What has happened to Oklahoma?

One thing we used to know was how to kill people fast.

Now I can't get an Oklahoma press to consider a book with Okie in the title (ORNERY PEOPLE: WHAT WAS A DEPRESSION OKIE?) and the current inhabitants can't figure out how to execute a man humanely!

How Silas Suggs Died

11 June 1897 the TAcoma Daily News

5 Feb. 1898 Salt Lake City BROAD-AX

More on Cohan's Feeling Sorry for the Disbarred and Jailed (for 1 night) Mike Nifong

Yesterday a man who signed himself "dukeno1" and identified himself as a personal friend of William D. Cohan wrote a long 5-star review of THE PRICE OF SILENCE, that seriously dishonest book, so bad that Brian Lamb devoted most of an hour of an interview with Stuart Taylor, Jr., to correct what Cohan had said. Lamb twice mentioned the [then] 42 1-star reviews on Amazon, which I can tell you was not an organized flaming, though I know three, I think, of the reviewers because they, like me, keep informed on LieStoppers. Well, yesterday when I saw the new temperate but very ignorant review by dukeno1 I saw that Mr. Parrish had already responded, very calmly and rationally, and another person, in the same tone, but talking about what she would have felt if a child of hers set to a very expensive school had been abandoned to a rogue prosecutor. 
Yesterday I added this on Amazon. It begins with a several line quotation from the start of dukeno1's review:

 
Hershel Parker says:
"We were told we [had] to go turn ourselves in for something we didn't do,' [Reade] Seligmann said."
Picture an intelligent, self-aware undergraduate, never in trouble before, and with a firm alibi against a rape charge having to proceed to court far outside his home district to respond to an indictment, encircled by a media, community and professorial frenzy. Athlete or not, he would be frightened to say the least."

Dukeno1, this is a promising start: you seem set to understand just how terrifying the accusations of rape were to the lacrosse players, or at least one of them, and perhaps set to understand that their families might also be horrified of what might happen to their sons immediately (what with the banner CASTRATE and other abominations, in some of which the Duke faculty participated) and what might happen if any of the sons were to be wrongfully convicted and jailed for three decades--perhaps until a wrongfully-convicted son would be of the age the parents were in 2006. But you don't seem to have imagined the terror under which the lacrosse team and their families lived, and also the terror under which the coach and his family lived. Look at Janet Pressler's letter to Brodhead, if you think the false accusations and the manipulations of the rogue prosecutor were not compounded by the rush to judgment by almost everyone at Duke from Steel and Brodhead on down. The lives of these people were altered forever, and now your good friend Cohan has poured heaps of burning coals on their heads, all over again.


Now, this morning, dukeno1's 5-star review has disappeared and with it our comments. I of course kept a copy of mine but not dukeno1's. I think this friend of Cohan's had no idea of the heartlessness of his friend's book until we pointed it out.

The Black Bean Drawing--"Decimation" of Texas Prisoners

Artistic depictions of the Black Bean Massacre, which my lucky double cousin Thomas W. Bell survived--and lived to write A NARRATIVE OF THE CAPTURE AND SUBSEQUENT SUFFERINGS OF THE MIER PRISONERS IN MEXICO, CAPTURED IN THE CAUSE OF TEXAS, DEC. 26TH, 1842 AND LIBERATED SEPT. 16TH, 1844.

Darrell Parker and Arkansas Turkeys

Darrell makes his own Turkey Calls and sells them.

After Stuart Taylor, Jr., talked to Brian Lamb on C-Span today about Cohan's very bad book

http://www.c-span.org/video/?318990-1/qa-stuart-taylor

42 one-star reviews on Amazon, Brian Lamb said twice. Conspiracy? No--just a lot of pretty well informed people, all of us outraged at the scurrilous book.

