by Harry Browne

September 20, 2002        

Another series of accusations has come from George Phillies, who wrote an entire book to condemn me, publishing his book on the Internet.

I suppose I should be flattered that someone has taken the trouble to write a whole book about me — no matter how uncomplimentary the book is. However, I can't seem to work up any gratitude over it.

The book is 20 chapters long, and I've read only two of them. After six years of campaigning, I have to focus on rebuilding my life. I simply don't have the time to deal with one more person who wants to make a name for himself by climbing on my back. So I won't write a refutation of the many charges Mr. Phillies has made.

From the little I've seen of the book, it appears to be a rehashing of the same rumors and allegations made by Jacob Hornberger, Liberty Magazine, the Tompkins campaign, and others.

Like the others, George Phillies has made the mistake of creating allegations that could easily be verified — and thus refuted. For example, in chapter 19, Phillies claims that a month before the 2000 election, I quit campaigning. He says:

Browne's surrender was a surrender with few precedents in American history. Even Bob Dole, facing an insurmountable Clinton lead in the polls, spent the last days and hours before election day in a fury of campaign appearances. Dole did everything he possibly could, so no one could ever say that he had let his party down. Browne did rather the opposite. Weeks before the general election, Browne effectively terminated the campaign he had promised to run.

It is so easy to verify whether this is true that one has to wonder how Phillies would have the nerve to make such a statement. Every day — from the official announcement of my campaign on February 14, 2000, through election day — I wrote a Campaign Journal that was distributed by email to over 15,000 people. The Journal installments described what I was doing each day of the campaign. It is a simple matter for anyone to check what my activity was in October and November 2000.

The entire Campaign Journal is on the Internet. It is arranged in one-month installments. But the activity in October was so extensive that the month is split into two installments. You can read what I was doing from October 1, 2000, to election day by clicking here.

Here's a summary of my activity during those 38 days:

15 national TV appearances
18 national radio appearances
19 local TV appearances
98 local radio appearances
40 press interviews
14 Internet interviews or articles
20 speeches
  5 articles written and published

That’s a total of 221 events in 38 days.

Included in this period was a nationally televised third-party debate, a speech to young people at the Rock-the-Vote concert in Winston-Salem, 23 cities visited, one stretch of 26 days away from home, a stretch of 21 days in which I didn’t see Pamela, and one period of 36 hours without sleep.

Perhaps Mr. Phillies is such a human dynamo that my schedule was nothing to him —and he thinks of it as "terminat[ing] the campaign." But I doubt that he'd find many people to agree with him.

What is silly about all this is how easy it is to verify what I was doing during that period — how simple the task of disproving his accusation, just by referring to my Campaign Journal. Even if you suspect that I imagined the activities in the Journal, all you'd have to do is contact some of the Libertarians mentioned in the Journal to see whether I really was where I said I was and really did the things I said I did.

But, then, people who engage in that kind of character assassination usually do so because they're a bit short on wisdom.

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