St. Martin's Press published J. H. Hatfield's Fortunate Son: George W. Bush And The Making Of An American President in October 1999. In the book's controversial and breathless afterward, Hatfield claimed to have met with three anonymous sources who confided that Bush had indeed been arrested for cocaine possession, and that George Bush Sr. had intervened to have his son's record expunged.

The story didn't last for long though, as Happy Nelson, the lawyer of Hatfield's former employer, contacted the media and dropped a bombshell: Hatfield was a convicted felon, he had hired a hitman to kill a manager where he worked. The felony conviction was sufficient to lead St. Martin's to pull the book from the shelves and reduce it to "furnace fodder." Salon, which was the first to report on the coke story, was also the first to help bury it, by running a series of articles slamming Hatfield's credibility and experience as a journalist. Salon even made room to bash Hatfield again in an article about book columnist Martin Arnold. Arnold had failed to join in on the Hatfield witch-hunt, which made him suspect in the eyes of Salon.

Of course, Salon's reportage, to the extent that it can even be called reportage, is just as suspect. While Salon spent miles of column inches on the St. Martin's debacle, it failed to mention that Fortunate Son was republished by Soft Skull Press, where I am senior editor. Salon's blindspot is telling, seeing how the AP, the Washington Post and 60 Minutes saw fit to report on the republication. Additionally, Salon has gone out of its way to ignore other evidence surrounding George W. Bush in the early 1970s.

It is clear that sometime in 1972, George W. Bush's life took an odd turn. He vanished from the Air National Guard, and eventually turned up doing volunteer work for Project PULL, in spite of a long history of shirking the noblesse oblige that normally informs the volunteer work of the ruling elite. Bush himself admits to an "irresponsibility" to immense that he dare not discuss rumors of coke use in the early 1970s, for fear that such an admission would send young people all over the country down the white-lined highway of no return. Additionally, Michael Dannenhauer, the former Chief Of Staff of former President Bush, admitted to reporter Toby Rogers that the junior Bush did cocaine and experienced some "lost weekends" in Mexico. This story was presented in Soft Skull's version of Fortunate Son, in an introduction I co-wrote, and was promptly ignored by the American media, especially Salon, which was otherwise quite ready to jump on any anti-Dubya story.

Salon has done some "follow up." A recent article examined the continuing questions about Bush's National Guard record. I was once again bemused to see that my own work on the story had been filtered through "respectable" journalists at George magazine, only to be refuted by sheer assertion. Salon has mastered the art of such refutation. Hatfield is a felon and cannot be believed, in spite of the fact that the word of felons is sufficient to send thousands of people to prison every year. Direct evidence from Bush's National Guard file is ignored, but an unmatched and unlabeled document is presented only to be dismissed. Salon and other outlets claim that investigative journalists tried to prove Hatfield's story, but nobody bothered to ask me who the three sources were, even though I am in a position to know. Salon even expurgated the paragraph in my letter to the editor pointing out this suspect gap.

Salon has made a market from mining the Internet for "fringe" stories, and then blasting them. Like the salons of the early bourgeois era, the magazine is pleased to ogle the unusual, but when it comes time to put some effort and research into a story, it senses the boredom in the parlor and moves on to the next bit of trifle.

Bush Up To His Arse In Allegations
The story (August 25th, 1999) by Amy Reiter which started it all. Salon is happy to report on such fringe phenomena such as email stories, and is also willing to let the Bush camp deny allegations. God forbid the magazine engage in any real investigative journalism.

Is Hatfield The Real McCoy?
This Salon article (October 20th, 1999) by Craig Offman and Daryl Lindsey revealed that it didn't take long for the magazine to get mean, and sloppy, when Salon turned against Hatfield, after spending the first two days of Fortunate Son's release trumpeting the book. Rather than trying to determine the truth of the allegations, the magazine simply quoted Slate columnist Jacob Weisberg's statements of incredulity, and printed the Bush camp's slams against Hatfield without even a moment of examination. Indeed, when Mindy Tucker said that Hatfield should have "stuck with writing science fiction" Salon didn't even have the intelligence to point out that Hatfield had never written any science fiction.

Mountain Road
This Salon article (October 25th, 1999) by Suzi Parker shows that the magazine can engage in reportage when it feels like it. While Salon couldn't be bothered to examine Hatfield's claims at all, when the staff decided to bury Hatfield, they dusted off their muckraker manuals. All the old tricks are here: the high school photo, the naming of the man’s tiny hometown and exact street where he lived (the better to pinpoint death threats, which Hatfield experienced after this article was published), the interviews with neighbors and the dusting off of the marriage license. And yet, they can't find my email address to ask me if I knew who Hatfield's sources were? I’m even in the phone book!

