.
BYLINE: Kathy Sawyer
, Washington Post Staff Writer
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Jim Hatfield, aspiring
celebrity-author, sat on a couch in the greenroom
of Court TV, near the top of a semi-tall building
in midtown. He was jazzed, ready to "go live."
But--tick-tock. First
he had to wait, and wait, for some developments
in the Amadou Diallo case to play out on the same
cable channel.
Passing the time with
adrenaline-driven chitchat, he observed that the
greenroom was actually blue. He discussed the
relative appeal of female anchors. Inevitably,
Rick Rockwell's name came up--the spurned groom
from the "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?"
TV show. "I really feel sorry for the guy," Hatfield
said, shaking his head, philosophizing about the
media's tendency to put people on a pedestal and
then kick it down. "What's happening to him happened
to me about four months ago."
Here, without discernible
irony, Hatfield expressed profound sadness and
bitter disillusionment with the hypocrisy and
betrayals and downright dishonesty of certain
publishers and other media types he has encountered
in his continuing foray through the minefields
of marginal notoriety.
Last October he had
a major New York publisher presenting him to the
world as the industrious author of an "explosive"
biography: He alone in all the world had apparently
nailed the long-rumored allegations about a youthful
cocaine bust involving Texas governor and Republican
presidential candidate George W. Bush.
The explosive part,
it turned out, was Hatfield's hidden felonious
past. Two decades earlier, he was doing time in
Arkansas for burglary. One decade ago, having
dabbled in embezzlement, he was again behind prison
walls--this time in Texas for paying a hit man
$ 5,000 to kill a woman.
When all this started
to come out on the very brink of his book's publication,
he lied, claiming the felon was some other guy.
His denial quickly collapsed. His book was withdrawn.
This, according to
Hatfield, was the locus of a web of cowardice
and deceit that has deprived him of his just rewards.
A tricky argument, at best, but one he can tell
to the judge--or at least to Catherine Crier,
the former Texas judge now hosting an upcoming
segment on Court TV.
Hatfield, 42, adjusted
the J. Riggins tweed jacket he wore over a black
turtleneck sweater. He's got soft guileless features,
plump baby cheeks set off by a professorial mustache
and chin hair. His skin is sun-damaged, Jill,
the makeup person, had observed earlier as she
leaned in with a sponge of pancake.
He was not alone with
his jitters. The young sidekick sitting next to
him there in the very anteroom of celebrity was
a spike-haired former Kinko's manager and self-described
"punk" named Sander Hicks who--as the head of
Soft Skull Press--is Hatfield's latest publisher.
This was the comeback tour.
Before this appearance
on "The Crier Report," there had been an interview
with Lesley Stahl on "60 Minutes." Last night,
Hatfield had chatted with the Sunday Times of
London. That evening, Hatfield would do "Hannity
& Colmes," on Fox. Nineteen floors down, Court
TV limousines waited to take the pair wherever
they wanted to go.
Is this a great country,
or what?
Pulped Fiction?
Roving bands of top
reporters had searched in vain for the prize that
Hatfield claimed to have dug up almost effortlessly
for his book, whose full title is "Fortunate Son:
George W. Bush and the Making of an American President."
When the publisher began promoting it to the media
last October, journalists quickly detected numerous
deficiencies. Hatfield cited nothing other than
three anonymous sources to support his assertion
that Bush had been arrested for cocaine possession
in 1972 and, with the help of his powerful father
and a sympathetic judge, had his record expunged.
Leave aside the fact
that the Bushes angrily denied the allegations.
The sources sounded bogus. A columnist for the
online magazine Slate, for example, caught Hatfield
describing one of the three as "pausing to spit
tobacco juice into the ever-present Styrofoam
cup," even though Hatfield had said the interview
was conducted over the phone. Hatfield then admitted
that detail was bogus.
The media watchdog
Brill's Content would later sum up the weaknesses
this way: "There was no date of arrest, no judge's
name, no police officer's name, no paper trail."
With nothing but three unnamed sources, "the story's
credibility rested on the author's credibility."