Brodhead may have asked one good question in his whole life: "Why do you have to write this book?" That's what Cohan quotes him as saying on 605. Of course Brodhead ruins that by continuing, "We are just getting over the events of March 2006." Clearly Brodhead wants his behavior forgotten and the behavior of most Duke professors forgotten, but the question is still good. Why did Cohan "have" to write the book? KC and Stuart "had" to write UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT because of the horrendous mistreatment of the lacrosse players by Nifong, the Durham police department, almost all Duke professors, and almost all the high profile writers in magazines and newspapers and TV "personalities" like Nancy Grace. They had masses of new evidence that needed to be mustered into comprehensible order and put into a readable narrative. I understand this because I was the only one to transcribe all the letters in the great trove of Melville documents discovered in upstate New York in 1983 and to transcribe (ultimately) thousands of pages of other 19th century documents until I had a 9,000 or so page LOG in my computer. Until I got the story out in long books in 1996 and 2002 I was the ONLY one to know many stories about Melville. I "HAD" to write the biography, or at least try to get it out before I died, or get it in shape that someone else could finish it if I did die. I understand "HAVING" to write a book.

This next 2 paragraphs are from my Amazon review of Cohan: On the blog LieStoppers LTC8K6 commented: He [Cohan] wrote the book the way it is because he is angry that he couldn't document the story he wanted to tell. He wanted the story in the title, but it just isn't there. Anyone who didn't cooperate with him is therefore made to look bad in the book. He couldn't find the story he promised to the publisher, so he just rehashed old stuff with a Mangum/Nifong slant to make it "juicy", and blamed the lack of a story on the defendants." The full title, I should say, is THE PRICE OF SILENCE: THE DUKE LACROSSE SCANDAL, THE POWER OF THE ELITE, AND THE CORRUPTION OF OUR GREAT UNIVERSITIES.

As someone who knows something about publishing I find this comment on LieStoppers very plausible. This would account for the vast amount of padding in the book as well as Cohan's frustration at not getting all the doors wide open to him, as he expected, so that he had to content himself with Nifong, Peterson, and Mangum , and therefore rewarded them with page after page of self-justifying lies, and gave great space to Steel, the former chairman of the board of Trustees, for his maunderings (on Brodhead: "Dick is a talker . . . Dick wants to pontificate. He's an English professor"). It is as if Cohan is saying, "Who are the lacrosse players not to agree to talk to ME?" Cohan got the contract expecting unimpeded access or even welcoming arms and found that people were suspicious of him and did not want to play. Even Brodhead would not play with him, and asked, "`Why do you have to write this book?'" . Yes, this sounds right. There might possibly have been an excuse for pitching the book to Scribners but there was not excuse for writing it after it turned out that there was nothing new (or nothing new and honorable) to be said.

Now I think that Cohan was governed at the start by the stereotypes of race, class, and gender that motivated the Group of 88 and that left Brodhead terrified of offending the mob at Angry Studies. As a Duke graduate and as a published writer he thought he would have easy access to people at Duke and could write a book pretty easily. Now, the easy way to write a very long book is to fill it with very long quotations from documents that have already been printed (Jackki!! Saunders!!) and to eke it out with very long quotations from people who are saying new things. Unfortunately the only people willing to maunder on and on to him were Steel (now, even he was maundering in what he said of Brodhead), Mangum (so petite and attractive and with such a warm smile), and Nifong ("spit-roasted" but spewing foul-mouthed religiosity). So the only "news" is not evidence but self-justification, much of it patently false. What would a decent person have done? Drop the project. What did Cohan do? Fill his book with indignation about how the players hired expensive lawyers (and got off only because the had the money to hire such lawyers), how much money the players extorted from vulnerable Duke (using as Stuart Taylor says, wildly inflated figures), pepper the book, page after page, with dark suggestions that the lacrosse players were guilty of uncertain but certainly horrible deeds. The innuendo, the insinuation, the dark hints--all of this shows a flawed character. Cohan is not only a lousy excuse for a researcher. He is not a moral man. Now, what will Bill Anderson report about the earlier books? I don't expect people to turn evil and incompetent in their third or fourth or fifth book.

