Bill Berkowitz
February 6, 2005

Mangled History

Kate Coleman and Encounter Books' not so secret take down of Judi Bari, Earth First!, and the 'dead-enders' of the environmental movement

Kate Coleman expects her book on Judi Bari and Earth First! to be taken seriously. After all, she has a grand story to tell about some of the leading figures in Northern California's environmental wars that have pitted hard-scrabble, politically savvy and under-funded environmental activists against the Goliath's of the timber industry. But too many things in the book go wrong: she plays way too fast and loose with the facts -- and is accused of hundreds of errors, distortions and misstatement; her tone is mean-spirited and derogatory, showing little empathy or respect for the real life characters in her story; and, the book appears to be more about advancing the publisher's anti-environmental agenda than about the life of Judi Bari and the activities of Earth First!

Granted, an author doesn't always have the luxury of choosing her publisher, and in this case, Encounter Books (website), the San Francisco-based outfit headed by Peter Collier, chose Kate Coleman. Collier, a former lefty who turned to the right in the mid 1980s along with his more ubiquitous longtime writing partner David Horowitz, doesn't do things haphazardly. He must have had a pretty good idea of what he was going to get when he signed Coleman on.

In the end, The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Car Bomb, the Fight for the Redwoods, and the End of Earth First! published earlier this year by Encounter Books, tends to reveal more about Kate Coleman than about Judi Bari, Earth First!, the logging industry or the environmental movement.

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On May 24, 1990, Judi Bari, a longtime labor and environmental activist, was nearly killed when a pipe bomb exploded in her Subaru station wagon while she and fellow Earth First! activist, Darryl Cherney, were traveling through Oakland, California. Bari, who was seriously injured, and Cherney, who was also hurt, were taken to Oakland's Highland Hospital.

There the two were questioned and arrested by the Oakland Police Department (OPD). The OPD theorized that Bari and Cherney had unintentionally bombed themselves while transporting the bomb to sabotage power lines. Later, the Alameda County district attorney would drop charges against the pair for lack of evidence.

Judi Bari died of cancer in 1997.

In 2002, the FBI and the Oakland Police Department were found liable for violating the constitutional rights of Bari and Cherney. Last year a settlement was reached which awarded $4 million to be divided, after considerable legal fees, between Bari's estate and Cherney.

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Coleman's publisher, Encounter Books, run by Peter Collier, has a major league conservative political agenda. The San Francisco-based outfit is virtually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Milwaukee, Wisconsin based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a right wing foundation supporting the work of conservative think tanks, policy centers and media outlets. According to Media Transparency, a website tracking "The Money Behind Conservative Media," between 1998 and 2002, the publisher received more than $4.5 million from Bradley with most of the grants earmarked "to assist the in the creation of" and "support [for] an education book project".

Encounter has published a number of books attacking liberals -- The Hillary Trap and The World According to Gore by Debra Saunders -- and leftists -- The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by both Collier and Horowitz, and Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left by Ronald Radosh.

Collier is a longtime colleague of Horowitz, who currently heads up the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture (website), an organization that since 1989 has received more than $13 million in right wing foundation money. As lefties, they co-edited Ramparts magazine in the sixties. Later, they collaborated on several biographies of famous American families, including The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty, The Kennedys: An American Drama, and The Fords: An American Epic and their 1989 book, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties.

In the 1980s, Collier and Horowitz abandoned the left for far more lucrative careers on the right. In a dramatic ideological reversal, they came out as Reagan Republicans in a 1985 Washington Post article called "Lefties for Reagan".

Coleman considers herself on the left side of the political spectrum. She recently told the San Francisco Chronicle's Edward Guthman that she supported affirmative action and backed John Kerry. According to Coleman, Collier approached her to write the Bari biography. She denied, however, that he tried to influence how she would tell the story. She does have a history, however, of writing articles "exposing" the failings and foolishness of the left. In 1978, she wrote a lengthy expose of the Black Panther Party and its leader, Huey Newton in New Times. Her writings including "The Last Panther," (July 1, 1997) and "The Panthers for Real" (June 23, 2003), have appeared on Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine website (website), and have been cited regularly by Horowitz. Her work has also been published in Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, and Mother Jones.