And that went quickly
south. On Oct. 19, as the book was being released,
reporter Pete Slover of the Dallas Morning News
called the offices of Hatfield's publisher, St.
Martin's Press, to propose that Hatfield the biographer
was none other than Hatfield the felon, now on
parole after serving five years of a 15-year sentence
for solicitation of capital murder. St. Martin's
officials confronted Hatfield with the accusations
as he sat in their offices lunching on carryout
sushi.
Hatfield reacted with
convincing indignation, according to John Murphy,
St. Martin's head of public relations. "He seemed
absolutely shocked and angry. His eyes just sort
of rolled to the heavens." Hatfield adamantly
denied the charges, saying Slover must be confusing
him with some other guy. It was part of a conspiracy
by powerful Bush allies to discredit him, Hatfield
suggested.
But comparisons of
Social Security numbers, mug shots and comments
by the felon's parole officer quickly tagged the
42-year-old author as the ex-con in question.
Slover's story ran on Oct. 21. The next day St.
Martin's withdrew the book, recalling most of
the 70,000 copies it had shipped and dismissing
it as "furnace fodder." (Actually, Murphy says,
the book was not burned. "It was pulped.")
Even so, enough copies
remained on the market--a kind of black market
at this point--to reflect the burst of publicity:
The book peaked in late October at No. 8 on the
Amazon.com chart and at 30 on the New York Times
nonfiction hardcover list.
Hatfield abruptly disappeared.
Feeling beseiged, he says, he decided to "get
the hell out of Dodge." Next, a media pack descended
on his home town of Bentonville, Ark., prompting
him to rush his wife and newborn daughter to a
safe haven. Within days of the debacle, the unbooked
author e-mailed the online Drudge Report to declare
that he would never appear on "60 Minutes" or
the other national TV shows that had made him
offers. He would grant no interviews. The focus,
he said, should be on Bush. Hatfield vowed he
would fade quietly into the woodwork.
And Back Again
Enter the punk.
"The book they burned
is back," trumpets Hicks's Soft Skull Press on
the cover of its reincarnation of "Favorite Son."
Like the original, this version relegates the
anonymous charges against Bush to an afterword.
But it adds a foreword, in which Hatfield gives
his version of his criminal activities and the
events surrounding their disclosure.
"St. Martin's wanted
to make Hatfield seem establishment. That's really
not who Hatfield was, or is," Hicks said, deadpan.
This was early in the day, before the Court TV
appearance, when Hicks was at work in the proud
gloom of Soft Skull's basement offices on the
Lower East Side.
Hicks, 29, is all sharp
angles, fairly vibrating with exuberant attitude,
his hair swept back and gelled into points. He
had on a gray gabardine jacket he bought for $
3.00 at Value Village in Vegas. His desk is set
amid cracked concrete, rough boards and a worn,
quilt-covered couch with a big white lacy doily
splashed on its back.
Having spent some of
his youth in Falls Church, Hicks once told Washington's
City Paper that he had been influenced by "everything
that had been conditioned by the D.C. punk scene.
. . . dissent, resistance, beauty, energy and
empowerment."
He co-founded Soft
Skull in 1992, he says, "as a guerrilla operation
run under the table at the Kinko's" where he was
employed, copying his first book on the Xerox
5090 there. Eventually, Hicks took Soft Skull
corporate, selling shares in the stock to friends,
authors and family and scoring profiles in the
New York Times and Village Voice.
One of Soft Skull's
new titles is by Zack Exley, infamous as creator
of the Web site gwbush.com, which features faked
images of candidate Bush with a straw up his nose,
doing lines of cocaine. Last year the site so
enraged the candidate that he blurted at a news
conference that "there ought to be limits to freedom."
"Fortunate Son" had
Soft Skull written all over it.
To date, the house
has printed 45,000 copies, Hicks said, and "we
have had 32,000 trade orders, which are basically
sales to bookstores."
