Scott Stossel | The Atlantic

Panic Attacks and the Meaning of Life

2025-09-09T07:30:00-04:00

In 2013, Hazelden Publishing, the book-production arm of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the famous Minnesota-based treatment center for drug and alcohol addiction, released a book called White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, by an English professor named Michael Clune. To say that it seemed like a departure from the collections of daily meditations and 12-step affirmations that compose much of the Hazelden list—staples full of what David Foster Wallace called the “polyesterishly banal” language of recovery—would be putting it mildly. White Out is like something from the high-modernist era of Joyce and Woolf—dark, fragmented, impressionistic, saturated with irony and black humor. “The best book about drugs since Les Paradis Artificels” by Charles Baudelaire, the novelist Ben Lerner wrote in The New Yorker. After Hazelden let it go out of print, McNally Editions—“devoted to elevating unduly neglected books and authors”—brought out a 10th-anniversary edition in 2023.

The contours of White Out are basically familiar: A 20-something man trying to write a Ph.D. dissertation becomes possessed by a fierce heroin addiction. His recovery narrative is conventional enough—he keeps failing and failing and failing again to get clean, before finally getting forced into sobriety by the threat of prison time and by family pressure. White Out possesses the quest element that propels many a recovery memoir—except that in Clune’s case, the quest for sobriety is until the end consistently subordinated to the quest to score more drugs. For three-quarters of its pages, the book reads like a paean to dope, a lyrical testament to the transcendent bliss of the first time using, and to the futile effort to recapture it. Until the end, Clune’s sympathy is with the dope, or with the addiction. And yet I can see how someone at Hazelden thought it made sense to acquire this book: As addicts know, sometimes the best delivery mechanism for a message about how to get sober is honest testimony from a recovered addict—and White Out provides an excruciatingly vivid account of the subjective experience of addiction.

With his new book, Pan, Clune has turned his cockeyed sensibility and coruscating intellect to fiction. (Or, perhaps, “fiction”: A section of Pan, with only a few alterations, was previously published in Harper’s and slugged as “memoir.”) This time, he’s portraying an adolescent at the mercy of panic attacks. In light of what we know from White Out, seeing this narrative as an origin story of addiction is not unreasonable: The road from anxiety disorder to drug dependence is well trod. (I have trod it myself; it sucks.) In fact, it is tempting to assess Pan from a clinical-scientific perspective, reviewing it as a psychiatric case study—the literary critic, the DSM-5 in hand, doing grand rounds on the mental-health ward, assessing the accuracy of Clune’s rendering of panic attacks. But to do so would be like analyzing Moby-Dick as a field guide to cetaceans—instructive in its way but kind of missing the point.

Once again, Clune doesn’t follow the standard quest plot, a tidy arc from diagnosis to cure. Still, in capturing the symptoms, he is spot-on. Through the first-person narration of his protagonist, Nicholas, a teenager suddenly besieged by anxiety, Clune conveys with uncanny vividness what a panic attack feels like. Nicholas is especially attuned to how the distortion of visual perception can trigger a cascade of runaway mental and physical responses. “I was sitting in geometry class under the fluorescents when it happened,” he says of his first attack, at age 15:

The textbook lies next to my hand on the desk. Next to the textbook is a large blue rubber eraser. Hand, textbook, eraser. Desktop bright in the fake light.

My hand, I realize slowly, it’s a … thing.

My hand is a thing too. Hand, textbook, eraser. Three things.

Oh.

That’s when I forgot how to breathe.

Nicholas’s narration captures the subjective experience of panic with high-res precision. “That’s what your thoughts are waiting for,” Nicholas says, describing how during a panic attack first your own thoughts and then your own body (and sometimes first your body and then your thoughts) betray you. Your thoughts “flood your head with news of the catastrophe unfolding in your body.”

[Read: Surviving anxiety]

For some—for me—the experience of certain kinds of anxiety has a disconcerting synesthetic quality. Rays of sunlight come through my eyes and get in my chest, and I feel like I’m gagging on them. For Nicholas, too, senses and even physical properties intersect with and become one another. Light takes on a solid, tactile quality (“black coils of sunlight heaped”) and artistic forms become fully permeable (Bach is like “architecture inside a color”). And here he is after a panic attack: “I thought until there were no spaces between the thoughts, until each thought resembled the one before. I thought until my thoughts turned the color of darkness behind my eyelids, until they sounded like breathing.”

Nicholas’s third panic attack lands him in the emergency room, convinced he is having a heart attack. If we’re reading this as a clinical case study, that’s a typical presentation: Panic attacks send lots of people to the ER believing they’re having a heart attack. What makes Nicholas identifiably Clunian is that he doesn’t rush to the ER. He tries—successfully for a time—to ward off the attack by reading Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which becomes a magic prophylactic against death; only at 4:35 a.m., when he gets to the end of the book, does he tell his dad what’s happening, and they go to the hospital.

Pan isn’t a paean to panic attacks, exactly, but it is about a quest to find through them, fearsome as they are, some kind of higher meaning or transcendent level of existence. “A panic attack doesn’t feel like a panic attack,” he declares at one point. “It feels like insight.”

Not that he would be able to escape panic even if he wanted to; the doctors he sees are hapless. The ER doctor who first diagnoses a panic attack prescribes … a paper bag for him to breathe into. No longer commonly recommended as a panic remedy, it used to be (I carried paper bags around with me as a kid, to no avail). The scientific rationale, such as it is: Breathing in your own exhaled carbon dioxide from the bag is supposed to fix a CO₂ deficit caused by hyperventilation that exacerbates symptoms such as dizziness and tingling in the extremities. Clune deploys the bag for comedic purposes, most notably in Nicholas’s encounter with one of his Catholic-school nuns, who is convinced he is using it for nefarious purposes, with Nicholas protesting that “they’re medical bags.” The materialist, physiological explanation for the phenomenon of panic generates a bright contrast with the philosophical and metaphysical inquiries that have Nicholas, and Clune, in their grip.

Pan is a coming-of-age novel set in the Chicago suburbs of the early 1990s. The depressing townhouse development, Chariot Courts, where he is living with his divorced dad, is “a battleground between the idea of home and the armies of impermanence.” His mom’s house, which he ultimately returns to, is somehow even worse, “far more exposed to impermanence,” Nicholas says. “It was a satire on the very idea of home.” A kind of everyplace that’s no place, his world is kept afloat only by a raft of pop-cultural references and brands that dominated the 1980s and ’90s, imbued with the deep meaning that a teenager of the time would have accorded them: the restaurant chain Ruby Tuesday; Ministry; Guns N’ Roses; Who’s the Boss?; Roseanne; the Chicago Bulls of the Michael Jordan era; the Plymouth Horizon; 7-Eleven Slurpees. “More Than a Feeling,” the 1970s rock anthem by Boston, in particular takes on for Nicholas a talismanic, mystical—and, for the reader, rather droll—significance.

[Read: What to read when you’re ready to say no]

Nicholas provides a fine-grain anthropological analysis of status competition in high school, where “you have to be aware of your popularity,” he says. “It’s like your credit rating in adulthood.” But his anxiety makes achieving coolness a challenge—panic is the “opposite of cool.” Cool is “minimal consciousness” and “panic, on the other hand, is excess of consciousness. Your consciousness gets so strong it actually leaps out of your mind entirely. It starts vibrating your body. It shakes meat and bone.” Again, spot-on.

Nicholas does ordinary stuff, like work at Ace Hardware and become romantically involved with a classmate, Sarah. Yet she becomes almost as preoccupied as he is with figuring out the origins of his panic, and Clune scripts for him a young autodidact’s intellectual adventure. Nicholas heads to the public library, and is led (via a detour through books on financial panics) to the works of Oscar Wilde, whose preoccupation with ancient Greece prompts Sarah to suggest maybe panic has something to do with Pan, the mischievous Greek god with goat legs who, when awakened from sleep, would scream terrifyingly at passersby. Maybe, Nicholas comes to think, what bedevils him is not a medical condition—the sort of thing a physician can properly diagnose—but the devilry of Pan.

His anxiety acquires the dimensions of something existential or spiritual, even theological: He establishes (in his head) the First Church of Pan, with a series of liturgies and behaviors meant to ward off his anxiety by keeping him exquisitely attuned to Pan’s possible presence. Soon he, Sarah, and his friend Ty fall in with a weird but cooler-than-them crowd who spend their afternoons in an abandoned barn. There they listen to music and do drugs—though not Nicholas, who worries that drugs will worsen his panic, which is the only consciousness-warper he needs. They also engage in strange rituals (including bludgeoning mice to death with shovels) devised by one kid’s older brother, college-age Ian, and have the sorts of conversations that kids doing drugs have.

The overall effect is like Judy Blume filtered through David Lynch or William S. Burroughs: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Nicholas, Having a Panic Attack While My Friends Trip on Acid. This is a bracing gestalt.

For a reader, the psychedelic swirl of drugs, music, spiritual musings, and disturbing rites can feel like being sober around a bunch of people who are very stoned: The deep wisdom being dispensed seems more like faux profundity, and you feel excluded, confused, and annoyed. But then come the passages of cockeyed brilliance—such as this one, yoking Nicholas’s philosophical meditation on the nature of subjective perception to the 1960s sitcom Gilligan’s Island.

No one knows how color really looks to anyone else. It’s the definition of a private experience. All we share are the names.

The sole exception to the rule of the total privacy of color experience can be found in the television of the Gilligan’s Island era. Due to an accidental feature of this primitive technology, the color of television made in the middle nineteen sixties is essentially public, rather than private. The sky in Gilligan’s Island isn’t the color of the sky outside, and it’s not the color of the sky in eighties television. No, we know everyone sees Gilligan’s Island–era color identically from the inside. We can tell this isn’t our own private feeling from the way it feels. It doesn’t feel like my feeling. It feels like everyone’s.

The engineers who designed the color, Nicholas explains, “inadvertently created the first and last collective color sensation in the history of human civilization. Watching Gilligan’s Island is the closest I’ve ever gotten to seeing the world as someone else does.”

[Read: America’s approach to addiction has gone off the rails]

This sounds like something out of the mouth of a Quentin Tarantino character on a brilliant, oddball tangent. Is it technologically, scientifically, philosophically true? Actually, yes, sort of. Beginning in the 1950s, the National Television System Committee required that television sets be calibrated to constrain the range of color to ensure that viewers had a uniform experience of it. Of course, there’s no way to measure whether the “qualia” of inner color experience is shared among individuals. But it feels true to Nicholas, and this high-low riff delivers an ineffable intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction.

When Nicholas discovers Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Clune’s coming-of-age novel edges toward a Künstlerroman, because from Baudelaire he gets the idea of trying to transform darkness—to transform panic—into beauty, or even comfort, through writing. By putting on the page “the boredom and horror and emptiness of the world,” he thinks, maybe he can even create “a home for the familyless” and “a level of the world invulnerable to panic.”

Trying to write well enough about panic anxiety to transcend it and convey what Ian calls its “absolute clarity” is surely in part what Clune is up to in Pan. For Nicholas, anyway, this works—sort of, at least for a time. He starts sleeping better.

But capturing through language what panic is like—translating for other people what happens “deep inside, in the weird physics of consciousness” amidst an attack—is impossible. The panic resurges, and he realizes he needs a better elixir, “something stronger” than his own writing. No, not drugs—for the young Michael Clune, those would evidently come soon enough—but art. Sarah directs him to the art of the Renaissance. Looking at the paintings of Bellini, Nicholas finally “fell out” of his own head, and his body merges with time (more synesthesia) and with the world of inanimate things around him.

When Nicholas gets sent back from his father’s house to live with his mother for his senior year, he begins groping his way toward a more mundane psychological explanation for his panic attacks: his parents’ divorce. But the Divorce theory, as he comes to call it, feels too banal a source of his affliction. “Maybe it’s better to pretend it could be Pan instead of Divorce, magic instead of mental illness,” Nicholas thinks. “Mental illness,” Ty tells him, supportively, “it’s retarded.”

Pan’s final pages are a kaleidoscope of phantasmagoria and philosophic bewilderment, a refusal of closure and clarity that is seemingly—and fittingly—designed to give readers a heavy dose of, to use the clinical term, derealization. This conclusion is evidently true to Clune’s youthful self, too: After all, ahead of him lies hell. Perhaps psychologists and philosophers should prescribe this dazzling and disorienting novel as exposure therapy for both the sick and the well. Because ultimately nothing—not writing, not art, not drugs, not brown paper bags, not cognitive behavioral therapy (though all of those might help)—can create a “level of the world invulnerable to panic.” Nothing can create the home of absolute safety and belonging, or promise the freedom from anxiety and the transcendence of death we crave.

The Unbearable Greatness of Djokovic

2024-05-24T06:00:00-04:00

If there was a moment—a single shot, in fact—when the chemical composition of men’s tennis changed, it came on September 10, 2011, in the semifinals of the U.S. Open, as Novak Djokovic faced Roger Federer. At the time, Djokovic had won just three Grand Slam tournaments, compared with Federer’s towering 16. Federer took a two-sets-to-love lead and appeared to be cruising to victory. But Djokovic—who had improved his fitness in recent years, taking up yoga and giving up gluten—won the next two sets, sending the match to a fifth and deciding set.

The fans in Arthur Ashe Stadium stood strongly behind Federer. This annoyed Djokovic. At times, he grimaced at the fans and mocked them, bringing jeers. At 4–3 in the fifth set, Federer broke Djokovic’s serve to seize a 5–3 lead, providing him the opportunity to serve out the match. The crowd rose to its feet, cheering wildly. Federer then took a 40–15 lead, giving him two match points. Victory was a serve away.

What happened next is revealing: Djokovic is sneering; he appears disgusted with the whole scene. Federer hits a hard serve out wide to Djokovic’s forehand. It’s a good serve. But Djokovic, powered by what appears to be pure disdain, smacks the ball as hard as he can—like he doesn’t even care, like he’s not even trying to win the point, an insolent whip of the racket—for a where-did-that-come-from? cross-court winner. The fans roar, and Djokovic eggs them on sarcastically as though to say, So now you’re cheering for me?

Federer looks stunned. But he still has another match point in hand. The fans remain mostly behind him. He sets up to serve again. Djokovic is grinning and nodding his head, like some malevolent imp. This time Federer serves to Djokovic’s backhand and Djokovic returns the ball into the middle of the court, where Federer botches a forehand. The unforced error brings the game to deuce. After that, the players trade points for a bit, but Djokovic eventually wins the game, and then the next three, to win the match.

[Read: Tennis explains everything]

Afterward Federer, deflated and incredulous, seemed to feel that Djokovic had committed some kind of offense against tennis, dishonoring the sport. The Serb, he said, had given up: Facing double match point, Federer said, Djokovic didn’t look like someone “who believes much anymore in winning. To lose against someone like that, it’s very disappointing, because you feel like he was mentally out of it already. Just gets the lucky shot at the end, and off you go.” Do you really think Djokovic’s blistering return on the first match point was attributable to “luck,” a reporter asked, as opposed to “confidence”? “Confidence? Are you kidding me?” Federer said. “I mean, please. Some players grow up and play like that—being down 5–2 in the third, and they all just start slapping shots … For me, this is very hard to understand. How can you play a shot like that on match point?” It was a rare failure of grace for the gentlemanly Swiss.

That single shot by Djokovic seemed to break something in Federer; he was different after that. Sure, he still won two more Australian Open championships and two more Wimbledon championships—an enviable career in itself for just about any other player. But Djokovic had lodged a grain of sand in the gears of Federer’s machinery, throwing it off just enough to make his winning seem less inevitable. Djokovic, for his part, went on to beat Rafael Nadal in the finals the next day, and from there just kept methodically adding to his collection of Grand Slam titles. Since that day 12 years ago, Djokovic has won 21 (and counting) additional Grand Slam titles to Nadal’s 14 and Federer’s four.

Even when, as part of a surprising late-career resurgence, Federer made it back to the Wimbledon final against Djokovic, in 2019, those match points he’d held and lost in 2011 seemed to reverberate across the years, echoing in his head. They were certainly echoing in mine as I watched: Once again, Federer had two match points against Djokovic on his own serve in the fifth set—and once again Djokovic fought off the match points and won the championship, the first player since 1948 to come from down a match point to win the Wimbledon final.

Ever since that back-from-the-dead comeback against Federer in 2011, Djokovic has been enshrouded in a ruthless, cold-blooded unkillability. Until you’ve driven a stake through his heart by winning match point, he keeps coming and coming and coming. He revels in playing possum, cavalierly frittering sets away early against weaker players in order to make the eventual comeback and execution all the more delicious.

What is perhaps most intimidating about Djokovic is the steeliness of his nerve. The ice water in his veins gets chillier as the stakes get higher: The more important the point, the more likely he is to win it. The ATP keeps track of what it calls “pressure stats,” which measure performance on the highest-value, highest-stakes points (break points, tiebreakers, etc). Djokovic, unsurprisingly, has the highest ranking on the pressure-stats list among current players. But he also ranks highest all time by that metric, ahead of Pete Sampras, Nadal, and Federer. Before he lost a tiebreaker to Carlos Alcaraz in the Wimbledon championship last summer, Djokovic had won a staggering 15 straight tiebreakers in major tournaments. When everything is on the line, he rarely falters. Which suggests that the ridiculous shot that broke Federer’s spirit in 2011 was not pure luck, but an early demonstration of his ability to absorb the crowd’s hostility and channel it into a kind of dark energy that elevates his game to a superhuman level.

Inconveniently for partisans of Federer or Nadal, Djokovic’s case for being the best of the Big Three—and the greatest male player of all time, and one of the greatest athletes of all time, across all sports—grows ever stronger. Even though he lost in the semifinals of the Australian Open to Jannik Sinner in January, if he wins any of this year’s remaining Grand Slam tournaments—and oddsmakers currently have him as the favorite for the U.S. Open, and a close second-favorite at the French Open and Wimbledon—it will reach the point of irrefutability. And I’m having a hard time with that—because, like many other tennis fans, I can’t stand the guy.

Some of Djokovic’s unlikability surely comes with the fearsome intensity needed to be a great champion: Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant and Larry Bird and Tom Brady and Muhammad Ali were ruthless toward anyone they were competing against (and sometimes alongside of). And there have been plenty of unlikable tennis players before. Jimmy Connors—who, if you believe Andre Agassi, was narcissistic and cantankerous—was beloved for his gritty playing style and for, at least in this country, his brash Americanness. Others, such as the Romanian Ilie Năstase (nicknamed “Nasty” for antics like using an unconventionally “spaghetti-strung” racket, throwing temper tantrums, participating in a near-riot in a stadium, and making sexist and racist comments) and John McEnroe (who was a petulant brat on the court before becoming a revered elder statesman of the sport), acquired a kind of dark charisma, and they were embraced as rakish antiheroes.

But all of these players have relished their roles. Daniil Medvedev, the Russian currently ranked No. 5 in the world, also embraces his status as a villain, reveling in his obnoxiousness; this gives him a perverse charm. His comfort in his villainy, seasoned lightly with irony, endears him to fans. (Or at least to this fan.)

Djokovic’s problem is that he manifestly hates being hated, hates that he doesn’t receive the love and respect that Nadal and Federer did, even as he surpasses their on-court achievements. When Djokovic started winning majors in the late 2000s, he seemed to expect that he would be embraced by fans the way Federer and Nadal were. And when he wasn’t, his resentment fueled his desire for adulation, which made him try harder to be liked, which only tended to alienate people, as he oscillated between attempts at ingratiating himself with the fans and outbursts of resentment when they didn’t respond to him as he wanted. “I just feel like he has a sick obsession with wanting to be liked,” Nick Kyrgios, the fearsomely talented but volatile Australian player, said of him in 2019. “I just feel he wants to be liked so much that I just can’t stand him.”

Djokovic has mostly his own behavior to blame for his complex public image. He claims a mystical connection to wolves, based on an encounter he says he had with one as a little boy in Serbia. And there is indeed something lupine about Djokovic: the bared teeth, the feral snarling, the predatory ruthlessness, the bulging-eyed howls he emits after winning key points. Maybe he acquired these qualities as a survival mechanism during childhood. At age 11, he spent months sheltering from nightly bombings in Belgrade. During the day, he’d practice on what was left of bombed-out tennis courts. “We’d go to the site of the most recent attacks, figuring that if they bombed one place yesterday, they probably wouldn’t bomb it today,” he wrote in his 2013 book, Serve to Win. It’s the sort of triumph-in-the-face-of-adversity tale that tends to endear a player to the public. But the book’s subtitle—The 14-Day Gluten-Free Plan for Physical and Mental Excellence—bespeaks Djokovic’s more mercenary instincts (which, in fairness, may also be a product of those wartime years).

[From the August 1903 issue: Lawn tennis]

A few years ago, an enterprising tennis fan compiled a YouTube video called “89 Reasons Everyone Hates Novak Djokovic.” Before ATP Media blocked the video on copyright grounds, nearly half a million viewers were treated to 24 minutes of Djokovic smashing rackets, yelling at ball kids, yelling at fans, yelling at umpires, yelling at his coaches, quitting matches when he was behind, and taking questionable (and sometimes preposterous) injury timeouts. He was disqualified from the 2021 U.S. Open when, after losing a game in a fourth-round match, he struck a ball in frustration and pegged a line judge directly in the throat. He refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19, which led him to get deported from Australia and miss the 2022 Australian Open, as well as the 2022 U.S. Open because he wasn’t eligible for a visa. He knowingly exposed people to the virus when he did an interview and a photo shoot in France, the latter unmasked, after testing positive.

Djokovic has been photographed having a meal with a former commander of the Drina Wolves, among the perpetrators of the Bosnian genocide; more recently, his father showed up at a tournament with what appeared to be a pro–Vladimir Putin motorcycle gang waving Russian flags. (Djokovic Sr. apologized for the “disruption.”) And for those already predisposed to find Djokovic a shady character, his ardent anti-vaccine stance sits oddly alongside his willingness to ingest mysterious concoctions mixed with undeniable surreptitiousness by his team, not to mention his belief in the power of the Taopatch (a plastic-and-metal patch he wears affixed his chest whose “nanocrystals emit photons toward the body providing several health benefits,” according to the company that sells it). All of which makes him the Aaron Rodgers of professional tennis. (Rodgers, unsurprisingly, has taken to Instagram in support of Djokovic’s anti-vax stance.)

[Jemele Hill: The selfishness of Novak Djokovic]

Djokovic’s will to win is fearsome. But when necessary, he resorts to head games and skulduggery. He has an uncanny knack for resurrecting himself from the dead after visits to the bathroom. In the final of the Cincinnati Open against Carlos Alcaraz last summer, Djokovic was getting badly outplayed by the young Spaniard, and seemed to be suffering from heat stroke (as the Tennis Channel commentator Jim Courier put it at the time), requiring medical attention and struggling to stay on his feet. Then, after a trip to the restroom, he roared back to life, Lazarus from the dead, ultimately prevailing 5–7, 7–6, 7–6. In the finals of the French Open against Stefanos Tsitsipas in 2021, down two sets to love, Djokovic took a seven-minute bathroom break and then came back to win. What tactical or emotional adjustment, he was asked, had he made in the bathroom that allowed him to come back from two sets down against a player 11 years his junior? “I told myself I can do it, encouraged myself,” Djokovic said. In the quarterfinals of Wimbledon the following year, after dropping the first two sets to Sinner, 14 years his junior, he retreated to—where else?—the bathroom, where he said he managed to “reanimate” himself with a “pep talk” in the lavatory mirror, during which he gave himself “positive affirmations” and channeled the spirit of Kobe Bryant. Then he came back out and dominated the next three sets.

Djokovic makes such frequent and effective use of bathroom breaks that in 2021 The Wall Street Journal conducted a statistical analysis, calculating that he’d won 83.3 percent of the sets he played following bathroom breaks in major tournaments since 2013, five percentage points higher than his overall win rate. Aside from talking to himself in the mirror, what is he up to in the privacy of the bathroom? Anti-Djokovic conspiracists point meaningfully to his willingness to ingest those mysterious concoctions prepared by his coaches during matches. But the International Tennis Federation has an anti-doping policy and conducts regular drug testing; Djokovic has complained about the intrusiveness of the testing but has never failed one. And the rules do permit bathroom breaks, limited to three-minutes twice per match (five minutes if they are also changing clothes). Those time limits are rarely enforced, however, and Djokovic takes regular advantage of that.

I’ve tried to like Djokovic. I appreciate his style of play: He is arguably the best service returner in the history of the game, and one of the best overall defensive retrievers, stretching for impossible shots with his boneless Gumby limbs. And those 89 (or more) reasons to hate him notwithstanding, maybe he’s not a bad guy. Other men and women on the pro tour say they like him. Even Kyrgios, the Aussie who professed a few years ago to find him insufferable, has come around to say that he and Djokovic now have a “bromance.” He has advocated for more money for lower-ranked players. He was the only player Naomi Osaka thanked by name for supporting her when she controversially refused, on mental-health grounds, to do press conferences at the French Open in 2021. He is smart, speaks multiple languages, and is an uncanny mimic.

But rooting interests in sports can be irrational and ill-founded, the arbitrariness of their application bearing no relation to their intensity. Maybe my inability to like Djokovic reflects badly on me. That I prefer Roger Federer, all effortless elegance and Swiss-watch precision, perhaps suggests an aesthetic (even an aristocratic) prejudice against the grittier, sweatier, try-hard style that Djokovic brings to the game. But no one is sweatier or grittier than Rafael Nadal, a Tasmanian devil in a cloud of red clay, and I adore him not only for his brute baseline grinding and the nuclear intensity of his game but for his manifest sweetness of soul: He is proof that an adamantine will to win can coexist with sportsmanship and humility.

Djokovic may be most likable, or most relatable, in defeat. When he fell to Medvedev in the 2021 U.S. Open finals, failing in his quest to win a rare calendar Grand Slam (all four majors in the same year), and ended up sobbing under a towel in his chair, he received the most enthusiastic and appreciative cheers of his career. And when he was gracious in defeat to Alcaraz in the Wimbledon final last summer, some noted that maybe now he could finally move, as John McEnroe had before him, from ill-mannered churl to respected tennis statesman. Maybe now, in the evening of his career, he could finally earn not just the respect but the love accorded to Nadal and Federer.

But Djokovic seems more inclined to rage against the dying of the light. He told 60 Minutes that the younger players who are trying to wrest away his crown “awaken a beast in me.” (A wolf, I suspect.) At the U.S. Open last September, he collected his 24th Grand Slam. Before losing to Sinner in Melbourne in January, he’d had a 33-match winning streak at the Australian Open, stretching across four years (which included his scorched-earth revenge tour in 2023, when he won the Open after being banned for his vaccination status the year before). He is currently the No. 1 player in the world, by a fair margin—the oldest, at 37, ever to hold the top spot. And he continues to run on vinegar and bile: During his two weeks at the Australian Open this year, he criticized the up-and-coming Black American player Ben Shelton for not showing him proper “respect”; yelled at a heckling fan, telling him to come down and “say that to my face”; and aggressively stared down opponents after winning shots. More recently, in his semifinal loss to the Norwegian Casper Ruud at Monte Carlo in April, he shouted at a fan to “shut the fuck up.”

That last incident may be telling, because Djokovic’s outburst came when he was unraveling in the third set, during a match he uncharacteristically failed to come back and win. Might this be evidence that Djokovic is, finally, losing his invincibility? Sometimes when the end comes, it comes fast; what once seemed impossible looks in retrospect to have been inevitable. Ruud, a soft-spoken Scandinavian with one of the most powerful forehands in the game, had never before come close to beating Djokovic. But Ruud, at least, is a top-10 player.

