Cullen Murphy | The Atlantic

What Tracy Kidder Stood For

2026-04-01T16:00:00-04:00

Tracy Kidder, who died last week at the age of 80, was a longtime contributor to The Atlantic and a writer of articles and books that served for many readers as timeless exemplars of what nonfiction writing could be. A headline announcing his death—Kidder, it said, “turned unlikely subjects into bestsellers”—had it right but also had it wrong. A number of Kidder’s books, such as The Soul of a New Machine and Mountains Beyond Mountains, did indeed become best sellers. And the focus of these books—the inner secrets of computer design; medical care for those who have none—was not typical best-seller material.

But the subjects Kidder was drawn to—computers and health care, but also the challenges and miracles of public-school classrooms; the inner workings of small cities and towns; the character of friendships in nursing homes; the ordeal of an immigrant who fled genocide in his homeland for life in America; the dynamics of homelessness and the experience of the unhoused—were far from unlikely. Is anyone in America untouched by one or more of these, or unaware of them as part of the national fabric? Kidder had the audacity to tackle subjects that are so large and omnipresent that they tend to recede behind the scrim of ambient reality—no longer counting as “news” in any conventional sense. These subjects are also hard to understand without deep and lengthy engagement. They are difficult to write about in a manner that won’t be dismissed as “worthy,” garnering more praise than readership. And they are morally tinged in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes not.

Kidder’s writing changed people’s lives. He is rightly celebrated for the literary quality of his journalism—he held up John McPhee as a particular inspiration—but his work had a life beyond a reader’s encounter with the page. In the days after his death, I heard from a number of people who felt compelled to voice what his writing had meant to them. Here’s part of a letter from a young friend explaining the impact of Kidder’s book about Paul Farmer, a co-founder of Partners in Health, and Farmer’s fight against tuberculosis, HIV, and other communicable diseases in Haiti and elsewhere. The writer is Ben Hayes, a doctor specializing in addiction who works in a community-based clinic in the Bronx:

Reading Mountains Beyond Mountains was a turning point in my life. My dad gave me the book after I graduated from college, at a time when I was searching for a meaningful way to align my career with my moral compass. Kidder’s account of Paul Farmer and his colleague Dr. Jim Kim transformed my sense of what it meant to be a global citizen. It also reshaped how I thought about what it meant to be a doctor: See patients where they are. Don’t wait for them to come to you. Build relationships with dignity and compassion. And fight to change the structural determinants of health to achieve the same standard of care for all people, regardless of race, geography, or income.

Tracy Kidder had a look about him. He was lanky, with strong eyes, high cheekbones, and a patrician nose. He was comfortable in khaki trousers and rolled-up sleeves. He sailed. If you met him, you might correctly infer some of his early background: born in New York City, boyhood in Oyster Bay, education at Andover and Harvard. But then it was off to Vietnam, where he served for a year. At Harvard, he had begun to develop a taste for writing—fiction, at first—and after returning from Vietnam, he enrolled in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. One of his teachers there, the novelist and journalist Dan Wakefield, eventually put him in touch with editors at The Atlantic, where Wakefield was a contributor.

Kidder’s arrival at the magazine, then in Boston, is described in the 2013 book Good Prose, written by Kidder and Richard Todd, who would be his editor for almost half a century. (Todd died in 2019.) It is a small, sneaky, funny, perfect volume about writing—a how-to book that in demeanor and substance would never be placed in a how-to lineup. The year was 1973, a time, the authors write, “that in memory seems closer to The Atlantic’s distant past than to our present era.” The building, in Boston’s Back Bay, was a shabby old family mansion, with servants’ quarters in the back for junior staff. Everyone used typewriters. Some women wore a hat at their desk. Kidder camped out just to use the phones—long-distance calls were expensive. He was 27, recently married, and living in rural Massachusetts. His wife, Frances, was and is a painter. Her portraits of Kidder over the years lodge in the eye with more urgency and ease than any photograph.

Kidder won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for The Soul of a New Machine, published in 1981, about teams of engineers at the Data General Corporation racing to develop a new computer system. The book, excerpted in The Atlantic, was published when the dawning digital world was incomprehensible to most people—including, at first, to the author. Kidder combined the necessary explication of digital and corporate mysteries with piercing character studies and a driving narrative. Engineers came across as (slightly strange) warriors. As for the “soul” of the title: It refers to the designers who gave life to their creation. “Look,” one engineer explains, “I don’t have to get official recognition for anything I do. Ninety-eight percent of the thrill comes from knowing that the thing you designed works, and works almost the way you expected it would. If that happens, part of you is in that machine.”

Emily Todd, the daughter of Richard and Susan Todd, was not yet a teenager when The Soul of a New Machine was being written:

I remember Tracy calling our house daily, showing up with manuscript pages in hand to read, pacing through the house, trying to puzzle out a problem with structure, worrying out loud. (Would anyone ever want to read a book called The Soul of a New Machine? I can still hear him saying.) Our whole family became familiar with the stages Tracy went through with each book—the search for the right subject, the years of reporting, the long first drafts. I knew their rituals, Tracy’s and my father’s. They spread out the manuscript on the floor, walking among the pages and moving them around. When the book was done, they imagined bad reviews—I think they might have even written them down as a talisman to ward off real ones.

The hallmark of Kidder’s writing was his deep—to his publishers, perhaps interminable—immersion in the subject matter: people and places, knowledge and expertise. Some journalism entails wide-ranging travel and ever-changing scenery. Kidder’s entailed close observation of a character or characters over very long periods of time: Mrs. Zajac’s fifth-grade classroom in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Dr. Jim O’Connell and his homeless patients on the streets of Boston. When NASA announced plans to allow a journalist to ride aboard the space shuttle, Kidder jumped at the chance to be The Atlantic’s nominee. Any such plans were of course scrapped after the Challenger tragedy, in 1986. Would a few days aloft have been enough time for Kidder? Factoring in the run-up to the flight, he surely could have made it work. But the imagination turns to an episode from 2024: the inadvertent stranding of a pair of astronauts for nine months aboard the International Space Station. Two characters, nine months, and a few hundred cubic meters—that would have been a perfect Kidder story.

How perfect an experience it would have been for the astronauts to have Kidder with them is hard to say. Susan Todd remembers what she calls the “bounteousness” of Kidder’s presence—the physical fullness of his proximity, whether he was bumping into a chair or spouting 1,000 words to someone else’s three. He was clear and insistent when it came to his aims for any project, and by no means shy. Corby Kummer, a newly arrived Atlantic editor, remembers working with Kidder on an excerpt—a cover story—from his 1985 book, House: “His manner was courtly, patient, and genial—until you suggested a change to his prose he thought he didn’t like. Then you were in for long, long discussion in which doubt and reflexive resistance would often but not always give way to amenability to alteration. During these sessions, it was clear that patience and congeniality took a far back seat to what he thought would be truest to his prose and the people in it.”

Over time, Kidder’s canvas grew bigger, and the moral strain in his thinking, always present, grew more pronounced. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, from 2003, Kidder wrote: “The world is full of miserable places. One way of living comfortably is not to think about them or, when you do, to send money.” Paul Farmer didn’t need Kidder’s book to enable his work bringing medical care to the world’s destitute, but Mountains Beyond Mountains brought that work to the attention of millions, and was meant to get under your skin (as Farmer himself could). In Rough Sleepers, published in 2023, Kidder focused on Jim O’Connell’s efforts to care for Boston’s homeless population. The counterpoint to such difficult subject matter came in the way Kidder wrote about people: their humane gestures and unexpected kindnesses, their improbable humor and sense of the absurd, their fellow feeling and even love. Kidder himself could be funny, including at his own expense—any reader of Good Prose will see genuine self-deprecation at play.

Kidder was working on Rough Sleepers when he crossed paths with James Parker, an Atlantic writer who has long been involved with the Black Seed Writers Group, a space for homeless writers in Boston:

I met Tracy when he was working on what wound up being his last book, about homelessness in Boston and in particular about its great healer, Dr. Jim O’Connell. Jim put us together, and Tracy came to a session of the Black Seed Writers Group. He loved the space, and the space loved him back. Tracy made you feel good. In person, and on the page. His tolerance, his energetic outward-flowing open-heartedness, was both a moral condition and an aesthetic strategy: It enabled him to see people clearly, people with souls, in all their grandeur and their ungrandeur, the better to write about them. And his style was an American classic: Transparent at first sight, it was actually prismatic. Light came through it and changed direction.

Kidder was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year, and his illness progressed rapidly. On the day before he died, the three daughters of Richard and Susan Todd—Emily, Maisie, and Nell—stood by his bed in his daughter’s house, with his wife, Fran; his children, Alice and Nat; and other family members nearby, and took turns reading aloud from the introduction to Good Prose. The introduction closes with a few paragraphs of what the authors were too polite (or embarrassed) to call a manifesto. Call it what you will, but it captures what Kidder, like Todd, always stood for:

We think that the techniques of fiction never belonged exclusively to fiction, and that no techniques of storytelling are prohibited to the nonfiction writer, only the attempt to pass off inventions as facts. We think that the obscure person or setting can be a legitimate subject for the serious nonfiction writer. And we think that every piece of writing—whether story or argument or rumination, book or essay or letter home—requires the freshness and precision that convey a distinct human presence.

During the past three decades American culture has become louder, faster, more disjointed. For immediacy of effect, writers can’t compete with popular music or action movies, cable network news or the multiplying forms of instant messaging. We think that writers shouldn’t try, that there is no need to try. Writing remains the best route we know to clarity of thought and feeling.

It’s not the 23rd Psalm. But it’s a creed.

The Master of the White-Knuckle Narrative

2025-06-18T06:00:00-04:00

William Langewiesche, whose extraordinary body of white-knuckle narrative reporting from all parts of the globe appeared in these pages over a period of decades, died earlier this week at the age of 70. He had been living with a debilitating cancer for several years but continued to plan new projects and to write. His straightforward optimism and ambition, in the face of long odds, are what brought him to The Atlantic in the first place. In the spring of 1991, he sent to our offices a two-part, 20,000-word account of his experiences in the Sahara—a blend of natural history, travelogue, black humor, and adventure story, rendered in deceptively simple prose that possessed an irresistible force. The envelope from Langewiesche arrived out of the blue, along with a cover letter reading “Enclosed are two pieces on Algeria.” Within a few months, that submission, virtually unchanged, became an Atlantic cover story, “The World in Its Extreme.”

Over the next 15 years, Langewiesche contributed a score of major articles to The Atlantic: On Pakistan’s development of atomic weapons. On tensions along the U.S.-Mexico border. On a catastrophic ferry sinking in the Baltic. On the anything-goes legal regime governing ships on the high seas. One particular specialty was flying. His father, Wolfgang, had been a legendary pilot—he was the author of the classic book Stick and Rudder—and Langewiesche flew small planes professionally (air taxis, air ambulances, cargo planes) while in college at Stanford and afterward, supporting himself while he began writing for aviation magazines. For many years, he supplemented his income by teaching pilots how to fly in the worst possible weather, taking off with one of his students only when the radar had lit up with danger.

One of Langewiesche’s gifts was the ability to translate technical minutiae into a gripping yarn. He could recount the arcane details of how an airplane makes a turn in a way that evoked the raptures of dance. His description of the job of air-traffic controller may have encouraged many readers to start taking the train. Langewiesche investigated aviation disasters of every kind, whether the nosedive of Valujet 592 or the incineration of the space shuttle Columbia. He won a National Magazine Award for one of his aviation investigations—into the crash of EgyptAir 990—during an extraordinary run that saw him named as a finalist for the award virtually every year for a decade. He would win another National Magazine Award for his reconstruction of a massacre at the hands of American forces in Haditha, Iraq.

Langewiesche’s access to the world of expertise—engineers, historians, nuclear scientists, forensic investigators, other pilots—ran deep, but he was no armchair analyst or globe-spinning litterateur. After 9/11, he spent six months among the workers at Ground Zero to report on the grim, complex task of finding remains and removing debris, on most days venturing deep into the smoldering pile. (His three sequential Atlantic cover stories on the subject in 2002 became the book American Ground.) Langewiesche made many trips to Iraq for the magazine, covering all aspects of the war and producing a cover story about the surreal, hothouse American world inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone. For his much later cover story about the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370—the magazine’s most-read article in 2019—he traveled along the rim of the Indian Ocean, stopping wherever he heard that fragments of wreckage had washed ashore. Fluent in French, he embedded with the French Foreign Legion on a mission to Guyana. A single day on such an assignment would exhaust most people. He was with them for a month.

Langewiesche had no taste for manufactured drama. Real drama, he believed, could be found almost anywhere, in any story, if you looked deeply and patiently enough. Similarly, there was nothing overwrought about his prose. His sentences relied on ordinary words, but for all that possessed a pure and crystalline character that turned reading into compulsion. He rarely injected the first person into what he wrote, but the reader was treated to a seemingly omniscient perspective from right behind his eyes. And that perspective was earned. To ask Langewiesche how he knew a particular fact or how he knew what someone thought—the kind of thing fact-checkers and editors ask all the time—was to embark on an explanatory excursion that underscored how hard he worked for every morsel of insight.

A certain cast of mind characterizes Langewiesche’s work for The Atlantic as well as for Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine. He was skeptical about most political and social institutions, not because they weren’t needed but because they were fragile and self-serving. But he was not skeptical about knowledge and expertise, nor about the capacity of ordinary people to transcend circumstances and institutions with humanity and ingenuity. Those people peer out from between the lines of everything he wrote.

Feudalism Is Our Future

2025-06-03T07:00:00-04:00

Judging from news accounts and interviews, numerous people in and around the Trump administration are beguiled by imperial Rome. They see themselves as interpreters of its lessons—beware immigration; uphold masculinity; make babies—and inheritors of its majesty. A banner at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, in Washington, D.C., depicted Donald Trump in Augustan profile, his brow garlanded with laurel leaves. Elon Musk styles himself “Imperator of Mars” and has named one of his many children Romulus. Steve Bannon keeps a bust of Julius Caesar in his Capitol Hill office.

Two decades ago, when maga was just a Latin word for “enchantress,” I wrote a book about ancient Rome and modern America. The book didn’t touch on masculinity or the birth rate, and it didn’t try to explain the fall of Rome; the idea was just to sift through the story of a past society for clues to the one we live in now. Researching a bygone empire brought me into contact with prominent scholars who generously gave me their time. One man I think about often is the late Ramsay MacMullen, a historian at Yale and the author of the classic 1988 study Corruption and the Decline of Rome—a book whose lessons retain their grip.

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MacMullen was nearing 80 when I met him, still an active outdoorsman, and at the time considered the greatest living historian of the Roman empire, an honorific bestowed by the American Historical Association. We got together initially for lunch in New Haven, Connecticut, and afterward kept up by phone and email. I already knew him as a jaunty writer, spelunking among funerary inscriptions and papyrus fragments and bits of ancient poetry. In person, his short, tousled white hair complemented the way he spoke: confident, casual, polydirectional. At lunch, MacMullen brought up a wide range of topics—perhaps dwelling too long on early Church councils—but again and again came back to a single theme: what happens to a polity when central control and common purpose are eroded by expediency, self-interest, and profit. This had been the subject of his book on corruption—a word, as MacMullen used it, with connotations broader than bribery and graft.

What interested him, he explained, were the mechanisms that kept the Roman empire functioning, and how grit worked its way inexorably into the cogs. Rome never had an administrative state as developed as anything we know today, but when it worked, it worked pretty well. What MacMullen called a “train of power” linked authority at the center to faraway commanders and distant magistrates, to minters of coin and provisioners of ships—all the way “to a hundred cobblers in the Bay-of-Naples area, a hundred peasant owners of ox-carts in Cappadocia.”

[From the October 2003 issue: Cullen Murphy on medieval characteristics of the present day]

And then it came undone. MacMullen described the problem: Over time, layers of divergent interests came between command and execution, causing the train of power to break. The breakage could come in the form of simple venality—somewhere along the way, someone found it profitable to ignore distant authority. Or it could occur because a public task was put into private hands, and those private hands had their own interests to protect. The military was largely farmed out to barbarian contractors—foederati, they were called—who did not always prove reliable, to put it mildly. In many places, the legal system was left to the marketplace: A bronze plaque survives from a public building in Numidia listing how much a litigant needed to pay, and to whom, to ensure that a lawsuit went forward. MacMullen had many examples of such breakage—a whole book of them.

A political scientist might use the phrase externalization of state functions to capture much of what MacMullen was looking at. A more familiar term would be privatization, the word MacMullen himself used. By the early 2000s, after two decades of deregulation and denationalization, the term had gained wide currency in a different context: to describe the path taken by governments in the West, notably the United States and Great Britain, as ever larger chunks of public responsibility—for security, finances, education, infrastructure, data—were lopped off and put into private hands. Independent fiefdoms were coming to life everywhere. I had written about this process, and it became a big part of my book.

I found myself returning to Corruption and the Decline of Rome in the early days of the current Trump administration, and wondering how MacMullen would have reacted to the rapid dismantling of government agencies and the mass firing of government workers. More and more public functions are now likely to be outsourced. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been pushing for years to privatize health care for veterans. Another administration official, Mehmet Oz, has argued for privatizing Medicare—a program he now oversees. The administration has shown interest in taking apart the National Weather Service and spinning off some of its functions. It is looking into fully privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which underpin the nation’s mortgage industry.

The president has floated the idea of privatizing the United States Postal Service. On his first day in office, he issued an executive order allowing the Justice Department to again send inmates to prisons run by private companies, reversing the Biden administration’s policy. He has promised to deport millions of undocumented people, and elements of that effort are also being privatized. Politico reported this spring that investors led by Erik Prince, the founder of the mercenary group once known as Blackwater, had sent a proposal to the White House arguing for the creation of a private military entity to set up “processing camps” and conduct roundups, possibly with the help of private citizens deputized to make arrests. The administration has as yet said nothing about that idea, but it did award a $151 million contract to the charter company CSI Aviation to operate deportation flights—an opportunity “too valuable not to pursue,” according to an executive of one of CSI’s subcarriers.

[Adam Serwer: The new dark age]

MacMullen died three years ago, so I can’t ask him about any of this. I do remember two questions I posed when we met. The first I had thought almost preposterous: Could he summarize the evolution of imperial Rome in a single sentence? He said he could do it in three words: “Fewer have more.”

The second question was about privatization, and where it leads. MacMullen was too careful a scholar to venture any grand pronouncement. There is no “must” in history, he explained. He could speculate only about how certain processes had played out in ancient Rome. That said, he liked comparing cultures and time periods (he later sent me a paper he’d written on corruption in Rome, India, and China in three different eras), and he liked to explore ideas. He thought about my question, then bounced it back: “Are you thinking about the Middle Ages?” he asked. “Or are you thinking about right now?”

The Middle Ages and I had a deal, or so I thought. For my part, I gave them sincere respect (the rise of universities, the revival of philosophy, the invention of eyeglasses) and romantic admiration (the mossy arches, the mottled stained glass, the wafting aroma of spit-roasted boar). I studied medieval history in college and for many years collaborated with my father on Prince Valiant, a comic strip set in the Middle Ages. Dank masonry and a roaring fire still bring a feeling of peace.

[From the February 1994 issue: Cullen Murphy on Prince Valiant’s England]

In return for my love, the Middle Ages were supposed to stay where they were. But they have not. With the accelerating advance of privatization, they seem to be moving our way in the form of something that resembles feudalism. Medievalists argue over what that word really means, parsing it with contentious refinement. Was it even understood at the time? Stripped bare, though, the idea is simple enough.

In Europe, as imperial power receded, a new system of organization took hold, one in which power, governance, law, security, rights, and wealth were decentralized and held in private hands. Those who possessed this private power were linked to one another, from highest to lowest, in tiers of vassalage. The people above also had obligations to the people below—administering justice, providing protection. Think of the system, perhaps, as a nesting doll of oligarchs presiding over a great mass of people who subsisted as villeins and serfs.

The idea of governments as public ventures with a public purpose and some degree of public voice—what the Mayflower Compact called a “civill Body Politick”—took a long time to claw its way back into existence. Most people in the developed world have been living in a civill Body Politick, or something that aspires to be one, for several centuries. I won’t overstate how successful this experiment has been, but it’s the reason we have police forces rather than vigilantes, and safety nets rather than alms thrown haphazardly from horseback by men in tights.

In the 1980s and ’90s, privatization started gaining traction again, and it had plenty of help. Anti-government sentiment created opportunities, and entrepreneurs seized them. Privatization was also pushed by policy makers who saw outsourcing as inherently more efficient. And besides, the public sector can’t do everything. Case by case, privatization of this or that may well make sense. The problem comes in the sheer accumulation. In the U.S., even before Trump took office a second time, there were roughly twice as many people employed by private contractors to do the federal government’s business as there were federal employees.

As the pace of privatization picked up in the 21st century, the idea of “neo-feudalism” or “techno-feudalism” began to interest scholars and theorists—Joel Kotkin, Jodi Dean, Robert Kuttner, and Yanis Varoufakis, among others. Most of the scholars are profoundly wary: They foresee an erosion of transparency, a disregard for individual rights, and a concentration of power among an ever smaller group of wealthy barons, even as the bulk of the population is relegated to service jobs that amount to a modern form of serfdom. For their part, theorists on the techno-libertarian or neo-reactionary fringe, observing from egg chairs in the Sky Lounge, see all these same things, and can’t wait.

The meaning and consequences of privatization may be up for debate, but the phenomenon itself can’t be argued away. To run through a few examples:

Holding a monopoly on control of the money supply was once a hallmark of public power. In the span of a decade, private cryptocurrencies have undermined that control while at the same time enabling a wide range of illicit activities. Cryptocurrencies are hard to regulate even when there’s a will, which there often isn’t. In the U.S., Trump and his family are heavily involved in the crypto business. In April, the president announced that he would invite the top 220 investors in his $TRUMP meme coin to a private dinner; the value of the meme coin rose within hours by 60 percent.

A monopoly on the legitimate use of force—replacing the knights and pikemen of sundry vassals with professional standing armies—was another traditional hallmark of public power. Donald Rumsfeld famously observed that “you go to war with the army you have,” but another option today is “the army you rent.” Globe-spanning private military companies such as the Wagner Group and Triple Canopy recall the roving mercenary Landsknechte of yore. The world is awash with mustered-out veterans of recent wars. Governments and corporations alike often want kinetic solutions without legal oversight. (“Like medieval mercenaries,” a 2019 report from National Defense University observes, today’s freelance personnel “can prove overly brutal when executing contracts.”) From 2007 to 2012, the U.S. alone spent $160 billion on private security contractors. Growing up alongside them—an industry even larger in size—are the private intelligence-gathering companies, such as Palantir, on which the U.S. spends a significant portion of its intelligence budget. The very name Palantir seems to harken back, via Tolkien, to a feudal world.

Public police forces with a mission to protect everyone are largely a 19th-century invention. But police forces are shrinking. In the U.S., anyone with money and a need now hires private security guards, who outnumber police officers by a ratio of 2 to 1. Among companies based in the U.S., the third-largest global employer—after Amazon and Walmart—is a private security firm, Allied Universal. Private guards patrol small towns and swaths of entire cities. A consortium of hundreds of businesses in Portland, Oregon, hired a company named Echelon Protective Services to secure their downtown precinct, day and night. During the fires that devastated Los Angeles in January, the wealthiest residents of Brentwood called in the secretive security firm Covered 6 to protect their homes from looting. As for personal protection, the market has no ceiling. Mark Zuckerberg’s reported annual budget for personal security is $23 million, five times more than the pope pays for the Swiss Guards.

As in medieval times, the affluent withdraw behind barriers. If it were built today, Windsor Castle would be described in the sales prospectus as a “privately governed residential community.” In the 1990s, when the economist Robert Reich began writing about “the secession of the successful,” some 3 million American housing units were lodged inside gated communities, which protected a population of about 8 million. Today, gated communities encompass 14 million housing units. On its website, a real-estate company in Florida earlier this year asked readers, “Is a Moat Right for You?” It was an April Fools’ joke, but not a very good one, because modern moated residences already exist. Perhaps the most exclusive gated community in the world is actually an island—Indian Creek Village, in Biscayne Bay, Florida, with 89 residents (including Jeff Bezos, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner) and a perimeter-security radar system designed by the Israeli company Magos. Officers in speedboats intercept anyone venturing too close.

Privatization has also upended the law. One example from an ambitious survey by Robert Kuttner and Katherine V. W. Stone in The American Prospect : the growing use of compulsory arbitration, written by corporations into private contracts, as a way of settling consumer and employment disputes. The public court system is clogged. Arbitration—the “outsourcing of jurisprudence,” as the authors call it—creates a parallel private system, one in which efficiency may be more highly valued than public oversight or due process.

Oversight more broadly—of the environment, food, drugs, finance—has been drifting for decades into the hands of those being overseen. In their 2021 book, The Privatization of Everything, Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian documented the loss of public control over water, roads, welfare, parks, and much else. The deliberate dismantling of government in America in recent months, and its replacement with something built on privatized power and networks of personal allegiance, accelerates what was long under way. Its spirit was captured decades ago in a maxim of Ronald Reagan’s economic adviser Murray Weidenbaum: “Don’t just stand there— undo something!”

One of the most watched television programs in the U.K. last year was the ITV series Mr Bates vs the Post Office, a dramatized version of events that took place starting decades ago. Britain’s postal system, once overseen directly by a government minister, became a (government-owned) statutory corporation in 1970. In time, parts of it were spun off—since the days of Margaret Thatcher, the nation has pursued privatization more aggressively than most other countries—and the legal and oversight structure was subjected to continual tinkering. In a deal originating as a “public-private partnership” arrangement, the Post Office in the late 1990s computerized its accounting and other operations; the system was supplied by a U.K. company that was then acquired by the technology giant Fujitsu. Glitches in the software soon resulted in hundreds of rural postmasters being falsely accused of theft and summarily fired. Several went to prison. A number committed suicide. Fujitsu has acknowledged the errors; it does not accept blame for the entire cascade of injustice. Inside the Post Office, corporate opacity and dispersed responsibility made concealment easy and accountability hard. Without investigative reporting by the trade publication Computer Weekly—and, of course, the TV series—there might have been no accountability at all.

In the end, the head of the Post Office suffered an ironically feudal fate: Formerly a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, she had her CBE status revoked by King Charles III. And Mr. Bates, the local postmaster who organized resistance by the subpostmasters, was knighted.

Mr Bates vs the Post Office enjoyed great storytelling advantages—a gnomish hero, angry villagers, and all that verdant countryside. But grit working its way into the cogs of government is rarely cinematic or even in public view. The consequences may reveal themselves slowly, and often come down to the fine print. In 2008, desperate for cash, Chicago privatized its parking meters, selling off the rights to all the revenue for 75 years to a group of investors led by Morgan Stanley. A “true-up” provision in the contract requires the city to compensate investors for lost revenue when meters are taken out of service—a provision that weighs on decision making whenever the city considers projects that would eliminate meters or favor mass transit over cars. The rights to operate toll highways have been sold off by some jurisdictions to private companies, including foreign ones. The fine print in the contracts often prevents improvements to adjacent roads on the grounds that such enhancement would create undue competition. Private prisons generally put a quota clause into their agreements. States and municipalities may be hoping, as a matter of policy, to reduce their prison populations, but the beds in private prisons must be filled regardless.

Evoking the train of power that enables effective government, MacMullen wrote: “At every point of connection the original intent must be transmitted as it was received. Otherwise it will come to nothing.” Control and accountability are the bedrock. Control: Who makes the decisions and who decides whether they will be executed—and for whose benefit? Accountability: Who determines whether something has gone wrong, and who determines whether the problem is fixed? In a privatized world, government becomes “diffuse, unstable, unpredictable,” and the skein of responsibility more and more attenuated. Contractors hire subcontractors, who hire subcontractors of their own. “I can’t tell you about the sub to the sub to the sub,” a NATO official told The New York Times in 2010 when asked about convoy guards in Afghanistan who turned out to be in league with the Taliban. Throughout much of our spun-off government today, “the sub to the sub to the sub” is almost a job description.

Is feudalism our future? There is no “must” in history, and the present is as much a riddle as anything that lies ahead. A privatized world may be a temporary aberration, a new stage of development, or just the default setting of human society. Our own era doesn’t have a name yet, and it won’t be up to us to give it one. From the perspective of some far-distant vantage point, the age we inhabit may even come to seem “Middle.” With contentious refinement, historians will parse what “privatization” might have meant, and wonder whether we understood it at the time.

This article appears in the July 2025 print edition with the headline “Feudalism Is Our Future.”

What Made William F. Buckley So Unusual

2025-06-01T06:00:00-04:00

The June issue of The Atlantic features an excerpt from Sam Tanenhaus’s long-awaited biography of the conservative intellectual and polemicist William F. Buckley Jr. That book—Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America—will be published by Penguin Random House on June 3. Buckley exerted enormous influence not only on American politics but also on how political debate was waged (more and more, on television). I asked Tanenhaus to review the highlights of Buckley’s 60-year career, and to explain some of the qualities of personality—incuding his sense of humor—that made Buckley such an unusual public figure.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Cullen Murphy: William F. Buckley Jr. died in 2008. Two generations of Americans have no real firsthand memories of him, and probably an even larger number don’t fully appreciate the role he played in American political and intellectual life for almost half a century. Can you give us a quick overview of Buckley’s significance and how it endures?

Sam Tanenhaus: WFB—or Bill Buckley, as all who knew him learned to say, at his insistence—was too many different people to summarize easily. He is best-known for being the architect of the modern conservative movement that remade the party of Eisenhower in the 1950s into the party of Reagan in the 1980s. That was one Buckley. He was also the author of some 50 books. His very first, God and Man at Yale, a scathing and witty critique of his alma mater published in 1951, when he was 25, laid out the lines of attack being repeated today by the Trump administration and its allies, who like Buckley say that Ivy League institutions enforce anti-American orthodoxies and through them corrupt the broader culture. Buckley was also a pioneer in the uses of media. At his peak, he was a thrice-weekly columnist syndicated in more than 360 newspapers—this at a time when most people got their information from newspapers. His TV debate-and-discussion program, Firing Line, which began in 1966 and lasted until 1999, invented the talking-head cable-news programs of our own time. Bill Buckley the literary man and editor was also a discoverer and nurturer of talented young writers whose work he published in National Review, the magazine he founded in 1955. Some of the best American writers and critics in the second half of the 20th century—Joan Didion, Garry Wills, George F. Will, Arlene Croce, John Leonard, and more—got their start writing for National Review. And this doesn’t touch on Bill Buckley the sailor, skier, best-selling spy novelist. Or Bill Buckley the devout Catholic—“our pope,” as one admirer told me.

Murphy: What’s astonishing to think about is how quickly he arrived on the scene with God and Man at Yale. He goes from being utterly unknown to nationally known with a snap of the fingers. Why did the book make such a splash?

Tanenhaus: Novelty and timing had much to do with it. He excelled at choosing moments, and seeing where the argument was and also where it wasn’t. In 1951, McCarthyism was a potent force, and Ivy League campuses were under assault—rather as they are today. The difference was that God and Man at Yale, or GAMAY in the shorthand acronym that Buckley and his publisher used, was the first assault to come from high up inside the ivory tower. Buckley wasn’t a populist scourge or congressional Torquemada. He was Mr. “White Shoe” Yale—editor of the campus newspaper, the “last man tapped” for Skull and Bones, which meant the No. 1 big man on campus. He was chosen to give the Class Day oration—that speech, delivered before 10,000 people at commencement, presaged the book. Also, he wrote with wit and style. Even as he attacked left-leaning “atheistic” professors, he learned from them. He wanted to write a book they would respect for its arguments and prose.

[From the April 1968 Issue: What makes Bill Buckley run]

And they did. When I was first getting to know him, he invited me to his home in Stamford, Connecticut, for lunch. I was amazed to see that the other guest was a distinguished Yale professor, Charles Lindblom, who is denounced in GAMAY. Of course, this was long afterward—40 years later. But still, I was surprised. When Buckley was out of earshot, I asked Lindblom what he’d made of the book at the time. “Oh, that was Bill,” he replied. “He had to do that to make his point.” Then he tucked into lunch on the lovely veranda with its view of Long Island Sound. I wasn’t writing about Buckley yet. I was in the first stages of a biography of Whittaker Chambers. But moments like that—the sheer improbability of Bill Buckley, of which this was just one glimpse—made me wonder, Okay, this person is not like anyone else I’ve encountered. What makes him tick?

Murphy: Well, what did make him tick? There was his Catholicism, as you’ve mentioned. He was preternaturally, to use a Buckley word, congenial, and his congeniality crossed party lines. Where did his conservatism—his type of conservatism—come from? It was not a populist conservatism. It had intellectual roots.

Tanenhaus: It all began at home, the large rural estate in the northwest corner of Connecticut where he grew up, the sixth of 10 children. Later, when Bill was a fixture on TV—with his memorable voice and patrician style—many assumed he came from Old Yankee stock. He did not. His father, a lawyer and oil speculator, came from the Rio Grande Valley—in fact, from one of the frontier border towns that helped “Landslide” Lyndon B. Johnson steal a Senate election in 1948. Bill’s mother came from New Orleans. This made the Buckleys “culturally southern,” according to Bill’s older brother Jim, who became a U.S. senator and federal judge. That culture included southern courtliness and graces. I kept meeting brilliant people who said Bill Buckley was the “best conversationalist in the world.” This seemed extravagant—until I got it. They meant the best listener. In the book, I call it “predatory attentiveness,” the debater’s habit of absorbing everything you said so it could be—elegantly most of the time, though not always—tossed back at you.

Murphy: And his conservative philosophy? Where did that come from? What were its basic tenets? And how did it take hold of a Republican Party that mostly seemed to be living in an Eisenhower mold?

Tanenhaus: The single greatest disappointment in Bill Buckley’s intellectual life—letting down himself, friends and admirers, and, I increasingly feel, the country at large—was his failure to articulate a serious coherent conservative philosophy. He tried to do it, with a book he began writing in 1963 after the assassination of President Kennedy, which brought much hard scrutiny to the American right and its growing militancy. He wrote several chapters—some 60 pages—but could get no further. He kept promising himself and others that he would return to this book, but he never did, and by the end of the 1960s had given up.

I knew about this book when I began work on the biography, and wondered, like his friends, why he was not able to finish writing it. But when I read the pages he did write, which are in the enormous Buckley archive at Yale, I saw that the problem was the opposite—not that he couldn’t finish but that he didn’t know where to begin. The few chapters keep circling back to a single point, contained in the title, The Revolt Against the Masses. Buckley was always good at book titles, and this one extends the argument made in José Ortega y Gasset’s classic The Revolt of the Masses, published in 1930, which Buckley read at Yale in a seminar taught by his mentor Willmoore Kendall. Ortega’s book is a learned aristocrat’s complaint about the leveling sins of democracy and modern technology, which elevated the lower orders at the expense of their betters—people like Bill Buckley, with their taste and refinement, their respect for tradition, and, in Bill’s case, the age-old Catholic Church, with its high dogma and sacred rituals.

Ortega was a big influence on the first American thinker the teenage Bill Buckley met—he was a guest in the Buckley family’s home in Sharon, Connecticut—the libertarian man of letters Albert Jay Nock. Any reader of Buckley can always tell when he’s reaching for a big point because he’ll quote Nock, usually on the debasement of American life in the modern era. Nock’s most important book was Our Enemy, the State (1935). Ortega plus Nock equals aristocratic libertarianism.

[From the February 2008 Issue: “We're on our way home now, duckie!”]

Another component, much the finest aspect of Buckley’s thinking, came from Catholic teaching, in particular belief in charity—that is, the love one extends to friends and even adversaries. Out of this came Buckley’s many philanthropies. When I told him about a young writer at work on a book about a Catholic school in Harlem, Buckley sent a substantial sum the writer’s way so he could finish it. He very much believed in noblesse oblige, a belief he got from his father, a political reactionary who was also exceedingly generous.

It was this idea of a kind of voluntarist society superintended by a small, enlightened group—Nock called them “the remnant”—which Buckley and his allies developed into a hard-edged attack on the New Deal “welfare state” and all its offshoots, including Eisenhower’s modified version of it, sometimes called the Big Deal. Every national political leader Buckley ardently embraced for the whole of his life—in sequence, Charles Lindbergh (1939–41), Joseph McCarthy (1950s), Barry Goldwater (1960s), and Ronald Reagan (1970s–80s)—declared himself the enemy of “big government,” meaning our own federal government as it expanded under Democratic and Republican leaders alike during the period many look back on as the American Century.

Buckley absorbed this philosophy in childhood and never abandoned it, though he added a new layer during the Cold War, with the emergence of an enemy even more dangerous than the U.S. government: global communism. Defeating it—or them—became his guiding mission. That epic battle required a big military (including a costly nuclear program), and interventions across the world (including in Vietnam) as well as closer to our shores (Castro’s Cuba, Allende’s Chile). Closer still, and nearly as menacing, were “socialistic” elements inside America’s own political, cultural, and intellectual establishment.

Put all these ideas together, and you have the ideology of the modern right through the end of the 20th century, which simultaneously opposed the encroachments of government (especially when it sought to raise up the “undeserving” at the expense of talented “individualists,” as Nock and his disciples called themselves) even as it urged that same government to wage the Cold War on every front. This ideology, sometimes called “fusionism,” was spelled out in the pages of National Review and eventually was adopted by the GOP, whose leaders saw the utility of presenting themselves to voters as more than pastel “me too” Republicans (later called Republicans in Name Only—RINOS), and instead as counterrevolutionaries determined to “roll back” statism at home and abroad.

It worked brilliantly in strategic and tactical terms, especially when the liberal Cold War consensus began to come apart in the 1960s as anti–Vietnam War protests and the civil-rights movement synchronously grew. Buckley and others argued that the increased radicalism of the left was the stepchild of a permissive, wayward consensus politics that lacked clear, coherent principles. The masses were now in control, and the only solution was to rise up against them. Buckley was not a serious political thinker, but he was a gifted enactor of political ideas as a writer, debater, and—in one pivotal chapter in the life of both him and the conservative movement—candidate for mayor of New York in 1965.

Murphy: Since you brought it up: I remember the mayoral campaign vividly. Buckley was funny, and he turned conservative politics from resolutely angry into something that could be fun. Do you think the mayoral race changed the conservative movement? Or him? Or both?

Tanenhaus: When he was asked what he’d do if he won, he said: “Demand a recount.” It was a line he’d worked out in advance. His aide de camp, a young Yale grad named Neal Freeman, pleaded with him not to use it, since it would feed suspicions that Buckley wasn’t taking the campaign seriously. But one of the points Buckley wanted to make was that people were taking politics too seriously. He seldom talked about politics. He once told me he did it only when he was paid, and when he was paid, it was a lot—$11,000 per episode of Firing Line as of 1971. In 1967, Time put him on the cover—a big deal in those days. (Just ask Donald Trump.) The headline was in fact “Conservatism Can Be Fun.”

[Ta-Nehisi Coates: When James Baldwin met Bill Buckley]

Why did anyone care about fun? For one thing, because fun was in short supply in the politics of that time. In the span of five years, three of our greatest figures—Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King—were assassinated. We worry about violent uprisings in our moment. In the 1960s, they happened almost continually. New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Newark all became war zones. And here was Bill Buckley suggesting there might be another way: Ideological adversaries could talk to one another, use language as a weapon but also as an instrument of persuasion. In the course of that singular New York mayoral campaign, which one friend likened to Andy Warhol–quality performance art, Buckley articulated his ideology with remarkable flair in a city that was being undone by crime, delinquency, and out-of-control municipal spending. He summoned all the strains of conservative belief and remade the GOP into the party we knew until 2016

The luckiest turn for Buckley and New York voters during the mayoral election was a newspaper strike in the fall of 1965. This made TV the main news medium. Each of the local news stations invited the three candidates—the Conservative Party candidate, Buckley; the Republican, John Lindsay; and the Democrat, Abe Beame—into the studio for debates. They were a revelation. Here was something no one had ever witnessed before—a first-class mind and university wit talking about issues like crime in the streets and welfare rolls. Columnists like Murray Kempton and Pete Hamill were enthralled.

It wasn’t just the debates. Twenty years ago I wrote an anniversary story on the 1965 campaign for The New York Times Magazine. One of the items that turned up in my research was an audiotape of a luncheon speech Buckley gave to the Overseas Press Club in October 1965. At the time, Buckley was 39. I have never heard anyone command an audience the way he does on that tape—the jokes, the erudite wit, the phrasing and polish, the mellifluous voice, the charm.

It was the mayoral campaign that persuaded Buckley—and WOR, a local New York TV network—to broadcast a regular weekly debate program beginning in the spring of 1966: Firing Line. Richard Nixon’s speechwriter Ray Price—who had known and been awed by Buckley at Yale in the late 1940s—told me that Firing Line was Bill’s single greatest contribution to the conservative movement and to American politics. For the first time, he brought his argument into the living rooms of Upper West Side liberals and their equivalents across the land, and many were entertained and also persuaded—not every time or in all cases, but just enough to keep listening. Liberals found themselves thinking, I don’t agree with him but he’s smarter than I am, and maybe I should hear him out. Getting people to listen, to drop their defenses and let you inside their minds, is the all-important first step in winning the argument. With the mayoral campaign and Firing Line, Buckley became good company.

At the same time, the mayoral race was caught up with race in the other sense—that is, racial conflict. It was the great issue in the 1965 campaign, as it was in so much of American politics in those years, and in subsequent years too. One of the things that became clear as I explored the life and times of Bill Buckley was that issues involving race made the conservative movement—that is, brought it into the mainstream. Anti-communism was a strong cause, but it was shared by many. Murray Kempton, Buckley’s favorite columnist—in those days, just about everyone’s favorite columnist—once pointed out that differences between the patrician Averill Harriman and the rogue Joe McCarthy were differences of taste, by which he meant Harriman’s anti-communism was genteel while McCarthy’s was vulgar.

[Matthew Yglesias: William F. Buckley, RIP]

In May 1954, at the same moment McCarthy was coming apart during the Army-McCarthy hearings—seen by as many as 20 million people in the infant days of television—the Supreme Court issued the Brown decision outlawing segregated schools. This instantly created new allegiances and new enmities—first in the ’50s, when the Dixiecrats found allies among northern Republicans, and then in the ’60s and ’70s, when the civil-rights movement moved north, and the new “backlash politics” arose in big cities where the conflicts were different and ethnic groups clashed over schools, jobs, and housing. The same argument that landed with a thud in Buckley’s debate at Cambridge University with James Baldwin—Black Americans were actually doing pretty well, and whites should stop apologizing—excited audiences a month or two later when Buckley made it in Manhattan.

William F. Buckley in a radio studio in New York during a debate when he was a candidate for city mayor in 1965. (Sam Falk / The New York Times / Redux)

Murphy: The high-water mark of Buckley’s political influence may have been the election of Ronald Reagan. Would that be fair to say? What was the Buckley-Reagan relationship like?—that’s the first question. And the second is related: The GOP itself is changing by the time Reagan assumes office—the conservatism, if that’s the word, it espouses more and more is not an intellectual conservatism but a populist emotion. How did Buckley think about what was happening?

Tanenhaus: Yes, most would agree that in 1980, with the election of Reagan—“my favorite president,” as Buckley called him—his ideology and the movement reached their peak. It was a personal triumph for Bill, because he had been Reagan’s tutor, going all the way back to 1961, when he had gone to Los Angeles to speak to conservatives and Reagan—then a TV actor and nascent right-wing activist—had been his introducer.

Today, after so many transformations and with the passage of time, few grasp how fringe a figure Reagan seemed to many, even after he was twice elected governor of California [in 1966 and 1970] and proved himself to be a responsible and sensible administrator. The fringe reputation grew out of his association with the John Birch Society, a major force in California politics despite the wacky assertions of Robert Welch, its leader—most notoriously that President Eisenhower was a Soviet agent. Buckley and company didn’t know what to do about Welch. At first they prescribed an early version of “don’t take him literally, take him seriously,” but once Welch became an embarrassment, Buckley huddled with Goldwater and some others. All agreed that Bill, the super-clever counterpuncher, would take apart Welch’s mad theories, which he did at length in the pages of National Review in 1962, outraging many subscribers—one of many episodes that prompted Buckley’s famous retort, “Cancel your own goddam subscription.”

Reagan was one of those enlisted to second the attack on Welch—and both the movement and Reagan were saved. But Buckley wanted to bring “Ronnie” along slowly. In 1968, riding high on his landslide first victory in California, Reagan was the presidential favorite of many on the right—including the campus legions who were members of the Young Americans for Freedom (one of Buckley’s many suboperations). Buckley said no. Reagan wasn’t ready. It was Nixon’s turn.