Asked if he has any
concerns at all about Hatfield's credibility,
Hicks side-stepped adroitly. "I love that question--it
shows how Bush has evaded the questions raised"
by the book. He mentioned Bush's poor record in
defending the environment against big business
and other issues.
The one element of
Hatfield's past that seemed to give Hicks pause
was the discovery that he was a Reagan Democrat.
Hicks got a funny look on his face when he heard
Hatfield mention that, but soon found a way to
shrug it off. "My mother was a Reagan Democrat,"
he said with a grin.
Pressed on the point,
Hicks said, "Maybe Hatfield isn't aiming to be,
like, the next Martin Luther King or Karl Marx
or Frederick Douglass, but he's got a great analytical
eye and he can spot a spoiled rich kid when he
sees one." Meaning Bush. Also, Hicks added, "he's
hard-working and always delivers on time." (This
line is a kind of mantra in the Hatfield saga,
repeated by at least three Hatfield publishers.)
Soft Skull, Hicks went
on, "has the potential to start and lead a political
movement--a reformist movement to the left. .
. . I have a burning passion to eliminate starvation
on a world scale . . ."
A co-worker stuck his
head in to inform Hicks that the Court TV limo
was waiting outside.
'Got Into a Little
Trouble'
"There ain't no sin
and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff
people do."
--J.H. Hatfield, quoting
his mother quoting Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath,"
in an author's note for "Fortunate Son"
After the Court TV
taping, at a midtown restaurant called Rive Gauche
that Hatfield had scouted out, the waitress, a
young blonde named Liberty, had obviously caught
Hatfield's attention. He was pleased that she
remembered him from the night before, when he
had been in with a reporter from London. "Hey,
Liberty? I'll probably be back a few times before
I leave on Friday," he told her. "I'm makin' this
my hangout while I'm up here." This was another
interview, he explained, so he'd be needing the
table a little longer than for a normal lunch.
This Hatfield is a
Southern archetype: disarmingly down-homey, lightly
self-effacing, polite, mentally agile, keenly
attuned to the mindset of his listener(s). As
one of Hatfield's former associates in Dallas
put it: "He's pleasant and affable and quite frankly
has a good sense of humor. A very likable guy.
You know, you wouldn't suspect him of trying to
kill somebody just to get their job."
Over coffee, following
a burger and fries, Hatfield talked about the
twists and turns his life had taken. He grew up
in the foothills of the Ozarks, a region dominated
by the Tyson chicken and Wal-Mart empires headquartered
there. He was the second son of a chicken doctor.
"Not a degreed doctor," but a self-educated veterinarian
who drove around, sometimes with young James tagging
along, and attended to the poultry in the chicken
houses dotting the rolling hills. Hatfield's mother
worked for Wal-Mart, he said, "in warehouse and
distribution."
The young Hatfield
had what he described as "a very religious upbringing"
in the Church of Christ. No musical instruments,
no dancing allowed. Always drawn to writing, he
says he asked his parents for an electric typewriter
for Christmas when he was about 12. "Everybody
had high expectations for me. I was supposed to
marry the preacher's daughter."
Instead, he said, he
dropped out of college, married (and soon divorced)
a girl "nobody wanted me to marry," got arrested
for writing bad checks, then got convicted and
imprisoned for burglary, serving seven months
of a five-year sentence. "I've analyzed it a lot
of times. Everybody was shocked 'cause I rebelled.
. . . I mean, I just decided that here's a kid
that never did anything when he was growing up
except sit in his room and do homework. . . .
Went to Harding College on a track scholarship
and then I quit like four weeks after I was there.
Came home, got into a little trouble."
That time, he said,
"I broke into a couple of houses that weren't
too far from us. . . I don't know why I did it.
. . . It was a major step, because I was just
the perfect child."
In 1976, after he got
out of jail, he joined a stream of other kids
from Bentonville and headed for the nearest big
city: Dallas. Hatfield says he worked briefly
for an oil company and wrote freelance entertainment
reviews.
He eventually went
to work for a finance company that had HUD-subsidized
properties across Texas. One of the top officials
there was Delores Kay Burrow, the woman he would
end up trying to murder.