Luca Nardi is not. A few weeks before Monte Carlo, in the third round at Indian Wells, Nardi, a 20-year-old Italian, who was ranked 123rd in the world at the time, became the lowest-ranked player to beat Djokovic in 18 years—and the lowest-ranked player ever to beat him in a big tournament. At the time of their meeting, Djokovic had won 19 more Grand Slam championships than Nardi had won professional matches (five). Nardi had in fact failed to gain regular access to the main draw at Indian Wells, sneaking in only as what’s known as a “lucky loser”—a player who gets a free pass into the tournament despite failing to qualify for it, by replacing a competitor who has to withdraw at the 11th hour due to injury.

That Djokovic got defeated by a lucky loser was shocking. Less shocking, perhaps, was Djokovic’s behavior during and after the match. In the third game of the second set, Nardi momentarily froze in confusion during a point because he thought a ball that landed in would be called out. He recovered in time to hit the ball and win the point from an off-guard Djokovic, who’d been thrown by Nardi’s pause. Nardi had done nothing wrong. But Djokovic complained to the umpire that Nardi’s hesitation should have been ruled a “hindrance,” and that the point should have been taken away from him. “It’s a desperation move,” Andy Roddick, the most recent American player to be ranked No. 1 in the world (way back in 2004), said of Djokovic’s attempt to litigate the point after it was played. “I don’t see any world where Novak should ever be desperate against someone ranked 123 in the world.”

What happened afterward was worse. Nardi had grown up idolizing Djokovic, with a poster of him on the wall of his childhood bedroom, and he had just won by far the biggest match of his career. But when meeting at the net for their post-match handshake, Djokovic offered only barbed congratulations, presuming to chastise him. “It’s not right,” Djokovic said, in Italian, “but bravo.” The tennis journalist Ricky Dimon, among others, called out the world No. 1 for this. “Appalling that Djokovic brought up the stopping play when he shook Nardi’s hand at the net,” he wrote on X. “1) that point had nothing to do with the outcome of the match, 2) it’s not Nardi’s call to make, 3) umpire made the right call.”

A month later, in the third round of the Rome Open, which he has won six times, Djokovic again lost weakly to a lower-ranked player, this time to the world No. 32, Alejandro Tabilo of Chile, who had never before beaten a top-10 player. Djokovic looked adrift on the court; his timing and balance were off. More astonishing, he looked anxious, double-faulting at key moments, including match point. Afterward, he made excuses. After his previous match, two days earlier, he’d been hit on the head with a water bottle accidentally dropped by an autograph-seeking fan in the stands, and Djokovic intimated that a concussion might have caused him to struggle with his balance. Maybe so.

A few days ago, Djokovic surprised the tennis world by accepting a late wild-card entry into this week’s Geneva Open, a relatively low-level tournament. He seems belatedly to have concluded that he needs to try to play himself back into championship form before the French Open starts. But if he’s not had enough match play recently, that’s his own doing. After his earlier losses to Nardi and Ruud, Djokovic had immediately withdrawn from the next tournaments he’d been scheduled to play in, the Miami Open and the Madrid Open, respectively. This was driven, he said, by the need to conserve energy for the Grand Slams, which has been his strategy in recent years. Competing for the major championships at Djokovic’s age requires careful stewarding of resources. And the French Open begins on Sunday. But the abrupt withdrawals had a whiff of pique—of sulking in defeat, of insulating himself from losing to lesser mortals by refusing to play them until he’s on a stage commensurate with his stature and in fit enough condition to beat them.

But his strategy may be working: As of Thursday, he was into the Geneva semifinals, suggesting that once again he may be rounding into form at just the right time to defend his French Open title starting next week.

For a long time I resisted the notion that Djokovic could ever be the equal of Federer and Nadal. But as the years passed and the Serb’s trophies piled up, my arguments on behalf of the Swiss and the Spaniard have had to become more and more sophistic. I may finally have run out of arguments. But I’ll make one final attempt.

In that 2019 Wimbledon final, Federer outplayed Djokovic for much of the match, and he actually won more points than Djokovic did. But tennis scoring, like the Electoral College, allows the person who does the most winning to lose. And, like the 2016 election, this raises tantalizing counterfactuals: But for three points—one each in 2010 (another U.S. Open semifinal in which Djokovic fought off two match points to upset Federer), 2011, and 2019—Federer might now have 23 Grand Slam titles and Djokovic only 22, and the complexion of the argument over the Greatest Player of All Time would look different.

[Caira Conner: How will we remember Roger Federer? ]

Yet I confess that if my life depended on a single point of tennis and I had to pick a pro in his prime to play it for me, I might select Djokovic as my champion. Because had Djokovic not been banned from two Grand Slams for being unvaccinated against COVID, and disqualified from another for pegging that line judge in the throat, he might well have 27 Grand Slam titles. (Such is the role of contingency and luck in the unfolding of sports narratives, as in life.)

So, okay, I (grudgingly) acknowledge Djokovic’s greatness. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy watching him lose, or that I want his reign of dominance to extend any longer. And the evidence is mounting that it won’t. Years hence, we may be able to isolate the match, or the very point, when in retrospect it became clear that his grip on dominance had weakened. Will it turn out to be at last summer’s Wimbledon, when Alcaraz stared down Djokovic in the second-set tiebreak, winning it 8–6 and breaking the Serb’s astonishing streak of 15 straight tiebreak wins, puncturing his aura of invincibility, dispelling the illusion that he could never be beaten in the highest-stakes moments? Or will it be his loss in this year’s Australian Open semifinals, when he appeared strangely listless—or maybe, finally, just old—as he got steamrolled by the hard-hitting Sinner? Will it be his hapless loss to Alejandro Tabilo in Rome? Or will it be his loss to the lucky loser Luca Nardi at Indian Wells, his botching of that weird second-set point and his truculent, ungracious response to it?

That sports reveal character is a truism spouted regularly by coaches and motivational speakers. But it is not inaccurate. An essential part of Djokovic’s character, certainly, is his steely mental fortitude; that’s why I’d want him playing the point to save my life. But for the player I’d like children to emulate, in tennis or in life? Give me Alcaraz or Sinner—the future of men’s tennis—who both exhibit not just fiery competitive spirit but sportsmanship on the court, and generosity and kindness off it. Or give me Roger Federer.

Or give me Rafa Nadal, who—while his contemporary Djokovic was enjoying one of the best years of his career—endured a Job-like litany of injuries and setbacks, missing almost all of 2023 and falling to No. 644 in the world with dignity and stoicism. Who, as his body betrays him in multiple ways (abdominal tear, hip tear, another abdominal tear, quadriceps tear, abdominal tear again, back trouble, all after an injury that required him to play with his left foot anesthetized, so it was like he was playing on a stump), is trying to make a capstone run in what will almost surely be the last year of his career. It would be wonderful—truly storybook—if Nadal could claim a final Grand Slam title at Roland Garros, the French red clay courts he has lorded over for two decades, amassing a staggering 112–3 record and 14 championships there. Alas, that’s unlikely to happen. (Various oddsmakers have him anywhere from the third favorite to the eighth, despite his having won only a few professional matches in the past 16 months and being ranked in the 600s.) As the tournament approached and his performances were lackluster, Nadal kept saying that if his body did not feel better by the start of Roland Garros, he would not play. But he has arrived in Paris and is in the draw, though he had the back luck to land Alexander Zverev, who is currently No. 4 in the world, as his first-round opponent Sunday.

I, and millions of others around the world, would swoon if Nadal were to somehow magically win his 15th French Open. But as the tournament begins, my main hope is that Djokovic does not win it. And, for the first time in years, my expectation is that he won’t; the intimations of his tennis mortality have become too loud, the depredations of age finally overtaking him. As his physical powers wane, his fanatical competitiveness and otherworldly mental toughness can only carry him so far. To my eye, Djokovic may be suddenly, finally, done. Which is what I’ve believed about Djokovic in dozens of individual matches over the years … almost all of which he came back to win.

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.”

Putting Trump on the Couch

2023-08-04T07:46:13-04:00

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association established the so-called Goldwater Rule as a response to the many mental-health professionals who had ventured glib and florid diagnoses of Senator Barry Goldwater during his 1964 presidential campaign. “I believe Goldwater has the same pathological makeup as Hitler, Castro, Stalin, and other known schizophrenic leaders” was a representative comment; many other psychiatrists and psychologists deemed him schizophrenic, a “megalomaniac,” and “chronically psychotic.” In the four decades between its enshrining and the 2016 election, the Goldwater Rule—which prohibits psychiatrists from issuing diagnoses of public figures they haven’t seen as patients—was mostly honored.

But from the earliest moments of Donald Trump’s campaign, his behavior, falling far outside the boundaries of conventional candidate comportment, raised the question of whether he could be adequately assessed in purely political terms. Where did politics end and psychology—or psychopathology—begin? Thus the Trump years have inevitably given rise to the routine flouting of the Goldwater Rule, most notably in a collection of writings assembled by the former Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. (Lee subsequently got fired from Yale for publicly arguing that Alan Dershowitz was suffering from a “shared psychosis” with Trump.)

Now, with Trump the Republican 2024 front-runner—his accumulating indictments notwithstanding—the psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer seems to have successfully engineered an end run around the Goldwater Rule: In his interesting and challenging new novel, Death of the Great Man, Kramer takes on some of the relevant psychological issues of the Trump era via fiction.

Kramer, the longtime Brown University medical-school professor who became internationally famous 30 years ago for writing the best-selling Listening to Prozac, helped transform how we think about psychopharmacology and the self. In this novel, he confronts his protagonist, an idealistic psychiatrist named Henry Farber who shares much of Kramer’s biography, with the question of how and whether to provide psychotherapy to an American president who shares much of Trump’s biography.

Kramer is at pains to emphasize that he doesn’t intend a one-to-one correlation between his fictional president, who is referred to only as the “Great Man,” and the real-life Trump. Yet in his general behavior (he’s an erratic and autocratic populist who has shredded democratic norms) and many details (he has an attractive, younger European wife, and has refused to accept defeat in his reelection campaign, which took place amid the depredations of a global pandemic), the Great Man is unmistakably Trumpian.

The Great Man is also—we learn in the novel’s third sentence—dead, almost certainly murdered; his body was discovered on the couch in Farber’s consulting room in Providence, Rhode Island. The novel flashes back (how did the president come to be in Farber’s office?) and forward (who killed the Great Man? Will Farber get fingered for it?), but it is not a classic whodunit, because Kramer heavily seasons the mystery with stylistic elements drawn from literary fiction and political satire, which allows for both comedy and commentary. For instance, Kramer depicts the Great Man’s wife, Náomi, who on the surface seems much like Melania Trump, as a literary intellectual and former dramaturge with liberal leanings and an interest in existential philosophy. So nauseated is Náomi by the moral (and literal) stench of her husband that she routinely retches when he’s nearby. She also turns out to have been the secret instigator of the effort to recruit a therapist for the Great Man. She may also be his murderer.

I interviewed Kramer on Zoom earlier this summer. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Scott Stossel: What inspired this novel?

Peter D. Kramer: This was an epiphany. It was December of 2016, and Trump had just been elected. I was in New York, consulting on clinical cases at Cornell medical school. One of my editors had a short amount of time for me at the end of the day, and so I went to Union Square, near my publisher’s offices, a little early. It was rainy, so I went into the Barnes & Noble to look for books for my grandsons. I was on the escalator and the book just came to me: I thought I should write a novel that relates to Trump. The framework came to me almost whole. I went into a little corner in the children’s books section and started writing notes on my phone.

And then I went in and presented my idea to the editor, and he said: “Absolutely not.” And I thought, well, this is what I have to write, and I sat down to write it anyway.

[Read: Evaluating Trump’s psyche in public]

Stossel: What was the editor’s objection? Fear of political blowback or just “this isn’t gonna sell”?

Kramer: I knew from the start that this book was going to begin with a toxic populist U.S. president dead on a psychiatrist’s couch—and of course if Trump had died at some point in between the writing of the book and its publication, that wouldn’t have been amusing.

This editor had another reasonable objection, which is that assassination for regime change is an illiberal expedient. It’s not amusing. You can’t kill off presidents—it’s just morally not the right thing. But in the novel, this isn’t murder for regime change; every character around him has a reason to want the Great Man dead. And these reasons are really only incidentally political. He’s just so horrible to everyone, and so many people have their own motives for killing him.

Stossel: How close did you mean to make the Great Man to Trump? Did you start with the public Trump we all see on TV and try to imagine his inner life?

Kramer: The thinking began with Trump, but of course characters take on their own lives for the writer. I am not an expert on politics or history, so I focused on what Trump would look like to a psychotherapist. That meant I had to create what I didn’t know about, which is this intimate person: How does he treat his wife? How does he treat people around him? How would he do in therapy? And I was running into this other constraint, which is that psychiatrists are not supposed to diagnose public figures from a distance. I didn’t want to violate the Goldwater Rule by saying, “Oh, this is fiction” and then depicting Trump exactly. I wanted, instead, to play with the question of what psychiatrists would do if they could really get close to a Trump figure.

Stossel: The reader’s mind inevitably goes to Trump because the Great Man behaves in very Trumplike ways and has a very Trumplike biography.

Kramer: My model was the dictator fiction that’s common in Latin America. In The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez takes a particular dictator, Gustavo Pinilla of Colombia, and adds elements of General Franco of Spain and Juan Vicente Gómez of Venezuela, and creates this outrageous version of a dictator. Márquez has him basically governing the country from the grave. So that gave me, I thought, license to create a comic character who was outrageous in certain ways. Whether he’s more outrageous than Trump, I can’t say. But he’s outrageous in his own way, and specifically Trumplike in five or six other ways.

Stossel: Let’s talk about the Goldwater Rule. Don’t mental-health professionals have a “duty to warn” when somebody poses a danger to themselves or others? And what if that danger posed is not to an individual but to the entire American population, which is clearly how some of the experts in the Lee book see Trump?

Kramer: The real function of the Goldwater Rule is to protect psychiatry from itself—from all these doctors expressing their political views through making diagnoses without a careful respect for the clinical facts. I remember an era when—this is way back—people would say, “Well, if your patient has not expressed anxiety about the atom bomb, the patient is in denial.” And I thought, My patients will express whatever they express, and the introduction of uniform political views into psychiatry is a disaster. I’ve had patients who were very much on the front lines of the anti-abortion movement, and I am very much on the other side. But you are out to treat the patient who’s in front of you—you’re not out to impose your views or ask them to see things differently than they do.

You just need to deal with patients as you find them—even with patients who are racist and prejudiced and anti-Semitic or whatever. To create some kind of internal rule in psychotherapy that integrates political views is a disaster.

Stossel: Let’s say you have a patient referred to you with depression, and he quickly evinces extreme racist and misogynistic views, and election denialism. What would that encounter in the consulting room look like?

Kramer: This is very much one of the topics of the book. One of the worries regarding Henry Farber is that he will go and treat the Great Man, and that will just give the Great Man some ease, and make him better able to do the terrible things he does. Farber has great faith in his therapeutic method, so the setup is this: He’s known—as I am—for writing a book early in his career that was a best seller, and he’s also known as a sleep doctor. Later in life he’s specialized in the treatment of paranoid men. And he’s brought in to treat the Great Man’s insomnia, but secretly there’s some hope on the part of the people who bring him in that he will treat the personality problems as well. And I think Farber is comfortable with what seems like a corrupt assignment, because he just believes in his therapeutic method, which is that if he sits empathetically beside his patient—metaphorically speaking—and looks out at the world as his patient does, and gets the patient to feel what he feels and be aware of his feelings, good things will happen, that there will be some general liberation, and that will be useful both for his sleep problems and his disordered personality. But he’s not trying to nudge the person in any direction; he’s trying to get the person to free himself of whatever it is that constrains his feeling and thinking.

Farber’s extreme commitment to this approach is comic. When the Great Man throws him into a jail cell at one point, Farber thinks, How can I utilize this thing that my patient has done? The patient will indirectly notice how I behave in the jail cell, and maybe I can do that in a way that’s therapeutic; I’ll prepare for our next encounter by reviewing similar cases. I don’t know that I am self-abnegating in that way. But I do retain an idealistic faith in the therapeutic method that if you put people in touch with themselves—that’s your job, and your job isn’t to guide the direction of progress.

Stossel: Let’s say, as implausible as this is, Ivanka calls you up and says, “My father is suffering from grave depression after his brush with COVID mortality”—would you do as Farber does and take Trump on as a patient?

Kramer: I would take the case in a minute. I think Farber cross-examines this stuff: Is he taking the case because this will demonstrate that he’s a virtuoso of empathy, or out of his own self-aggrandizement because this is such a challenging case? I do think I would be tempted by the level of effort that would be required. I like taking on cases that I thought were difficult for me because they were unlikable patients. (Anyone who’s my patient: That wasn’t you!) I do think the book is my attempt to imagine what the level of effort would be like. Farber keeps looking for the element of full humanity in his patient. When he perceives this little spark of it, he’s so encouraged by it; he thinks there’s something here he can work with. I think that would be a challenge with someone like Trump: sort of waiting him out until you see that little hint of something that’s not propaganda and self-praise but something that has a little texture and dimensionality to it. I mean, I was really trying to imagine what that would look like for Trump.

Stossel: And what would that look like?

Kramer: I think it could be exposure of vulnerability. Could just be genuine emotion. There are easy emotions like anger, which is sort of the lowest-level emotion; patients who can’t access much else can often access rage. But there are other moments where I imagine under all the grievance there could be some genuine pain or sadness, and you’re curious about that.

Stossel: Imagine Trump meeting with a child psychiatrist when he was a younger person. Do you think this would help him process whatever the trauma of growing up with his father was?

Kramer: I think it’s at least possible to think that this grudge against the world, the constant sense of having been wronged, could have been diminished. That’s what psychiatry that examines early-childhood injuries is out to do—free people from being in the thrall of their resentment for the rest of their lives.

Stossel: Allen Frances, the psychiatrist who presided over the composition of the DSM-4, has written that Trump’s presidency and aberrant behavior are more symptoms of culture that’s gone mad than of any psychiatric illness. And Jeffrey Lieberman, a psychiatrist at Columbia, has written that Trump doesn’t have any DSM illness—he’s just “a jerk.” Do you think there are links between various personality types and certain political ideologies or behaviors?

Kramer: I know Jeff and Allen a little bit, and I don’t agree with the argument “Well, this is just evil, and diagnosis has nothing to do with it.” Diagnosis aside, I think what we saw was four years of a certain kind of personality on display. And it was almost impossible to be a political analyst without wondering about certain of his actions; there wasn’t enough logic in the behavior to explain it only in political terms. In the book, I write about “arbitocracy.” This isn’t really authoritarianism, because it’s not consistent enough, or organized well enough—not that authoritarian regimes generally are either—but this seemed to be even more arbitrary and herky-jerky. So, yes, I think personality is relevant in talking about the politics of Trump.

Stossel: I know you don’t want to diagnose Trump. But having sat, as Henry Farber, in therapy sessions with the imaginary Great Man, what would you diagnose Great Man with? If he’s gonna file an insurance claim, that requires your giving him a DSM diagnosis, right?

[Read: Trump is not well]

Kramer: Right. I’m with Farber, who says that the men in his paranoid-men’s group do not meet a strict by-the-book definition of paranoia; they’re people who have this same kind of hypervigilant posture in the world. And he says of the Great Man, “Yes, he would qualify as one of my patients.” So it’s sort of a loose paranoia for the Great Man.

Stossel: Is paranoia a DSM disorder?

Kramer: It’s a delusional disorder, which is in the DSM. And of course I diagnosed patients in my practice for the purpose of deciding which medicine to use, and for insurance claims. I think diagnosis is very helpful. But personality disorders—that is, borderline personality, sociopathy, or paranoia, the kinds of diagnoses that were debated with regard to Trump—were never something where I’ve found the particulars that useful. Patients don’t necessarily stick with one personality-disorder diagnosis—they can have one and a year later have another, or the diagnosis can even disappear, and they end up with just depression or drug abuse or something, and don’t have the personality disorder. It’s not a very stable diagnosis.

Stossel: Are personality disorders susceptible to treatment by medication? If you were treating Trump—or, if you prefer, if Farber is treating the Great Man—is there a drug regimen that could ease their distress or make them less inclined to wreak pain and havoc on everyone around them?

Kramer: Well, the experience of treating personality disorder with medication has not been terrific. There certainly was a lot of use of SSRIs in treating borderline personality disorder, with some success and a lot of failure. I think the results were similar for lithium. In Listening to Prozac, I talk a lot about rejection sensitivity, a category that isn’t written about a lot anymore. And people had this diagnosis of rejection sensitive dysphoria, which sometimes did well on antidepressants. It turned out that really what was going on was that their vulnerability to social insult was so great that they looked very erratic, and on medication they could be less erratic and less in pain.

But as a therapist looking at the relationship between Henry Farber and the Great Man, I wasn’t tempted for Farber to reach for the prescription pad. I did not want to introduce medication to the book.

Stossel: You can’t medicate a politician into making better policy.

Kramer: Yeah. I mean, I think if you got up close to one of these political figures and saw that he had ADHD, maybe a stimulant would be calming in a paradoxical way. Or if the person really is manic, maybe lithium would be helpful. You can imagine some diagnosis that can’t be made from a distance but here up close you might see something that was not as evident in these speeches and debates. Medication could possibly help with those.

The Bathos of Brady

2023-02-02T14:56:54-05:00

I’m sick of writing about Tom Brady.

You’re probably sick of reading about him. Now you know how the ancient Mesopotamians felt about Methuselah: Jeez, 969 years old—how many more hot takes do we need about when that priest is going to retire?

What we witnessed in the past year was the undead phase of Brady’s football career. The actual human version of that career ended, possibly, after his Super Bowl win with the Buccaneers, in 2021 or, more probably, with his short-lived retirement early in 2022. But Brady shambled on, liminal, cadaverous, desiccated (compare his sunken, middle-aged cheeks of 2023 with the chubby baby face of his early seasons), his demeanor on the field alternately forlorn and enraged. But as fans of The Walking Dead or The Last of Us know, the undead can be lethal.

Zombie Tom Brady, even in his final undead year, at age 45, still led the NFL in passing attempts and completions, still engineered a few astonishing fourth-quarter comebacks, and, in his playoff loss to the Cowboys, devoid of an effective running game to assist him, threw a remarkable 66 passes, for 351 yards and two touchdowns. In some ways, the undead Brady is not so physically distinguishable from the pre-undead Brady, who even as a young man staggered around outside the pocket like a mummy who had missed too many Pilates classes.

[Read: Tom Brady’s tone-deaf perfection]

He remains the greatest quarterback of all time. But what an annus horribilis the past year has been for him. Brady began 2022 by botching the rollout of his (first) retirement announcement: Word of it leaked before a Super Bowl in which he wasn’t competing, which made him appear narcissistic and graceless. Then he alienated his religiously devoted New England fans by failing to acknowledge them in his farewell letter. Then, 40 days later, he unretired, reportedly against the wishes of his family. Then he was rumored to have gotten his Tampa Bay coach, Bruce Arians, kicked upstairs to a front-office job in favor of Todd Bowles, who he thought—wrongly, as it turned out—would oversee an offense more to his liking. Then he got separated and divorced from his supermodel wife, who was manifestly unhappy with his decision to return to the field. Then he lost an estimated $93 million in crypto when the FTX exchange collapsed. Then he got sued, as part of a class-action lawsuit, for endorsing crypto in advertisements and allegedly gulling hapless ordinary investors into losing their savings. Then he endured the first and only losing season of football in his entire life, and a peremptory early playoff exit. It’s like he combined the nadirs of Bernie Madoff, Billy Joel, and Mark Sanchez into a single, ignominious year.

To follow up his trumpets-and-fanfare retirement by unretiring not even two months later seemed undignified. Sure, Michael Jordan unretired, and so did Gordie Howe, and George Foreman, and Michael Phelps, and Mario Lemieux—but all of them at least allowed a respectable amount of time to elapse before returning. And most of them came back to achieve more glory. Jordan, after his quixotic foray into Minor League Baseball, carried the Chicago Bulls deep into the NBA playoffs right away, and then to three straight NBA championships. Foreman came back and, at age 45, was crowned the oldest heavyweight boxing champion ever. Phelps came back to win five more Olympic gold medals (plus a silver). Lemieux came back after nearly four years away to lead the Pittsburgh Penguins to the NHL conference finals—and his excuse for retiring in the first place was honorable, or at least exigent: He’d had cancer. Brady allegedly retired because his wife asked him to—and then he defied her wishes by returning to the NFL. “I have my concerns,” Gisele Bündchen told Elle in September. “This is a very violent sport, and I have my children and I would like him to be more present.”

He’d had a chance to go out on top, as the commentators say, after winning the 2021 Super Bowl. Had Brady left then, it would have been Pete Sampras–style (dropping the mic after winning his 14th Grand Slam at the US Open in 2002, never to be seen again) or Ted Williams–style (bidding Hub fans adieu with the ultimate swing of his bat in 1960): a final demonstration of athletic greatness imprinted on the national retina. Instead, he faded away, still a competent quarterback but no longer an elite one, and with an aura of bathos enshrouding him. In this, Brady’s unretirement was more like Michael Jordan’s quasi-forgotten second unretirement, when he came back to play for the Washington Wizards and was … just okay, a bloated and earthbound facsimile of his former godlike self; he, like Brady in his undead phase, reeked a little of the guy who’d stayed at the party a bit too long. Or, worse, of the college alum who keeps coming back to the frat house after he’s a little too old.

[Read: The case against Tom Brady]

Why did Brady come back, when the dimming of his star was so clearly going to be the likely result, and when his family didn’t want him to play? Was the prospect of quotidian life outside the locker room that unbearable? Maybe. Many athletes struggle in retirement; after the intensity of meaning derived from professional sports—the brothers-in-arms camaraderie, the grueling effort and the sacrifice, and the commensurate potential rewards—normal life must seem awfully pallid in comparison. When you’ve played the conquering hero each week in front of a stadium full of 70,000 screaming spectators, with tens of millions more living and dying with your every move as they watch you on television, the absence of that adulation, and the diminution of the perceived stakes of your decisions and actions, must be hard to bear—as life on Elba must have been for Napoleon.

But the normal reasons for dreading retirement shouldn’t have applied in Brady’s case. Sure, postretirement gigs can be depressing. But it’s not like he’s looking to become a Walmart greeter. He’s already got a 10-year, $37.5-million-a-year job as a color commentator lined up with Fox. Some athletes go bankrupt after their pro career ends. Even if for some reason he decides to forgo his broadcasting job, that’s not likely to happen to Brady.

Brady’s status as the GOAT is secure; in the fullness of time, the slightly sad and tawdry final season will fade beneath his corona of achievements. But one of his secret weapons was his preternatural ability to know when to bail out of a play, when to get rid of the ball in order to live to fight another down. But then his instincts abandoned him. He couldn’t let go. He wanted, like Icarus, to stay aloft, to go still higher: more records to break, more wins, another Super Bowl ring. But in holding on to his career a tick too long, he lost his marriage, he lost his unbroken streak of winning seasons, and he lost—just a little of—the sheen of greatness.

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.

Breaking Down an American Catastrophe

2022-08-25T18:59:00-04:00

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Earlier this month, we published Caitlin Dickerson’s 18-month investigation into the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, the result of more than 150 interviews and a review of thousands of pages of government records, some of which were obtained after a multiyear lawsuit. At nearly 30,000 words, Caitlin’s cover story is one of the longest Atlantic articles in memory.

Today we’re sharing nine of the biggest takeaways from her story. We hope that it’s a useful resource, whether you’ve already read Caitlin’s article or are taking this as an entry point to her work.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

“The Policy Was Wrong, Period”

During the Trump administration, family separations began in secret in the summer of 2017 as part of a regional program to combat illegal crossings in the Border Patrol’s El Paso, Texas, sector. Jeff Self, the Border Patrol chief in El Paso, spearheaded the initiative following a general directive from Washington that encouraged local officials to take steps to minimize border crossings in their regions, in accordance with President Donald Trump’s campaign promises to voters.