Cohan and Dishonest Writing, Brodhead and Dishonest Reviewing, and the Role of Amazon Reviewing

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Cohan and Dishonest Writing, Brodhead and Dishonest Reviewing, and the Role of Amazon Reviewing

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/04/21/the-attempted-rehabilitation-of-mike-nifong/

The reviewing William Cohan’s THE PRICE OF SILENCE on Amazon has reached the Washington POST blogger Radley Balko:

Financial reporter William Cohan has a long book out this month that bills itself as a fresh look at the Duke lacrosse case. But judging from early reviews, it’s more of an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of disgraced former Durham County district attorney Mike Nifong and his role in the Duke lacrosse case. Early reaction to the book has been telling: The book has received mostly glowing reviews from the New York Times, Salon, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. Cohan also pulled off the rare triple play of publishing: He received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly and Booklist. But the book also has received some harsh criticism. In fact, just as rare as the triple-starred review is to see a book so warmly reviewed by critics get so thoroughly trashed on Amazon. After 45 reviews, Cohen’s book currently has an aggregate 1.8 stars out of a possible 5. Of the 45 reviews so far, 35 have given him the lowest possible score. [It’s 41 one-star out of 51 right now, 7 five-star and 3 four-star.]

On an Amazon comment that seems to have been removed, Grandjete rebutted someone’s idea that people were ganging up on Cohan. Well, as far as I know there’s no campaign against Cohan the way teenagers choose a victim to bully on Facebook. Most of the 1-star reviewers seem to be people who knew enough about the Duke-Durham scandal of 2006 to remember that the DA, Mike Nifong, was disbarred and forced to spend a token night in jail. The rogue prosecutor image stuck in people’s minds, and many remembered the frantic, ferocious behavior of the Gang of 88—Duke professors who fired up hatred of the accused lacrosse players. It was hard to forget the images of the banner that said CASTRATE. Besides the general readers who posted on Cohan’s book on Amazon there were bloggers who keep in touch with the still on-going (infinitely delayed) trials and the subsequent adventures of the stripper who falsely accused a varying set of lacrosse players of a varying set of crimes and is now in jail for murder. Cohan upset a lot of the bloggers, including me, by quoting Nifong in a long, long, self-justification marked by foul-mouthed religiosity and interviewing the false accuser Mangum (who seemed “more petite and attractive than I expected”) and allowing her to spin yet more fantasies for his book. (I recognize several of these bloggers in the Amazon reviews.) In my review and my comments I was outraged and pained by Cohan’s strange heartlessness and his persistent snarkiness toward the lacrosse players and their families. Anyhow, Grandjete mentioned that I was a Pulitzer finalist and a former history professor. In my comment I corrected that last part. My comment on Amazon reviewing along with Grandjete’s disappeared last night, so I resurrect it here with the addition of a few lines about myself as a victim of dishonest reviewing.

               Grandjete, thanks for your refuting idea that the one-star reviews suggest there is a "campaign" against THE PRICE OF SILENCE--though there is no doubt that many people keeping up with the Duke-Durham case will speak out when something as contemptible as Cohan's book is published. I had better say that although I could well have been a historian and perhaps would have been happier in a history department, I was in an English department when I was named one of the two Pulitzer finalists for biography in 1997--that year the prize went to a work marketed in the UK and Ireland as fiction, Angela's Ashes! Moriarty [this was a previous commenter], I also won two times the highest award from the Association of American Publishers' Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division. I am a serious scholar who signs his own name to reviews on Amazon. I have thought a lot about the importance of Amazon reviewing, even as I read about some of the problems with gangs of posters praising or damning books and the scandal of “reviewers” who get review copies in return for 5-star reviews.  Amazon is so important in the new world of publishing and reviewing that in the 2013 MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE (p. 532) I say: "Even if dishonest publishers hire people to write positive reviews, honest reviewers can still do what [Richard B.] Schwartz do, sign our real names to anything we post as an Amazon review. Along with literary bloggers and litblogs, reviewing in Amazon or any future similar site will go far to make up for the decline in the number and quality of print reviewing."  I had Schwartz in mind because we had corresponded, on Amazon, about the importance of signing our names to reviews.