But first, over a period
of years, he stole tens of thousands of dollars
from the firm. He blames the company. The management
structure, he writes in the new foreword, "foisted
[sic] a breeding ground for individual greed and
corruption."
"It was the whole atmosphere,"
he said as the late shift came on at the restaurant.
Liberty had gone. "It was government-subsidized
property, it's government money, it was easy money
. . . it was right there, it was disposable. There
really wasn't a check-and-balance system to it."
Hatfield's hankering
to be an author was evident during this period,
an acquaintance in Dallas remembers. He told co-workers
he had won a contest to publish a James Bond novel
after the death of Bond creator Ian Fleming. "Years
went by and we never saw the book. We wondered
if it was really true," the acquaintance said.
Eventually, Hatfield
showed up with hard evidence: copies of his first
book, "The Killing Zone." (The jacket blurb announces:
"Bond has his hands full as he battles a lucious
[sic] lady assassin. . . . Aided by his sex-galore
confederate Lotta Head . . . 007 is pitted against
Klaus Doberman in his heavily armed fortress.")
When he left the company, Hatfield's colleagues
assumed a connection. "Everybody was happy that
he had found a career other than collecting rents
and managing properties," the acquaintance said.
"That he was going to go off and become an author."
Hatfield now admits
that this was another deception. "I was so overly
confident that my work would be selected, I boasted
to everybody. When it wasn't selected, I self-published
and sold it to everybody I knew. I really had
egg on my face, but nothing compared to now."
The Bomb
One February day in
1987, a bomb went off beneath a Buick in a multilevel
parking garage in Dallas. Fortunately, the foot-long
pipe bomb malfunctioned, and the car's two passengers--Burrow
and a colleague-- were not injured. The survivors
owe their lives, apparently, to the technical
ineptitude of one Charles Ray Crawford, whom Hatfield
paid $ 5,000 to do the job.
Hatfield says now that
he hired the hit man only as a favor to his boss,
Lawrence R. Burk, who had promoted him, participated
in the corruption with him, had in fact become
like a father to him. Hatfield claims Burk wanted
Burrow killed because she was trying to blackmail
him over an old extramarital affair between the
two of them. Hatfield says he never intended the
bomb attack to succeed. "Crawford wasn't the sharpest
knife in the drawer," he writes. "I honestly believed
and hoped that he would just take [the money]
and run."
Attorneys for Burk
and Burrow say Hatfield's allegations about their
clients are "horrendous, libelous" lies from start
to finish. Hatfield's real motivation, they argue,
was not to please Burk. It was, first, to silence
Burrow after she stumbled onto his stealing and,
second, to take her job. Lawyer Michael Eaton
says he has a witness who heard Hatfield say more
than once that he wanted to kill Burrow "because
he was enraged about the fact that this incompetent
woman was his supervisor" and "if he got her out
of the way. . . everyone would recognize what
a managerial genius he was. He is a real narcissistic
kind of a guy, from what I can tell, but I think
most sociopaths are."
The U.S. attorney's
office, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms and the HUD inspector general all
investigated Burk years ago based on Hatfield's
accusations, the Dallas attorneys say, but never
charged him with anything.
Over the clink of flatware
at the restaurant, Hatfield said of his intended
victim: "She wasn't liked by anybody." Then he
said: "She confided in me. We were very close
. . . which made it more difficult, too, because
I knew her. . . . It's hard to explain, I guess.
"I never thought she
would [be killed]. I really didn't. The last time
I saw her, when I left the company--and not to
sound like Judas, but--I kissed her on the cheek
and said goodbye, and [we] wished each other well
and went our separate ways . . . I just kinda
felt trapped, and I was also leaving the company
. . ."
Burk and Burrow are
suing Hatfield, Soft Skull, Amazon.com, Barnes
& Noble and Borders for libel damages based
on the contents of the new foreword. Hatfield
has offered to settle the suit by deleting the
foreword from future editions and inserting the
following: "With heartfelt apologies and contrition,
the author regrets the references to Lawrence
R. Burk and Delores Kay Burrow Hardman [her new
married name] in the previous edition." At most,
Eaton said that might help mitigate the damages--a
little.