This local separation program later expanded to New Mexico. These initiatives help to account for the more than 1,700 family separations that occurred before they were publicly acknowledged by the Trump administration in the summer of 2018, according to government records provided to the ACLU as part of a federal lawsuit over family separations.

(The Atlantic)
Records obtained by The Atlantic show that officials at DHS and its components acknowledged in writing that these unannounced early family separations would likely be viewed negatively if they were to be made public. (Carla Provost, the acting head of the Border Patrol, wrote to her boss, the head of Customs and Border Protection, that “it has not blown up in the media as of yet but of course has the potential to.”) After that acknowledgment, these agencies produced public statements suggesting that separations were not occurring when, in reality, they were.

(The Atlantic)

(The Atlantic)

(The Atlantic)
After the Zero Tolerance separation policy was made public in the summer of 2018, Trump-administration officials claimed that their goal was merely to prosecute parents who crossed the border illegally with their children, not to separate relatives from one another. But myriad documents and interviews prove that this is explicitly false. For example, Tom Homan, who first proposed the idea to separate migrant families during the Obama administration and reraised it under President Trump, acknowledged as much: “Most parents don’t want to be separated,” Homan told Dickerson. “I’d be lying to you if I didn’t think that would have an effect.” (Homan says his idea was intended to help families, not hurt them.)

Likewise, a report about the regional separation initiative in El Paso that was obtained by The Atlantic uses variations of the phrase family separation more than 10 times. Numerous other records show that the separation of families, not just the prosecution of parents, was the stated goal of the policy’s architects and many of those who pushed for it to be implemented.

(The Atlantic)
As word of a looming, nationwide family-separation program spread throughout the federal government, various officials tried to advocate against the practice by raising concerns with their supervisors. Though Dickerson was often told in her reporting that the worst outcomes of Zero Tolerance, such as the prolonged and even permanent separation of families, could not have been foreseen, internal government reports obtained by The Atlantic warned explicitly of those outcomes and recommended ways to prevent them. These warnings and recommendations were ignored.

(The Atlantic)

(The Atlantic)
Records and interviews reflect the immense pressure to implement Zero Tolerance, not only from ideologically driven “hawks” such as Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, but also from trusted, high-ranking law-enforcement officials serving in apolitical positions. Kevin McAleenan, the head of Customs and Border Protection under Trump, is among those who took up the mantle of pushing for family separations, declaring his support for the idea in an email obtained by The Atlantic. Kirstjen Nielsen, the then–Homeland Security secretary, signed a memo approving of Zero Tolerance after a heated debate with McAleenan; Nielsen and others who overheard the discussion say that he argued, among other things, that “you can’t tell Customs and Border Protection not to enforce the law; you can’t exempt parents from prosecution; the president wants this.” (McAleenan denied ever pressuring Nielsen on his own behalf. He said that he did convey directives that he was receiving from the White House and others.)

A top lawyer working for one of the congressional committees that investigated family separations told Dickerson, “To me, the person who did not get enough scrutiny or enough blame or enough attention was Kevin McAleenan.” The lawyer said, “Kevin knew everything that was going on, he pushed it, he supported it, and he was the key to implementing it.” After Zero Tolerance ended, McAleenan said publicly that he felt it was a mistake. “The policy was wrong, period, from the outset,” he told Dickerson. “It should never have been undertaken by a law-enforcement department, even while facing the stark challenges we faced at the border.”

(The Atlantic)
The implementation of Zero Tolerance was a disaster. For 48 days, catastrophes cascaded. When Border Patrol agents were instructed to begin separating families under Zero Tolerance, they received little to no information about how to conduct separations or what to communicate to parents and children. After two and a half weeks, the Border Patrol leadership finally told agents to write down which children belonged to which parents. The guidance that agents received also vilified parents who crossed the border with their children, including those seeking asylum, for having chosen “to put their children in harm’s way.”

(The Atlantic)
The separations were brutal. Neris González, a Salvadoran consular worker who witnessed many of them, recalled a sea of children and parents, screaming, reaching for one another, and fighting the Border Patrol agents who were pulling them apart. Children were clinging to whatever part of their parents they could hold on to—arms, shirts, pant legs. “Finally the agent would pull hard and take away the child,” González said. “It was horrible. These weren’t some little animals that they were wrestling over; they were human children.”
Record keeping about family separations was so lacking that when a magistrate judge in South Texas demanded that the Border Patrol there provide the court with weekly lists of separated children and their locations, threatening to hold the agency in contempt for failing to do so, agents panicked about their inability to fulfill such a basic request. “I might be spending some time in the slammer,” one supervisor wrote to a colleague, who replied, “I ain’t going to jail!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

(The Atlantic)
Within days of the start of Zero Tolerance, Matt Albence, a high-ranking deputy at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, expressed concern that if the parents’ prosecutions happened too swiftly, their children would still be waiting in Border Patrol stations to be picked up by Health and Human Services, making family reunification possible. He saw this as a bad thing. When Albence and other enforcement authorities received reports that reunifications had occurred in several Border Patrol sectors, they lamented the news in writing with comments like “we can’t have this” and “what a fiasco,” and took steps to prevent any further such reunifications from happening.

(The Atlantic)

Related:

Today’s News

The Justice Department ordered the release of a redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
New York’s highest court agreed to hear Harvey Weinstein’s appeal to overturn his 2020 sex-crimes conviction.
Vladimir Putin ordered a 10 percent increase in the number of troops in the Russian military.

Dispatches

Wait, What?: Mini-Trumps are a midterm disaster, Molly Jong-Fast writes.
Deep Shtetl: Yair Rosenberg reflects on what a Holocaust orphan’s anthem from Shanghai can teach us about overcoming calamity.

Evening Read

Icon Sportswire / Getty; The Atlantic

Sports Streaming Makes Losers of Us All

By Alex Kirshner

Few things are more satisfying for a certain type of college-football fan than a Notre Dame loss, and all the better if it’s an upset. So last September, when the Fighting Irish were in danger of losing to the University of Toledo Rockets, 16.5-point underdogs, I knew I had to watch. First I flipped over to NBC, where Notre Dame’s home games are generally aired. No luck. Even before I could Google it, my Twitter feed reminded me of the problem: I had been Peacocked.

Read the full article.

Tom Brady Is a Man Out of Time

2022-01-30T15:15:00-05:00

Somewhere, maybe in the attic of his childhood home in San Mateo, California, or perhaps in an alcove of a Florida bunker, I imagine there must be a portrait of Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr. that shows him gnarled and gray, his throwing arm wizened, the twinkle in his eye occluded by glaucoma and cataracts. Because what, other than some dark Dorian Gray sorcery, some sinister Faustian bargain, can account for the Methuselahian magic of Tom Brady’s geriatric greatness (Super Bowl MVP last year, for a gobsmacking fifth time, at age 43! Conceivably the regular-season MVP candidate again this year, for what would be the fourth time, at age 44!) as a football player? This can’t all have been avocado ice cream and his fitness guru Alex Guerrero’s “pliability” exercises, can it?

Yesterday, ESPN’s report that Brady would shortly be announcing his retirement sparked confusion and disbelief all over. Brady has been playing so long, and has been so good for so long—years past the typical expiration date for professional athletes—that it’s started to seem he might stick around forever. He had previously said he would play until he was at least 45, or until “I suck”—neither of which, quite manifestly, is true yet. He still has a year remaining on his contract with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Compounding the confusion was Brady’s own company, TB12, which posted and then deleted a tweet that seemed to acknowledge the retirement news. Then both his father, Tom Brady Sr., and the Buccaneers’ front office put out statements saying that the quarterback hadn’t made a decision yet. Finally, his agent, Don Yee, released his own, bizarre non-denial denial, the seeming implication of which was that Brady had made up his mind but, for whatever reason, wasn’t quite ready to roll out his plans yet. All this threatened to overshadow the NFL playoffs—including this afternoon’s conference championships—an outcome that Brady himself, who cares deeply about his own image and about his football brethren, surely did not intend.

But here he was, still dominating the football landscape even as he was reportedly trying to recede from it. Brady has reached a point where he exists outside of time, or on some metaphysical time scale that he alone controls and where the normal rules of aging, and beginnings and ends, do not apply.

Other athletes have become imprinted in legend because of the unlikely circus-sideshow freakishness of their attainments. Muggsy Bogues, who starred for the Charlotte Hornets in the NBA in the 1980s, was a Thumbelina-ish 5 feet 3 inches in a league where typical heights run a foot and half taller than that. William “the Refrigerator” Perry, of the 1985 NFL-champion Chicago Bears, was better known for his kitchen-appliance-size rotundity and his novelty-act cameos on offense than for his skill as a defensive lineman. Even in the category of athletic longevity there have been comparably ageless outliers: In 2007, Julio Franco suited up for the Atlanta Braves at an absurdly late-middle-age 49, and Jamie Moyer pitched for the Colorado Rockies at the same age, in 2012. Even more absurdly, in 1980, Gordie Howe played professional hockey in the NHL for the Hartford Whalers alongside his adult sons, Mark and Marty, at the age of 52. I am 52 now, and simply getting from the bed to the bathroom in the morning can feel like an Olympian feat of agility and endurance.

[Read: Tom Brady’s tone-deaf perfection]

But what has set Brady’s accomplishments (way) apart is that even as his advancing age has pushed him into circus-freak territory, his greatness has remained undiminished; in fact, his greatness and his circus-freakishness have merged. Franco appeared once on a Hall of Fame ballot and Moyer was an estimable pitcher, but by the end of their careers both were at best marginal players in a sport not nearly as physically destructive as football. Gordie Howe was one of the greatest hockey players ever, but the bulk of that greatness came well before his first retirement from the sport, in 1971; the last time he led the NHL in scoring was in 1963, at age 35. Tom Brady led the NFL in touchdowns and passing yardage this year, at age 44.

Brady’s astounding statistical accomplishments will be much trumpeted whenever an announcement officially comes, but to cite just a few here: He has appeared in twice as many Super Bowls—10—as any other quarterback, and he won seven of them—three more than any other quarterback and one more than any other team has ever won across more than 50 years of NFL history. As my colleague Derek Thompson recently noted, Brady has won more than twice as many playoff games as the next-most-winning quarterback, Joe Montana, and played in 18 more playoff games than any other player not his teammate. He holds just about every significant career passing record in pro football: regular-season passing yards, completions, and touchdowns; most regular-season wins and playoff victories.

But what’s almost as remarkable as the full body of work Brady has compiled is how much he has achieved at an unprecedentedly advanced age for a football player in the modern era. The average retirement age for an NFL player is 27. Since turning 40 (!), Brady has thrown for almost 23,000 yards and 168 touchdowns, and engineered 10 fourth-quarter comebacks and 13 game-winning drives (a very good career for most quarterbacks).

This season he was not only the oldest current player in the NFL—he was the oldest player by more than four years, an eternity in football time. At the start of this season, he was older than 13 NFL head coaches. He is older than his own offensive coordinator, Byron Leftwich. Many of the quarterbacks who faced off against Brady this year had his poster hanging on the walls of their childhood bedrooms. A growing cohort of NFL players was born after Brady embarked on his pro career, in the spring of 2000. A number of players in the league now are the sons of Brady’s former teammates, taking him into Gordie Howe territory. He has played against Devin Bush Sr. and Devin Bush Jr.; against Ed McCaffrey and his son Christian McCaffrey; against Terrence Metcalf and his son DK Metcalf. In the Super Bowl last year, one of Brady’s teammates, a rookie safety named Antoine Winfield Jr., intercepted a pass for the Buccaneers; in November 2001, that rookie’s father, Antoine Winfield Sr., a cornerback for the Buffalo Bills, intercepted one of Brady’s first passes as a starter for the New England Patriots. Antoine Jr. had then just turned 3.

[Scott Stossel: The end of Brady]

I suppose I should admit that I’ve been hanging around The Atlantic long enough that a number of my own colleagues were born after I first set foot in these precincts, back in 1992. But the position I play does not require me to get sacked by 300-pound linemen or speeding-freight-train linebackers again and again—as Brady has been 543 times. And that’s not including the thousands of times he’s been late-hit, crunched, bent, twisted, pile-driven, or battered without an official sack being registered. (It also doesn’t include the 13 people he himself has tackled, to their great ignominy.) Forget leading the NFL in passing this year—it’s a marvel that he’s still walking upright.

Brady has played so well for so long that he is an era unto himself, outlasting America’s entire 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan. John Madden, who for many years, dating back to the early 1980s, was the voice of the league, and who was the color commentator for Brady’s first Super Bowl (famously, and wrongly, advising that Brady should not attempt the drive at the end of regulation that won the game), died last month; today’s most perceptive color commentator, Tony Romo, followed Brady into the league as a quarterback and preceded him out of it. (The list of star quarterbacks who have come into the league, burned brightly, and then flamed out while Brady has remained incandescent include Romo, Eli Manning, Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, Andrew Luck, Brady’s own offensive coordinator Leftwich, and most recently Ben Roethlisberger. The list of non-star NFL quarterbacks who have come and gone during Brady’s tenure must number in the scores, if not hundreds.)

As a New Englander—okay, let’s be real, as a Masshole—I revere Brady for the championships he’s brought to the Patriots, for the glory he’s bestowed on the region. But as he’s gotten older, and as I have, my reverence for him has acquired an additional dimension: With intimations of my own mortality getting actuarily louder, Brady’s ability to somehow defy, if not reverse, the normal processes of aging, to rage (gracefully) against the dying of the light, provides the illusion that decay and death can maybe be deferred a little longer. Of course, his agelessness also makes me hate him a little, too, for the same reasons the rest of his seemingly perfect life does; I can only imagine the hatred that, say, New York Jets fans must feel for him.

[Read: The case against Tom Brady]

Brady has never been the strongest quarterback, nor the most athletic, nor, certainly, the fastest. This undoubtedly has helped his longevity; you can’t lose what you’ve never had. What he does have, in addition to great throwing accuracy, is the ability to effectively slow things down on the field, to think faster than things on the field are moving, to “make his read” and “go through his progressions,” as the analysts say, and make the best, most odds-conferring decision again and again. He also has a quick release—the ability to get rid of the ball in a hurry—one that’s amazingly gotten faster as he’s gotten older, a remarkable but necessary feat of self-preservation. Again and again, as the hourglass has run out on games, he has excelled; his ability to manage the clock is unsurpassed. Perhaps this ability has extended beyond the field of play.

Interestingly, as the news of an imminent retirement announcement was reported by ESPN yesterday afternoon, Brady seemed to have lost control of the narrative. This rarely happens. He is always scripting unlikely endings (he led 42 fourth-quarter comebacks, nine of them in the playoffs)—and sometimes impossibly unlikely endings, most famously coming back from 28–3 in the second half of Super Bowl LI to beat the Atlanta Falcons. Last weekend, in the NFC divisional playoff round against the Los Angeles Rams, he was down, 27–3, even further into the game than he had been against the Falcons. Once again, he clawed his team back into the game. His greatness was visibly pressing on the Rams’ collective psyche as they blundered again and again, visions of that Super Bowl comeback, and many others, dancing in their head. Astonishingly, he managed to draw the Buccaneers even with 42 seconds left.

But in that instance, events got away from him: Matthew Stafford drove the Rams down the field for a last-second field goal. And then yesterday, the ESPN report seemed to catch Brady and his inner circle by surprise. Maybe he’s not retiring (I’ve gotten this wrong before). Maybe his command of the clock and the narrative remains as firm as ever, and he will play out his contract and lead the Bucs to the Super Bowl again next year.

Whatever the plan turns out to be, I suspect No. 12 is keeping his head about him, even if the original play call has broken down. Because one of the lessons of his career has been that if you can stay in the moment, you can slow time down and make it submit to you—and that even when things appear dark and helpless (28–3, for God’s sake), if you just keep forging ahead and doing your best, things may yet turn out far better than appears possible. There are worse models for our time.

The End of Brady

2020-01-08T07:00:00-05:00

Decline comes for us all. Rome fell. The British empire receded. The Romanovs, the Habsburgs—gone. And on a fog-enshrouded night last weekend in Foxborough, Massachusetts, the most impressive and enduring sports dynasty of the 21st century sputtered to its inevitable end, as the Patriots lost to the Tennessee Titans, 20–13, in a first-round playoff game.

If this was Tom Brady’s last game as a Patriot—he is 42 years old and a free agent—or indeed his last as a professional quarterback, “Hub Kid Bids Fans Adieu” it was not. In 1960, in his final at-bat at Fenway Park, famously memorialized by John Updike in The New Yorker, Ted Williams hit a home run, an apt capstone to a legendary career. With his final pass in what may be his final game at Gillette Stadium, Brady threw a hapless pick-six—an interception that was run back for a touchdown—an ignominious and undignified end that seemed almost contrary to nature.

Since 2001, with the age-defying Brady at quarterback and the hooded and glowering Bill Belichick as coach, Patriot dominance had come to seem almost like a law of physics—an immutable constant. Nine Super Bowl appearances and six Super Bowl championships spread across 17 years. Sixteen AFC East Championships—including the past 11 in a row. A perfect 16–0 regular season in 2007. Brady himself has won more games than any other quarterback in pro-football history; he has never had a losing season. He was the league MVP three times, and the Super Bowl MVP four times. He has more playoff touchdowns, completions, passing yards, and Super Bowl appearances than any other player in history. What makes the sustained stretch of shock and awe that Brady and Belichick imposed on the rest of the league all the more impressive is that it was achieved during a proverbial era of parity for professional football, when the rules have pushed toward an egalitarianism of outcome. (For a plutocratic bunch, those NFL owners run a pretty socialistic operation.)

[Read: The case against Tom Brady]

But what Brady and Belichick accomplished went beyond statistics: They taught Patriots fans and Patriots haters alike to believe in magic. No matter how dire things looked, when Belichick and Brady were involved there was always—always—a chance. Across his career, Brady engineered 42 fourth-quarter comebacks—nine of them in the playoffs (the same number, I note, as Joe Montana and John Elway combined). He’s like Thor, or Superman, or Greta Thunberg—when everything looks lost, he arrives to save the day.

Fourteen-point underdogs against the St. Louis Rams (“the Greatest Show on Turf”) in Super Bowl XXXVI, in Brady’s first year as quarterback, in 2002? No problem. Down 10 points to the Seattle Seahawks in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XLIX, in 2015? No problem. Down 28–3 at halftime against the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI, in 2017? No problem.

After two decades of this, we’d become accustomed to Brady’s Lazarus act, his ability to bring the Patriots back from the dead again and again. Part of the joy of rooting for the Patriots over the past decade was watching them defy premature obituaries. “Let’s face it, they’re not good anymore,” the ESPN analyst Trent Dilfer famously declaimed after the Patriots got creamed by the Kansas City Chiefs early in the 2014 season; the Patriots went on to win the Super Bowl that year. “Tom Brady is going to be a bum,” Max Kellerman, another ESPN analyst, said before the 2016 season, predicting that his career was about to take a dive; Brady won Super Bowls in two of the next three years.

The run of Patriot dominance is so long that if you watch TV clips from games in Brady’s first season, they’re from a different era of technological history: The resolution isn’t as crisp; the replays are grainy. A lot of the iconic commentators from then are now long retired (John Madden) if not dead (Pat Summerall). When Brady started his first game, Friends was the most popular show on television, and ER was still the third-most-popular. The nation was still reeling from 9/11. The second NFL game Tom Brady ever started, on October 7, 2001, coincided with the launch of air strikes on Afghanistan, just half an hour before kickoff. Some Americans who will be casting their first presidential ballots next fall had not yet been born.

Over time, Patriots fans grew to worship—the word is not too strong—Tom Brady. Non-Patriot fans grew to fear and despise him. But everyone, fan and foe, benefited from the Patriot greatness he and Belichick produced. Because who wants a mediocre nemesis, an Evil Empire that is not fearsomely invincible? Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine would hardly quicken the pulse in the same way if they had the career win-loss record of, say, the Jacksonville Jaguars. Horror movies would lose their punch if the monster didn’t keep coming back, again and again, sometimes even after a stake seems to have been driven through its heart. Which is why on Saturday night, long after the game was over, Twitter was littered with comments from Tom Brady haters about how they were still worried the Patriots were somehow going to come back to win the game.

Though it’s hard to remember this now—because Patriot greatness has spanned a full generation—a time did exist when Tom Brady was not widely reviled outside New England, but rather was the plucky underdog, the little backup quarterback who could. Whose coach didn’t trust him to throw the ball and was limited to managing a careful, ball-control offense. Who was a 14-point underdog in that first Super Bowl, in 2002. Boston had not yet entered its latest period of overweening sports dominance: The Red Sox were still mired in eight decades of flamboyant futility; the Celtics hadn’t won a championship since the ’80s; the Bruins hadn’t won one since the ’70s. Brady himself was not yet the actress-impregnating, supermodel-marrying, business-empire-promoting, multimillionaire magazine-cover icon he would become. In fact, he lived, rather charmingly, with his sister, in a working-class city south of Boston.

Were it not for a fluke (and nearly lethal) hit by New York Jet defensive back Mo Lewis on Drew Bledsoe in a routine early-season game in 2001, one wonders if Brady would have ever transcended the permanent backup status for which, by draft number (he was picked in the sixth round) and general appearance (have you seen his shirtless photo from the 2000 NFL combine? Or the video of his 40-meter-dash there?), he seemed destined. Maybe his innate talent and drive would have propelled him to greatness in any case, but it’s interesting to contemplate a counterfactual history where he remained mired in relative anonymity—or where, who knows, he goes on to end up in the baseball Hall of Fame. (In the late 1990s, the Montreal Expos had drafted him as a catcher, projecting him as an all-star.)

In truth, the Patriots may have been decaying, as empires do, into late-stage decadence for a while: Spygate, Deflategate, Aaron Hernandez’s murder trial and suicide, owner Bob Kraft’s charges in Florida, the misbegotten Antonio Brown experiment, the organization’s friendly relationship with Donald Trump. Critics say this revealed the Dorian Gray–style inner rot that made the Patriots easier to hate.

[Read: The white flight from football]

For Patriots fans, the astonishing run of Brady-Belichick dominance was a gift we had done nothing to earn, like white privilege or Lutheran grace, but from which we benefited nonetheless. The association with excellence—more than that, with greatness, with insurmountable and immortal achievements, with the aura of invincibility—felt good. It conferred on Patriot Nation a borrowed transcendence of normal human mediocrity (we have the greatest coach ever, the greatest quarterback ever, the greatest team ever), without our even having to leave the couch. In some tiny symbolic way, it obscured the horrible finality of death. We will die, but what the Patriots accomplished from 2001 to 2019 will live forever. Or so we like to pretend.

And now that the run is over, what we’re experiencing feels something like grief. Or maybe, less nobly, like withdrawal: We’d become addicted to winning, and as happens with addiction, no amount of winning would ever satisfy. Six Super Bowls should have been enough—fans in many cities would be happy with just one—but we craved more, needed more.

The pain of losing causes me to reflect on the oddness of feeling any emotion at all in vicarious reaction to a bunch of people I’ve never met putting an oblong object across a chalked-out line on a field more times than a bunch of other people I’ve never met wearing a different-color uniform. Why do we even care? Sports fandom is spilt nationalism, arbitrarily channeled tribalism, productively sublimated war impulse—which is why these games evoke such strong feelings, and why the culture lavishes so much money on them, and why they may be, ultimately, a social good. But what the wonderworking of Brady and Belichick engendered in Patriots fans was a kind of civic religion in which faith was rewarded far more than the odds, or the nature of the NFL, should have allowed—a faith both stronger and more benign than many other kinds these days. Now that faith is shaken. The grace of Brady is not everlasting: The Patriots will be lucky to go 9–7 next year. It feels sad.

No one, I know, will shed a tear for grieving Patriots fans. (If there’s an emotion non-Patriots fans are feeling, it’s schadenfreude, deeply savored for being so long deferred.) But the end of the dynasty is everyone’s loss: We shall not see its like again.

Trump Versus the Judiciary

2019-01-13T21:18:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.

There is a notion of the U.S. judiciary as apolitical, as composed of—in the formulation of the current Supreme Court chief justice—impartial umpires calling balls and strikes. This is a useful, even necessary, fiction that previous presidents have seen fit to promote, even when they weren’t happy about it, in the service of preserving an independent judiciary and a functioning system of constitutional checks and balances.

Not long ago, jurists and legal scholars were scandalized when Barack Obama used his 2010 State of the Union address to reproach the Supreme Court for its decision in Citizens United, which opened the spigots of campaign finance. Not since FDR in 1937, some said, had a president so egregiously transgressed against the independence of the judiciary! But Obama’s admonishment was sufficiently mild—he didn’t accuse the justices of making an overtly political decision, or of acting in bad faith—that the only reaction from the Court itself was a slight shaking of the head and a furrowing of the brow by Samuel Alito, a display that was itself criticized as unbecomingly political for a Supreme Court justice. Chief Justice John Roberts remained silent.

How genteel that all now seems—because the current president has been unrestrained in his criticism of judges and court decisions with whom he disagrees. And he disagrees with them a lot, as they have repeatedly rebuked him on everything from his policy of separating families at the southern border to his Muslim travel ban to his crackdown on “sanctuary cities” to his ban on transgender people in the military. (Actually, Trump has been seeking to undermine court decisions since even before he took office, such as when he implied, in 2016, that the rulings of U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, presiding over a class-action lawsuit against Trump University, were illegitimate because he is “Mexican.” Curiel was born in Indiana.)

Late last year, Trump escalated the executive branch’s clash with the judiciary to levels not often seen since the age of Marbury v. Madison, at the turn of the 19th century. In November, the administration announced a new policy requiring that migrants apply for asylum only at legal border crossings; currently, people can enter the country illegally and then seek asylum. Judge Jon Tigar, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, issued a temporary restraining order, blocking the new policy from going into effect. (The president “may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden,” Tigar declared.) Talking to reporters before climbing aboard Marine One a few days before Thanksgiving, the president criticized Tigar, calling him “an Obama judge” (he was appointed by Obama in 2012), and the Ninth Circuit Court—where Northern District cases are appealed—“a disgrace.”

“Every case gets filed in the Ninth Circuit because they know that’s not law,” the president said, mangling his logic in his dudgeon. “That’s not what this country stands for. Every case that gets filed in the Ninth Circuit, we get beaten ... People should not be allowed to immediately run to this very friendly circuit and file their case.” But, the president said, “we will win [the asylum case] in the Supreme Court of the United States.”

This was too much for the normally reticent John Roberts to abide.

In an unprecedented reproach by a sitting chief justice of a sitting president, Roberts issued a statement to the Associated Press: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. The independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Trump replied via, of course, Twitter. “Sorry Chief Justice Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.” Trump went on to deny that the Ninth Circuit represented “an ‘independent judiciary.’”

Trump is right, of course, that there are “Obama judges.” Roberts himself, like Alito, is a “Bush judge”—and the justices who elevated George W. Bush to the presidency were “Reagan judges” and “Nixon judges.” Roberts knows this. But what surely alarms him is that Trump’s politicization of the judiciary—like his politicization of the FBI and the CIA and the Justice Department and various other independent American institutions—threatens its legitimacy. (In places where the judiciary loses its independence—Hungary and Poland being two recent examples—constitutional democracy can quickly weaken and die.) In the aftermath of Brett Kavanaugh’s ascension to the highest bench—the result of a bitter, brutal confirmation process that put its own stresses on the legitimacy of the Court—Chief Justice Roberts is at pains to reaffirm the judiciary’s independence. That he felt compelled to take the unprecedented step of publicly correcting the president suggests that he believes Trump’s behavior threatens not just the authority of the Supreme Court but the viability of our political system.

