Top 10 smear campaigns
As details emerge of the smear campaign against Derek Walcott for which Ruth Padel was forced to resign as Oxford University Professor of Poetry, a look at the ten biggest, most salacious and most outrageous smear campaigns.
1- The smear emails
Mad Dog, McPoison… When Damian McBride’s numerous nicknames hit the headlines in April they testified to an illustrious career built on smear.
So when the PM’s former strategy advisor was forced to resign over email conversations floating vicious smear campaigns against Tory MPs, those who knew him were not exactly surprised.
Derek Draper, to whom the emails were sent, claimed it was a high price to pay for a “silly email”, but the “poetic licence” (McBride's words, not mine) used to fashion allegations against Cameron and Osborne took an unintended flight into tragi-comedy when McBride was forced to resign, mired in his own grime.
2 - The Hillary lesbian smear
The anonymous e-mails and letters that dropped into inboxes and through front doors during the primary season of the 2008 US presidential elections take some beating.
One claimed that Hillary Clinton was having a lesbian affair with Huma Abedin, her beautiful aide. A blogger claiming to support John McCain said that Rudy Giuliani's wife supported the killing of “innocent puppies”. And all this within the state of South Carolina alone… 3 - Obama the Muslim
Obama’s Kenyan older half-brother, Malik, did him no favours when he told Israel Army Radio in an interview that, if elected, his brother would be a good president for the Jewish people “despite his Muslim background”.
Conservative websites, and blogs supporting Hillary Clinton, spread the news that “Obama’s brother outs him as a liar and a one-time Muslim” and distributed a picture of the brothers in traditional “Muslim” dress.
Obama's campaign was forced to launch a website, www.fightthesmears.com that continues to, er, do what it says on the tin.
4 - The Nadar/GM smear
After Ralph Nader wrote a book about auto safety, General Motors, he says, hired private investigators to snoop around in his personal affairs, even hiring beautiful girls to lure him into compromising situations.
After five years of public feuding before television cameras, congressional committees and the courts, the company agreed, in 1970, to pay Nader $425,000 in an out of court settlement.
Times Archive, 1971: Nader's raiders
5 - The Stab-in-the-back legend
The Stab-in-the-back legend – that’s the name given to a popular re-writing of history in Germany in the period after World War I and before World War II and the smear with the most serious consequences in modern history.
The trend attributed Germany's defeat in the war not to military weakness, but to the failure of specific groups to respond to its "patriotic calling" at the most crucial of times, particularly by Jews, Socialists and Bolsheviks.
It proved a vital ingredient in the Nazi Party's mobilisation of support, and its eventual reign of terror.
Times Archive, 1933: Germany's 'Day of Mourning' 6- The Arkansas Project
In December 1993, reclusive multimillionaire Richard Mellon Scaife began subsidizing The American Spectator magazine's efforts to unearth damaging information about President Clinton.
By the time his grants ended in 1997, Mr. Scaife had given $2.4 million, $1.8 million specifically earmarked for obtaining information about Bill and Hillary during their years in Arkansas, or, as it came to be known, ''The Arkansas Project”.
7- Watergate
It was just a petty burglary at a Washington office complex, but it unravelled into perhaps the biggest political scandal in history, and the unearthing of its most famous smear campaign.
By the time President Nixon was forced to resign two years later in 1973, the full extent of Watergate was known to the world - a partisan smear campaign, planned in the inner sanctum of the Nixon administration, using the tools and resources of government.
Times Archive: Watergate and the fall of Nixon 8- Treasongate
When the CIA sent Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat, to Niger in 2002, to investigate reported attempts by Iraq to buy uranium there, he returned empty-handed, having been unable to substantiate the reports.
Undeterred, President Bush used them in his State of the Union speech, prompting Mr Wilson to write a angry response in the New York Times. A week later, his wife was outed as a CIA employee by a conservative columnist.
The leak investigation that followed ended in the conviction of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief aide to then-Vice-President Dick Cheney and one of the highest-ranking White House officials ever to stand criminal trial. His conviction was later commuted by President Bush.
9 - The 'Dusky Sally' smear
The presidential election of 1800, in which Thomas Jefferson unseated John Adams, still ranks as one of the nastiest in America’s history.
According to the biography of John Adams by historian David McCullough, Jefferson was the target of a "whispering campaign ... to the effect that all Southern slave masters were known to cohabit with slave women and that the Sage of Monticello was no exception."
The allegation was probably true, by the way, but the tactics were sneaky.
Times Archive, 1800: Mr Jefferson elected President 10 - The Clearstream affair
“Watergate à la française”, or the Clearstream affair, involved a fake list of public figures, anonymously leaked to a French judge in 2004, who allegedly held accounts at a Luxembourg-based clearing house in 1991 and were made to look as if they had received illicit kickbacks from arms sales.
Among the names on the list was Nicolas Sarkozy, now president.
The judicial investigation into the affair has centred around Dominique de Villepin, who at the time was Sarkozy's rival for the succession to Mr Chirac.
Mr Sarkozy, himself a civil plaintiff in the case, has reportedly promised to "hang" the culprit "on a butcher's hook."