               You don't always get honest reviewing even in the best mainstream media organs now or even the most famous academic journals. Let me make the previous sentence more truthful: You don’t often get honest, well-informed reviewing in the “best” mainstream media organs now, and certainly not in the most famous academic journals. Look, recently, at the way the new biography of Paul de Man has been minimized so as to rehabilitate de Man. Look at the puff pieces (as Stuart Taylor, Jr., call them them) which greeted Cohan’s book. It is no secret that I still am pained by the damage to my reputation from the Dean of Yale College who lied about me in the NEW YORK TIMES on 23 June 2002, suggesting that I had fantasized my story--that only I "in my black hole" had heard of the book Melville finished in 1860 and called POEMS, while in fact every Melville scholar and many critics had known about it since 1922. There’s not another word: he lied about me. The Dean of Yale College, never a "scholar" but only a critic, and a superficial as well as supercilious one at that, in this case the author of a dishonest review, was Richard H. Brodhead, who later went to Duke. I take honest reviewing very seriously, in Amazon or anywhere.

MY DOUBLE COUSIN THOMAS W. BELL'S ACCOUNT OF THE BLACK BEAN MASSACRE, 25 MARCH 1843

This is my Double Cousin Tom Bell's account of the Black Bean Massacre in his book, A NARRATIVE OF THE CAPTURE AND SUBSEQUENT SUFFERINGS OF THE MIER PRISONERS IN MEXICO, CAPTURED IN THE CAUSE OF TEXAS, DECEMBER 26TH 1842 AND LIBERATED SEPTEMBER 16, 1844.

THE TEXAS STATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION:

BLACK BEAN EPISODE. The Black Bean Episode, an aftermath of the Mier Expedition, resulted from an attempted escape of the captured Texans as they were being marched from Mier to Mexico City. After an escape at Salado, Tamaulipas, on February 11, 1843, some 176 of the men were recaptured within about a week. A decree that all who participated in the break were to be executed was modified to an order to kill every tenth man. Col. Domingo Huerta was to be in charge of the decimation. The victims were chosen by lottery, each man drawing a bean from an earthen jar containing 176 beans, seventeen black beans being the tokens signifying death. Commissioned officers were ordered to draw first; then the enlisted men were called as their names appeared on the muster rolls. William A. A. (Bigfoot) Wallace, standing close to the scene of the drawing, decided that the black beans were the larger and fingered the tokens successfully to draw a white bean. Observers of the drawing later described the dignity, the firmness, the light temper, and general courage of the men who drew the beans of death. Some left messages for their families with their companions; a few had time to write letters home. The doomed men were unshackled from their companions, placed in a separate courtyard, and shot at dusk on March 25, 1843. The seventeen victims of the lottery were James Decatur Cocke, William Mosby Eastland, Patrick Mahan, James M. Ogden, James N. Torrey, Martin Carroll Wing,^qqv John L. Cash, Robert Holmes Dunham, Edward E. Este, Robert Harris, Thomas L. Jones, Christopher Roberts, William N. Rowan, James L. Shepherd, J. N. M. Thompson, James Turnbull, and Henry Walling. Shepherd survived the firing squad by pretending to be dead. The guards left him for dead in the courtyard, and he escaped in the night but was recaptured and shot. In 1848 the bodies were returned from Mexico to be buried at Monument Hill^qv, near La Grange, Fayette County.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: 

John Crittenden Duval, The Adventures of Big Foot Wallace, the Texas Ranger and Hunter (Macon, Georgia: Burke, 1870). Thomas J. Green, Journal of the Texian Expedition Against Mier (New York: Harper, 1845; rpt., Austin: Steck, 1935). Sam W. Haynes, Soldiers of Misfortune: The Somervell and Mier Expeditions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Harold Schoen, comp., Monuments Erected by the State of Texas to Commemorate the Centenary of Texas Independence (Austin: Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebrations, 1938). Houston Wade, Notes and Fragments of the Mier Expedition (La Grange, Texas: La Grange Journal, 1936).