Winning Ruined Boston Sports Fandom

2018-10-23T17:10:41-04:00

Before the fall of 2004, wearing a Boston Red Sox hat outside of New England elicited the sort of sympathy or solicitude more commonly extended to a lost child or a wounded fawn. Red Sox fans were objects of pity. To the extent we attracted admiration, it was for our dedication to suffering.

Wearing a Red Sox hat outside of New England today elicits looks of resentment or hostility, as if for a John Hughes villain or a hedge-fund plutocrat. Red Sox fans are objects of contumely. To the extent we attract admiration, it’s for … Well, we don’t attract admiration anymore, actually—only envy, at best.

But I’m not like that, I want to say. I still carry decades of epic futility and loss with me! I’m an avatar of humility on behalf of Boston’s sports teams and its tragic Puritan character! For Red Sox fans above a certain age, years of humbling defeat—crushing, gutting, ripped-from-the-jaws-of-victory defeat, mostly at the hand of the Evil Empire, the Yankees—is seared into our souls: 1978 (the Boston Massacre; Bucky F—ing Dent) and 1986 (Bob Stanley’s wild pitches; the bum-kneed arch of Bill Buckner’s legs) and 2003 (Why is Pedro still in the game?; Aaron F—ing Boone)—all the accumulated weight of 86 years of championship famine brought on by the Curse of the Bambino, incurred when the ill-starred Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000 in 1919.

Nobody’s buying it. Such is the absurd bounty of championships, division titles, and playoff appearances the city has accrued that Boston can no longer credibly claim to be the Little Sports Metropolis That Couldn’t. Boston’s baseball, football, basketball, and hockey franchises have each made multiple trips to the finals in the 21st century, and they have each come home with at least one championship. The Patriots alone have five, and are likely to contend again this year, despite having a quarterback who is 113 years old and has bones made out of quinoa and overripe avocado.

[Read: How the Yankees became baseball’s most improbable underdogs]

Red Sox aside, that success isn’t just recent. A few years ago, crunching some numbers for his Upshot column in The New York Times, David Leonhardt calculated that Boston has been the most successful sports city in America over the past half century, as measured by the percentage of possible championships its teams has won. (Pittsburgh and Los Angeles are second and third, respectively.) Measured across the full sweep of modern sports history, Boston is second in total number of championships won, behind only New York; Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia all trail, by a lot. For its part, Wallet Hub, a credit-reporting site, recently produced a ranking of 420 American sports cities using a range of metrics (wins and losses for the major teams, along with revenue from ticket and merchandise sales, among other measures). Boston finished first, beating out New York and, once again, L.A., Pittsburgh, Chicago, and 415 other cities.

So what explains Boston sports fans’ persistence in seeing themselves, with ever-declining plausibility, as plucky underdogs or lovable losers? Living in the political shadow of Washington; the celluloid shadow of L.A.; the historical shadow of Philadelphia; and the cultural, financial, and pretty much every other kind of shadow of New York, Bostonians carry a chip on their shoulder about their city’s slightly inferior relative standing among America’s major cities. That those other cities are mostly arriviste newcomers when compared to Boston only compounds the insecurity.

Second, the city’s teams and their fans have repeatedly turned to sports for a sense of redemption. At its most venal, that impulse has been addressed to self-inflicted wounds, as when the Patriots converted the depredations of repeated cheating scandals—the team was accused of spying in 2007 and of deflating balls in 2015—into concentrated rage that propelled them to Super Bowls. But Boston fans have also found solace in sports at genuinely trying moments. After 9/11, what outcome could be more triumphantly American than for the Super Bowl to be won, a few months later, by a team of Patriots? After the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013, the Red Sox put the city—“our f—cking city,” as David Ortiz memorably put it—on their backs, and carried it to the World Series.

[Read: The Red Sox need a World Series win]

Third, and most potently, the Red Sox’s 86-years-long exploration of futility and failure still occupies outsize space in the heads of older New Englanders. (As Leonhardt put it in his report on Boston sports greatness, “If you’re a Boston sports fan over the age of 30, it may be emotionally difficult for you to think of your teams as successful.”) For years, the baseball team’s remarkable and creative string of failures was a binding agent for the whole of the region. Loss is annealing; the team’s chronic, tragic missteps provided a kind of lingua franca of shared suffering. I remember in the 1980s when Stephen King, the bard of northern New England and the doyen of horror writing, was asked what the scariest thing he could imagine was: It’s the bottom of the ninth, with two outs. The Red Sox are one out away from finally winning their first World Series since 1918. And the denizens of Fenway Park look up to see nuclear missiles streaking across the sky. (That I can now find no evidence of King’s ever saying this may mean he said it in the years before everything was captured for eternity by the internet—or it may mean that the Red Sox–addled nuclear anxieties of my own mind somehow formulated this as a bit of apocrypha that now feels like a real memory. In any case, he certainly should have said this.)

But this emotional reality no longer comports with statistical fact, and it hasn’t for nearly 15 years now. Besides, who would trade the piling up of championships for years of defeat?

Well, I might. In August of 2005, as the then-defending world champion Red Sox trudged through the dog days of summer on their way to a Wild Card berth and first-round loss to the Chicago White Sox, I wrote in an essay for The Boston Globe that something had been lost when the Red Sox traded in their years of accursed failure for a championship. To this day, nothing I’ve ever written has attracted so much invective—a testament to the snarling intensity of Boston fandom, or perhaps just to the depth of my obtuseness.

“Before 2004,” I wrote then, “the basic Red Sox mode was that of tragedy,” and then I quoted an essay from the Catholic journal Commonweal. “The Sox remind us that life is a trial; that it raises hopes to crush them cruelly; that it ends badly … A Red Sox fan is an Irishman, an Armenian, reciting ancient hurts by ancient enemies … By now Red Sox suffering surpasses an individual human life span. It is a cathedral of loss and pain. It is holy.” But, I asked, “if this suffering no longer surpasses a human life span—if it is no longer suffering—is it any longer holy?” And I wondered further whether, now that we’d finally won a World Series—and then if we started to accumulate more victories (as we since have)—the force of our yearning would be diminished. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” as Robert Browning wrote, “Or what’s a heaven for?”

I don’t know whether the force of our yearning has diminished—Boston fans remain ravenous for more championships—but its quality has. We’ve exchanged the weight of history for the swagger of dominance; humble, sacred hope has given way to a spoiled, profane gluttony.

When the Boston Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, my grandfather was 84; that’s how many years he’d been waiting for them to win a championship. My daughter, on the other hand, was 13 months old. Now, at age 15, she’s hoping for the fourth World Series championship of her lifetime, which would be one every 3.75 years—a far cry from my grandfather’s one every 84—and which would be her tenth Boston championship. Talk about spoiled.

But what are we to do? A return to epic-scale futility would take decades of almost-winning-but-ultimately-losing; it can’t be achieved in the years that I, at age 49, have left. So I yield to gluttony and unleash my inner Masshole. I hope this year’s Red Sox team, which is ridiculously likable, crushes the hateful Dodgers. If we can’t have the grace of epic losing, then bring on mere greatness.

Race and the American Idea

2015-10-15T13:47:44-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

Some colleagues and I have just finished compiling a massive (290,000 words, which is probably about 750 book pages—and is 2,000 (!) iBook pages) e-book anthology called Race and the American Idea: 155 years of writing from The Atlantic. That's a big book—and a good deal, at $9.99 on Amazon—but we actually left out far more than we included. If we'd included all the pieces we considered the collection could easily have have reached a million words.

Working on this project brought home something I already sort of knew, but with renewed force, which is how central the problem of race has been to American history across hundreds of years. As I wrote it in the introduction, America's “greatest and most enduring challenge” has been:

What Atlantic authors have, over the decades, variously called “the problem of the color line” (W. E. B. Du Bois, 1900), “The Heart of the Race Problem” (Quincy Ewing, 1909), and, in an editorial by John Quincy Adams’s grandson calling for an end to “The Reign of King Cotton,” “what is coarsely, but expressively, described in the political slang of this country as ‘The Everlasting Nigger-Question’” (Charles Francis Adams Jr., 1861).

The history of America contains many jangling dissonances. On the one hand the “Shining City Upon a Hill”; on the other the rapacious conquest of the frontier. On the one hand the progressive expansion of liberty and democracy; on the other the persistent subordination of certain groups to second-class citizenship or worse. On the one hand the economic and political benefits of capitalism; on the other its sometimes brutal costs and inequities. But no dissonance is more emblematic of the nation’s struggle to realize itself than the one between the noble rhetoric and liberty-touting ideals of our founding documents and the reality of life for its African American citizens—each of whom, at the country’s inception, was officially not a full citizen but only three-fifths of one. This dissonance gives rise to the chasm between, say, Abraham Lincoln declaring America, in a message to Congress on December 1, 1862, a month before signing the Emancipation Proclamation, to be “the last best hope of earth” and Malcolm X telling an audience hosted by a chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality just over a century later, “We don’t see any American dream. We’ve experienced only the American nightmare.”

In America’s reckoning with race is the story of the country’s quest to overcome its “past and live up to its founding principles, the struggle to leave behind brutal oppression and systematic racial discrimination to become a version of itself that exemplifies the ideals it venerates. The Atlantic’s writers recognized this early on. As Edmund Quincy wrote in the second issue, in a fiery essay arguing for the urgency of abolition, “The ideal of a true republic, of a government of laws made and executed by the people, of which bards have sung and prophets dreamed, and for which martyrs have suffered and heroes died, may yet be possible to us, and the great experiment of this Western World be indeed a Model, instead of a Warning to the nations.”

To be a model instead of a warning. That struggle has persisted past slavery and Reconstruction, through Jim Crow and housing discrimination and segregation, through the civil-rights movement and black nationalism and on into the modern age of mass incarceration. The essays and articles in this volume convey the outlines, and some of the particulars, of that struggle, and show how The Atlantic, across many generations, has tried to help readers make sense of it, and to help chart a route away from a warning and toward a model.

The collection runs from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass through W.E.B Du Bois and Booker T. Washington to Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates. If you're interested in the history of the country, and its struggle to live up to the ideals it established for itself at the moment of its founding, I hope you'll consider browsing through this book.

The NFL Is Evil—and Unstoppable

2015-06-22T20:25:08-04:00

Even if you’re not a football fan, the litany of unpleasantness emanating from the National Football League in recent months has been hard to avoid, because it keeps spilling out of the sports coverage to lead the nightly news: cheating, taxpayer fleecing, bounty hunting, domestic abuse, brain damage, suicide, even murder (and murder-suicide).

For his clumsy handling of much of the aforementioned, Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, has been called, among many other things: “pathetic,” a “liar,” a “power mad autocrat,” a new “Torquemada,” a “buffoon,” a “puppet,” and a “shit-eating moron.”

But Goodell is also very rich (current annual compensation: $44 million), because he presides over a colossus of TV ratings and revenue generation that has secured him the goodwill of the NFL’s owners, at whose discretion he serves. The league is reporting historic levels of viewership. In the fall of 2014, NFL football games constituted all 20 of the most-watched television programs—and a remarkable 45 of the top 50. (The only interlopers were Game Seven of the World Series, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, two episodes of NCIS, and a lone 60 Minutes broadcast.) The 2015 Super Bowl, between the football-deflating Patriots and the performance-enhancing-drug-gobbling Seahawks, attracted the largest U.S. TV audience ever. The league is projected to earn $12 billion in TV and other revenue this year.

The NFL is greedy and violent and may be damaging the brains of a new generation of players—yet we evidently can’t stop watching the show it puts on for us.

Bill Maher on Masturbation and National Security

2014-01-24T07:00:00-05:00

Phil McCarten/Reuters

As his HBO show Real Time begins its twelfth season with higher ratings than ever—4.1 million viewers, high for a premium-cable talk show—the iconoclastic comedian and political commentator Bill Maher spoke to The Atlantic about why he likes doing comedy shows in red states, how his show is different from Jon Stewart's, why the God of the Old Testament is "the most psychopathic character in fiction," and why he believes most opposition to President Obama is racist.

Let me start by asking the question you're probably most sick of answering, so we can get it out of the way. The infamous episode of your ABC show Politically Incorrect, on September 17, 2001—

The tragic events of 9/17?

Yes, The tragic events of 9/17. [Ed. note: Maher said, in response to President George W. Bush's comment that the 9/11 hijackers were cowards, "We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly." Advertisers withdrew and the show was cancelled a few months later.] You've said the aftermath of that was the most traumatic period of your life. So I'm curious, what has it been like moving over to HBO, where there are no advertisers? And, second, why does everyone forget that when you made your remarks, you were just agreeing with a guest, Dinesh D'Souza?

Yeah, I had Dinesh on our show last season, and brought that up to him. You know, I was just agreeing with what he said. I was concurring, as a good host does, you know? And maybe extrapolating a little. But yeah, I could have used a little cover from Mr. D'Souza.

Are you tired of talking about the events of 9/17?

No!

It's now been 13 years. Do you feel like HBO has your back in a way that ABC did not?

Absolutely. They always have. And, of course, let's be honest, it's easier for them to have my back because they don't have to deal with advertisers. You know, I was never mad at ABC for firing me. I totally understood that I was on a broadcast medium that depends on advertisers, and if the advertisers pull out there's really not much you can do. I was only pissed at them because they lied about it. They said we lost our audience and we never did! We always had good ratings, and we retained good ratings, and very high retention ratings from Nightline. It took a long time for Jimmy Kimmel to come up to the ratings that we used to get in that timeslot. So, that was the only thing that pissed me off about it.

You're a comedian. But Real Time is somewhere between a pure comedy show and, say, Morning Joe. When you sit down to write your show, are you thinking that your job is to generate laughs, or are you trying to convey a perspective on the news? It's been observed that many young people now get their news from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Who's your intended audience, and what are you trying to communicate to them?

Part of it is what you just attributed to those other two shows. You said people get their news from those two shows, but I'm guessing at least as many people watch my show. So, I think I'm trying to do the same thing. Give people news. The main thing I'm thinking of, because we are after all a weekly wrap-up show, is I'm doing this show for people who are interested in the news, but don't have time to follow it like I do. They have lives. They have kids. They have jobs. They can't read the paper every day. So, Friday night at 10 o'clock when they sit down in front of the television set, I want them to be able to feel as they watch it—an hour of Real Time—in one section of the show, either the monologue, in the New Rules, in the panel, in one of the one-on-one interviews—I want them to feel like every important issue, or at least what I feel is important, that happened that week got in some way mentioned. And then, of course, I do want to make it as entertaining as possible. And we have enough prewritten stuff that I know there's always going to be laughs throughout the show. And the panel is lively too, but the panel, you know I have no control over what three other people say, or how amusing they're going to be.

How do you view Stewart and Colbert? Do you see what you're doing as kind of comparable to what they're doing? Or are you doing something different?

I'm more comparable to them than to, say, Dancing With the Stars. But I see vast differences. I don't think we're as predictable. I will disagree with my liberal audience. I will challenge them. Sometimes I'll even yell at them. I'm real about it. I treat the audience like real friends, and sometimes we argue. And sometimes they need to be educated about something. Sometimes liberals can be in a bubble too. And, you know, there's just a host of issues that I think our show and the old show has been out front on, that are more and more becoming mainstream. Things like atheism and marijuana legalization—but not just those—that I've been talking about for years; somehow things get into the mainstream after somebody has been pounding away on it for a long time. And then they just seem normal.

You famously gave a million dollars of your own money to the pro-Obama super PAC. From the perspective of where we are now, do you feel that was money well spent?

If you look at what the alternative universe would be under a Mitt Romney presidency, I think it's money very well spent. There's not an issue I can think of where Mitt Romney would be better. And I can only imagine what sort of cavalcade of nutcases would have followed him into Washington. Because he basically promised his soul to those hard-right groups that control the party now. And Mitt Romney never has had much of a backbone. So I'm very happy with that, because I did some research on it and it seemed to make a difference. At least that's what the people who run the PACs—like Paul Begala—have told me. Until we had that little bit of publicity, the big-money people on the left were kind of sitting on their hands. I got scared at that point, because I remember talking to a lot of liberal people who were saying Obama's reelection is in the bag. And I said, you know you don't get outside of your circle of people. Out there in America, it's not in the bag! Not in the bag at all.

How would you characterize yourself politically?

I think everybody thinks they make sense. I don't see issues ideologically. I see what makes sense. You know, I've tried to identify this new category called "the 9/11 liberal," because after 9/11 there was a category that sprung up called "9/11 conservatives." These were people like Dennis Miller, who became very, very conservative. Ron Silver was another one. We were all freaked out by 9/11, as we should be. It was a horrendous attack. But I think at a certain point, the liberals turned a blind eye to the singular threat that is radical Islam. This is something I've had a lot of problems with my liberal audience over, and we talk about it quite frequently on the show. That's a good example of something where I just think it makes common sense, and if you don't understand that there are disturbing percentages, often majorities of people across the Muslim world, who believe in things that are anything but liberal. You know, rule of law isn't just different than theocracy. It's better. Free speech, respect for minorities, and equality of women. Separation of church and state, freedom to practice any religion you want, or none, without the threat of violence. All of these issues, if anyone in their own country stood up against, the liberals would be incensed about. But somehow because they see Muslims as a minority, they want to defend them for the very things that are illiberal. I hold a number of positions that I think would be seen as conservative—but, again, I don't see them as liberal or conservative. I see them as "that's what I think makes sense."

Speaking of Dennis Miller, what happened to him? Did 9/11 break him?

First of all, I've never been a close friend of Dennis's. We've been colleagues for many years. Dennis is a very private guy, but we certainly were friendly. We shared the same manager for 30 years. And I'm a fan of Dennis as a comedian. I think he's a terrific kind of comedian. He really knows how to practice the art of standup comedy. That being said, yeah, he became a lot more conservative. I understood the national-security side of it. That's the "9/11 conservative" moniker that was hung on him and some other people, and that makes sense. What I didn't understand was why he became a down-the-line right-wing conservative on a number of issues. He's Fox News's go-to guy now. Maybe it's just the money, you know. People want to work, and he found an audience. But it doesn't really follow that you have to be conservative on every issue just because of 9/11. I cannot tell you what goes on in Dennis Miller's mind, and people ask me that all the time.

It seems to be what happened to David Mamet too.

That I think is religion. David Mamet is seriously influenced by religion. Very orthodox religion. And religion warps thinking. It's impossible to worship superstition on Sunday or Saturday and just be a normal person every other day of the week.

Another area where you've sort of broken faith with the liberal conventional thinking is on the right of the NSA to be collecting all this metadata in the service of protecting us from what could be a really horrible nuclear catastrophe. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

I never said that I was outright in support of the NSA. I'm certainly on the page of most Americans in that we need to know more. I think Edward Snowden did the country a great service by opening up this can of worms. What I did say in one of our editorials that we did this year is I used the quote that so often is bandied about in the media by Benjamin Franklin who said that those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither. Well, Franklin didn't live in the 21st century. Franklin didn't live in post-nuclear-weapons times. The worst that could've happened in his era is that the gunpowder blew up, or the musket went off. We live in a very different era, and I live very close to the port of Long Beach, and the port of Los Angeles, where almost half of the cargo comes in. It'd be a very likely place for them to sneak in a dirty bomb. My day would be much more ruined a dirty bomb going off than it would by the NSA knowing when I masturbate. Now I don't think the NSA should know when I masturbate, but I'm just saying, we live in different times than when Benjamin Franklin said that, so let's get real. What I did say is, I am willing to give up some liberty for some security.

If the NSA's knowing when you masturbate was directly correlated with their ability to stop an attack, that would probably be okay, right?

[Laughs] That would be okay, yes.

I was looking at your standup schedule for the next couple of months: Mobile, Alabama; Corpus Christi, Texas; Jacksonville, Florida; Birmingham, Alabama. Do you have a death wish? Or are you trying to find the liberals there or are you trying to speak to the red staters? What's your goal in picking those venues as opposed to on the East or West Coast where it would be easy to sell out theaters?

Yeah, but I can sell them out in Corpus Christi and Mobile too. The thing is, I don't have to seek out the liberals in those cities. When I come to town, they seek me out. I guess we're seeking each other out. I've learned this over the last 10 or 15 years. There are so many liberal people in conservative areas. There's a lot of reasons why people live where they live, and it's not often, or certainly not always, because that's where they're politically aligned. So there's lots of progressive, free-thinking, liberal people in all these states, and what makes it so fun to go to red areas, if you will, is that those people there are so, I think, gratified that I didn't write off the whole state, go "Alabama, I would never go there!" No, I understand that there are smart people living in Alabama. Yes, they're surrounded by a bunch of rednecks, but when I come to town, there's something more magical than when I go to San Francisco or New York, which is predictably liberal.

And do you find that the people who turn out are, as it were, the liberal base? Or do you get more hecklers?

Oh, no … I mean, I do see sometimes there's very often somebody in the front row scowling at me with his arms folded, but that's invariably a husband who was dragged there by his wife.

I've seen you talk about how 25 years ago, there were Republicans you respected—like Bob Dole, Howard Baker. Who in the Republican Party now, if anybody, do you respect?

Oh, that's a great question. [Laughs] I don't know, do you have a few minutes while I think that over? I mean, name some people, and I'll try to…

Joe Scarborough?

Um, yeah, Joe is more of an honest broker. Joe will attack his own party, which I think is the key. You have to be willing to, just like when you're an artist, edit your own best jokes, or you make an album and you cut 16 tracks and you gotta take away four. You gotta be able to kill your own children. That's the same thing with politics. You have to be able to be ruthlessly self-critical and turn on your own people. I've seen Joe do that, so yeah, whenever somebody does that, I do respect them. What I do not like is people who just know how to cheer for their own team. That's the problem I have, again, sometimes with my studio audience in L.A. They only know to cheer for the blue team and boo for the red team. And it's not as simple as that.

How about John McCain, who's intermittently maverick?

Right. John McCain, it's almost like alternate side of the street parking. One day, he kind of takes hits and reminds you of the old maverick John McCain from 2000, the guy we all liked so much. And then he's also capable of just being as bad as anybody in the Senate.

How about John Boehner?

No. What? John Boehner? Very recently, I think he's got fed up with the Tea Party finally and maybe has shown signs of bucking them. But until very recently, this is the guy who wouldn't call votes because he was afraid of the Tea Party. He's not exactly been a profile in courage.

How would you characterize your foreign policy? You came out after being an ardent opponent of Iraq, but supported the Libyan intervention. Are you a liberal interventionist or a realist?

Number one is I'd love to see us end the empire. And stop getting into every war that comes along. If you Google "wars in America," I think that in 216 of our 237 years, we've been at it with somebody. At some point you gotta look in the mirror and say, "Maybe it's me." Of course, this is because our defense industry, as Eisenhower warned 50 years ago, warning us about this idea that we have to watch out for this greedy maw that is the military-industrial complex. Of course we're always in a war, because we create endless amounts of armaments that have to be used up somehow. I think if you take the 13 countries who spend the most behind us on defense, and you add up everything they spend, we still spend more than all of them combined. That's insane. Even deficit hawks like Paul Ryan want to add $500 billion more to the defense budget, which is already the most bloated part of the budget. So that's number one. Can we get the troops out of Germany and Japan? Jesus Christ, how long do these wars have to be over? Do we ever end anything? I think that would solve so much in this country if we stopped having an empire and stopped spending so much money on blowing shit up. And then, to be smart about the war on terror, which I think Obama has been much more than Bush was. It's not a war that needs to be fought with armies, and cannot be won with armies. It's a war that needs to be waged with good police work and spy work. And that's more of how we're doing it now. If you want to ask me about drones, yeah, drones do some bad things, but again there are no great answers to this war. I'd rather fight the war with drones than with armies.

What is your view of Obama now? I know you've expressed disappointment with him on some issues. How would you grade him a year into his second term?

Well, I always grade him with an eye to knowing that there was probably no president in history that had more opposition, irrational opposition, to everything he tried to do.

By irrational, do you mean racist?

Absolutely, racist. We all remember that as soon as he was elected, Mitch McConnell, and Boehner, they all had a meeting and they said they would not, in any way, support anything that had President Blackula's bite marks on it. You know, he's had to deal with that from the beginning. Yes, it is racial. I know that's the one thing that they hate to be called. They just cannot stand to be called racist. Okay, but let's look at the facts. So much of what he has done is the exact thing they asked him to do. He lowered taxes. That was the first thing he did, he lowered everybody's taxes. A third of the stimulus package that they hated so much was a tax cut. You'd think a party that's called "taxed enough already," that's all about lowering taxes, would've liked that. Nope. When they did polls, over 90 percent of Teabaggers didn't even know he did that. He cut the deficit in half! He has shrunk the size of government and reduced the number of government workers, something Bush never did. The stock market has more than doubled. And yet they still don't like him. I can't put my finger on what it is, but it's certainly not his record. If they think he's a socialist, they really need to think again because he's not even a liberal. He's got Mitt Romney's healthcare plan and George W. Bush's foreign policy. What do they want from the guy?

So you don't think it's his policies that cause him problems?

It's personal. Who was the guy who said, was it Pete Sessions, was that the congressman, the Republican, who said, "I cannot stand to be in the same room with him?" [Ed. note: Democratic Senator Dick Durbin claimed Sessions told Obama, "I cannot even stand to look at you," though Sessions and the White House denied it happened.]

I can't remember.

I can't stand to be in the same room? They hated Clinton, but they never said anything like that about Clinton, that they couldn't stand to be in the same room with him, and his cum was on the furniture.

How delicious do you find the prospect of a Hillary presidency or at least a White House with Bill Clinton rattling around as first husband? How do you balance your excitement about that as a comedian versus your enthusiasm for—or terror about—the politics of it?

I am not afraid of Hillary as president. She is really smart and very capable obviously. Unfortunately the Clintons are centrist Democrats, they are corporate, centrist Democrats. They are in a lot of ways part of the problem, a lot of our problems that we face now are because in the ‘90s the Democrat Party gave up on being the liberal party. And a lot of that was Bill Clinton. Glass-Steagall was repealed under Clinton. [Robert] Rubin was the treasury secretary and you were left with a country that did not have a left party. And we still don't. We have a far-right party, and we basically have a center-right party. And we don't have a left-wing party. That is why things like Obamacare are really Republican plans that were repackaged—and as soon as Obama put his name on it, they didn't like it, but it is really Bob Dole's old plan. Or cap and trade! Cap and trade is somehow the Democratic response to global warming now, whereas 20 years ago, that was George [H.W.] Bush's plan to fight acid rain. So you know I am not thrilled with a Clinton presidency, but as a comedian, yes, Hillary and Bill Clinton are always going to be good for comedy.

Who would thrill you politically in 2016 from either party?

Elizabeth Warren would be somebody I would be very excited about. A true Democrat, a true progressive, and somebody who I think has the right ideas about everything. I love her.

Obviously everybody knows your staunchly atheist views. But do you ever think about Pascal's wager, which is that, as crazy as a lot of religious doctrine may seem, and as bad as it can make people behave, what if you're wrong and you're dooming yourself to eternity in hell? Do you worry about that?

Of all the reasons to be religious, that is the one of the dumber ones. What if I'm wrong? If it is the God of the Old Testament, I am so fucked already, and you and everybody else. A more psychopathic character you will not ever find in fiction. Just the idea that people worshipped the God of this Bible is insane. There is no more psychopathic mass murderer than God, so good luck with worrying that you picked the wrong religion, you're going to suffer for it. As far as the question of how do we know? No, we don't know. Am I a billion percent sure? Nobody is a billion percent sure of anything. I don't know how it all began, no one does. But I am pretty sure it's not that God had a son. [laughs] You know he's this orb of perfect energy, this powerful beyond imagination, but he's got kids. That would drive him fucking nuts, let me tell you. So you know we don't know the answers but the answer to that is not to make up stories. If you don't know something, just say, I don't know. That's your gospel right there. The gospel of "I don't know." I combined apathy and atheist, and I came up with apatheist. I don't know what happens when I die, and I don't care.

