Read Online We're with Nobody by Alan Huffman - Free Book Online Page B

Spartacus led a cinematic uprising against the Roman Empire (“They trained him to kill for their pleasure . . . but they trained him a little too well!” gushed Universal Pictures), and the navy of Mark Antony and Elizabeth Taylor went down in defeat in the Battle of Actium. With so much material to work with, it’s not surprising that the debut of opposition research was among the era’s milestones.
    Of course, it wasn’t called oppo at the time, but in the first century B.C. , Marcus Tullius Cicero, then the Roman consul, famously documented a plot by one Lucius Sergius Catilina (commonly referred to as Catiline) to murder several senators and overthrow the government. In what would have been the executive summary of his research report Cicero proclaimed, “How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience? . . . You do nothing, you plan nothing, you think of nothing which I not only do not hear, but which I do not see and know every particular of.” In other words, “Catiline is a scoundrel! It’s been documented!”
    Cicero charged that Catiline had established an armed rebel camp, that during a secret meeting he and his cohorts had formalized their plot, that two Roman knights had been employed to slay Cicero in his sleep and—to ensure that the story ran above the fold—that Catiline had murdered his wife to make room for another woman while engaging in an act so despicable that Cicero refused to even speak of it. Upon announcing the last detail, Cicero no doubt paused—meaningfully. Everyone was dying to know! Cicero may have been referring to allegations that Catiline had had sex with a vestal virgin, who was said to be the half sister of Cicero’s wife, and may have married his own daughter.
    Most of what Cicero revealed appears to have been factual, with the possible exception of his claim that Catiline sought to “destroy the whole world with fire and slaughter,” which would be pretty tough to document.
    Public disclosure of the damning details had the desired effect. When Catiline took his seat in the senate, other senators got up and moved, leaving him a solitary figure on his bench. Emboldened, Cicero called for his execution. In what was essentially history’s first documented attack ad, which ran live, Cicero asked, “For what is there, O Catiline, that you can still expect, if night is not able to veil your nefarious meetings in the darkness, and if private houses cannot conceal the voice of your conspiracy within their walls—if everything is seen and displayed?” Perhaps it wasn’t catchy, but people caught his drift. Today, “O Catiline” would be the opposition’s mantra.
    Catiline attempted to respond, but his fellow senators shouted him down, labeling him a traitor. He scurried from the chamber, throwing out verbal threats, as often happens when there’s no meaningful rebuttal. In the end he fled north, where he was killed by Roman troops. As a result of Cicero’s later attacks, Mark Antony had his hands chopped off and displayed them in a smartly designed exhibit in the forum.
    Although it would be centuries before it really hit its mainstream stride, oppo was here to stay. When scandal-mongering pamphlet wars between England’s Whig and Tory parties broke out in the eighteenth century, freelance writers such as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, whose only alternative was to wait tables, were only too happy to stoke the public’s political bloodlust with the necessary diatribes (under assumed names). Soon Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin got similar gigs in the increasingly raucous political environment of the American colonies.
    In the 1800 presidential race of the fledgling United States, incumbent John Adams found out just how vicious oppo could be when his opponent, Thomas Jefferson, accused him of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force