Within a Month! The Bringing Down of Bobby Ray Inman

This March 1994 political commentary essay presents Murray N. Rothbard’s polemical explanation of Bobby Ray Inman’s rapid collapse as Bill Clinton’s nominee for secretary of defense. Its thesis is that Inman was not merely “thin-skinned” or psychologically unstable, as the press implied, but was driven out by a coordinated media-political campaign whose deeper roots lay in intelligence factionalism, neoconservative influence, and conflict over Israel’s access to U.S. intelligence.

Rothbard opens by stressing the near-unanimous acclaim that greeted Inman’s nomination, making the speed of his fall the essay’s central puzzle.

To pundits, media people, politicians, and leading “well-informed sources” inside the Beltway, Bobby Ray Inman could walk on water.

The essay then turns sharply against what Rothbard sees as the press’s evasive psychologizing. He argues that journalists transformed a political struggle into a story about temperament, while neglecting both the accusations against Inman and Inman’s own account of why particular figures, especially William Safire, were hostile to him.

Amidst all the stress on Bobby Ray's supposedly fragile psyche, it was overlooked that very little space was devoted to the content of the charges that Safire and the others were leveling against Bobby Ray; and virtually no space to Bobby Ray's explanation of the hostility that Safire and the others had long harbored against him, and which led to their anti-Inman campaign.

Rothbard’s structural move is to replace personality with power. He reviews the pending controversies—International Signal and Control, Tracor, and “Nannygate”—but treats them less as proof of guilt than as ammunition in a campaign. The essay’s real target becomes “Big Media,” whose ability to define plausibility and ridicule conspiracy claims Rothbard regards as itself a political force.

This is not to say that Inman’s conspiracy charge is proven. What we need to find out the truth is an all out, tough congressional investigation, armed with subpoena power, to get to the bottom of the entire mess.

The second half supplies the alleged backstory: Inman’s 1981 move to restrict Israel’s access to U.S. satellite photographs after the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Rothbard casts this as the origin of Safire’s vendetta and embeds it in a broader map of CIA factions: hard-line Cold Warriors and pro-Israel operatives versus more establishment “moderates” such as Inman. His explanation of the cross-ideological press hostility is bluntly ideological.

The answer is that they all have one important thing in common, one tie that binds. They are all ardent Zionists, and the source of the hostility to Inman at not being sufficiently pro-Israel now makes sense in underpinning the vendetta when Inman reluctantly agreed to Clinton’s and Talbott’s importuning to return in triumph to Washington.

The conclusion laments that Inman withdrew rather than forcing public exposure of these networks. Rothbard’s relevance here lies in his characteristic anti-establishment method: he reads a Washington personnel crisis as evidence of hidden alliances among media, intelligence, party politics, and foreign-policy lobbies.

But it would have been far healthier for America, and for Americans’ knowledge of the political forces at work in this country, if Bobby Ray had stood fast, and had forced a knock-down drag-out confrontation, in the course of which much of the truth might have come to the surface.

The essay is thus less a defense of Inman’s record than an attack on the mechanisms by which reputations are made and destroyed in Washington. Rothbard’s core conceptual move is to insist that “conspiracy” can name ordinary elite coordination, not fantasy, and that media narratives about irrationality often conceal struggles over policy, access, and power.