Martin The Moribund
Salon's book section is often enlightening and interesting, but this article (April 5th, 2000) just made me laugh. In an otherwise interesting look at New York Times book columnist Martin Arnold, author Kera Bolonik experiences an editorial spasm and insists that Hatfield's credibility was "shattered." Sure, thanks to ad hominem attacks and argument through assertion, as Bolonik demonstrates here.

Who Is George W. Bush?
The introduction to Soft Skull Press' republication of Fortunate Son, written by myself and High Times reporter Toby Rogers. We found the only source on record for Bush's cocaine use, and pointed out the huge gap between theory and practice in modern reportage. For these scoops, the mainstream media largely ignored us. That is, until they needed more information to fill their own column pages, without the tedious expense of doing their own reportage.

Fortunate Son News
A collection of clips and information on Fortunate Son, from the Soft Skull Press Web site. Pictures of Rogers and Dannenhauer (thus demonstrating that his claims that he never met Rogers are false) are included. Page 76 of George W. Bush's National Guard file clearly shows that he failed to show up for his physical. This material was up for months before the Boston Globe newspaper (May 23rd, 2000) deigned to timidly discuss the story.

Where Conspiracies Never Die: Letters
This Salon letters file (October 24th, 2000) collected reactions to Anthony York's article (October 20th, 2000). The Salon editors cut this crucial paragraph from a letter by Nick Mamatas: "I myself am not convinved that the cocaine arrest story is accurate, but it is worth noting that the mainstream media did little to examine the story. I have frequently read that scores of journalists have scoured Texas for evidence of Hatfield's three anonymous sources, but you know what? Not one of them ever contacted me, even though I am the Senior Editor at Soft Skull Press, co-wrote the introduction of the Soft Skull Press edition of Fortunate Son and am in a position to know the identity of the sources. I'm not saying that I know, or that I would tell if I did, I'm saying that I am a very obvious rock that not one of the ace reporters in the country ever bothered to turn."

Where Conspiracies Never Die
This Salon article (October 20th, 2000) features Anthony York's coyly inaccurate examination of the Bush/National Guard story. He wrongly credits the Boston Globe newspaper with the scoop (it was me and the rest of the Soft Skull gang, thank you very much) and ignores the real evidence in George W. Bush's National Guard file. York prefers instead to blast an unlabeled and torn piece of paper that the journalistic aces at George magazine managed to dig up. What could have been a good story about journalism and a Presidential candidate is turned into another round of "Hey, lookit the freaks and their evidence! Aren't they funny?"

The Real Military Record Of George W. Bush: Not Heroic, But Not AWOL, Either
George magazine's laughable attempt, by Peter Keating and Karthik Thyagarajan, at burying this National Guard story. I was interviewed by Karthik Thyagarajan, who rather than asking questions, simply spent two hours ranting about how he was only a lowly freelancer, and how his editor "Frank" wouldn't take him seriously. And yet, "Frank" and the rest of the people at George expect us to take this story seriously. Their "previously unpublished" material includes material taken directly from the Soft Skull Press Web site (it isn't published if it isn't in George apparently). The article's setting "the record straight" depends almost entirely on the word of someone who claimed to have dated George W. Bush while he was stationed in Alabama, and a torn and undated piece of paper. Wow.

The Smoking Jet
Democrats dare play journalist without the official sanction of the smoke-filled salons of the mainstream media. This site is an excellent repository of information on Bush's controversial National Guard career and journalism's response to it. It offers a paragraph-by-paragraph refutation of George's love letter to the Bush campaign, but also fails to mention the Fortunate Son/Soft Skull connection to this story, and Salon's eager attempt to bury the story it first reported over a year ago. This site loses points for that, and for its sometimes hard to follow linking system.

Texas Observer: Knee-Deep In Eufuala
One of the few articles to examine my work in the introduction to Fortunate Son, is also an example of everything wrong with journalism today. The Dannenhauer material is attacked as being no different than any other "rumor" about Bush's cocaine, in spite of the fact that the intro was the first time any name had been attached to the coke story. Author Michael King also demonstrates his sub-literacy by claiming that I compare the censure of Fortunate Son to the suppression of the independent press in seventeenth-century England. I, of course, do no such thing. I simply point out that Milton's notion of a free press used to inform journalistic ethics, but now the old saying "no news is good news" seems to be a much better predictor of the behavior of journalists. And of course, ace reporter King didn't contact me, didn't have a fact-checker contact me, and didn't even bother to mention that he was working on an article critiquing my work. I happened to find this bit of tripe on a Web search months after it was published.

Disinformation Dossier On The Bush Nazi Coke Moonie Connection
Check out the Disinformation Dossier on the Bush Nazi Coke Moonie Connection.