Fifteen months after
the failed murder attempt, Crawford rolled over
on Hatfield in exchange for a reduced sentence.
In July 1988, Hatfield pleaded guilty to solicitation
of capital murder and was sentenced to 15 years.
When he walked out the door of the Huntsville
prison known as The Walls on parole five years
later, U.S. marshals rounded him up and took him
to El Reno, in Oklahoma, to do federal time related
to the embezzlement.
"I wrote [in prison],"
Hatfield said. "Matter of fact, writing has always
been a salvation for me."
A thought occurred
to him. "Maybe I should just stick to crime fiction,
you know, like Elmore Leonard."
After he was paroled
back to Bentonville, he got himself an agent and
a publisher. Working out of an office in a converted
barn, he churned out six or seven quickie paperbacks,
such as the "The Ultimate Unauthorized Star Wars
Trilogy Trivia Challenge," "Lost in Space: The
Ultimate Unauthorized Trivia Challenge for the
Classic TV Series," an encyclopedia of "X-Files"
trivia, and biographies of "Star Wars" actors
Ewan McGregor and Patrick Stewart. "It's not John
Grisham money, that's for sure. But I like to
think I make a fairly decent living at it," he
said.
His decision to step
up to a Bush biography was "a natural progression,"
he said over coffee. "This was my first hardcover.
He's a man I've been fascinated with, from strictly
a biographer's point of view." One of his selling
points in dealing with St. Martin's was that the
Texas-based parents of his current wife, Nancy,
had some connections in Bush circles that would
help him get interviews, he said.
In a cheery blurb he
wrote about his emergent authorial self for Amazon.com
a few years ago, he alludes to another possible
selling point: He's a glutton for headlines. "My
publisher loves the fact that I'm a publicity
hound."
No Checks
"A good book is the
precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed
and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."
--Milton
"Do I know for a fact
these allegations [about Bush] are true? No, of
course not. But I know that the author believes
them to be true."
--Thomas Dunne of
St. Martin's Press, original publisher of "Fortunate
Son," quoted in the online magazine Salon
The rise of the Internet
has generated a fog of angst over its roiling,
unconstrained frontier stampede of voices from
anywhere. The Hatfield incident (among others)
has swung the spotlight fleetingly back onto books,
reminding anyone who cared to notice that this--one
of the most ancient and revered information technologies--has
its own shadowland of hustlers and slackers, grifters
and drifters.
Thomas Dunne, 53, the
first publisher of "Fortunate Son," operates an
eclectic, profitable, high-volume fiefdom within
St. Martin's. The Dunne imprint alone publishes
125 books a year, St. Martin's spokesman Murphy
said, giving each of its nine editors only weeks
to work on a given title. Among his successful
authors are fiction writers Rosamunde Pilcher
and Frederick Forsyth. But Dunne had also suffered
another high-profile misstep in 1996, when he
signed up scholar David Irving to write a biography
of Joseph Goebbels. Irving turned out to be linked
with Holocaust deniers. The book was withdrawn.
The publisher advanced
Hatfield $ 25,000 for the book. Nobody at St.
Martin's had met the author until he arrived for
the abortive book promotion last October, according
to Murphy. No fact checking was done. Nobody insisted
on knowing Hatfield's sources or on securing supporting
material for his sensational charges. Knowing
nothing of his criminal record, and despite his
lack of journalistic credentials, they trusted
the author, who was represented by a reputable
agent. They took comfort, by all accounts, in
the sheer volume of his notes and files, and in
his general demeanor.
A standard lawyering
of the book turned up no problems. This is hardly
surprising, and had nothing to do with confirming
the book's accuracy. For one thing, Murphy and
others said, the typical book contract, including
Hatfield's, provides that the writer, not the
publisher, will be held accountable for any libelous
material. For another, the standard required to
prove libel against a public figure such as a
politician is so high that few bother to sue.