House of John Andrew Jackson Costner, CSA 1832-1892

COHAN'S "THE PRICE OF SILENCE" & THE MAIN-STREAM MEDIA WHICH HAS LEARNED NOTHING SINCE 2006

1.0 out of 5 stars A BOOK THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED, April 19, 2014

By 

Hershel Parker

This review is of The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities (Hardcover)

In magazines, newspapers, and blogs there have already been many reviews of William D. Cohan's THE PRICE OF SILENCE, many of them laudatory, partly because of the way writers for the mainstream media were selected as recipients of advance review copies. Stuart Taylor, Jr., co-author with KC Johnson of the 2007 definitive book on the Duke-Durham scandal, UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT, comments now on the "amazing succession of puff-piece reviews in The Wall Street Journal, FT Magazine, the Daily News, Salon, the Economist, the Daily Beast, and The New York Times, whose reviewer (unlike the others cited above) at least knew enough to write that 'Cohan hasn't unearthed new evidence' and that '[t]here is still nothing credible to back up the account of an unreliable witness.'" William L. Anderson summarizes some early reviews: "This is a book Publisher's Weekly has declared to be: `Top-notch investigative journalism (that) defines this examination of "one of the most improbable legal sagas in American history." [Jane] Mayer declares [in the NEW YORKER]: `For the first time, Cohan gets many of the central characters to speak--and what they have to say is eye-opening.' Indeed, Cohan does get the `central characters to speak,' and they speak often throughout the book. Who are these `central characters'? They are Crystal Mangum and Michael Nifong. Ignoring that disturbing fact, the New York Times tells readers the book is `gripping,' while the Washington Post says it is `authoritative.' Yes, it is `authoritative' in the way that having O. J. Simpson be the chief storyteller of the murder of Nicole Simpson . . . . would be authoritative. The sources cannot be trusted to tell the truth, but Cohan dismisses the obvious and literally makes the accuracy of the narrative depend upon their words. And, hey, they have a story to tell, but it is not an account of what really happened."

As KC Johnson has pointed out, "Much of the book (hundreds of the more than 600 pages) consists of summaries of previously published remarks, news articles, op-ed columns, or blog posts. How Cohan frames this material is telling, but the repackaged summaries themselves contain nothing new." And what is new is not authoritative, particularly the many pages in which Cohan lets three people plead their cases--the doped-up lying stripper, now a murderess of a human being as well as a would-be murderer of the reputations of young lacrosse players, and the discredited Nifong and his lawyer, Ann Peterson. Yes, Bill Anderson, this is like listening for hours as O. J. Simpson explains why he flew to Chicago that night. KC Johnson's collaborator on UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT, Stuart Taylor, Jr., says, "The most striking thing about William D. Cohan's revisionist, guilt-implying new book on the Duke lacrosse rape fraud is what's not in it. The best-selling, highly successful author's 621-page The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities adds not a single piece of significant new evidence to that which convinced North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper and virtually all other serious analysts by mid-2007 that the lacrosse players were innocent of any sexual assault on anyone. Unless, that is, one sees as new evidence Cohan's own stunningly credulous interviews with three far-from-credible participants in the drama who themselves add no significant new evidence beyond their counterfactual personal opinions."

Peter Berkowitz points out that Cohan usually purports to be neutral, allowing his witnesses to speak at length: "Mostly, he [Cohan] lets characters and commentators speak for themselves, rarely explicitly interjecting his opinion or offering original analysis. However, his book strongly intimates that the until-now-untold second rush to judgment was directed against Nifong (a convicted liar) and Mangum (now a convicted killer) who, Cohan reports, had a history of bipolar disorder. In particular, Cohan gives Nifong free rein in page after page to justify his indefensible conduct. Cohan is occasionally snarky toward the falsely accused athletes, but oddly respectful of the disgraced prosecutor. He never challenges Nifong, though there is much to contest. The definitive account of this case has been Until Proven Innocent, the rigorous and courageous book by Stuart Taylor Jr. and Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center Professor KC Johnson. That remains true, emphatically so, after the publication of The Price of Silence. Thankfully for the historical record, Johnson is still setting the record straight: In his indispensable blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, he details the numerous untrue statements and fanciful conjectures Nifong makes in his conversations with Cohan. Most egregiously, Cohan leaves unchallenged Nifong's sinister insistence that although evidence was lacking of the crimes for which the three players were charged, `something happened' of a criminal nature in the bathroom of the lacrosse house on the evening of March 13, 2006. Cohan thereby lends the vague and entirely unsubstantiated accusation credence."