Is your primary goal to get people to laugh or to get them to think?

I have never been interested—even when I was a young comic starting out—in material that didn't have some bite to it. That didn't have some nutrition to it. I never did the "men do this, and women do this, and dogs and cats." Jerry Seinfeld is a genius because he can talk about trivial subjects in a way that everyone will know what he's talking about and the most intelligent people are not insulted at all and are in fact delighted. But I am not that guy. I always wanted to talk about stuff that mattered. So if my joke doesn't have some meaning behind it, I am not going to be doing that, I am not going to be interested in that subject anyway.

You're a George Carlin admirer.

Yeah, Carlin was pretty much the same way. But Carlin would do 20 brilliant minutes on society and then 10 minutes on farting. He mixed it up. I don't. I just do the society.

What's the significance of being over 50?

I just think when you're under 50, and of course you're stretching it a little into your 40s, it's okay to sort of play that, hey, I'm the swinging-bachelor type. And we did used to do jokes on Politically Incorrect, and maybe on the early years of Real Time, that ended with me in the hot tub with twins or something. There were some of those punch lines. I just think when you're over 50, I can't explain it, maybe it's not logical, but I just think it is time to just not talk about your personal life. Unless you're married and have kids and grandkids or something. There is something about it to the average person that if you're not married, you're either gay, or you're a dirty old man, and I don't want to be any of those things.

You've acquired dignified reticence in your old age?

Yes, beautifully put Scott, a dignified reticence.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Performance Anxiety in Great Performers

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Performance anxiety is among the most widespread of phobias; by some measures, it afflicts up to 20 percent of Americans. That group includes a striking number of people who perform for a living. Barbra Streisand developed overwhelming performance anxiety at the height of her career; for 27 years she refused to perform for the general public, appearing live only in private clubs and at charity events, where she presumably believed the pressure on her was less intense. Carly Simon abandoned the stage for seven years after collapsing from nerves before a concert in Pittsburgh in 1981. When she resumed performing, she would sometimes ask members of her band to spank her before she went onstage, to distract her from her anxiety. The singer Donny Osmond had panic attacks during performances for a number of years. (He is now a spokesman for the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.)

The comedian Jay Mohr tells a story about frantically trying to smuggle a Klonopin onstage to stave off what he feared would be a career-ending panic attack while performing a skit on Saturday Night Live. (What saved Mohr on that occasion was not the Klonopin but the distracting hilarity of his sketch mate Chris Farley.) Hugh Grant, who several times has announced that he was thinking of retiring from acting, has said that he suffers from panic attacks when the cameras start rolling. He survived one film only by filling himself “full of lorazepam,” a sedative with the trade name Ativan. “I had all these panic attacks,” he said. “They’re awful. I freeze like a rabbit. Can’t speak, can’t think, sweating like a bull. When I got home from doing that job, I said to myself: ‘No more acting. End of films.’ ”

Ricky Williams, who won the Heisman Trophy in 1998, was known to suffer from severe anxiety; social interactions made him so nervous that he would give interviews only while wearing his football helmet. Laurence Olivier, convinced that his stage fright was about to send him into what he was sure would be reported as a “mystifying and scandalously sudden retirement,” finally confided his distress to the actress Dame Sybil Thorndike and her husband. (“Take drugs, darling,” Thorndike told him. “We do.”)

Then there are notable figures from history. Demosthenes, a Greek statesman renowned for his oratorical skills, was, early in his career, jeered for his anxious, stammering performances. Cicero, the great Roman statesman and philosopher, once froze while speaking during an important trial in the Forum and had to cut short his remarks. “I turn pale at the outset of a speech and quake in every limb and in all my soul,” he wrote.

In 1889, a young Indian lawyer froze during his first case before a judge and ran from the courtroom in humiliation. “My head was reeling and I felt as though the whole court was doing likewise,” the lawyer would write later, after he had become known as Mahatma Gandhi. “I could think of no question to ask.” Another time, when Gandhi stood up to read remarks he had prepared for a small gathering of a local vegetarian society, he found that he could not speak. “My vision became blurred and I trembled, though the speech hardly covered a sheet of foolscap,” he recounted. What Gandhi called “the awful strain of public speaking” prevented him for years from speaking up even at friendly dinner parties, and nearly deterred him from developing into the spiritual leader he ultimately became.

Thomas Jefferson, too, had his law career disrupted by a fear of public speaking. One of his biographers notes that if he tried to declaim loudly, his voice would “sink in his throat.” He never spoke during the deliberations of the Second Continental Congress and, remarkably, according to Joshua Kendall’s book America’s Obsessives, gave only two public speeches—his inaugural addresses—during his years as president. After reviewing presidential biographies and other materials, psychiatrists at Duke University, writing in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, diagnosed Jefferson posthumously with social phobia.

Surviving Anxiety

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I’ve finally settled on a pre-talk regimen that enables me to avoid the weeks of anticipatory misery that the approach of a public-speaking engagement would otherwise produce.

Let’s say you’re sitting in an audience and I’m at the lectern. Here’s what I’ve likely done to prepare. Four hours or so ago, I took my first half milligram of Xanax. (I’ve learned that if I wait too long to take it, my fight-or-flight response kicks so far into overdrive that medication is not enough to yank it back.) Then, about an hour ago, I took my second half milligram of Xanax and perhaps 20 milligrams of Inderal. (I need the whole milligram of Xanax plus the Inderal, which is a blood-pressure medication, or beta-blocker, that dampens the response of the sympathetic nervous system, to keep my physiological responses to the anxious stimulus of standing in front of you—the sweating, trembling, nausea, burping, stomach cramps, and constriction in my throat and chest—from overwhelming me.) I likely washed those pills down with a shot of scotch or, more likely, vodka, the odor of which is less detectable on my breath. Even two Xanax and an Inderal are not enough to calm my racing thoughts and to keep my chest and throat from constricting to the point where I cannot speak; I need the alcohol to slow things down and to subdue the residual physiological eruptions that the drugs are inadequate to contain. In fact, I probably drank my second shot—yes, even though I might be speaking to you at, say, 9 in the morning—between 15 and 30 minutes ago, assuming the pre-talk proceedings allowed me a moment to sneak away for a quaff.

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If the usual pattern has held, as I stand up here talking to you now, I’ve got some Xanax in one pocket (in case I felt the need to pop another one before being introduced) and a minibar-size bottle or two of vodka in the other. I have been known to take a discreet last-second swig while walking onstage—because even as I’m still experiencing the anxiety that makes me want to drink more, my inhibition has been lowered, and my judgment impaired, by the liquor and benzodiazepines I’ve already consumed. If I’ve managed to hit the sweet spot—that perfect combination of timing and dosage whereby the cognitive and psychomotor sedating effect of the drugs and alcohol balances out the physiological hyperarousal of the anxiety—then I’m probably doing okay up here: nervous but not miserable; a little fuzzy but still able to speak clearly; the anxiogenic effects of the situation (me, speaking in front of people) counteracted by the anxiolytic effects of what I’ve consumed. But if I’ve overshot on the medication—too much Xanax or liquor—I may seem to be loopy or slurring or otherwise impaired. And if I didn’t self-medicate enough? Well, then, either I’m sweating profusely, with my voice quavering weakly and my attention folding in upon itself, or, more likely, I ran offstage before I got this far. I mean that literally: I’ve frozen, mortifyingly, onstage at public lectures and presentations before, and on several occasions I have been compelled to bolt from the stage.

Yes, I know. My method of dealing with my public-speaking anxiety is not healthy. It’s dangerous. But it works. Only when I am sedated to near-stupefaction by a combination of benzodiazepines and alcohol do I feel (relatively) confident in my ability to speak in public effectively and without torment. As long as I know that I’ll have access to my Xanax and liquor, I’ll suffer only moderate anxiety for days before a speech, rather than sleepless dread for months.

I wish I could say that my anxiety is a recent development, or that it is limited to public speaking. It’s not. My wedding was accompanied by sweating so torrential that it soaked through my clothes and by shakes so severe that I had to lean on my bride at the altar, so as not to collapse. At the birth of our first child, the nurses had to briefly stop ministering to my wife, who was in the throes of labor, to attend to me as I turned pale and keeled over. I’ve abandoned dates; walked out of exams; and had breakdowns during job interviews, plane flights, train trips, and car rides, and simply walking down the street. On ordinary days, doing ordinary things—reading a book, lying in bed, talking on the phone, sitting in a meeting, playing tennis—I have thousands of times been stricken by a pervasive sense of existential dread and been beset by nausea, vertigo, shaking, and a panoply of other physical symptoms. In these instances, I have sometimes been convinced that death, or something somehow worse, was imminent.

Even when not actively afflicted by such acute episodes, I am buffeted by worry: about my health and my family members’ health; about finances; about work; about the rattle in my car and the dripping in my basement; about the encroachment of old age and the inevitability of death; about everything and nothing. Sometimes this worry gets transmuted into low-grade physical discomfort—stomachaches, headaches, dizziness, pains in my arms and legs—or a general malaise, as though I have mononucleosis or the flu. At various times, I have developed anxiety-induced difficulties breathing, swallowing, even walking; these difficulties then become obsessions, consuming all of my thinking.

I also suffer from a number of specific fears and phobias, in addition to my public-speaking phobia. To name a few: enclosed spaces (claustrophobia); heights (acrophobia); fainting (asthenophobia); being trapped far from home (a species of agoraphobia); germs (bacillophobia); cheese (turophobia); flying (aerophobia); vomiting (emetophobia); and, naturally, vomiting while flying (aeronausiphobia).

Anxiety has afflicted me all my life. When I was a child and my mother was attending law school at night, I spent evenings at home with a babysitter, abjectly terrified that my parents had died in a car crash or had abandoned me (the clinical term for this is separation anxiety); by age 7 I had worn grooves in the carpet of my bedroom with my relentless pacing, trying to will my parents to come home. During first grade, I spent nearly every afternoon for months in the school nurse’s office, sick with psychosomatic headaches, begging to go home; by third grade, stomachaches had replaced the headaches, but my daily trudge to the infirmary remained the same. During high school, I would purposely lose tennis and squash matches to escape the agony of anxiety that competitive situations would provoke in me. On the one—the only—date I had in high school, when the young lady leaned in for a kiss during a romantic moment (we were outside, gazing at constellations through her telescope), I was overcome by anxiety and had to pull away for fear that I would vomit. My embarrassment was such that I stopped returning her phone calls.

In short, I have, since the age of about 2, been a twitchy bundle of phobias, fears, and neuroses. And I have, since the age of 10, when I was first taken to a mental hospital for evaluation and then referred to a psychiatrist for treatment, tried in various ways to overcome my anxiety.

Here’s what I’ve tried: individual psychotherapy (three decades of it), family therapy, group therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, rational emotive behavior therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, hypnosis, meditation, role-playing, interoceptive exposure therapy, in vivo exposure therapy, self-help workbooks, massage therapy, prayer, acupuncture, yoga, Stoic philosophy, and audiotapes I ordered off a late-night TV infomercial.

And medication. Lots of medication. Thorazine. Imipramine. Desipramine. Chlorpheniramine. Nardil. BuSpar. Prozac. Zoloft. Paxil. Wellbutrin. Effexor. Celexa. Lexapro. Cymbalta. Luvox. Trazodone. Levoxyl. Inderal. Tranxene. Serax. Centrax. St. John’s wort. Zolpidem. Valium. Librium. Ativan. Xanax. Klonopin.

Also: beer, wine, gin, bourbon, vodka, and scotch.

Here’s what’s worked: nothing.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Some drugs have helped a little, for finite periods of time. Thorazine (an antipsychotic that used to be referred to as a “major tranquilizer”) and imipramine (a tricyclic antidepressant) combined to help keep me out of the psychiatric hospital in the early 1980s, when I was in middle school and ravaged by anxiety. Desipramine, another tricyclic, got me through my early 20s. Paxil (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI) gave me about six months of significantly reduced anxiety in my late 20s before the fear broke through again. A double scotch plus a Xanax and a Dramamine can sometimes, when administered before takeoff, make flying tolerable. And two double scotches, when administered in quick enough succession, can obscure existential dread, making it seem fuzzier and further away.

But none of these treatments has fundamentally reduced the underlying anxiety that seems hardwired into my body and woven into my soul and that at times makes my life a misery.

My assortment of neuroses may be idiosyncratic, but my general condition is hardly unique. Anxiety and its associated disorders represent the most common form of officially classified mental illness in the United States today, more common even than depression and other mood disorders. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, some 40 million American adults, about one in six, are suffering from some kind of anxiety disorder at any given time; based on the most recent data from the Department of Health and Human Services, their treatment accounts for more than a quarter of all spending on mental-health care. Recent epidemiological data suggest that one in four of us can expect to be stricken by debilitating anxiety at some point in our lifetime. And it is debilitating: studies have compared the psychic and physical impairment tied to living with an anxiety disorder with the impairment tied to living with diabetes—both conditions are usually manageable, sometimes fatal, and always a pain to deal with. In 2012, Americans filled nearly 50 million prescriptions for just one antianxiety drug: alprazolam, the generic name for Xanax.

And anxiety, of course, extends far beyond the population of the officially mentally ill. In a much-cited 1976 study, primary-care physicians reported that anxiety was one of the most frequent complaints driving patients to their offices—more frequent than the common cold. Almost everyone alive has at some point experienced the torments of anxiety—or of fear or of stress or of worry, which are distinct but related phenomena. (People who are unable to experience anxiety are, according to some theorists, more deeply pathological—and more dangerous to society—than those who experience it acutely or irrationally; they’re psychopaths.)

My life has, thankfully, lacked great tragedy or melodrama. I haven’t served any jail time. I haven’t been to rehab. I haven’t assaulted anyone or attempted suicide. I haven’t woken up naked in the middle of a field, sojourned in a crack house, or been fired from a job for erratic behavior. As psychopathologies go, mine has been—so far, most of the time, to outward appearances—quiet. Robert Downey Jr. will not be starring in the movie of my life. I am, as they say in the clinical literature, “high functioning” for someone with an anxiety disorder or other mental illness; I’m usually quite good at hiding it. This is a signature characteristic of the phobic personality: “the need and the ability,” as described in the self-help book Your Phobia, “to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside.” To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I’m like a duck—paddling, paddling, paddling.

Stigma still attaches to mental illness. Anxiety is seen as weakness. In presenting my anxiety to the world by writing publicly about it, I’ve been told, I will be, in effect, “coming out.” The implication is that this will be liberating. We’ll see about that. But my hope is that readers who share this affliction, to whatever extent, will find some value in this account—not a cure for their anxiety, but perhaps some sense of the redemptive value of an often wretched condition, as well as evidence that they can cope and even thrive in spite of it. Most of all, I hope they—and by “they” I mean “many of you”—will find some solace in learning that they are not alone.

Stupefied by Thorazine and exhausted by an afternoon of anxiety-induced gastric distress, the author, age 12, before a classmate's bar mitzvah in 1982 (Courtesy of the Stossel family)

I struggle with emetophobia, a pathological fear of vomiting, but it’s been a while since I last vomited. More than a while, actually: as I type this, it’s been, to be precise, 35 years, two months, four days, 23 hours, and 34 minutes. Meaning that more than 83 percent of my days on Earth have transpired in the time since I last threw up, during the early evening of March 7, 1977, when I was 7 years old. I didn’t vomit in the 1980s. I didn’t vomit in the 1990s. I haven’t vomited in the new millennium. And needless to say, I hope to make it through the balance of my life without having that streak disrupted. (Naturally, I was reluctant even to type this paragraph, and particularly that last sentence, for fear of jinxing myself or inviting cosmic rebuke, and I am knocking on wood and offering up prayers to various gods and Fates as I write this.)

What this means is that I have spent, by rough calculation, at least 60 percent of my waking life thinking about and worrying about something that I have spent zero percent of the past three-plus decades doing. This is irrational.

And yet, an astonishing portion of my life is built around trying to evade vomiting and preparing for the eventuality that I might throw up. Some of my behavior is standard germophobic stuff: avoiding hospitals and public restrooms, giving wide berth to sick people, obsessively washing my hands, paying careful attention to the provenance of everything I eat.

But other behavior is more extreme, given the statistical unlikelihood of my vomiting at any given moment. I stash motion-sickness bags, purloined from airplanes, all over my home and office and car in case I’m suddenly overtaken by the need to vomit. I carry Pepto-Bismol and Dramamine and other antiemetic medications with me at all times. Like a general monitoring the enemy’s advance, I keep a detailed mental map of recorded incidences of norovirus (the most common strain of stomach virus) and other forms of gastroenteritis, using the Internet to track outbreaks in the United States and around the world. Such is the nature of my obsession that I can tell you at any given moment exactly which nursing homes in New Zealand, cruise ships in the Mediterranean, and elementary schools in Virginia are contending with outbreaks. Once, when I was lamenting to my father that there is no central clearinghouse for information about norovirus outbreaks the way there is for influenza, my wife interjected. “Yes, there is,” she said. We looked at her quizzically. “You,” she said.

For several years, in my mid-30s, I worked with a psychologist in Boston, Dr. M., who had a practice at one of the city’s academic medical centers. I had originally sought treatment for a number of phobias, but after several months of consultations, Dr. M. determined—as several other therapists, before and since, also have—that at the core of my other fears lay my fear of vomiting (for instance, I’m afraid of airplanes partly because I might get airsick), so she proposed we concentrate on that.

“Makes sense to me,” I concurred.

She explained that we would try to apply the principles of what’s known as exposure therapy toward extinguishing my emetophobia.

“There’s only one way to do that properly,” she said. “You need to confront the phobia head-on, to expose yourself to that which you fear the most.”

Uh-oh.

“We have to make you throw up.”

No. No way. Absolutely not.

She explained that a colleague had just successfully treated an emetophobe by giving her ipecac syrup, which induces vomiting. The patient, a female executive who had flown in from New York to be treated, had spent a week undergoing exposure therapy. Each day she would take ipecac administered by a nurse, vomit, and then process the experience with the therapist—“decatastrophizing” it, as the cognitive-behavioral therapists say. When she flew back to New York, Dr. M. reported, she was cured of her phobia.

I remained skeptical. Dr. M. gave me an article from an academic journal reporting on a clinical case of emetophobia successfully treated with this kind of exposure.

“This is just a single case,” I said. “It’s from 1979.”

“There have been lots of others,” she said, and reminded me again of her colleague’s patient.

“I can’t do it.”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Dr. M. said. “I’ll never force you to do anything. But the only way to overcome this phobia is to confront it. And the only way to confront it is to throw up.”

We had many versions of this conversation over the course of several months. I trusted Dr. M., who was kind and smart. So one autumn day I surprised her by saying I was open to thinking about the idea. Gently, reassuringly, she talked me through how the process would work. She and the staff nurse would reserve a lab upstairs for my privacy and would be with me the whole time. I’d eat something, take the ipecac, and vomit in short order (and I would survive just fine, she said). Then we would work on “reframing my cognitions” about throwing up. I would learn that it wasn’t something to be terrified of, and I’d be liberated.

She took me upstairs to meet the nurse. Nurse R. showed me the lab and told me that taking ipecac was a standard form of exposure therapy; she said she’d helped preside over a number of exposures for now-erstwhile emetophobes. “Just the other week, we had a guy in here,” she said. “He was very nervous, but it worked out just fine.”

We went back downstairs to Dr. M.’s office.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it. Maybe.”

Over the next few weeks, we’d keep scheduling the exposure—and then I’d show up on the appointed day and demur, saying I couldn’t go through with it. I did this enough times that I shocked Dr. M. when, on an unseasonably warm Thursday in early December, I presented myself at her office for my regular appointment and said, “Okay. I’m ready.”

The exercise was star-crossed from the beginning. Nurse R. was out of ipecac, so she had to run to the pharmacy to get some more while I waited for an hour in Dr. M.’s office. Then it turned out that the upstairs lab was booked, so the exposure would have to take place in a small public restroom in the basement. I was constantly on the verge of backing out.

What follows is an edited excerpt drawn from the dispassionate-as-possible account I wrote up afterward, on Dr. M.’s recommendation. (Writing an account of a traumatic event is a commonly prescribed way of trying to forestall post-traumatic stress disorder after a harrowing experience.) If you’re emetophobic yourself, or even just a little squeamish, you might want to skip over it.

We met up with Nurse R. in the basement restroom. After some discussion, I took the ipecac.

Having passed the point of no return, I felt my anxiety surge considerably. I began to shake a little. Still, I was hopeful that sickness would strike quickly and be over fast and that I would discover that the experience was not as bad as I’d feared.
Dr. M. had attached a pulse-and-oxygen-level monitor to my finger. As we waited for the nausea to hit, she asked me to state my anxiety level on a scale of one to 10. “About a nine,” I said.

By now I was starting to feel a little nauseated. Suddenly I was struck by heaving and I turned to the toilet. I retched twice—but nothing was coming up. I knelt on the floor and waited, still hoping the event would come quickly and then be over. The monitor on my finger felt like an encumbrance, so I took it off.

After a time, I heaved again, my diaphragm convulsing. Nurse R. explained that dry heaving precedes the main event. I was now desperate for this to be over.

The nausea began coming in intense waves, crashing over me and then receding. I kept feeling like I was going to vomit, but then I would heave noisily and nothing would come up. Several times I could actually feel my stomach convulse. But I would heave and … nothing would happen.

My sense of time at this point gets blurry. During each bout of retching, I would begin perspiring profusely, and once the nausea passed, I would be dripping with sweat. I felt faint, and I worried that I would pass out and vomit and aspirate and die. When I mentioned feeling light-headed, Nurse R. said that my color looked good. But I thought she and Dr. M. seemed slightly alarmed. This increased my anxiety—because if they were worried, then I should really be scared, I thought. (On the other hand, at some level I wanted to pass out, even if that meant dying.)

After about 40 minutes and several more bouts of retching, Dr. M. and Nurse R. suggested I take more ipecac. But I feared a second dose would subject me to worse nausea for a longer period of time. I worried that I might just keep dry heaving for hours or days. At some point, I switched from hoping that I would vomit quickly and be done with the ordeal to thinking that maybe I could fight the ipecac and simply wait for the nausea to wear off. I was exhausted, horribly nauseated, and utterly miserable. In between bouts of retching, I lay on the bathroom tiles, shaking.

A long period passed. Nurse R. and Dr. M. kept trying to convince me to take more ipecac, but by now I just wanted to avoid vomiting. I hadn’t retched for a while, so I was surprised to be stricken by another bout of violent heaving. I could feel my stomach turning over, and I thought for sure that this time something would happen. It didn’t. I choked down some secondary waves, and then the nausea eased significantly. This was the point when I began to feel hopeful that I would manage to escape the ordeal without throwing up.

Nurse R. seemed angry. “Man, you have more control than anyone I’ve ever seen,” she said. (At one point, she asked peevishly whether I was resisting because I wasn’t prepared to terminate therapy yet. Dr. M. interjected that this was clearly not the case—I’d taken the ipecac, for God’s sake.) Eventually—several hours had now elapsed since I’d ingested the ipecac—Nurse R. left, saying she had never seen someone take ipecac and not vomit. [I’ve since read that up to 15 percent of people—a disproportionate number of them surely emetophobes—don’t vomit from a single dose of ipecac.] After some more time, and some more encouragement from Dr. M. to try to “complete the exposure,” we decided to “end the attempt.” I still felt nauseated, but less so than before. We talked briefly in her office, and then I left.

Driving home, I became extremely anxious that I would vomit and crash. I waited at red lights in terror.

When I got home, I crawled into bed and slept for several hours. I felt better when I woke up; the nausea was gone. But that night I had recurring nightmares of retching in the bathroom in the basement of the center.

The next morning I managed to get to work for a meeting—but then panic surged and I had to go home. For the next several days, I was too anxious to leave the house.

Dr. M. called the day after the ordeal to make sure I was okay. She clearly felt bad about having subjected me to such a horrible experience. Though I was traumatized, her sense of guilt was so palpable that I felt sympathetic toward her. At the end of the account I composed at her request, which was accurate as far as it went, I masked the emotional reality of what I thought (which was that the exposure had been an abject disaster and that Nurse R. was a fatuous bitch) with an antiseptic clinical tone. “Given my history, I was brave to take the ipecac,” I wrote.

I wish that I had vomited quickly. But the whole experience was traumatic, and my general anxiety levels—and my phobia of vomiting—are more intense than they were before the exposure. I also, however, recognize that, based on this experience in resisting the effects of the ipecac, my power to prevent myself from vomiting is quite strong.

Stronger, it seems, than Dr. M.’s. She told me she’d had to cancel all her afternoon appointments on the day of the exposure—watching me gag and fight with the ipecac had evidently made her so nauseated that she spent the afternoon at home, throwing up. I confess I took some perverse pleasure from the irony here—the ipecac I took made someone else vomit—but mainly I felt traumatized. It seems I’m not very good at getting over my phobias but quite good at making my therapists sick.

I continued seeing Dr. M. for a few more months—we “processed” the botched exposure and then, both of us wanting to forget the whole thing, turned from emetophobia to various other phobias and neuroses—but the sessions now had an elegiac, desultory feel. We both knew it was over.

The author with his grandfather and great-grandfather (at left, with cane), who endured multiple hospitalizations and rounds of electroshock therapy for anxiety between the 1940s and 1960s. (Courtesy of the Stossel family)

Is pathological anxiety a medical illness, as Hippocrates and Aristotle and many modern psychopharmacologists would have it? Or is it a philosophical problem, as Plato and Spinoza and the cognitive-behavioral therapists would have it? Is it a psychological problem, a product of childhood trauma and sexual inhibition, as Freud and his acolytes once had it? Or is it a spiritual condition, as Søren Kierkegaard and his existentialist descendants claimed? Or, finally, is it—as W. H. Auden and David Riesman and Erich Fromm and Albert Camus and scores of modern commentators have declared—a cultural condition, a function of the times we live in and the structure of our society?

The truth is that anxiety is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture. Even as anxiety is experienced at a spiritual and psychological level, it is scientifically measurable at the molecular level and the physiological level. It is produced by nature and it is produced by nurture. It’s a psychological phenomenon and a sociological phenomenon. In computer terms, it’s both a hardware problem (I’m wired badly) and a software problem (I run faulty logic programs that make me think anxious thoughts). The origins of a temperament are many-faceted; emotional dispositions that seem to have a simple, single source—a bad gene, say, or a childhood trauma—may not. After all, who’s to say that Spinoza’s vaunted equanimity, though ostensibly a result of his philosophy of applying logical reasoning to irrational fear, wasn’t in fact a product of his biology? Mightn’t a genetically programmed low level of autonomic arousal have produced his serene philosophy, rather than the other way around?

I don’t have to look far to find evidence of anxiety as a family trait. My great-grandfather Chester Hanford, for many years the dean of Harvard College, was in the late 1940s admitted to McLean Hospital, the famous mental institution in Belmont, Massachusetts, suffering from acute anxiety. The last 30 years of his life were often agonizing. Though medication and electroshock treatments would occasionally bring about remissions in his suffering, such respites were temporary, and in his darkest moments, in the 1960s, he was reduced to moaning in a fetal ball in his bedroom. Perhaps wearied by the responsibility of caring for him, his wife, my great-grandmother, a formidable and brilliant woman, died from an overdose of scotch and sleeping pills in 1969, a few months before I was born.