He came to regret this—first when Nixon went to China, undermining his own long history of anti-communism, the one important conservative credential Nixon had; and later, amid the catastrophe of Watergate, set in motion by Buckley’s own good friend and former boss, E. Howard Hunt. Hunt was Buckley’s handler when Bill was briefly a “deep cover” CIA officer in Mexico City in 1951. He quit after eight months, having found his assignments “tedious”—always the death-knell word for him. Besides, far more stimulating work awaited him back in the U.S.: promoting the surprise best seller God and Man at Yale.

[From the July/August 2009 Issue: Daredevil]

But, as you suggest, Buckley’s relationship with Reagan was complicated, in part because Reagan was more complicated than many realized. I myself didn’t realize it until I dug into the facts of Buckley’s friendship with him. These were two large figures with, shall we say, healthy egos. A colleague of Reagan’s once said Reagan felt superior to everyone in any room of politicians he was in because he had the confidence of one who came from nowhere but had a successful career in Hollywood in its golden age, the 1930s and ’40s. That took discipline, skill, talent. Reagan, as the nation and world eventually learned, was a master script reader and deliverer. Gore Vidal once said that Reagan was a far better actor than he was given credit for, and acting is an art. And his speaking voice was probably the best of any American politician’s, then or since.

Well, Buckley was pretty good in the speaking and script department too, and in fact wrote his own scripts (including the 1,500 introductions he wrote to Firing Line episodes), and he discovered—or, rather, had the reality thrust upon him—that at a certain point, Reagan decided his tutelage under Bill Buckley was complete, and it was Reagan’s turn to take over. This happened in the days following his epic landslide victory in 1980. Thrilled and excited, National Review’s editors declared themselves the true victors and brashly announced, “We have a nation to run.”

That sealed it. Reagan decided not to attend the magazine’s big 25th-anniversary bash at the Plaza Hotel, in New York, held in December 1980—a snub that caused Buckley acute embarrassment and haunted him all his remaining days. In fact, he was still steamed about toward the end of his life, when he was working on his final book, The Reagan I Knew, which was published posthumously in 2009. The last time I saw Buckley, at his home in Stamford in February 2008, three weeks before he died, the two people he talked about were Reagan and Henry Kissinger, who had become his closest friend—a friendship that dated back to 1954 but grew in the Nixon years and after. In 1980–81, Buckley pleaded with Reagan to bring Kissinger into his Cabinet, but Reagan wouldn’t do it because Henry was so deeply disliked on the right—blamed for détente with the Soviet Union and for the China opening. Buckley himself opposed both gambits but liked and admired Kissinger anyway, in part because of his exceptional intellect. Nevertheless, he felt better about it all when, long afterward, Kissinger told him, on one of his last visits to Stamford shortly before Buckley died, that both heretical moves had originated with Nixon, who in addition to being a criminal was one of the most talented geostrategic chess players ever to occupy the White House. Reagan was very good at that too. Buckley and others were appalled when Reagan reached a truce with Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan had gotten out in front of them all.

One of the lessons of modern politics, reinforced for me while working on this book, is that the role of intellectuals, while important, is actually different from what we—and they—may suppose. Buckley and his allies liked to think of themselves as preceptors and teachers—even visionaries and prophets—ushering in the grand ideas. Mere vote-hustling presidents were the vehicles or instruments of those ideas. In truth the relationship is generally the opposite. The charismatic leader clears the way and the “verbalists,” in the term used by one of Buckley’s mentors, James Burnham, fall behind in the important but subsidiary roles of cheerleaders and publicists. This was the message the supposed simpleton Ronnie Reagan coolly delivered to the über-sophisticate Bill Buckley by deciding to skip the banquet at the Plaza.

[Emma Green: In the age of Trump, no wonder Republicans miss William F. Buckley]

This led to another painful irony. Once Reagan entered the White House, he didn’t need Bill Buckley. Nixon had needed him, to keep the right wing in line. But Reagan came directly out of the right wing. Bill Buckley was a social ornament—especially to the ladder-climbing Nancy Reagan—but otherwise not especially useful. The journalist the Reagans cultivated was Buckley’s protégé George F. Will, the king of Washington columnists. Fortunately, Buckley had so big and full a life in New York, and had so many interests and friendships of his own there, that he didn’t need Reagan either.

Murphy: Reagan aside, what did Buckley think about the direction his party was going in?

Tanenhaus: Populism is a fraught subject for the whole of conservative-movement history. Lindbergh wasn’t precisely a populist, but he also was not an officeholder or office seeker. But Joe McCarthy was, and he remains the most important figure in Buckley’s crucial formative years. Buckley took up his cause early and defended him ’til the end of his life, though he made vague stabs at saying that maybe “Joe” had been more trouble than he was worth. In fact, Buckley was well aware that the movement needed crowd-pleasing candidates. How else to win office? The ideas and arguments—the philosophy—could be adjusted and contoured (and readjusted and recontoured) to suit each new movement tribune.

After Reagan left office, and the Cold War was won, Buckley found himself a reluctant promoter of the movement’s new causes, the “culture wars,” which in the ’70s included disputes about “forced” school busing and abortion and, in the ’80s, revolved around the AIDS epidemic. The booming voices belonged to Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh. Buckley liked them all, in particular Limbaugh. When I attended one of National Review’s big events in the early 2000s, Rush was the host and man of honor. Many were surprised. They shouldn’t have been. He was a rabble-rouser, but then so had been McCarthy.

Fred R. Conrad/ The New York Times/ Redux

I’m asked time and again what would Buckley have made of Donald Trump. My answer is, first, that backward-looking prophecy is the bane of poor historians. It’s impossible to read the present into the thinking of a person who lived in an earlier time. Buckley died in 2008, at age 82. He came from a different world than our own but also helped bring our world into being, particularly the world of American conservatives. Many Buckley admirers and acolytes are now Trumpists. Is this a betrayal of Buckley and his legacy, or is it a fulfillment?

There are arguments to be made on both sides. I decided not to discuss or quote Buckley’s one extended commentary on Donald Trump, a penetratingly dismissive assessment written in 2000 (and published in, of all venues, Cigar Aficionado), when Trump was toying with running for president on the Reform Party ticket invented by Ross Perot. Why did I omit this? Because it was written long before Trump emerged as a force in the Republican Party. Many who agreed with Buckley’s dismissive words back then have since changed their minds. The editors of National Review vehemently opposed Trump in January 2016 but no longer do so. Would Buckley have undergone a similar revolution in his thinking? I can’t say, and neither can anyone else.

Murphy: You’ve spent 25 years working on this book. You’ve had access to Buckley’s papers. You’ve interviewed his friends and members of his family. You knew Buckley, and spoke with him often and at length. A life fuller than his is hard to imagine, and like anyone’s, it had its complexities. As a person—as I understand it, and as he emerges in your book—he elicited great loyalty and affection, and returned it. What were the qualities that accounted for this?

Tanenhaus: Like most journalists who’ve been kicking around for a long time, I’ve been in the company of many prominent people. But of them all, not one (with the exception of the great Linda Ronstadt, when I got to interview her some years ago) was so natural and enjoyable company as Bill Buckley. As Garry Wills said, he was “just exciting to be with.” One reason was that the distinctions that so often place barriers between the great and the ordinary simply melted away, with no effort on his part. This may seem strange, since Buckley’s speech and manner struck so many as affected or even pretentious. Nothing could be further from the truth. An interviewer asked him once about his ornate vocabulary and diction. Bill replied, “I talk to my dog the same way.” (That was Rowley, his adored Cavalier King Charles spaniel).

[Ross Douthat: Cruisin’ with the Right]

When I first met Buckley, in 1990, he was at or near the peak of his fame. He was a best-selling author, TV star, and Manhattan socialite. He was the acknowledged leader of one of the great political movements in American history and had just seen the single great mission in his life, the defeat of global communism, achieved under American statesmen he had anointed. I was nobody, a 34-year-old barely published freelance journalist. Yet Bill Buckley treated me as his equal in every way, with no hint of pretense or condescension. He had a quality not just of courtesy but of deference I’d not encountered before or since.

This is related to something else—his utter lack of pettiness. His mortal enemy was Gore Vidal, yet I never heard Buckley speak ill of him. One of Buckley’s protégés, the writer Michael Lind, told me that the only time he heard Buckley mention Vidal was to praise his brilliance as a writer. Some of this was good manners. My wife and I were recently in Sharon, Connecticut, and spoke with many there who knew several generations of Buckleys. Not once did any Buckley they knew disparage or criticize anyone in personal terms. In Bill’s case this carried over into all his dealings. Courtesy was also rooted in his faith. When Bill was growing up in Sharon, every Catholic member of the household—that is, servants and groomsmen—went to church together on Sundays. They piled together into the family Buicks and drove to the modest Catholic church, St. Bernard.

Murphy: Why did you write this biography? You’ve been at work on it, off and on, for a quarter of a century.

Tanenhaus: Books, as you know, seem to choose authors rather than the other way around. But I can tell you the precise moment when it occurred to me to write about Bill Buckley, if not exactly why. It was in 1992. I was midway through my biography of Whittaker Chambers, and I had just read Garry Wills’s wonderful little book Confessions of a Conservative, which included a tantalizing reference to a lunch with Chambers when Garry was at National Review in 1957. Wills was my idol then—as he still is—and I wrote asking if I could speak with him. This was pre-internet and pre-email. Letters were really letters signed and posted in the mail. After some weeks had passed, it seemed clear that Wills was not going to reply. I mentioned my frustration to Buckley. Not long after, the phone rang. It was Bill Buckley, and I remember his exact words. “I hadn’t spoken to Garry Wills in 20 years”—because of an epic falling-out during the Vietnam and civil-rights era—“but I just got off the phone with him and he’s waiting for your call.” And he was. I made the call, and Garry Wills told me about his meeting with Chambers.

I’ve turned that little episode over in my mind many times in the past more than 30 years, and each time I’m struck by something different: his extravagant kindness to me, the delight he plainly took in letting me know the extent of his interest in the book I was writing, the excuse he was perhaps looking for to resume a connection whose loss troubled him.

But when I think about it now, what I think of is the enjoyment it afforded Buckley too in solving my problem—the pleasure he found or created in such moments, and there were thousands like them. It is the pleasure of the artist, pleasure allied with an odd detachment. It is of a piece with the feel for comedy—his love of conversation as continual repartee and his embrace of the political life as more than the grim clash of zealotries but instead an adventure and expression of personality. The greatest work of secular religious writing is Dante’s La Divina Commedia—comic because the hero reaches paradise. And Buckley, the Catholic who never knew a moment of doubt, was sure the same deliverance awaited him.

[From the December 1951 Issue: The changes at Yale]

Buckley was born in 1925, the same year a writer he admired and identified with, his fellow Irish Catholic romantic F. Scott Fitzgerald, published The Great Gatsby. Both Bill Buckley and Jay Gatsby turn 100 this year. The two epigraphs in my book come from Marcel Proust and John Keats. I was sorely tempted to add a third, from Gatsby:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away … it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

To be in Bill Buckley’s company was to feel this and also to feel—to know—that hope really is a gift, not a delusion, though Buckley knew a great deal about delusion too.

Point Nemo, the Most Remote Place on Earth

2024-10-11T11:00:00-04:00

Illustrations by Anuj Shrestha

Updated at 9:40 a.m. ET on November 12, 2024

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It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 48°52.5291ʹS 123°23.5116ʹW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.

They had been sailing a 60-foot foiling boat, the Mālama, in the Ocean Race, a round-the-world yachting competition, and had passed near that very spot, halfway between New Zealand and South America. Now, two months later, they had paused briefly in Newport, Rhode Island, before tackling the final stretch across the Atlantic. (And the Mālama would win the race.) I spoke with some members of the five-person crew before going out with them for a sail on Narragansett Bay. When I asked about their experience at the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, they all brought up the weather.

With a test pilot’s understatement, the crew described the conditions as “significant” or “strong” or “noteworthy” (or, once, “incredibly noteworthy”). The Southern Ocean, which girds the planet in the latitudes above Antarctica and below the other continents, has the worst weather in the world because its waters circulate without any landmass to slow them down. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the most powerful on Earth, a conveyor belt that never stops and that in recent years has been moving faster. These are the waters that tossed Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton. The winds are cold and brutal. Waves reach 60 or 70 feet. In a second, a racing boat’s speed can drop from 30 knots to five, then jump back to 30. You may have to ride out these conditions, slammed and jammed, for five days, 10 days, trimming sails from inside a tiny sealed cockpit, unable to stand up fully all that time. To sleep, you strap yourself into a harness. You may wake up bruised.

[Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go]

This is not a forgiving environment for a sailboat. But it’s a natural habitat for the albatross you find yourself watching through a foggy pane as it floats on air blowing across the water’s surface—gliding tightly down one enormous wave and then tightly up the next. The bird has a 10-foot wingspan, but the wings do not pump; locked and motionless, they achieve aerodynamic perfection. The albatross gives no thought to the longest swim. It may not have touched land in years.

The oceanic pole of inaccessibility goes by a more colloquial name: Point Nemo. The reference is not to the Disney fish, but to the captain in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In Latin, nemo means “no one,” which is appropriate because there is nothing and no one here. Point Nemo lies beyond any national jurisdiction. According to Flightradar24, a tracking site, the occasional commercial flight from Sydney or Auckland to Santiago flies overhead, when the wind is right. But no shipping lanes pass through Point Nemo. No country maintains a naval presence. Owing to eccentricities of the South Pacific Gyre, the sea here lacks nutrients to sustain much in the way of life—it is a marine desert. Because biological activity is minimal, the water is the clearest of any ocean.

What you do find in the broad swath of ocean around Point Nemo—at the bottom of the sea, two and a half miles below the surface—are the remains of spacecraft. They were brought down deliberately by means of a controlled deorbit, the idea being that the oceanic point of inaccessibility makes a better landing zone than someone’s rooftop in Florida or North Carolina. Parts of the old Soviet Mir space station are here somewhere, as are bits and pieces of more than 250 other spacecraft and their payloads. They had been sent beyond the planet’s atmosphere by half a dozen space agencies and a few private companies, and then their lives came to an end. There is a symmetry in the outer-space connection: If you are on a boat at Point Nemo, the closest human beings will likely be the astronauts aboard the International Space Station; it periodically passes directly above, at an altitude of about 250 miles. When their paths crossed at Point Nemo, the ISS astronauts and the sailors aboard the Mālama exchanged messages.

Illustration by Anuj Shrestha

The Mālama’s crew spoke with me about the experience of remoteness. At Point Nemo, they noted, there is no place to escape to. If a mast breaks, the closest help, by ship, from Chile or New Zealand, could be a week or two away. You need to be able to fix anything—sails, engines, electronics, the hull itself. The crew described sensations of rare clarity and acuity brought on by the sheer scale of risk. The austral environment adds a stark visual dimension. At this far-southern latitude, the interplay of light and cloud can be intense: the darks so very dark, the brights so very bright.

Simon Fisher, the Mālama’s navigator, described feeling like a trespasser as the boat approached Point Nemo—intruding where human beings do not belong. Crew members also described feelings of privilege and power. “There’s something very special,” Fisher said, “about knowing you’re someplace where everybody else isn’t.”

We all know the feeling. Rain-swept moors, trackless deserts, unpeopled islands. For me, such places are hard to resist. Metaphorically, of course, remoteness can be found anywhere—cities, books, relationships. But physical remoteness is a category of its own. It is an enhancer: It can make the glorious better and the terrible worse. The oceanic pole of inaccessibility distills physical remoteness on our planet into a pure and absolute form. There are continental poles of inaccessibility too—the place on each landmass that is farthest from the sea. But these locations are not always so remote. You can drive to some of them. People may live nearby. (The North American pole of inaccessibility is on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota.) But Point Nemo is nearly impossible to get to and offers nothing when you arrive, not even a place to stand. It is the anti-Everest: It beckons because nothing is there.

I first heard the name Point Nemo in 1997, when hydrophones on the floor of the South Pacific, thousands of miles apart, picked up the loudest underwater sound ever recorded. This got headlines, and the sound was quickly named the “Bloop.” What could be its source? Some speculated about an undiscovered form of marine life lurking in the abyssal depths. There was dark talk about Russian or American military activity. Readers of H. P. Lovecraft remembered that his undersea zombie city of R’lyeh was supposedly not far away. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration eventually concluded that the sound had come from the fracturing or calving of ice in Antarctica. In this instance, freakish conditions had directed the sound of an Antarctic event northward, toward a lonely expanse of ocean. Faraway hydrophones then picked up the sound and mistook its place of origin. News reports noted the proximity to Point Nemo.

[Video: The loudest underwater sound ever recorded has no scientific explanation]

You might have thought that a planetary feature as singular as the oceanic pole of inaccessibility would be as familiar as the North Pole or the equator. In a sci-fi story, this spot in the South Pacific might be a portal to some other dimension—or possibly the nexus of the universe, as the intersection of First and First in Manhattan was once said to be. Yet at the time of the Bloop, the location of the oceanic pole of inaccessibility had been known and named for only five years.

I have not been to Point Nemo, though it has maintained a curious hold on me for decades. Not long ago, I set out to find the handful of people on Earth who have some sort of personal connection to the place. I started with the man who put it on the map.

Hrvoje Lukatela, a Croatian-born engineer, left his homeland in the 1970s as political and intellectual life there became turbulent. At the University of Zagreb, he had studied geodesy—the science of measuring Earth’s physical properties, such as its shape and its orientation in space. Degree in hand, he eventually found his way to Calgary, Alberta, where he still lives and where I spent a few days with him last fall. At 81, he is no longer the avid mountaineer he once was, but he remains fit and bluff and gregarious. A trim gray beard and unkempt hair add a slight Ewok cast to his features.

After arriving in Canada, Lukatela was employed as a survey engineer. For several years, he worked on the Alaska Highway natural-gas pipeline. For another company, he determined the qibla—the precise alignment toward the Kaaba, in Mecca—for a new university and its mosque in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In time, he created a software company whose product he named after the Greek astronomer Hipparchus. This was in the 1980s, when digital cartography was advancing rapidly and civilian GPS systems were on the horizon. The Hipparchus software library—“a family of algorithms that dealt with differential geometry on the surface of an ellipsoid,” as he described it, intending to be helpful—made it easier to bridge, mathematically, three-dimensional and two-dimensional geographical measurements. Lukatela can go on at length about the capabilities of Hipparchus, which he eventually sold to Microsoft, but two of the most significant were its power and its accuracy.

By his own admission, Lukatela is the kind of man who will not ask for directions. But he has a taste for geographical puzzles. He heard about the longest-swim problem from a friend at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and was immediately engaged. You could twirl a classroom globe and guess, correctly, that the oceanic pole of inaccessibility must lie in the South Pacific, probably concealed by the rectangle where most publishers of maps and globes put their logo. But no one had tried to establish the exact location. As Lukatela saw it, the logic of the search process was simple. It takes three points to define a circle. Lukatela needed to find the largest oceanic circle that met two criteria: The circumference had to be defined by three points of dry land. And inside the circle there could be no land at all. The oceanic point of inaccessibility would be the center of that circle.

I’ll leave the computational churning aside, except to say that Hipparchus was made for a problem like this. Drawing on a digitized cartographic database, it could generate millions of random locations in the ocean and calculate the distance from each on a spherical surface to the nearest point of land. Lukatela eventually found the three “proximity vertices” he needed. One of them is Ducie Island, a tiny atoll notable for a shark-infested lagoon. It is part of the Pitcairn Islands, a British overseas territory, where in 1790 the Bounty mutineers made their unhappy home. A second vertex is the even tinier Motu Nui, a Chilean possession, whose crags rise to the west of Easter Island. The character Moana, in the animated movie, comes from there. The third vertex is desolate Maher Island, off the coast of Antarctica. It is a breeding ground for Adélie penguins. The three islands define a circle of ocean larger than the old Soviet Union. Point Nemo, at the center, lies 1,670.4 miles from each vertex. For perspective, that is roughly the distance from Manhattan to Santa Fe.

Lukatela completed his calculations in 1992, and quietly shared the results with his friend at Woods Hole and a few other colleagues. As the young internet gained users, word about Point Nemo spread among a small subculture of geodesists, techies, and the simply curious. In time, new cartographic databases became available, moving the triangulation points slightly. Lukatela tried out two of the databases, each recalibration giving Point Nemo itself a nudge, but not by much.

Lukatela had named the oceanic pole of inaccessibility after the mysterious captain in the Jules Verne novel he had loved as a boy. Submerged in his steampunk submarine, Captain Nemo sought to keep his distance from terrestrial woes: “Here alone do I find independence! Here I recognize no superiors! Here I’m free!”

But Captain Nemo couldn’t entirely stay aloof from the rest of the planet, and neither can Point Nemo. Many of the boats in the Ocean Race carry a “science package”— equipment for collecting weather data and water samples from regions of the sea that are otherwise nearly impossible to monitor. Data collected by their instruments, later given to labs, reveal the presence of microplastics: Even at the oceanic point of inaccessibility, you are not beyond the reach of humanity.

An article this past spring in the journal Nature reported the results of a scientific expedition that bored deep into the sediment of the ocean floor near Point Nemo. The focus was on the fluctuating character, over millions of years, of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, whose existence became possible after tectonic forces separated Australia and South America from Antarctica. The current helps regulate temperatures worldwide and keep Antarctica cold. But, as the Nature article explained, its character is changing.

I spent several hours recently with one of the article’s authors, Gisela Winckler, at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, high on the Palisades overlooking the Hudson River. Winckler is a physicist and an oceanographer, and her interest in oceans and paleoclimate goes back to her graduate-school days at Heidelberg University, in Germany. She confessed that she’d first learned about Point Nemo not from a scientific paper but from the 2010 album Plastic Beach, by Damon Albarn’s project Gorillaz. Winckler is intrepid; early in her career, a quarter century ago, she descended to the Pacific floor in the submersible Alvin, looking for gas hydrates and methane seeps. Yellow foul-weather gear hangs behind her office door. On a table sits a drill bit used for collecting sediment samples. Water from Point Nemo is preserved in a vial.

Illustration by Anuj Shrestha

Winckler’s two-month expedition aboard the drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution, in 2019, was arduous. Scientists and crew members set out from Punta Arenas, Chile, near the start of the dark austral winter; they would not encounter another ship. The seas turned angry as soon as the Resolution left the Strait of Magellan, and stayed that way. The shipboard doctor got to know everyone. Winckler shrugged at the memory. That’s the Southern Ocean for you. The drill sites had been chosen because the South Pacific is understudied and because the area around Point Nemo had sediment of the right character: so thick and dense with datable microfossils that you can go back a million years and sometimes be able to tell what was happening century by century. The team went back further in time than that. The drills punched through the Pleistocene and into the Pliocene, collecting core samples down to a depth corresponding to 5 million years ago and beyond.

The work was frequently interrupted by WOW alerts—the acronym stands for “waiting on weather”—when the heave of the ship made drilling too dangerous. Five weeks into the expedition, a violent weather system the size of Australia came roaring from the west. The alert status hit the highest level—RAW, for “run away from weather”—and the Resolution ran.

But the team had collected enough. It would spend the next five years comparing sediment data with what is known or surmised about global temperatures through the ages. A 5-million-year pattern began to emerge. As Winckler explained, “During colder times, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current itself becomes cooler and slows down, shifting a little bit northward, toward the equator. But during warmer times, it warms and speeds up, shifting its latitude a little bit southward, toward the pole.” The current is warming now and therefore speeding up, and its course is more southerly—all of which erodes the Antarctic ice sheet. Warm water does more damage to ice than warm air can do.

Before I left the Palisades, Winckler walked me over to the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository, a sediment library where more than 20,000 tubes from decades of expeditions are stacked on floor-to-ceiling racks. The library was very cold—it’s kept at 2 degrees centigrade, the temperature of the sea bottom—and very humid. Open a tube, and the sediment may still be moist. I wondered idly if in her Point Nemo investigations Winckler had ever run into a bit of space junk. She laughed. No, the expedition hadn’t deployed underwater video, and the chances would have been infinitesimal anyway. Then again, she said, you never know. Some 30 years ago, during an expedition in the North Atlantic, she had seen a bottle of Beck’s beer from an array of cameras being towed a mile or two below the surface. In 2022, in the South Pacific, the headlights of a submersible at the bottom of the Mariana Trench—about seven miles down, the deepest spot in any ocean—picked up the glassy green of another beer bottle resting in the sediment.

Jonathan McDowell has never been to the ocean floor, but he does have a rough idea where the world’s oceanic space junk can be found. McDowell is an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also part of the team that manages science operations for the Chandra deep-space X-ray telescope. At more or less monthly intervals, he publishes a newsletter, Jonathan’s Space Report, notable for its wide-ranging expertise and quirky humor. He has written about Point Nemo and its environs, and in an annual report, he provides long lists, in teletype font, with the coordinates of known debris splashdowns.

British by parentage and upbringing, McDowell looks ready to step into the role of Doctor Who: rumpled dark suit, colorful T-shirt, hair like a yogi’s. He is 64, which he mentioned was 34 if you count in Martian years. I met him at his lair, in a gritty district near Cambridge—some 1,900 square feet of loft space crammed with books and computers, maps and globes. One shelf displays a plush-toy Tribble from a famous Star Trek episode. A small container on another shelf holds a washer from the camera of a U.S. spy satellite launched into orbit in 1962.

McDowell has been preoccupied by spaceflight all his life. His father was a physicist who taught at Royal Holloway, University of London. As a teenager, he began keeping track of rocket launches. In maturity, McDowell has realized a grander ambition: documenting the history of every object that has left the planet for outer space. Nothing is beneath his notice. He has studied orbiting bins of garbage discarded decades ago by Russia’s Salyut space stations. If a Beck’s bottle were circling the planet, he’d probably know. McDowell estimates that the thousands of files in binder boxes on his shelves hold physical records of 99 percent of all the objects that have made it into orbit. For what it covers, no database in the world matches the one in McDowell’s loft.

Unless something is in very high orbit, what goes up eventually comes down, by means of a controlled or uncontrolled deorbit. The pieces of rockets and satellites and space stations large enough to survive atmospheric reentry have to hit the planet’s surface somewhere. McDowell pulled several pages from a printer—colored maps with tiny dots showing places around the world where space debris has fallen. The maps reveal a cluster of dots spanning the South Pacific, like a mirror held up to the Milky Way.

Guiding objects carefully back to Earth became a priority after 1979, when the reentry of the American space station Skylab went awry and large chunks of debris rained down on southern Australia. No one was hurt, McDowell said, but NASA became an object of ridicule. The coastal town of Esperance made international news when it tried to fine the space agency for littering. From the 1990s on, more and more satellites were launched into orbit; the rockets that put them there were designed to fall back to Earth. The empty ocean around Point Nemo became a primary target zone: a “spacecraft cemetery,” as it’s sometimes called. That’s where Mir came down, in 2001. It’s where most of the spacecraft that supply the International Space Station come down. There are other cemeteries in other oceans, but the South Pacific is Forest Lawn. The reentry process is not an exact science, so the potential paths, while narrow, may be 1,000 miles long. When reentry is imminent, warnings go out to keep ships away.

Illustration by Anuj Shrestha

When I mentioned the conversation between the Mālama crew and its nearest neighbors, the space-station astronauts, McDowell pointed me toward a bank of flatscreens. He called up a three-dimensional image of Earth and then showed me the orbital path of the ISS over the previous 24 hours. Relative to the universe, he explained, the plane of the ISS orbit does not change significantly on the timescale of a day or so—the station goes round and round, 16 times a day, five miles a second. But because the globe is spinning underneath, each orbit covers a different slice of the world—now China, now India, now Arabia. McDowell retrieved a moment from the day before. The red line of the orbit unspooled from between Antarctica and New Zealand and traced a path northeast across the Pacific. He pointed to the time stamp and the location. At least once a day, he said, the space station will be above Point Nemo.

[Read: A close look at the most distant object NASA has ever explored]

McDowell is drawn to the idea of remoteness, which maybe shouldn’t be surprising: To an astrophysicist, remoteness is never far away. But, he said, “there are layers and layers when it comes to how you think about it.” In 2019, a space probe relayed pictures of a 22-mile-long rock known as Arrokoth, the most distant object in our solar system ever to be visited by a spacecraft. That’s one kind of remote. More recently, the James Webb Space Telescope has found galaxies more distant from our own than any known before. That’s another kind. McDowell brought the subject almost back to Earth. On our planet, he said, Point Nemo is definitely remote—as remote as you can get. “But I’m always moved by the thought of Mike Collins, who was the first person to be completely isolated from the rest of humanity when his two friends were on the moon and he was orbiting the far side, and he had the moon between him and every other human being who has ever lived.”

Collins himself wrote of that moment: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it.”

I joined Hrvoje Lukatela and his wife, Dunja, for dinner one evening at their home near the University of Calgary. Hrvoje and Dunja had met at university as young mountaineers—outdoors clubs offered a form of insulation from the Communist regime. They emigrated together soon after their marriage. In the basement office of their home, he still keeps his boyhood copy (in Croatian) of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Lukatela spread maps and computer printouts on the table as we ate.

Lukatela might wish to be remembered for the Hipparchus software library, but he accepts that the first line of his obituary will probably be about Point Nemo. He is proud of his discovery, and like a man with a hammer, he has a tendency to see everything as a nail. He and Dunja spend part of the year in Croatia, and in an email this past spring, he sent me some new calculations that solve the longest-swim problem for the Adriatic Sea (“with millimetric numerical precision”). Set him down alongside Loch Ness or the Central Park Reservoir, and I can guess what he’d be thinking.

Lukatela has a dream for Point Nemo, though probably not one that he can pursue alone. His hope is that someone, someday, will venture into the South Pacific and leave GPS receivers on Ducie Island, Motu Nui Island, and Maher Island, establishing the location of the triangulation points more accurately than ever before. While they’re at it, they might also drive brass geodetic markers into the rock. Ducie and Motu Nui would be relatively easy to get to—“I could do it on my own,” he ventured. (Dunja, listening, did not seem overly concerned.) Access to Maher Island, Lukatela went on, with its inhospitable location and brutal weather, might require some sort of government expedition.

[From the February 1906 issue: A history and future of human exploration]

What government would that even be? Lukatela indicated Maher Island on a map. Officially, it is part of Marie Byrd Land, one of the planet’s few remaining tracts of terra nullius—land claimed by no one. But Lukatela recalled hearing that Maher Island had recently come under the jurisdiction of one of those start-up micronations that people invent to advance some cause.

He was right. Maher is one of five Antarctic islands claimed by the Grand Duchy of Flandrensis, a Belgium-based micronation devoted to raising ecological awareness. At international conferences, the grand duke, Nicholas de Mersch d’Oyenberghe, wears military dress blues with handsome decorations and a yellow sash. But he answers his own email. Asked about Lukatela’s ambition, he explained that his country is the only one in the world that seeks to bar all human beings from its territory; the thousand or so people who have registered as citizens are all nonresidents. “No humans, only nature!” is the Grand Duchy’s motto. However, he went on, a mission to install a GPS receiver and a geodetic-survey marker would be deemed scientific, and welcomed. The Grand Duchy would be happy to provide a flag.

The astronaut Steve Bowen has orbited above Maher Island and Point Nemo many times. Before being selected by NASA, Bowen was a submariner; he knows a lot about life in a sealed container far from anywhere. He was one of the crew members aboard the International Space Station who spoke with the Ocean Race sailors as their trajectories crossed at Point Nemo. When I caught up with him this past summer, he compared his circumstances and theirs. The astronauts sleep a lot better, he said—in microgravity, you don’t wake up bruised. But the environment never changes. There is no fresh air, no wind, no rain. Bowen remembered the exhilaration whenever his submarine surfaced in open sea and he would emerge topside into the briny spray, tethered to the boat, taking in a view of nothing but water in every direction.

In the space station, Bowen would often float his way to the seven-window cupola—the observation module—and gaze at the planet below. From that altitude, you have a sight line extending 1,000 miles in every direction, an area about the size of Brazil. In a swath of the planet that big, Bowen said, you can almost always find a reference point—an island, a peninsula, something. The one exception: when the orbit takes you above Point Nemo. For a while, the view through the windows is all ocean.

That same expanse of ocean will one day receive the International Space Station. When it is decommissioned, in 2031, the parts that don’t burn up in the atmosphere will descend toward the South Pacific and its spacecraft cemetery.

Last March, aboard a chartered ship called the Hanse Explorer, a Yorkshire businessman named Chris Brown, 62, exchanged messages with Lukatela to make sure that he had the coordinates he needed—the original computation and the later variations. Brown values precision. As he explained when I reached him at his home in Harrogate after his return from the South Pacific, he and his son Mika had been determined to reach Point Nemo, and even have a swim, and he wanted to be certain he was in the right neighborhood.

This wasn’t just a lark. Brown has been attempting to visit all eight of the planet’s poles of inaccessibility, and he had already knocked off most of the continental ones. Point Nemo, the oceanic pole, was by far the most difficult. Brown is an adventurer, but he is also pragmatic. He once made arrangements to descend to the Titanic aboard the Titan submersible but withdrew in short order because of safety concerns—well founded, as it turned out, given the Titan’s tragic implosion in 2023. The ship he was chartering now could stay at sea for 40 days and was built for ice. Autumn had just begun in the Southern Hemisphere when the Browns left Puerto Montt, Chile, and the weather turned unfriendly at once. “Nausea was never far away,” he recalled.

[Read: The Titanic sub and the draw of extreme tourism]

But approaching Point Nemo, eight days later, the Hanse Explorer found a brief window of calm. Steering a Zodiac inflatable boat and guided by a GPS device, Brown made his way to 48°52.5291ʹS 123°23.5116ʹW. He and Mika slipped overboard in their wetsuits, becoming the first human beings to enter the ocean here. A video of the event includes photos of the men being ferociously attacked by an albatross. While treading water, they managed to display the maritime flags for the letters N, E, M, and O. Then, mindful of Lukatela’s further calculations, they headed for two other spots, a few miles distant—just to be safe. Admiral Robert Peary’s claim to have been the first person to reach the North Pole, in 1909, has long been disputed; his math was almost certainly off. Brown did not want to become the Peary of Point Nemo.

He isn’t, of course. I think of him, rather, as Point Nemo’s Leif Erikson, the man credited with the first New World toe-touch by a European. I think of Hrvoje Lukatela as some combination of Juan de la Cosa and Martin Waldseemüller, the cartographers who first mapped and named the Western Hemisphere. Jonathan McDowell is perhaps Point Nemo’s Alexander von Humboldt, Gisela Winckler its Charles Lyell and Gertrude Bell. Steve Bowen and the Ocean Race crew, circumnavigating the globe in their different ways, have a wide choice of forebears. The grand duke of Flandrensis may not be Metternich, but he introduces a hint of geopolitics.

Unpopulated and in the middle of nowhere, Point Nemo is starting to have a history.

This article originally stated that, relative to the universe, the plane of the ISS orbit never changes. In fact, because of the Earth’s oblateness, it does shift over time. This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Most Remote Place in the World.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The DeLorean Owners Association Strikes a Pose

2024-08-01T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Neal Slavin

Constraints can be liberating. My father was a cartoonist, and at public events, he’d ask someone to put three big marks on a piece of paper—lines, squiggles, blotches—and then tell him what to draw: a house, a horse, a flower. Somehow, he could always do it—but the angle and approach would be unexpected.

That memory returned as I explored the forthcoming revised edition of Neal Slavin’s When Two or More Are Gathered Together, first published almost half a century ago. Here’s the constraint: The photos are all group shots. The genre has a bad reputation, picked up from too many uninspired high-school yearbooks, corporate brochures, and family-reunion albums. Slavin wanted to pursue wilder game while remaining smack in the realm of the ordinary: hot-dog vendors, bodybuilders, cheerleaders, synchronized swimmers, Elizabeth Arden masseuses, Santa’s Helpers, Biltmore Hotel chambermaids, fire-department chaplains. (The new edition has some 120 images, roughly half of which were taken after the book’s original 1976 publication.)

From When Two or More Are Gathered Together (Damiani Books, 2024). © Neal Slavin.

Cemetery Workers and Greens Attendants Union, Local 365 SEIU AFL-CIO, Ridgewood, New York, 1972–75

From When Two or More Are Gathered Together (Damiani Books, 2024). © Neal Slavin.

The Wheelmen, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 1972–75

Slavin gave his subjects an overarching instruction: You decide how to pose yourselves. The mandate proved revolutionary. The resulting photographs possess rare animation and humor, the subjects’ self-arrangement adding an extra layer of revelation. DeLorean owners wave at the camera from inside their vehicles, gull-wing doors up. Uniformed cemetery workers smile shyly, shovels in hand, beside a freshly dug hole in the ground.

From When Two or More Are Gathered Together (Damiani Books, 2024). © Neal Slavin.

DeLorean Owners Association, Washington, D.C., 1988

Why group shots? I asked Slavin, now in his 80s. He has always considered himself something of a sociologist, he said. For many people, America calls to mind the freestanding individual—our national myth. But groups, Slavin said, are the true foundation of the country. He cited Alexis de Tocqueville, who famously observed that, in America, people propulsively associate with one another. And when people make decisions as a group—in this case, about a photograph—you get energy, Slavin said: You “can’t press the button unless you have that energy coming at the camera.”

This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “All Together Now.”

The Last Time a President Dropped Out of the Race

2024-07-25T16:38:00-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

“I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

Those are the words not of President Joe Biden, who announced his withdrawal from the 2024 campaign on Sunday, but of a previous president who took himself out of the running: Lyndon B. Johnson, speaking from the Oval Office on March 31, 1968.

I was in high school at the time, and remember watching the speech with my parents on an old black-and-white TV with semi-functional rabbit ears. All through the 1960s, major events collided with a chaotic intensity that in retrospect is hard to disentangle—a pattern that may seem all too familiar today.

Of all those years, 1968 was the most fraught. It began with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam—ultimately a military defeat for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, but a psychological blow from which the U.S. did not recover. In March, the strong showing in the New Hampshire primary by the anti-war candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy against the incumbent Johnson was perceived as tantamount to a win. In April came the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; in June, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; in August, the demonstrations and ferocious police response outside of the Democratic convention, in Chicago.

Johnson’s withdrawal from the presidential race took America completely by surprise—more than Biden’s exit did—and overshadowed his announcement, in the same speech, of a bombing pause in Vietnam and a renewed push for negotiations. I’ve always wondered what kind of moment it was for him. Earlier this year, The Atlantic published excerpts from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s memoir based on more than 300 boxes of archival materials that her husband, Richard “Dick” Goodwin, had saved from his time as a prominent speechwriter and presidential adviser. Johnson had been an important figure in both of their lives. Dick Goodwin wrote some of Johnson’s landmark speeches, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, a historian and a former special assistant to Johnson, published her first book in 1976 about LBJ, with whom she had worked closely as he wrote his memoirs.

“The first thing to recognize,” she told me when we chatted earlier this week, is that by March 1968 “he was facing a precarious political situation. He had been battered in New Hampshire, and he was expected to lose, big, in Wisconsin. More importantly, he had been told by his generals that he had to send 200,000 more troops to Vietnam, but that even then the most that could be expected was a stalemate.” There was also the issue of his health. Johnson had suffered a major heart attack in 1955, and the men in his family had a history of early deaths. In 1967, he initiated a secret actuarial study on his life expectancy, and was told he would die at 64—a prediction that came to pass. As Goodwin noted, “he would have died in that next term, if he’d had a second term.”

“What he talked to me about later was more personal,” Goodwin went on. “He knew he couldn’t go out on the streets without being bombarded by people carrying signs. How many kids did you kill today? There was no pleasure any longer in the part of politics he had always loved: being out with people. He told me that he had this nightmare regularly—that he was in a river, and he was trying to get to shore, and he went toward the shore on one side, and then he couldn’t reach the shore, so he turned around, figuring he was going the wrong way, and he couldn’t reach the shore on the other side either. He was just caught in the middle.”

Goodwin recalled that, up to the last moment on March 31, 1968, the people closest to Johnson weren’t sure he would deliver the final part of his speech—the withdrawal passage. In 1964, he had thought about not running for a full term as president; his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, had helped change his mind. In this case, withdrawing from the race was essential to his credibility on Vietnam: He believed that he would not be seen as acting in good faith to end the war if he were still a candidate.

“That night, I think, he was relieved and knew that he had done the right thing,” Goodwin said, going on to re-create the moment in time. “All the editorials are superlative. He has put principle above politics. It’s a personal sacrifice. He goes to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and gets a standing ovation. In the polls he goes from a 57 percent disapproval rating to a 57 percent approval rating. Most importantly, on April 3, he gets a message that North Vietnam is willing to come to the table. His aide Horace Busby said that, for Johnson, it was one of the happiest days of his presidency.”

Shortly after Johnson’s speech, Tom Wicker of The New York Times, one of the preeminent political writers of his day, described in these pages how Johnson had been drawn inexorably into Vietnam. The background of intractable war—more than half a million American soldiers fighting on foreign soil—is one of several differences between Johnson’s decision not to run and Biden’s. Johnson was not in (obvious) physical decline, as Biden seems to be. However imperfect, political and civic institutions were stronger back then. An authoritarian demagogue did not appear to be waiting in the wings, and the future of American democracy did not seem to be at stake (though Richard Nixon’s disregard for the law would ultimately drive the country to crisis). But both presidents faced a badly divided nation, and both seemed to understand that they could not be the instrument to heal those divisions.

Biden’s short speech to the nation yesterday evening was freighted with sadness. Like Johnson, Biden has never not been a politician. Biden was in his final year of law school when Johnson gave his withdrawal speech. He was elected to the New Castle County Council roughly two years later, and to the U.S. Senate two years after that. Politics helped give him purpose in the face of personal tragedy—the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident, in 1972; the death of his son Beau, from brain cancer, in 2015.

Will Biden experience the sense of release that Johnson did? For Johnson, it was momentary. On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. The rest of 1968 unspooled in anger, protest, violence. The Vietnam peace talks bogged down. And retirement, when it came, did not prove easy. Leo Janos, a former White House speechwriter, contributed a haunting account to The Atlantic of Johnson’s postpresidential life on the LBJ Ranch, in Texas, where Johnson faced more health issues and struggled to come to terms with his exile from politics. “He wanted so much for what he had done to be remembered,” Goodwin recalled.

Biden has a lot to be remembered for, too. But legacies are slippery. It can take decades to appreciate their value, and the country may squander them anyway. One thing can be said for sure: Whatever Joe Biden does when he leaves office, he will not be driving around a 350-acre spread in Delaware checking on his cattle.

William Whitworth’s Legacy

2024-03-11T09:52:50-04:00

William Whitworth, the editor of The Atlantic from 1980 to 1999, had a soft voice and an Arkansas accent that 50 years of living in New York and New England never much eroded. It was as much a part of him as his love of jazz, his understated sartorial consistency, and his deep dismay when encountering the misuse of lie and lay, a battle he knew he had lost but continued to fight. Bill, who led this magazine during a period of creative evolution, died last week in Conway, Arkansas, near his hometown of Little Rock, at the age of 87. He is survived by his daughter, Katherine W. Stewart, by a half brother, F. Brooks Whitworth, and by a half sister, Sharon Persichitte.

Bill was a mentor to two generations of writers—writers of narrative reporting, primarily, but also novelists, biographers, intellectuals, essayists, and humorists. He expanded The Atlantic’s topical range and its cultural presence. His editorial instincts were penetrating, but couched in a manner that was calm and grounded. James Fallows, a longtime contributor who came to The Atlantic a few years before Bill arrived, was among the people we asked for their recollections. He remembers their initial meeting in a high-ceilinged office at 8 Arlington Street, in Boston, across from the Public Garden:

I saw a slight man, bearded, with receding hair, wearing a bow tie. “Mr. Fallows,” he said softly, “I’m Bill Whitworth.” Thus began an hour of his patiently asking me about how The Atlantic worked, and how much I was paid, and why I’d made this or that choice in the recent stories I’d done. Bill entirely directed our first conversation with seemingly simple questions: Did you think about this? Why did you write that? Can you explain what the experts are saying? What if they’re all wrong? Who did you want to talk with who got left out? What do you still need to know?

A reporter’s role in life boils down to going around and asking, “What is this?” and “How does it work?” Decades of working with Bill made his colleagues understand that an editor’s role in the final stage of an article boils down to asking, “What are you trying to say here?” and “Can we leave this part out?” In the conception stage of an article, the questions boil down to “What have you seen?” and “Why does it matter?”

