The apostate

It's at this point, Brock says, that he realized that "the strange lies were all mine." He had ginned up a case against Anita Hill in his book that, by his own admission, "was shoddy, not only in the sources I had trusted, but in the obvious fact that I had missed significant evidence that showed that Hill's testimony was more truthful than Thomas's flat denials after all." He also came to see his infamous "Troopergate" story for the Spectator as equally distorted; he now calls it "a mix of circumstantial observation and rumor." In the process of contriving such stories, he tells us, "I lost my soul." An emotional reckoning was in the making.

After that, Brock landed another book deal to write a hatchet job on Hillary Clinton, but the result, the sympathetic "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham," enraged his conservative clique, and he found himself slowly banished.

Brock then branched out from his previous exclusively right-wing perch and wrote his first purported tell-all, an article called "Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man," for Esquire magazine. But, Brock admits, this piece, which detailed his own excommunication from the conservative elite, actually had a "self-serving and even misleading slant" because it refrained from detailing "the truth about myself, about my role in the events described, and about my own flawed work." That record is one he sets out to right in "Blinded by the Right," presumably, once and for all.

He starts at the very beginning. His early years, he tells us, were frequently difficult ones. He grew up amid a devout Catholic family living comfortably in suburban New Jersey; at one point his father left the church to join a more extreme sect that continued to celebrate Mass in Latin. "Dad," Brock writes, "was a winger through and through."

David's awkward relationship with his father is described in the familiar, self-serving style of grown children who look back with more than a tinge of bitterness. David was a precocious young man who grew up alienated. "My father and I had a bitter exchange when I insisted he buy me a very expensive three-piece, glen check Pierre Cardin suit for my eighth-grade graduation," Brock relates.

Initially, David's political ideas were formed in opposition to his father's; he recalls cheering on the presidential victory of Jimmy Carter as a 14-year-old. The tension with his father seemed to peak in his high school days, when the "older I got, the more his limitations caused me to disrespect him, while at the same time the more irritated he became with a son who at age fifteen could already outargue him."

More unique are Brock's accounts of his own family's casual familiarity with deceit. Both he and his younger sister, Regina, were adopted, but were trained from an early age to deny it, for fear it would somehow reflect badly upon the family. "Living with the secrecy and lies, I acquired an unusual ability to block out and avoid the truth and to live my life with no inner questioning," Brock writes.

There would be other, earlier struggles with the truth. He describes the family's move to Texas when he was a teen and his efforts there to stifle his nascent sexual urges; he threw himself into physical relationships with girls and even with a female teacher. Then came graduation, and a move to the University of California at Berkeley, where things changed rapidly.

Brock began an open gay relationship in college, eventually came out to his family and soon began to switch his political allegiance to the conservatives. The way he describes this shift strongly suggests that he decided to define himself, as many undergraduates do, by what he was against; in his case, it was against the excessive political correctness of Berkeley in the early 1980s. After Brock sparked protests by penning a column in the student newspaper praising the U.S. invasion of Grenada, the battle lines were firmly drawn. "I became as self-righteous and rigid as my critics," he says.

And with that rigidity came a hint at the ugly tactics he would use later on. He became a pariah on the newspaper, though a "small cadre of loyalists had stuck by me" and he conspired toward "building up my power base." At one point, he seized an opportunity to discredit another editor by telling the editor in chief that the university's vice chancellor had called the newspaper to complain about one of his rival's stories. But when the editor in chief called the chancellor, she learned the truth. "He hadn't called," Brock writes. "When the editor confronted me about the lie, I froze, speechless, and walked away."

His early career as a journalist at the student newspaper had ended, but his career as a crusading conservative had only just begun.

For Brock, advocacy journalism appears to have been a way of seeking out acceptance. He says he was greeted so warmly by the "sectarian right-wing Berkeley campus underground," from historian Walter McDougall to political scientist Paul Seabury, that he "fell easily under the spell of my surrogate father figures, as though anyone who gave me attention could dictate my beliefs."

A cynic could quibble with this reasoning; Brock later in the book explains that he believes that he shifted politically in part to repair relations with his father. If so, why the need for surrogate father figures? This self-analysis continues throughout the book: Brock describes himself as an emotionally parched youth striving desperately for affection. After he's had his greatest success, the publication of his biased hit job, "The Real Anita Hill," he gets what he was really after all along, "a warm, secure place in the conservative movement." All he ever needed, it seems, was a little love.

But this brings up another troubling aspect of Brock's confessions: He often seems willing to accept only partial blame for his own sins.

Next Page: Under the spell of right-wing "mentors"

• View blog reactions