A few readers seem to think I aspired to write a history of Power Line in “Looking back at 23 years” and charged me with omitting Paul Mirengoff and Steve Hayward from my account. However, to borrow John Updike’s adjective, my post was memoiristic in nature. I was recalling my experiences, my reporting, my interests, my favorite posts, all as manifested on the site over the years. Paul and Steve, important as they are to the history of Power Line, had literally nothing to do with the subject of my personal retrospective.
I think most readers understood. One kind reader wrote from Durham, North Carolina, to remind me that, despite my implication to the contrary, I had actually met Trump aide Stephen Miller before my confused encounter with him at the Minneapolis Trump rally in October 2019. She recalled that Stephen was a Duke undergrad and head of the Duke Conservative Society when I spoke to the group on campus in 2006 during the lacrosse scandal. I had been invited to speak to the group by then Duke undergrad Peter Magnuson, now a Minneapolis attorney, and my Durham correspondent had attended my presentation. Stephen was head of the group and in attendance. Maybe that’s why he greeted me in 2019 like an old friend!
I also heard from William Campenni, who served in President Bush’s unit of the Texas Air National Guard with President Bush. I drew frequently on Bill’s work in Power Line posts on Ratheragate that are collected here. Bill’s 2004 appearance on C-SPAN is posted here. Bill also appeared as a witness in Byron York’s 2004 National Review story “The Facts About Bush and the National Guard.” Bill was provoked by the 2015 movie Truth to write the Daily Signal column “The Truth About Dan Rather’s Deceptive Reporting on George W. Bush.”
Bill wrote overnight in response to my post — I thought some readers might find his remarks of interest:
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In your chronicle of 23 years of Power Line’s contributions to the political debate I found it humbling and gratifying to be mentioned within that panoply of the powerful and prominent friends you have assembled in your tenure.
The crossing of our paths one and a score years ago for me started out with a simple letter to a newspaper instigated by John Kerry’s slander of the Air National Guard and its members, one of whom was me, who already had a Vietnam Service Ribbon, as an Air Guardsman, before John Kerry ever planted a foot in Vietnam. For me, my post was more of a catharsis for the insult of this cowardly dilletante, not a defense of a George Bush. I never even expected it to be printed, and was somewhat overwhelmed by the experience that followed.
Imagine, a nobody like me all of a sudden tossed into a presidential campaign, with appearances demanded by every news network, I believe the count was fifteen, plus countless radio talk shows and nearly every major newspaper. It was not all that pleasant and experience, either, with national news anchors and pundits who never even talked to me excoriating me and accusing me of words and deeds I never made.
Even worse were the blogs of the prominent social and political media of the period, like the Daily KOS and the Democrat Underground, publishing my home address and practically encouraging their followers to come after me.
Of course, there was also a positive side. People I did not know, common folk like me but also like members of Congress, thanking me for speaking out, heck, even a handwritten letter of appreciation from a President of the United States.
And of course, there was that phone call from a guy at Power Line named Johnson who surprisingly was only interested in facts, not political commentary.
That was February 2004.
Then came September, and Dan Rather. For me, it made February a minor dress rehearsal. All those people obviously kept my phone number, because it never stopped ringing. And I was even madder this time, for everything I was hearing was just not true, and I had the documentary evidence and the personal experience to refute it.
Years later I saw the movie Truth on a flight (I would never have paid to see it). I was floored when the climactic scene supposedly showed a triumphant Mapes relying on an acronym OETR to vanquish CBS hired lawyer Larry Lanpher. It was I who pointed out to Lanpher that use of the acronym was actually proof that the memos could not have existed. The script writers sure twisted that.
The Rather story did have the salutary effect of renewing our exchanges, and I appreciated the forum you frequently gave me on Power Line over the last two decades to educate the audience on the reality of the Rathergate fiasco as it reappeared in those intervening years.
So again, thanks for including me, thanks for keeping Power Line around as a beacon of truth in a dark sea of political ignorance, biases, and hate. I wish you another 23 years of good health and prescient and perspicacious punditry.