My mother, Chester’s granddaughter, is, like me, an inveterate worrier, and, though she enjoyed a productive career as an attorney, she suffers from some of the same phobias and neuroses that I do. She assiduously avoids heights (glass elevators, chairlifts), and tends to avoid public speaking (when she has to talk publicly, she takes beta-blockers in advance) and risk taking of most kinds. Like me, she is mortally terrified of vomiting (and has not done so since 1974). As a young woman, she suffered from panic attacks. At her most anxious (or so my father, her ex‑husband, says), her fears verged on paranoia: just after I was born, while suffering from postpartum depression, she became convinced that a serial killer in a yellow Volkswagen was watching our house. (Today, my mother and father, now divorced 15 years, disagree about the severity of the paranoia: my mother says it was negligible—and that, moreover, there really was a serial killer afoot at the time, a fact that research confirms.) My only sibling, a younger sister who is a successful cartoonist and editor, struggles with anxiety that is different from mine but nonetheless intense. She, too, has taken Celexa—and also Prozac and Wellbutrin and Klonopin and Nardil and Neurontin and BuSpar. None of them worked for her, and today she may be one of the few adult members of my mother’s side of the family not currently taking a psychiatric medication.

On the evidence of just my mother’s side of the family (and there is a separate complement of psychopathology coming down to me on the side of my father, a respected research physician who drank himself unconscious many nights throughout much of my later childhood), it is not outlandish to conclude that I possess what Sigmund Freud called “the hereditary taint,” a genetic predisposition to anxiety and depression.

But these facts, by themselves, are not dispositive. In the 1920s, my great-grandparents had a young child who died of an infection. This was devastating to them. Perhaps this trauma, combined with the later trauma of having many of his students die in World War II, cracked something in my great-grandfather’s psyche. Perhaps my mother, in turn, was made anxious by the fussy ministrations of her worrywart mother; the psychological term for this is modeling. And perhaps I, observing my mother’s phobias, adopted them as my own.

Or maybe the generally unsettled nature of my childhood psychological environment—my mother’s constant anxious buzzing; my father’s alcoholic absence; their sometimes unhappy marriage, which would end in divorce—produced in me a comparably unsettled sensibility. Both my mother and father were well intentioned and loving, but between them, they combined overprotection and anger in a way that may have been particularly toxic for a child with an innately nervous temperament. On many occasions, my screaming bouts of nighttime panic would awaken the whole family, and my father would lie patiently with me, trying to calm me down enough to sleep. But sometimes, exhausted and frustrated, he would lash out at me physically. My mother dressed me until I was 9 or 10 years old; after that, she picked out my clothes for me every night until I was about 15. She ran my baths until I was in high school. Any time my sister and I were home while my parents were at work, we had the company of a babysitter. By the time I was a young teenager, this was getting a bit weird—as I realized the day I discovered, to our mutual discomfort, that the babysitter was my age (13). My mother did all of this out of genuine love and anxious concern. And I welcomed the excess of solicitude: it kept me swaddled in a comforting dependency. But our relationship helped deprive me of autonomy and a sense of self-efficacy.

Still, in most respects my parents maintained a safe, loving, and stable suburban home; many people grow up in circumstances far more traumatic than mine and don’t develop clinical anxiety. Ultimately, it’s impossible to disentangle nature and nurture—my anxiety is surely the result of both, and of the interaction between the two. For instance, it’s possible that my mother’s anxiety while pregnant with me—having endured two miscarriages followed by difficulty getting pregnant again, she says her already high level of worry was inflamed by the fear that she wouldn’t carry me to term—produced such hormonal Sturm und Drang in the womb that I was doomed to be born nervous. Research suggests that mothers who suffer stress while pregnant are more likely to produce anxious children. Thomas Hobbes, the political philosopher, was born prematurely when his mother, terrified by a rumor that the Spanish armada was advancing toward English shores, went into labor in April 1588. “Myself and fear were born twins,” Hobbes wrote, and he attributed his own anxious temperament to the ambient turmoil of his gestation. Maybe Hobbes’s view that a powerful state needs to protect citizens from the violence and torment they naturally inflict on one another (life, he famously said, is nasty, brutish, and short) had its origins in utero, as his mother’s stress hormones washed through him.

Or do the roots of my anxiety lie even deeper and extend more broadly than the things I’ve experienced and the genes I’ve inherited—that is, in history and in culture? My father’s parents were Jews who emigrated from Weimar Germany. My father’s mother became a nastily anti-Semitic Jew—she renounced her Jewishness out of fear that she would someday be persecuted for it. My sister and I were raised in the Episcopal Church, our Jewish background hidden from us until I was in high school. My father, for his part, has had a lifelong fascination with World War II, and specifically with the Nazis; he watched the 1973–74 television series The World at War again and again. In my memory, that program, with its stentorian music accompanying the Nazi advance on Paris, is the running soundtrack to my early childhood. Jews, of course, have millennia of experience in having reason to be scared—which perhaps explains why some studies have suggested that Jewish men are more likely to suffer from neuroses than are men in other groups.

My mother’s cultural heritage, on the other hand, is heavily WASP; she is a proud Mayflower descendant who until recently subscribed to the notion that there is no emotion and no family issue that should not be suppressed.

Thus, me: a mixture of Jewish and WASP pathology—a neurotic and histrionic Jew suppressed inside a neurotic and repressed WASP. No wonder I’m anxious: I’m like Woody Allen trapped inside John Calvin.

Anxious on vacation: the author, age 10, in Bermuda (Courtesy of the Stossel family)

Everyone knows that anxiety can cause gastrointestinal distress. (My friend Anne says that the most effective weight-loss program she ever tried was the Stressful-Divorce Diet.) But medical researchers have charted the connections in precise and systematic detail: as one’s mental state changes, for instance, so does blood flow to and from the stomach. The gastrointestinal system is a concrete and direct register of one’s psychology. In their 1943 landmark of psychosomatic research, Human Gastric Function, the physicians Stewart Wolf and Harold Wolff concluded that there was a strong inverse correlation between what they called “emotional security” and stomach discomfort.

That’s certainly true in my case. Being anxious makes my stomach hurt and my bowels loosen. My stomach hurting and my bowels loosening makes me more anxious, which makes my stomach hurt more and my bowels even looser, and so nearly every trip of any significant distance from home ends up the same way: with me scurrying frantically from restroom to restroom on a kind of grand tour of the local latrines. For instance, I don’t have terribly vivid recollections of the Vatican or the Colosseum or the Italian rail system. I do, however, have detailed memories of the public restrooms in the Vatican and at the Colosseum and in various Italian train stations in the winter of 2002. One day, I visited the Trevi Fountain—or, rather, my wife and her family visited the Trevi Fountain. I visited the restroom of a nearby gelateria, where a series of impatient Italians banged on the door while I bivouacked there. The next day, when the family drove to Pompeii, I gave up and stayed in bed, a reassuringly short distance from the bathroom.

When your stomach governs your existence, it’s hard not to be preoccupied with it. A few searing experiences—soiling yourself on an airplane, say, or on a date (and yes, I have done both)—will focus you passionately on your gastrointestinal tract. You need to devote effort to planning around it—because it will not plan around you.

Case in point: In the summer of 1997, while researching my first book, a biography of Sargent Shriver—who founded the Peace Corps for his brother-in-law John F. Kennedy—I spent part of the summer living with the extended Kennedy family on Cape Cod. One weekend, then-President Bill Clinton, who was vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, went sailing with Ted Kennedy, and I suspected that Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, where the Kennedys have their vacation homes, would be crawling with Secret Service agents. With some time to kill before dinner, I decided to walk around town to take in the scene.

Bad idea. As is so often the case for people with unruly, nervous bellies, it was at precisely the moment I passed beyond Easily-Accessible-Bathroom Range that my plumbing came unglued. While sprinting back to the house where I was staying, I was several times convinced I would not make it and—teeth gritted, sweating voluminously—was reduced to evaluating various bushes and storage sheds along the way for their potential as ersatz outhouses. Imagining what might ensue if a Secret Service agent were to happen upon me crouched in the shrubbery lent a kind of panicked, otherworldly strength to my efforts at self-possession.

As I approached the entrance, I was simultaneously reviewing the floor plan in my head (Which of the many bathrooms in the mansion is closest to the front door?) and praying that I wouldn’t be fatally waylaid by a stray Kennedy or celebrity (as I recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Liza Minnelli, and the secretary of the Navy, among others, were visiting that weekend).

Fortunately, I made it into the house unaccosted. Then a quick calculation: Can I make it all the way upstairs and down the hall to my suite in time? Or should I duck into the bathroom in the front hall? Hearing footsteps above and fearing a protracted encounter, I opted for the latter and slipped into the bathroom, which was separated from the front hall by an anteroom and two separate doors. I scampered through the anteroom and flung myself onto the toilet.

My relief was extravagant and almost metaphysical.

But then I flushed and … something happened. My feet were getting wet. I looked down and saw to my horror that water was flowing out from the base of the toilet. Something seemed to have exploded. The floor—along with my shoes and pants—was covered in sewage. The water level was rising.

Could the flooding be stopped? Turning around, I removed the porcelain top of the toilet tank, scattering the flowers and potpourri that sat atop it, and frantically began fiddling with its innards. I tried things blindly, raising this and lowering that, jiggling this and wiggling that, fishing around in the water for something that might stem the swelling tide.

Somehow, whether of its own accord or as a result of my haphazard fiddling, the flooding slowed and then stopped. I surveyed the scene. My clothes were drenched and soiled. So was the bathroom rug. Without thinking, I slipped off my pants and boxer shorts, wrapped them in the waterlogged rug, and jammed the whole mess into the wastebasket, which I stashed in the cupboard under the sink. Have to deal with this later, I thought to myself.

It was at this unpropitious moment that the dinner bell rang, signaling that it was time to muster for cocktails in the living room.

Which was right across the hall from the bathroom.

Where I was standing ankle-deep in sewage.

I pulled some towels off the wall and dropped them on the ground to start sopping up some of the toilet water. I got down on my hands and knees and, unraveling the whole roll of toilet paper, began dabbing frenziedly at the water around me. It was like trying to dry a lake with a kitchen sponge.

What I was feeling at that point was not, strictly speaking, anxiety; rather, it was a resigned sense that the jig was up, that my humiliation would be complete and total. I’d soiled myself, destroyed the estate’s septic system, and might soon be standing half naked before God knows how many members of the political and Hollywood elite.

In the distance, voices were moving closer. It occurred to me that I had two choices. I could hunker down in the bathroom, hiding and waiting out the cocktail party and dinner—at the risk of having to fend off anyone who might start knocking on the door—and use the time to try to clean up the wreckage before slipping up to my bedroom after everyone had gone to bed. Or I could try to make a break for it.

I took all the soiled towels and toilet paper and shoved them into the cupboard, then set about preparing my escape. I retrieved the least soiled towel (which was nonetheless dirty and sodden) and wrapped it gingerly around my waist. I crept to the door and listened for voices and footsteps, trying to gauge distance and speed of approach. Knowing I had scarcely any time before everyone converged on the center of the house, I slipped out of the bathroom and through the anteroom, sprint-walked across the hallway, and darted up the stairs. I hit the landing, made a hairpin turn, and headed up the next flight to the second floor—where I nearly ran headlong into John F. Kennedy Jr. and another man.

“Hi, Scott,” Kennedy said. (I’d just met him for the first time the day before. “I’m John Kennedy,” he had said when he extended his hand in introduction. I know, I had thought as I extended mine, thinking it funny that he had to pretend courteously that people might not know his name, despite the ubiquity of his face on the cover of checkout-counter magazines.)

“Uh, hi,” I said, racking my brain for a plausible explanation for why I might be running through the house at cocktail hour with no pants on, drenched in sweat, swaddled in a soiled and reeking towel. But he and his friend appeared utterly unfazed—as though half-naked houseguests covered in their own excrement were common here—and walked past me down the stairs.

I scrambled down the hallway to my room, where I showered vigorously, changed, and tried to compose myself as best I could—which was not easy because I was still sweating terribly, right through my blazer, the result of anxiety, exertion, and summer humidity.

If someone had snapped a photo of the scene at cocktails that evening, here’s what it would show: various celebrities and politicians and priests all glowing with grace and easy bonhomie as they mingle effortlessly on the veranda overlooking the Atlantic—while, just off to the side, a sweaty young writer stands awkwardly gulping gin and tonics and thinking about how far he is from fitting in with this illustrious crowd and about how not only is he not rich or famous or accomplished or particularly good-looking, but he cannot even control his own bowels and therefore is better suited for the company of animals or infants than of adults, let alone adults as luminous and significant as these.

The sweaty young writer is also worrying about what will happen when someone tries to use the hallway bathroom.

Late that night, after everyone had gone off to bed, I sneaked back down to the bathroom with a trash bag and paper towels and cleaning detergent I’d pilfered from the pantry. I couldn’t tell whether anyone had been there since I left, but I tried not to worry about that and concentrated on stuffing the soiled rug and towels and clothes and toilet paper I’d stashed under the sink into the trash bag. Then I used the paper towels to scrub the floor, and I put those into the trash bag as well.

Outside the kitchen, between the main house and an outbuilding, was a Dumpster. My plan was to dispose of everything there. Naturally, I was terrified of getting caught. What, exactly, would a houseguest be doing disposing of a large trash bag outside in the middle of the night? (I worried that there might still be Secret Service afoot, who might shoot me before allowing me to plant what looked like a bomb or a body in the Dumpster.) But what choice did I have? I slunk through the house and out to the Dumpster, where I deposited the trash bag. Then I went back upstairs to bed.

No one ever said anything to me about the hallway bathroom or about the missing rug and towels. But for the rest of the weekend, and on my subsequent visits there, I was convinced that various household-staff members were glaring at me and whispering. “That’s him,” I imagined they were saying in disgust. “The one who broke the toilet and ruined our towels. The one who can’t control his own bodily functions.”

On April 13, 2004, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, I, then 34 years old and working as a senior editor at The Atlantic and dreading the publication of my Sargent Shriver biography, presented myself at the nationally renowned Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University. After meeting for several hours with a psychologist and two graduate students and filling out dozens of pages of questionnaires, I was given a principal diagnosis of “panic disorder with agoraphobia” and additional diagnoses of “specific phobia” and “social phobia.” The clinicians also noted in their report that my questionnaire answers indicated “mild levels of depression,” “strong levels of anxiety,” and “strong levels of worry.”

Why so many different diagnoses? And why were they different from the diagnoses of my youth (“phobic neurosis,” “overanxious reaction disorder of childhood”)? Had the nature of my anxiety changed so much? How can we make scientific or therapeutic progress if we can’t agree on what anxiety is?

Even Sigmund Freud, the inventor, more or less, of the modern idea of neurosis—a man for whom anxiety was a key, if not the key, foundational concept of his theory of psychopathology—contradicted himself over the course of his career. Early on, he said that anxiety arose from unexpressed sexual impulses (anxiety is to repressed libido, he wrote, “as vinegar is to wine”). Later in his career, he argued that anxiety primarily arose from unconscious psychic conflicts. Late in his life, in The Problem of Anxiety, Freud wrote: “It is almost disgraceful that after so much labor we should still find difficulty in conceiving of the most fundamental matters.”

Today, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (now in its just-published fifth edition, DSM-5) defines hundreds of mental disorders, classifies them by type, and lists, in levels of detail that can seem both absurdly precise and completely random, the symptoms a patient must display (how many, how often, and with what severity) to receive any given psychiatric diagnosis. All of which lends the appearance of scientific validity to the diagnosing of an anxiety disorder. But the reality is that there is a large quotient of subjectivity here (both on the part of patients, in describing their symptoms, and of clinicians, in interpreting them). Studies in the 1950s found that when two psychiatrists evaluated the same patient, they gave the same DSM diagnosis only about 40 percent of the time. Rates of consistency have improved since then, but the diagnosis of many mental disorders remains, despite pretensions to the contrary, more art than science.

In the spring of 2004, such was my terror over the looming book tour that I sought help from multiple sources. I first went to a prominent Harvard psychopharmacologist. “You have an anxiety disorder,” he told me after taking my case history. “Fortunately, this is highly treatable. We just need to get you properly medicated.” When I gave him my standard objections to reliance on medication (worry about side effects, concerns about drug dependency, discomfort with the idea of taking pills that might affect my mind and change who I am), he resorted to the clichéd—but nonetheless potent—diabetes argument, which goes like this: “Your anxiety has a biological, physiological, and genetic basis; it is a medical illness, just like diabetes is. If you were a diabetic, you wouldn’t have such qualms about taking insulin, would you? And you wouldn’t see your diabetes as a moral failing, would you?” I’d had versions of this discussion with various psychiatrists many times over the years. I would try to resist whatever the latest drug was, feeling that this resistance was somehow noble or moral, that reliance on medication evinced weakness of character, that my anxiety was an integral and worthwhile component of who I am, and that there was redemption in suffering—until, inevitably, my anxiety would become so acute that I would be willing to try anything, including the new medication. So, as usual, I capitulated, and as the book tour drew closer, I began a course of benzodiazepines (Xanax during the day, Klonopin at night) and increased my dosage of Celexa, an antidepressant I was already taking.

But even drugged to the gills, I remained filled with dread about the book tour, so I went also to the Boston University center, and was ultimately referred to a young but highly regarded Stanford-trained psychologist who specialized in cognitive-behavioral therapy. “First thing we’ve got to do,” she said in one of my early sessions with her, “is to get you off these drugs.” A few sessions later, she offered to take my Xanax from me and lock it in a drawer in her desk. She opened the drawer to show me the bottles deposited there by some of her other patients, holding one up and shaking it for effect. The drugs, she said, were a crutch that prevented me from truly experiencing and thereby confronting my anxiety; if I didn’t expose myself to the raw experience of anxiety, I would never learn that I could cope with it on my own.

She had a point, I knew. But with the book tour approaching, my fear was that I might not, in fact, be able to cope with it.

I went back to the Harvard psychopharmacologist (let’s call him Dr. Harvard) and described the course of action the Stanford psychologist (let’s call her Dr. Stanford) had proposed. “You could try giving up the medication,” he said. “But your anxiety is clearly so deeply rooted in your biology that even mild stress provokes it. Only medication can control your biological reaction. And it may well be that your anxiety is so acute that the only way you’ll be able to get to the point where any kind of behavioral therapy can begin to be effective is by taking the edge off your physical symptoms with drugs.”

At my next session with Dr. Stanford, I told her I was afraid to give up my Xanax and related what Dr. Harvard had said to me. She looked betrayed. After that, I stopped telling her about my visits to Dr. Harvard. My continued consultations with him felt illicit.

Dr. Stanford was more pleasant to talk to than Dr. Harvard; she tried to understand what caused my anxiety and seemed to care about me as an individual. Dr. Harvard seemed to see me as more of a general type—an anxiety patient—to be treated with drugs. One day I read in the newspaper that he was administering antidepressants to gorillas at the local zoo. Dr. Harvard’s treatment of choice for the gorillas in question? SSRI antidepressants, the same class of medication he had prescribed for me.

I can’t say for certain whether the drugs worked for the gorillas. Reportedly, they did not. But could there be a more potent demonstration that Dr. Harvard’s approach to treatment was resolutely biological? For him, the content of any psychic distress—and certainly the meaning of it—mattered less than the fact of it: such distress, whether in a human or some other primate, was a medical-biological malfunction that could be fixed with drugs.

Not all therapists have such black-and-white views; many find room both for medication and for other kinds of therapy. Some cognitive-behavioral therapists, for instance, use certain drugs to enhance exposure therapy. And neuroscientists increasingly recognize the power of things like meditation and traditional talk therapy to render concrete structural changes in brain physiology that are every bit as “real” as the changes wrought by pills or electroshock therapy.

Even as a high-school student, the author still struggled with severe separation anxiety, making it hard for him to spend extended time away from home and family. (Courtesy of the Stossel family)

My own experience, of course, involves ample exposure to both drugs and other therapies, often in concert. Starting when I was 11, I saw the same psychiatrist once or twice a week for 25 years. Dr. L. was the psychiatrist who, when I was taken to McLean Hospital, administered my first Rorschach test. When I started therapy with him, he was approaching 50, tall and lanky, balding a little, with a beard in the classic Freudian style. Over the years, the beard came and went, and he lost more of his hair, which turned from brown to salt-and-pepper to white. Trained at Harvard in the 1950s and early 1960s, Dr. L. came of professional age in the late stages of the psychoanalytic heyday, when Freudianism still dominated. When I first encountered him, he was a believer both in medication and in such Freudian concepts as neurosis and repression, the Oedipus complex and transference. Our first sessions, in the early 1980s, were filled with things like Rorschach tests and free association and discussions of early memories. Our last sessions, in the mid-2000s, were focused on role-playing and “energy work”; he also suggested during those latter years that I sign up for a special kind of yoga program, later alleged to be a brainwashing cult by some former members, though their claims were never proved.

Here’s some of what we did in our sessions together over a quarter century: looked at picture books (1981); played backgammon (1982–85); played darts (1985–88); experimented sporadically with various cutting-edge psychotherapeutic methods of an increasingly New Age complexion, such as hypnotism, eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, energy-systems therapy, and internal-family-systems therapy (1988–2004). During this period I also moved, in tandem with prevailing pharmacological trends, from one class of drugs to another, in often overlapping succession: from antipsychotics to benzodiazepines to tricyclic antidepressants to MAOI antidepressants to SSRI antidepressants back to benzodiazepines again. I was the beneficiary, or possibly the victim, of seemingly every passing fad in psychotherapy and psychopharmacology.

Medication has more reliably soothed my anxiety than various other forms of therapy have. (Without Thorazine and imipramine and Valium, I don’t know that I could have gotten through seventh grade.) Yet the case for medication, I can also tell you, is complicated by drawbacks and side effects that range from sedation to weight gain to mania to headaches to digestive and urinary troubles to neuromuscular problems to dependency and addiction to, some say, brain damage—and that’s leaving aside withdrawal symptoms that, in the case of many drugs, can be far worse than the side effects. While lots of people will testify that drugs have helped them, lots of other people will testify (and often do, in court filings and before Congress) that medication has ruined their lives. Though plenty of studies, and many individual experiences, suggest that drugs can be highly effective in treating anxiety, the benefits are at the very least not clear-cut.

Sigmund Freud relied heavily on drugs to manage his anxiety. Six of his earliest scientific papers described the benefits of cocaine, which he used regularly for at least a decade, beginning in the 1880s. Only after he prescribed the stimulant to a close friend who became fatally addicted did Freud’s enthusiasm wane. Much of the history of modern psychopharmacology has the same ad hoc quality as Freud’s experimentation with cocaine. Every one of the most commercially significant classes of antianxiety and antidepressant drugs of the past 60 years was discovered by accident or was originally developed for something completely unrelated to anxiety or depression: to treat tuberculosis, surgical shock, allergies; to use as an insecticide, a penicillin preservative, an industrial dye, a disinfectant, rocket fuel.

Prozac and other, similar selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are currently the medications of choice for many psychiatrists, and have been for more than two decades. Given how completely SSRIs have saturated our culture and our environment, you might be surprised to learn that Eli Lilly, which held the U.S. patent for fluoxetine (the generic name for Prozac), killed the drug in development seven times, in part because of unconvincing test results. After examining the tepid outcomes of fluoxetine trials, as well as complaints about the drug’s side effects, German regulators in 1984 concluded, “Considering the benefit and the risk, we think this preparation totally unsuitable for the treatment of depression.” Early clinical trials of another SSRI, Paxil, were also failures.

I’ve been on one or another SSRI pretty much continuously for going on 20 years. Nevertheless, I can’t say with complete conviction that these drugs have worked, at least for long—or that they’ve been worth the costs in terms of money, side effects, drug-switching traumas, and who knows what long-term effects on my brain.

After the initial flush of enthusiasm for SSRIs in the 1990s, some of the concerns about drug dependency and side effects that had attached to tranquilizers in the 1970s began clustering around antidepressants. “It is now clear,” David Healy, a historian of psychopharmacology, wrote in 2003, “that the rates at which withdrawal problems have been reported” on paroxetine, the generic name for Paxil, “exceed the rates at which withdrawal problems have been reported on any other psychotropic drug ever.”

Even leaving aside withdrawal effects, there is now a large pile of evidence suggesting—in line with those early studies of the ineffectiveness of Prozac and Paxil—that SSRIs may not work terribly well. In January 2010, almost exactly 20 years after hailing the arrival of SSRIs with its cover story “Prozac: A Breakthrough Drug for Depression,” Newsweek published a cover story about the growing number of studies that suggested these and other antidepressants are barely more effective than sugar pills. A large-scale study from 2006 showed that only about a third of patients improved dramatically after a first cycle of treatment with antidepressants. Even after three additional cycles, almost a third of patients who remained in the study had not reached remission. After reviewing a host of studies on antidepressant effectiveness, a paper in the British Medical Journal concluded that drugs in the SSRI class—including Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil—“do not have a clinically meaningful advantage over placebo.”

How can this be? Tens of millions of Americans—including me and many people I know—collectively consume billions of dollars’ worth of SSRIs each year. Doesn’t this suggest that these drugs are effective? Not necessarily. At the very least, this massive rate of SSRI consumption has not caused rates of self-reported depression to go down—and in fact all of this pill popping seems to correlate with substantially higher rates of depression. Meanwhile, the relationship between low serotonin levels and anxiety or depression (once, and to some extent still, the theoretical reason SSRIs, which boost serotonin, should work) now seems less straightforward than previously thought. George Ashcroft, who, as a research psychiatrist in Scotland in the 1950s, was one of the scientists responsible for promulgating the chemical-imbalance theory of mental illness, abandoned the theory when further research failed to support it. “We have hunted for big, simple neurochemical explanations for psychiatric disorders,” Kenneth Kendler, a co-editor of Psychological Medicine and a psychiatry professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, conceded in 2005, “and have not found them.”

Some drugs work on some people, but the reasons are murky, and the results sometimes fleeting. Of course, studies have generally not found the response rates to nonpharmacological forms of treatment to be better than the response rates to antidepressants or any other drugs. Some recent studies have found that the effects of cognitive-behavioral therapy are more enduring than drug treatment. But as a general rule of thumb across many types of therapy, patients tend to split pretty evenly among those who see long-term improvement, those who see only transient benefits, and those who see no improvement at all. (That’s generally true of placebo treatments as well.) And so, just as I find it difficult to endorse most of these treatments, I am also reluctant to condemn them. Like medication, they clearly do help some patients. This is a fact I can vouch for personally.

On the Sunday in the autumn of 1995 when my mother announced to him that she might want a divorce, my father, desperate to save the marriage, and in a gesture that was completely out of character, acquiesced to emergency couple’s counseling. When that didn’t work, and my mother left him, he became unmoored, and soon began seeing Dr. L., my psychiatrist. For years before that, my father, despite footing the bill for my sister’s and my shrinks, had disdained psychotherapy. “How was your wacko lesson?” he’d ask jeeringly after I’d had an appointment. He did this so often that the term became a part of the family’s lingua franca, and eventually my sister and I were referring without irony to our wacko lessons. (“Mom, can you give me a ride to my wacko lesson on Wednesday?”)

And yet, there he was, suddenly sharing a therapist with me. My own sessions with Dr. L. came to be dominated by the therapist’s questions about his new star patient, my father. I couldn’t blame Dr. L. for finding my father the more interesting patient. After all, while he’d been seeing me for more than 15 years, he’d been seeing my dad for only a few months. My dad entered therapy emotionally wrecked by his separation, profoundly shaken, and newly sober. He completed therapy less than two years later, happy, productive, remarried, and deemed (by himself and by Dr. L.) to be much more “self-actualized” and “authentic” than he had been before. He was in and out of therapy in 18 months. Whereas I was entering my 18th year of therapy with Dr. L. and was still as anxious as ever.