I love knowing that the one book with Bill’s byline (as opposed to the dozens or hundreds he inspired, improved, or edited), published when he was 33, is called Naïve Questions About War and Peace. The book is the long transcript of a conversation—urged along by Bill’s faux-naïve questions—with one of the Vietnam War’s main defenders, Eugene V. Rostow. Rostow keeps giving Bill high theory as a rationale for the war. Bill keeps asking “What are you trying to say here?” and “Why does it matter?”

William Alvin Whitworth was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1937. He grew up in Little Rock, attended Central High School, received a B.A. from the University of Oklahoma, and then returned to Little Rock as a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette. Among the stories he covered was the fight over desegregation, centered on his old high school. At the Gazette, Bill met two people who became lifelong friends—Ernest Dumas and Charles Portis, later a novelist (Norwood, True Grit, The Dog of the South). In 1963, Bill followed Portis to Manhattan to take a job at the New York Herald Tribune, where his newsroom colleagues included Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Dick Schaap, and the photographer Jill Krementz. On his second day at the Trib, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. During the years that followed, Bill covered John Lindsay’s New York City mayoral race, Robert F. Kennedy’s Senate race, the first Harlem riots, the free-speech movement at Berkeley, the Vietnam anti-war protests—he got tear-gassed a lot—and the Beatles’ first trip to the United States. He was in the Ed Sullivan Theater for their American-television debut.

Krementz showed some of Bill’s clips to her friend Brendan Gill, a staff writer and drama critic for The New Yorker, who in turn shared them with the magazine’s editor, William Shawn. One day Bill got a call from Shawn out of the blue, asking him to come by for a conversation. As Bill recalled in an oral history for the Pryor Center, at the University of Arkansas, “We had several mysterious meetings—mysterious to me, because it was never specified why we were talking.” Until finally Shawn offered him a job. He started at The New Yorker in 1966.

For the next seven years, he wrote full-time for the magazine, mainly features under the “Profiles” and “Reporter at Large” rubrics. A number of his articles from that time would live in the magazine Hall of Fame, if such a place existed—among them his profiles of the Theocratic Party’s recurring presidential candidate, Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, and of the television-talk-show host Joe Franklin.

In the early 1970s, Bill began to spend less time writing and more time editing. Among his writers were the journalist and historian Frances FitzGerald, the film critic Pauline Kael, and the biographer Robert Caro, whose first book, The Power Broker, about Robert Moses, Bill excerpted for the magazine. In the late 1970s, Shawn began handing off some of his duties to Bill, who for several years served as his de facto deputy and heir apparent.

In 1980, the real-estate developer Mortimer B. Zuckerman bought The Atlantic, which had been flailing financially under its previous ownership. He offered the job of editor to Bill, who accepted it only after Zuckerman agreed that he would never meddle in editorial affairs—a promise that he kept. For his first issue as editor—April 1981—Bill featured a Philip Roth short story on the cover. The Whitworth-Roth friendship would last for decades, until Roth’s death, interrupted only for a few years in the 1990s when, after a scorching, two-sentence dismissal of one of his novels by The Atlantic’s book reviewer Phoebe-Lou Adams, Roth boxed up all his back issues of the magazine and mailed them to Bill, with a note saying that he would never speak to him again. And he didn’t, for a number of years. Then one day a postcard from Roth arrived in the mail. “Bill,” it read, “Let’s kiss and make up.”

One early coup for Whitworth’s Atlantic was an extensive excerpt—spread over several issues—from the first volume of Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Writers such as Seymour Hersh, V. S. Naipaul, and Garry Wills soon began to appear in the magazine. The December 1981 cover story—“The Education of David Stockman,” by William Greider, a news editor at The Washington Post—revealed that Ronald Reagan’s own budget director believed the new administration’s “supply side” economic program to be essentially specious. The article, based on lengthy conversations with Stockman, caused a furor. Over the years, Bill would publish work by Elijah Anderson, Saul Bellow, A. S. Byatt, Gregg Easterbrook, Louise Erdrich, Ian Frazier, Jane Jacobs, Robert D. Kaplan, George F. Kennan, Randall Kennedy, Tracy Kidder, William Langewiesche, Bobbie Ann Mason, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, E. O. Wilson, Gore Vidal, and many more. Crucially, the roster did not consist only of contributors who were already big names. The writer Holly Brubach recalls her own experience when she first sought to write for The Atlantic:

I was in my twenties, and, for reasons I found hard to fathom, Bill believed in me—this was long before I believed in myself. The handful of writers I’d encountered claimed that they’d always felt destined for a life dedicated to the making of literature, that they’d begun keeping a journal in childhood; they never seemed to doubt that their ideas were worthy of the reader’s attention. On that basis, I told Bill, I didn’t think I was a writer. He asked me if I trusted his judgment. Of course I did. “Then why don’t you just proceed on faith for a while?” he replied.

Another contributor, Benjamin Schwarz, describes his first encounter:

“Mr. Schwarz? This is Bill Whitworth, at The Atlantic.” So Bill introduced himself to me, a neophyte writer fumbling at a career shift, when we first spoke, in 1995. I’d sent Bill an unsolicited, provocative manuscript barely a week before, and he was calling to tell me he’d like to run it as the cover story. That was all Bill: open toward an unknown writer, confident in his judgment, impervious to reputation and approved opinion.

He was eager to publish points of view he did not agree with, so long as they adhered to certain standards of rigor, and to publish articles that he may not have cared for stylistically, noting that homogeneity of taste soon makes any publication feel stale. Nicholas Lemann, an Atlantic contributor during most of the Whitworth years, described a quality in writing that Bill always looked for:

When I went to work for him, I had a strong impulse to become a Gay Talese–style “literary journalist,” and he cured me of that. He insisted that a piece, or at least a major piece, have a strong and original point to make, whatever its virtues were as a piece of writing. And he was completely, uncannily immune to whatever the liberal/media conventional take of the moment was. You had to say something that the rest of the world was not also saying. That has really stayed with me—I try to put the work that I do to Bill’s test every day.

With the art director Judy Garlan, Bill also made The Atlantic a showcase for art and graphic design, something that it had never been. Work by Edward Sorel, Seymour Chwast, Guy Billout, and István Bányai, among others, appeared regularly in its pages. The Atlantic began to win awards for its design, not just its journalism.

During the two decades of Whitworth’s tenure as editor, The Atlantic was a finalist for dozens of National Magazine Awards and the winner of nine. Bill didn’t especially relish the compliments that began to pour in, about how he had revived the “once staid” Atlantic. He had gone back to look, he would explain, and his three immediate predecessors had deservedly won similar accolades. It made you wonder, he said, when the magazine could have actually been in that staid condition. In any case, he guessed, his own years on the job would one day become the staid foil to some successor’s resuscitation—and fine with him. As long as this kept happening with every handover, it was good news for the magazine.

Writers remember Bill’s conversations about articles as shrewd, gentle, and patient. His comments on galley proofs, meant for a writer’s editor alone, were more direct, sometimes requiring diplomatic translation before being passed along. He wrote in pencil in a tiny but perfect script, a sort of 20th-century Carolingian minuscule of his own devising. There was something sacramental about the way he worked: a single lamp illuminating a Thomas Moser desk, a galley before him on a brown blotter, retractable pencil in hand, jacket off, bow tie secure, door ajar.

He had a reverence for editorial comments on galleys, and to illustrate some technical point once pulled from a file drawer a galley of an article by A. J. Liebling covered with marginal comments by William Shawn. His own comments ranged from small corrections to magisterial anathemas to unexpected excursions into questions of culture and journalism. Encountering a usage that he simply would not allow—and there were many, such as using verbs like quipped and chortled; and using convinced when you meant persuaded; and using human as a noun, instead of human being—he would circle it and write in the margin, “Let’s don’t.” References to “the average American” were banned, on the grounds that there is no such thing. A writer once began a sentence with the phrase “Taking a deep breath that rounded out her cheeks like a trumpet player’s …” Bill noted the impossibility of that feat of inhalation with the words “Try it.” Another writer wanted to use his nickname as a byline. Bill circled the “Jeff” and wrote, “Ernie Hemingway, Bob Penn Warren, Bill Faulkner, and Jim Joyce all advise against this.” As he read galleys, a word or phrase sometimes jogged a memory and led to a ballooning comment in the margin, just for the record. A mention of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood prompted a note recounting a conversation in which Shawn expressed to Bill some of his misgivings about Capote’s work.

When Bill liked an article, his praise was genuine but spare. He didn’t gush, telling writers that their work was “extraordinary” or “magnificent.” He preferred simple words with durable meanings. The apogee of his joyful reaction was a penciled “Good piece” on the last page of a galley, words that editors sometimes cut out and sent to the writer in question. One editor, visiting a writer at home, found the words framed and hanging on an office wall.

“Bill expressed himself best on paper,” recalls Corby Kummer, who joined The Atlantic staff as a young editor in the early 1980s.

In his notes on galley proofs of articles, each a master class in editing, he was intimate, playful, patient, impassioned. In person, a very slow burn. At our first meeting, in a midtown Manhattan Italian restaurant—he particularly favored Italian restaurants, I came to learn—I said, by way of starting a conversation, “This is a very business-lunch kind of a place.” Bill looked at me and said, “Well, this is a business lunch,” letting a silence fall. During the main course, he asked me what were some of my favorite books and authors. It was my turn to look at him. Had I ever, in fact, actually read a book? I was fairly sure I had, but could think of not one author or one title. Finally he described his enthusiasm for George Orwell, and I recalled that yes, I had read and admired Down and Out in Paris and London. It was The Road to Wigan Pier he found exemplary, though. Naturally, I bought it the next day.

A major innovation that Bill brought to The Atlantic was a fact-checking department. At this magazine as at most others, checking facts had mainly been the domain of copy editors, who looked up names and dates in reference books. Too often, Bill would say, publications by default depended on a single tried-and-true way of discovering whether something was wrong: “by publishing it.” Bill was shaped by his experience at The New Yorker, where fact-checking had been intensive for decades. A checking department has been part of The Atlantic’s DNA ever since. His attitude toward its importance is hard to overstate. Once, on a galley proof, he reacted to a writer’s statement that the sanctity of facts wasn’t much, but was all we had: “I can’t agree that the sanctity of facts isn’t much. After Hitler, after the Moscow show trials and the other horrors of this century, facts are precious. In one sense (science) they are the very essence of Western civilization.” He paused, then continued with his pencil on a new line: “On the other hand, the sanctity of facts isn’t all we have. We also have kindness, decency, children, Bach, Beethoven, etc.”

Yvonne Rolzhausen, currently the head of The Atlantic’s fact-checking department, recalls having Bill by her side during one especially difficult episode:

I had just started as a fact checker and was working on what was meant to be a lighter feature on the popularity of plastic surgery. We quickly realized that it was, instead, a contentious takedown of risky procedures and the surgeons performing them. As the publication deadline approached, I had harrowing phone calls with a screaming (and litigious) practitioner. Bill spent many an hour walking through the piece with me to see how I was doing. We’d sit at his desk, and he’d offer me vanilla sandwich cookies as I described the latest threats. We delayed the piece twice while I worked away on it, but I’ll always be grateful for Bill’s calm demeanor and support.

Another innovation that Bill brought to The Atlantic—and that is no longer part of its character—was a policy of not holding editorial meetings. He preferred one-on-one engagements with his editors. Like anyone, Bill had his quirks, and maybe that was one of them. When taking a writer or an editor to lunch, he insisted on sitting side by side at the restaurant, rather than across a table. (He used the same side-by-side configuration when meeting with writers in his office, sitting alongside the author in an easy chair.) His framed memorabilia—including the original Bernard Fuchs drawing of Bishop Tomlinson, for that 1966 profile—leaned haphazardly against a wall, never hung in 20 years. Bill read widely about vitamins and other supplements, his beliefs venturing at times into speculative territory, a pharmacological Area 51; if you’d been out with the flu, you might return to find pamphlets on your desk. He liked pigs, and published a fond and funny article about them in 1971 that endures as a small classic. He would order catfish whenever he saw it on a menu in the Northeast, but seemingly only to confirm that it didn’t measure up to the bottom-feeding creatures found in Arkansas.

Bill was particular about his deportment. He was once discovered at his desk with a tailor’s tape, measuring the collar of a blue button-down shirt. He was convinced—not persuaded but convinced—that Brooks Brothers, in a misguided bid for modishness, had slightly extended the point of the collar, resulting in a modest outward bulge when the collar was buttoned down. Bill described the result as a “midwestern roll,” as if this were an age-old term of art. He used that term in his months-long correspondence with Brooks Brothers executives and with Alan Flusser, the author of Clothes and the Man: The Principles of Fine Men’s Dress, whom Bill sought to enlist as an expert witness.

His knowledge of jazz was profound. He had learned to play the trumpet at a young age, and at the University of Oklahoma he’d had a band called the Bill Whitworth Orchestra. When he went to work at the Gazette, it meant spurning approaches from the Jimmy Dorsey and Stan Kenton bands. As a young reporter, he had invited the trumpeter and band leader Dizzy Gillespie, whom he’d met at a performance in St. Louis, to come to Little Rock. Gillespie did, and stayed with Bill and his mother. They remained friends. As Gillespie recalled later in a New Yorker article, Bill wrote to him after the Little Rock visit to say that brass players from all over had come to his home to “kiss the sheets.” Bill’s taste in decor might have run to beige walls and Shaker minimalism, but music for him was pure color. Terry Gross, the Fresh Air host, recalls that Bill would email about interstitial music on the show that he enjoyed but couldn’t identify. (“He also urged me to maximize my intake of Vitamin D, and start taking Vitamin K, which I didn’t even know existed.”) To be invited to “listen to some music” at his home wasn’t a casual experience—it wasn’t drinks, small talk, and something playing in the background. You sat next to him in a high-backed chair against an off-white wall, facing speakers that stood against the unadorned opposite wall. From time to time, after some inspired solo, he might turn his head to you briefly and nod.

In 1999, Mort Zuckerman sold The Atlantic to David Bradley, and Michael Kelly took over as editor. The magazine would eventually move to Washington, and Bill himself would eventually move back to Little Rock, where he enjoyed a close circle of friends. He did not retire. For some years he edited articles for The American Scholar. Rickety stacks of book manuscripts that he was editing for publishers rose from the floor of his home. The books ranged from weighty historical tomes to the acclaimed memoirs (in two volumes) of Anjelica Huston. Anne Fadiman, a former editor of The American Scholar, paints a familiar portrait of Bill at work:

When the author of a piece about which he was particularly unenthusiastic used the verb “impress” without a direct object, Bill wrote in the margin, “This maddening use of transitive verbs as intransitive is a sort of literary fungus spread by reviewers and critics.” Next to the observation that beaks enabled early birds to catch their worms, he wrote, “Hmmm. Does this work out? All birds are enabled by their beaks. Early birds enabled by their earliness.” And below a simile he judged unnecessary, he wrote, “Look, Ma! I’m writing!”

Colleagues and friends regularly made trips to Little Rock and spent a day or two. There would be dinner with Arkansas friends. Some music. Some real catfish. And Bill was available for advice from afar, editing the work of writers he admired. Holly Brubach, in recent years at work on a biography, would send Bill each chapter as she finished it, and then they’d talk for hours by phone:

Occasionally, over the course of these marathon phone sessions, we would stray from the paragraph at hand and retrieve some small experience that had lodged itself in one of our memories, and I relished those interruptions, as if we’d stopped for a picnic by the side of the road. Bill would offer a glimpse of the young man he’d been before occupying the pedestal on which I and so many others had placed him. One of these stories, prior to his career in journalism back east, involved being a young pickup musician in Little Rock, where he and a friend had landed a gig playing for Mitzi Gaynor, in town with her own show. She had nice legs. After rehearsal, he’d knocked on her dressing-room door. “Oh, hello,” she greeted him, “you’re the guy on trumpet,” before politely declining whatever it was he was proposing. “You see that man over there?” she asked. “He’s my manager, and he’s also my husband, and if I were to accept your invitation, he would kill us both.” Bill was of course gracious in the face of rejection. She shook her head, and, as he walked away, he heard her say to no one in particular, “It’s always the saxophonists and the trumpeters.”

Will the Expelled People of Chagos Finally Find Justice?

2023-10-24T09:17:08-04:00

You could be forgiven for thinking that a label on a map—in this case the British Indian Ocean Territory, or BIOT, pronounced somewhat like “buyout”—is something you could take at face value. I own a coffee mug emblazoned with the territory’s coat of arms: a Union Jack, a crown, a palm tree, and some wavy lines representing water, all displayed on a shield supported by two sea turtles. I have seen coins and stamps from the territory, and have frequently come across the domain name .io (for Indian Ocean). This entity has a flag, a website, and a commissioner in London. And there is some dry land associated with the name: the 60 or so low-lying tiny islands of the remote Chagos Archipelago, spread across 6,000 square miles of sea, near the Indian Ocean’s geographic center. I stepped foot on several of the islands last year, bringing back a vial of fine white sand that I hoped customs authorities wouldn’t mistake for something else.

BIOT was created in the 1960s as a useful fiction. The Chagos Archipelago originally formed part of the British island colony of Mauritius, some 1,300 miles to the west. As Mauritius sought independence, Britain set out to detach Chagos from the colony’s administrative jurisdiction. Keeping it separate was important so that one of the archipelago’s islands, Diego Garcia, could effectively be leased to the United States for use as a major military base. Britain was in the process of a military withdrawal “east of Suez”; the U.S. was moving in, and Diego Garcia offered a strategic location. To make the detachment from Mauritius look legitimate in international eyes, Britain claimed, falsely, that the islands were populated only by transient “contract labourers” and that, as a result, no vexing issues of self-determination were involved.

In a tone of imperial languor, a Foreign Office memo in 1966 referred to those who lived on the islands as “some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure.” For security reasons, the U.S. wanted them gone, and Britain was happy to oblige. The several thousand people of Chagos, whose enslaved ancestors had been brought to the archipelago mainly from Madagascar and Mozambique more than two centuries before, worked chiefly in the harvesting and processing of coconuts for their oil. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, they were forcibly expelled under the pretense that they hadn’t really been inhabitants at all. The new empty zone of atolls was renamed the British Indian Ocean Territory. The motto on its escutcheon reads In tutela nostra Limuria (“Limuria is in our charge”), the reference being to a mythical lost continent. The Americans occupied Diego Garcia, and when the airport runway was finished, the comedian Bob Hope arrived on one of his USO tours to entertain them.

The Chagossians have been seeking redress ever since—some mixture of reparations, an apology, a pathway to British citizenship, and the right of return. Mauritius has been seeking redress too—it wants its islands back, and has declared that it would allow the Chagossians to return, if they so wished. Those who remember life on Chagos are now old, and they and their descendants are spread across Mauritius, the Seychelles, and Great Britain itself. They are not united in their outlook. By now, it is likely that relatively few would exercise an option to reside permanently in the archipelago; they would like to be able to visit, however. Many are more interested in better treatment in the places they now live, and in compensation. Affection for Mauritius is not always deep. But starting three decades ago, some of the Chagossians began bringing legal actions in British courts, even as the government of Mauritius began pursuing its own claims through international courts. Unexpectedly, both sets of plaintiffs secured some victories. Quiet negotiations are now under way involving Britain and Mauritius, and the U.S. can reasonably be assumed to be involved behind the scenes. In the next year or so, the sun may finally set on the British Indian Ocean Territory.

The international lawyer Philippe Sands tells this story, of the Chagossians’ long exile and their fight for some form of justice, in The Last Colony. His account ranges across history while giving voice to the living. He has himself been involved in some of the legal battles. I have known Sands ever since I helped publish excerpts from his investigation into the use of torture at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility and how U.S. government lawyers justified it. Sands went on to write East West Street, about the origins of the legal concepts of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity”—an account that intersects with his own family’s experience during the Holocaust. His book The Ratline, which had a parallel life as a popular podcast, centered on an SS Gruppenführer and war criminal who, after the war, took refuge in the Vatican and died there under mysterious circumstances.

The Last Colony does not cover the endgame of the Chagos saga, which continues to unfold, but the book is animated by the belief that an end may be in sight. International law is peculiar: It often doesn’t seem to matter until suddenly, after decades have gone by, it does. The legal process can be tedious, and not just for the lawyers—but this short book is not a treatise. Sands wisely builds some of his narrative around the life of Liseby Elysé. She had been born in the Chagos Archipelago—on Île du Coin, an island in the Peros Banhos atoll—and was barely 20, recently married, when, in 1973, she, her husband, and everyone else in the atoll were rounded up, given a few hours to pack a single suitcase each, and made to board a ship for Mauritius, a six-day voyage away. Elysé was pregnant, and would lose her baby after her arrival in Port Louis. All pets had to be left behind. They were hunted down and shot, or herded into coconut-drying sheds and gassed, events memorably chronicled by the journalist Simon Winchester.

Nearly 50 years later, in 2018, Liseby Elysé was the person chosen to describe the experience of expulsion to the World Court, in The Hague. Sands writes:

Madame Elysé’s statement was projected on two large screens that hung above the judges, words and images broadcast around the world. In faraway Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius, the proceedings were shown live on national television, as her friends gathered in a community centre to watch.

The Chagossians had been trying to leverage the legal system for decades. One effort was driven by a man named Olivier Bancoult, who was just a boy on Île du Coin when he and his family were forced to leave. Bancoult leads an organization called the Chagos Refugees Group and has argued in British courts that the eviction was illegal and that the victims have a right of return. He actually won his first case, in 2000, but the British government brushed it aside after 9/11—no point aggravating the Americans as they waged a war on terror. (Diego Garcia was reportedly used as a transit point for rendition flights.) The second effort—in the World Court—was driven by Mauritius, for its own purposes. Mauritius, represented by a team that includes Sands, argued that the detachment of Chagos by Britain had been based on blatant falsehoods and that the detachment and the expulsions were illegal. In 2019, the World Court ruled against Britain, a judgment endorsed by the UN General Assembly not long afterward. In February 2022, with those victories in hand, Mauritian officials and a group of Chagossians mounted a trip to the archipelago: Mauritius to assert a claim, the Chagossians to visit the islands of their birth—the first time they had done so without a British military escort.

[Read: They bent to their knees and kissed the sand]

The Last Colony includes maps and photographs that kindled my own memories of that trip, which I wrote about for The Atlantic last year. The islands of the archipelago are volcanic platforms tufted with palm trees and fringed by white sand. Sea turtles swim in the clear water of the lagoons. Giant crabs drop to the ground from trees. Ashore, the Chagossians hacked away at weeds and vines in cemeteries whose earliest gravestones bore dates from the late 18th century—a long way back for transient contract laborers. The stone churches stood roofless, each a tropical Tintern Abbey, palm trees sprouting in the naves, the floors covered thickly with coconuts. The Chagossians cleared them out, too.

The last photo in the book is of Liseby Elysé sitting on the trunk of a palm tree that leaned horizontally over a patch of sandy beach on Île du Coin. Like Sands, I remember seeing her there, bouncing gently. Whether from clear-eyed memory or the ache of nostalgia, the Chagossians often speak of the archipelago as a lost Eden. The sight of Elysé sitting on a tree trunk seemed to capture a moment from her long-ago youth, before the expulsion.

The final contours of a Chagos agreement, if there eventually is one, are still unknown. After the World Court ruling and the Chagossian pilgrimage to the archipelago, the British government seemed intent on keeping up appearances. When Queen Elizabeth died, in September 2022, the BIOT commissioner offered formal condolences “on behalf of the British Indian Ocean Territory,” as if there were something and someone to speak for. But, as Sands notes, the wider world has already begun to treat a settlement as inevitable. The Universal Postal Union has banned BIOT stamps. The UN has relabeled its official maps.

In November 2022, Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, announced that “through negotiations, taking into account relevant legal proceedings, it is our intention to secure an agreement on the basis of international law to resolve all outstanding issues, including those relating to the former inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago”—a statement that was interpreted as somewhere between opening a door and throwing in the towel. In February of this year, the U.S. Department of State called the expulsions from Chagos “regrettable,” implicitly (if coolly) accepting the historical account of American policy laid out in David Vine’s 2011 book, Island of Shame. Both Mauritius and Britain have indicated that, whatever the ultimate outcome, the U.S. base on Diego Garcia will likely remain more or less as it is. Only the landlord will change.

I spoke recently with Olivier Bancoult, the Chagos activist, as he passed through Washington. No one thinks seriously in terms of independence for Chagos—the goal at the moment is for some sort of special recognition as part of Mauritian sovereignty. But the Chagossians do have a flag, as well as a soccer team based near London that plays internationally. In the future, some of them may even try to move back to the archipelago, though doing so would be difficult: The buildings and infrastructure are gone, and nature has reclaimed almost everything. One could imagine that some basic support for the rest of the archipelago—to sustain a modest resettlement—could be provided by way of Diego Garcia, but such a prospect is getting far ahead of events. Bancoult and his group are not involved in the negotiations, but he was pressing his case at the State Department and on the Hill; and in press conferences; and on NPR. Then he made his way to the United Nations, in New York. When I asked Bancoult what he was looking for from the negotiations, he recited a list. But it began with just two words: “an apology.”

The Greatest Museum You’ve Never Heard Of

2023-07-07T07:00:00-04:00

In the basement of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, in Milan, a conservator named Vito Milo had just applied a small gel strip to the edge of a 500-year-old drawing in order to dissolve the glue that joined it to a larger paper frame. Now, with a scalpel, he worked loose a few millimeters of the drawing. I asked Milo what was in the gel, and after he rattled off a list of ingredients in Italian, I offered a layman’s rough translation: “special sauce.” He smiled and nodded. “Si, special sauce.”

The drawing was a page from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, and I had been invited to witness the painstaking process of its conservation. One morning last winter, I descended to the conservators’ laboratory, which occupies a room just outside the steel-and-glass doorway to the Ambrosiana’s gleaming vault. At the bottom of the stairs, I was stopped by an attendant, who took a coffee cup from my hands and placed it out of harm’s way.

The Codex Atlanticus is a 1,119-page collection of da Vinci’s engineering designs and technological dreams—for flying machines, weapons of war, hydraulic devices—along with line after line of commentary in a small, precise hand. It is the largest collection of works by da Vinci in the world. The folio pages, once bound into a single volume, are now preserved as individual sheets. The one Milo was bent over—folio 855 recto, with its design for a parabolic swing bridge—rested on the glass of an LED light box. Da Vinci’s brown ink stood out sharply against a glowing background. Looking closely, inches from the page, I could make out the suggestion of a little man on horseback atop the bridge, rendered in a few flicks—a playful addition for scale.

I was reminded of this visit to the Ambrosiana when I saw the announcement of a da Vinci exhibition, “Imagining the Future,” at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, in Washington, D.C. Twelve original folios from the Codex Atlanticus have just gone on display—the first time any of the Codex pages have traveled to the United States. The show, which runs through August 20, has understandably gotten attention: Everyone knows what “da Vinci” signifies—his name recognition is universal.

“Ambrosiana,” of course, is another story.

The Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Piero Cruciatti / Anadolu Agency / Getty)

The Biblioteca Ambrosiana is one of the world’s least-known great museums—to the public, at any rate, if not to scholars. It occupies a handsome 400-year-old building, just a few blocks from Milan’s famous cathedral, but receives only about 180,000 visitors a year. The Vatican Museums, in Rome, welcome that number every week. The Ambrosiana was founded in 1607 by Cardinal Federico Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan, who named it after the city’s patron, St. Ambrose, and endowed it with his own extensive collection of books, manuscripts, and works of art.

The paintings owned by the Ambrosiana are small in number but choice in quality: Botticelli, Caravaggio, Titian, Bruegel, and da Vinci himself. The newly restored preliminary cartoon done by Raphael before he painted The School of Athens—nine feet high and 26 feet long—takes up an entire wall of one gallery. A monumental study in charcoal and lead-white on gray paper, it is emotionally more vivid than the finished fresco. In other galleries, odd relics are preserved behind glass: a lock of hair from Lucrezia Borgia; the gloves worn by Napoleon as he watched his army fall to the Duke of Wellington’s, in 1815.

The books and manuscripts come from all over the world: Borromeo’s collecting sensibility was cultural and cosmopolitan, not religious or provincial. The Ambrosiana opened its doors to anyone who could read and write—one of the first libraries in Europe to do so. It did not chain books in place, as other repositories did, preferring a different kind of security: The penalty for theft, spelled out on a marble plaque that can still be seen, was excommunication.

Over the years, the collection has been augmented, notably by the acquisition of the Codex Atlanticus, in 1637. Da Vinci had died more than a century earlier, leaving his drawings and notes to one of his students. Many of these folio pages were later gathered and bound by the late-Renaissance sculptor Pompeo Leoni into a volume whose dimensions gave the Codex its name. (Atlanticus refers to a large paper size used for atlases.) The Codex then followed a picaresque path into the hands of a Milanese nobleman, who bequeathed it to the Ambrosiana.

The folio pages, which span a 40-year period of da Vinci’s work, are covered not only with sketches and schemata but also with da Vinci’s singular “mirror writing”—he was left-handed, and wrote from right to left. Not all of the exposition is technical. In one place, da Vinci scribbled some words of reminder to buy charcoal, for drawing. The Codex Atlanticus contains his last known dated note, from 1518: “On the 24th of June, the day of Saint John, in Amboise in the Palace of Cloux.” Da Vinci died in Amboise the following year, at age 67.

The most traumatic event in the Ambrosiana’s life was the arrival of Napoleon. He crossed the Alps in 1796, and as he made his way down the Italian peninsula, he sent wagonloads of plunder back to Paris. The hundreds of paintings and statues taken from Italy—Laöcoon and His Sons, from Rome; Venus de’ Medici, from Florence; the bronze horses atop St. Mark’s, from Venice—would by themselves constitute a world-class museum. In fact, they did: the Louvre. Napoleon took books and manuscripts too. Much of the Vatican archives made its way north. So did the Codex Atlanticus.

After Napoleon’s defeat, the plundered treasures of Europe were supposed to be returned to their places of origin. Some were; some weren’t. The Vatican couldn’t afford to cart back all of its archives; many documents were sold for scrap and used in Paris to make paper or to wrap meat and cheese. France held back many items. In the end, only about half of what was lost to le spoliazioni napoleoniche—“the Napoleonic looting”—was actually returned. The Codex Atlanticus was one of those items. It has been lodged safely in the Ambrosiana ever since.

Two da Vinci folios from the Codex Atlanticus (Mondadori Portfolio)

Safe from marauders, but not from everything. During the 1960s, specialists took apart the massive single volume of the Codex and reframed each of the 1,000-plus folios with a modern paper support, leaving both sides of each folio visible when necessary. When that was done, the pages were rebound into 12 smaller volumes. Then, in 2006, a conservator from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, raised an alarm. Examining the Codex, she had discovered black spots on the pages, possibly caused by mold.

An investigation began. The spotting, it turned out, was caused not by mold but mainly by mercury salts, probably in the adhesive attaching each folio to its paper support. Fortunately, the spotting hadn’t affected the da Vinci folios themselves—only the paper around them. The Codex volumes were taken apart. Each affected folio had to be detached from its old paper frame and given a new one. Henceforward, the folios would be preserved as single sheets.

Which brings the story back to Vito Milo, working outside the Ambrosiana’s vault. He wore a white lab coat and white latex gloves. His features were bottom-lit by the golden glow from the box. As he worked, he spoke about the intimacy of this connection to da Vinci: how you can see his erasures, his mistakes, the little notes he wrote to himself. It would take about a month, he said, before this particular drawing was free of its old paper support, cleaned of the old glue, and reaffixed with a new kind of adhesive to a new support. Then he would be onto the next folio.

One consequence of unbinding the Codex is that the folios could be digitized. Another is that individual sheets can travel and be displayed, making possible exhibitions such as the one now in Washington. At the Ambrosiana itself, a rotating selection of a dozen pages is now always on public view in display boxes, climate-controlled and bulletproof. The protocols are strict: To prevent deterioration brought on by natural light, a folio can be exhibited for only three months. Then it must rest in darkness for three years.

The Ambrosiana remains an ecclesiastical institution, and Alberto Rocca, the director of its picture gallery, is a Catholic priest. I met with him for an hour in a Baroque ground-floor office, its ceiling high, its bookshelves sagging. A member of the Ambrosiana’s governing College of Fellows, Rocca oversees not only the picture gallery but also a network of programs for far-flung scholars. He is trim and professional. Take off the Roman collar, and he would be at home among the staff at the Rijksmuseum or at Christie’s.

Our conversation ranged over many topics. Looking back: how unusual Borromeo’s cross-cultural outlook was at the time, and also how unusual his wish to make books freely available to the public. Looking forward: the difficulty of sustaining an institution of this kind. The Ambrosiana’s art gallery can support itself; the research library, with its 1 million books and 40,000 manuscripts, cannot. Europeans, Rocca noted, don’t have the philanthropic tradition that Americans do.

It is said that Napoleon himself walked out of the library with Petrarch’s own copy of Virgil under his arm. (It was eventually returned.) It is certainly true that some material by da Vinci did not come back, and likely never will. Rocca did not wish to dwell on history, even if Napoleon clearly had a lot to answer for. On the plus side, Rocca said, “at least we have the gloves he had when he was defeated at Waterloo.”

My Night in the Sistine Chapel

2023-05-11T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Alex Majoli

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At the Vatican Museums, the nightly ritual of the keys begins in Room 49A, a tight, windowless chamber, generally referred to as il bunker, which I entered one evening last November from a grassy courtyard as rain began to fall. The keeper of the keys—the clavigero—is a former member of the carabinieri named Gianni Crea. He has a staff of about a dozen, and keeps nearly 3,000 keys in the bunker. Can he match each one to a lock? At the Vatican, yes, he said; he has trouble at home. Some keys, like No. 401, which weighs a pound and opens the main interior door to the oldest of the museum buildings, were forged centuries ago; others resemble keys you’d find in a hardware store or a kitchen drawer. Many have plastic tags with handwritten labels. They open every utility box, every window, every gate and portal.

The heavy bronze doors at the museums’ main entrance are pulled shut every afternoon at 4 p.m. and locked with a key numbered 2,000. Over the next two hours, until the exit doors are also closed, the last visitors proceed through the hallways. Behind them, here and there, lights begin to dim. Metal detectors power down. At the glassed-in security station in the Atrium of the Four Gates, departing guards punch time cards. Behind the glass, alongside a crucifix and a photograph of Pope Francis, a flatscreen presents live images from security cameras. The screen gives the enclosure a quiet glow.

Each sector of the museum has its own large key ring, the kind carried by a jailer. On this night, when the last of the visitors had gone, Crea piled a tangle of keys on the counter of the security station, then handed out key rings to his staff. The lockdown got under way. He kept a larger set of keys for himself, so that he and I could make our way anywhere.

Before leaving the bunker, Crea had taken a key from an envelope. The flap, now torn, bore his signature and had been stamped with the papal coat of arms. He had picked up the key that morning from a command post at the Porta Sant’Anna, one of the Vatican gateways, and would return it shortly before midnight. He handed the key to me, gesturing to a tiny, unmarked vault in the wall of the bunker. I opened the vault and found another key. If Lewis Carroll had invented a nuclear-launch protocol for the Holy See, this might have been it. The key in the vault was the key to the Sistine Chapel.

I HAD COME OFTEN to the Vatican Museums ever since a first visit when I was in grade school. Over the years I had written about some of the museums’ activities, and on several occasions had met with the director, the art historian Barbara Jatta. But I had long wanted to experience the museums in a different way: to wander the four and a half miles of hallways after the doors close and to be there in the early hours before the doors open; to explore the collection—the 20,000 sculptures and paintings and other works on display—as night settles over Rome and the galleries adjust to a quieter state of being. A few months ago, I got my wish: The Vatican Museums agreed to let me spend most of a night inside and to go wherever I wanted. I would always be in the company of the clavigero and of another member of the staff, by turns Matteo Alessandrini, the head of the press office, and a colleague, Megan Eckley, both of whom I knew well. Not unusually, Matteo represents a second generation with a Vatican calling. His father, Costanzo, had served Pope John Paul II as a personal bodyguard.

The nightly lockdown begins: Gianni Crea at the central security station, Atrium of the Four Gates (Alex Majoli / Magnum / Vatican for The Atlantic)

The Vatican Museums—there are many separate units—occupy what is essentially a rectangle. To the north, the Belvedere Palace, which began life as a 15th-century papal villa, lies hard against Vatican City’s massive walls. To the south, near St. Peter’s Basilica, a quarter of a mile away, is the Sistine Chapel. Two long loggias link north to south and form the rectangle’s sides. The space these buildings enclose is divided into courtyards.

We decided to start the evening where the museums themselves had started, in the Belvedere Palace. The creators of what are now the Vatican Museums, half a millennium ago, were driven by a radical change in perspective. For centuries, the bountiful supply of ancient statuary unearthed in Rome had been burned for lime to make mortar. With the revival of classical learning, Renaissance popes began to preserve the marble instead, putting the best pieces on display in the Belvedere’s Octagonal Courtyard. The collection grew and the mission broadened. In time, visionaries such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Antonio Canova created something like a modern museum. It remains modern in its scholarship and expertise, and in many of its operations.

But it is also the world’s oldest major museum, and, as Jatta emphasizes, a spiritual dimension is part of its mission. Some precincts are consecrated space. The gift shops sell more rosaries than anything else. The original buildings were meant for the personal use of the pope, and in places encompass a confusing warren of small rooms and narrow staircases that were never intended to receive 7 million visitors a year. The scale of the Vatican Museums can be hard to comprehend—20 acres of wall space—and the task of renewal and conservation is perpetual. Masonry subsides and cracks. Frescoes fade. Roofs leak. Only four spaces have air-conditioning. The museum complex is not a static object. It is an organism, and life flows through it.

[Read: An American art critic’s 70-year love affair with Rome]

Earlier in the day, I had stopped in to see Marco Maggi, the head of the conservator’s office. His job comes with a pedigree—the first person to hold it was appointed in 1543. The office oversees the various restoration laboratories but its primary responsibility is to keep materials from deteriorating in the first place—statues and paintings, to be sure, but also mummy linens, Roman glass, medieval parchment, Renaissance tapestries, and items made of bronze or bone, feathers or sealskin. Reflecting on the biography of every object—the unique journey each has made to this place across miles and years— Maggi repeated an observation he’d once heard, and that stayed with me all night. “Time,” he said, “is an emotion.”

THE IDEA THAT A MUSEUM comes alive at night—that works of art themselves might relax and chat when people are not there—animates movies and novels and children’s books. And there is a sort of truth to the idea: After hours, life goes on. As we set out among the galleries, faint noises from the ceiling called attention to a skylight. Workers above could be heard talking as they washed the exterior, their movements backlit like those of puppets in a shadow play. Elsewhere, cleaners with soft brushes in their hands and vacuum cleaners strapped to their backs gently dusted imperial Roman statues—an animal’s claws, an athlete’s thighs, an emperor’s beard. In a conservation laboratory set among exhibits, technicians in white coats worked late, repairing the frayed edge of a woven artifact from Africa.

The museums at night can feel like an elaborate play structure: gilded corridors the length of a football field, rooms teeming with a stone zoo of lions and crocodiles and other marble creatures, darkened galleries and countless places to hide. Every door conceals a surprise. In the Belvedere Palace, the clavigero unlocked a gate that gave access to a tower encasing the Bramante staircase, a spiral ramp named for the chief architect of Pope Julius II. It is a double helix—people can ascend and descend without crossing paths—and large enough to accommodate a papal carriage, as it once had to do. The staircase links the lofty interior of the palace to an exterior private entrance far below. We stepped outside, at ground level, into a downpour. A fountain in the shape of a galleon sprayed jets of water from masts and cannons, as if trying to fight off the weather. Back upstairs, the Octagonal Courtyard was dimly lit and open to the sky. Rain glazed a ring of sarcophagi and pelted a central pool. Some of the Vatican’s original treasures are still here. One alcove frames the ancient statue known as Laocoön. I moved a velvet rope aside and walked behind the statue, and was surprised to find an object affixed to the base: a lone marble arm.

Laocoön was the man who tried to warn his fellow Trojans about that gift of a wooden horse. Angry, one of the gods sent serpents to strangle Laocoön and his sons—the moment captured in marble. The sculpture, from the first century B.C., had been unearthed in a vineyard near the Colosseum in 1506—Michelangelo was present for the excavation—and became the nucleus of the Vatican collection. But bits were missing, including the father’s right arm. Could the arm be restored?

Restoration was once standard practice; along with fig leaves, classical statues gained hands, noses, and entire limbs made from plaster or marble. As recently as a few decades ago, souvenir-seekers might snap off a plaster finger, leaving a trace of white dust on the floor.

Left: The Niccoline Chapel, inside the Apostolic Palace, with frescoes by Fra Angelico. Right: The statue of Laocoön in the Octagonal Courtyard, the nucleus of the Vatican Museums. (Alex Majoli / Magnum / Vatican for The Atlantic)

To restore Laocoön, the pope’s architect held a competition, appointing Raphael as judge. Eventually an arm was added, slightly bent but reaching upward—the version preserved in countless copies. Michelangelo was skeptical; an experienced anatomist, he inferred that Laocoön’s arm must have been angled sharply behind his head. Four hundred years later, a big piece of the missing limb was discovered. Michelangelo had been right. The original arm was reattached. The discarded arm was left behind the statue, where on a rainy night the beam of a flashlight picked it out.

A museum loses something when visitors are gone: People are part of the display. But it gains something in return. In the emptiness of night, you become acutely aware of your physical senses. Eyes adjust to changing gradations of light. Black windows become mirrors. Shadows dance at light’s command: Projected on a wall, marble stallions pulling a Roman chariot seem to rear in anger; an unfinished angel by Bernini in clay and wire becomes even larger and hovers protectively over a Caravaggio. Faint smells come into their own. A whiff of paint lingers in a room that has been newly restored. A scent of candle wax pervades a papal chapel. The acoustic environment is unexpected. Every sound creates an echo—voices, footsteps, keys, raindrops. The high-low wail of a siren from the city outside seems impossibly remote. There is an urge to touch, to run a hand across surfaces like the underside of a Raphael tapestry, whose filaments of golden thread give the appearance of a circuit board.

Without the bustle, I was aware of another sense too, a kind of sixth sense: a consciousness of actual lives bound up with whatever I was looking at. In the Pinacoteca, the picture gallery, we passed Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint Jerome; Leonardo’s fingerprint was clearly visible in a patch of blue-green sky. A few rooms away, lit up and richly colored in an otherwise darkened space, Raphael’s The Transfiguration might have been a stained-glass window. It was easy to see why this place had been chosen for a memorial Mass, a few weeks earlier, recognizing staff members who had died or suffered loss in the previous year. On the same floor, in the older rooms of the Belvedere Palace, the presence of Michelangelo was inescapable: A visitor sees what he would have seen. Michelangelo came to this place to study the Belvedere Torso, a marble dating to the first century B.C. He thought of the torso—its arms missing, its legs cut off at the knees—as his “teacher” and used the taut anatomy in his portrayal of Adam on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. In an adjacent room stands a basin, carved from a single slab of imperial porphyry, that may once have graced Emperor Nero’s Golden House. It is said that Nero and his wife used to bathe in it, a detail I pass along understanding that It is said, a staple phrase in Rome, generally means “Don’t look too closely.” But ordinary people are also reflected in the basin’s history. The porphyry, weighing half a ton, had been quarried in Egypt. Hundreds of lives were invested in hauling and floating it to Rome. It would not have been an easy task.

There was not a living soul in the gleaming straightaway of the Chiaramonti loggia, which extends south from the Belvedere Palace, and yet it was full of life. Marble heads of ancient Romans are arranged side by side on tiers of shelves that stretch for 100 yards. Some are idealized renderings of gods and emperors. Some are busts of people one might actually have known. They capture receding hairlines, double chins, unfortunate fads in coiffure; they capture pride, love, vanity, sadness. The names of many of these men and women have been lost. In some cases, all that is certain is a place of origin and a date, along the lines of Syria, 1st Century B.C. or Dacia, 3rd Century A.D. But the individuality of the features, the imprint of personality, is too strong to ignore. I could imagine these people suddenly alive, marble becoming flesh, eyes blinking in surprise. Their expressive faces send a message that recalls an inscription in Rome’s Capuchin ossuary: What You Are Now, We Once Were.

