.........In 1996, a new cable-news channel asked Coulter to audition for a spot as a commentator. She appeared on MSNBC its first day and quickly became one of its most loved and hated contributors. A few months later, she began writing for Human Events, among the oldest conservative publications in the country. (Coulter jokes in How to Talk to a Liberal that the journal "had to break a half-century 'no girls' rule to hire me.") In 1998, John Kennedy Jr. asked her to write a regular column for George.
Washington wasn't quite sure what to make of the spindle-shanked blond. "When I first met her," says a fellow conservative, "she was walking around with a black miniskirt and a mink stole, making out with Bob Guccione Jr. in the stairwell." (Coulter dated publisher Guccione, son of the porn mogul, for six months. She says the stairwell story "could be" true, although "I make out in public less often now that I'm publicly recognizable." As for living on chardonnay and cigarettes, Coulter says that's "definitely true.") Except for a brief stint in Missouri, where she clerked for a federal judge, Coulter has never lived in a so-called red state; in fact she obliterates the overcooked red-blue distinction. Although beloved in Bush country, Coulter lives in a New York City apartment, loves expensive Manhattan restaurants, chews Nicorette in church and hardly ever misses the drag queens' Halloween parade in Greenwich Village.
She likes to tell people, "I get up at noon and work in my underwear," but it's not actually true—Coulter is rarely up before 1.
MSNBC found Coulter "blunt, rude and just completely over the top," says Stephen Lewis, a former MSNBC producer involved in Coulter's hiring—and firing. The network dismissed her at least twice: first in February 1997, after she insulted the late Pamela Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to France, even as the network was covering her somber memorial service. Coulter said Harriman was one of those women who "used men to work their way up" and suggested "Sharon Stone or Madonna" as her replacement. Even so, the network missed Coulter's jousting and quickly rehired her.
Eight months later, Coulter's relationship with MSNBC ended permanently after she tangled with a disabled Vietnam veteran on the air. Robert Muller, co-founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, asserted that "in 90% of the cases that U.S. soldiers got blown up [in Vietnam]—Ann, are you listening?—they were our own mines." (Muller was misquoting a 1969 Pentagon report that found that 90% of the components used in enemy mines came from U.S. duds and refuse.) Coulter, who found Muller's statement laughable, averted her eyes and responded sarcastically: "No wonder you guys lost." It became an infamous—and oft-misreported—Coulter moment. The Washington Post and others turned the line into a more personal attack: "People like you caused us to lose that war."
But her troubles with MSNBC only freed her to appear on CNN and Fox News Channel, whose producers were often calling. In 1998, Coulter was one of the first pundits to argue forcefully that Clinton should be impeached; she helped lead the charge by writing High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, which became a best seller. When reporters asked David Schippers, the House Judiciary Committee's chief investigator, for a "road map" to the impeachment inquiry, he told them, "Read Ann Coulter's book."
After Coulter helped get the President impeached, one might have expected her to follow fellow anti-Clinton machinators—Linda Tripp and her friend Lucianne Goldberg come to mind—into obscurity. But Coulter's second book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, an assault on the media, spent eight weeks at the top of the Times best-seller list and rekindled the debate on whether reporters show a liberal bias. Slander was followed in 2003 by Treason, and by then Coulter had inspired an industry of debunkers, people who scour her every utterance for mistakes large and small. Entire websites were devoted to this purpose.
When I asked Coulter about her mistakes, she responded by e-mail: "I think I can save you some time ... The one error liberals have produced is that I was wrong when I said the NYT didn't mention Dale Earnhardt's death on the front page the day after his death. There have been novels and Broadway plays written about Ann Coulter's one mistake, which was pretty minor IMHO [in my humble opinion]—the Times article DID begin: 'His death brought a silence to the Wal-Mart.'" Actually, it didn't. The article began, "Stock car racing's greatest current star and one of its most popular and celebrated figures, Dale Earnhardt, crashed and was killed today ..." The article doesn't mention Wal-Mart, although a subsequent piece did.
Coulter has a reputation for carelessness with facts, and if you Google the words "Ann Coulter lies," you will drown in results. But I didn't find many outright Coulter errors. One of the most popular alleged mistakes pinging around the Web is from her appearance on Canadian TV news in January, when Coulter asserted that "Canada sent troops to Vietnam." Interviewer Bob McKeown said she was wrong.
"Indochina?" Coulter tried. McKeown said no. Finally, Coulter said haltingly, "I'll get back to you." "Coulter never got back to us," McKeown triumphantly noted, "but for the record, like Iraq, Canada sent no troops to Vietnam." What he didn't mention was that Canada did send noncombat troops to Indochina in the 1950s and again to Vietnam in 1972.
To be sure, Coulter's historical efforts can be highly amateurish.
Her writings on the Civil War—she calls Confederate soldiers "a romantic army of legend"—could only be penned by a (Northern) dilettante. And although she has admiringly cited the work of cold war historian Ronald Radosh, he says she misinterpreted that period in Treason. "There were Soviet spies in postwar America," he says.
"But McCarthy was really a nutcase ... She's like the McCarthy-era journalists in a way. She's just repeating what they said, that the only patriotic Americans are on the right." Radosh, a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, also says Coulter has exaggerated his own troubles as a conservative in academia. "She called me a victim of the left and the academy. That's partially true, but I've had plenty of jobs in academia." Coulter responded that Radosh had complained to reporters in the past about being blacklisted. She also called him "a chickens___."
One consequence of Coulter's feline aggression is that she wins not only enemies (including one who hired a private investigator to look into her past) but creepily devoted fans. She has had discussions with the FBI about her stalkers, one of whom sent flowers every day for six months. Coulter is terrified her address will become public, and she sometimes hides behind a surgical mask when she flies. Ever since two men threw pies at her at the University of Arizona last year, she has traveled with a bodyguard, a bourbon-drinking ex-cop who says, quite believably, that he can kill with his bare hands.
Even so, Coulter told me her most persistent stalker "is the one who will kill me someday."
Meanwhile, she is a single woman in her 40s who has been engaged at least three times--"I don't know, something like that"—but never married. Instead she spends time with a large group of devoted friends, among them a restaurant critic, a children's-book author, an ex-supporter of Lyndon LaRouche's, a liberal P.R. agent, an actress and myriad bankers. She sees her friends for long dinners with lots of laughter and Ann Coulter stories. One friend has dubbed her "the blond-tressed fascist spellbinder."
Although it drives Coulter crazy, even friends sometimes say her public and private personas differ. Kent Brownridge, 63, general manager of Wenner Media and a longtime Democrat who used to work for George McGovern, says, "You couldn't find a nicer friend" than Coulter. But, he adds, "I think she has a professional point of view or a shtick or whatever ... Ann has perfected a thing she does on TV because she is outrageous and funny. That's her business, public commentator."
But I'm not sure the public and private Anns are so different. On TV or in person, you can trust that Coulter will speak from her heart.
The officialdom of punditry, so full of phonies and dullards, would suffer without her humor and fire. Which is not to say you don't want to shut her up occasionally. Not long ago, I went to church with Coulter—Redeemer Presbyterian, an evangelical congregation in Manhattan. The actor Ron Silver had also tagged along—Coulter brings lots of people to church, including, at one time, an ex who is Muslim. Pastor Timothy Keller spoke of the importance of allowing one's heart to be "melted by the sense of God's grace because of what he did on the cross for you." After he finished, I asked Coulter whether she had managed to convert her Muslim boyfriend. "No," she answered, her heart apparently not melted: "I was just happy he wasn't killing anyone." With that, she threw her head back and laughed. ******
