— David Brock claims that he went to UC Berkeley as a liberal, and had a conversion experience while writing a story on Jean Kirkpatrick’s 1983 speech there. The way Brock tells the tale, he was so appalled by the way Kirkpatrick was treated that he rejected his liberal values and went over to the Right. Like so much of what Brock has written, this story is completely false, as Will Harper discovered in the course of researching Brock’s college days for the East Bay Express:
When Kirkpatrick came to Berkeley, the byline atop the Daily Cal’s coverage was not Brock’s. It belonged to Chris Norton, a freelance writer who contributed news stories and editorials about US foreign policy. Back issues of the February 16, 1983 paper show Norton’s name beneath the lead headline “Kirkpatrick clashes with hecklers over US policy.” “Someone told me to go cover this and I said okay,” says Norton, who later became a Central American correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and Newsday. “He didn’t write the story; I wrote the story,” adds Norton, who expressed disbelief when told that Brock claims to have written that day’s main story. Indeed, Brock did not have any story in the paper that day.
Harper interviewed 19 people who worked at the Daily Cal during Brock’s tenure, and unearthed nothing but contradictions of Brock’s accounts of the Kirkpatrick visit and his alleged conversion. The only consistency to David Brock is life-long practice of dissembling, exaggerating, and self-glorification.