The shadow of a stallion comes between a discus thrower and the god Hermes in the Hall of the Chariot. (Alex Majoli / Magnum / Vatican for The Atlantic)

Among the 1,000 pieces of sculpture in the loggia, two busts were gone, their absence as obvious as missing teeth; all that remained were ragged circles marking where the bases had been fixed to a shelf. A few weeks earlier, an American tourist had told a guard that he needed to see the pope. Informed that a meeting was not possible, he had knocked the two busts to the floor. One of them—Veiled Head of an Old Man—lost part of his nose and an ear. The bust is being repaired, but this old Roman, whoever he was, will forever bear the marks of an encounter in 2022.

[From the May 1996 issue: Backlogs of history]

The Vatican Museums employ undercover personnel known as volanti, who walk among the crowds. But incidents still occur. In August, climate protesters from an organization called Last Generation glued their hands to the base of Laocoön. (A few weeks earlier, the same group had splashed pea soup on Van Gogh’s The Sower, also in Rome.) The Vatican has a court system but few jail cells. The Laocoön perpetrators were remanded to Italy, a few yards away.

The American tourist who knocked over the busts likewise found himself in Italian custody. Word of the incident spread quickly. When Barbara Jatta saw Pope Francis at an event not long afterward, his first words to the museums’ director were “Who was that poor man?”

We left ancient Rome behind and headed for the newest part of the museums—the Anima Mundi gallery, devoted to works from beyond the Western world. The route to the gallery led past a terrace that looked out across the Vatican gardens to the dome of St. Peter’s and the misty silhouettes of umbrella pines. The dome was lit gently, except for the blazing lantern atop its crown. Antonio Paolucci, a former director of the museums, used to say that the best time to view the dome at night would have been centuries ago, when only the moon gave illumination. Electric lighting, he felt, made the lantern look like a birthday cake. Tonight, in the wet air, it wore a halo.

I was not prepared for the beauty of the Anima Mundi gallery—a sleek, modern space the size of a small warehouse. The gallery was dark but the collection was revealed in illuminated vitrines that arose like glass meeting rooms in an open-plan office. Many of the objects had been gifts to popes. Father Nicola Mapelli, the director of the gallery, walked among objects he especially loves: funerary poles and wandjina rock art from Australia; a ritual mask from Tierra del Fuego; a red-eyed, black-skinned Madonna and Child from New Guinea.

Museum officials sometimes speak of Anima Mundi as “the next Sistine Chapel,” and a big part of the museums’ future. Most of the Church’s growth is outside Europe and North America. Of course, the existing Sistine Chapel remains a big part of the future too. We made our way toward the chapel and the Raphael Rooms, at the far end of the rectangle. Pausing by a window, Matteo Alessandrini pointed to the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery, on the Vatican grounds. The time was about 10 o’clock, and a single room was lit—the salone of the pope emeritus, Benedict XVI. He had only a month to live.

Left: The Sistine Chapel. To the left of the altar, under Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, stands the door to the Room of Tears. Right: Father Nicola Mapelli and lab technicians working after hours at the conservation laboratory in the Anima Mundi gallery. (Alex Majoli / Magnum / Vatican for The Atlantic)

A few moments later, Matteo indicated a small handle in a frescoed wall and pulled out a thin rectangle of masonry. Behind it was a pane of glass, embedded in the wall centuries ago as an early-warning system: Cracked glass would mean the building had begun to subside. I reached in with a finger. We were okay for now.

In the Raphael Rooms—four chambers that Raphael covered with frescoes in what were once a suite of papal apartments—heavy wooden shutters had been closed against the night, but an open window was still reflected in the polished shield of a figure on an opposite wall: a trompe l’oeil joke by the artist. Gouges in the walls are still visible, the work of soldiers with pikes during the Sack of Rome in 1527. Raphael had been painting the last of these four rooms, the Room of Constantine, when a fever carried him off. Graffiti, centuries old, has been scratched into its lower walls: fu fatto papa pio iv, someone wrote, noting the election of a new pontiff. That was in 1559.

From the Raphael Rooms, the Sistine Chapel was only a few staircases away. Its most striking aspect, when you enter alone and in weak light, is not the frescoed ceiling but the sheer expanse of floor. During the day, when the room is packed with people, all looking up, the floor disappears. Once, years ago, lifted toward the chapel’s ceiling in the basket of a cherry picker, I had the chance of a bird’s-eye view. But I naturally looked up, and not at the five-story drop.

Now, late in the evening, after Gianni Crea turned the key and pulled the knob, an expanding trapezoid of light from the hallway behind us illuminated the intricate marble inlay ahead.

An axis of braided circles ran down the length to the altar, the effect dynamic and yet placid. This is the tessellated floor that Michelangelo would have known—the one that received any droppings of paint that missed the scaffolding or his face. It’s the floor Raphael would have walked on when (it is said) he took advantage of Michelangelo’s absence from Rome to sneak a look at the work in progress. The chapel would not be cleaned until morning, but as lights came on I saw little in the way of litter—unusual in a room that as many as 25,000 people walk through every day. The explanation may simply be the power of this place, its sacral nature. People do leave prayers. I found a folded slip of paper on the masonry bench that runs along the walls, saw what it was, and put it back.

[From the June 1999 issue: The mirror of Dorian Gray]

Free of distraction, you have a chance to notice details—for instance, the spots high on the walls where Michelangelo was unable to paint, because his scaffolding got in the way. Or how the plane of The Last Judgment leans forward, as if to convey active urgency; the slant is obvious at the join, where the front wall meets the sidewalls. Digital sensors, visible once you look for them, collect data from all parts of the chapel. They monitor temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, and particulates, as well as the size of the crowd. The data are tracked on screens in the conservator’s office; we likely produced a blip just by opening the door and turning on a light. The Sistine Chapel is one of those few air-conditioned spaces in the Vatican Museums. The air in the room can be exchanged as often as 60 times a day. If need be, the volume of traffic can be reduced by controllers upstream. They can close doors and loop throngs into a detour, or encourage exploration. People should know about Etruscan art anyway. But the chapel never fully shakes off its millions of annual visitors—their dust, their heat, their coughs and sneezes.

Those visitors arrive through a single entrance and leave through a single exit. But there are additional doors—another thing you notice when the room stands empty. The Sistine Chapel is part of the Apostolic Palace, the official papal residence, and some doors, usually locked, lead directly into private areas. Late in the evening, an elderly priest came through the double doors in the wall farthest from the altar, perhaps drawn by light seeping underneath them at an odd hour. We were invited into the Sala Regia, an ornate hall in the Apostolic Palace where popes once received royalty, and then into the Pauline Chapel, where cardinals celebrate Mass before a papal conclave begins. It is also a private chapel for the pope. There was to be a funeral here the next morning for a dignitary identified only as un diplomatico. Michelangelo’s last paintings dominate the sidewalls of the chapel—The Conversion of Saul and The Crucifixion of Saint Peter. Peter is shown being crucified upside down, as tradition says he was. But the head is torqued, lifting off the cross so that Peter can see into the room. His dark eyes followed me all the way down the center aisle, and all the way back.

Later, another door opened, near the Sistine Chapel’s altar, and a man stood silhouetted in a bright rectangle: He was standing at the entrance to the Room of Tears. Immediately upon election, a new pope takes refuge here in order to reflect on the weight thrust upon him, and to change into a white cassock. The man in the doorway, its custodian, allowed us in.

On a wall in the Pinacoteca, the picture gallery, Caravaggio’s Deposition and the specter of a Bernini angel (Alex Majoli / Magnum / Vatican for The Atlantic)

It is a suite, not a single room. The vestibule holds a red plush Victorian love seat. White cassocks in various sizes hang on a rack in the room beyond; one of them should fit any newly elected pontiff well enough. A final room contains a small wooden desk bearing a nameplate from the most recent conclave: Bergoglio, the surname of Pope Francis. On a shelf nearby sit boxes labeled bianca and nera—chemical additives used to produce white or black smoke during a conclave, after each vote. In the vestibule, the custodian pointed to an alcove sheltering a waist-high antique cabinet. Did we know what it was? With a flourish, he opened the cabinet to reveal a commode, the oval seat upholstered in rich red leather.

The Vatican Museums go dark for everyone before midnight. It was 11 p.m., and time to leave. The lights in the Sistine Chapel were extinguished, and the door swung shut. A quarter of a mile later, Crea returned the chapel’s key to its vault. Alarms were set. Outside, Crea locked the museums’ back entrance and put the key to the vault (in a freshly sealed envelope, signed and stamped) and the key to the back door into a zippered pouch. This he deposited at a command post on his way out of the city-state. Until about 5 a.m., no one would be inside.

I would see the Sistine Chapel once more. Two hours before dawn, as the rain tapered off, the gates of the Porta Sant’Anna swung open for Crea’s BMW. One of the Swiss guards at the gate saluted and then bent to the window. The guardsmen wore not the ceremonial uniform of red, blue, and yellow but the deep-blue service uniform, still with a Renaissance flair—breeches, knee socks, tunic, beret. Instead of swords, the guards carried sidearms. They were young and fit, and looked capable of a kinetic response to Stalin’s mocking question “How many divisions has the pope?” The car was waved through.

We stopped at the command post to pick up the pouch, then drove farther into Vatican City. The car crossed a courtyard, passed under a building, made some sharp turns, and came out amid the Vatican gardens alongside a road that leads to the back entrance of the museums. This is the route typically taken by guests of the Holy See’s secretary of state and by certain other visitors. French President Emmanuel Macron had recently come this way. A year earlier, Kim Kardashian, arriving with Kate Moss, had created a stir, wearing what appeared to be a spray-on white doily; she had to put on a long coat before being allowed to enter the Sistine Chapel. Members of the staff still spoke about that visit. (Moss, they said, had been lovely.)

When other guards arrived, Crea unlocked the entrance. Inside, switches were flicked. The security station glowed once more. Tutto okay? one of the men said into a phone—a routine call to the central office of the governatorato, the Vatican’s city hall, which manages the alarm system. Yes, everything was okay. Crea began handing out rings of keys. He himself took No. 401 and proceeded to the double doors that give entry to the Belvedere Palace. Using both arms, he pulled them open.

We meandered along the Gallery of the Tapestries. The hall was dark, but a flashlight framed the risen Christ in a bright circle. We arrived once more at the Sistine Chapel. The door to the Sala Regia opened briefly, revealing a flash of color: Swiss guards stood smartly in ceremonial uniforms, helmets catching the light—an honor guard for the diplomat’s funeral. The counterpoint in the chapel was a red-haired woman in a white smock, armed with a bucket, a broom, and a mop.

She worked with propulsive energy, first wiping down the altar and then sweeping 6,000 square feet of marble floor. I introduced myself; her name was Barbara and her grip was strong. She said she cleaned not only the chapel but also the stairs leading to and from it, and the toilets nearby and some of the laboratories. The chapel took her an hour; some of her supplies were kept behind the altar. She liked starting every day like this, and explained why with an arc of her arm that took in the ceiling. The contents of her dustpan confirmed the scarcity of litter: six small museum tickets, a handful of tissues, a couple of candy wrappers, a scrunchie. When her sweeping was done, Barbara opened a wooden cabinet against a wall and wheeled out a machine resembling a small Zamboni. Pushing it by hand, she polished the entire floor. The triumphant figure of Christ in The Last Judgment seemed protective, watching over Barbara as she worked. I knew that the figure’s torso had been based on that of Laocoön, but saw now that the right arm was angled over his head, as Michelangelo knew it should be, not raised above. He had made his point.

The recently restored Room of Constantine, the chamber Raphael was working on when he died (Alex Majoli / Magnum / Vatican for The Atlantic)

The museums’ doors would soon be opening. The hallways had begun to awaken. Guards passed by in twos and threes. Salespeople unloaded boxes from carts: fresh supplies of guidebooks and rosaries, key chains and plush toys. An aroma of espresso trailed from a break room. Near the gates, metal detectors blinked on. Outside, below the Vatican’s high walls, the colored flags of tour guides poked above the crowd.

We sought higher ground, climbing to a terrace that overlooks the Cortile della Pigna, the Pinecone Courtyard. The view, Barbara Jatta told me, had made this terrace a favorite spot: It offers a panorama of the Vatican and all of Rome. The storm had passed. A thin haze lay over the city, pierced by domes and towers. The sun, low above the Alban Hills, was on the verge of breaking through.

I was conscious of the way the various cogs of a museum’s life turn at different rates. The slow, unending process of accretion over centuries. The biography, sometimes tortuous, of every object. The cyclical flood of visitors. The start-and-stop progress through a gallery. And the sudden spark of provocation, when something you see triggers a thought or a memory—a long-ago visit here with a parent, a moment of love or friendship, an inexplicable vibration of the spirit. In that instant, a museum exists for the visitor alone. I had been carrying around Marco Maggi’s words like a riddle—“Time is an emotion”—even as the meaning fell into place.

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “Night at the Vatican.”

The Literary Legacy of C. Michael Curtis

2023-01-16T09:53:15-05:00

A few years ago, the novelist and short-story writer Lauren Groff reflected on what had launched one of the more sparkling literary careers of recent years:

When C. Michael Curtis pulled my short story “L. DeBard and Aliette” from the slush pile in 2005, I was in my first semester in graduate school at Madison. In the years since I’d graduated from college, I’d been a bartender and administrative assistant and had worked my brain and fingers raw, trying and mostly failing to write well on my own. In that time, I finished three and a half apprentice novels and countless short stories, none of which was very good. Finally, with the story that The Atlantic took, I had at last written a story that was not only good enough but good enough for Curtis’s sharp eye and exacting standards.

Groff went on: “My entire life as a writer unfolded from that moment of acceptance from C. Michael Curtis and The Atlantic, and the sheer luck of that snip in time feels holy to me.”

Mike Curtis, who died last week at the age of 88, was a member of The Atlantic’s staff for 57 years. The American literary empyrean is thickly populated with writers Mike discovered or nurtured. For good reason: Over his long career as an Atlantic editor—and as a teacher of writing at Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Tufts, Boston University, Bennington College, and, most recently, Wofford College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he co-occupied the John C. Cobb Chair in the Humanities with his wife, the novelist Betsy Cox—Mike was a tireless champion of short fiction who loved nothing more than discovering new talent. “The best part of my job,” he once said, “is turning over all those rocks and finding a silver dollar now and then.”

During his long tenure at The Atlantic, Mike turned over a lot of rocks, and found a lot of silver dollars. Among the writers whose work that Mike was the first, or among the first, to discover and publish in a national magazine were Charles Baxter, Ann Beattie, Ethan Canin, Louise Erdrich, Rebecca Lee, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jay McInerny, James Alan McPherson, Tim O’Brien, John Sayles, Akhil Sharma, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Tobias Wolff. Mike also worked with plenty of established masters: A. S. Byatt and Saul Bellow, Raymond Carver and Cynthia Ozick, Alice Munro and Richard Ford, John Updike and Philip Roth, Richard Yates and Paul Theroux and Walter Mosley, Barth and Barthelme and Borges, and many, many others.

In 2002, Nic Pizzolatto, then a student in the M.F.A. program at the University of Arkansas, submitted two stories to The Atlantic. He came home one day to find a message on his voicemail—it was Mike Curtis saying that he liked the stories and was accepting them for publication. “I think at first I thought it was one of my friends, being an asshole,” Pizzolatto recalled. But the magazine published “Ghost-Birds” in the October 2003 issue and “Between Here and the Yellow Sea” in November 2004, and Pizzolatto embarked on a successful career as a novelist and television writer, eventually creating and writing the acclaimed True Detective series for HBO.

Ann Beattie recently described the role Mike played in her career:

When I first started to write fiction in the early 70s, the name C. Michael Curtis was interchangeable with Shining Star. He was one: someone to look up to because of his ability to spot emerging talent; an esteemed editor among editors; a man who shaped taste and followed through with writers, encouraging them in significant (and also thoughtful) ways. He really loved short stories, and he was responsible for helping along—really, for determining—the early careers of many young writers, in a genre that, pre-mass-MFA, had been faltering. I knew him as a person determined to re-energize the contemporary American short story—a dedication that was indispensable to its resurgence. He was such an astute reader, and, in his interactions with writers, a listener. Watchful. Helpful and kind. He just assumed that reading and writing were important, essential pursuits, and that it was his role to encourage things along, spreading the good word. In many senses, he was a true believer.

One of the first people Mike brought into The Atlantic after arriving at the magazine was a writing student at Syracuse University who, in the early 1960s, was contributing violent, bloody, sex-and-booze-saturated stories to a variety of university-affiliated publications. Mike pictured the writer, who went by “J. C. Oates,” as “a scruffy garage mechanic with a sour view of humanity, someone I wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night.” But he admired the writing and accepted one of Oates’s submissions, contingent on the author allowing Mike to cut the story by one-third. “In the Region of Ice,” whose author had dropped the initials and was now going by Joyce Carol Oates, was published in The Atlantic in August 1966, and was deemed the best story of the year by the O. Henry Collection, then the most prestigious garland in short fiction. In the ensuing decades, Mike published many stories by Oates, now one of the most influential voices in American fiction and herself a dedicated teacher.

Across six decades, Mike and his team of interns and editorial assistants sifted through thousands of stories each month. His correspondence was immense and never-ending, scrawled in the white space of the letters he received in a tight, nearly indecipherable hand. As Jane Rosenzweig, now the director of the writing center at Harvard, remembered:

When I started working as Mike’s assistant, in 1994, his first compliment was about how fast I could type (on the electric typewriter in my office)—not because he didn’t value my reading and critiquing skills, but because my typing speed allowed me to keep up with the enormous number of letters he wrote to authors who submitted their short stories to the magazine. Mike read everything with the same attention and interest—stories submitted by literary agents, stories sent directly to him by authors, stories pulled from the “slush” pile by interns. His personal replies to authors were legendary; I still meet writers who can quote verbatim what he said to them 25 years ago, both the praise and the criticism. He may have thought the story was “too long for what it accomplishes,” or “small,” or “engaging, but not for us,” but he encouraged those writers to try again, and many did—for decades. The letters were usually brief—just a sentence or two—but enough to remind an aspiring writer that someone was out there, waiting for their next story.

Tobias Wolff recalled Mike’s shrewd relentlessness in a task that required both judgment and endurance:

How many manuscripts came pouring through Mike’s mail slot every day? In the course of a week? A month? Hundreds, for sure. Yet whenever I spoke to Mike about writing, almost always on the phone, during editing sessions (we met only twice, and briefly), he warmed to the subject with the freshness of youth. And he brought that same freshness to our editing sessions. In truth, I couldn’t wear the man down, hard as I often tried, in my defense of a word or phrase or passage that I thought indispensable to my story, and that Mike did not. He wasn’t always right, but he was right most of the time.

Mike’s path to becoming an influential figure in American fiction was far from foreordained. He was indeed hard to wear down. Born in 1934, he experienced a Dickensian early childhood—a tumultuous and disrupted family life; stints in foster homes; boarding school starting at age 4; and high-school classmates who beat him up, at an Arkansas school from which almost no one went on to college and where he played on a basketball team that never won. Ralph Lombreglia, one of the writers Mike worked with for decades, recalled getting a rare glimpse into Mike’s past:

I first met Mike in the mid-1970s when I wrote to ask his advice about becoming a fiction writer. He invited me to the Atlantic offices where I arrived in a suit, tie, and London Fog raincoat with epaulets on the shoulders. I’ll always be grateful to him for not remembering that meeting. Later, whenever he bought one of my short stories, we had lunch together on Newbury Street, concluding with his favorite dessert, chocolate-covered ice cream bonbons. One of those lunches was particularly memorable. The story he was publishing concerned a woman raised in an orphanage despite having had two living parents. “You know,” he said, “your story is remarkably similar to my own life,” and went on to tell me that he was the illegitimate son of the prominent architect Ely Kahn. Mike’s mother had had a passing affair with him in the 1930s, but she “didn’t want a son around,” as he put it, and so he was abandoned to various boarding schools and foster homes. For years he’d known his father’s identity but never revealed it, even when he first met members of the man’s family. I told Mike that my own mother’s life was the basis of that story, and that I intended to expand it into a novel someday. My last letter from Mike, in 2018, began, “Finished your novel, all 576 pages of it.” His unsurprising advice was to cut it by half and send it back to him. I’m still in the middle of that rewrite. I assumed that Mike would be around forever.

From his inauspicious Arkansas high school, Mike eventually escaped to Cornell’s School of Hotel Management, in 1952. Browsing in the university library, he discovered the works of Franz Kafka. No more hotel management—he wanted to transfer to the liberal-arts college and become a literature major. He had to apply several times before administrators realized he was serious enough to admit. Soon, he was editing the literary magazine and working for the newspaper and rooming with an engineering major and aspiring writer named Thomas Pynchon. His other roommate was the folk singer and novelist Richard Fariña, who would go on to write the 1966 cult classic Been Down So Long It Looks Up to Me. (Fariña would later marry Joan Baez’s sister Mimi; Pynchon served as best man.)

After graduation, in 1956, Mike briefly worked at the Ithaca Journal and at Newsweek before returning to Cornell for a doctorate in political science. He was unsure whether he should pursue a career at the CIA or as a journalist. But he kept his hand in literature, writing fiction for campus literary magazines and composing poems, one of which won an American Academy of Poets Prize. In 1961, when Peter Davison, The Atlantic’s longtime poetry editor, came to Cornell with Anne Sexton to do a reading, Mike pressed some poems into his hands. Davison ended up accepting three of them for publication. He also offered Mike a summer job reading the fiction slush pile. This led to a phone call in the spring of 1963 from the magazine’s top editor, Edward Weeks, asking if Mike would come to Boston and take a job as a junior editor. Mike was about to take his comprehensive exams en route to securing his Ph.D. But, as he recalled in a 1984 interview with The Missouri Review, “I had been in grad school for four years and my wife was about to have a baby and I’d been in Ithaca for twelve years and it was time to leave. So I said yes, took a leave of absence from grad school, and came to The Atlantic.” That leave of absence never ended. “In those days The Atlantic had no masthead and we really didn’t have titles in any formal way. I came as an assistant to the editor. I was there for five weeks before I ever saw Mr. Weeks. In fact, I feared he might not even know I was there.” An older editor, Charles Morton, took Mike under his wing, and he soon developed a portfolio editing both fiction and nonfiction, especially pieces on sports, religion, and the social sciences.

In 1966, Weeks was succeeded as editor in chief by Robert Manning. In his memoir, The Swamp Root Chronicle, Manning recorded that among the editors he inherited was “a young Cornellian named C. Michael Curtis [who] had a sharp ear and a clear eye for promising new short story writers as well as a good grip on the many social issues with which the magazine concerned itself. Mike was a shy and complicated fellow whom the vicissitudes of childhood had afflicted with a stutter that magically disappeared when he taught creative writing at nearby colleges … or when he held a good hand at the poker table.”

In time left over after editing, teaching, and family, Mike applied himself to pickup basketball. He played at YMCAs and writers’ conferences all over the country. He wasn’t tall, and after age 50 he wore rec specs and a bulky knee brace that he used as a weapon when posting up in the paint. But he was an ardent competitor—nickname: “Bear”—who could score layups over taller defenders using crafty spin and whose passing was crisp and creative; unalert teammates were liable to take a hard no-look pass to the nose or the back of the skull. He refused to let advancing infirmity keep him off the court, playing regularly deep into his 80s. The writer Ethan Canin remembered those games:

He pretty much gave me my start as a writer, picking me out of a slush pile that only a person like him would have bothered to read, let alone conscientiously. And then for the next thirty years fighting the good fight, always pushing literary fiction, always pushing young writers. But what I remember most about Mike was the way he played basketball. Rumor had it that in his prime he’d been a Golden Gloves boxer, and he certainly played that way. He showed up on the court with a piece of hardware around his knee that looked like the spurs from a Roman chariot. And it turns out he was in basketball as he was in life—always pushing, always pushing.

Mike possessed both stoicism and a sly wit. The wit emerged from what appeared, deceptively, to be a placid and dry demeanor, and it made itself known like an ambush in his letters and lectures. A mischievous tone sometimes took on an edge. For years, a letter Mike wrote in 1989 hung on the walls of The Atlantic’s offices. A frustrated aspiring contributor who had had his submissions rejected many times had written in to say that he’d heard rumors that the magazine used five different forms of rejection letters for different situations. Mike responded:

The persistent rumors are quite true, though modest in their assessment of our protocols. We have, in fact, many more than five different kinds of rejection slips. One slip, for example, is sent in response to all stories about household pets. Another is used to reject stories about troubled academic couples traveling in Europe (still further distinction is made between stories in which the warring couple is restored in their affection for each other by the spectacle of alien hearts at play and stories in which the more justifiably aggrieved of the pair comes at last to his/her senses and cuts short what promises to become a damaging drift into self-degradation).

Other slips are used for war stories, for stories about adolescents involving college (or high school) chums who finally realize the truth of their relationships, or any story in which one character is a fish. We have a special stock and ink for stories about children who have been abandoned or abused by one or both parents, and for whom the memory has become particularly acute as the child, now an adult, reflects upon the neediness of his/her own child/children. Still other rejection slips are earmarked for stories which make use of anthropomorphism, women who suddenly develop male sexual characteristics, or automobiles that talk back.

We have rejection slips for retired professionals, for children under the age of 14, for writers who hold political office, and for academics who have been told by friends they ought to submit manuscripts to The Atlantic.

We have rejection slips for stories sent simultaneously to more than one magazine, for writers who use only one name (usually a vegetable or mineral), for fiction manuscripts sent as proof that anyone can do better than the author of a recent Atlantic story, and for writers who say they will renew their subscriptions to this magazine only if we will publish their fiction.

We also have a special rejection letter for writers who are more wedded to the possibilities of language than to the niceties of convincing narrative. That is the letter you are reading at this moment.

When The Atlantic was based in Boston, Mike and his family would host lively annual softball games and picnics at their home in Concord and then in Littleton, Massachusetts, where children of staff would play alongside the sheep he kept in the summer, in lieu of having to mow the lawn. Inevitably a basketball game would also break out at the hoop on the garage or across the street. Those were family occasions, and children were never shy around Mike. Tobias Wolff remembers:

One day my wife heard my then-5-year-old son, Michael, talking to someone upstairs, yet she knew he was alone up there. She found him with the telephone in his hand, gabbing away. It was Mike on the other end. He’d called to discuss a story, but was happy to talk to my boy instead. He was laughing when I took possession of the phone. Well, why not? It was surely more fun than listening to me plant my flag on some needless adjective.

Decades of reading more than 10,000 short stories a year in search of the dozen or so that The Atlantic could actually publish that year infused Mike with a deep belief in the importance of fiction to culture, and a kind of impish wisdom about the writing life.

On handling disappointing news from editors: “Take your rejection slips and cover a wall with them. I did that when I was in college. I became fascinated by the different paper colors and typefaces and probably sent work to magazines I otherwise wouldn’t have, except that I wanted to get copies of their rejection slips.”

On what a short story can accomplish: “The value of short fiction lies, perhaps, in its capacity to ignite uncertainty and mindfulness into our lives, as well as to remind us of the perceptiveness and artfulness of the storytellers among us.”

Mike leaves behind six anthologies of short fiction, including Contemporary New England Stories (1992), Contemporary West Coast Stories (1993), God: Stories (1998), and Faith: Stories (2003); five Atlantic National Magazine Awards for fiction, along with many more finalist nominations; and the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, which awards $5,000 and publication to a debut book of short fiction by writers living in the South.

He is survived by his wife, the novelist and poet Betsy Cox; his brothers, Ben Curtis and Andrew Curtis; his son Hans Curtis; his daughter, Hilary Curtis Osmer; his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Morrow; his stepson, Michael Cox; and five grandchildren—D. J. Osmer, Jack Morrow, Nate Morrow, Caroline Cox, and Andrew Cox. His oldest son, Christopher Curtis, died in 2013. He is also survived by hundreds of writers whose careers he launched or nurtured; by the thousands more whose work he gave the respect of serious attention; and by a republic of letters enriched by his having contributed to it with such dedication for so long.

An American Art Critic’s 70-Year Love Affair With Rome

2022-11-07T08:00:00-05:00

The New York–born critic and photographer Milton Gendel (1918–2018) lived in Rome for the last 70 years of his life, a quiet man observing the international swirl of artists, writers, aristocrats, and socialites of which he was himself a part—not to mention the ordinary hubbub of Roman life. Gendel died in 2018, not long before his 100th birthday. He would always say, of his seven decades in Rome, that he was “just passing through,” but his various homes in the city became a hub for figures including Antonia Fraser and Iris Origo to Princess Margaret and the collector Mimi Pecci Blunt. While personally unobtrusive, he was a shrewd listener, seemed to know everyone, and found his way everywhere. Gendel left behind tens of thousands of photographs and 10 million words of diary entries chronicling the cultural and social scene at the intersection of the American Century and la dolce vita. A collection of Gendel’s words and pictures, excerpted below, will be published tomorrow.

Pope Pius V, Isola Tiberina, Rome (1974) (Photograph by Milton Gendel. Courtesy of Fondazione Primoli, Rome.)

Rome. Monday, November 13, 1967

Lunch at Piazza Campitelli. Walk to St. Peter’s. After two or three years of having the nave encumbered with seats—for the Council—the church looks as it used to do. What balls was taught about the interior. [The art historian Everard M.] Upjohn at Columbia used to say with conviction that the space had been falsified by the decorations. The mosaics and sculptures and the architectural details were out of scale, and thus one had no real idea of the vast proportions of the building. This is not true. The visitors give the scale themselves immediately. The space is measurable, in terms of the familiar classical orders—it is clearly one of the largest such spaces in existence. Comparable—as a question of scale—is the Pantheon. The Upjohns were thinking of another kind of space and comparing it to that of St. Peter’s, to the disadvantage of the latter: the kinds of space developed from the end of the Imperial Roman times to the Gothic period. In other words, spaces created with unmeasurable elements, which give an illusion of incommensurable continuity.

It was a beautiful day, and at 4:00 the basilica was still very light. Beams striking down from the window over the front doors. Small figures of visitors moving along the great concourse that is the nave. I was reminded of Pennsylvania Station. It was wrong to destroy it. In a Communist country, it would not have happened for the same reason that so much was preserved in Italy: poverty.

Anna Gendel, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Venice (1967) (Photograph by Milton Gendel. Courtesy of Fondazione Primoli, Rome.)

Rome. Wednesday, December 6, 1967

At 8:00 to Carla Panicali’s. Dinner for the Calders. Very lively. Louisa Calder tangled with me at once on Vietnam, not realizing we were more or less on the same side. But that was partly because she has become so rabidly anti-government that she speaks well of de Gaulle. [Alexander] Calder a great, fumbling, white-haired thing in red shirt and red tie. Almost incomprehensible because he slurs his words since he had a heart attack. Slurred them before, too. But he is swift and piercing in his glances and seems to hear everything from all sides of the table. Horseplay with a datepick in the shape of a woman. Calder making a kind of mobile out of a fork and the pick and a date.

[From the December 1964 issue: Alexander Calder]

Iris Origo, Palazzo Orsini, Rome (1979) (Photograph by Milton Gendel. Courtesy of Fondazione Primoli, Rome.)

Rome. Wednesday, May 30, 1973

I had a long conversation with [the diarist and biographer] Iris Origo, whom I haven’t seen in a very long time … She spoke about her shyness, how she always felt out of things when she was a girl, especially as she had to change among three different cultures, American, Italian, and English. Bernard Berenson dismayed her once, when she was seventeen, and he hurled a challenging question at her across his salotto, which was full of people. She mustered her courage and answered—something about what she wanted out of life. That’s what I mean, he said with disdain, addressing the others—that is conventional thinking. She spoke about his diaries and his self-dissatisfaction. I said that it was a pity he had been born too soon; he was a generation or two out of line. Nowadays there would be very little conflict over his commercial operations and his scholarship. He didn’t have enough balance to see that he had gotten out of life the most that he was capable of. He was a worldling with dreams of monastic cloistered scholarship.

Padre Martini sculpture, Isola Tiberina, Rome (1991) (Photograph by Milton Gendel. Courtesy of Fondazione Primoli, Rome.)

Rome. Thursday, August 23, 1973

To Carla Panicali’s to give her the transparency from Tom [Hess] for his article on Ad Reinhardt and to hear the story of the pope’s museum of modern art. Monsignor Pasquale Macchi, a polished little fellow, was the man behind the effort. He is a promoter and saw it as a good thing for the Vatican image. He succeeded in getting presents from artists and patrons. For instance, Gianni Agnelli has given a Francis Bacon, worth 150 million lire, and a Marino Marini worth 50. Carla had no plausible explanation as to why Gianni should have been so munificent. In secret, she told me that Macchi had bought some things from her directly—about 50 million lire worth—and she expected him to buy much more. This was not to be known publicly, as the Vatican preferred to play poor-mouth. In fact, at the opening the pope had referred to the generosity of friends of the Vatican who had made the museum possible “senza intaccare le finanze traballanti del Vaticano” [without affecting the shaky finances of the Vatican]. There was a suspicion of general suppressed laughter, said Carla.

Flea market, Porta Portese, Rome (1979) (Photograph by Milton Gendel. Courtesy of Fondazione Primoli, Rome.)

Rome. Saturday, February 9, 1974

Josephine [Powell] drove out with me to some junkyards she knew about. The best was a large area off the Via Appia Nuova, on the Raccordo Anulare, to the left. A monumental woman … dominated the yard from a snug furnished hut. Outside was a colossal wrought iron lantern with colored glass—something from a turn-of-the-century theater or department store. I priced a spiral staircase (180,000 lire), a straight iron ladder (50,000), some marble—white—about 25,000 for enough to make a fireplace. Josephine priced a four-wheeled cart of silvery old wood—70,000 lire.

But the prize of the junkyard was a group of toilet fixtures—a vast porcelain bath—oval—and another smaller one, a sink on a pedestal and a neoclassic toilet bowl. The woman owner made an impressed face when I asked the price. Quella è roba buona … la vasca più grande era del Duce [That’s good stuff … the bigger tub was Mussolini’s] …

On the way back to Rome, we stopped at a stone yard to price slate and peperino. A man with a mustache gave me the various prices—a beautiful dark pietra serena came to 9,000 lire a square meter; green marble, 16,000 … He also had rosa di Francia, a pretty pink marble, and many kinds of travertine. He asked me whether I was an artist, [and] when he heard that I was a giornalista, he said that he hoped I did not pay attention to the clothes a person wore—che non bada ai panni—and got me into his field house, where he showed me a book with a reproduction of a confused surrealist painting he had done. His name is Pasqua Pierini, and he was eager to have a conversation about art. I was not and tried to show that I was really an undereducated American and wasn’t up to a metaphysical conversation.

He became more animated, though, and pronounced in a D’Annuzian way on the burning fires of creativity.

Tortoise Fountain restoration, Piazza Mattei, Rome (1979) (Photograph by Milton Gendel. Courtesy of Fondazione Primoli, Rome.)

Rome. [Undated] 1980

Alex and Tatiana Liberman expansive at the Rally Room of the Grand Hotel. The fashion shows were over, and you could breathe again, said Alex. Why, yesterday this room was packed with fashion people, and now they’ve all gone. I ate gamberetti and spigola and raspberries. Delicious food. Alex sailed into Balthus. He was a phony painter, just as he was a phony aristocrat and phony everything. Tatiana liked his work but found it limited. Why was it so “frozen”? I cited Chardin, Poussin, Piero, Vermeer, putting Balthus in company that’s really a bit too good for him. Alex declared that he couldn’t stand the “literary” character of the work. He liked only abstract art. He sounded like an old manual of the old avant garde …

And what explained the grandiosity of Roman buildings? They had been to see the Palazzo Spada, at my suggestion. It was power, wasn’t it? Imperial power. But that collection of paintings was pathetic, said Alex. All second-rate. Rome was second-rate in its art, wasn’t it? There wasn’t a Louvre. I composed them a Louvre by imagining the Barberini and Corsini collections thrown together with the addition of the Galleria Borghese and the Doria Pamphilj and the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel and Raphael’s Stanze.

They didn’t seem to get the point, and I felt that they would go away repeating that art in Rome was mediocre. Despite my citation of the Masolino and Pinturicchio wall paintings and the Rubenses and other notable works in the churches. Caravaggio.

Princess Margaret and Fabrizio Mancinelli of the Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel (1993) (Photograph by Milton Gendel. Courtesy of Fondazione Primoli, Rome.)

Rome. Thursday, March 17, 1983

The cleaned Michelangelo frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are spectacular. What a transformation. The sixteenth-century palette becoming visible again. Basis for all the later Mannerist color. And the high relief of the figures and of the architectural elements when they are not flattened by accumulated grime.

Leo [Steinberg, an art critic,] spotted [Fabrizio] Mancinelli, the curator of Renaissance art, who was standing with [the art historians] John Shearman and Kathleen Weil-Garris observing the display of Raphael tapestries. Shearman had figured out the sequence of the tapestries that were made for Leo X and were full of Medici iconography and found where they were meant to go. He said, humorously triumphant, They fit!

A guard with a fierce manner but a twinkling expression was routing well-groomed elderly American ladies who were flashing away at the walls. Using flashes is not allowed in the chapel. Leo was very interesting on The Last Judgment. Michelangelo had rebuilt the wall so that it sloped in 30 cm. from the top to the bottom. Vasari, ridiculously pragmatic, according to Leo, said that this was done so that the dust wouldn’t gather on the surface of the wall. But it was to emphasize the invasion of the chapel’s space by The Last Judgment. The Church Triumphant replaces the Church Militant, and Christ himself takes the place of the popes. Hence there was no coat of arms of Paul III to replace the one of Sixtus IV corresponding to the one on the opposite wall that had been there. Michelangelo had progressively stepped up the scale of his figures toward the end wall. And the great moldings, for instance defining the corner lunettes, had been narrowed to the maximum.

And look at the cross that the stocky figure is planting—where is he setting it? On the cornice itself. That is Simon of Cyrene, according to Leo, and the painting is the first example in art history of the painted invading the real space.

This article was adapted from the book Just Passing Through—A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday: The Diaries and Photographs of Milton Gendel, edited by Cullen Murphy.

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They Bent to Their Knees and Kissed the Sand

2022-06-15T06:00:00-04:00

I.

Victoria, Seychelles

When Olivier Bancoult boarded the ship that was to take him 1,000 miles across the Indian Ocean to the Chagos Archipelago—his childhood home, from which he and his fellow islanders had been expelled 50 years earlier—he carried five wrought-iron crosses. Most of them bore a short inscription, hand-lettered in white paint, memorializing the return of Chagossians to their birthplace. The crosses were to be driven into the ground of Peros Banhos and Salomon, two of the archipelago’s once-inhabited atolls. But one cross was different. It was inscribed with the name of Bancoult’s grandfather Alfred Olivier Elysé, and it was destined for an island cemetery. Elysé had died in 1969, as expulsions from the archipelago were under way.

The expulsions were part of an international bargain, though not one that the 2,000 people of Chagos had any say in. The short version: For many years, the archipelago was a faraway administrative appendage of the British colony of Mauritius, an island off the coast of Africa. When Mauritius sought independence, in the mid-1960s, Britain decided to keep Chagos for itself. It did so primarily to sequester one of the atolls, Diego Garcia, for use by the United States—part of a global American ambition, at the height of the Cold War, to establish military outposts in strategic places. Chagos itself was nowhere, but it was equidistant from everywhere: Draw a long line from Madagascar to Indonesia, and another from India to Antarctica, and stick a pin in the blue at the intersection. The catch for Britain was that under international law, the archipelago could be separated from Mauritius only if it had no “permanent population.”

Chagos did have a permanent population—it had had one for centuries. The Chagossians harvested coconuts and they fished. They had churches of stone. Mossy gravestones go back many generations. But a world away, in the offices of Whitehall and the clubs of St. James’s, this was a technicality. That the islanders involved were Black made decisions even easier. The conversations might reasonably be imagined, but they don’t have to be. Foreign and Colonial Office documents from the period state that, for official purposes, people living in Chagos were to be referred to as transitory “contract laborers.” The archipelago was described as having “no indigenous population except seagulls.” Internal documents freely admitted that all of this was a “fiction.” A few years before Alfred Olivier Elysé was laid to rest in the Catholic cemetery on Île du Coin, one of the Chagos islands, a comment scrawled on a British document by an official named Denis Greenhill captured the government’s outlook: “Along with the Birds go some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure.”

One thing at least was true: Governmental fiat had the power to turn fable into fact. For reasons of state, the permanent inhabitants of the archipelago were removed, often with little warning, and typically allowed to bring only a single bag or suitcase or wooden box. The United States, which wanted and endorsed the expulsions, built its military base. The archipelago as a whole—Diego Garcia and some 60 other islands, mainly in the Peros Banhos and Salomon atolls—was reconstituted into a colonial entity known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, within which Diego Garcia could nest. Having been detached from Mauritius, BIOT would become both the newest British colony in Africa and the last remaining one.

Uprooted and desperately poor, the Chagossians formed small communities in Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the United Kingdom, with little support from any of those countries. As a remembrance, many kept sand from Chagos in small bowls in their home. On the balance scale of Cold War morality, the sand didn’t count for much. But the Chagossians never forgot where they’d come from—or, given that half a century has now elapsed, where their parents and grandparents had come from. Some hoped to return to Chagos, or at least to have that right. Some wanted a path to citizenship in Britain. Most wanted compensation commensurate with their loss.

[From the May 2021 issue: National parks should belong to Native Americans]

Bancoult, who makes his living as an electrician in Mauritius, is the president of the Chagos Refugees Group. He left Île du Coin, in Peros Banhos, on March 30, 1968, at the age of 4, taking a small boat from the jetty to a bigger boat anchored in the lagoon. He has an islander’s way of using on rather than in to refer to where he comes from: “on my birthplace.” Bancoult is a large man with a large personality. He is friendly and he is forceful. In the register of his voice, the calm vivisection of British actions can mount by degrees into the more insistent tones of a man who has truth on his side.

Olivier Bancoult has led efforts to secure his people’s right of return to their home islands, including
Diego Garcia, now the site of a U.S. military base. (Illustration by Oliver Munday. Sources: Gallo Images / Getty; Ed Habershon / BBC)

Over the years, Bancoult has pressed the Chagossian cause with the Congressional Black Caucus and the pope. Starting in the 1990s, he began looking for cracks to exploit in the edifice of British law. Future historians sifting through musty files in the Public Record Office will find an impressive volume of litigation bearing the name Bancoult. The documents point the way to a tangle of episodes—in British tribunals as well as the International Court of Justice (or World Court) and the United Nations General Assembly. In 2019, to the surprise of many, the UN confirmed a finding by the World Court: The creation of the British Indian Ocean Territory had been illegal. The archipelago belonged to Mauritius. The Chagos islanders could turn their eyes toward home.

Which is why, earlier this year, Bancoult and a group of other Chagossians found themselves on a converted British minesweeper, now a private vessel named the Bleu de Nîmes, with those five homemade crosses. They’d also brought bouquets of flowers, asking the crew to keep them cooled. The five Chagossians on the ship were guests of the government of Mauritius, which had an additional agenda of its own for this voyage: to assert its sovereignty over the archipelago—to, quite literally, plant a flag. The voyage was hopeful, if uncertain. The World Court and UN notwithstanding, Mauritian sovereignty is something that London has yet to concede; for all anyone aboard knew, the British might seek to impede the trip in some fashion. Just out of sight, a British patrol vessel shadowed the Bleu de Nîmes when it entered Chagossian waters. Jagdish Koonjul, the ambassador of Mauritius to the United Nations, was aboard the Bleu de Nîmes; he smiled diplomatically when someone referred to him as a “human shield.”

We had departed from the Seychelles; typhoons made departure from Mauritius impossible. The ship slipped past the mega-yachts of oligarchs, anchored off Victoria. Mountains receded, then disappeared. Between the Seychelles and Chagos lies nothing but open sea, sometimes rough. Five full days elapsed before the first hint of land—shorebirds diving for fish. A few hours later, the Bleu de Nîmes reached Peros Banhos, anchoring in its lagoon. Like every atoll, Peros Banhos is the rim of an extinct volcano, this one about 10 miles in diameter. In places the rim emerges sufficiently above water to create a necklace of tiny islands, linked by reefs.

The Chagossians took a launch to Île du Coin, where three of the group had been born, and waded onto the smooth, coralline sand. The island is narrow and slightly curved, about a mile and a half long. The white beach was alive with small crabs. Coconuts bobbed in the surf. The Chagossians bent to their knees and kissed the sand, leaving a splay of palm prints. They stood and joined hands, closing their eyes and reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Kreol, the French-based language of the islands. They concluded the prayer and planted the first of the wrought-iron crosses.

