Whose Words Are These?

By Marc Fisher
Thursday, September 28, 2006

O n my desk right now, I have a stack of papers representing a whole bunch of people's memories of words George Allen supposedly once said.

There are news stories, familiar to most Virginians by now, reporting the allegation by the senator's former football teammate, Ken Shelton, a radiologist in North Carolina, that Allen routinely used an ugly racial slur and stuffed a severed deer head into a black family's mailbox back in the 1970s.

And there are e-mails, blog entries and notes from phone conversations with people who say they heard Allen use the "N-word" not only in his college days, but as late as 2003, too. Some of these stories have names attached to them; some don't.

Some seem of dubious validity, such as anonymous Internet postings from people who claim to have had encounters with the senator in which he randomly blurted slurs. Others seem more credible at first -- former Republican campaign consultant Doug Thompson says he heard Allen use the term at a cocktail party in 1984 and again at a fundraiser in 1991. But Thompson runs a Web site with a tabloid sensibility and a checkered record for accuracy.

Still other people -- a University of Virginia political scientist, an anthropologist in Alabama, a carpenter in Georgia, a Virginia housewife -- have risked their good reputations by going public with their accounts of Allen's use of the epithet.

The drip, drip of allegations over the past week -- combined with previous acknowledgments that the senator displayed a Confederate flag and a noose (a noose ) in his home and office -- has convinced many Virginians that George Allen is a racist.

Now turn it around: If you're Allen, you face an endless stream of free-floating accusations, and all you can do is say no, that never happened, and then gin up acquaintances to say this is not George Allen, he would never say such things.

How should a conscientious voter decide what's true?

"I'd just ask people to look at the facts," said Allen's campaign manager, Dick Wadhams. "We've had one person go on the record, and not one of [Shelton's] teammates has come forward to back him up. It's an interesting new standard in journalism: If somebody called you and said, 'I want to make a charge against Jim Webb,' should that person automatically be afforded the assumption of truth?"

I asked Wadhams whether the racial slur story would be getting less play in the media if voters and reporters had not known about the flag and the noose, or if Allen's "macaca" moment hadn't been caught on tape.

"No, I don't think so," Wadhams said, arguing that a double standard is at work here, a readiness to repeat any ugly charge against Allen, with no such eagerness to inspect the life of his Democratic opponent.

Wadhams says he'll find a way out of this blogswarm of allegations, an Internet version of the media feeding frenzy that was set off by each new accusation in the various Clinton-era sex scandals. "We're going to win this thing despite the onslaught," he said.

But questions about Allen's racial attitudes won't go away until voters figure out just what to believe, just who Allen really is. Partisans on both sides think they already know: On my blog's comment boards, dozens of people contend that the N-word was "in the air" in the 1970s and that if Allen used the slur in conversation, that distinguished him hardly at all. At least as many people argue that the word has always been powerfully ugly and that folks who were brought up right would never have used it, no matter what was "in the air."

For those who don't have a horse in this race, the imperative is to determine a fact: George Allen either did or didn't make routine, casual and bigoted use of the slur.

I asked several historians how they judge stories told by people decades after events took place.

"It's an art," said Robert Dallek, a biographer of Lyndon Johnson who has just completed "Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power." "You have to make judgments about what seems to be closest to the truth. As a historian, I want to get as much written material as I can. I have 20,000 pages of Kissinger's phone transcripts. With interviews, it's much harder. You have to be very skeptical."

So how do you know who is telling the truth?

Dallek suggested looking at: "Who is speaking? What are their motives? And how many witnesses can you bring to bear? You see what the balance is. Thirty years later, memories are hazy. But you do get some good anecdotes, and then you have to decide."

When conflicting accounts prohibit a definitive finding, the historian -- and the voter -- must go with what adds up, what feels right. "It's what resonates with what you know," Dallek said.

What we know: George Allen posed for his high school yearbook photo -- in California -- wearing a Confederate flag pin. He kept a Confederate flag in his living room. He displayed a noose in his law office.

Now he stands accused of using racial slurs. You can feel the resonance across all of Virginia.

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