At some level, it is adaptive to be reasonably anxious. According to Charles Darwin (who himself seems to have suffered from crippling agoraphobia that left him intermittently housebound for years after his voyage on the Beagle), species that experience an appropriate amount of fear increase their chances of survival. We anxious people are less likely to remove ourselves from the gene pool by, say, frolicking on the edges of cliffs or becoming fighter pilots.

An influential study conducted 100 years ago by two Harvard psychologists, Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, laid the foundation for the idea that moderate levels of anxiety improve performance: too much anxiety, obviously, and performance is impaired, but too little anxiety also impairs performance. “Without anxiety, little would be accomplished,” David Barlow, the founder and director emeritus of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University, has written.

The performance of athletes, entertainers, executives, artisans, and students would suffer; creativity would diminish; crops might not be planted. And we would all achieve that idyllic state long sought after in our fast-paced society of whiling away our lives under a shade tree. This would be as deadly for the species as nuclear war.

Even if I can’t fully recover from my anxiety, I’ve come to believe there may be some redeeming value in it.

Historical evidence suggests that anxiety can be allied to artistic and creative genius. The literary gifts of Emily Dickinson, for example, were inextricably bound up with her reclusiveness, which some say was a product of anxiety. (She was completely housebound after age 40.) Franz Kafka yoked his neurotic sensibility to his artistic sensibility; Woody Allen has done the same. Jerome Kagan, an eminent Harvard psychologist who has spent more than 50 years studying human temperament, argues that T. S. Eliot’s anxiety and “high reactive” physiology helped make him a great poet. Eliot was, Kagan observes, a “shy, cautious, sensitive child”—but because he also had a supportive family, good schooling, and “unusual verbal abilities,” Eliot was able to “exploit his temperamental preference for an introverted, solitary life.”

Perhaps most famously, Marcel Proust transmuted his neurotic sensibility into art. Proust’s father, Adrien, was a physician with a strong interest in nervous health and a co-author of an influential book called The Hygiene of the Neurasthenic. Marcel read his father’s book, as well as books by many of the other leading nerve doctors of his day, and incorporated their work into his; his fiction and nonfiction are “saturated with the vocabulary of nervous dysfunction,” as one historian has put it. For Proust, refinement of artistic sensibility was directly tied to a nervous disposition. Dean Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California at Davis who has spent decades studying the psychology of genius, has written that “exceptional creativity” is often linked to psychopathology; it may be that the same cognitive or neurobiological mechanisms that predispose certain people to developing anxiety disorders also enhance creative thinking.

Many of history’s most eminent scientists also suffered from anxiety or depression, or both. When Sir Isaac Newton invented calculus, he didn’t publicize his work for 20 years—because, some conjecture, he was too anxious and depressed to tell anyone. (For more than five years after a nervous breakdown around 1678, when he was in his mid-30s, he rarely ventured far from his room at Cambridge.) Perhaps if Darwin had not been largely housebound by his anxiety for decades on end, he would never have been able to finish his work on evolution. Sigmund Freud’s career was nearly derailed early on by his terrible anxiety and self-doubt; he overcame it, and once his reputation as a great man of science had been established, Freud and his acolytes sought to portray him as the eternally self-assured wise man. But his early letters reveal otherwise.

No, anxiety is not, by itself, going to make you a Nobel Prize–winning poet or a groundbreaking scientist. But if you harness your anxious temperament correctly, it might make you a better worker. Jerome Kagan says he hires only people with high-reactive temperaments as research assistants. “They’re compulsive, they don’t make errors,” he told The New York Times. Other research supports Kagan’s observation. A 2013 study in the Academy of Management Journal, for instance, found that neurotics contribute more to group projects than co-workers predict, while extroverts contribute less. And in 2005, researchers in the United Kingdom published a paper, “Can Worriers Be Winners?,” reporting that financial managers high in anxiety tended to be the best, most effective money managers, as long as their worrying was accompanied by a high IQ.

Unfortunately, the positive correlation between worrying and job performance disappeared when the worriers had a low IQ. But some evidence suggests that excessive worrying is itself allied to intelligence. Jeremy Coplan, the lead author of one study supporting that thesis, says anxiety is evolutionarily adaptive because “every so often there’s a wild-card danger.” When such a danger arises, anxious people are more likely to be prepared to survive. Coplan, a professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, has said that worrying can be a good trait in leaders—and that lack of worrying can be dangerous. If people in leadership positions are “incapable of seeing any danger, even when danger is imminent,” they are likely, among other poor decisions, to “indicate to the general populace that there’s no need to worry.” (Some commentators have suggested, based on findings like Coplan’s, that the main cause of the economic crash of 2008 was politicians and financiers who were either stupid or insufficiently anxious or both.) Studies on rhesus monkeys by Stephen Suomi, the chief of the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology at the National Institutes of Health, have found that when monkeys genetically predisposed to anxiety were taken early in life from their anxious mothers and given to unanxious mothers to be raised, a fascinating thing happened: these monkeys grew up to display less anxiety than peers with the same genetic markings—and many also, intriguingly, became the leader of their troop. This suggests that, under the right circumstances, some quotient of anxiety can equip you to be a leader.

As always, all of this comes with the proviso that anxiety is productive mainly when it is not so strong as to be debilitating. But if you are anxious, perhaps you can take heart from these findings.

I’ve come to understand that my own nervous disposition is perhaps an essential part of my being—and not just in ways that are bad. “I hate your anxiety,” my wife once said, “and I hate that it makes you unhappy. But what if there are things that I love about you that are connected to your anxiety?

“What if,” she asked, getting to the heart of the matter, “you’re cured of your anxiety and you become a total jerk?”

I suspect I might. Military pilots, by reputation, at least, are famously unanxious. And one small-scale study from the 1980s found that nine out of 10 separations and divorces among Air Force pilots were initiated by wives. Perhaps the two are linked. Low baseline levels of autonomic arousal (which can correspond to low levels of anxiety) have been tied not only to a need for adventure (flying a fighter plane, say), but also to a certain interpersonal obtuseness, a lack of sensitivity to social cues. It may be that my anxiety lends me an inhibition and a social sensitivity that make me more attuned to other people and a more tolerable spouse than I otherwise would be.

The notion of a connection between anxiety and morality long predates the findings of modern science or my wife’s intuition. Saint Augustine believed fear is adaptive because it helps people behave morally. The novelist Angela Carter has called anxiety “the beginning of conscience.” Some research into the determinants of criminal behavior suggest that criminals tend to be lower in anxiety than noncriminals. (On the other hand, different studies have found that high levels of anxiety, especially in youth, correlate with delinquent behavior.)

My anxiety can be intolerable. But it is also, maybe, a gift—or at least the other side of a coin I ought to think twice about before trading in. As often as anxiety has held me back—prevented me from traveling, or from seizing opportunities or taking certain risks—it has also unquestionably spurred me forward. “If a man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in anxiety,” Søren Kierkegaard wrote in 1844. “Since he is a synthesis, he can be in anxiety, and the greater the anxiety, the greater the man.” I don’t know about that. But I do know that some of the things for which I am most thankful—the opportunity to help lead a respected magazine; a place, however peripheral, in shaping public debate; a peripatetic and curious sensibility; and whatever quotients of emotional intelligence and good judgment I possess—not only coexist with my condition but are in some meaningful way the product of it.

In his 1941 essay “The Wound and the Bow,” the literary critic Edmund Wilson writes of the Sophoclean hero Philoctetes, whose suppurating, never-healing snakebite wound on his foot is linked to a gift for unerring accuracy with his bow and arrow—his “malodorous disease” is inseparable from his “superhuman art” for marksmanship. I have always been drawn to this parable: in it lies, as the writer Jeanette Winterson has put it, “the nearness of the wound to the gift,” the insight that in weakness and shamefulness is also the potential for transcendence, heroism, or redemption. My anxiety remains an unhealed wound that, at times, holds me back and fills me with shame—but it may also be, at the same time, a source of strength and a bestower of certain blessings.

Knifed

2013-11-05T11:46:58-05:00

In the spring of 1968 Sargent Shriver—the founding director of the Peace Corps, the head of [President Lyndon B.] Johnson’s War on Poverty, and, as the husband of Eunice Kennedy, a brother-in-law of John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy—was appointed U.S. ambassador to France. His appointment was not without controversy in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party—and in his own extended family.

The problem was that during the fall of 1967 Bobby Kennedy had begun contemplating challenging Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy had been increasingly opposed to LBJ’s handling of Vietnam, and he and Johnson had never had much use for each other; Kennedy had to stifle his distaste when his brother selected LBJ as his running mate in 1960. Even though their mutual dislike was no secret, for the most part the two had maintained an outward truce, and Kennedy had resisted seeking the nomination for fear of creating a damaging rift within the party. Late in 1967, however, Senator Eugene McCarthy, of Minnesota, began his own campaign; now RFK could not be held solely to blame for any rift.

In late January of 1968 the Tet Offensive destroyed any remaining credibility LBJ had with liberal Democrats and lost him the support of the American people generally … Kennedy knew if he wanted to make a move, he had to do it soon.

The president had offered the ambassadorship to Shriver earlier that winter. So while Kennedy was considering whether to run against Johnson, Shriver was considering whether to go to Paris. Shriver monitored Kennedy’s deliberations closely. It clearly bothered Kennedy that his brother-in-law had remained in the Johnson administration long after many other former JFK aides and Cabinet members (including RFK himself) had left. But as long as the veneer of a truce existed between LBJ and RFK, Shriver could stay with impunity. If that truce were broken by Kennedy’s entering the Democratic race, however, Shriver would be seen as sleeping with the enemy if he continued to serve the administration in any capacity.

It was a no-win situation. Ever since John F. Kennedy’s assassination, when Johnson had reached out to him in an effort to signal continuity with the Kennedy administration, almost anything Shriver did (or didn’t do) for Johnson had been fraught with symbolic weight. For good or ill, both sides saw him as The Kennedy in the Johnson administration. Shriver had always supported the Kennedy family’s political aspirations, but he was still working for Johnson, and he believed it was his patriotic duty to serve the president’s interests. Meanwhile, although he remained unwaveringly devoted to the anti-poverty program, that wasn’t enough for the president, who pressured him to accept the Paris appointment … He wanted Shriver out of the country—and out of RFK’s orbit.

In the second week of March, Shriver told Johnson he would accept the ambassadorship, pending the approval of the French government. Then he left with Eunice for a vacation in Spain. A few days later, on March 16, LBJ’s fear was realized: Bobby Kennedy announced that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination. On March 22 Secretary of State Dean Rusk called Shriver in Madrid seeking reassurance that Shriver still wished the president to submit his name to the Senate for confirmation; he and Johnson were worried that Kennedy’s announcement might have caused Shriver to reconsider. But Shriver had made up his mind: he would go to Paris.

Although Shriver accepted the appointment without any malign intent, some of those close to RFK saw his decision as an insult to their candidate. What’s more, Shriver, citing his diplomatic obligations, declined to work for the Kennedy campaign—even after Johnson withdrew from the race, on March 31. To some in the Kennedy circle, this was an unforgivable violation of the family code.

Nor was it his first. In early 1964 Johnson had leaked word to the press that Shriver topped his list of potential running mates for that year’s election. LBJ believed that in making this known he could keep Bobby Kennedy off the ticket (there was considerable pressure to put him on it) and inoculate himself against attacks from Kennedy’s wing of the party. But to Kennedy, for one of his in-laws to even contemplate joining LBJ’s ticket constituted a betrayal …

Then, tragically, everything changed. A few minutes after midnight on June 5, 1968, moments after he had given a speech in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, celebrating his victory over Eugene McCarthy in the California primary, Bobby Kennedy was shot. He died in the hospital the next day. LBJ sent Air Force One to transport Kennedy’s body to New York, and the Shrivers flew to LaGuardia to join family members and Kennedy’s aides. When Shriver tried to help unload the casket from the plane, some of the aides pushed him away, bitter in their grief.

Kennedy’s former advisers soon dispersed to the campaigns of the remaining candidates for the Democratic nomination, among whom the two leading contenders were now McCarthy and [Vice President Hubert] Humphrey. But the “Kennedy movement,” as the journalist Theodore White called it, longed for Ted Kennedy to enter the race, or at least to make himself available as a running mate. The American people, especially Democrats, craved a Kennedy on the 1968 ticket. If Ted was not going to step forward, however, the order of succession—which had previously run from Joe Jr. to Jack to Bobby to Ted—was no longer clear. For Kennedy supporters outside Bobby’s inner circle, the next best alternative was Shriver: a Kennedy in-law who shared RFK’s commitment to social programs and who had something of JFK’s dash and style. By the third week in June newspapers were reporting that Shriver was one of Humphrey’s top choices for a running mate. On June 21 Humphrey told reporters that he was “very interested” in allying himself with Shriver.

A Shriver nomination would be politically tricky, because no one knew exactly what the Kennedys wanted and whether or not they would approve. Nevertheless, the first signs were positive …

[In late summer] Ted Kennedy weighed in. He talked to Shriver by phone in France for about half an hour. On the question of whether the family would support Shriver on the Humphrey ticket, Kennedy was ultimately inconclusive. But the substance of the conversation, as Shriver described it the next day in a letter to one of his closest friends, was revealing. Shriver wrote, “Many K[ennedy] boosters really are sore at me—even bitter—because I didn’t help more [on RFK’s campaign].” Ted agreed to “keep in close touch” with Shriver through the convention and said that if [Kennedy brother-in-law] Steve Smith was the source of negative comments about Shriver, he would “slow him down or shut him up.” Shriver now realized, however, that there was a fundamental problem: “Those who had staked most of their personal hopes on RFK are extremely frustrated—& the prospect of anyone ‘in the family’ who didn’t impale him—or herself—on a picket fence without regard to the consequences—suddenly being in a position to pick up all the marbles—that prospect is galling!” Shriver concluded his letter with uncharacteristic bile: “Clearly … the same clique who opposed [the Peace Corps] as an independent agency—the same palace guard (now without a palace) (or a pretender) find it hard to accept the prospect of a prodigal in-law (let alone son) sitting down to their feast.”

“All I asked Teddie was for neutrality,” Shriver wrote …

Humphrey was evidently convinced that Shriver had all the qualifications he was seeking in a running mate; [Humphrey confidant] Max Kampelman recalled in a memoir, “Hubert was very fond of Sarge, whose genial and charming exterior hid a strong sense of principle, personal integrity, and stubborn independence.” But he felt he could not choose him without the Kennedy family’s unequivocal blessing …

The convention opened on Monday, August 26. By Wednesday morning it looked as though Humphrey had the nomination sewn up …

Over breakfast with Humphrey on Wednesday morning, [Chicago Mayor Richard] Daley—having finally accepted that Kennedy would not run for vice president—had strongly urged him to pick Shriver. The Chicago Daily News that day enthusiastically trumpeted Shriver’s qualifications. In Paris, Shriver had been meeting with Averell Harriman and Cyrus Vance, LBJ’s leading negotiators in the Paris peace talks, to discuss what sort of peace plan he would urge on Humphrey if offered a place on the ticket. He began thinking about how, if nominated, he would proffer an olive branch to the peace movement generally, and to the protesters who had been beaten and jailed in Chicago in particular.

But late Wednesday night, as Harris Wofford, who had worked for JFK in the White House and for Shriver at the Peace Corps, recorded in a memoir, Senator Walter Mondale, of Minnesota, called him from Humphrey’s suite to say that “Kennedy family opposition to Shriver’s nomination was weighing heavily against his selection.” (Wofford suspected that [longtime JFK aide] Kenny O’Donnell was speaking in the family name, “perhaps without prior authority.” Indeed, as Kampelman later recalled, O’Donnell made clear to Humphrey during the convention that “the family would consider it an unfriendly act” if he were to select Shriver.) Wofford told Mondale that this “former Palace Guard” had “no monopoly on the Kennedy legacy.” Besides, he asked, did Mondale really think that a man as decent as Ted Kennedy would impede the electoral aspirations of his own brother-in-law?

In fact, it seems, Kennedy already had. Earlier in the day, according to Humphrey’s aides, he had called Humphrey and promised his support. But notes [Shriver’s friend Bill] Josephson took on a conversation with Kampelman that September make clear that the support did not extend to Shriver. According to the notes, which I obtained from Josephson recently, Kampelman recalled Humphrey’s exact words after getting off the phone with Kennedy: “I sensed Teddy was not adamant [in his opposition to Shriver], but led [me] to believe better not.”

Reflecting on these events nearly 40 years later, Ted Kennedy acknowledges having been disappointed at Shriver’s decision not to participate in RFK’s campaign. But he insists that he did not veto Shriver’s nomination for vice president. He says that he does not clearly recollect the telephone conversation with Humphrey about Shriver, but that he will never forget how he felt at the time. His brother Bobby’s death had been devastating to him; he was in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. Having had two brothers assassinated while campaigning, Ted wanted to get as far away from politics as possible until his wounds could heal. His distress and his desire to retreat from politics, Kennedy believes, account for any negative vibrations Humphrey may have received when they spoke.

Whatever Ted intended, on Thursday morning Humphrey’s people let Shriver’s people know that the choice for VP was down to [Oklahoma Senator Fred] Harris and [Maine Senator Edmund] Muskie. (Ultimately Humphrey chose Muskie.) “We needed the good will of the Kennedys more than we needed Sarge,” one of Humphrey’s advisers said at the time. “His name was effectively vetoed” …

Two years after the 1968 convention Max Kampelman had lunch with Shriver in Washington. As Kampelman recorded in a letter soon afterward, “We … talked about 1968 and Chicago. I again made it clear to [Shriver] that he was knifed and I believe he knows that. I believe he also knows who did it.”

Read the full article in the Atlantic archives.

What Makes Us Happy, Revisited

2013-04-24T21:58:20-04:00

In June 2009, The Atlantic published a cover story on the Grant Study, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies of human development. The project, which began in 1938, has followed 268 Harvard undergraduate men for 75 years, measuring an astonishing range of psychological, anthropological, and physical traits—from personality type to IQ to drinking habits to family relationships to “hanging length of his scrotum”—in an effort to determine what factors contribute most strongly to human flourishing.

Recently, George Vaillant, who directed the study for more than three decades, published Triumphs of Experience, a summation of the insights the study has yielded. Among them: “Alcoholism is a disorder of great destructive power.” Alcoholism was the main cause of divorce between the Grant Study men and their wives; it was strongly correlated with neurosis and depression (which tended to follow alcohol abuse, rather than precede it); and—together with associated cigarette smoking—it was the single greatest contributor to their early morbidity and death. Above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t matter. There was no significant difference in maximum income earned by men with IQs in the 110–115 range and men with IQs higher than 150. Aging liberals have more sex. Political ideology had no bearing on life satisfaction—but the most-conservative men ceased sexual relations at an average age of 68, while the most-liberal men had active sex lives into their 80s. “I have consulted urologists about this,” Vaillant writes. “They have no idea why it might be so.”

But the factor Vaillant returns to most insistently is the powerful correlation between the warmth of your relationships and your health and happiness in old age. After The Atlantic’s 2009 article was published, critics questioned the strength of this correlation. Vaillant revisited the data he had been studying since the 1960s for his book, an experience that further convinced him that what matters most in life are relationships. For instance, the 58 men who scored highest on measurements of “warm relationships” earned an average of $141,000 a year more at their peak salaries (usually between ages 55 and 60) than the 31 men who scored lowest; the former were also three times more likely to have achieved professional success worthy of inclusion in Who’s Who. And, in a conclusion that surely would have pleased Freud, the findings suggest that the warmth of your relationship with Mommy matters long into adulthood. Specifically:

Men who had “warm” childhood relationships with their mothers earned an average of $87,000 more a year than men whose mothers were uncaring.
Men who had poor childhood relationships with their mothers were much more likely to develop dementia when old.
Late in their professional lives, the men’s boyhood relationships with their mothers—but not with their fathers—were associated with effectiveness at work.
On the other hand, warm childhood relations with fathers correlated with lower rates of adult anxiety, greater enjoyment of vacations, and increased “life satisfaction” at age 75—whereas the warmth of childhood relationships with mothers had no significant bearing on life satisfaction at 75.

Vaillant’s key takeaway, in his own words: “The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points … to a straightforward five-word conclusion: ‘Happiness is love. Full stop.’ ”

Robert Spitzer

2012-10-24T22:41:53-04:00

Retired Professor of Psychiatry

He didn’t have to do it. Robert Spitzer was retired. He was weak from Parkinson’s disease. As the chair of the task force that had developed the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the version of the mental-health establishment’s bible that had, in 1980, famously pried psychiatry loose from its Freudian underpinnings—his enshrinement in the history of psychiatry was secure. Even his place in the history of civil rights was assured: he had been the driving force behind the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexuality from the official realm of psychopathology in 1973; until then, the APA had classified gays as mentally ill. It would have been easy for him to drift quietly off into well-respected posterity; he didn’t have to publicly admit error, to reckon openly with an episode that might stain his reputation.

The episode: At a conference in 2001, Spitzer delivered a paper on “reparative therapy”—commonly known as “ex-gay therapy”—called “Can Some Gay Men and Lesbians Change Their Sexual Orientation?” His answer, based on interviews he’d conducted with 200 men and women who claimed to have changed their sexual orientation, was yes. The study, later published in a peer-reviewed journal, provoked huzzahs from “ex-gay” advocates (the man who’d normalized homosexuality was now declaring it could be treated!) and cries of disbelief from colleagues and homosexuals. In the face of the onslaught, Spitzer stood by his research.

Then, last spring, Gabriel Arana, an editor at The American Prospect who had undergone several years of reparative therapy in his teens, called on Spitzer at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. Arana, as he wrote movingly in an essay he later published in the magazine, had been driven to depression and nearly to suicide by the treatment, before he (and his parents) came to terms with his homosexuality. When Arana asked Spitzer about the criticisms that had been leveled against his paper, Spitzer told him, “In retrospect, I have to admit I think the critiques are largely correct,” and then went on to ask Arana if he would print a retraction of the study so that he wouldn’t “have to worry about it anymore.”

On April 25, Spitzer himself wrote a letter to the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, which had published his study. His letter didn’t merely acknowledge his study’s “fatal flaw” (there was no way to determine whether the test subjects who claimed they had changed their sexual orientation really had) but also took responsibility for its consequences: “I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works.”

See all our 2012 Brave Thinkers.

Image credit: Alex di Suvero

'An Optimist's Eye and a Skeptic's Squint': Remembering Robert Manning

2012-10-04T15:00:26-04:00

Remembering the longtime Atlantic editor, who guided the magazine through a critical era of war, protest, and cultural change.

A young Robert Manning, second from left in the first row, listens to historian Arthur Schlesinger.

The Atlantic was saddened by the passing of editor emeritus Robert Manning, who died over the weekend at the age of 92. After a distinguished career at the Associated Press, Time, the New York Herald Tribune, and the U.S. State Department, Manning joined The Atlantic as its executive editor in 1964, taking over as its tenth editor-in-chief in 1966, when his predecessor Edward Weeks retired.

Presiding over the magazine from 1966 until 1980, Manning helped usher The Atlantic into the modern era. Circulation nearly doubled under his stewardship, as he intensified the magazine's engagement with the news and public affairs, while preserving a focus on literary and cultural matters. Under Manning, the magazine published some of the nation's best established intellectual figures and literary giants (Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Richard Yates, John Updike, Jose Luis Borges, Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Dr. James Watson, Walter Lippmann, among many others), while launching or advancing the careers of such writers as James Fallows, Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Drew, Tracy Kidder, Ward Just, James Alan McPherson, L.E. Sissman, Dan Wakefield, and Ann Beattie.

C. Michael Curtis, who was a junior editor at The Atlantic when Manning arrived and who has been with the magazine for more than fifty years, says, "Robert Manning changed the direction of the magazine, bringing to it an involved awareness of public affairs, an astonishing roster of new -- though now much honored -- writers, and a feisty determination to make The Atlantic the best magazine of its kind." James Fallows, whom Manning hired in 1979, recalled in a recent blog post that Manning was "a very graceful writer and a talented editor, a proud and witty man, a gregarious and devoted and big-hearted friend":

During his nearly 15 years as The Atlantic's editor, he brought the magazine into the center of covering the big events of that time, notably the Vietnam war, civil rights progress and tumult, the economic transformations of the oil-shock and stagflation era, the cultural rending and refashioning of American society, the Watergate-induced changes in D.C. politics, and much else. He also led a very strong Atlantic team -- including Michael Janeway, Richard Todd, Louise Desaulniers, C. Michael Curtis, and others.

In Manning's first issue as editor, April 1966, he announced that he aimed to "survey the world with an optimist's eye and a skeptic's squint, trying to abjure trifles, to look beyond the awkward incidents of the hour, and to illuminate the long sweep of events -- and find excitement in doing so." He believed, as he wrote in his memoir, that "The Atlantic should be a place of many and differing voices" -- to be of no party or clique, as the magazine's 19th century founders had it, and he observed that to produce "ambitious journalism on a monthly schedule called, first, for accurate anticipation of events and trends and, second, the knack of marrying the right writer to the right idea the right time."

Even in the age of Internet journalism, when we produce more content for TheAtlantic.com every day than we did for a single issue of the magazine in the 1960s, that remains an apt description of our challenge today.

Arnold Schwarzenegger on Denial, the Shrivers, and Having It All

2012-10-01T11:00:21-04:00

Before he ran for office, he had a lot to say about work-life balance and his wife's legendary family.

Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger poses during a photocall for the animated TV series "The Governator" in Cannes, France, in April 2011. (REUTERS/Jean-Pierre Amet)

In the summer of 2003, the notion that Arnold Schwarzenegger might run in California's gubernatorial recall election suddenly tantalized the political universe. The prospect of an action-movie star -- who happened to be a Republican with family ties to the Kennedy family -- jumping into the race to displace Democratic governor Gray Davis was delicious, if unlikely.

On July 29, less than a week after the Secretary of State of California had declared that anti-Gray activists had gathered enough signatures to trigger a recall election, I talked to Schwarzenegger. The timing was coincidental. I was finishing up a biography of Schwarzenegger's father-in-law, Sargent Shriver, and had by that point interviewed scores of Shriver's former colleagues and all of his closest family members, including Schwarzenegger's wife, Maria Shriver. Schwarzenegger was the last person I would interview for the book.

Reporters were hounding Schwarzenegger about his intentions. So when I got him on the phone, the first thing I said was, "I bet you're relieved to be doing an interview where you don't have to talk about whether you're going to run for governor."

"Yeah," he said, in his heavy Austrian accent. "That or Terminator III. I'm so sick of that." (The movie had been a box office smash that summer, and he'd been out promoting it.)

But several times in the course of our conversation, he volunteered that he wasn't going to run for governor. He declared this so forcefully, and so colorfully -- and without any prompting from me -- that I believed him. He explained that if he had to commute from Los Angeles to Sacramento, he wouldn't be able to be present for his children, and that he feared that exposing his kids to that kind of "punishment" would put them at risk of getting into drugs and alcohol -- "like the Bush daughters," he said, who had both recently been charged with alcohol-related offenses. "I would kill myself if that happened to my kids because I would then think I was a failure at those basic things. So that's why I'm going to wait, I'm going to postpone my run for governor." A week later, on Jay Leno's show, he announced his candidacy.