Then they ventured into the dense vegetation—coconut trees heavy with green fruit, flame trees that bloom a brilliant red—to seek the remains of their civilization.

II.

The fate of the Chagos Archipelago has rested for centuries in the hands of the Great Powers, whether those powers were moving in, moving out, or just trying to hold on—“to get some rocks which will remain ours,” as Sir Paul Gore-Booth, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, described his country’s intentions in the 1960s. The Chagos Archipelago spreads out across 250,000 square miles, an area the size of Texas; taken together, the islands have a landmass the size of Manhattan. In two weeks at sea, traveling to, from, and among them, we did not see another ship. The recorded history of the archipelago has chiefly been scientific and geopolitical rather than cultural or social. Charles Darwin sailed through in 1836, during the voyage of the Beagle, but his interest lay in coral. For all but one of the islands, there is no longer any human history to record: Everyone is gone. The exception, Diego Garcia, is inhabited by 2,500 American-military personnel and temporary foreign workers, mostly Filipino. That tiny atoll, a single V-shaped island with a central lagoon, is strictly off-limits. Those who have been stationed there describe a place that would resemble the base at Guantánamo Bay—gyms, fast food, television, snorkeling—if Guantánamo were on the moon and the moon were an ocean. Until their expulsion, more than 1,000 Chagossians lived on Diego Garcia. Many accounts of the island by Americans stationed there mention signs of previous habitation: a ruined house here, a crumbling church there, a handful of graveyards. Diego Garcia’s runway and “downtown” lie atop two village sites.

Chagos was chanced upon by Portuguese navigators in the 16th century. They mapped the islands and gave some of them, such as Peros Banhos, the names they retain. The Dutch came next, but didn’t stay. Chagos eventually came into the possession of France, as did Mauritius and Réunion. The French gave names to more of the islands. They imported enslaved workers from Madagascar and Mozambique, and later brought indentured workers from southern India, to labor in coconut plantations. After the defeat of Napoleon, Great Britain acquired Chagos and Mauritius.

[Read: Ed Yong on how how rats in the Chagos islands remake coral reefs]

Little changed for the people of the islands, who by then numbered in the several hundreds. In time, after abolition, slavery was replaced completely by indentured servitude; in the 20th century, indentured servitude became low-wage employment by corporate planters. The language of the people remained Kreol. The main religion was Catholicism. Cargo ships provided an occasional connection to Mauritius—at most, four times a year. In the 1960s, as Mauritius negotiated its independence, the Chagos islanders were working for a single company, Chagos-Agalega Ltd., which exported copra—the dried kernel of a coconut—along with the oil pressed from it. The Chagossians had created a distinctive society. They had their own houses, their own boats, their own gardens. Their form of sega music provided the soundtrack for our time at sea.

One evening on board the ship, Bancoult spread out half a dozen well-creased nautical charts, pointing to key features of the archipelago. Starting from the far north: Blenheim Reef, a treacherous marine structure about 20 miles in circumference that has caused the destruction of scores of ships; below that, Salomon atoll, with a dozen small islands around its rim; to the west of Salomon, the larger Peros Banhos atoll, with about 30 small islands; and finally, at the bottom, Diego Garcia, some 150 miles south of Blenheim Reef. Bancoult pointed to where the Chagossians on the ship, all now living in Mauritius, had been born. Suzelle Baptiste was from Diego Garcia. Rosemonde Bertin was from Salomon. Lisbey Elysé, Marcel Humbert, and Bancoult himself were from Peros Banhos.

La Tigre

When Chagossians look back at the life they recall, or the life they’ve heard about, they conjure an idyll—Garden of Eden meets Shangri-la. They use the word paradise. They talk of “la vie facile.” People ate fish from the sea and shared with one another. There was enough of everything to go around. Could it have been that good? Once, on deck, still a day out from Peros Banhos, I heard two of the Chagossians talking about the remoteness of island life, and how remoteness can produce contentment: “What you see is all you know.”

The plantation company paid workers both in cash and in food and supplies. It provided small pensions after retirement. There was a certain amount of infrastructure, including electricity in a few places. A Catholic priest traveled among the atolls. A number of islanders learned to read and write; others signed documents with a thumbprint. Photographs of special occasions from a century ago show people of the archipelago wearing dresses and suits.

The islands are certainly beautiful—thickly wooded atolls in a turquoise sea as pure as anywhere on Earth. The most startling creature is the coconut crab, which grows to the size of a cat and may drop suddenly from trees. Its claws can take off a finger. They are not a problem, Bancoult explained, “if you know how to pick them up,” and they are good to eat. Still, the work of the islanders was hard. The rows of tiny stone rectangles in the cemeteries of Chagos tell a story of death at an early age. And as events would show, the existence of the Chagossians as a people was at the mercy of forces beyond their control.

III.

The deal between the United Kingdom and the United States was worked out in secret against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, which Britain had declined to support. As if to make amends, the government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson sought to accommodate Washington’s desire for a foothold in the Indian Ocean. In diplomatic memorandums, officials avoided the term military base; the preferred locution was joint communications facility. Diego Garcia seemed ideal. The atoll’s lagoon could shelter a small navy. The ribbon of land on the western side had room for miles of runway—an unsinkable aircraft carrier. The U.S. naval commander in the Pacific, Admiral John McCain, father of the future senator, described the atoll as the Malta of the Indian Ocean.

At the time, Britain was engaged in negotiations over Mauritian independence. Decolonization was occurring worldwide, and the United Nations had adopted rules—which Britain had endorsed—about “self-determination” and “territorial integrity.” When it came to Chagos, Britain finessed the self-determination argument through its claim that the islands had no permanent inhabitants, only a “floating population” of migrant workers. It finessed the territorial-integrity argument by inducing negotiators from Mauritius, meeting in London, to accept dismemberment. As the release of a Downing Street document later revealed, the idea, in dealing with the chief Mauritian negotiator, was to “frighten him with hope”: Independence could be had, but only if the Mauritians relinquished Chagos.

This approach had the desired effect. Mauritius became independent. Chagos was “detached.” Because the U.S. wanted no one nearby, the people of Chagos—who did not officially exist—were forced to leave. The entire population of Diego Garcia had been removed by the end of 1971. A military base had to be constructed, and the Americans needed the island “sanitized” and “swept,” a task that fell to the British. The people expelled from Diego Garcia were not permitted to take their animals; about 1,000 pet dogs had to be left behind. Many followed their owners to the beaches. In his meticulous book about Diego Garcia, Island of Shame, the anthropologist David Vine describes how, at the direction of Sir Bruce Greatbatch, an order came down to eliminate the dogs. Animals that could not be easily poisoned or shot were lured with meat into a copra-drying shed and then gassed with motor-vehicle exhaust.

Bob Hope arrived on the first jet to land on the runway, in 1972, using Diego Garcia to stage one of his Christmas shows for American troops. He flew in with Redd Foxx and Belinda Green, Miss World that year. A British naval officer remains nominally in charge of Diego Garcia and commands a small complement of Royal Marines. But the island is leased to the U.S. through 2036. Vehicles drive on the right.

[Read: The problem of English identity]

As for the Chagossians who’d lived there, many were transported to Mauritius—crowded under tarpaulins on the merchant ship Nordvaer, or packed into the ship’s sweltering hold along with the copra and coconut oil—and more or less left on the docks to fend for themselves. Others made their way to Peros Banhos or Salomon, until an ongoing campaign of attrition made life on those atolls untenable. The plantation company was bought out by the British government and ultimately shut down. Supplies of rice and flour were curtailed. Anyone who made the mistake of leaving Chagos—to visit relatives, to see a doctor—would discover, without warning, that going home was prohibited. Bancoult had traveled with his parents, Rita and Julien, and his sister Noellie to Mauritius; Noellie needed urgent medical attention after her foot had been run over by the wheel of a cart and she’d developed gangrene. The medical care came too late, and Noellie died. The family prepared to return to Peros Banhos, but were prevented from doing so. Nor could they communicate with people back home: Mail delivery had been halted. Rita did not learn of the death of her father, still in Chagos, for several years. In 1973, those who’d clung to Salomon and Peros Banhos were rounded up. People had as little as a day to pack a bag.

The Chagos Archipelago, meanwhile, began its new chapter as the British Indian Ocean Territory. Rather than opening with something along the lines of “We the people,” the territory’s constitution declares, “No person has the right of abode.” Accompanied by British military personnel, small groups of Chagossians have in recent years been allowed brief “heritage visits” to some of the islands. A larger group, also under military escort, made a pilgrimage in 2006. On their visits, the Chagossians have used the limited time on each island—never overnight—to clear vegetation from the decaying churches and restore the crumbling graves of their loved ones. They have cleaned inscriptions. They have left flowers. And then they have had to depart.

The ruins of a Chagossian church on Boddam island (Ed Habershon / BBC)

The British Indian Ocean Territory came to possess all the outward trappings of a colony. Its head of state is Queen Elizabeth. It has a commissioner, in London, who also oversees the British Antarctic Territory. There is a flag. Coins have been issued: The silver 50-pence coin displays the Queen on one side and an orange anemonefish, like Nemo, on the other. The coins are legal tender within the territory, though there is really no place to spend them. British Indian Ocean Territory stamps have been designed and printed—for collectors, or for use at the post office on Diego Garcia. The territory has the internet country code .io—for “Indian Ocean”—created by an entrepreneur and used extensively by internet start-ups and online-gambling operations. Signs have been posted on some of the islands by the BIOT government. They signal to the very few visitors—mostly owners of mega-yachts—that they have stepped foot on British territory. Visitors are asked to refrain from littering.

IV.

All told, some 2,000 people were displaced from the Chagos Archipelago. At U.S. insistence, the islanders were even barred from working on Diego Garcia; instead, foreign laborers were brought in. The Chagossians had been promised housing and various kinds of assistance, but the promises were not kept. Some settled in the Seychelles, at the time still a British colony, where hundreds were lodged at first in a prison. Those who found themselves in Mauritius settled mainly in Port Louis, the capital. The Chagossians were treated badly—unwanted newcomers, and culturally different from everyone else. They were shunted into the worst urban districts, near garbage dumps and in neighborhoods with high crime. They had skills, but none that were highly valued. Drug use, prostitution, suicide—all became serious problems, reflected in sega lyrics and oral histories. The Chagossians were referred to collectively, and pejoratively, as les Îlois—“the islanders.”

Were they citizens of any nation? They seem to have thought so. Many of the poorest Chagossian homes in Mauritius displayed a pressed-tin portrait of the Queen. But the United Kingdom in the early 1970s was not generous with passports, especially for “Tarzans or Men Fridays,” nor is it generous with them now. Those who had been expelled from Chagos did become citizens of Mauritius, if that’s where they went, though it didn’t feel like home. In time, many also came to hold British Dependent Territories Citizenship, which entitled the bearer to the vague condition of British “subject” and to a passport, but not the right to live in Britain (or, in this case, to live in the dependent territory).

Only in 2002, after much agitation, did people born on the islands (along with their children, but not their grandchildren) get the right to apply for full British citizenship. Nothing about the status of Chagossians today is uniform: It varies from person to person, generation to generation, place to place. In March, the British government accepted an amendment to proposed legislation—which recently became law—that would streamline the citizenship process for anyone of Chagossian heritage, despite fears voiced by some about precedent. (The author of the amendment, Baroness Lister of Burtersett, responded, “We are not setting a precedent because I assume we are not planning to evict anybody else.”)

[Ysabelle Cheung: Hong Kongers, don’t idolize the U.K.]

When Bancoult surveyed the domains of the Chagossians with his nautical charts, he left out Crawley, in West Sussex. A quarter century after the expulsion, many Chagossians decided that life in Britain, unfamiliar as it was, might be better than life anywhere else. The first small groups arrived on flights from Port Louis to Gatwick Airport, south of London, in 2002. There were no resettlement officials to meet them, no gift baskets of Marmite and Major Grey’s. Not knowing what else to do, they camped out in the airport arrival lounge, for days and even weeks. Gatwick is adjacent to Crawley, and the Chagossians began moving into town after the local council grudgingly found some housing.

With great persistence, the Chagossians in Crawley put down roots. Others followed. Today, the number of people in Crawley whose ancestry can be traced to Chagos is about 3,000. Chagossians can still be found at Gatwick—they are a mainstay of the service infrastructure that makes the airport possible, from handling baggage at the terminals to making beds at the hotels. But joblessness is high, as is the incidence of depression and other challenges. Chagossians use a word with the Kreol spelling dérasiné to describe the experience of being cut off from the past. They use another word, sagren, to capture a deep, wasting sorrow. The term may not appear in medical journals, but it is a diagnosis I heard more than once from Chagossians talking about friends, or about themselves.

During a recent trip to London, I took a train down to Crawley to meet members of the Chagos community, which extends two and even three generations beyond the one expelled from the archipelago. The town is not the kind of place one sees on tourist posters. Crawley grew quickly both because of Gatwick and because the government chose to build tracts of new housing there after the Second World War. The architecture is repetitive and nondescript. The heart of the town is the County Mall Shopping Centre, not some holy well or Norman keep.

The Chagossians in Crawley present no unanimity of opinion about Chagos and their future. Some have been more interested in rights and compensation than in resettlement, and in any case don’t harbor warm feelings toward Mauritius. This point of view is articulated on the U.K.-based website Chagossian Voices. Others in Crawley share the same desire for recognition and support, but their views are more in line with those of the Chagos Refugees Group. They are drawn emotionally to the idea of resettlement—even if not necessarily for themselves—and believe it could happen. They would like to set foot on the archipelago one day.

If Chagos possesses anything like a National Archives, it would be the iPhone of Evelyna Bancoult, one of Olivier’s daughters. She lives in Crawley with her two young children. Evelyna’s sister, Jessica, a mother of three, lives in Crawley as well. So do many relatives. When I came to visit, people converged on the home of a cousin of Evelyna’s to talk about their memories. On her phone, Evelyna pulled up black-and-white historical photos, grainy videos, and recent family pictures. Her grandmother, now deceased, spoke to the room from the phone. In soundless footage, military officers watched Chagossians descend a gangplank—the fading record of a heritage visit. Evelyna’s quick fingers found news reports, documentaries, press conferences, music. Children playing in the room paused to lean on her shoulder as she sat on a couch, pointing when they saw someone they knew.

The scene was enthusiastic but also serious. The people there felt that few in Britain had their interests in mind. They denounced xenophobic dithering in Parliament over immigration. Fingers jabbed toward my knee for emphasis. Then, calmly, more than one of those in the room brought up the subject of history—history in a narrow sense (our history) but also in a larger sense: the responsibility of nations to face their failures.

The Chagossians do not live in any single neighborhood of Crawley—and there are Chagossians in Manchester, Leeds, and other cities—but you cannot miss the glimmerings of shared identity. They cook from recipes handed down by their mothers and grandmothers, though certain ingredients are hard to find. They draw on extended family networks. The adults have been in England for years, most of them, and speak with a variety of London-area accents, but a cadence of elsewhere is unmistakable. In their homes, what you do not see, because the Chagossians were expelled so suddenly and allowed to bring so little with them, are mementos of life on the archipelago. If Evelyna loses her cellphone, the only physical evidence of the community’s origins may be chromosomes and grains of sand.

Though I’d be tempted to include the football jerseys. In 2014, a soccer team representing the Chagos diaspora became a member of Conifa, the Confederation of Independent Football Associations—a version of FIFA for soccer teams not affiliated with that body. Many of Conifa’s members have a claim to national distinctiveness. The Roma people field a team. South Ossetia, Kashmir, Kurdistan, Tibet, Cornwall, and Western Sahara each field a team. The Chagossian team draws on local players. In recent years, it has twice qualified for the Conifa World Cup.

When I met him in Crawley, Cedric Joseph, the very young goalkeeper—he is 19—showed me his gloves, painted with the orange, black, and blue of the Chagossian flag. Three people jumped in to explain the symbolism. The cross talk boiled down to this: Orange is for the plantations and the sun; black is for the dark times; blue is for the sea and the future. Joseph’s grandmother was born in Chagos; he said he felt sometimes that he was representing her. But really, it was great just to get out there and play. And the team was good. And so was he. He made fun of himself, slipping into a parody of a sports announcer’s voice: “The best, youngest goalkeeper in south England.”

V.

Olivier Bancoult has been to Crawley many times, to visit his daughters and to advance the interests of the Chagos Refugees Group. The lawsuits he has filed on behalf of his people have almost all been brought in British courts. Search the internet for the name Olivier Bancoult, and you will scroll through a long list of entries that commence with the tagline Bancoult v. For brevity’s sake, lawyers refer to the various cases by the order in which they were filed: Bancoult 2, Bancoult 4.

What Britain did to Chagos provoked legal challenges along two broad tracks. The first—the Bancoult track—began in the 1990s. Whatever their private opinions, Bancoult and his lawyers have never sought to contest British sovereignty before the courts of England. Their focus is human rights under British law. They have contended that the Chagossians were wrongly evicted from their homes and that they have a right to return to their islands. Bancoult’s first lawsuit went so far as to invoke the Magna Carta, which prohibits forcible expulsion without what today would be called due process. In the face of stiff headwinds, and to general astonishment, he won the case, in 2000. Britain’s foreign secretary at the time, Robin Cook, announced that he would accept the High Court’s decision on the right of return.

But then, less than a year later, came 9/11. Tony Blair’s government—and a new, more compliant foreign secretary—had no desire to disturb the status quo on Diego Garcia or any of the other islands. The military base was being used as a waypoint for extraordinary rendition—and by some reports, as a detention and interrogation site—while the War on Terror ramped up. Bombing campaigns against Afghanistan and, later, Iraq would be launched from there. In 2004, the British government used a device called an Order in Council—an archaic procedure allowing ministers to bypass Parliament and wield regal powers that the monarch herself can no longer exercise, but to which she must assent—to quash Bancoult’s victory. None of his subsequent legal actions has been able to restore the right of return. But his follow-on cases have achieved something else: Through the process of discovery, they’ve dredged up a mass of historical documents that confirm the cynicism and lies of the government’s inner councils. Henceforward, British officials would have to preface remarks about Chagos with a throat-clearing admission that the government’s behavior had of course been “shameful and wrong.”

The second track was the international one: the attempt by Mauritius to get Chagos back from Britain, alleging that detachment had been agreed to under duress. Early efforts got little traction. But then the British government made a mistake. In 2010, Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced that the British Indian Ocean Territory would be turned into a “marine protected area” and placed off-limits to habitation and commerce (but not to U.S. military operations). Miliband’s decision was cheered by many environmental organizations. The archipelago encompasses the largest coral atoll structure on the planet—the Great Chagos Bank. Turtles and sharks abound. Fork-tailed frigate birds, among the fastest on Earth, skim by overhead. But Britain wasn’t thinking about a National Geographic documentary. A cable to Washington from the U.S. embassy in London quoted a British diplomat stating that “no human footprints” or “Man Fridays”—that language again—would be permitted within the protected area, and admitting privately that the move would “put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago’s former residents.”

The marine protected area may have been intended as a clever way to cauterize all pending legal disputes involving a right of return, but it in fact gave Mauritius a new, if seemingly unlikely, line of attack through the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The government enlisted the assistance of a prominent international and human-rights lawyer named Philippe Sands. Sands is a longtime friend; when he first explained the case to me, a decade ago, he described all of the dominoes that would have to fall. He did not use the word quixotic. Over time, he assembled a legal team from Mauritius, Belgium, India, Ukraine, and the United States.

The legal battle for Chagos lacks the drama of Inherit the Wind or Twelve Angry Men. The dominoes fell, but in slow motion, one every few years. In accordance with the Convention on the Law of the Sea, Mauritius brought its case before a tribunal of international arbiters. The government argued that Britain had no standing to create the marine protected area; Chagos had been illegally detached from Mauritius, and Britain was therefore not the relevant “coastal state.” The arbitrators agreed unanimously that creation of the protected area was “not in accordance” with the provisions of the Law of the Sea convention but kicked the sovereignty question to the UN General Assembly, which then weighed in with a lopsided vote: Let’s see what the World Court has to say about whether the detachment of the archipelago was legal in the first place.

None of this involved the fate of the Chagossians—not directly—but many of them believed that if Britain’s sovereignty were upended, their efforts could be aided. Mauritius had not barred them from their homeland; Great Britain had done that. And the Mauritian government had indicated receptivity to the Chagossian cause. The World Court heard the case in September 2018, and it began by looking at the “factual circumstances” behind detachment and expulsion. Lisbey Elysé, expelled from Chagos when she was not yet 20, gave testimony before the justices. She was a little overwhelmed, she told me, and ever mindful of the fact that she had been chosen to represent all Chagossians. Fearful that she might be nervous speaking directly to the court, she asked for and was granted permission to present a video. It was three minutes and 53 seconds long. Elysé, then 65, spoke in Kreol. Seated next to Sands, she watched from a front-row seat in a black suit as the video, with English subtitles, flickered in the Great Hall of Justice.

We boarded the ship in the dark so that we could not see our island. And when we boarded the ship, conditions in the hull of the ship were bad. We were like animals and slaves in that ship. People were dying of sadness in that ship. And as for me, I was four months pregnant at that time. The ship took four days to reach Mauritius. After our arrival, my child was born and died …

I maintain I must return to the island where I was born and I must die there and where my grandparents have been buried. In the place where I took birth, and in my native island.

In the end, the World Court declared that Britain was in the wrong—the detachment of Chagos had indeed been illegal because “this detachment was not based on the free and genuine expression of the will of the people concerned.” The court’s opinion was ultimately affirmed by the UN General Assembly, with only six votes in opposition. The Mauritian case was strong. Jagdish Koonjul, its ambassador, made it well. The United Kingdom’s European allies were nowhere to be seen—Britain’s hasty, messy exit from the European Union had made sure of that.

Olivier Bancoult, Marcel Humbert, and Rosemonde Bertin were among the group of five Chagossians who this year, for the first time, could return to the islands without British permission. (Illustration by Oliver Munday. Sources: British Library / Alamy; Ed Habershon / BBC)

The World Court’s opinion was advisory, and the U.K. has so far done its best to ignore it. A Royal Navy officer continues to serve as the titular commandant of Diego Garcia. Yachts wishing to transit the marine protected area are still directed to obtain permission from the colonial administration. The United Kingdom’s BIOT website is unflappably vague: “We remain open to dialogue on all shared issues of mutual interest.” A strategic rationale for the British position has not been advanced, other than the open-ended one that defense of the realm requires it. The psychological rationale is obvious—shedding the last bits of empire is hard to contemplate. It is the remote-island dynamic in reverse: “What you see is all that’s left.”

But Mauritius can now claim international recognition of its sovereignty over Chagos. As Sands, the Chagossians’ lead attorney, maintains in a forthcoming book, the British position is eroding, in small steps that may lead to larger ones. Citing the UN’s decision, the Universal Postal Union, which governs mail service among nations, has withdrawn recognition of Britain’s BIOT stamps. The .io domain name is under legal challenge, and the government of Mauritius has asked Google to relabel its maps. It seems inevitable that the International Civil Aviation Organization, which coordinates a variety of essential protocols, will recognize Mauritian control of the airspace over Chagos. The United States still takes Britain’s side; it is convenient to have an absentee landlord who allows almost anything. But there is a difficulty. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has argued forcefully that Beijing must accept a “rules-based order” when it comes to the South China Sea. Beijing has a ready response: What about Chagos? Ultimately, American wishes may not need to become an issue. Mauritius has stated repeatedly that it has no objection to the use of Diego Garcia as a U.S. military base. There would have to be a “status of forces” agreement, as there is for any base on foreign soil, which would set the rules and the rent. An agreement might even accommodate a partial resettlement of Diego Garcia itself; foreign nationals live close to other U.S. bases, sometimes in great numbers.

The time will come when Britain throws in the towel, and it may come soon. When the government of Mauritius decided in February to send a ship into Chagossian waters under its own flag—the ship I traveled on—London’s response was annoyed but restrained. It would not fight the Mauritians on the beaches; it would not fight them on the landing grounds. The BIOT patrol vessel that shadowed the Bleu de Nîmes kept its distance, though it was visible on radar. We never learned whether the loss of internet service, which started when the ship entered the BIOT zone, had anything to do with its presence. One purpose of the voyage—an oceanic survey of Blenheim Reef, relating to a boundary dispute with the Maldives—was a deliberate challenge: Mauritius shares a boundary with the Maldives only if the Chagos Archipelago is Mauritian territory. Mauritian officials also took the opportunity to pour some concrete, plant some flagpoles, and run up the Mauritian colors on Salomon and Peros Banhos. There were no statues to topple, but someone unbolted and took away a metal sign warning of arrest and imprisonment by the “BIOT government” for various infractions, such as overnight camping and “possession of crabs, dead or alive.”

[From the April 1899 issue: Growth of the British colonial conception]

For Mauritius, asserting a claim to Chagos was a main reason for this expedition. But that assertion dovetailed with the desires of the Chagossians. If the British were no longer in charge, then the prohibition against “right of abode” was a dead letter. For the first time in 50 years, the Chagossians could go home without asking permission.

VI.

The islands of Peros Banhos—5.3333° S, 71.8500° E—encircle a crystalline lagoon. From a distance they are low, green smudges that a swell can hide from view. Waves crash on submerged reefs between them. On February 12, as the Bleu de Nîmes sailed through a single open channel into the lagoon, Olivier Bancoult stood at the gunwales and began to name the bits of land. For once he seemed a little uncertain. He grabbed Marcel Humbert, a fisherman, to confirm the names. Humbert pointed to each island as he began turning in a circle: “Grande Soeur, Petite Soeur, Île Poule, Île Monpâtre, Île Anglaise, Île du Coin ...” The shore of Île Monpâtre was marked by a dull-red oblong, the overturned hull of a yacht, beached and bleached for decades. Bancoult had started the day wearing the bright home-field jersey of the Chagos soccer team, but by now he and others from the islands had changed into simple white T-shirts bearing words in black letters: Everyone has the right to live on his birthplace.

The Chagossians knelt on the sand as they came off the launch that had brought them to Île du Coin. Some of them held up birth certificates—destroyed in the course of a riot, they’d been told by British authorities, until Bancoult tracked the records down. The jetty many of them had walked when they left Île du Coin was now in ruins; only a small-gauge rail track, once used to transport barrels of coconut oil, held the concrete together. A pair of rusted wheels, joined by an axle, remained on the rails.

The Chagossians led the way inland with a rhythmic whack of machetes. The air was humid and earthy, the ground everywhere an ankle-turning carpet of fallen coconuts. We came to a place where a village had been. I had seen a photograph from the 1960s of the island administrator’s house—whitewashed walls, cool verandas, a monumental stone staircase ascending from a prim English garden. All that was left was the staircase, rising to nothing and held fast in a tangle of banyan roots, like a temple at Angkor Wat. The roofless stone church held a congregation of palm trees and coconut crabs. The Chagossians labored to clear the building—it remained a sacred space. Several of them had been baptized within its walls.

We put in the next day at Salomon atoll, this time on an island called Boddam, roughly the same size as Île du Coin. The ruins here were even more extensive—tin roofs rusted and collapsed; stone walls dank with moss and mold; trees and vines sprouting from windows and doors. From one beam a pair of recently discarded buoys dangled above broken liquor bottles. Crudely painted on the buoys were the names Olga and Ivan. The Chagossians again made their way to a roofless church. They cleared it of vegetation. In one chancel window, a few panes of colored glass had somehow survived unbroken, gleaming in a wooden lattice. Next door, in what had been a clinic, Rosemonde Bertin, born on Boddam, pushed through the foliage and found the dark, damp corner where she had given birth to her first child, in 1972—shortly before she and her family were forced to leave.

Later, half a mile away, in the island cemetery, Bertin poured water on an inscription and wiped it with leaves to bring out the name: Mme. Yvon Dyson, née Denise Rose. Denise Rose was the midwife who’d brought Bertin into the world; she herself died in childbirth not long afterward. The cemetery occupied a full acre. Bertin, Bancoult, and others splashed water on more of the weathered slabs to reveal the inscriptions. From 1880: Ici repose Dookie—just that single name, once known to everyone, now a cipher.

Is a repopulation of Chagos even possible at this point? The grandchildren in Crawley, watching Young Sheldon and reading Roald Dahl, may not see a path to the future that leads through Peros Banhos. A study conducted by the British in 2002 concluded that significant development of the islands would be impractical for a variety of reasons, including a possible insufficiency of fresh groundwater. (The study did not consider rainfall.) A second study, in 2015, came to a different conclusion, suggesting that an economy based on coconuts, fish, and a limited amount of tourism could be sustainable. History, of course, has already conducted its own experiment: Although climate change is unpredictable, these islands once supported a population of thousands. On our way to the graveyard on Boddam, a storm blew in with impressive speed, and it rained heavily for half an hour. Sheltering under a tree, machete in hand, Bancoult commented, “The British said there was not enough water.”

I don’t know how realistic any plans may be for Chagos. The Mauritian government has pledged to assist, but has avoided specifics. It’s easy to imagine some form of World Heritage Site coexisting with some form of modest development. I do know this: With every encounter, the Chagossians have sought to take the fate of the islands back into their hands—to possess the islands by word and deed. They have spent the few hours of every heritage visit tending graves and cleaning churches. On the extended trip in February, when Chagossians could at last travel freely and do whatever they wished, they did the same. They also trapped crabs and fished for red snapper and drank milk from coconuts. As if bouncing on a seesaw, Lisbey Elysé sat on the trunk of a coconut tree jutting out over the water. The Chagossians remembered old names and told old stories. As they talked, the rusting wheels on the jetty became a wagon again, rolling back on its track toward the oil press and the drying sheds and a world that was alive.

Mauritius raised flags over islands on this voyage; anthems were sung. The moments were moving: a legal and moral victory, even as Britain harrumphed. But the embrace of the islands by the Chagossians was something different. It had the intimate physicality of love.

This article appears in the July/August 2022 print edition with the headline “Back to Chagos.”

Ireland’s Great Gamble

2022-03-14T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 1:09 p.m. ET on December 19, 2022.

Early in the pages of We Don’t Know Ourselves, Fintan O’Toole’s masterful “personal history” of modern Ireland, I came upon a moment in O’Toole’s life that intersected unexpectedly with my own. The date was Tuesday, March 8, 1966. In a Dublin bedroom in the chill dark of early morning—1:31 a.m. exactly—O’Toole’s mother, given to premonitions, awoke and exclaimed, “God, what was that?” Then came the sound of a distant explosion.

I, too, heard the explosion. My American family had moved from the United States to Ireland for several years. I was a schoolboy, a little older than O’Toole; our home was a mile or so from his. As everyone soon learned, an IRA splinter group had blown off the top of Nelson’s Pillar, an imposing column in O’Connell Street that some saw as a symbol of British oppression but most regarded as a convenient landmark and an elegant viewing platform. I had paid my sixpence and spiraled up the interior staircase many times. Now the Pillar was a ragged stump. Thinking back on the moment, O’Toole writes:

My father got us up early that morning and we took the bus in to see the wreck of Nelson. He said it was a big thing, an event we should remember. He took us right up close to the base where huge lumps of stone were scattered randomly like pebbles. Nobody stopped us. My father picked up a small piece of the granite, its outside worn grimy by the murk of the city, its inside glistening with newly revealed speckles of quartz, a secret self, hidden within the monument until the shock of the explosion so violently brought it to life.

O’Toole and I must have crossed paths that morning, or come close, because our fathers had the same impulse. I rode into the city with my dad and collected pieces of granite; I keep one on my desk. That March day in Dublin feels as present to me now as it does to O’Toole. It was, he writes, “the first time I was conscious of pure memory, of the idea that something you had in your head was now gone forever.”

O’Toole’s sweeping, intimate book covers a lifetime of Ireland’s history: a period of six decades when the country transitioned from one thing to another with little understanding of where it had been or where it was going, and was content to wear blinkers. A dishonest deflection of important questions was a deep-seated habit. The years punctuated by the bombing of Nelson’s Pillar marked a turning point. Even a kid in short pants and knee socks could sense that something was up.

In 1966, the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rebellion against British rule, Ireland was still an intensely Catholic country. Schools made liberal use of corporal punishment—a leather strap to the palms in O’Toole’s school, a bamboo cane to the palms in mine—and the teaching of Irish was compulsory. Most homes in rural areas had no plumbing. Horse-drawn wagons delivered milk even in central Dublin. The smell of turf and coal was baked into a city that served as a placeholder for postwar Berlin in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. The official version of Irish history was a dour, gray, pietistic nationalism. When the remains of Roger Casement, executed for his part in preparations for the Easter Rebellion, were returned to Ireland by Britain in a goodwill gesture, the occasion was marked by grim festivity. As a Boy Scout, I marched in the cortege behind Casement’s flag-draped casket on a day that spat sleet and snow.

Yet in this same Ireland, at this same moment, industrial estates were springing up rapidly around Shannon Airport and its famous duty-free shops. Ireland launched its first television channel in 1961—a year after TV came to Albania—and although Ireland itself had only Telifís Éireann, one could also get the BBC, and therefore access to the rest of planet Earth. Irish theater was effectively still subject to censorship, but the new plays of Brian Friel hinted at a flowering to come. Though Church teaching and the law forbade contraception, sympathetic doctors finessed the ban by prescribing the pill for menstrual irregularity, leading to what one prominent obstetrician described as “the highest incidence of irregular cycles in women in the history of the human race.”

My own vivid, limited sense of that time and place—of a country watching itself change—is lodged in my memory like a single piece of a puzzle. O’Toole provides a place for that piece to go: the missing context in all directions.

Books about modern Ireland abound—the Irish love their words; isn’t that what people say? They include magisterial scholarship (the works of R. F. Foster), searing fiction (Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, John McGahern’s The Dark), and episodic recollections with a sharpened edge (John Banville’s recent Time Pieces). O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is in a category all its own, a blend of reporting, history, analysis, and argument, explored through the lens of the author’s sensibility and experience: his boyhood in the Crumlin housing estate; his education at the hands of the fearsome Christian Brothers; his awareness, as a political journalist in Dublin, of clerical cover-ups and government chicanery; his impatience with the “silences and evasions” of Irish life.

O’Toole was born in 1958, the son of a bus conductor and a homemaker, into an Ireland where in many respects time seemed to have stopped. The failed Easter Rebellion had led eventually to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which decreed partition for the island and granted independence to the southern Free State. It also brought on a bloody civil war—the original “Troubles.” Éamon de Valera, a commandant in the uprising who was spared execution in 1916 in part because he was an American citizen, opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty but went on to lead the nation it created. He warned against “amorphous cosmopolitanism,” as if that were imminent. Through decades of economic torpor, the country’s chief export was beef. Its other export was people. The Ireland of de Valera’s aspiration was Catholic, rural, Irish-speaking, and, as he himself put it, “as self-contained as possible.” Church and state—specifically, de Valera’s long-dominant Fianna Fáil party—worked hand in glove, a regime of mutual reinforcement. The fusion was symbolized by the use of the term martyrs for the Easter rebels.

The year of O’Toole’s birth was also the year when a government minister named T. K. Whitaker produced a report with the bland name “Economic Development.” It was so calm and academic—the “Grey Book,” in shorthand—that it quietly became national policy. The report’s broad impetus was Ireland’s backward condition as a kind of charming North Korea. The more immediate spark, Whitaker later acknowledged, had been a cover image on Dublin Opinion magazine showing a sign sprouting from an empty island. The sign read Shortly Available: Undeveloped Country / Unrivalled Opportunities / Magnificent Views, Political and Otherwise / Owners Going Abroad. Whitaker’s report provided a blueprint for opening the Irish economy to outside investment and ultimately to Europe. It embodied what O’Toole refers to as “the great gamble”—that “everything would change economically but everything would stay the same culturally.”

It would not and could not. For all its genuine warmth, O’Toole writes, President John F. Kennedy’s state visit, in 1963, was also a reminder of a world the Irish did not yet inhabit but were starting to glimpse: the wealth, the cars, the confidence, the sex, the sunglasses. The sight of the Irish and American presidents standing together underscored the distance. Could anyone imagine de Valera having a drink with Marilyn and Frank? But a different Irish future lay within reach. Whitaker’s plan would lead, down the road, to surging prosperity and brash ad campaigns in foreign airports featuring photos of savvy young redheads above slogans like People Are To Ireland As Oil Is To Texas. In the 25 years after 1990, American companies invested five times more heavily in the vaunted Celtic Tiger than they did in the People’s Republic of China. Among other things, Ireland became a leading manufacturer of Viagra, Prozac, and Botox. The bubble would one day burst, but the change in the country was permanent.

In effect, O’Toole writes, two very different Irelands came to coexist uneasily, neither displacing the other:

“Ireland,” as a notion, was almost suffocatingly coherent and fixed: Catholic, nationalist, rural. This was the Platonic form of the place. But Ireland as a lived experience was incoherent and unfixed. The first Ireland was bounded, protected, shielded from the unsavoury influence of the outside world. The second was unbounded, shifting, physically on the move to that outside world. In the space between these two Irelands, there was a haunted emptiness, a sense of something so unreal that it might disappear completely.

Emptiness is not really the right word. As O’Toole goes on to explain, the space was amply filled, by hypocrisy on the part of Ireland’s leaders, and by a kind of “doubleness” on the part of everyone else—a way of seeing and not seeing, of paying lip service to one set of values while pegging behavior to another.

Two figures loom over O’Toole’s narrative, one from Church and one from state: John Charles McQuaid, the archbishop of Dublin, who ruled Ireland’s Catholic life from 1940 until 1972; and Charles Haughey, who served three terms as taoiseach, or prime minister, between 1979 and 1992.

McQuaid was a diminutive, regal, fastidious man once likened by the poet Brendan Behan to a lasso (actually, “an elderly degenerate proselytising umbilical lasso”): a prelate who simultaneously held Ireland together and held it captive. He thundered against contraception, abortion, and divorce. His eyes and ears were sharp. When he heard Cole Porter lyrics being sung on Radio Éireann—“But I’m always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion / Yes, I’m always true to you, darlin’, in my way”—he put a stop to it. The programmer was told, as he later recalled, that “His Grace is concerned at the somewhat, eh, circumscribed morality of the song.” O’Toole once served as an altar boy for McQuaid when the archbishop came to Crumlin for a funeral Mass. Secular leaders had genuflected before him, and after Mass, as McQuaid touched the cheeks and tousled the hair of the altar boys, so did O’Toole: McQuaid “raised his right arm gently to the height of his own waist, palm down, so that I could see the amethyst in the Borgia ring presented to him on his elevation to the episcopacy.”

The only circumscribed morality McQuaid was prepared to tolerate was the abuse of young boys and girls by priests, and of women from many backgrounds by nuns in the infamous Magdalene Laundries. The abuse was known to him and others, and suspected by many, but brushed aside. Later investigations revealed that when parents broached the subject of abuse with Church authorities, they did so timidly and apologetically, as if it were they or their children who had done something wrong. The Church, O’Toole writes, had “successfully disabled a society’s capacity to think for itself about right and wrong.”

McQuaid died in 1973; standing vigil at the lying-in-state, as if to proclaim his solidarity, was a young minister and de Valera acolyte named Charles Haughey. As prime minister, he would back a 1983 constitutional amendment to protect Ireland’s anti-abortion laws from judicial interference. He also backed a referendum that maintained the ban on divorce. Earlier, as minister of justice, he had overseen Ireland’s film-censorship regime and spurned efforts at softening and reform. Haughey upheld the outward forms of marital propriety while conducting a long affair with the wife of a high-court judge.

Haughey was deeply corrupt. In the late 1960s, when he was an elected member of the Dáil, the Irish Parliament, his government salary was £3,500 a year; the annual wages for the staff at his estate north of Dublin came to £30,000. Later in life, Haughey would buy one of the Blasket Islands, off the coast of Kerry, then as now a symbolic link to a mythic past. The modernizing Irish present made the purchase possible—Haughey received secret infusions from builders and beef barons, retailers and speculators, as well as from the public purse. When a popular colleague needed a liver transplant, he solicited large sums of money for the operation, knowing all the while that insurance would cover the cost; then he kept the donations.

Haughey lived, O’Toole notes, like a member of the old Protestant elite—like “an Ascendancy squire”—confident that his constituents would be gratified by the national progress his lifestyle represented: The squire was now an Irish Catholic. People knew all of this but at the same time found it impossible to face directly. O’Toole describes attending a press conference in 1981—his first as a young political writer—where an editor impolitely asked Haughey, “Where did you get your money?” When Haughey dodged, the questioner persisted. Other journalists grew irritated—not at Haughey, but at the editor. “Haughey’s money was not really a journalistic question,” O’Toole observes. “It was, like child abuse or abortion or Magdalene Laundries, one of those things that was both known and unknowable.”

Much of the known and unknowable revolved around sex and sexuality. In O’Toole’s telling, hypocrisy on these matters acted as a solvent, finally detaching Ireland from the grip of the past. The gap between pious pronouncements and “lived experience” was simply too vast. In 1971, activist women made a show of traveling to buy birth-control pills and condoms in Belfast, Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, where they were readily available; the “contraceptive train” was seen by the Church as an outrage, but the anger and need were real. In the five decades after 1970, some 250,000 Irish women traveled to England to obtain abortions—this in a country of fewer than 5 million. Everyone knew someone.

The saga of Galway’s bishop, Éamonn Casey, who fled to South America in 1992 after revelations about his American lover and their teenage son, was followed by endless investigations into clerical abuse of children. Laws began to change. Contraception was legalized, then divorce, then abortion in 2018. Irish people by the hundreds of thousands, O’Toole notes, had seen the pain of friends and family, and come to conclusions “different from the ones they knew they were supposed to arrive at.” The flock, he observes, had moved far ahead of the shepherd. In 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by referendum. Thinking back on that vote, O’Toole writes:

What was being recognized was not just the wonderful and ordinary variousness of Irish lives and desires, it was Irish society’s other secret self—not the one that contained all the darkness and in-turned violence, but the great secret of intimate grace. Ours had been a place in which the quiet kindness of human acceptance, of loving and liking people even when their lives were not as they were supposed to be, had been consigned to the private realm, even while, paradoxically, we presented to the world a face of intolerance that was never really our own.

We Don’t Know Ourselves is astonishing in its range. Every chapter takes up a specific topic—the expansion of schooling, Irish peacekeepers during the Congolese crisis, the rise and decline of emigration, Muhammad Ali’s visit to Dublin, the invasion of American country music, Gay Byrne and his smooth and legitimizing The Late Late Show, the quest for membership in the European Union, Bobby Sands and the hunger strikes, the influx of hard drugs, the bungalow boom and bubble, the lunacy of the “Island of Ireland” development in Dubai, the Good Friday Agreement. The chapters move forward chronologically. What unites them all is O’Toole’s moral presence and literary voice: throughout, a sly, understated humor; when needed, passion and even anger. In the end, surveying what Ireland has become during his lifetime, he manages an optimistic note, one that is not merely asserted but earned. “What is possible now, and was entirely impossible when I was born, is this: to accept the unknown without being so terrified of it that you have to take refuge in fabrications of absolute conviction.”

I came away from We Don’t Know Ourselves seeing modern Ireland more convincingly portrayed and explained than ever before. I wish I understood modern America half as well.

This article appears in the April 2022 print edition with the headline “How Ireland Blundered Into the Modern World.”

This article originally stated that Charles Haughey, who became minister for justice in 1961, oversaw Ireland’s censorship of Casablanca. In fact, the country’s censorship office had banned the film when it was first released, in 1943.

The Sci-Fi Crime Novel That’s a Parable of American Society

2022-03-01T07:00:00-05:00

A few weeks ago, a long-ago conversation with a friend came to mind as I tried to bring some order to my bookshelves. My friend was not yet of a certain age, but he had, he confessed, crossed a line: He had made a transition from the curating stage of life to the editing stage. He was no longer collecting; he was deaccessioning. I lack his wisdom and maturity, and rather than editing as I sorted, I instead paused to thumb through and scan. And then I came across a book that made me stop and reread: The City & the City (2009), by the British writer China Miéville. It is a police procedural novel with a background environment that recalls Philip K. Dick. A crime needs to be solved in a society where two different cities—two separate polities, with separate populations, customs, alphabets, religions, and outlooks—coexist within the same small patch of geography. The names of the overlapping cities are Besźel and Ul Qoma.

When you engage with a book, personal circumstance is always your companion. John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud is a knife to the heart of any parent. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man might as well be scripture if you’re 18. And not just with a book. My mother took me to see Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when it opened in New York in the late 1960s—her idea. Part of the thrill was realizing that she knew me and understood I would like it.

