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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The Dark Money Funding a Times Columnist's Magazine

Is Bret Stephens being paid by the Israeli government? Inquiring readers
want to know.

Amnesty International's report accusing Israel of practicing
"apartheid" continues to make news, albeit not in America's most
influential news source
.
American Jewish leaders recently took credit for discrediting the report
both nationally and internationally

in advance of its appearance. The executive director of Amnesty's
Israel office criticized the language of the report
,
albeit without taking issue with any of its evidence. Paul O'Brien,
Amnesty's executive director, told reporters that he thought Israel
should not exist as a Jewish state
,
which led all 25 Jewish members of Congress to condemn him
.

The New York Times did not mention anything about the reaction to
Amnesty's report. Had it done so, of course, it would have had to
explain what it was in the first place. Loyal Altercation readers may
remember that I noted my surprise that the Times chose to ignore both
the 278-page, 1,559-footnote report and the enormous reaction it
engendered entirely. Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha's
explanation, published here the following week, was that "it is not
our practice to cover every report published by NGOs
."

Our email conversation continued, however. I noted in my response to her
note that, during the same month the Times had no time for either the
Amnesty report or the enormous reaction it inspired, it ran four stories
inspired by Whoopi Goldberg's opinions on the Holocaust
.
(If the Times had published one article on the Amnesty controversy, then
it would have deemed Whoopi four times as important as Amnesty
International, but since it published zero, that number is infinity.)

My new inquiry to the Times concerned a different matter: the dark-money
Maimonides Fund that is paying
Times op-ed writer Brett Stephens as editor of the right-wing Jewish
journal Sapir . In my email to Ms. Rhoades
Ha, I noted that the Fund does not anywhere reveal the identity of its
donors. I also noted that the Israeli government has committed many
millions of dollars to secretly funding publications and institutions
that support its views
, as, without
exception, Sapir happens to do. I cannot know-nor can anyone-who is
behind this funding, but there was a model employed by the CIA during
the Cold War of secretly subsidizing the publication of intellectual
journals like Encounter
.
Irving Kristol, who edited the magazine with Stephen Spender, insisted
to his grave that he had no idea that he and his contributors were being
paid by the CIA for their pro-American stance, but the controversy
dogged his entire life, right up through his Times obituary
.

To be clear, I am not leveling any accusations against anyone, and would
not do so without evidence. But here is my question: Does The New York
Times allow its employees to receive compensation-and to have side
jobs-when that compensation comes from institutions that refuse to
identify their funders? I know the paper has strong rules about
potential conflicts of interest or even situations that lead to their
"appearance." This one strikes me as clearly falling into that
category.

Ms. Rhoades Ha replied: "This outside work was approved by editors in
advance. Bret's participation in the journal is consistent with his
long-held view on Israel, and editors do not believe any disclosure is
needed. Bret has not written about the Maimonides Fund and does not
intend to."

I hardly need to note that I do not believe that this response addresses
the problem. If you or I were receiving funds from a dark-money
foundation and wrote a regular column on the Times op-ed page, we would
not write about it either. That is, my friend Jane Mayer will tell you,
the whole point of dark money
.
And if you or I were in the business of handing out millions of dollars
in secret funding from the Israeli government to promote its views in
the U.S. and elsewhere, well, an anonymously funded conservative journal
that calls for the bombing of Iran

would make a mighty attractive recipient. And while it's true that the
journal's views are consistent with those of Bret Stephens, I can say
from more than 30 years of experience, there is a great deal more to
being a columnist than what actually appears on the page.