It was not until the
book was in galley proofs, Hatfield said, that
he was inspired by a Bush cocaine scenario--circulating
in anonymous e-mails on the Internet--to revisit
certain of his sources and flesh out the drug
incident.
Those sources are not
named, but Hatfield does fill 54 pages with names
and publications from which he says he drew information,
none of them tied to any particular statements.
Journalists for two different publications contacted
random samplings of people in the list, with negative
results: In one case, 10 of the alleged sources,
and in the other case 17, denied ever talking
to Hatfield. (The author says that they are mistaken,
publicity-shy or intimidated by the power of the
Bush family.)
On their comeback tour,
Hatfield and Hicks have complained that St. Martin's
rushed "Fortunate Son" into print in order to
capitalize on the drug scandal, forcing certain
journalistic compromises along the way.
From its headquarters
in Manhattan's Flatiron Building, St. Martin's
denies the accusations, saying its decision to
speed up publication was made before Hatfield
came up with the sensational drug allegations
and solely in order to be competitive with other
scheduled Bush books.
The Hatfield affair
merely represents business as usual in significant
chunks of the publishing industry, industry leaders
and analysts say. In an era when books are treated
more and more like any other consumer product,
publishers often care more about getting books
to market and less about accuracy. Brill's Content,
in a review of the Hatfield scandal, concludes
that publishers don't do more research into their
authors' backgrounds "because they don't believe
they need to. The odds are on their side. More
than 65,000 books are published every year, and
the number of times that a publisher has been
humiliated by revelations of an author's dishonesty
is negligible."
The Fallout
The revelation of Hatfield's
criminal past shook St. Martin's. Editor in Chief
Robert Wallace resigned, saying, "I do not in
any way wish to have my name associated with 'Fortunate
Son' " or with future books by Thomas Dunne Books,
"over which I have no control."
Other St. Martin's
executives claimed that Wallace had had opportunities
to speak out against the controversial afterword,
but never did. In a telephone interview, Murphy
said: "I ran it past him. He agreed it was absolutely
newsworthy."
However, Wallace has
indicated that this exchange occurred not long
before publication, when Murphy was looking for
help generating publicity and that for all Wallace
knew, "the author could have been from the planet
Xenon."
Wallace, like Dunne
and most others at St. Martin's, has declined
recent requests for interviews on the topic. But
Dunne spoke with Brill's Content earlier, dismissing
the flap with a verbal shrug: "There are corrections
in the New York Times all the time." Besides,
he said, the drug charges "could still be true."
A Man of Conviction
"When all this happened
four months ago, I said, 'Can they do that? Can
they say that about me?' "
Hatfield was recalling
a conversation with his lawyer about the negative
media attention. His lawyer responded, "How many
times have you been asked, when you worked on
biographies, do you have permission to work on
that book?"
"I go, 'Well, if they're
a public figure you can do an unauthorized biography.'
And he goes, 'Guess what--you're a public figure
now.' "
Hatfield said he tries
to roll with the punches. "But you get upset sometimes.
Salon put our street address [online] and . .
. showed [my wife's] maiden name and when we got
married and tried to talk to our preacher and
had private information about our mortgage and
I, you know, that doesn't have anything to do
with me, my past, the book, Bush, anything. So,
like I say, we got a little gun-shy with some
of that stuff."
The recent unpleasantness
has apparently shocked his in-laws. "Let's put
it this way," Hatfield says. "We're supposed to
go visit in May? I'm not going. My wife and baby
are going."
Hatfield knows how
to do a mea culpa. "I shouldn't have been in any
of it," he said, referring to the felonies.
But he maintains that
his ethics--today--are solid. "I can't tell you--the
tabloids have offered me money for the sources.
I just took out a second mortgage on my home,
because of legal fees, and it'd be nice to take
$ 50,000 and give 'em the sources. But I'm not
gonna do it."
Why all this concern
about his sources, he wonders almost to himself.
Why aren't people going after Bush?