Shortly after the book was released, Bari's ex-husband, Mike Sweeney, set up a website, ColemanHoax.com, which lists 351 errors and falsehoods contained in the 232-page book. Click here for the entire list; also see "Coleman's top 26 lies,"; and Sweeney's "Instant Proof" feature where "With a click of the mouse," you can "see for yourself if Coleman's statements are true." Unfortunately, like the book, Sweeney's Web site doesn't spare the vitriol.

In early January, Friends of Judi Bari (FOJB) (website) was established "to defend Judi and her legacy from attacks by Big Timber, the FBI, the right-wing and their paid character assassins."

In Coleman's conversation with the Guthman, she takes little responsibility for the errors claiming that they will be corrected in subsequent editions. In the Chronicle story, headlined "Is the biographer of activist Judi Bari a tool of the right -- or just a skeptical liberal?," Coleman blamed the errors on being rushed to deadline; on fact checkers asleep at the wheel; and on Bari's cronies for denying her personal interviews and access: "I hold the Bari-ites and some of Bari's family responsible for censorship, for conspiring to keep certain biographical facts from me, then to turn around and criticize me exactly for not coming up with the very facts that they were responsible for withholding." (If only half of the errors/distortions/lies are corrected, it will still be a monumental task for Coleman, requiring her to practically rewrite the entire text.)

"In the end" writes columnist Chris Coursey of The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, CA), "Coleman's book is ripe for comparison with the original investigation of the car bombing. The cops focused on Bari and...Cherney, as suspects in the bombing, then dropped the case when the facts didn't fit their theory. Coleman focuses on Sweeney, then concludes, "there was never any evidence against Sweeney that would pass muster in any court of law" ("Another Bari investigation falls short").

Some of Coleman's public appearances have turned into mini episodes of Crossfire, with Bari's comrades and Coleman's supporters locking horns. Responding to Guthman's questions about criticism from pro-Bari folks, Coleman said: "They don't know whom they are talking to. They're furious about (my) smearing Our Lady of the Forest -- Judi. And they're furious 'cause I said 'The End of Earth First' in the subtitle." She added, "They're not talking ideas. They have nothing that they're doing that's building a movement. These are dead-enders. The only way they have a forum is to attack me."

("Dead-enders" is a term that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used to describe the insurgents during the early days of the occupation of Iraq.)

The book has stirred up a predictable hornet's nest. As of early February, the hornets were furiously buzzing around at the Web site of Amazon Books, where the 15 reviewers were nearly evenly split -- some think the book is a "smear job" that is "fraught with errors." Others argue that the book "offers insight into both Bari's followers as well as her personal life," and is "a rich and complete evaluation" of her life and times. Overall, the book earns three of five stars from reviewers.

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I never knew Judi Bari. I met her once when she and her lawyer visited the DataCenter -- an Oakland-based research center I worked at for 25 years -- and gave a brief talk to the staff over lunch.

I don't know Kate Coleman. I met her once a few years ago during a walking tour of places related to the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley.

And, I don't know much about Larry Lee, the man to whom Coleman dedicates the book. Lee was a highly respected newsman, reporter and radio pioneer and driving force behind the development of community radio.

What would Larry Lee say about this book?

If you are inclined to read Coleman's book be forewarned, and be sure to use the citations at ColemanHoax.com as a companion reader to better enable you to discern fact from fiction.

Susan Faludi, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Backlash" and "Stiffed" is also writing a book about Judi Bari, which will be released next year. Hopefully, Faludi will do a better job of getting the story straight. Given Encounter Books' anti-progressive and anti-environmental mission and record, one can't help but wonder whether journalistic standards were pushed aside in the rush to publish a pre-emptive strike against Faludi's work.