I first read The City & the City during the time of Obama. The novel was always a parable, but it could be enjoyed simply as a clever, at times mind-bending fantasy, and as a fantasy it earned many awards. When I reread the book a few weeks ago, the fun was gone. The moment—my zeitgeist companion—was one of deepening and well-founded worry over the cohesion of American society. “America Is Falling Apart at the Seams” (The New York Times). “2022 Is the Year America Falls Off a Cliff” (Globe and Mail ). “79 Percent of Americans Say U.S. Is Falling Apart” (Futurism). If the traditional life cycle of commentary holds, the next stage will urge a long view of history. And it is true that perspective can provide a dulling comfort. There is a moment in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending when Marshall, an apparently dimwitted student, is asked by his history teacher, “How would you describe Henry the Eighth’s reign?” Marshall, Barnes writes, “searched for possible hidden complexities in the question before eventually locating a response.

“‘There was unrest, sir.’”

Pressed to elaborate, Marshall summons his powers to the maximum: “I’d say there was great unrest, sir.”

But societies do fall apart, and there is no single reason why. One historian, years ago, decided to collect and enumerate all the scholarly explanations for the fall of Rome. He counted upward of 210 specific theories. Sometimes the dissolution of a society is rapid and startling—think of Yugoslavia after Tito. Sometimes it is so slow—as with imperial Rome—that entire lifetimes go by without anyone’s being aware. Centuries may elapse before someone gives dissolution a name and a date.

[Read: The man who sacked Rome]

To turn the lens around, one can ask how cohesive some societies really were before they were seen to fail. The “United” Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland today shows signs of unraveling, but many Scots, Welsh, and Irish have opinions about how raveled it ever was. As for the United States, all the talk about exceptionalism doesn’t in itself make us exceptional. The colonies that formed the original union were protective of their autonomy and suspicious of federal power; in the 21st century, some of these states might as well be thought of as nations and are charting their own distinct directions. But separation isn’t only about lines on a map. Michael Harrington called his 1962 book about rural and urban poverty The Other America, implicitly acknowledging that it wasn’t about the America occupied by most of those who would buy and read his book. The Texas hill country known to Lyndon Johnson in the 1930s, as described in Robert Caro’s The Path to Power, has almost nothing in common with the urbane, martini-swilling world of The Thin Man, but they are exactly contemporaneous. A rhetorical question: Do most Black Americans and white Americans think of American history and experience in the same way? Do both feel they walk an equal distance toward one another to achieve a shared sense of ownership? Cohesion is easier to assert when questions like these are not asked, or even thought of.

Which brings me back to The City & the City. The novel never explains what caused the people of Besźel and Ul Qoma to live separately in the same place. Nor is the cleavage physically sharp, as it was with East and West Berlin. Some precincts are fully one entity or the other, but vast areas known as “crosshatch” are mixed, and citizens of the two entities are taught from an early age to “unsee” one another even as their paths may intersect in a crosshatched park or public square. The gravest offense one can commit in one of these cities is to fail to unsee—that is, to notice, to observe, to connect with a member of the other city. The merest glance is a transgression. If a figure of authority—a police officer, say—must move from one city to the other for some official purpose, there is a bureaucratic procedure for doing so. Outside that procedure, interaction between members of the two populations results in a condition called “breach.” Retribution is swift and summary.

As I sorted my books and returned them to the shelves, I had a decision to make. Should The City & the City go alongside Kafka and Borges or alongside Frederick Douglass and Eric Foner and other writers who made America their subject? I put it with the Americans. I have no idea whether the book is a parable of where we were, where we are, or where we’re heading. Maybe it’s all three. But I’m pretty sure that the value we need is breach.

This post appears courtesy of The American Scholar.

No, Really, Are We Rome?

2021-03-11T08:00:00-05:00

Illustration by Nicolás Ortega; Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Vandals (1890). Fine Art Images / Getty.

This article was published online on March 11, 2021.

The scenes at the Capitol on January 6 were remarkable for all sorts of reasons, but a distinctive fall-of-Rome flavor was one of them, and it was hard to miss. Photographs of the Capitol’s debris-strewn marble portico might have been images from eons ago, at a plundered Temple of Jupiter. Some of the attackers had painted their bodies, and one wore a horned helmet. The invaders occupied the Senate chamber, where Latin inscriptions crown the east and west doorways. Commentators who remembered Cicero invoked the senatorial Catiline conspiracy. Headlines referred to the violent swarming of Capitol Hill as a “sack.”

Outside, a pandemic raged, recalling the waves of plague that periodically swept across the Roman empire. As the nation reeled, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the role of a magister militum addressing the legions, issued an unprecedented advisory that put the sitting ruler on notice, condemning “sedition and insurrection” and noting that the inauguration of a new ruler would proceed. Amid all this came a New York Times report on the discovery and display of artifacts from the gardens of Caligula, an erratic and vengeful emperor, one of whose wives was named Milonia.

Ever since Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the prospect of a Rome-inflected apocalypse has cast its chilling spell. Britain’s former American colonies, which declared their independence the year Gibbon’s first volume was published, have been especially troubled by the parallels they discerned. The Founders feared the stealthy creep of tyranny. Half a century later, the narrative progression of The Course of Empire, Thomas Cole’s allegorical series of paintings, depicted the consequences of overweening ambition and national hubris. Today, as ever, observers are on the alert for portents of the Last Days, and have been quick, like Cato, to hurl warnings. And of course there are some Americans—including the January 6 attackers—who would find national collapse momentarily satisfying. “Sack Rome?” a barbarian wife says to her husband in an old New Yorker cartoon. “That’s your answer to everything.”

The comparisons, of course, can be facile. A Roman state of some sort lasted so long—well over a millennium—and changed so continuously that its history touches on any imaginable type of human occurrence, serves up parallels for any modern event, and provides contradictory answers to any question posed. Still, I am not immune to preoccupation with the Roman past. A decade and a half ago, I published a book called Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, which looked closely at the age-old Rome-and-America comparison. The focus was mainly on themes that transcend partisan politics, but it was also written at a particular moment, and reflected certain brute realities: The country was mired in Iraq and Afghanistan; fear and suspicion of foreigners were on the rise; and public functions of all kinds (maintaining highways, operating prisons, providing security) were being privatized. All of this had echoes in Rome’s long story.

It’s not as if the themes I wrote about then are obsolete. But they have a new context. The comparisons that come to mind now are not only about realities on the ground but about unrealities in our heads. The debasement of truth, the cruelty and moral squalor of many leaders, the corruption of basic institutions—signs of rot were proliferating well before January 6, and they remain, though the horde has been repelled.

If I were writing Are We Rome? today, one new theme I’d emphasize emerges from a phrase we heard over and over during the Trump administration: “adults in the room.” The basic idea—a delusion with a long history—was that an unfit and childish chief executive could be kept in check by the seasoned advisers around him, and if not by them, then by the competent career professionals throughout the government. The administration official who anonymously published a famous op-ed in The New York Times in 2018 offered explicit reassurance: “Americans should know that there are adults in the room.” Various individuals were given adult-in-the-room designation, including the White House counsel Don McGahn and Chief of Staff John Kelly. I sometimes imagined these adults, who included distinguished military veterans, wearing special ribbons. The obvious flaw in the arrangement was that the child could summarily dismiss the adults with an intemperate tweet.

For long periods in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the Roman empire was literally in the hands of children, as reigning emperors died unexpectedly and sons as young as 4 and 8 ascended to the most exalted rank. Adults in the room were appointed to serve them—often capable generals such as Stilicho (who served Honorius) and Aetius (who served Valentinian III). The idea was to acknowledge imperial authority as sacrosanct but at the same time have people in charge who could handle the job. And often it worked, for a while. The diplomat and historian Priscus described what happened when Valentinian grew up. The emperor’s intemperate tweet took this form:

As Aetius was explaining the finances and calculating tax revenues, with a shout Valentinian suddenly leaped up from his throne and cried out that he would no longer endure to be abused by such treacheries … While Aetius was stunned by this unexpected rage and was attempting to calm his irrational outburst, Valentinian drew his sword from his scabbard and together with Heracleius, who was carrying the cleaver ready under his cloak (for he was a head chamberlain), fell upon him.

There is no substitute, it turns out, for actual leadership at the top. Even so, when the adults are gone, the next line of defense is bureaucratic heroism. A civil service is one reason entities as large as the Roman empire—or the British or American one—have had staying power. Watch the behavior of imperial functionaries in the fifth century, when much of the Roman world was falling apart, and you see the ability of bureaucratic procedure and administrative competence—food goes here, gold goes there—to hold bits of the rickety scaffolding together when no one seems to be in charge. I’m not aware of ancient references to a civitas profunda, but the “deep state” is neither a modern nor a malevolent invention.

Yet these behind-the-scenes efforts at preserving normalcy do eventually falter, and a second new theme might be the dangers that apparent continuity, including symbolic continuity, can conceal. Corrosive change—in values, behavior, infrastructure—is often hard to observe; things look the same, until they don’t. Even before January 6—or November 3—many worried that the outward forms of American democracy might prove more robust than the thing itself. Inaugurations lift the spirit, but among Millennials in the U.S., fewer than a third believe that it is “essential” to live in a democracy (this from findings reported by the political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk). Congress has ceded authority to the president across a wide front, preserving mainly its capacity to hinder, acclaim, and conspire. The power to declare war survives only as an artfully arranged fig leaf; it was in fact relinquished decades ago. For all that, the Capitol is still reverenced as “the people’s house.”

Octavian, Julius Caesar’s adopted son, made himself Rome’s first emperor, ruling under the name Augustus. But he understood the utility of make-believe, maintaining the fiction that he had preserved republican government. Augustus did not proclaim himself an autocrat; the title princeps would do—the “first man.” In the manner of Donald Trump’s 1776 Project, but adroitly, he invoked the blessing of ancient sentiment to conceal radical intentions. The Senate would go on meeting, enjoying what the Roman historian Tacitus called “pretenses of freedom” long after it ceased to play any important role; in fact, it went on meeting after the empire was gone. Tacitus is always a delight:

This was a tainted, meanly obsequious age. The greatest figures had to protect their positions by subserviency; and, in addition to them, all ex-consuls, most ex-praetors, even many junior senators competed with each other’s offensively sycophantic proposals.

Form endures when substance is gone. In time, the city of Rome became as much a fiction as the vestiges of the old republic. Augustus adorned the capital not only with temples but also with election facilities. (And he showed up in person to vote, though the process was a charade.) Centuries later, Rome continued to look like an imperial capital, and extract wealth like one, even after becoming an empty shell. The real action and power had shifted elsewhere. Generals and armies roamed the provinces, responding to emergencies (and the ambitions of one another). Rival cities rose. But grain shipments to Rome continued. Monuments were cherished as touchstones of enduring greatness. Distinguished families lived in splendor. Senators plotted.

A third new theme might take up the idea of “alternative facts.” The term was coined by the Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway to put a gloss on one set of lies; it soon became shorthand for all of them. The administration’s reliance on falsehood needs no belaboring. It gave life to conspiracy theories, undermined faith in a national election, and stoked acts of insurrection. Allies on television and on social media helped all of that along. The Romans had a word for such allies: panegyrists.

Social media in ancient Rome was of the old-fashioned kind—word of mouth. While serving overseas as a provincial governor, Cicero designated an associate named Caelius to keep him up-to-date about rumors back home. Caelius informed Cicero that he was paying special attention to the susurratores (“whisperers”), the political gossips who lurked in the Forum. There were truth-tellers throughout Roman history, but as the centuries wore on, the telling of official lies became a recognized art form. Panegyrists were paid performers, subsidized by those they celebrated. The narrative arcs—about the prosperity of the empire, about success in battle—bend toward glory. The panegyrist Mamertinus evokes the glowing nimbus of Maximian’s hair. The panegyrist Claudian describes how Honorius will make Rome great again:

Oak groves shall drip with honey; streams of wine well up on every side, lakes of olive oil abound. No price shall be asked for fleeces dyed scarlet, but of themselves shall the flocks grow red to the astonishment of the shepherd, and in every sea the green seaweed will laugh with flashing jewels.

We will be tired of so much winning. The fulsome phrases of the panegyrists made Edward Gibbon squirm. But by empire’s end, giving praise to the ruler was the dominant form of rhetoric. And to many eyes, Gibbon knew, the portrait painted by the panegyrist was synonymous with history.

I subscribe to an academic news feed that drops research about Rome into my inbox—a history-book version of the beer-of-the-month club. Scholars engage in heated arguments about the Roman empire, but one thing we know for sure is that it is gone. And, unlike Brexit, no one was aware of the “end” as it was happening. Rome was sacked, as were other cities, and armed conflict at times brought turmoil, but decay occurred over centuries, and for many the transition from one thing to another was not stark. The human life span puts blinders on perception.

But that same life span concentrates human concerns in a useful way. Think of it as the inertia of the ordinary, a final new theme. For all the images of Roman calamity, the makings of a quieter set of images sit on a table near my desk—mundane odds and ends from the ancient world, given to me over the years. Most of them are from imperial Rome: a clay oil lamp, a delicate glass vase, colored marble from a villa’s floor, curved white limestone from a window’s arch, a grinding stone, a writing stylus, a key in the shape of a ring, a votive figurine. And coins—a silver denarius from the reign of Marcus Aurelius, for instance, and another from the reign of his unfortunate son, Commodus.

What the antiquities represent are not triumph and glory, but basic human needs—food, shelter, safety, knowledge, commerce, beauty, the life of the spirit—and the organized activities that secure them. These activities have, so far, always survived calamity—a bridge from every past to every future. Human society is resilient. And tending to basic needs can be a source of aspiration. America’s Constitution defined the promotion of “general welfare” and “domestic tranquility” as part of the country’s very purpose.

But resilience does not prevent calamity. And being blindsided in slow motion is the hardest fate to avoid. The historian Ramsay MacMullen once distilled the long arc of the Roman empire into three words—“fewer have more”—but only the time-lapse perspective of a millennium and a half allows us to understand such a thing with brutal clarity. The sack of Washington unfolded suddenly, in a way no one could miss. The greater dangers come in stealth.

The Man Without a Country

2021-01-05T10:30:00-05:00

Residents of Palm Beach are not amused. There has long been speculation that Donald Trump intends to take up postpresidential residence at Mar-a-Lago, the waterfront club he owns in Florida. Neighbors now point to a 1993 deal whereby Trump, in return for permission to turn a private estate into a profit-making business, agreed that no club member would live on the premises for more than 21 days a year, or for more than seven consecutive days at a time. If the agreement is enforced, the former president may find himself shuttling forever among Trump Organization properties in the U.S., Scotland, Dubai, the Philippines, and elsewhere; perhaps even being put up from time to time in the settlement named for him in the Golan Heights. In the worst case, he might live like King Lear, serially testing the goodwill of his children.

The president’s predicament brings to mind the fate of Philip Nolan, the central character in one of the most popular American short stories ever written—a staple of school reading lists for a century, up until the 1960s, but now largely forgotten. “The Man Without a Country,” by Edward Everett Hale, was published in The Atlantic in the winter of 1863. It was a moment of national crisis: America was deep in civil war; Gettysburg had been fought that summer; soon after, Lincoln had given his famous address. Hale, a prominent Boston writer and minister—the grandnephew of the Revolutionary martyr Nathan Hale, and the nephew of Edward Everett, who gave the other speech at Gettysburg—conceived a patriotic tale to aid the Union cause.

In the story, the narrator has just received word of the death of Philip Nolan—“poor Nolan, as we all learned to call him”—an Army lieutenant and a decent man who, decades earlier, when Thomas Jefferson was president, had found himself caught up in some questionable business involving Aaron Burr. Upon being convicted by court-martial, Nolan had jumped up and cried, “D--n the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!”

The judge, pronouncing sentence, granted Nolan his wish. ’Til the end of his days, he must live aboard a Navy corvette on the high seas. The buttons with the initials U.S. on his military uniform are replaced with buttons of plain brass. He is to be given his own quarters and treated well, but no one is permitted to give him news about his native country. He may read books, but not from an American publisher. Blocks of text are cut out of foreign newspapers to remove references to the United States. Whenever his ship sails home to an American port, he is transferred at sea beforehand to an outbound vessel.

Half a century goes by. Now Nolan lies dying. A shipboard officer named Danforth visits his cabin. He finds that Nolan has created a shrine to America. He has drawn a majestic eagle and a portrait of George Washington. He has created pennants with stars and stripes. He has drawn a detailed map of the United States as he remembers it, one still marked with an “Indiana Territory” and a “Louisiana Territory.” Nolan looks up at Danforth and says, “Here, you see, I have a country!”

Taking pity, Danforth ignores his orders and tells Nolan of all that has happened in America since the judge handed down his sentence. Nolan had noticed the occasional addition of stars on the ship’s flag; Danforth tells him the names of all the new states that have come into the Union. He describes the coming of the steamboat, the railroad, the telegraph. He gives the current president’s name as Lincoln. The one thing that Danforth cannot bring himself to reveal to the dying man is that America has been plunged into civil war. “I told him everything I could think of that would show the grandeur of his country and its prosperity; but I could not make up my mouth to tell him a word about this infernal Rebellion!”

I remember reading my father’s tattered Little Brown edition of the story, with the embossed sailing ship on the cover—his boyhood copy—and feeling overcome with sadness at Nolan’s predicament; sadness, and also fear. The idea of being forcibly detached from family, church, neighborhood—the “country” of the title referred to all of this, as well as citizenship—was chilling. National identity and the nature of citizenship were Hale’s subjects; the Civil War was being fought over them. A few years after Hale’s story was published, birthright citizenship would be guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. This is the era when United States becomes a singular rather than a plural noun. Worldwide, in the course of the century, ideas of nationalism, sovereignty, and citizenship were codified in international law.

I have sometimes wondered how Edward Everett Hale’s mental map would have changed if he were writing his story today. He might well decide to make it a parable not about renouncing country but about embracing statelessness. I don’t mean forcible statelessness—when people are driven from their homeland. Those refugees would like nothing better than to have a state to call their own. Rather, Hale today might cast his eye on the voluntary statelessness of the affluent—of people who enjoy the benefits of one or more nation-states but give support and allegiance to none. For them, statelessness is a lifestyle option.

[Read: The rise of the global elite]

As analysts have documented, the globalized opt-out class is a large and expanding group. If they have territoriality, it is the Premier Club lounges at airports. The wealth they possess is sheltered “offshore.” They are bound to one another by mystic cords of tablet and smartphone. Their pedigree is mix-’n’-match international—maybe Hong Kong, Dragon School, Harvard, Blackstone—and their indigenous culture is the high-end eclecticism of FT Weekend. They qualify for Global Entry, which they need when moving from house to house. They buy nationalities and passports as flags of convenience. They are people without a country, and happy with their lot.

In his own way, Donald Trump is a member of this stateless class—not in terms of personal taste and private behavior, which would repel many other members, but in terms of outlook and consequence. He is American by birth, yet has paid more in taxes to other countries than he has to the U.S. Treasury (and not very much anywhere). His concept of America is empty of values, history, and law. In his lifetime he has committed himself to no public or private institution, no church, no party, no school; nor to any person as a friend, or to any idea as a conviction. His business ambitions preclude nothing and no one. No patch of earth is held to be sacred; geography is a figure of speech. While registering to vote in Florida, he sought to keep Washington, D.C., as his permanent address. He is incurious about what happens in his own land. Pandemic deaths in America do not interest him, much less move him. To give your life for your country is unimaginable: “What was in it for them?” he reportedly asked, among the soldiers’ graves at Arlington National Cemetery.

Two centuries ago, Philip Nolan’s judge had to go to great lengths to mete out a punishment of statelessness: condemning the defendant to live aboard a sailing ship, beyond sight of land, for the rest of his life. Today, statelessness can be achieved without moving an inch. Donald Trump, when he took his seat behind the Resolute Desk, became our first stateless president. A postpresidency spent touring his global properties would be a logical next step.

And unlike Philip Nolan, he will lash out. In “The Man Without a Country,” poor Nolan gives Danforth his Bible and asks him to open it after his death. On a scrap of paper, Danforth finds what Nolan hopes to have carved on a simple stone as his epitaph: “He loved his country as no other man has loved her; but no man deserved less at her hands.”

Trump Needs a Safe Space

2020-11-13T06:45:00-05:00

More than a week after losing the presidential election to Joe Biden, Donald Trump continues to proclaim victory and stall the transition. Some White House advisers profess (“privately”) to be nudging Trump toward a concession—so far with no success. It’s time to think differently about how to ease the president into a new reality.

In the movie Good Bye, Lenin!, a woman in communist East Berlin falls into a coma shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She awakens many months later, unaware of the world-changing events that have taken place. Doctors fear that the slightest shock could kill her. Because the woman had been an ardent party member, her teenage son sets out to create the illusion—for her—that the wall is intact and everything is how it was. He dresses the way East Germans used to dress. He stocks his mother’s kitchen with East German food. He cobbles together fake news programs out of old footage on state-run TV. He comes up with an explanation for the “Coca-Cola” billboard his mother sees one day from her window.

Inhabiting the lie that he actually won the election, Trump is ripe for similar treatment. It might be simplest for everyone if he found refuge in a safe space where he can indulge his illusions while the rest of us get on with our business.

[Adam Serwer: The crisis of American democracy is not over ]

Trump is destined to receive the Secret Service protection accorded to every former chief executive, and he still gets to be called “Mr. President”—a good start when it comes to creating the right ambience. On the next trip to Bedminster or Mar-a-Lago, he should be induced by some pretext to stay put. (Antifa caravan approaching Washington?) His minders can give him an updated version of that 2016 electoral map he likes so much, with its swaths of red. A flick of the Sharpie would excise Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta, flipping three states into his column. A gratifying extra touch—Greenland, given three electoral votes, also shown in red.

His normal schedule already consists of “no public activities,” which is helpful, but he will be expecting “state visits” from foreign leaders. This could easily be accomplished. NATO is governed by the principle of collective security—all for one, one for all—and a clearer case for invoking Article 5 can hardly be imagined. Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and others can stop by on a rotating basis. Think of it as “burden-sharing.” With the help of Howard X, the famed Kim Jong Un impersonator, a summit meeting with the North Korean leader could also be arranged.

Real news, of course, cannot be allowed to reach Trump—perhaps a notional concern. Aides can tell him that the “failing” New York Times and the “failing” Washington Post are not being delivered because they have … failed. As for TV, if Fox insists on depicting reality, they can switch the screen to NewsMax or One America News Network. He could still phone in to Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, who haven’t conceded the election, either. And if he wants to tweet with abandon, then Twitter can grasp a path to redemption, and quietly separate his account from his audience.

[Read: Twitter’s next Trump problem]

Verisimilitude is important. To recreate the White House environment, a stream of COVID-positive visitors could be invited for meetings, keeping infection levels high. Having familiar faces around—Jared, Ivanka, Melania—is essential. Would they go along with the charade? They need no lessons in complicity—a big plus—but an “all is forgiven” welcome to a future Met Gala might be part of the answer. Mike Pence would be harder to persuade, but the cardboard cutout has been working well for years. Having familiar faces no longer around is also important; the president needs to be able to fire people on a regular basis. And to hire new ones. Firing is easy: His administration would already be gone. But if Hollywood celebrities really want to serve their country, a troupe of performers straight from central casting—John Goodman, Kristin Chenoweth, Bryan Cranston, Anne Hathaway—would stand ready to play their part and bring the idea of “acting secretary” to its logical conclusion.

As time goes on, the Good Bye, Lenin! strategy would present challenges. It’s easy to simulate a Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony (Scott Baio and Roger Stone would definitely accept), harder to explain why an inauguration can’t be held on the Mall (“Being used for spectator overflow from the Biden trial, sir”). But it’s worth a try. With luck, Trump will one day tell us he’s had “the greatest second term in history, with the possible exception of Lincoln’s.”

The Bush-Gore Recount Is an Omen for 2020

2020-08-17T11:16:00-04:00

Twenty years ago this fall, the United States was plunged into 36 days of turmoil as lawyers, judges, political operatives, and election workers grappled with the uncertain result of the presidential contest in Florida. Whoever won the state would win the presidency. In the end, after start-and-stop recounts and the intervention of courts at every level, Texas Governor George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, was declared the victor, edging out Vice President Al Gore, the Democrat.

The story of the 2000 Florida recount offers a reminder of just how chaotic the electoral process can become—and of how disarray in a single state can undermine faith in the democratic process nationwide. The U.S. Constitution gives individual states the responsibility for conducting elections. Rules and procedures vary widely. Today, at a time far more polarized than two decades ago, not just one but every state faces potential challenges to the integrity of its electoral process. In many states, the balloting technology is antiquated. And in many states, registering to vote has deliberately been made harder, especially for the poor and people of color. A continuing shift toward widespread voting by mail—accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic—seems likely to provoke lawsuits based on discredited claims that the practice spurs voting fraud.

A cause for truly legitimate concern is something else entirely: whether the U.S. Postal Service can handle the expected volume and return marked ballots to election officials in time for them to be counted in November’s national elections. On August 13, in an interview on Fox News, President Donald Trump declared his opposition to providing the financially troubled USPS with additional funding, giving as an explicit reason a desire to hamper mail-in voting, which he had previously said “doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” The USPS has already announced plans for cutbacks in service across the board. On August 14, The Washington Post reported that the Postal Service had informed 46 states and the District of Columbia that it could not guarantee that mailed-in ballots could be delivered in time to be counted.

[Read: The postal service can handle the election—if it’s allowed to]

The account here, drawn from interviews with more than 40 people with firsthand experience of the Florida-recount saga, is both a history and a warning.

I. Election Night

As votes were counted on the night of November 7, 2000, Bush watched the returns at the governor’s mansion, in Austin. Gore watched the returns at the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel, in Nashville. The weather in both cities was chilly and wet. By the end of the night, Gore held a lead over Bush in the national popular vote, which he would never lose, but the contest in the Electoral College was tight, and it all came down to Florida. The election, both campaigns understood, was far from over.

Leading up to the election, polls had indicated that the race between Bush and Gore would be close, with an especially slim margin in several key states. Potentially affecting the outcome were two other candidates: Ralph Nader, of the left-wing Green Party, and Pat Buchanan, of the right-wing Reform Party.

On Election Day, a number of counties in Florida reported problems. A confusing ballot—the so-called butterfly ballot—in Palm Beach County prompted thousands of voters to cast their ballot unwittingly for Buchanan. Ballots in Duval County also caused confusion; some 22,000 votes there were disqualified because voters chose more than one candidate. The punch-card apparatus used elsewhere in the state sometimes failed to punch out a hole completely, meaning that the machine would not record a ballot choice.

Ben Ginsberg (Bush campaign general counsel): On the Monday before the election, we had the luxury of being able to go out for lunch. Campaign operatives stop asking lawyers questions the closer it gets to Election Day—they know what the law is by that point. We were in our favorite dive Mexican restaurant in Austin. Somebody asked about recounts, and I said, “I’ve been doing a lot of recounts over the past 16 years, and there is no way we will ever have a presidential recount. The last one was in 1876. It will not happen again.”

[Norm Ornstein: The November election is going to be a mess]

Ron Klain (Gore recount committee general counsel): I got a call on Election Day from a lawyer named Lester Hyman, probably at 8 a.m., Nashville time. His daughter, Liz, had called him to say that people were coming out of the polling places in Palm Beach, and they were confused about who they had voted for. They thought they might have voted for Pat Buchanan by accident. I found [Gore adviser] Michael Whouley, reported this to him, and then frankly didn’t really think much about it. It was just one polling place in Palm Beach.

Nick Baldick (Gore operative in Florida): It was, like, 11 a.m. when we got our first call about the butterfly ballot. We knew it was creating huge anxiety and fear, and that we would lose some votes, and we knew that the election was going to be close.

Karl Koch (Gore aide): My phone was blowing up with calls, people saying, “Oh my God, something awful is happening in Palm Beach.” We tried to start communicating messages—“Make sure you’re paying attention to your ballot.” But at that point, we’re way past the halfway point of Election Day.

Just before 8 p.m. Eastern time, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN projected that Gore would win Florida, putting him on track to gain the 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency. The projection was premature. Polls were still open in western Florida, where the Bush vote was likely to be strong, and there were issues with the exit-poll and vote-tally information provided by the consortium Voter News Service, on which all of the networks relied.

Clay Roberts (director of the Florida Division of Elections): I had a TV on in my office, and I’m watching the national coverage. They called Florida while the polls were still open west of the Apalachicola River. I had sent a letter to all the networks making sure that they knew that Florida had two time zones, and that they weren’t to report Florida results until after 7 p.m. Central time.

Karl Rove (Bush chief strategist): We’re talking to [Tim] Russert; we’re talking to Bob Schieffer; we’re talking to anybody in the press who we could talk to. I lambasted Bernie Shaw for calling Florida without all the polls closed. He was incredulous, like, “What do you mean the polls aren’t all closed?” I said, “You’ve got the entire panhandle of Florida in the Central time zone, and they’re still voting.”

[Read: The voting disaster ahead]

Chris Lehane (Gore press secretary): I have this vivid memory of being on the top floor of the Loews—in the presidential suite, ironically—where the vice president was, with his family. The networks called Florida for Gore. At that point, he’s the president-elect, and I remember referring to him as that.

David Morehouse (Gore trip director): We thought we had it. I didn’t pop any champagne corks, but I’m sure there were champagne corks popped. I remember seeing Karl Rove on the networks saying they had prematurely called Florida. I thought that was just the Bush campaign doing their spinning.

Before long, the networks put Florida back into the “Undecided” column. Then, just after 2 a.m., they gave the state, and the presidency, to Bush. Gore called Bush to concede and headed to the War Memorial Auditorium to make a concession speech.

Judy Woodruff (CNN anchor): We were not making the call. It wasn’t Bernie Shaw and Judy Woodruff—it was the CNN political unit, which was in contact with the consortium. We were live on the set and we were getting information they conveyed through our earpieces. We started hearing that there was going to be a rescinding of the call.

Joe Lieberman (Gore’s vice-presidential candidate): The networks pulled back the announcement that we had carried Florida. My wife was exhausted, and she said, “Let’s go back to our room.” We go back to our suite in our hotel, and as you walk in, there’s a foyer table, and she just sweeps a bowl of flowers onto the floor. My wife is maybe more expressive than I am.

Karl Koch (Gore aide): My wife was on the phone in Tallahassee with an open line to the national war room, and she’s laughing and saying, “All I can hear is Michael [Whouley] walking around saying, ‘Oh, fuck.’”

Michael Feldman (Gore traveling chief of staff): It all happened very quickly. I cannot tell you what network it was, but the network called Florida for Bush and then the election for Bush. Somebody went to change the channel, and then changed the channel again, and then changed the channel again. Every network had called the election for Bush.

Betsy Fischer Martin (NBC producer): I remember [Tom] Brokaw saying, “This would be something, if the networks managed to blow it twice in one night.” Later he said, “We don’t just have egg on our face. We have a whole omelet.”

Michael Feldman (Gore aide): There wasn’t a ton being said, but at some point the vice president and [his campaign manager] Bill Daley went next door to an adjacent room. I believe it was then that the vice president called Governor Bush and had that first conversation.

But new information soon became available, and within the hour, Gore called Bush to retract his concession, saying: “Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you.” With only a few thousand votes separating the two candidates, Florida was very much in play.

Jeff Greenfield (CNN analyst): While we were waiting for Gore to concede, even a numerically challenged person like myself began to notice that the vote margin in Florida for Bush was shrinking by the minute. Gee, that’s odd. We’ve called the race; he’s the next president. But these new numbers …

Karl Rove (Bush strategist): I had this red phone on my desk—talk about a classic cliché—and only one person had the number, so when it rang, it was either some pizza joint or it was Governor Bush. I picked up the phone, and he says, “What the heck is going on?” And I said, “We don’t know.”

[Laurence H. Tribe, Jennifer Taub, and Joshua A. Geltzer: Trump has launched a three-pronged attack on the election]

Michael Feldman (Gore aide): We were riding to the War Memorial, and at some point, my White House pager went off. It was Michael Whouley. He said, “I’m looking at the secretary of state of Florida’s website. It’s under 6,000 votes. We’re within the automatic recount. Are you with Bill?” We added Bill Daley to the call.

Ron Klain (Gore aide): My cellphone rang, and it was Ron Fournier of the Associated Press. And Ron said, “Why is Al Gore conceding?” I said, “Because we lost the election, Ron.” And he said, “Do you know that the Associated Press, the nation’s oldest news organization, has not yet declared Florida for Bush?” I hung up and called Nick Baldick, who was running Florida for Gore, and I was like, “What the fuck is going on?” He was like, “Hey, no one in Nashville has called me. I hear you guys are conceding. What’s going on up there?”

[From the September 1896 issue: The election of the President]

Chris Lehane (Gore aide): I remember the holding room we were in at the War Memorial, the bowels of the amphitheater—you know, stone and brick, like from the 1920s, water dripping all around. And it’s in that room that, like, the fate of the free world is hanging in the balance.

Michael Feldman (Gore aide): Gore walked in, and he was not happy to be there. Bill [Daley] said to him, “It’s under 1,000 votes.” I’m on the phone, and I just remember him looking at Bill and at me, and it was like, What?

Joe Lieberman (Democratic vice-presidential candidate): Bill Daley called [Bush campaign chair] Don Evans and said the vice president would like to talk to Governor Bush. They put him on, and Al says, “Governor, it’s so close now that I must tell you I feel compelled to withdraw my concession.” And there’s silence, and a little back-and-forth, and then silence, and then Al says, “Well, I don’t care what your little brother says. I’m formally telling you I am no longer conceding, thank you, good night.” Somebody said, “Oh, man, that was incredible. You called Jeb his little brother.” And Al said, “I didn’t call him his little brother. He said to me, ‘My little brother tells me that we’re definitely going to carry Florida.’”

Ben Ginsberg (Bush aide): It was 40 degrees and raining in Austin, and no one cared in the least: You had just won the presidency. Except the vice president should have been out conceding. It was taking a long time. There were big Jumbotrons set up around the stage, and all of a sudden [CNN political correspondent] Candy Crowley was going, “Give me a mic! Give me a mic! The vice president has withdrawn his concession.” Then the weather felt really bad—cold and wet and rainy.

Kristen Silverberg (Bush policy adviser): We stumbled back to the offices. One of the lawyers for the campaign was online, Googling Florida recount rules. I remember thinking that wasn’t very confidence-inspiring.

Karl Rove (Bush strategist): At 2:48, our statewide lead dropped to 39,600 votes. Palm Beach County was the last big one to come in. At 3 a.m., it came crashing in: We were down to an 11,000-vote lead. Ten minutes later, 10,000. Thirty minutes later, 6,000. By 3:47, we were 2,000, and at 4:10, our margin settled in at about 1,800 votes.

Ben Ginsberg (Bush aide): About 3:30 in the morning, Don Evans came up to me and said, “All right, you better get that recount mechanism going. Time to saddle up.”

Chris Lehane (Gore aide): There’s a number of us, including myself, clearly falling asleep as we’re standing up. And we go to a meeting, and there’s a bunch of lawyers in the room who have been on call in case there were issues. They’re talking about how you win these recounts by being smart about the districts you pick to do the recount in. I still remember Mark [Fabiani] spoke out against that and argued that, you know, this is a presidential campaign. It cannot look like we’re trying to cherry-pick.

[Read: How Donald Trump could steal the election]

Mark Fabiani (Gore deputy campaign manager): I remember going to see Gore at the end of the night, and him coming out of his bedroom with the bathrobe that the hotel had given us. We all got monogrammed bathrobes with our initials on them.

Michael Feldman (Gore aide): I still have my monogrammed Loews Vanderbilt robe. That’s a trigger.

November 17, 2000: A Palm Beach County canvassing-board member holds up a disputed ballot for examination by lawyers for the two major political parties. The man at right is Republican John Bolton, later George W. Bush’s UN ambassador and Donald Trump’s national security adviser. (Greg Lovett / AFP via Getty)

II. The Battle Begins

On the morning of Wednesday, November 8, the Bush and Gore campaigns began sending lawyers and volunteers to Florida. The narrow margin had set in motion an automatic mechanical recount—checking the machines and the tallies—but not a recount by hand. The mechanical recount reduced Bush’s margin to 327 votes. Gore had the right to request a hand recount in each of Floria’s 67 counties—the request had to be made county by county—but he asked for a recount in just four: Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia. All of them were populous and heavily Democratic. They were also counties where problems with voting had been concentrated. Bush’s post-election effort in Florida was led by the former secretary of state James A. Baker. Gore’s effort was led by the former secretary of state Warren Christopher.

Ben Ginsberg (Bush aide): When you go into a recount, you need people in four different disciplines: You need lawyers. You need people who can be sure the ballots are secure and not tampered with. You have to have communications people. And you need people who are good in logistics. One of the great things about campaign people is that they know how to get the impossible done in a real hurry. There were planes already on standby.

Jill Alper (Democratic consultant): I remember saying, “Gosh, I wish we had a plane,” and then saying, “Wait. We have the Lieberman plane.” We put the all-call out. People started coming back.

Alan Rose (Gore staffer): I remember thinking, I can’t believe Lieberman has been on this plane for the whole election. It was a broken-down old charter. It was unmarked—no shrink-wrapped logo.

Kristen Silverberg (Bush aide): I left from Austin on the first plane at maybe five or six. I remember asking, “What do we know about Florida recount law?” Everybody kind of stared at each other. Then we all went to sleep for an hour.

Jill Alper (Democratic consultant): I was in the front of the plane. With one of the lawyers, I put together a little recount training guide. I used the microphone that the stewardesses would normally use.

Alan Rose (Gore staffer): We landed in Tallahassee at the same time Jeb Bush did, coming from Austin. On the tarmac, we walked right by him.

Theodore Olson (Bush lawyer): I was flying to meetings in Los Angeles. Somewhere over the middle of the United States—there were telephones on airplanes in those days—I checked messages, and I had two calls from people in connection with the Bush campaign asking if I could get to Tallahassee right away. I told them I was going the wrong direction at 30,000 feet. When I got to Los Angeles, I turned around.

Robert Zoellick (Bush recount aide): I had clothes for just a few days. We had to build all the basics, from learning Florida election law to office space, food, places to stay. We were getting very good lawyers to come down, but where do you put them?

Bret Baier (Fox News reporter): One weekend, the hotels were all booked because of the Florida–Florida State game. I ended up staying in someone’s house, like, in a guest room. I woke up looking at a family picture, thinking, What is this room? And who is that family in the photo?

David Boies (Gore lawyer): When I arrived at the offices in Tallahassee, I was greeted by Ron Klain, who said, “Welcome to Guatemala.”

Ron Klain (Gore aide): If you had to think about the worst possible place to fight this thing out, other than maybe Texas, Florida was the most adverse circumstance you can imagine. The person in charge of running the whole thing is the fucking candidate’s brother, Jeb Bush. If I handed you how Florida worked on a piece of paper, you would say, “This is a Third World banana republic.”

Karl Koch (Gore aide): The Bush argument was easier than our argument—“The votes have been cast; it’s over.” We had to make the argument for why the election wasn’t over, and people don’t want to hear that argument.

Mark Fabiani (Gore aide): Some of us proposed a plan where on Sunday night, after the NFL games, Gore would make an address. He would have done it in Florida, and he would have done it in front of a group of senior citizens—you know, primarily Jewish people who had been disenfranchised by the butterfly ballot and had ended up voting for Pat Buchanan. And he would say to them, “Look, I know this is heartbreaking for you. But here’s what I think is the best thing for this country. I pledge not to bring legal action, and I know that some of you might want me to bring legal action on the butterfly ballot. I pledge not to bring this action to court. However, I pledge to resolve it as speedily as possible with a statewide recount that would be supervised by some, you know, eminent people.” That was what some of us thought we should do. Probably Bush would have rejected it. But it at least would have given us a dramatic moment, and it would have put Gore in a good position. Even if we then had to go to individual county recounts, we could say, “Look, we wanted to do a statewide recount, and the other side wouldn’t do it.” And this was all very much in motion. And then Senator Lieberman attended a meeting on Saturday after the Sabbath ended and argued very strongly against this. So we ended up staking out a position of, you know, limited recounts in limited counties. And that led the other side, of course, to take the position that that’s unfair.

Joseph Geller (chair, Miami-Dade Democratic Party): When the first of the official campaign people started trickling in, somehow they made a decision, I believe without asking us, that they were only interested in manual recounts in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia. Well, you know, that could be their opinion, but that might have been the moment where the campaign was lost.

Robert Zoellick (Bush recount aide): We wanted to emphasize finality and fairness. And part of finality and fairness was accepting the rules, as opposed to writing the rules to serve the outcome the other side wanted. We always had to be careful about a public dynamic that everybody should just keep counting until the result flips. Our message was that Bush won, various recounts reestablished this, and it’s time to end the push for a different result. Gore’s slogan was “Count all the votes,” but he undermined his own position, because he started by seeking hand recounts in only four very Democratic counties. He didn’t ask for a statewide recount, and his team tried to block some military absentee ballots.

The organizational styles of the Bush and Gore efforts were markedly different. Bush remained aloof, focused on a presumptive transition to the presidency; Florida was tightly overseen by Baker (Bush’s brother Jeb, the governor, had officially recused himself). In contrast, Gore was personally involved; decision making was more inclusive and dispersed.

Robert Zoellick (Bush recount aide): The Gore people were actually way ahead of us. They’ve got a plane with 70 lawyers. They’ve got all this preparation done. I arrived the day after the election, and Baker and [Bush campaign manager] Joe Allbaugh had come from Texas on a private plane. We were the first three down there. We’re really starting from scratch. But by the end, we had specialized teams focusing on the Florida courts, and on the different divisions of the Florida courts, absentee and other ballot issues, and on the federal courts. We had separate people on TV. Then we had recount teams. Baker and a few of us coordinated briefings with Governor Bush. If you look at David Boies—in the last week, he was doing all the courts, TV, and advising Gore by himself. Boies was very good, but he was stretched too thin, and we had talent that could match him in each area. Also, Governor Bush had empowered Baker, so we could make decisions and stick with them.

Fred Bartlit (Bush lawyer): After the election, Ron Klain and I would go to places and talk about the recount. Ron would recall these huge conference calls with 40 or 50 people. Gore himself would be on the call. And the calls would go on for a long time. Then they’d ask me. I said we had a morning meeting for about 40 minutes with four of us headed by Secretary Baker. George Bush was never there. We believed in SEAL Team Six, not the 3rd Infantry Division.

Kimball Brace (voting-equipment expert witness): I remember an hour-long phone call with Al Gore. He was very inquisitive about what I knew in terms of voting equipment. Either he had been very well briefed or he had a great big file cabinet next to him. He kept asking, “What about these vendors? Who owns this company?” All kinds of things.

Joshua Bolten (Bush policy director): Bush didn’t have a lot to do. He made the smart judgment that he should not attempt to be the field commander. He was at the ranch most of the time.

III. Hanging, Dimpled, Pregnant

Legal actions went forward on many fronts; the chair of the Miami-Dade canvassing board referred to the proliferation of suits as “musical courts.” The Bush camp sought to stop hand recounts, and lost, on constitutional grounds, in federal court. The Gore camp sought, in state court, to prevent certification of the results until hand counts in four counties were complete—and momentarily prevailed, in the Florida Supreme Court. Separately, the Gore camp won a ruling by a Florida judge, Jorge Labarga, that so-called dimpled chads could be considered by officials conducting recounts.

Meanwhile, the laborious process of hand counting got under way in Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, and Volusia Counties. It was tedious and fractious. Hanging over everything: a running clock. The Electoral College would meet on December 18. If election disputes were not resolved, the matter would pass to the Florida legislature in advance of that deadline.

Jorge Labarga (circuit-court judge): The main thing I was asked to rule on is: What was the intent of the voters? The way voting went was you had this little card and you insert it into this machine, and then you puncture the circle of the people you’re voting for. And then that card full of holes would be inserted into a computer. People don’t always follow directions. Instead of just puncturing the hole for Al Gore, some people would write Al Gore. Or you could see where they tried to push the little chad through—there’s, like, a bulge in it—but it held in place. That would be a “pregnant” chad. The question for me was: Do we have to have a complete removal of the chad? Or what about a person who wrote in the name Al Gore—do we count that? Clearly they indicate intent. I ruled that they should be counted.

Mark Glaze (recount volunteer): They brought out the physical ballots in boxes. And the monitor, a theoretically neutral person, would, one by one, go through the ballots and hold them up. And there would be an observer from the Gore side, and one from the Bush side. The monitor was not supposed to let us touch the ballots.