It's true that ever since it gave the former PR exec-turned-Nixon
speechwriter William Safire

a column in 1973, the Times has always had at least one op-ed columnist
who would defend Israel at all costs. (I visited Safire at his country
home in Harpers Ferry one weekend around 1991, and he excused himself to
go to his backyard working tent-replete with hammock and fax
machine-to take a call from Israeli Premier Yitzhak Shamir, who all
but dictated Safire's next day's column.) When former Times
Executive Editor Abe Rosenthal was fired and given the consolation prize
of an op-ed column (after having turned into a "crazy person
"
in the estimation of his former Times editorial page editor, Andrew
Rosenthal), he attacked Israel's critics in pretty much every other
column he wrote. William Kristol's brief tenure as Times columnist
was also
characterized by unbending admiration for the Jewish state. Stephens is
the newest iteration of a time-honored tradition you can read about in
my first book, 1992's Sound & Fury
.
The new twist is that he is also being paid by anonymous Israeli
sources. Again, I make no accusations save for a decided "appearance
of conflict of interest" and what so far strikes me as a surprising
lack of curiosity about it from the Times.

Returning to another previous Altercation, the one on Jeopardy! (sort
of)
,
I noted a question recently about the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin
incident

which insisted that Vietnamese boats had, in fact, fired on U.S. ships.
It made me nervous at first, because the famous "second Gulf of Tonkin
incident"-the one that provided the excuse for Lyndon Johnson's
disastrous bombing of Vietnam-almost certainly never happened (as
readers of 2004's When Presidents Lie

are well aware). Thankfully, the date given was August 2, 1964, which
was the date of the "first" incident. Anyway, felicitations to the
Jeopardy! staff for that.

What remains a source of confusion to many, however, is the barely known
"third Gulf of Tonkin incident." It was this one that led Lyndon
Johnson to proclaim, "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales
out there
,"
a quote that is almost always misattributed to Johnson on the occasion
of the alleged "second" incident. I discovered this after I made the
same mistake in a New York Times op-ed and quickly received a letter
from former Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy, who actually
wrote Congress's Gulf of Tonkin Resolution well before either incident
in preparation for just such an occasion. Congress passed Bundy's
handiwork on August 10 in response to Johnson's hyping of the
literally imaginary second incident. Johnson was so eager to make an
announcement about the imaginary August 4th incident in time for the
11:00 news that he gave the North Vietnamese sufficient warning to shoot
down the plane of U.S. pilot Everett Alvarez
,
who ended up being held prisoner for the duration of the war.

Today, the Gulf of Tonkin experience strikes me as worth remembering, as
so many reborn Cold Warriors are demanding ill-considered military
action in Ukraine based on facile and inappropriate historical analogies
and inviting potentially ruinous consequences. (See, for instance, this
guy
.)
Jacob Heilbrunn's New York Review piece
offers a
useful primer.

[link removed]

Speaking of all of the above, the Brookings Institution Press recently
published a biography entitled The Last Gentleman: Thomas Hughes and the
End of the American Century
, by Bruce L.R.
Smith. Hughes played a key role in the Johnson administration's
foreign policy in a variety of roles. He personified as well as anyone
the now defunct "American Establishment
."
I got to know Hughes back in 1983 when I was an intern at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace; he was its president, and it was my
job to organize speakers to give lunchtime talks. He once told us a
story about Harvey Hollister Bundy, who succeeded John Foster Dulles as
Carnegie's chair in 1952. Bundy was the father of both William and
McGeorge Bundy, two of the key architects of U.S. policy in Vietnam. He
reared back and smiled as he observed: "If Harvey Bundy had really
cared about 'international peace,' he would have stayed home and
paid more attention to raising those boys of his." (He may have been
quoting someone else, but if so, it was a great quote.)

My friend Rosanne Cash recently tweeted this great story: "My dad
would have been 90 today. Several yrs ago I was at his house on his
birthday and a huge bouquet arrived. 'Who are those from?' I asked.
He rolled his eyes. 'Elizabeth Taylor. We were born one day apart &
she sends these every year to remind me I'm a day older than
her.'"

Here are Johnny and Rosanne singing
together, and here is just Rosanne doing
"Ode to Billy Joe."

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Last night, the story broke

that RT America was stopping production and laying off its staff. This
column was written before that story became public.

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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