Hatfield likes to quote
a passage from the New York Times that made note
of the numerous great, or at least accepted, authors
who had done time in prison, saying of "Fortunate
Son": "People might not mind a former convict
writing a book as long as the book is really good."
As Hatfield interprets
it, the passage makes the point that he, like
those others, should be forgiven his past. He
is not shy about including himself in exalted
company: He compares his situation to that of
Joe Klein, who lied about authoring the book "Primary
Colors," to TV actor Tim Allen, who served time
on a drug charge before becoming famous, and to
Watergate investigators Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein, who protected their sources.
Hatfield sort of knew
his background might come out once he decided
to lob allegations at a powerful figure like Bush,
he said. So he has a hard time explaining why,
when it actually happened, he lied and denied
and, once he was nailed, ran.
The word "lie" exasperates
him. "Boy, if I hear that one more time, worded
that way. Because it all happened in the span
of one afternoon. That was it. I mean, St. Martin's
hit me up, I did not want to address it at that
time. I wanted to get home. It's that simple.
Maybe it's difficult for some people to understand,
but I had a newborn baby. I had a wife. I knew
it was going to run in the Dallas Morning News.
. . . I don't know how to describe it, but I'm
up here in NYC, I'm all by myself, the whole world's
comin' in on me. . . . [St. Martin's was demanding]
'Tell us who your sources are or we're going to
recall the book.' I'm like, 'You know, you've
been asking for these damn sources from day one.
You want me to leak 'em out to some newspaper
people and everything, I'm not doing that.'
" . . . But the major
reason, I was just tryin' to kill a little time.
Just stall."
On a Roll
Now Hatfield and Hicks
were out under the hot lights in the minefield
of marginal notoriety and situational ethics and
freedom of speech, cameras rolling. It was Court
TV's "Crier Today." Crier was hitting them with
the tough questions, about lying and credibility
and the need to get corroboration and all of that.
Hicks assured her Hatfield
had told him the names of his three anonymous
sources. Well, she asked, have you checked them
out? "I have not personally called them up on
the phone, but I have the feeling that they would
not want to talk to me, the punk of publishing."
Moments later, getting
comfortable, Hicks pounds home a message he likes
better: "This is a struggle, and we're definitely
up against some very powerful enemies here. But
you have to look at their tactics. Bush is a dirty
politician. I've got a lot more integrity as a
punk rocker than he does as a politician. And
I will stand by that."
Here he played the
Bob Jones University card, noting that Bush "spoke
at a place that's basically, like, really really
scary, Nazi-type Christians."
Hatfield had grown
bolder, too, as the words flowed past, and started
calling Crier by her first name, getting playful
at times, teasing her about her Texas accent when
she referred to his time in "the pen." He chuckled,
"That's the judge comin' out, the peauhn." She
laughed with him, then continued, "But nevertheless
. . ." And at other points he even got a bit stern
and reproachful, saying to her, "Let me correct
you on something . . . ."
Afterward, Hicks would
put out a jubilant press release on his Soft Skull
Web site stating that "millions" of viewers had
seen this performance. Would it be too cruel to
tell him that the actual number of households
reported by an official service was 157,000?
As the interview ran
out of time, Hatfield took up the defense of his
new best friend sitting next to him: "I'd defend
this guy to the end of time because he's a maverick,
he's independent, he's not scared of anybody,
he's not like a St. Martin's Press that the first
time somebody goes boo, because they're some big
conglomerate publishing company, they recall it.
Not just recall it, Catherine, but burned it.
We don't burn books in this country."
Crier, thanking them
for coming, said, "If this continues on, I would
like to talk to y'all again, and if you ever decide
to come forward with sources, let's, let's get
it on the record."
Now, back down on the
sidewalk on an unseasonably balmy day, Hatfield
and Hicks were elated. Live TV! No filters. You
get to tell your side, man, you get a little control.
"Whoawooh!" Hicks whooped skyward.
They decided to dismiss
their limos and walk, the better to savor this
magnificent media moment.
Published: March 19,
2000