The negative reviews in newspapers and magazines are piling up now. In the Charlotte OBSERVER Joe Neff vigorously attacks the book: "William D. Cohan opts for an apology for Nifong and, by extension, prosecutors who hide evidence and lie to judges. The 653-page book mostly rehashes previous reporting. What is new is Nifong speaking for the first time about the case. Nifong makes remarkable claims that the author - clearly sympathetic, if not besotted - fails to challenge or test. Nifong claims the prosecutor who took over the case was "sandbagged" when the attorney general later declared the players innocent; Cohan could have proven that claim false had he tried to interview the prosecutor, garrulous and blunt-speaking Jim Coman, who was adamant about declaring the players innocent. Nifong claims he's pretty sure he never told told his campaign manager that the national headlines were millions of dollars of free advertisement. Cohan never contacted the campaign manager, the very accessible Jackie Brown. Nifong claims the State Bar's disciplinary committee chairman concluded he was guilty before Nifong ever testified. Cohan never tried to talk with Lane Williamson, the chairman. Nifong claimed the judge who jailed him for a day had told friends beforehand that he planned on convicting Nifong of contempt of court. Cohan made no attempt to interview Judge W. Osmond Smith. These would be pathetic mistakes for a daily newspaper story. For an author spending months or years on a book, it's a revealing choice to avoid interviews that contradict the revisionist narrative: that Nifong is the victim."

The more thoughtful reviews of William Cohan's THE PRICE OF SILENCE on Amazon have been unusually negative because so many people have remained well informed about the 2006 case in which Crystal Mangum, a Durham, North Carolina, doped-up female black stripper with a long history of false accusations, attempts at murder-by-vehicle, prostitution, and other activities, accused a varying number of Duke lacrosse players of raping, sodomizing, beating, and otherwise mistreating her. The stripper's lies were seized on by the Durham District Attorney, Michael Nifong, as a way of winning him the black vote in the upcoming election. He won the election at the cost of endangering the lives of the lacrosse players, especially the three he accused as being Mangum's attackers. For his behavior he was subsequently disbarred and (for a night) imprisoned. All this is well known, though a reader of Cohan's book is repeatedly pushed to believe that "something happened" to the stripper at the hands of the lacrosse players.

I want to focus on two words in the title of Dixon Steele's early Amazon review: "Absurd Insinuation," perfect terminology for some of Cohan's interpolations which push the reader to judge long passages of text. I have struggled to find the right words for other strategies Cohan uses. "Cruel innuendo" might be one. My 2nd Websters is so old that it does not contain the word snarky, although it explains that snark is from two words, snake and shark. Cohan at times is snarky, smirky. Sometimes he strews fairy dust of doubt when no doubt existed. Let me look at some examples.