Jon Winchester (recount volunteer): It was a sweatshop. We got in there and counted ballots for hours and hours. One of the observers would say, “Oh, this is a good one,” and the other would say, “Oh, I object—that one’s questionable.” And we’d have to put it into the canvassing-board pile [for review].

Ann McFall (Volusia County canvassing-board member): They fed the canvassing board and the workers for the canvassing board—they had turkey legs every night brought over from the prison. You had some really important people just holding up these long, long turkey legs. Oh my God, it was something.

Jorge Labarga (circuit-court judge): When the case was done, the election supervisor rented a Ryder truck, and the truck carried all those ballots to Tallahassee. The happiest day of my life was when I saw that yellow truck on the Florida Turnpike heading north, away from me.

Katherine Harris, Florida’s Republican secretary of state—the official responsible for overseeing elections—proved to be a lightning rod. Democrats questioned whether she was impartial, because she had been co-chair of George W. Bush’s Florida campaign. Some Republicans worried about her political skills in a crisis.

The Gore campaign had hoped to achieve as much as possible in the “protest” period, before certification, at the county level. Harris argued that challenges would be better afterward, statewide, in the “contest” period. Pressing for certification, Harris sought speedy completion of recounts, or an end to them. The role played in her office by the Republican operative Mac Stipanovich remains a matter of dispute.

Leon St. John (lawyer for Palm Beach County): Time was on the side of the Republicans, because Bush had a lead and there was a deadline to certify the vote under Florida law.

Katherine Harris (Florida secretary of state): My role was to protect Al Gore’s legal rights, not his political viability, so I was focused on certification and trying to follow the law, although the Florida Supreme Court delayed me several times. The Gore campaign felt that they had to prolong the protest phase, and hopefully gain more votes, but what happened when they did that, they short-circuited the time in the contest phase, and there wasn’t time to do the manual recount statewide as we should have had.

Robert Zoellick (Bush recount aide): All the political whirlwinds were buffeting Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. She was trying to be fair under Florida statutes, but the Florida Supreme Court was inventing new law and the press was clobbering her. I don’t know whether it came through Jeb Bush or the Republican Party, but Katherine was given Mac Stipanovich as an adviser to steady her nerves. His nickname was “Mac the Knife.” Mac, a former marine, had run [Jeb] Bush’s first, and losing, campaign for governor. A great personality and mind, one of those colorful people you come across in state politics, with a wealth of knowledge about local personalities, battles, and bodies. At the time, he was studying for a master’s degree in medieval French history.

Mac Stipanovich (Republican operative): I was sitting in Latin class when my phone vibrated. I looked down and saw who it was and stepped outside, and the ask was: Could I get into Katherine Harris’s office and help her? I had a good relationship with Harris. I had helped in her election, and we’d been personal friends ever since. The strategy was to bring the election in for a landing, to make it end, to get it over with, to just keep squeezing down the options. My primary job was to give strategic advice and to counsel Katherine. I was fairly well known in Tallahassee. I would arrive early in the morning, be driven in from outside into the parking garage, go up to her office, stay there until everything was over at night, and then be driven out of the parking garage to my car off-site. Driving into the capital past reporters who would have recognized me would not have inspired confidence that impartiality was the rule in the secretary of state’s office.

Deborah Kearney (counsel, secretary of state’s office): Mac Stipanovich was friendly with Katherine, and he would come visit and they would talk. I think one time he either tried or he actually sat in on a meeting with us, and we just said, “No, we don’t want his input; we don’t need his input; we don’t like his input.”

Katherine Harris (Florida secretary of state): By the way, there are those who say that they were back-channeling to the Bush campaign, or that I was a puppet and they were pulling my strings, but that’s absolutely not true. Mac is just Mac. It was important for him to be able to say whatever he wanted to say so he could write history, so he could help write a film, so he could be so important in this recount. But he’s not even a footnote to me.

On Wednesday, November 15, Harris announced that no further votes from hand recounts would be accepted and that she intended to certify the results of the election in Florida. According to the Associated Press, at this time Bush held a lead over Gore of 286 votes. It would expand to about 930 when absentee ballots from overseas were counted; Gore’s attempt to exclude absentee ballots arriving after the official deadline proved unsuccessful in the courts. On November 17, the Florida Supreme Court stepped in to prevent certification until it could rule on whether hand recounts should be accepted; in the meantime, hand recounts continued. On Tuesday, November 21, the court decided unanimously that hand recounts should go on, and gave the counties five days to finish them.

Charles T. Wells (chief justice, Florida Supreme Court): We came out with our ruling on Tuesday evening before Thanksgiving and extended the time to receive the recount until the Sunday after Thanksgiving at 5 p.m. if the secretary of state’s office was open that day, or 9 a.m. the following day if it wasn’t open. Well, that was met very adversely by the Bush people, who maintained that we had no leeway in which to extend the time. It was also met with an adverse reaction from the Miami-Dade County canvassing board, which maintained that this was not sufficient time for them to count. So they just disbanded their efforts.

Craig Waters (spokesperson, Florida Supreme Court): A number of businesses realized that they could get their logo on worldwide television if they simply sent someone to stand in front of where I was making announcements and hold up a sign. I looked up one time and there was a septic-tank service that kept driving past the podium.

Joseph Klock Jr. (lawyer for Katherine Harris): We developed a rule, and the rule was that any time we won anything, we’d make it a point of celebrating within two hours, because it basically took about two hours before the Supreme Court would reverse what we were able to accomplish.

Ben Ginsberg (Bush aide): We got the sense that the majority of judges on the Florida Supreme Court didn’t really like us much. We thought we had the better of the arguments, but the loss was not a terrible shock. [Bush lawyer] Ted Olson had all the papers ready, so we were pretty quick to go up to the Supreme Court.

Many ballot disputes involved whether punch-through machines had completely dislodged a “chad” next to a candidate’s name—thereby indicating a voter's choice—or had left them slightly hanging. Sometimes the machine merely left an impression, or a “dimple.” (Robert King / Newsmakers)

IV. The Brooks Brothers Riot

On Wednesday, November 22, the day after the state supreme court’s ruling, the Bush campaign petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for certiorari—that is, asked it to review the lower court’s decision. That same day, Bush’s running mate, Dick Cheney, suffered a mild heart attack. Also that day: the so-called Brooks Brothers riot, which unfolded in the office building where the Miami-Dade recount was taking place. Dozens of Bush volunteers from out of state had descended on Miami: “50-year-old white lawyers with cell phones and Hermès ties,” as The Wall Street Journal described them. Many gathered to protest the recount, and the protest spiraled out of control. Caught up in the confrontation was Joe Geller; he was at the scene by chance, hoping to demonstrate how voting machines processed punch cards. In the aftermath, the Miami-Dade recount was halted.

Ron Klain (Gore aide): I really thought we were going to be ahead in the tally after Thanksgiving weekend. We had this delay in the certification ’til Sunday. We just needed to get the count finished in Miami-Dade, and we would have been ahead. Sunday night, Katherine Harris would have faced the certification with Gore ahead. And that plan went awry. One reason was the Brooks Brothers riot.

Duane R. Gibson (Bush volunteer): We could see instances—I could, anyway—where I thought the Democrats were cheating. Challenging things. Delaying things. And it was starting to be a sham, in my view. About a dozen of us, we said, “This is a bunch of baloney. Let’s go up and let’s see what’s going on at the election office,” which was in the Miami-Dade County office building. And what happened was, the head of the Democratic Party in Miami-Dade, he walks in there, like carte blanche. There’s a big glass window, like at a bank. And all the ballots are sitting back there, right? And I see this guy pick up a ballot and put it in his pocket. I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Joe Geller (chair, Miami-Dade Democratic Party): I arrived in the middle of a protest rally. They were chanting, “Let us in! Let us in!” They were banging on the doors and on the glass partitions. The staff all knew me. So I went to the window and said, “Can you please give me a sample ballot?” The protest all around us is getting louder and louder and rowdier and rowdier, and it seemed like we waited forever. Finally the elections woman came back and passed me a sample ballot. It was labeled official Democratic Party training ballot in capital letters, clearly visible. And a Republican operative says, “What do you have there?” And I hold it up, so she can see what’s written on it. And she looked at me, and she looked around at the screaming individuals, and she yells, “He’s got a ballot! He stole a ballot!” She could not possibly have been confused.

Duane R. Gibson (Bush volunteer): We started yelling, “Hey, he took a ballot! He took a ballot!” We were like, “This is such a sham.” We don’t know what’s going on with those ballots back there. I mean, who knows if they’re taking votes out or putting new votes in. Ballots are getting handed to the head of the Democratic committee in Miami. So we started shouting. “Stop the count! Stop the fraud!” And it got louder and more energized. And the cameras came.

[From the July/August 2020 issue: The dark soul of the sunshine state]

Joe Geller (chair, Miami-Dade Democratic Party): They’re saying, “This guy stole a ballot.” A mob descended on me, yelling and screaming at me and jabbing me with their elbows. I make it to the elevator and take the elevator downstairs, and in the elevator, it’s dead silent. When the elevator doors open, and there are cameras again, they start yelling. There’s one guy in particular dogging me, who had followed me from upstairs. He keeps saying things like “You’re in trouble.” As I head to the exit of the building, he launches himself into me, full body. I turn around and head back to the escalator, and just as I get to the foot of the steps, a cop comes up to me and says, “They say you stole a ballot.” I say, “Absolutely not. I have a training ballot of the Democratic Party. I’m permitted to have that.” His sergeant comes up, and I explain again. He says, “Well, I want to see it.” And I say, “That’s fine, but we’re not going to do it right here with CNN live. At the distance the cameras are, you’re not going to be able to read it. If you’ll step around the corner with me, I’ll be happy to show it to you.” I step around the corner and show it to the guy. He says, “Let’s go back to the elections office, and they’ll verify what you say, I’m sure.” And of course the woman says, “Yes, that’s Mr. Geller. I gave him a Democratic Party sample ballot.” So the cops say, “Okay, sorry, Mr. Geller,” and walk me through the elections office to a back elevator. I pass what used to be called the counting room, and see, through the glass walls, all three members of the canvassing board and some of their staff. They’re all looking worried. I drive home and immediately put on the TV. One of the members of the canvassing board says, “Well, we were trying to finish this recount, but under the current circumstances, I don’t think it’s possible.” They were frightened.

Jamie Holland (Democratic poll watcher): I remember seeing some of the protest and wondering, Why isn’t our passion as strong as theirs? The other side is catching the media, and we’re just grinding it out without that sense of being equally outraged.

Mac Stipanovich (Republican operative): Somebody said at the time—this is probably unfair—that while the Democrats were bent over their calculators, we were breaking bar stools over their heads.

Mark Fabiani (Gore aide): I was in D.C. at the Ritz-Carlton, around Thanksgiving. [Gore aide Chris] Lehane comes over, and we’re sitting in the lobby. There’s a harpist playing in one corner. And as we’re sitting there talking, this huge rat just saunters across the entire lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, as if it didn’t have a care in the world. We thought it was a metaphor for the entire situation. We started calling the hotel the “Rats-Carlton.”

The so-called Brooks Brothers riot: Republican operatives protest the hand recount of ballots that machines had been unable to tally, November 22, 2000. (Reuters)

V. The Supreme Court

On Friday, November 24, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Gore. Two days later, on Sunday night, Katherine Harris certified the vote tally in Florida, and Bush’s lead stood at 537 votes. Some recount results were excluded—the results from Palm Beach County had arrived two hours late. Miami-Dade had stopped its recount.

Laurence Tribe (Gore lawyer): Ron Klain called, and he said, “We really need help. It looks like there is an issue about federal-court intervention with the electoral recount, and we need you to fly down to Florida immediately.” The question of whether, as a matter of federalism, this is an appropriate intervention was very much up in the air. The next morning, I appeared in federal court, and I remember arguing that it was inappropriate for a federal court to intervene at this point. If there were any constitutional issues about the recount, they could be properly handled at the state level and in the state court.

[Read: Does Brett Kavanaugh agree with Bush v. Gore?]

Charles Fried (Bush lawyer): The feeling many of us had was that the Florida Supreme Court had one commitment above all: that George W. Bush not be elected. They hated him—not every one of them—because of tort reform. The Florida Supreme Court at the time was very plaintiffs-oriented, and many of them had come up through the most aggressive parts of the plaintiffs bar. The thought that this man should become president was unbearable, because in Texas he had really two signature issues—educational reform and tort reform.

Barbara Pariente (justice, Florida Supreme Court): Our court was criticized as being political, but there were at least two other cases that we ruled on—including the Palm Beach County butterfly-ballot case and the absentee-ballot case from Martin County and Volusia County—where we ruled for then-Governor Bush. A different decision in any one of those cases would have “given” the election to Vice President Gore.

Oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court were held on Friday, December 1. Laurence Tribe argued for the Gore campaign. Theodore Olson argued for the Bush campaign. On Monday, December 4, the Court chose, in effect, to kick the ball down the road, when all nine justices agreed to vacate the Florida decision and ask the state supreme court to clarify its arguments.

Joseph Klock Jr. (lawyer for Katherine Harris): They had 750 people in the courtroom that day. The tables where the counsel sit is usually a respectful distance from the bench, but they had pushed the tables all the way up so that they were almost touching it. From where I was sitting, I could look straight up and see Justice Ginsburg, four and a half feet away.

Nina Totenberg (NPR Supreme Court reporter): The court first sent the case back to the lower court to revisit its decision, and I thought that when they did that, the handwriting was on the wall. Either the Florida Supreme Court was going to do what the Supreme Court wanted it to do, or the Supreme Court was not going to uphold what the state court did.

Charles T. Wells (chief justice, Florida Supreme Court): They asked us to explain in more detail what the basis of our decision was. I considered that what they did was actually punt—they recognized that there really wasn’t a case in controversy at that point on the Bush side, and they sent it back to us.

Theodore Olson (Bush lawyer): We were thrilled. The Court vacated the decision and asked the Florida Supreme Court to explain what it was doing and what kind of legal standards it was applying and whether it was aware of certain federal statutes and constitutional issues. And the Florida Supreme Court basically ignored that. We felt that we had a very strong case that the way the statewide recount was being undertaken was capricious and arbitrary and very inconsistent.

Laurence Tribe (Gore lawyer): I viewed that as victory because I thought the Supreme Court of Florida would respond quickly and persuasively. Little did I know that the Florida court would essentially take this request from the U.S. Supreme Court for an explanation and put it in some desk drawer, and that this would provoke anger among the Supreme Court justices.

Though it did not respond to the U.S. Supreme Court immediately, on Friday, December 8, the Florida Supreme Court did overturn a lower-court ruling and order a statewide hand recount of some 60,000 ballots that voting machines had, for one reason or another, rejected. The vote this time was not unanimous—it was 4–3, with the chief justice in the minority—and it was all but certain to invite immediate high-court scrutiny. On Saturday, December 9, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay and halted the recount.

Barbara Pariente (justice, Florida Supreme Court): When we had our court conference, it was not as collegial as the conference after the first opinion, where we had all autographed our names on the opinion. By the time of this opinion, it was hard to feel that we were going to be able to resolve this controversy in a way that was not going to have significant political repercussions.

Charles Fried (Bush lawyer): The Supreme Court of Florida proceeded to order a recount, which they’d been told to stop doing. And this was so blatant that three of the Florida justices, including the chief justice, dissented from the decision. So my perspective was simply this: that what was going on was an obvious violation of both due process and equal protection.

Barbara Pariente (justice, Florida Supreme Court): It was certainly not a pleasant atmosphere, writing that opinion. I pulled an all-nighter. But it became more unpleasant for me the next morning. I was on my way to Barnes & Noble to pick up a copy of The Federalist—to reread what it says about the role of the judiciary—and I hear on NPR that the U.S. Supreme Court has accepted jurisdiction, and not only that, but they’ve stopped the statewide recount.

Laurence Tribe (Gore lawyer): The stay by the U.S. Supreme Court, issued ultimately 5 to 4, was the decisive signal that something dramatic was happening. And I thought, Oh my God, I’m going to have to convince the Supreme Court that the Supreme Court of Florida understands what it’s talking about.

David Boies (Gore lawyer): I was in a sports bar across the street from the Governors Inn, in Tallahassee. I had been in the office and had spoken to Vice President Gore. We were all very happy. The votes were being counted. He was steadily gaining on Governor Bush. My work was essentially done, and I was going home. They had all these television screens, and a crawler came across that said the Supreme Court had issued an order stopping the vote count. My initial reaction was that this had to be a mistake. There had not been an opportunity to brief or argue the case. There were substantial issues as to whether there was really a federal question involved. The Supreme Court had never intervened in a presidential election to affect the counting of the votes in a state.

Tamarra Matthews Johnson (clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor): We knew that the stay was going to issue. A television was set up in a conference room, and it showed the ballot counting in Florida. One guy was using a device, like a magnifying glass, to study ballots. And then you see the banner at the bottom of the screen saying the Supreme Court has issued a stay. I still marvel at the fact that this order comes down from a thousand miles away, the Court has said stop, and everyone just stops.

Laurence Tribe (Gore lawyer): I remember being squirreled away in a large suite at the Watergate Hotel, trying to prepare for the oral argument, and I get a call from Ron [Klain] saying, “Are you available to talk to Warren?” So Warren Christopher comes up to my suite at the Watergate. He was quite a regal fellow. He wanted to know if he could put his topcoat down. So he puts his coat down, and he says, “Can we sit down and talk?” His mood was so grave. He obviously didn’t have great news. He said, “I have spoken with the vice president, and we’ve decided that David [Boies] should handle the second argument.” I said, “Well, it’s certainly up to the vice president and you, Mr. Christopher, but what’s the theory?” And he said, “Al thinks that the Court’s main interest will be in the details of how things are going down in Florida, what the nature of the recount is.” And I said, “With all respect, I think that’s ridiculous. I don’t think the Court gives a shit about what’s happening in Florida as such. It simply wants to decide for the country what has happened in this very chaotic situation where it looks like the Florida recount is sort of an exercise in chaos rather than in democracy. And I think it’s important for the Court to understand, as a matter of federal law, why the appropriate thing is to let the recount go on, even under some corrected formula.” He said, “That’s all very well, but the vice president has decided that David should handle it. Will you help him get ready for the argument?” I said, “Of course.”

Ron Klain (Gore aide): I didn’t really know David Boies before our time in Florida. I came to have great respect for him as a lawyer, a brilliant legal mind. But arguing in the Supreme Court is this very specialized thing, and Larry Tribe is probably the best person living today to argue in the Supreme Court. I obviously have a longtime personal relationship with Larry. He’s been my professor in law school, my mentor. People didn’t love his argument the first time around when we went to the Supreme Court, but there was no question in my mind that Larry was the right choice. It never dawned on me we were going to do anything else until the vice president called me and said, “Look, I want to rethink this.”

[From the March 2020 issue: The Supreme Court’s enduring bias]

Laurence Tribe (Gore lawyer): David appears in the suite and says, “I only have a couple of hours.” I don’t know what else he had on his schedule. But he said, “Can you help me understand the equal-protection claim?” So we spent really, at most, two or three hours talking about the way the Fourteenth Amendment limited the formula or the approach a state supreme court could use to recount the ballots. And I said I thought there was a solid argument, though not a convincing one, for the proposition that the chaotic and non-uniform way the votes are being recounted violates equal protection, but the key will be the remedy. What happens if the Supreme Court ultimately decides that there is a real Fourteenth Amendment argument? And he said, “That’s a stupid argument; we’re going to win that.” And I said, “I wouldn’t count on it.”

Oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court took place on Monday, December 11. The hastily written opinions, which added up to a 5–4 reversal of the Florida court, were made public at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, December 12. Even supporters of the outcome acknowledged that the decision did not reflect the Court at its best. In a dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens famously wrote: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.” On Wednesday, December 13, Al Gore conceded defeat.

David Boies (Gore lawyer): The atmosphere was electric. You’d never had the United States Supreme Court as an institution intervene like this in a presidential election, and you had never had a case where the United States Supreme Court told a state how to count or not count ballots in a presidential election. From an analytical standpoint, from a historical standpoint, from the standpoint of principle, both [Anthony] Kennedy and O’Connor were justices who I thought I should be able to get, and I only really needed one of those. On the other hand, on the prior Saturday, the Court had by a 5–4 majority stopped the vote count, and I thought that it would be extremely difficult for any justice who had taken the extraordinary step of stopping the vote count to now reverse themselves and uphold what the Florida Supreme Court did.

Theodore Olson (Bush lawyer): Article II of the Constitution says the legislature of a state must prescribe the method by which electors are selected in a presidential election. We argued that that provision of the Constitution had been violated because the judiciary was changing the rules by which the votes would be counted and the electors would be selected. We also argued that the recounts violated both the equal-protection and due-process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment because the rules were being changed on the fly after the election—from county to county and from hour to hour, in an effort by the Democrats to produce votes that would change the outcome. Individual voters in different areas of the state were being treated differently with respect to the weight given to their votes.

Joseph Klock Jr. (lawyer for Katherine Harris): I remember at one point the chief justice was looking down at David, and the chief justice said to him, “Well, Mr. Boies, how long should the counting go on?” At which point [Justice Antonin] Scalia said, “Oh, until they win.”

Karl Rove (Bush strategist): I stayed that night at the Hilton in McLean, Virginia. I’d gotten room service and was in my pajamas. I’ve got the television on, and at 10 p.m. the Supreme Court comes back. I have NBC on, and Pete Williams and Dan Abrams are outside the Supreme Court trying to describe the opinion. As I recall, Williams had somebody feed him the opinion from the back to the front. So he is reading the conclusion, and it is that the Court finds that the Florida Supreme Court violates the equal-protection clause and Article II, and the election is over.

Ben Ginsberg (Bush aide): The decision started coming in one page at a time on an old fax machine. We divided up the opinion among all the former Supreme Court clerks, figuring they would have the most instant insight. And it was actually [future Senator] Ted Cruz, reading Justice Stevens’s dissent, who said, “Holy cow, we must have won.”

Ron Klain (Gore aide): Among the many bad things about Bush v. Gore, one of the worst is it takes, like, ’til page seven until you find out the outcome of the case. It’s a horribly written opinion. So I’m reading along, reading along, reading along. I have Gore on the phone, people are bringing me pages one page at a time. Finally we hit the seventh page.

Karl Rove (Bush strategist): I call Bush at the governor’s mansion. He’s in bed reading with the television off. So he turns on the television, and when he turns it on, it is set to CNN. Charles Bierbauer is reading the decision from the front, and he has no clear idea of the conclusion. I say, “Congratulations, Mr. President,” and Bush is like, “What are you talking about?” I tell him what Pete Williams is saying on NBC. And he tells me that the guy on CNN is saying something else. After we go back and forth a couple of times, he says to me, “I’m calling Baker,” and hangs up.

Nina Totenberg (NPR Supreme Court reporter): The decision is the decision—it’s a ticket for one trip only. It’s never been cited in any other case, and nobody expects it ever will be. The odd thing about this was that the five justices in the majority were the court’s moderate conservative and very conservative justices, but all of them agreed on one thing in their general philosophy, and that is they were supporters of a more aggressive protection of states’ rights. And in this case they went for a federal decision that essentially rejected states’ rights. Conversely, the four liberals were people who more often than not were not big supporters of states’ rights, and in this case they were big supporters of states’ rights.

Chris Lehane (Gore aide): I got an email—I don’t even know what it was called in those days. It was somewhere between a pager and a phone. You wore it on your hip. The message was from Gore, and it said, “Please do not trash the Supreme Court. Al.” And I didn’t. I was incredibly impressed and struck by the vice president trying to put the values of the country first. But I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t think about how different the world would be today in so many respects.

Joshua Bolten (Bush aide): I remember Bush warned the staff against triumphalism. He said this has been a really difficult period, and if he was going to be able to govern properly, a lot of people who did not think he was the legitimately elected president were going to have to accept him as president.

Nina Totenberg (NPR Supreme Court reporter): I know in hindsight that Justice O’Connor had second thoughts. She could dig her feet in, but she was a person who was capable of reflection and thinking that she’d been wrong. That doesn’t necessarily mean that she would have done something different. It means she had real second thoughts in hindsight about whether the decision had been right.

Joshua Bolten (Bush aide): I just remember thinking, Man, this isn’t the way this should be decided. I believed that Bush won the election, but there would be no way ever of having pure truth on it.

Ron Klain (Gore aide): I am not over it. I don’t think I’ll ever be over it.

Police separate Bush and Gore supporters outside the U.S. Supreme Court as the justices consider the Florida recount issue for the first time, December 1, 2000. (Mark Wilson / Newsmakers)

VI. The Aftermath

A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots was conducted by two groups—first by The Miami Herald and USA Today, in conjunction with the accounting firm BDO Seidman; and later by a multi-outlet consortium of news organizations, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, in conjunction with NORC at the University of Chicago. The Herald investigation concluded that Bush would still have won, and would likely have widened his lead slightly, even if the Supreme Court had permitted the recount that Gore had sought. The review also determined that, had a full statewide recount of all disputed Florida ballots taken place, with each ballot reviewed from scratch and ballot counters using an inclusive standard, Gore might possibly have won by a few hundred votes. Gore had never requested such a statewide recount. The consortium came to similar conclusions.

Marty Baron (Miami Herald editor): We were left with the big question as to whether the vote was really accurate. Mark Seibel, who was our managing editor for news at the time and now works here at the [Washington] Post, said, “You know, the ballots are public records.” He felt that we could get access to those ballots and that maybe we should do our own recount.

Kirk Wolter (director, Florida Ballots Project, NORC): The goal was simply, what would have happened had SCOTUS not stopped the recount? There were various voting standards on the table at that point in time. It’s been so long, I can’t recount them for you, but the Bush team advanced proposals, the Gore team advanced proposals, the Florida Supreme Court advanced proposals, Katherine Harris had her way of doing things, and so forth. And the question was, under each of those various proposals, what might have happened had the recounts continued?

Marty Baron (Miami Herald editor): In certain counties, we encountered resistance from the supervisors of elections. They argued that it was not, in fact, a public record, and we had to litigate against them. We prevailed in each one of those cases. Now we had to decide what was the standard that was going to be used. First of all, each county had its own system, so in many of the counties, if not most of the counties, it was a punch-card system. We decided that we would look at it under multiple standards. In places like Duval County, as I recall, you actually marked the ballot. You would fill it in. And there were a lot of people who were first-time voters, and they would mark something and cross it out and then mark something else. And obviously we couldn’t count those ballots. And then there was the debate in Palm Beach County, where they had the so-called butterfly ballots, where people were very confused—they thought they were voting for Al Gore and instead they voted for Patrick Buchanan. There were a lot of those people. That said, you could only count the way they actually voted. You couldn’t go back and make a determination as to what they intended to do. You could only look at what they actually did. So we went to every one of the 67 counties. We looked at the results under different standards. We did a calculation. We looked at BDO Seidman’s. We were in very close agreement with BDO Seidman’s calculation. We came to the same conclusion. And the conclusion was that George W. Bush had won Florida and, therefore, won the presidency.

Kirk Wolter (director, Florida Ballots Project, NORC): We were not allowed to actually touch the ballots. Only a county worker was authorized to touch a ballot. So the county worker would hold up the ballot for our workers to review, and if the ballot was clear, that was fine, but if the ballot wasn’t clear, we were allowed to touch the hand of the county worker and move the hand and rotate the ballot and change the position of the ballot in various ways in order to get the best possible view.

Marty Baron (Miami Herald editor): When we launched this inquiry, the Bush campaign and Republicans in general were outraged. They felt that it was an effort to delegitimize a Bush presidency. That wasn’t our intention at all. Our intention was to find out what the real vote was—to do the recount that the U.S. Supreme Court would not allow to proceed. And as it turned out, it showed that George W. Bush had won the election by pretty much any standard. I can tell you two things. Number one, there are still many Democrats who don’t accept that as the result, and ignore this study. And number two, the Republicans have never apologized for having falsely accused us of trying to delegitimize the Bush presidency.

Mac Stipanovich (Republican operative): I believe to this day that George Bush won the election by having a plurality of the votes that were legally cast that day. If you ask me, do I believe that a plurality of the people who went to the polls that day, and tried to vote, tried to vote for George Bush? I don’t think so. But we were counting legal votes.

The nearly 6 million punch-card ballots cast in Florida in the 2000 election remain intact, preserved in boxes and wrapped in plastic at the Florida State Archives, in Tallahassee.

Ballot boxes from the 2000 election in storage in Palm Beach in November 2001. Many of them were sold on eBay to raise money for the county. (Joe Raedle / Getty)

The Man Who Sacked Rome

2020-06-09T07:00:00-04:00

Rodrigo Corral

The sack of Rome by Alaric and his Goths has exerted an outsize influence on the Western imagination. It was a devastating event, and sent psychological aftershocks across the empire. On the night of August 24, in the year 410, thousands of Goths made their way into the city through the Porta Salaria, not far from where the American embassy sits today. Rome’s walls were stout, and had recently been reinforced; an accomplice on the inside may have opened the gates. The invaders ravaged the city for three full days before departing with captives and plunder. According to legend, they took away sacred trophies the Romans had themselves looted from the Second Temple in Jerusalem more than three centuries earlier.

Rome’s defenses had not been breached in 800 years—not since a sack by the Gauls at the beginning of the fourth century b.c., long before Rome became an imperial power. News of what the Goths had done spread quickly. The sack was seen as a portent—of the end of the empire or even, as some apocalyptic Christian writers saw it, the end of God’s earthly creation. Saint Jerome wrote an emotional letter (“as I dictate, sobs choke my utterance”) from faraway Bethlehem: “The city that once captured the hearts and minds of the world has been captured!” Saint Augustine urged Christians to flee the “moral disease” of secular Rome and put their faith in a heavenly city that beckoned from beyond this life. A memory of the sacking shivered down the ages. “This awful catastrophe of Rome,” Edward Gibbon wrote in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “filled the astonished empire with grief and terror.” Victorian painters turned again and again to the subject, slathering pots of paint across acres of canvas. The depictions are disturbingly romantic: seminude invaders among smoldering monuments, preening with bloodlust and concupiscence. The sack has resonance to this day. The historian Niall Ferguson invoked it in a column published after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, noting: “This is exactly how civilizations fall.”

[From the June 2007 issue: Cullen Murphy, the author of ‘Are We Rome?,’ talks about the American empire's parallels with the ancient republic]

But who was this man Alaric, and what exactly happened during those three days in a.d. 410? These are the questions that the historian Douglas Boin, the author of several specialized studies about late antiquity, sets out to answer in Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome, a smart book for the general reader. Boin has his work cut out for him. Alaric stands with Attila among Rome’s best-known antagonists, but the source material is gossamer-thin. Few accounts by writers with firsthand knowledge survive, and most of these chroniclers have a slanted perspective—pro-empire or pro-Goth or pro-apocalypse. Other accounts were composed 50 or 100 years later. And historical works by a number of writers have come down to us only in bits and pieces.

Many other historical figures (Cleopatra, Chaucer, Shakespeare) have presented similar problems, which hasn’t deterred historians: Stir the reliable bits and the speculative bits into a yeasty batter of everything else known about society at the time, and a focused narrative can emerge. “From this collection of odds and ends,” Boin writes in that spirit, “we steal a glimpse of a real person.” Yet even when the job is done with rigor, the results are a little weasely—ample use of must have and could easily and not hard to imagine. The method works best when the historical context provides solid ground, which the fifth century doesn’t. Politically, the era was unruly and mysterious—a chess game in which players came and went, and the pieces on the board could change color and identity overnight. But instability and shifting allegiances are also essential to the story.

The late Roman empire—still encircling the Mediterranean but divided into eastern and western spheres—was held together by bribery, accommodation, backstabbing, and force of arms. The city of Rome was more than 1,000 years old and rich, but functionally no more than a symbolic capital; power lay with armies, and emperors could be anywhere. (Diocletian had been emperor for 20 years before he saw Rome for the first time.) Networks of influence crossed traditional boundaries of ethnicity and religion. Consider the life of a woman named Galla Placidia. She was the daughter of one emperor and the half sister of two others but grew up in the household of a general named Stilicho, the son of a Vandal. Stilicho fought faithfully for Rome but was never quite trusted, and was executed after military setbacks. Galla Placidia’s first husband (who also met an unhappy end) was not some Roman blue blood but a Goth named Athaulf—who happened to be Alaric’s brother-in-law.

[From the September 2006 issue: Cullen Murphy on the road from Ravenna]

It was a time when governance was fractured; the division of the empire into eastern and western jurisdictions is just one example. Constitutional norms were a distant memory. Christian influence was ascendant even as eminent pagans fought to uphold the old ways. Threats to security came from all directions. Germanic tribes hired themselves out to defend the empire in the manner of private security firms like Blackwater, switching sides if the price was right. And who was a “Roman” anyway? Goths, Vandals, and Huns all fought on Rome’s behalf at various times. They also fought against Rome, and one another.

Yet the soft power of Romanitas—a concept that is hard to define precisely but encompasses the values, amenities, and way of life of the imperial system—remained alluring. Many “barbarians”—not a word much in favor these days—became citizens; their families may have been citizens for centuries. When expedient, whole tribes were welcomed into the empire and given some sort of legal status. In a.d. 212, Emperor Caracalla, bowing to reality, granted citizenship to all freeborn persons within the empire’s borders. Among the beneficiaries of Caracalla’s edict was a foreign soldier of mixed heritage named Maximinus Thrax, who became an imperial soldier and in 235 was proclaimed emperor. Outsiders didn’t seek to lay waste to Rome; they wanted to become insiders. In a way, they loved Rome to death.

Alaric was one of these people—don’t think of him as a man in bearskins who worshipped the forest gods. The bare outline of his life is not in dispute. He was born north of the Danube River to a prominent Gothic family in what had once been the imperial province of Dacia (roughly corresponding to modern Romania). The Romans had long since withdrawn, but his family was familiar with Rome and its ways. Alaric spoke Latin as well as his native Gothic tongue. He had been baptized a Christian, even if doctrinal affinity put him in the heretical Arian camp.

As a youth, Alaric crossed the Danube to seek his fortunes in the imperial army, bringing others with him, and proved himself a natural leader. At the Battle of Frigidus, in 394, he and his Gothic foederati saved the day for Emperor Theodosius. The cost to the Goths was high: some 10,000 killed. Alaric seems to have felt that their sacrifice—and his own role—wasn’t appreciated or even acknowledged. He retaliated angrily by marauding through Greece. As a placatory gesture, Emperor Arcadius—son of Theodosius—named him general of Illyricum, an imperial prefecture extending from the Balkans south to the sea. It was a significant responsibility. But administrative reshuffling soon eliminated the position. Alaric’s sense of grievance was now at a boil.

He commanded a force of Goths that was augmented, as time went on, by warriors from other groups. He wanted some combination of respect, money, territory to occupy, and a seat at the table. After one failed try, he led his forces into Italy a second time, buoyed by victories, undeterred by defeats, and always seeking to negotiate with the ruling powers. Extortion was generally involved. Eventually he reached Rome, putting the city under siege off and on for two years. His ability to interdict grain shipments led to hardship inside the walls. Countless efforts to defuse the crisis showed initial promise and then collapsed—Emperor Honorius, based in Ravenna, proved pigheaded and duplicitous. Finally, on the night of August 24, Alaric’s forces made their way inside.

Upbraided once for behaving badly, Evelyn Waugh replied, “Imagine how much worse I’d be if I weren’t a Catholic.” Something similar might be said of Alaric. He was Arian, to be sure, but regarded himself as a Christian, as Arians indeed were. He decreed churches and holy sites to be inviolable, and gave sanctuary to anyone who took refuge there. “He also told his men,” according to Orosius, one of the more straightforward chroniclers, “that as far as possible, they must refrain from shedding blood in their hunger for booty.” There was certainly violence, often attributed to the unruly Huns among Alaric’s forces, and many fires were set. Palaces and ordinary homes were looted. And yet even sources hostile to Alaric comment on his relative restraint, at least by the standards of the day. Archaeology has not uncovered evidence of vast destruction. A Sack of Rome Conference held in the city in 2010 revealed many disagreements among historians, but Rome’s fate was not that of Carthage or Dresden. Monumental buildings remained intact. Rome recovered, up to a point. But it was no longer seen as impregnable and, decades later, would be sacked again. A gradual depopulation began.

[From the April 1997 issue: Underground Rome]

When their fury was spent, the Goths followed the Via Appia south, then veered off into the toe of Italy. The intended destination was North Africa, the breadbasket of Rome, where the Goths hoped they might find a place to call their own. They never made it: Storms forced their ships to turn back. Alaric suddenly took ill—with what, no one knows—and in a few days was dead.

His mode of burial, apparently following Gothic tradition, became the stuff of lore. A river near the present-day city of Cosenza was momentarily diverted and a grave dug in the riverbed. Alaric was interred, along with a trove of valuables. Then the river was restored to its course. The slaves who did the work were executed, consigning the whereabouts of the site to oblivion. Over the years, treasure-hunters including Heinrich Himmler have searched for the hoard of Alaric. In 2015, Cosenza launched a search of its own. So far, the treasure, if it ever existed, has proved more elusive than Alaric’s life story.

It is hardly Douglas Boin’s fault that the balance in his narrative between “the man” and “his times” is no balance at all. The scales tilt heavily toward Alaric’s times—a rich subject in its own right—and Boin renders the confusion of the era without replicating that confusion in his prose. Alaric can never emerge as a fully three-dimensional figure, but in Boin’s hands he is lifted convincingly from the realm of brutish caricature.

Though Boin doesn’t advance an explicit argument, a preoccupation lurks within his language. “Alaric’s actions,” he writes at one point, “forced a difficult, long-overdue conversation about acceptance, belonging, and the rights of immigrant communities.” That’s a very 21st-century formulation. Was there a Ravenna Ideas Festival? The collective term he uses for Goths, Vandals, Huns, and other groups is always “immigrants.” In his pages we encounter “border patrol,” “border separation,” “gated communities,” and “cultural warriors.” He refers to the Danube River as a “fence.” He describes a “new combustible mix of xenophobia and cultural supremacy” that encouraged public figures to work “populism and nationalism into their applause lines.” Alaric the Goth is not a polemic. It never invokes modern times explicitly. But the linguistic anachronisms are inescapable. Intended perhaps to be slyly allusive, they come across as winks.

“Presentism” is a snare. The 21st century is not the fifth. But history should provoke, and Boin has a point. Migration flows around the world today are unremitting. Group allegiance is fluid, and the distribution of power capricious. “Us” and “them” remain fundamental categories. There’s an American version of Romanitas, and even antagonists want a piece of it. General James Mattis once recalled interrogating a jihadist in Iraq—formerly Mesopotamia, that graveyard of Roman dreams. The man had been caught planting a roadside bomb. As he was led off to prison, he asked Mattis a question: When he got out, would it be possible to emigrate to America? Mattis appreciated the irony. Alaric might have too.

Hitchens Remembered

2020-01-21T17:00:00-05:00

In 2015, the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation inaugurated the Hitchens Prize, awarded annually to an author or a journalist whose work, in the spirit of the late Christopher Hitchens, “reflects a commitment to free expression and inquiry, a range and depth of intellect, and a willingness to pursue the truth without regard to personal or professional consequence.”

Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and a contributing editor at The Atlantic, died in 2011. A number of his Atlantic colleagues published tributes at the time, seeking to capture the man and his work. They remembered him as a singular thinker, an intellectual giant whose conversation, writing, and internal drive inspired awe, even if his views didn’t always evoke agreement.

“No writer in the English-speaking world could match the depth and range of his reading, experience, and acquaintances,” his good friend and longtime editor, Benjamin Schwarz, wrote. “He wrote slashing and lively, biting and funny—and with a nuanced sensibility and a refined ear that he kept in tune with his encyclopedic knowledge and near-photographic memory of English poetry.”

“Hitchens’s work ethic was legendary, his ability unmatched,” an associate editor at the magazine, Nicholas Jackson, remembered. “He’s the only writer that I’ve ever written a fan letter to.”

Though he had never met him in person, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that he remained “grateful for having studied at Hitchens’s virtual foot.”

James Fallows’s remembrance was more complicated because, as he confessed, “I admired him but we were not friends, mainly because of disagreements arising from the 2000 election … and then of course the Iraq War.” Fallows praised Hitchens’s “erudition and allusions,” and reflected on his sometimes obdurate dedication to his opinions.

“He was more certain than most people of the black-and-white moral goodness of the case for war—and therefore of the moral weakness and spinelessness of those who doubted the case,” Fallows wrote, “and more reluctant than most to revise or reflect upon that view in light of changing facts.”

“His was a complex genius,” Fallows concluded, “all parts of which are worth remembering honestly.”

Such honesty was important to Hitchens, Schwarz remembered. “Christopher prized bravery above all other qualities,” he wrote, “and in particular the bravery required for unflinching honesty.”

In all his complexity and brash irreverence, then–senior editor Jennie Rothenberg Gritz remembered, Hitchens was also “profoundly human,” with “a tremendous capacity for awe” and a particular reverence for friendship.

The policy analyst Karim Sadjadpour recalled how, early in his career, he had met and formed a lasting acquaintance with Hitchens. “I was always surprised by how unfailingly gracious he was with his time,” he wrote.

The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, then a staff writer, added one poignant line to the remembrances: “I don’t think he would mind my saying that I thank God for the privilege of having known him.”

The 2019 winner of the Hitchens Prize is George Packer, currently a staff writer at The Atlantic and previously, for 15 years, a staff writer at The New Yorker. The past winners of the award are the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (2015); the Washington Post editor Marty Baron (2016); the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter (2017); and the writer and activist Masha Gessen (2018).

Our Predictions About the Internet Are Probably Wrong

2019-12-10T07:00:00-05:00

Alex Merto

Not long ago, I stopped by the Morgan Library, in Manhattan, to pay a visit to the Gutenberg Bible on display within a cube of glass in the Morgan’s towering East Room. Gutenberg Bibles are among the rarest of printed books—about 50 copies are scattered around the world. At the time of their production, in Mainz in the 1450s, Gutenberg Bibles were of course the most common printed books—they were among the only ones. If a Gutenberg Bible were to come on the market today, it would sell for as much as $35 million, according to some estimates. But who knows? Sheikhs and oligarchs might launch a bidding war. The Morgan has three Gutenbergs. The copy on display was bought by J. P. Morgan in 1911 at Sotheby’s, which was acting for the family of a Wiltshire banker, who had bought it from the British bookseller Bernard Quaritch, who had bought it from the family of a Middlesex brewer, who had bought it from a member of the aristocratic Sykes family, who in 1824 had sold off his brother’s famed library in order to buy hunting dogs. The Sykes copy can be traced to a Scottish monk, antiquarian, and spy who lived in Germany in the late 18th century, and it is probably the copy that was lodged for centuries in the Augustinian monastery  at Rebdorf.

I know all of this because of a remarkable (and hefty) recent study titled Editio Princeps—the book that prompted my visit to the Morgan. The author, Eric White, the curator of rare books at Princeton, has composed meticulous biographies of each of the complete Gutenberg Bibles that have come down to us. Many have led picaresque lives. Harvard’s copy was briefly stolen, in 1969, by a troubled young man who smashed its glass encasement, took the book, climbed out a window, and knocked himself unconscious when he fell to the ground; charges were dismissed on grounds of mental illness, and the thief went on to become an adult-film star. White tells the story of Johannes Gutenberg himself—how the goldsmith and maker of religious mementos for the pilgrimage trade combined the idea of metallic movable type (his true innovation, though it had antecedents) with a wooden press (like the kind used for making wine) to produce a printed page. The practice of copying books by hand did not immediately disappear, but the new technology spread fast. Venice, with its dense cluster of print shops, played the role of Silicon Valley. The printing press would soon upend the social order in ways that no one had anticipated and that few today give much thought to.

The comparison of the printing industry in Venice to the tech industry in Silicon Valley is not Eric White’s. It was made in 2005, by a historian of the printed word named Elizabeth Eisenstein, in the afterword to The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, an abridged edition of her monumental The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Eisenstein’s original two-volume study was published in 1979, before personal computers and the internet began to work their will, but she was well aware of subsequent developments.

Eisenstein, who died in 2016 at the age of 92, was sharp, elegant, funny, and determined. She had picked up tennis late, at age 50; playing in the senior division, she won more than 30 national championships, the last when she was in her 90s. Breaking into academe as a woman in the 1950s had not been easy, but her work on the impact of the printing press, published in her sixth decade, proved to be another senior-division win. Many historians had written about Gutenberg and noted the role the printing press played in fostering the Reformation. But no one had mounted a vigorous investigation of the invention’s broader long-term consequences. Betty was 80 when I met her. Over several dinner conversations, she spoke at length about the printing press—the manifest good that it had done, in terms of spreading and “fixing” knowledge, but also the massive disruption it had caused. Disruption was the actual word she used. She didn’t mean it in a self-congratulatory, tech-mogul sort of way.

The printing press took most people by surprise—it wasn’t a technology that everyone had been dreaming about for centuries, like flying machines—and its ramifications were dramatic. Printing gave rise to a “start-up” culture (again, Eisenstein’s term): Many printing shops failed, but many didn’t. Within a few decades, at least one printing press could be found in every sizable community—not just the Romes and the Londons, but also the Augsburgs and the Erfurts and the Modenas. The cost of entry was low. More books were printed in the five decades after Gutenberg’s invention than had been produced by scribes during the previous 1,000 years.

The printing press decentralized the role of gatekeeper. In a scribal culture, maintaining some measure of control over ideas and their dissemination was straightforward. In a printing-press culture, control was harder. Within their own jurisdictions, rulers tried anyway, and so did the Church. The word imprimatur is Latin for “Let it be printed”—it connoted official sanction. But more people had greater opportunities for public expression than ever before. Thwarted in Heidelberg, you could try Geneva or Utrecht.

The sheer number of books that printers produced made suppression problematic. Having your book land on someone’s watch list could even turn it into a best seller: Banned in Bologna! And words weren’t the only things that came off the press; mass-produced images, in the form of woodblock prints, shaped opinion even among the illiterate. Printing was referred to as a “divine art,” and the masters of this technology, in aprons rather than hoodies, could sometimes be a little full of themselves.

When people can publish whatever they want, they do. The printing press made individual books more uniform and more numerous, but it also put the idea of universal truth up for grabs. Martin Luther’s challenge to Catholic orthodoxy was, of course, powered by the printing press. Previous challenges had burned themselves out, like pathogens in the jungle. The printing press changed all that. Luther posted his famous 95 theses in 1517; within three years, his printed works had sold some 300,000 copies. In Renaissance terms, this was the equivalent of cat videos. Unlike monastic scribes, animated by the one true way, printers were profit-seeking entrepreneurs. They published whatever would sell. Before long, you could find anything in a printed book—conspiracy theories, magic spells, recipes, satire, erotica. You could find support for any point of view. You could just make something up and set it in type, and people would say, I read it in a book.

Eisenstein described much of this in her writings. Her larger point is that the world was never the same again. As she explained to me, we no longer register the impact of the printing press because we have no easy way to retrieve the ambient sensation of “before,” just as we can’t retrieve, and can barely imagine, what life was like when only scattered licks of flame could pierce the darkness of night. At first glance, printing seems like just a more efficient way of doing what people were doing anyway: making words and images available to others. But it was a revolution—many revolutions, really, most of them unforeseeable. Consider what it meant to own books personally and read them silently, rather than having to hear words read aloud: No one knew what you were up to in the privacy of your home. Writers and publishers wanted some degree of ownership—hence the new concepts of copyright and intellectual property. More books and rising literacy created an eyeglass industry, which in turn brought advances in lens-making, which ultimately made possible the telescope and spelled the end of biblical cosmology. The printing press transformed religion, science, politics; it put information, misinformation, and power in the hands of more people than ever before; it created a celebrity culture as poets and polemicists vied for fame; and it loosened the restraints of authority and hierarchy, setting groups against one another. This shattered the status quo in ways that proved liberating but also lethal: If the printing press deserves some of the credit for democracy and the Enlightenment, it also deserves some of the blame for chaos and slaughter. As Edward Snowden observes in his new book, Permanent Record: “Technology doesn’t have a Hippocratic oath.”

Drawing technological parallels is a dicey enterprise. It requires ample use of that said, to be sure, and as it were. And Eisenstein wasn’t harping on parallels. She wrote her books (and spoke with me) before Facebook and Twitter; before Russian hacking, Alex Jones, and Stuxnet. She had an eye on the internet but admitted that, when she first published her book on the printing press, the ascendant technology that drew her attention was the photocopier. She described a Xerox commercial from the late 1970s featuring a weary scribe named Brother Dominic, who is tasked with making 500 copies of an illuminated manuscript. He turns for salvation to a copying machine. “It’s a miracle,” his superior says, casting his eyes heavenward, when Dominic returns shortly with perfect duplicates.

That said, drawing parallels is hard to resist. The Rand Corporation published an early paper about the printing press and the internet in 1998, when the public version of what was then called the “information superhighway” was only a few years old, and only about 20 million computers worldwide were linked to it. The study, by James Dewar, took note of several developments that “we are already seeing”—spam, trolls, viruses, and a variety of scams (like those get-rich schemes emanating from Nigeria)—and warned of a “dark side.” Dewar made a crucial distinction: between technologies, such as knives and microwave ovens, whose intended consequences far outweigh  the unintended ones, and technologies, such as cars and air-conditioning, whose unintended consequences dwarf the intended ones. The study’s main message was that the internet, which originated as a form of military communication, was technology of the second kind. Its consequences would be “dominated” by the unforeseeable and the uncontrollable.

[Read: Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the collapse of the tech mythology]

By a factor of about a zillion, more has been written about what the internet may have in store for us than about the wide-ranging effects of the printing press. We’re all aware of the digital utopians and dystopians, the prophets and fantasists. Experts issue warnings. Regulators advance reforms. Right now we’re in a doom phase: The internet threatens everything from jobs to privacy to free will. We should indeed be thinking about these things. A swelling legion of academic centers and private think tanks does nothing but. Novels such as Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail and Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep stir the imagination. But as the example of Gutenberg’s invention suggests, it’s easy to forget how unforeseeable (and never-ending) the “unforeseeable” really is. When it comes to those who make predictions about the internet, the judgment of history is unlikely to be: They got it right.

Once, after listening to Betty Eisenstein lay out the wide array of unintended consequences of the printing press, whether mind-altering in a positive or catastrophic way, I made a remark along the lines of “And it took a mere 500 years for things to settle down.” She said, “Have they?”

This article appears in the January/February 2020 print edition with the headline “Before Zuckerberg, Gutenberg.”

An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry

2019-05-13T08:00:00-04:00

The first quotation from Donald Trump ever to appear in The New York Times came on October 16, 1973. Trump was responding to charges filed by the Justice Department alleging racial bias at his family’s real-estate company. “They are absolutely ridiculous,” Trump said of the charges. “We have never discriminated, and we never would.”

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In the years since then, Trump has assembled a long record of comment on issues involving African Americans as well as Mexicans, Hispanics more broadly, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, women, and people with disabilities. His statements have been reflected in his behavior—from public acts (placing ads calling for the execution of five young black and Latino men accused of rape, who were later shown to be innocent) to private preferences (“When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” a former employee of Trump’s Castle, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, told a writer for The New Yorker). Trump emerged as a political force owing to his full-throated embrace of “birtherism,” the false charge that the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, was not born in the United States. His presidential campaign was fueled by nativist sentiment directed at nonwhite immigrants, and he proposed barring Muslims from entering the country. In 2016, Trump described himself to The Washington Post as “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.”

Instances of bigotry involving Donald Trump span more than four decades. The Atlantic interviewed a range of people with knowledge of several of those episodes. Their recollections have been edited for concision and clarity.

I. “You Don’t Want to Live With Them Either”

The Justice Department’s 1973 lawsuit against Trump Management Company focused on 39 properties in New York City. The government alleged that employees were directed to tell African American lease applicants that there were no open apartments. Company policy, according to an employee quoted in court documents, was to rent only to “Jews and executives.”

The Justice Department frequently used consent decrees to settle discrimination cases, offering redress to plaintiffs while allowing defendants to avoid an admission of guilt. The rationale: Consent decrees achieved speedier results with less public rancor.

Nathaniel Jones was the general counsel for the NAACP. He later became a federal judge. John Yinger, an economist specializing in residential discrimination, served at the time as an expert witness in a number of fair-housing cases. Elyse Goldweber, a Justice Department lawyer, brought the first federal suit against Trump Management.

Nathaniel Jones: The 1968 Fair Housing Act gave us leverage to go after major developers and landlords. The situation in New York was terrible.

John Yinger: Community groups like the Urban League started doing audits and tests to show discrimination. In 1973, the Urban League found a lot of discrimination in some of the properties that Trump Management owned.

elyse goldweber: I went to a place called Operation Open City. What they had done was send “testers”—meaning one white couple and one couple of color—to Trump Village, a very large, lower-middle-class housing project in Brooklyn. And of course the white people were treated great, and for the people of color there were no apartments. We subpoenaed all their documents. That’s how we found that a person’s application, if you were a person of color, had a big C on it.

The Department of Justice brings the case and we name Fred Trump, the father, and Donald Trump, the son, and Donald hires Roy Cohn, of Army-McCarthy fame. [Cohn, a Trump mentor, had served as Senator Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel during his investigations of alleged Communists in the government and was accused of pressuring the Army to give preferential treatment to a personal friend.] Cohn turns around and sues us for $100 million. This was my first appearance as a lawyer in court. Cohn spoke for two hours, then the judge ruled from the bench that you can’t sue the government for prosecuting you. The next week we took the depositions. My boss took Fred’s, and I got to take Donald’s. He was exactly the way he is today. He said to me at one point during a coffee break, “You know, you don’t want to live with them either.”

Everyone in the world has looked for that deposition. We cannot find it. Trump always acted like he was irritated to be there. He denied everything, and we went on with our case. We had the records with the C, and we had the testers, and you could see that everything was lily-white over there. Ultimately they settled—they signed a consent decree. They had to post all their apartments with the Urban League, advertise in the Amsterdam News, many other things. It was pretty strong.

john yinger: Trump had some interesting language after the settlement: He said that it did not require him to accept people on welfare, which was kind of beside the point.

Pages from a February 1970 complaint against Trump Management alleging discriminatory rental practices

Under the terms of the settlement, reached in 1975, the Trumps did not admit to any wrongdoing. But soon, according to the government, they were back at it. In 1978, the Justice Department alleged that Trump Management was in breach of the agreement. The new case dragged on until 1982, when the original consent decree expired and the case was closed. Soon, Trump’s headquarters would be installed in Trump Tower, which opened in February 1983. Barbara Res was the construction manager.

barbara res: We met with the architect to go over the elevator-cab interiors at Trump Tower, and there were little dots next to the numbers. Trump asked what the dots were, and the architect said, “It’s braille.” Trump was upset by that. He said, “Get rid of it.” The architect said, “I’m sorry; it’s the law.” This was before the Americans With Disabilities Act, but New York City had a law. Trump’s exact words were: “No blind people are going to live in this building.”

elyse goldweber: Was he concerned about injustice? No. Never. This was an annoyance. We were little annoying people, and we wouldn’t go away.

barbara res: As far as discrimination, he wouldn’t discriminate against somebody who had $3 million to pay for a three-bedroom apartment. Eventually he had some very unsavory characters there. But if you read John O’Donnell’s book [Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump—His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall, written with James Rutherford and published in 1991], Trump talked about how he didn’t want black people handling his money; he wanted the guys with the yarmulkes. He was very much the kind of person who would take people of a religion, like Jews; or a race, like blacks; or a nationality, like Italians, and ascribe to them certain qualities. Blacks were lazy, and Jews were good with money, and Italians were good with their hands—and Germans were clean.

nathaniel jones: Consent decrees were an important tool. The sad thing now is that, in his last act as Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions issued a memorandum curtailing enforcement programs and consent decrees across the board when it comes to discrimination.

II. “Bring Back the Death Penalty”

The so-called Central Park Five were a group of black and Latino teens who were accused—wrongly—of raping a white woman in Central Park on April 19, 1989. Donald Trump took out full-page ads in all four major New York newspapers to argue that perpetrators of crimes such as this one “should be forced to suffer” and “be executed.” In two trials, in August and December 1990, the youths were convicted of violent offenses including assault, robbery, rape, sodomy, and attempted murder; their sentences ranged from five to 15 years in prison. In 2002, after the discovery of exonerating DNA evidence and the confession by another individual to the crime, the convictions of the Central Park Five were vacated. The men were awarded a settlement of $41 million for false arrest, malicious prosecution, and a racially motivated conspiracy to deprive them of their rights. Trump took to the pages of the New York Daily News, calling the settlement “a disgrace.” During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump would again insist on the guilt of the Central Park Five.

Jonathan C. Moore represented four of the Central Park Five when they later sued the City of New York. Yusef Salaam was one of the five young men who were wrongly convicted. Timothy L. O’Brien spent hundreds of hours with Trump while researching his 2005 book, TrumpNation. C. Vernon Mason represented Salaam and other defendants.

jonathan c. moore: The Trump ad was calling for the death penalty for juveniles. It was taken out at a time before there was any adjudication of their guilt. The theme was: Here are all these young black kids and Hispanic kids who are going to rape our young white women, so let’s put them all away. You know, we call them the Central Park Five, but it’s really the Central Park 15, or 18, or however many family members there were, because the family members suffered a great deal as well. They visited the boys in prison, on holidays; they did their birthdays inside, had Christmas parties. To this day I talk to some of them and they go into tears when they think about what happened.

yusef salaam: When we were accused of raping the Central Park jogger, it really wasn’t an accusation. It wasn’t like we were innocent and had to be proved guilty in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the people. Everybody, including Donald Trump, rushed to judge us, and therefore it became that much more difficult to be able to mount a really successful fight. And, of course, we lost.

timothy l. o’brien: One of the things Trump learned when he injected himself into the Central Park Five case was that he could get attention for himself because he was a spokesman for a certain type of Archie Bunker New Yorker. I think that’s one of the bonds that he shares with [Trump attorney and former New York City Mayor] Rudy Giuliani: They’re both profoundly guys from that moment in New York when a lot of racial boundaries got drawn.

c. vernon mason: The level of animosity and hatred was palpable. It was brutal. The language used around this case—“savages”—bordered on the kinds of stuff that Ida B. Wells and others wrote about during the lynching period.

An advertisement placed by Donald Trump in all four major New York newspapers on May 1, 1989, calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five

yusef salaam: For him to say, You know what? I’m going to take out an ad, and I’m going to call for the state to kill these individuals—it was almost as if he was trying to get the public or somebody from the darkest places in society to come into our homes. Remember, they had published our phone numbers, our names, and our addresses in New York City’s newspapers. So we were pariahs.

c. vernon mason: The defendants were afraid for their own safety and for their families. These were not people who had substantial means to protect themselves with security guards, or who were living in some gated community.

yusef salaam: I think about when they took our DNA and they tried to match it against what they had. And there was no match, and they still moved forward. The spiked wheels of justice continued to roll down the hill and mow us down. And all of this on the heels of what Donald Trump had published. Donald Trump’s ad was vicious. It was very disrespectful of what the law is supposed to be about.

jonathan c. moore: I have children, and I can’t imagine my son being in prison from age 14 to age 21. You’re stealing the most innocent part of somebody’s life. None of these kids had ever had any real interactions with the law before. When they were finally vindicated, there was never any apology from Trump, or even a hint of an apology.

yusef salaam: Donald Trump’s ad ran on May 1, 1989. The crime had happened April 19, 1989. We hadn’t even started trial! That was just a few weeks after we were accused. He put nails in our coffin. He’s continuing to do that by continuing to say that we are guilty, by continuing to say that the police department had so much evidence against us. What evidence did they have that stuck? They had no evidence. They had manufactured false confessions.

c. vernon mason: In 2016—this is 26 years after the case, and 14 years after it had been proved that none of these defendants had anything to do with that rape—Donald Trump said, I still believe they’re guilty. And I guess, in his mind, he would suggest that they still should be executed.

timothy l. o’brien: He trusts his gut on issues surrounding race, because he’s got a simplistic, deterministic, and racist perspective on who people are. I think at his core he has a genetic understanding of what makes people good and bad or successful. And you see it all the time—he talks about people having good genes. He looks at the world that way. He’s got a very Aryan view of people and race.

III. “They Don’t Look Like Indians to Me”

In the early 1990s, Trump attempted to block the building of new casinos in Connecticut and New York that could cut into his casino operations in Atlantic City. (All of Trump’s casinos eventually went into bankruptcy.) In October 1993, Trump appeared before the House Subcommittee on Native American Affairs of the Committee on Natural Resources. The subcommittee was chaired by Bill Richardson, later New Mexico’s governor. Trump was there to support an effort to modify legislation that had given Native American tribes the right to own and operate casinos. George Miller, a Democrat from California and the chair of the Committee on Natural Resources, was also present.

Tadd Johnson, of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Bois Forte Band, served as the Democratic counsel on the subcommittee. Rick Hill is a former chair of the National Indian Gaming Association and of the Oneida Tribe in Wisconsin. Pat Williams was a member of Congress from Montana.

Trump began by noting that he had prepared a “politically correct” statement for the committee, but almost immediately went off script. The hearing became loud and acrimonious.

bill richardson: He said he didn’t think that Native Americans deserved the legislation, because there was a lot of corruption around Native American casinos. I remember asking him after the hearing, “Well, what’s the evidence?” He said, “The FBI has it.” I said, “You’re making the accusation; why don’t you bring the evidence?” He said, “No, you should ask the FBI.” I said, “You’re making the charge of corruption and you’re not backing it up—that is unacceptable.”

tadd johnson: Trump was wearing pancake makeup, which I hadn’t seen before, at least not on somebody testifying in Congress. He was very evasive, and he made all these allegations about organized-crime activity but could produce no single incident, no tangible evidence, nobody we could talk to. A lot of what he was saying were just fabrications.

The transcript of an October 1993 hearing of the Subcommittee on Native American Affairs at which Trump testified

rick hill: He said, “You guys are all going to have egg on your faces.” This was going to be the worst thing to happen since Al Capone. Trump went all threatening, raving about how there is no way we could stop the Mafia. He used the phrase Joey Killer. He said there was no way the tribal chairmen could stop Joey Killer.

bill richardson: The second allegation he made that was very disturbing at that hearing was to examine some Native American tribes’ application as Indian tribes—they were trying to get the subcommittee to basically declare their tribes or their group of individuals Native Americans. Trump mentioned Native Americans who had recently opened casinos and said to George Miller, “They don’t look like Indians to me.” He said that. It was so outrageous.

rick hill: Miller challenged him. He said, “You know how racist what you’re saying is? How racist that is to judge people by what we think they look like and ignore their inherent rights as a person?”

tadd johnson: George responded, “Well, thank God people don’t have rights based upon your look test. And, you know, how many times have we heard this before in this country?” And then he went through a litany of various groups that were discriminated against, which is a long list.

pat williams: I was stunned by the openness of Trump’s anger toward anyone who would compete with him—and particularly if they were people of color.

tadd johnson: I remember watching the faces of the Indian people in the back. There were some tribal elders who had come in from Minnesota, and were giving looks that could kill.

bill richardson: It was the most hostile hearing that I’ve ever been involved in. And I was in Congress for 15 years.

pat williams: I think the reason Trump blew up at Miller didn’t so much have to do with whatever the debate was about at the moment. He blew up because he came to realize that Miller was more important than he was.

Later, using a front organization called the New York Institute for Law and Society, Trump and his associate Roger Stone placed advertisements in upstate–New York newspapers in an attempt to block the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe’s planned Sullivan County casino. On a page proof of one ad, featuring hypodermic needles and lines of cocaine, Trump wrote: “Roger, this could be good!” Trump, Stone, and the institute would later pay $250,000 in fines for violating disclosure rules governing political advertising. Bradley Waterman served as general counsel and tax counsel for the Saint Regis Mohawks. Tony Cellini was the town supervisor of Thompson, where the casino was going to be built.

Page proof—with Trump’s handwritten notation—of one of the ads Trump commissioned to oppose casinos run by Native Americans. The ad ran in 2000.

bradley waterman: Trump and Stone created an organization that was said to be pro-family and anti-gaming. Its real mission was to put the kibosh on gaming by the Mohawks in the Catskills and in that way protect Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City. To that end, the organization—actually Trump and Stone—purchased ads that portrayed the Mohawks as criminals, drug dealers, etc. The Mohawks regarded the ads as racist. So did I. So did everyone else who weighed in.

tony cellini: We were hurting for jobs in this area. And then all of a sudden these attack ads came out, which were financed, we found out later, to the tune of more than $1 million by Donald Trump.

bradley waterman: Trump personally approved the ads. For example, he wrote comments on proofs such as “Roger—do it.” Not surprisingly, Trump and Stone lied about the number of people who contributed financially to the organization. It was strictly a Trump-Stone operation. The chiefs were furious, particularly since Trump never met any Mohawks, set foot on Mohawk territory, or otherwise tried to learn about the Mohawks.

IV. “Our Very Vicious World”

In the summer of 2005, Donald Trump had an idea: What if the next season of his reality-TV show, The Apprentice, pitted “a team of successful African Americans versus a team of successful whites”? Trump thought the format would be a sort of social commentary—“reflective of our very vicious world.” The concept never made it to air, but Trump’s treatment of black contestants on his show generated controversy.

One contestant, Kevin Allen, a graduate of Emory University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, was criticized by Trump on the show for being too educated; at the same time, Trump suggested that Allen was personally intimidating.

Mark Harris was a television critic for Entertainment Weekly. Kwame Jackson was the runner-up on The Apprentice’s first season.

mark harris: We were still very early in the history of reality-competition TV. The Apprentice started in January 2004, so the models that I was working off of as a critic were really just Survivor and American Idol. The Apprentice had this very manipulative approach to race. I felt that it was casting and shaping stories toward stereotypes that a default white audience would find somehow satisfying.

kevin allen: I remember Donald Trump asking me, “Kevin, why are the women in the suite scared of you?” I had never heard this before from anybody. It was shocking to me to hear that sort of attack. There was a lot of picking at me and trying to make me come out and be that overly aggressive, overbearing, scary African American male. But I was in law school at the time and I had worked on Capitol Hill, and I’m fairly adept at defusing that sort of thing. I think it made me sort of a boring character. But there were moments when I was put in situations where it could have gone wrong.

mark harris: It’s interesting to look back at it now, because the way Kevin Allen was treated was like a sneak preview of white critical reaction to Obama. It was like, Well, maybe he’s too qualified, maybe he’s too smart, maybe he’s too cerebral.

kwame jackson: I think that Donald Trump had only been used to dealing with black men of a very specific genre: Mike Tyson, Don King, Herschel Walker—celebrities, entertainers. So to have a young African American man with arguably a better education than him—I don’t think that was something he was used to, because obviously he didn’t hire any in his organization.

Randal Pinkett, a black man and the show’s 2005 winner, was asked by Trump to share his title with the white runner-up, Rebecca Jarvis. Pinkett refused. As the winner, he later worked briefly for the Trump Organization.

randal pinkett: He did not want to see an African American as the outright and sole winner. I believe I backed him into a corner. It goes back to an old adage that I’ve been told throughout my life as an African American man—that you have to be twice as good just to be considered equal. And that is a statement that reflects the thinking of a Donald Trump. Donald can be racist in ways that he’s not even aware are racist, because he is so out of touch with people who are not like him.

timothy l. o’brien: The only people of color he’s gone out of his way to try to establish relationships with are people who are athletes, celebrities, or entertainers. He became close to Mike Tyson because Donald and Don King were trying to arrange heavyweight fights in Atlantic City, to draw high rollers to the casinos. It wasn’t because he was fond of black athletes. It was because black boxers were good for his business.

Donald Trump talks with The Apprentice’s Season 4 winner, Randal Pinkett, in 2005. (Stuart Ramson / AP / Shutterstock)

randal pinkett: I was the only person of color that I saw at an executive level in my entire year with the Trump Organization. And to put that into context, this was 2006. This was the height of Donald’s popularity with The Apprentice. He had launched several ventures, most of which are now defunct: Trump University, Trump Institute, Trump Ice, Trump Mortgage, Trump magazine. All of those companies were up and running. All of them had employees; they had CEOs who ran those companies—and still, as I recall, none of them had persons of color in executive roles. None of them.

V. “He Doesn’t Have a Birth Certificate”

“Our current president came out of nowhere, came out of nowhere … The people who went to school with him—they never saw him; they don’t know who he is.” That statement, made at the February 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference, marked the launch of Donald Trump’s public efforts to sow doubt about whether President Barack Obama had been born in the United States. “Birtherism” had been festering for several years before Trump embraced it—supplanting other proponents and becoming its most prominent advocate. In March, on The View, Trump called on Obama to show his birth certificate. In April, he said that he had dispatched a team of investigators to Hawaii to search for Obama’s birth records.

For Trump, the run-up to birtherism had been a controversy that flared when a Manhattan developer proposed building an Islamic cultural center on a site in Lower Manhattan—the so-called Ground Zero mosque. In 2010, on the Late Show, Trump told David Letterman: “I think it’s very insensitive to build it there. I think it’s not appropriate.” Letterman pushed back, saying that blocking an Islamic facility would be akin to declaring “war with Muslims.” Trump answered: “Somebody’s blowing up buildings, and somebody’s doing lots of bad stuff.” Trump offered to buy out one of the investors in order to halt the project. The action made him one of the project’s key opponents and for the first time gave him national visibility on the political right.

Anti-Muslim sentiment animated Trump’s birtherism campaign. He said of Obama on The Laura Ingraham Show in March 2011: “He doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him. Now, somebody told me—and I have no idea whether this is bad for him or not, but perhaps it would be—that where it says ‘religion,’ it might have ‘Muslim.’ ”

Sam Nunberg became an adviser to Trump after working with him to oppose the Islamic cultural center. Jerome Corsi, the author of Where’s the Birth Certificate?, and Orly Taitz, a dentist and an attorney, are among the instigators of the birther movement. Dan Pfeiffer was the White House communications director.

sam nunberg: I don’t believe Donald Trump would have done birtherism if he had not done the Ground Zero mosque and gotten all the conservative publicity he did. I had met Roger Stone, and we briefed Trump on the issue, and he came out and said he wanted to buy the site. Then he got interviews on Fox News. It also was a part of his brand—he wasn’t just somebody coming out saying, “I’m opposed to you,” but “I want to buy it.” He went where the “Just run on lowering taxes” Republican intelligentsia, the Republican establishment, will tell you not to go.

jerome corsi: Donald Trump came into it pretty late. I was driving the story well before Donald Trump. He called me maybe three or four times in the period around April and May 2011. Donald Trump’s interest advanced the story in terms of public awareness.

orly taitz: I just turned over all the information to him. I talked to his assistant. She told me to forward all the information to his attorney Michael Cohen. Because Trump was a well-known public figure, the issue did get attention.

dan pfeiffer: It wasn’t until Trump picked this up that it spilled into the mainstream. It created a permission structure for normal reporters to ask this question. It’s like, Well, Donald Trump, this famous person, said this on The View, which is different than saying Jerome Corsi wrote it in a book.

sam nunberg: It was about destroying Obama’s favorability, his likability. It was this way to differentiate Trump from Mitt Romney, who was dancing around not wanting to criticize Obama directly. We looked at Obama as a Manchurian president. Trump will do anything to win. Birtherism would brand Trump as the guy who would do anything he could to take down Obama. He wasn’t just going to lose with a smile and lose respectably the way John McCain and Mitt Romney liked doing.

Attempting to quell the conspiracy theories, on April 27, 2011, Obama released his long-form birth certificate. Ben Rhodes was Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications.

ben rhodes: I remember Obama started to get increasingly frustrated in Oval Office sessions—not just that Trump would say these things, but also that the media would cover it as a story. Obama was angry that he had to release the birth certificate. I remember being in the Oval Office and him commenting that he couldn’t believe he had to do this, but feeling he had to nip it in the bud. Obama was more acutely aware of issues involving race and racism than he sometimes projected. Obama knew this wasn’t going away, and he knew it was racist, and he knew he needed as much armor as he could get.

The birth certificate of President Barack Obama, released to the public on April 27, 2011, in an attempt to quell Trump-fueled “birther” theories

A few days later, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Obama and the comedian Seth Meyers mocked Trump’s birther claims, leaving Trump red-faced and seething at a table in the audience. Jay Carney was the White House press secretary.

seth meyers: We were constantly getting a refreshed list of who was going to be in the room. I will say that we were happy when we saw that Trump was going to be there. I think our best joke about him being a racist that night was: “Donald Trump said recently he has a great relationship with the blacks, but unless the Blacks are a family of white people, I bet he is mistaken.” There’s a thing Donald Trump does better than anybody else, which is that by stating one position, he reveals that he actually holds the opposite position.

One of the reasons we piled on with our Trump jokes wasn’t that he was a reality star. It was that he was someone who was doing the rounds, continuing to double down and triple down and quadruple down on this incredibly racist rhetoric. Historically, if you look at other rooms I’ve been in, I’ve never done a run of 10 jokes about anyone before. Obviously we felt pretty strongly for that to be the case.

[Read: Seth Meyers has ‘very fond’ memories of roasting Trump]

jay carney: After that, birtherism diminished as a subject in most media, but I’m sure folks took notice of what Trump had done, and how, by completely concocting this nonsense, he had hijacked the conversation. It still pisses me off.

dan pfeiffer: The mainstream political conversation after Obama released his birth certificate was: Trump is a clown, right? He’s a clown who got out of his depth and has embarrassed himself and should be run out of politics forever. It was not long after that that every Republican—even, you know, putatively serious Republicans like Mitt Romney—went and begged Trump for his endorsement. I don’t think any of us realized that there was a tremendous appetite for anger in the Republican base that Trump was seeking to use.

Trump did not let up. In May 2012, he told the CNN host Wolf Blitzer that “a lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate.” In August, he called the birth certificate “a fraud.” Finally, in September 2016, under political pressure during his presidential campaign, Trump acknowledged that Obama had in fact been born in the United States. That was not the end of the matter. In November 2017, The New York Times reported that Trump was still privately asserting that Obama’s birth certificate may have been fraudulent.

ben rhodes: It cannot be overstated that this is the creation story of Donald Trump becoming president of the United States. His whole brand is: I will say the things that the other guys won’t. Without birtherism there is no Trump presidency.

VI. “On Many Sides”

Roughly six months into Trump’s presidency, on the night of Friday, August 11, 2017, hundreds of neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched onto the University of Virginia’s campus in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil,” a Nazi slogan. The “Unite the Right” rally was protesting the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Confrontations arose between members of the so-called alt-right and groups of counterprotesters, including members of the anti-fascist movement known as “antifa.”

Mike Signer, Charlottesville’s mayor, had been dealing with far-right protests all summer. Richard Spencer was one of the key figures behind the “Unite the Right” rally.

mike signer: The first event was in May of 2017, led by Richard Spencer, who invented the term alt-right and is a UVA graduate. He had done an event right after Trump’s inauguration where he had led a fascist salute with all these people at a hotel in Washington, D.C.—buzz cuts, uniforms, very frightening.

richard spencer: There is no question that Charlottesville wouldn’t have occurred without Trump. It really was because of his campaign and this new potential for a nationalist candidate who was resonating with the public in a very intense way. The alt-right found something in Trump. He changed the paradigm and made this kind of public presence of the alt-right possible.

David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, who participated in the Charlottesville rally, called it a “turning point” for his own movement, which seeks to “fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.” Will Peyton, the rector of St. Paul’s Memorial Church, near the UVA campus, hosted an interfaith service in opposition to the rally. As alt-right protesters marched by, the roughly 700 people in the church were advised to stay inside for their own safety.

will peyton: I was out in a parking lot during the morning while all the various neo-Nazi people and different white-supremacist groups were gathering and unloading. They were piling out of vans and trucks, and kind of giddy. I’d never seen swastikas and Nazi salutes out in the open like that—people wearing helmets and carrying clubs and shields.

richard spencer: The whole day was chaotic. I woke up that morning; we had breakfast. We didn’t quite know what was going to happen. I certainly thought it was going to be a big event, but I never quite knew that it was going to turn into this ultimately historic event.

mike signer: Richard Spencer and David Duke spent time attacking me and talking about the Jewish mayor of the city. There was a threat against a synagogue saying, “It’s time to torch those jewish monsters lets go 3pm.” There was an intensity in the anti-Semitism that previously was unthinkable in American political life. I grew up five blocks from the headquarters of the American Nazi Party, in Arlington, Virginia. It was above what is now a coffee shop, in a ramshackle house, and we laughed at this lonely, pathetic old man who would come in and out of that building. Now you’re seeing something different. I was infuriated that you weren’t seeing a condemnation of this coming from the White House.

On August 12, a black man named DeAndre Harris was beaten by at least four white supremacists. At about 1:45 p.m. that day, James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old white supremacist from Ohio, drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others. Fields was convicted in December 2018 of first-degree murder. In March, he pleaded guilty to 29 of 30 federal hate-crime charges in a separate trial. Speaking on the afternoon of the attack from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, Trump denounced “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” He paused, then repeated: “On many sides.” Lisa Woolfork is a UVA professor and an organizer with Black Lives Matter’s Charlottesville chapter. Jason Kessler was an organizer of the rally.

richard spencer: We were dealing with this terrible accident that occurred with James Fields and Heather Heyer, and it was certainly not why I came and I don’t think it’s why anyone else came. I was trying to deal with that situation in the best way I could by just saying that we simply don’t know what happened and we should stress that this young man deserves a fair investigation and a fair trial. Trump, in his own way, was being honest and calling it like he saw it. I was proud of him at that moment.

Pages from the indictment of James Alex Fields Jr., who rammed his car (top right) into counterprotesters at an August 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing one person and injuring many others (Photo: Matthew Hatcher / Getty)

mike signer: This was a coordinated invasion of the city by violent right-wing militias. I watched a clip of the president and my mouth fell open, and I was at once ashamed for him and for the country.

lisa woolfork: The car sped down Fourth Street and collided with the counterdemonstrators who were marching that way. I was about 100 feet from the impact, and it was complete chaos. I remember seeing a shoe fly into the air. I remember people screaming. It was an utterly terrible moment. After a long and traumatic day, the president’s remarks were chilling. One of the dangers of having the president speak in the way that he spoke about the events in Charlottesville—about “many sides”—was that it promotes this very dangerous false equivalency. Trump made things much worse by explicitly stating that you can be a white supremacist or a Nazi or a neo-Confederate and still be a good person.

jason kessler: The president was absolutely correct in blaming both sides. I’ve probably seen more video of the event than anyone alive. People who are upset feel that the majority of the blame should be with the alt-right because of the tragic death of Heather Heyer. It’s fair enough to acknowledge their emotional need for this, but no one at “Unite the Right” was responsible for that car accident but James Fields himself.

will peyton: I had a visceral, emotional reaction when I heard what the president said. I was an eyewitness. I saw with my own eyes that there was one side here that came planning and intending violence. There’s just no two ways about that.

On August 14, Trump walked back his initial statement and specifically condemned “the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups.” A day later, he walked back his walk-back. There were “very fine people on both sides,” he said, adding that the “alt-left” had been “very, very violent.” White-nationalist leaders welcomed his remarks.

mike signer: There was a robocall that went out in November 2018, because the trial of Alex Fields was happening and he was about to be convicted. The call was all about how the Jew mayor and the Negro police chief had created this situation, and how we’re the ones who should be held responsible for Heather Heyer’s death.

VII. “Go Back to Their Huts”

In office, Donald Trump followed through on his promise to curb immigration from majority-Muslim countries. He created a commission to investigate voter fraud (virtually nonexistent, according to state election officials), claiming that he would have won the popular vote but for millions of ballots cast by people in the U.S. illegally. He shut down the government for 35 days in an attempt to secure funding for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He reportedly referred to African countries as “shithole” nations—asking why the U.S. can’t have more immigrants from Norway instead—and complained that, after seeing America, immigrants from Nigeria would never “go back to their huts.” The administration favored victims of Hurricane Harvey, which hit Houston, over those of Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico, sending three times as many workers to Houston and approving 23 times as much money for individual assistance within the first nine days after each hurricane.

sam nunberg: Remember in 2011 he was criticized when he said, “I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks”? I think he just doesn’t speak “politically correct.” It’s not in his vernacular, or consciousness. It’s generational. It’s also probably—not to play psychiatrist—it’s growing up where he grew up, in Queens, New York, and dealing with union members, dealing in a crime-riddled New York City. I think it’s just the way things were thought of as different then.

timothy l. o’brien: This is the same debate we have about whether or not he’s a liar. And I get the journalistic need to be really clear about how we use terms. You know, lying implies volition and knowledge. But I’m very comfortable saying I think he’s got a pathology around lying. And when it comes to race, I don’t think it’s merely using racial animosities or race-baiting as tools to promote his business. I think it’s a deep-seated reflection of what he thinks about how the world works.

kwame jackson: America’s always trying to find this gotcha moment that shows Donald Trump is racist—you know, let’s find this one big thing. Let’s look for that one time when he burned a cross in someone’s yard so we can now finally say it. People refuse to see the bread crumbs that are already in front of you, leading you to grandma’s house.

This article appears in the June 2019 print edition with the headline “An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry.”

Remembering a Man Who Had the Thing Itself

2019-05-08T08:00:00-04:00

Courtesy of Michael Bauman

“If you would seek my monument, look around you”—the words of Christopher Wren’s famous epitaph, laid into the floor of St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London, came to mind when a friend called with the news that Richard Todd, the longtime executive editor of The Atlantic, had died on April 21 after a fall. He was 78. Dick was the opposite of showy, flashy, or promotional. The idea of a grandiose self-assessment set into a marble rotunda, gazed upon by millions, would have elicited a gently amusing but unequivocal response. Wren’s epitaph came to mind for a different reason—because of the “look around you” part. As an editor and a man, Dick infused the works and lives of others around him to a rare degree.

Dick was an editor at The Atlantic throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. Before and after, he was an editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in later years with his own imprint. He taught writing at a number of colleges. His association with Tracy Kidder, whose book The Soul of a New Machine won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1982, is well known, but Dick worked closely with James Fallows, Suzannah Lessard, Ward Just, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Darcy Frey, Ann Patchett, Alan Lelchuk, Deborah Fallows, and many others.

The Atlantic during Dick’s time was lodged in a dignified townhouse—at 8 Arlington Street, in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston. The editorial staff numbered about 35, mail arrived in stamped envelopes, and galley proofs were set in hot type and printed on long sheets of newsprint. The passage of time makes the arrangements seem Dickensian, but journalistically, the magazine was at the center of things. Dick’s office, on the second floor, was notable for a bay window, a marble fireplace, and a framed original poem by Emily Dickinson, written out in her distinctive hand. To someone of my generation, a dozen years stepped back from his, Dick was a legendary figure. We had both gone to Amherst College—where he had written his thesis on Dickinson—and I knew, as aspiring young editors and writers for 50 years have known, that Dick was one of those people who were ever willing to reach out a hand. When he came to The Atlantic in a senior role, in the late 1960s under Robert Manning, he was barely 30. He was well known as a writer but far better known as an editor. His handshake was soft but his hands were hard: While working at The Atlantic he also ran a farm in central Massachusetts and sold vegetables from a stand. To meet him for the first time was to encounter someone who seemed older than whatever his years happened to be, but somehow older in a way that seemed young. Tweeds and a knit tie represented the ceiling of his sartorial endeavor; khaki trousers and a light-blue denim shirt the swept-pine floor.

Richard Todd and his wife, Susan Todd, at their Ashfield, Massachusetts, home, September 2018 (Courtesy of Robin Clements)

Watching editors at work is one of the more profitless activities one can undertake—it’s not like watching scrimshanders or surgeons or cooks. Several years ago, Dick and Tracy Kidder took turns exploring the editor-writer relationship in a superb book, Good Prose. It contains plenty of worthwhile advice: “Don’t concentrate on technique, which can be the same as concentrating on yourself. Give yourself to your story”; “try to attune yourself to the sound of your own writing. If you can’t imagine yourself saying something aloud, then you probably shouldn’t write it.” But the job of editing is often solitary. In the study of the colonial farmhouse in Ashfield, Massachusetts, where Dick and his wife, Susan, lived for decades, you would see manuscript pages in stacks of different heights arranged on a large table; only the presence of a pencil atop one of the stacks indicated that this was a work site. Visitors to Dick’s office at The Atlantic on occasion got more of a show: entering the room to find pages and notes laid out deliberately on the floor, Dick standing above them, observing and thinking. Coming upon such a scene was a reminder that there is a physicality to writing, as there is to working the soil, and that the word on the page activates all five senses, not just the sense of sight.

[Richard Todd: Las Vegas, ’Tis of Thee]

In autumn, the protruding lintels of old New England doorways are laden with welcoming displays of pine cones and pumpkins. Dick’s eyes and sheltering brow offered an open invitation in much this way. I was never sure why, but Dick’s own writing generally took a back seat to the writerly assistance he gave to others, whether as an editor or as a teacher. He was a keen social observer, and his manner and voice fit naturally with the demands of the personal essay. He was warm and he was funny. He had the capacity, as Chaucer did, to accept and enjoy the human condition for what it is, understanding that some things, such as the gene pool of Beacon Hill, could be admirable and laughable at the same time. His humor was educated but not highfalutin. It often derived from describing something exactly right—finding the combination of adjective and noun and adverb that precisely captured an act or attitude or outlook; that made you draw in your breath and smile and say to yourself: Yes, just so. Like his friend Richard Wilbur, he frequently took you by surprise in a quiet way that came to seem ordinary. Among my favorite essays of Dick’s is a short one he wrote for New England Monthly about swimming in the frigid summertime waters of Maine, to which he was partial. It ended like this, describing the moments after numbness has conquered and “all feeling beneath the ears subsides”:

After ten minutes or so people watching you swim in this water grow affectingly anxious, unable to comprehend that for you, suffering is only a memory. In the end, swimming in Maine proves not a physical but a mental experience. Freer than it ever is on land, the mind moves to new levels of abstraction. Like those distant islands that on a clear day seem to hover above the horizon, one’s thoughts float perfectly disembodied. When this condition becomes so pleasurable that you can hardly stand it, you might consider getting out: because you are about to die.

Dick did not publish a book of his own until he was almost 70—a book called The Thing Itself, about authenticity. It immediately became a classic. The authenticity he writes about comes in many forms. Objects and places, of course. But also the authenticity of community. The authenticity of oneself. The authenticity of love. There are brilliant passages in the book about mundane tasks such as cleaning out the barn, that “museum of false enthusiasms.” The Thing Itself manages to be a memoir without being an autobiography. Now that he is gone, it is the best way to know and experience Richard Todd.

Richard Todd with his granddaughter Penny Wallick (Courtesy of Maisie Todd)

I last saw Dick about two weeks before his death. My wife, Anna Marie, and I had been in the habit of stopping at Dick and Susan’s for lunch whenever we were heading to the Berkshires. It was early April, and the hill country around Ashfield was in that emergent state between winter and spring, which in New England can last for three months. Logs were burning in the kitchen fireplace. At one point, Susan suggested that we should read a poem, a poem dictated by the date: Richard Wilbur’s “April 5, 1974.” The poem begins, “The air was soft, the ground was cold,” and it perfectly caught the moment.

[Richard Todd: Lost in the Magic Kingdom]

There is another bit of writing that caught the moment, and that captures Dick, and it is this, the last paragraph of The Thing Itself:

But I think within these sheltering walls I may sometimes understand another meaning of what it can be to “live in the moment.” Not that striving, self-forging, abyss-staring quest—not that at all, but instead something more like acceptance. It happens perhaps at a table at night with the closest people and you feel not unpleasantly that you are no more or less real than the candlelight. That they have your substance, your very self, in their hands. That it is their gaze and their laughter, their unspoken and inexplicable affection that give you substance, that you are held there like a fallen leaf on an invisible updraft of air.

Before we left, Dick had one piece of business on his mind. In the early 1980s, he explained, there had been a small fire at 8 Arlington Street, and he had packed up whatever was on the shelves and walls for safekeeping while the painters and plasterers repaired the damage. Not long after that, Dick began to work from his home in Ashfield, and the boxes came with him. In one of those boxes was the framed handwritten poem by Emily Dickinson. He wanted to make sure that it found its way back to The Atlantic. He remarked on the irony that the magazine had never published any of her poetry, though one of its editors had been her mentor. I wondered if he and Susan could come down to Washington in May, see the offices, and put the poem on the wall. The poem is one of Dickinson’s riddles, about the fact that “tomorrow” is never a place we step foot:

Tomorrow—whose location

the Wise deceives.

Though its hallucination

is last that leaves—

Fourteen tomorrows later, Dick was in the hospital. He would not see another. He took a call to reassure and be reassured on one point: The poem was coming back.