158: There was "apparently no DNA evidence linking" James Van de Velde to a murder: no--no "apparently" about it: there was no such DNA evidence.
158 Michael Rubin "wrote that he suspected Van de Velde was a victim of campus politics." No "suspected" about it, if you read what Rubin said.
223: Cohan quotes Houston Baker's almost unbelievably vicious letter to Patricia Dowd, calling her "mother of a `farm animal,'" without any judgment on Baker at all. Then in the next paragraph he says that Kim Curtis "seemed to hold a grudge against the Duke lacrosse team that spring." Duke's overruling Curtis's grade pretty much destroys the idea that she merely "seemed" to hold a grudge.
376-377: Cohan quotes at extreme length what "Mangum's cousin, Jakki" told a Durham newspaper--much of obviously false, fantastically false. Yet he says over and over "Jakki said," "she said," before mentioning that "Jakki's opinion" was in the minority. A writer is not being fair and balanced when he gives such "opinion" so much space, particularly if he does not challenge it in any way.
379: In describing Philip Seligmann's attempt to get bail reduced for his son Reade, Cohan says that the senior Seligmann "was not above seeking some sympathy." Well, his son (who offered irrefutable exculpatory evidence) was in danger of being railroaded (even as "Nifonged" became, as Joe Neff says, a synonym for "railroaded") for a crime he did not commit--in danger of being locked up in prison for three decades. What could Cohan possibly have been thinking when he snarked at Philip Seligmann for not being above seeking some sympathy?
For Cohan, the great sin of Roy Cooper, the attorney general, was in trying to restore some justice to the accused lacrosse players by emphasizing that they were "innocent." On 510-513 Cohan repeatedly lets Nifong, a master of foul-mouthed religiosity (too foul for me to quote here), accuse Cooper of selling his soul to the devil and lets Nifong make many false accusations ("It's been reported to me that his coffers were enriched by tens of thousands of dollars by law firms in the Northeast," for example). Cohan quotes at length from the 2008 LAST DANCE FOR GRACE, putatively co-written by Vincent Clark and Mangum. His wording goes from quoting Mangum to making his own assertion. According to the wording on 514, "Roberts came into the bathroom" and helped Mangum finish fixing her clothes. So all of what Mangum says is true.
Starting on 517 Cohan recounts his jailhouse interview with Mangum, a self-described "people pleaser," (518) who "apparently" pleased Cohan by inventing new wooden splinters up her rectum, "wooden shards," in Cohan's words. News!
517: Mangum's murder of her boyfriend is only "alleged"; well, OK, only alleged in early November 2013.
531: As Nifong's misdeeds came to light he was subjected to torture as if he were a victim of the Inquisition: "Nifong was being spit-roasted." Not a word of sympathy with the lacrosse players who had been threatened with castration before imprisonment! No sympathy from their parents. Some of us remember the public appearance the Seligmanns made after Reade was declared innocent. These people suffered, Mr. Cohan.
548: Cohan says the lacrosse coach, Mike Pressler, who was pushed out of his job, settled with Duke but later sued for slander and libel because of John Burness's comments in violation of the the settlement; it would have been easy for Cohan to say there on 548 that Duke had to settle again because of Burness's loose talk (as Cohan mentions on 569 and 606).
562: Something almost unbelievably vile: "Not surprisingly, Evans's father made no mention of the evidence regarding the possibility that his son's DNA was on Mangum's fake fingernail."
563, Lane Williamson, who wanted Nifong disbarred, "was relentless." Nifong, of course, had not been relentless in his attacks on the innocent lacrosse players!
567: Nifong's sufferings went on and on, and he remembered: "Years later, Nifong reflected on what it was like for him to endure the state bar hearing."
567: When Richard Brodhead, the President of Duke University and Robert Steel, the chairman of the Duke board of trustees, announced Duke's settlement with Seligmann, Finnerty, and Evans, they did not specify "the amount that Duke forked over to the three men." "Forked over"? After what the lacrosse players had suffered at the words of Brodhead and others at Duke? After the bad advice Duke had given them and the failure of support?
569: Here Cohan declares that one of the Seligmanns' lawyers "apparently did not get paid"--a slur that has been refuted.
574: In part of the long quotation from Ann Peterson, a lawyer for Nifong, Cohan lets her say, unchallenged, that it was the wealth of the lacrosse players' families that got them off (when they should have gone to jail?). He quotes her: "They just have more resources. They had more resources, in this case, to hire experts. They had more resources to use the media. . . . There was absolutely no question that wealth played a role in this case." But they were innocent. If the families had not had money, they might have gone to jail for three decades. And the media? Who played to the media more than the righteous DA Nifong, speaking prejudicially? Quoting Ann Peterson at such length without constantly correcting her is despicable.
575: The lacrosse players and their families had not suffered, but Nifong suffers. Peterson "said she believes Nifong still has not recovered from the case."
576: It was all so unfair, Nifong says: "I was the only person incarcerated for any length of time in the Duke Lacrosse case. Nobody else was incarcerated at all."
579. Poor Nifong: "He said the outcome of the Duke lacrosse scandal triggered in him his own post-traumatic stress reaction."
581: Seligmann, Finnerty, and Evans could have been good sports and hired incompetent lawyers for a fairly moderate fee, if they had been able to find real bottom-crawling shysters. Ah, but they did not. All reprehensibly (what else could you expect of them?) they "hired high-priced attorneys to represent them in civil suits." Seligmann was worse than the others: he "hired the high-profile New York City attorney Barry Scheck"!
582: Cohan quotes Barry Saunders, columnist for the local NEWS & OBSERVER: "`Why, I think one of them [the accused] even spent an hour in custody---not in jail, but waiting for a magistrate to finish his lunch so daddykins could post bail.'"
589: Cohan quotes vileness from Saunders about "three chumps' lack of values"--these chumps being three nonindicted players who were suing Duke and Durham. Then, again almost unbelievably, Cohan starts a paragraph this way: "Not to be outdone, another group of thirty-eight nonindicted Duke lacrosse players filed their own lawsuit." They did it only "not to be outdone"!
590: Attorneys for the nonindicted players "commandeered the National Press Club" to announce their lawsuit. They stormed in with armed thugs and commandeered it! And one of the fathers, Steven Henkelman spoke "about the anguish his son faced." In fact, I recall Henkelman's making one of the most eloquent public addresses I ever heard. Cohan ends the paragraph by quoting Nifong on this lawsuit: "`That just shows you why you don't negotiate with terrorists.'"

On the blog LieStoppers LTC8K6 commented: He [Cohan] wrote the book the way it is because he is angry that he couldn't document the story he wanted to tell. He wanted the story in the title, but it just isn't there. Anyone who didn't cooperate with him is therefore made to look bad in the book. He couldn't find the story he promised to the publisher, so he just rehashed old stuff with a Mangum/Nifong slant to make it "juicy", and blamed the lack of a story on the defendants." The full title, I should say, is THE PRICE OF SILENCE: THE DUKE LACROSSE SCANDAL, THE POWER OF THE ELITE, AND THE CORRUPTION OF OUR GREAT UNIVERSITIES.

As someone who knows something about publishing I find this comment on LieStoppers very plausible. This would account for the vast amount of padding in the book as well as Cohan's frustration at not getting all the doors wide open to him, as he expected, so that he had to content himself with Nifong, Peterson, and Mangum , and therefore rewarded them with page after page of self-justifying lies, and gave great space to Steel, the former chairman of the board of Trustees, for his maunderings (on Brodhead: "Dick is a talker . . . Dick wants to pontificate. He's an English professor"). It is as if Cohan is saying, "Who are the lacrosse players not to agree to talk to ME?" Cohan got the contract expecting unimpeded access or even welcoming arms and found that people were suspicious of him and did not want to play. Even Brodhead would not play with him, and asked, "`Why do you have to write this book?'" . Yes, this sounds right. There might possibly have been an excuse for pitching the book to Scribners but there was no excuse for writing it after it turned out that there was nothing new (or nothing new and honorable) to be said.

The damage does not stop with the book. Cohan has embarked on a media blitz in which he repeatedly implies that "something happened" in the bathroom where Crystal Mangum declared that she was raped and otherwise brutalized. This insidious, or at time blatant, distortion of the established facts in the case is muddying the waters so foully that one almost despairs of truth ever prevailing. And Cohan is inflicting new pain on all the victims of the case, the accused and the non-indicted lacrosse players and their families and their admirable coach, Michael Pressler, and his family. It seems that the mainstream media learned nothing from its rush to judgment in 2006.

Columbus, Mississippi, in 1822

Columbus was a small place when my eyes first beheld it in 1822. It contained 

about 150 inhabitants. Main Street presented quite a different appearance 
from the present; only a few scattering houses. On the south 
side at the west end, there was a large house composed of 
four rooms in each story, with a cross passage through the 
center each direction; this stood on the point of the hill. It 
was occupied by the venerable Judge Cocke, who called it 
"the big pile of logs."

This is where Grandma Sims died in 1820 and is the site of the 

present Tennessee Williams Welcome Center.

A SHAMEFUL BOOK ON THE DUKE LACROSSE CASE

            In magazines, newspapers, and blogs there have already been many reviews of William D. Cohan’s THE PRICE OF SILENCE, many of them puff pieces, as Stuart Taylor, Jr., says.  So much has happened over the weekend that I am revising my post on Amazon and will repost it here.