The release of Schwarzenegger's new memoir, Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story, which comes out Monday, prompted me to go back and look at the transcript of our interview. Some of what I found there was ironic, particularly in light of subsequent developments. Throughout our conversation, he was charming, crude, funny, and insightful. He told me that, as he also reportedly writes in his memoir, his decision to go into public service was inspired by his in-laws, Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver. (Eunice passed away in 2009; Sarge passed away in early 2011.) He also talked about how Sargent was at first uncomfortable with his lifestyle as a bodybuilder and actor; about why Maria was attracted to him (she wanted to "rebel" against the traditional Kennedy political life); about how he and Maria shared extraordinary powers of "denial"; about how if had to be married to his mother-in-law they would end up either killing each other or "doing kinky stuff to each other in the bedroom"; and about an infamous toast he gave at his 1986 wedding to Maria.

Here are a few highlights of our conversation:

Schwarzenegger began by reading me a long letter Sargent Shriver had written him regarding his potential gubernatorial candidacy. "You're making me very very happy," Shriver had written. "I hope you realize that if I were a California resident I'd be voting Republican for the first time ever!" Shriver also wrote that he wished Schwarzenegger were not prohibited by being foreign-born from running for president. When I asked Schwarzenegger how reading this letter made him feel, he said he'd already decided not to run for office.

It doesn't have any effect on my decision because basically I know where I am with my decision as far as my children are concerned; they are an age where I want to spend time with them, versus spending time in Sacramento. I can't do both. That I know for sure. There has never been anyone who has been successful in doing both. So the question is, can the kids take that kind of punishment easier when they are a little bit older? Or can they take it now? I think now is not the time because I think that they will end up like the Bush kids and all those other kids all on alcohol and drugs. Listen, I would kill myself if that happened to my kids because I would then think I was a failure at those basic things. So that's why I'm going to wait, I'm going to postpone my running for governor.

He talked about what he had learned from Sargent Shriver, and also about how his future father-in-law was not comfortable at first with his lifestyle.

I got great insight from a guy like him. I always talked a lot about politics, about economic things and social issues about what the solutions are, you know, and you can assimilate two-thirds of it because he has so much information that even if you get 10 percent of that information that its fantastic enrichment. You get so enriched with all his knowledge so I mean he has been really terrific.

Of course in the beginning I think he was worried about my life, my lifestyle. Which I don't blame him because he is the father, you know, of Maria. He was saying, "We already have an actor in our family," that kind of thing. I could get that, I could feel that, you know, because he many times would say that in the beginning "Why don't you help people? You're an expert in health and fitness that's one of the things you ought to do, you could be continuing your education in that area." So his dream about my career was quite different from what it ended up. But maybe it's coming all the way around the circle, you know, and I'm ending up one day with something that he would, that he would love.

I told Schwarzenegger that Maria had told me he had modeled his life, and especially his forays into public service, after her parents'.

She means I think that I didn't model my life after theirs because I never really gave up my career or anything like that but I would say what I did was I used them as an inspiration -- because I felt like that it would be great to give back to the community. I felt like I had a lot of things to offer that are quite different from what Sarge had to offer, but that I really could have an impact because I had this wonderful, you know, all this media attention, all this star power, all this power and influence that I could really have an impact on issues, children's issues. I'd been working with that on afterschool programs, or on the President's Council on Fitness [under President George H.W. Bush] so that I could use my power to have an effect on that, to build that up. So a lot of the ideas and a lot of the inspiration comes from them and the key things that they taught me is the balance between what you make and what you give.

I told him that when I asked Maria if she believed the Freudian cliché about every woman wanting to marry her father, she'd said "Well, I think Arnold is more like my mom."

I think I've heard that a few times, you know, that Maria married her mother and that could very well be because I as a matter of fact I think that when Maria met me there is no way she could have looked at me and said, you know, you remind me of my dad. I think what made her fall in love with me was because I was the rebel, you know, I was the opposite of establishment you know. Bodybuilding was a sport that was not accepted socially -- it was was not the same as being a golf player or a tennis player or a football player. Those were the sports that were socially accepted; mine was not. I had to basically build the sport from scratch before people started accepting it...

I was definitely no symbol of anything that Sarge represented and I think that Maria fell in love with me because I was the opposite. I didn't go to work with a suit and tie I did not have studied the law, get a law degree like her brothers and father, someone that did not sit in an office all day long, trying to work his way up in the traditional sense and I would not go to the cocktail party and drink port, all those kinds of things, that was not me.

Maria... went for me so she could be a rebel on her own so that she kind of could defy, she did not want to fall into the same trap and the Washington scene or make you go down the same road where you kind of constrict your future, where you are going to be married to a guy at the country club and he's a lawyer and then you go to the cocktail parties for 35 years and have 3 kids and drive around with the trunk and the dog and the cats, you know, you can pretty much see what lifestyles people live and she wanted to do something totally different. She wanted to get away from all that. But this is all subconscious. I don't think she knew all that when she was 21. But I think that was the reason why she was excited about coming out here to Hollywood and starting a whole new life.

He talked about how both he and Maria have extraordinary powers of denial.

Maria lives in denial like I do -- that no problems exist, they don't exist. Maria always says "no, no, everything's fine, everything's fine, fine, fine." Maria says to me, "You must be tired." "Tired? Doesn't exist here. I'm not tired." Meanwhile I'm in the middle of falling asleep, but I'm not tired. So its like, denial, you know? It's like when I had my heart surgery, I didn't think about it before, nor did I ever think about it after. It didn't exist, it was like I was getting a tooth pulled or something like that. So she's like that, I'm like that, so we grind it out, same view of reality and so there are a lot of characteristics like that that we have in common

I asked him what he thought of the relationship between Sarge and Eunice Shriver.

Well, you know, it's so different than my parents. My parents were very affectionate with one another and I think that Sarge is very affectionate, I think, and she is not. I think Eunice does not feel comfortable with anything in public. I don't know what goes on, maybe they're having an orgy right now. I have no idea what goes on behind the walls. One thing I know for sure is they don't have the holding hands when they walk or holding each other. Every time he wants to kiss her she says, "C'mon, Sarge." There is a funny cute way of getting out of things. So it's a different thing but they have a tremendous bonding there and they have a tremendous amount of respect for one another and I think, in their own way, a huge amount of love for one another. But its just different the way its expressed.

I observed that Sarge and Eunice complemented each other very well.

Absolutely. Totally. One cannot argue it at all because it was perfectly set up. If she would have someone as a husband like I am, we would be fighting like cats and dogs -- either that or I'd be tying her up in the bedroom!

At his wedding to Maria Shriver in 1986, Schwarzenegger gave an effusive toast to his Austrian countryman Kurt Waldheim. Waldheim had recently become the subject of international controversy when, while running for the Austrian presidency that year, it was discovered that he had covered up details of his activities during World War II, when he had served in the SA, the Nazi paramilitary organization, and he had -- according to an international commission of historians later tasked with investigating these matters -- been aware of war crimes though there was no evidence he had directly participated in them. (Waldheim had been stationed five miles from Salonika, Greece, when one-third of the Jewish population there was deported to Auschwitz.) I asked Schwarzenegger if his father-in-law, who was reportedly made uncomfortable by the toast, had ever spoken to him about this.

Sarge never told me that he was uncomfortable. I think that what happened is that literally days before that a claim came out that Waldheim was tied to the Nazi party and he was part of the SS but there was no evidence of it at all. As a matter of fact most people dismissed it so when we got this gift from Austria, a wedding gift, which was presented to us by this young Austrian conservative politician who had flown over for the wedding and presented us with this gift and it said that it had come from Kurt Waldheim.

So Kurt Waldheim, I never got a note, or really didn't even see that it was in fact from Kurt Waldheim but that's what they said, and the note said from the "young majority," something like that. So in the toast I said I wanted to thank Kurt Waldheim for that gift, that he sent that and all those kinds of things and that he was a terrific guy and a good candidate to be president. This was two weeks before the election* and all this stuff you know so that's what I said and it was at that point where the whole thing started crystallizing later on you know all the claims got bigger and bigger and bigger the whole thing got really out of control I think that's really what happened.

As a matter of fact when I had a later on conversation with [the Nazi hunter] Simon Wiesenthal, he told me personally, said, "I just wanted you to know that Waldheim didn't do any of those things." He said, "Look, he was not in a position to do any of those things. What Waldheim's problem was, was that he was a fucking liar. He never should have lied in his book that he would ignore the fact that he was down there, that he was in a certain position, that he was a Nazi, and that he was doing a certain job. I mean he should have never cut that out or ignored it. He lied about it, said it was not true. He said, he's a fucking liar, not a criminal." I'm a big supporter of Simon Wiesenthal it was very interesting to talk to him about Waldheim and that kind of thing.

* The wedding was in fact about two months before the election.

The Good Works of Sargent Shriver

2011-01-18T16:57:00-05:00

The founder of the Peace Corps and leader of the War on Poverty has died. His biographer reflects on a remarkable legacy.

One of the more surreal moments during the seven years I worked on my biography of Sargent Shriver occurred fairly late in the process, when I was invited out to his house in Potomac, Maryland, for dinner one night. By this point, in the summer of 2003, Mr. Shriver had begun his descent into Alzheimer's, which was affecting his short-term memory and sometimes gave him trouble precisely identifying people at first. But his long-term memory was still good, and his analytical faculties remained for the most part intact, and he was always excellent company. So I was looking forward to meeting him that night and hearing his thoughts (which generally remained astute) on some chapters I had recently sent him.

He greeted me in the living room with his usual warmth and enthusiasm, eyes alight with pleasure. "Well, it's good to see you, you look ter-rific," he said, giving me a hearty handshake. I asked him how he was doing. "Fantastic," he said, escorting me to the liquor cabinet at the far end of the room. "Let me tell you about something great." And as he poured our drinks, he told me about what was on his mind.

Also by Scott Stossel:

Eunice the Formidable: Eunice Shriver thoroughly terrified her husband's biographer--and inspired his profound admiration. A reminiscence.

"Knifed": In 1968 the Kennedy family essentially blackballed a brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, who was very close to being chosen as Hubert Humphrey's running mate. In doing so, they may have accidentally thrown the election to Richard Nixon.

"Listen," he said. "This is the most amazing thing. There's this guy who is writing a book about me, and I've been reading chapters of it. It's spooky"--that was a favorite Shriver word--"how much information he's got about me. It's uncanny!"

My heart sank; this was catastrophic news. As I had labored month after month on the book, and one year had become two and then three and then seven, one of my fears was that someone would beat me to the punch. I mean, after all, here was one of the great underappreciated figures of modern American history--founder of the Peace Corps, commanding general of the War on Poverty, vice presidential candidate, and so much more besides--and no one had yet written a full-length biography of him. But now someone else was. And here was Shriver--using one of the signature motivational techniques he'd perfected while running the Peace Corps--goading me into working harder by letting me know that a competitor was tilling the same terrain. If I didn't want to get beaten, I'd better work faster, and better.

"Is that so?" I said weakly, eagerly waiting for him to finish filling my tumbler with scotch. I was going to need the drink.

Yes, he said, and he went on to regale me with some of the "amazing" tidbits this writer had unearthed, and all the hundreds of people he had interviewed, and my mood got bleaker and bleaker--this other guy seemed to have almost everything I did. How had I not gotten wind of this earlier? Great, I thought bitterly. Seven years of my life wasted. And then as Shriver went on, enthusiastically detailing what this other writer was doing, the light dawned: That other writer was me. Or, rather, Shriver didn't realize that I was me. Momentarily befogged by his Alzheimer's, he was telling me about my own book.

I let him go on for a few more minutes, just to make sure I was right. (Also, what an unusual opportunity: to get an uncensored opinion of your work from someone who doesn't know that the work is yours--and from someone whom, furthermore, the work happens to be about.) Then, as gently as I could, I steered him toward awareness. "Mr. Shriver," I said. "You're talking about my book, right? In that section on the founding of Head Start, do you think that I've managed to reconcile the conflicting views about where the idea originated?" And then something slipped into place in his mind and Shriver, with the grace and social skill that is characteristic of some Alzheimer's patients and that was even more characteristic of him, smoothly moved the conversation forward, and for the rest of the night--over drinks and dinner and coffee--he discussed the relevant chapters with lucidity and great enthusiasm.

For me, such moments are what stand out most memorably from my years of working with him on the book: Even as the disease robbed him of his memory, and sometimes of his logic, it did not rob him of his spirit--warm, ebullient, devout, inspiring--which was essential to all that he achieved.

One day in the summer of 1997, during the first week I spent intensively interviewing him at his summer home in Hyannis Port, we got to talking about his German ancestry, and about the summers he'd spent in Europe as a schoolboy in the 1930s. And that got him talking about his love of certain aspects of Germanic culture, which in turn got him talking about how years ago he and his son-in-law-to-be, Arnold Schwarzenegger, had bonded over their shared roots in that region of the world. We were sitting on the veranda overlooking the Atlantic Ocean (in my tapes of those interviews, his voice is sometimes inaudible over the sound of the wind blowing and the water lapping), and he suddenly stood up and said he had to go get something. Next thing I know, he's reappeared wearing the authentic leather lederhosen Schwarzenegger had brought him years ago from Austria. Shriver had, as he ruefully noted, put on weight since he received the gift, so he sort of had to jam himself into them, and was spilling out a little over the top, and his eighty-two-year-old legs were poking out the bottom of the shorts, and he had to leave the leather shoulder straps unfastened, and he generally looked ridiculous. Yet when we continued the interview, he still in his lederhosen, talking about how his eighteenth-century forebears had fled the wars of Europe, he was completely unselfconscious and, as always, charismatic.

At that point I was only beginning to get a handle on all that Shriver had accomplished, but I would soon come to grasp how it was that a guy who would so enthusiastically and unselfconsciously don such ridiculous garb for a biographer he barely knew could be such an effective leader. In fact, during the years he led the Peace Corps, it was sometimes precisely that sort of behavior that made him so effective, especially in winning the affections of people in Peace Corps countries abroad, because he would throw himself with such abandon into the folkways and traditions of the local culture. (This was vitally important for America during the years when the Cold War threatened to go hot.)

Indeed, while Shriver's commitment to service was utterly serious, and his intellect, despite murmurings by less charismatic competitors that he was a "lightweight," was penetrating (and he didn't always suffer fools gladly), what kept him from becoming ponderous or intimidating-as his formidable and amazingly accomplished wife, Eunice, could sometimes be-was that remarkable lightness of spirit.

I won't spend much time here rehearsing his many achievements and his historical importance--I spent more than 700 pages doing that in my book. But I do want to emphasize a few things. As I wrote in the biography, Shriver's achievements make him one of the major figures of the second half of the twentieth century. Among many other things, those accomplishments include:

His pivotal role in getting John F. Kennedy elected President in 1960;
Leading JFK's "talent hunt," staffing the cabinet and the upper levels of the Administration;
Founding and leading the Peace Corps;
Launching Head Start, Legal Services for the Poor, VISTA, and many other programs critical to the War on Poverty;
Presiding over the Paris Peace Talks on Vietnam;
Helping his wife to found the Special Olympics;
Cultivating a generation of public servants who will continue to exert a powerful influence on American history for years to come.

It is, as my wife (herself a former Head Start teacher) said recently, "criminal" that Shriver is not better known. (She also says that no one she has ever met better exemplified the best parts of the Christian faith.) And a good case can be made that Shriver, through the programs he started and ran, and through the generation of public servants he inspired, may have positively affected more people around the world than any twentieth century American who was not a President or other major elected official or Martin Luther King.

One of the things that I hope comes across in my book is that inscribed in Shriver's character is the compulsion to make the world a better place. At the end of every day, starting when he was in high school, he would ask himself, in effect, What have I done to improve the lot of humanity? Even into his eighties and nineties, when he should have been playing golf and resting on his laurels, he was still trying to do more--traveling the world on behalf of Special Olympics, raising money for public service programs, helping his children strategize about their various charities and political activities. When his Alzheimer's disease deepened, what seemed to remain was a fixation on two things: his love for his wife Eunice, and that we should all be working to make life better and more peaceful and more just for our fellow humans.

For me, exposure to Shriver was a revelation. I grew up in the shadow of Vietnam, Watergate, the hostage crisis, stagflation, oil crises, impeachment, and later 9/11 and the War on Terror. Public service, for my generation, often seems to be a hollow or futile thing. It can be hard even to say the words "make the world a better place" without having them stick in your throat, so hopelessly naïve and lacking in irony do they sound. For Shriver's generation, their experience of government and of public service was much different. They saw the New Deal help lift millions from Depression; they saw the Allies defeat Totalitarianism; they saw the post-War boom, the Civil Rights movement, and America put a man on the moon, just like JFK said we would. So much that he'd seen and done had instilled in him the faith that public service could be a powerful and positive force; so little that I've seen has conveyed that.

Shriver's voice, then, is a voice from a more hopeful past. But while he was in part a product of his times, his optimism and idealism and commitment to service transcend the particularities of his time and circumstance. His career is a rebuke to cynical journalist types like me who focus on what's wrong with things, what's "realistic," what can't be done. Often the things that he accomplished (starting the Peace Corps in just a few months, or getting 500,000 kids into Head Start programs its first summer when the "experts" said that 10,000 kids was the maximum feasible) were things that everyone beforehand had said were not realistic, or downright impossible. Shriver had a gift for what one of his old War on Poverty colleagues called "expanding the Horizons of the Possible." In my darkest moments of despair over my biography of him, when I had a half-written, 1,000-page pile of garbage, and I'd think to myself that I'd never be finished, and that this wasn't worth pursuing, I'd tell myself, For God's sake, Shriver ran the Peace Corps and the War on Poverty--at the same time, while raising five kids!--so you can damn well finish this book.

I tend to think of myself as a pretty cynical guy. I am not easy to inspire. But Shriver awakened in me--just as he did in thousands of others--the notion that it is always worthwhile to work harder, to do more, and to dream bigger about achieving peace and social justice.

A final note about his faith. The root of Shriver's self-conception was as a lay Catholic who always tried to model his life after the ethics of Jesus as expressed in the Gospels. This has not been a passive pursuit. Always he was asking himself, Am I living my life as Christ would want me to?

What he derived from his faith was less the solace of Lord's presence, or the promise of transcendence in the hereafter (though he did derive both of those qualities from his faith) than a kind of mobilizing vision for action here on earth. It is telling that in the 1930s Shriver invited Dorothy Day to speak at his undergraduate institution, Yale. Shriver's Catholicism was in some ways analogous to Day's: rooted in the ethics of the Christian Gospels; dedicated to working toward peace, social justice, and redemption of suffering here on earth; and concerned especially with the easing the plight of the poor and the disabled.

In some ways, Shriver and I were as different as can be: him an optimist about human nature, me a pessimist; him devoutly faithful, me a struggling agnostic. But I am nonetheless unequivocally sure of two things. First, if there is a heaven, Sargent Shriver is on his way there now--or no one is. Second, even if there is no heaven, his legacy of good works here on earth is an inspiration and a goad for all of us to do more and better.

Thumbnail image credit: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library/Wikimedia Commons

Eunice the Formidable

2009-08-14T23:27:00-04:00

Eunice Kennedy Shriver terrified me. In fact for many months in the summer and fall of 2003, it’s fair to say, she was the bane of my existence.

Every time her number came up on my caller ID, I’d cringe. I’d answer the phone, and she’d start right in, without so much as a hello. “Eunice Shriver,” she’d say, announcing herself, and then continue without pausing, “On the third page of chapter six, you’ve got it all wrong about Daddy.” Sometimes she wouldn’t even announce herself: “You still haven’t changed that bit about the mentally handicapped and Head Start,” she’d say, and then launch into a litany of other offenses I’d allegedly committed against her family or against history. I was in the final stages of writing and revising a biography of her husband, Sargent Shriver, and she had inserted herself quite forcefully into the process.

I believe the biography gave a full picture of Sarge Shriver—it captured the positive and the negative about him—but on balance it presents the man as an American hero and an underappreciated mover of history; I believe Sarge to be a great and good man, and I think the book conveys that. But for Eunice, no detail was too small to quibble and obsess over, especially if it pertained to the Kennedy family. I spent many hours over many days in her office at the Kennedy Foundation in Washington, dickering over portrayals of this program or that person. “I don’t think Bobby ever did that,” she’d say about something her brother Robert Kennedy had done to her husband. I’d cite my sources, and explain why I put things the way I did. “I don’t think so,” she’d insist, in contravention of the facts. We’d go over a chapter and I’d think she was done with it and I’d fly back home to Boston. And then a week later I’d be summoned back to Washington to go over the same chapter again. Throughout all this, I tried to maintain a steadfast stance of “I’ll take all this under advisement.” But sometimes if she felt I was being too resistant to her point of view she would hint ominously that she would have my publishing contract canceled. I didn’t know whether she had the power to do this, but I was afraid she might. Once, when I was doing research in the files of the Kennedy Foundation, I saw a large stack of what looked like book manuscripts piled on a shelf. I asked the Foundation archivist what they were and her response was chilling: “Those are histories of the Kennedy Foundation, or of Special Olympics, that Mrs. Shriver commissioned and then cancelled.”

Of course, Eunice had good reason to be skeptical of journalists. Decades of coverage of her family—some of it accurate and merited, much of it scurrilous and reprehensible—had made her wary. I first met her in the summer of 1997, when I stayed at the Shriver home in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, interviewing her husband. After I’d spent my first full day taping conversations with Sarge, discussing his service in World War II and his role as director of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, she took me aside and asked me coldly and directly if I could be trusted. She clearly didn’t like the idea of a writer she didn’t know skulking around the premises. Not knowing how else to respond, I said I could be trusted. She didn’t look convinced.

But over the course of that summer, she grew warmer toward me. And while my initial fear of her never dissipated, my respect and admiration for her grew and grew, eventually coalescing into something like awe. Partly this was because of what I was learning about her through my research: the many medical ailments she had endured and overcome (when she was young her chronic stomach trouble had emaciated her and led her family to call her “punie Eunie”); her early work on juvenile delinquency; her political acumen (“if that girl had been born with balls,” her father once memorably told a friend, “she would have been one hell of a politician”); her mother-bear-like protectiveness of her family; and of course her nearly single-handed role in literally revolutionizing the way the world sees the mentally handicapped. But partly my awe and respect derived from what I saw firsthand. She could be brusque, abrupt-to-the-point-of-rudeness, and mercilessly direct in asking something of a policymaker (in the early 1960s, President Kennedy would joke to Bobby Kennedy, “Let’s give Eunice whatever she wants so I can get her off the phone and get on with the business of the government”). And then five minutes later she could be warm and encouraging in her interaction with a Special Olympics athlete with Downs Syndrome.

She could also be savagely funny, and she exuded a youthful vigor that belied her age and frailty. I watched her, in her early eighties, engage in mad dance parties with her young grandchildren—once she grabbed me and made me join in. She possessed the fierce Kennedy competitiveness and love of intramural family skirmishing. One of the most indelible images from the summer of 1997 was a relay race of Kennedys on the lawn at Hyannisport. There were two teams consisting of several grandkids, ages ranging from around two to seven, one team anchored by Eunice and the other by her brother Ted Kennedy. As the baton was passed to the anchors, Senator Kennedy, then in his sixties, had a lead of several yards. Eunice, then in her late seventies, sprinted past him to cross the finish line. As she did, she looked back and yelled, “Hurry up, fatso!”

She had so much energy—physical energy, intellectual energy, nervous energy. In the book I wrote that “she is so full of nervous energy that even in repose she seems to give off an audible whir, like an overheating computer or household appliance.” She channeled almost all of that energy—sometimes ruthlessly—into good works.

The more I learned about her, the more of an honor it felt to have been traumatized by her relentless perfectionism. Her husband, her kids, her brothers—all of them had at one time or another been terrorized, and improved, by her. One day in the mid-1960s, Bobby Kennedy was scheduled to spend a day taping television advertisements with Democratic Senators and Congressmen running for re-election. He had taped spots with a few of the Congressmen, but had many more still to do when an aide reported that Eunice wanted to meet with him, and was calling repeatedly. Bobby started packing up to go. The aide was aghast—was Bobby really going to blow off a passel of Congressmen? “Look,” Bobby said, “Who do you think it’s worse to keep waiting: a bunch of Congressmen? Or my sister?”

Her vitality was such that she seemed indestructible. (I once joked to her that it was she, and not her son-in-law, who should be called The Terminator.) She survived multiple car crashes and life-threatening medical conditions. At least three times in recent decades Sarge summoned priests to administer Last Rites—only to have her surprise everyone by surviving. In the summer of 2001, the day before her 80th birthday, she was involved in a car accident that shattered one of her legs. I spent two afternoons interviewing her a few weeks later. Her leg was immobilized in a giant cast and she was confined to her bed at her home in Potomac, Maryland. I’d perch on the foot of her bed and put the tape recorder between us. You’d have thought that she—80 years old, with a shattered leg—would have been subdued. Not at all. Wearing a baggy nightdress, her grey hair splayed out in every direction, seeming completely unselfconscious about her appearance, she barked commands from the bed like it was the bridge of a ship: making phone calls to discuss Special Olympics business, ringing a bell to summon her secretary or the nurse who was tending to her leg, and answering my questions with acute intelligence. (In response to my asking whether Sarge had gotten Kennedy Administration jobs, such as running the Peace Corps, just because he was a member of the family, she responded sharply “He got the job because he was bright. If you’re not bright, you don’t get it. That’s the rule in my family. You know, if you’re bright, you’re smart, you’re attractive, and you’re a workaholic, my family will pay attention to you. But only under those conditions. And Sarge was all of those things.”)

She could be difficult, and she could be fearsome; though I grew fond of her, and she stopped actively making my life miserable, she never stopped terrifying me. She was, quite simply, the most formidable woman I have ever met. Her legacy is profound and inspiring.

North Korea: The War Game

2005-07-01T12:00:00-04:00

On the third weekend in March, while America was transfixed by the most exciting NCAA basketball tournament in years, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in the Far East, in the midst of a series of meetings with her opposite numbers in six Asian countries. Arriving in Seoul, South Korea, on Saturday, she boarded a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and flew to Command Post Tango, the underground bunker that would be the nerve center for the U.S. military in the event of a war against North Korea. While not quite on the order of Ariel Sharon's parading around the Temple Mount in Israel, Rice's move was undeniably provocative. No high-ranking American official had ever visited the bunker before—and the choice of a military site as the secretary of state's first stop seemed to represent a gentle rattling of the sword. What's more, Rice spoke against a backdrop of computers and television screens monitoring the 20,000 South Korean and American soldiers who were at that very moment engaging in one of their regular war-game exercises—practicing, in effect, to fight a war with North Korea no sane person hopes ever to see.

The North Koreans responded by rattling their sword right back. First they announced they were boosting their nuclear arsenal, as a “deterrent” against U.S. attack. And then, apparently, they began to act: a few weeks after Rice's visit, U.S. spy satellites detected a reduction in activity at the Yongbyon nuclear reactor. Possibly this meant that the reactor had run into mechanical trouble; more probably, it meant that the North Koreans had shut down the plant to withdraw spent fuel rods in order to reprocess them into fissile material for nuclear weapons. What was clear was that the situation represented a grave international crisis.

Last year The Atlantic addressed a similar crisis—this one centering on Iran's nuclear ambitions—by conducting a war game that simulated preparations for a U.S. assault ("Will Iran Be Next?" by James Fallows, December 2004). As Sam Gardiner, the retired Air Force colonel who ran the simulation, put it, the exercise was designed to produce a “clarifying effect” by compelling participants to think through the implications of certain decisions and plans of action. The result was a bracing corrective to the notion that Iran's nuclear capacity could be taken out with a quick military strike.

The North Korean situation is also ripe for war-game treatment, because of the extraordinarily difficult military and diplomatic challenges it presents. Iran, considered an urgent national-security priority, is thought to be three to five years away from possessing even a single nuclear device. North Korea is widely believed to have as many as ten already, and to be producing more every year. (It is also the first developing nation thought to be capable of striking the continental United States with a long-range ballistic missile.) And whereas Iraq did not, after all, have weapons of mass destruction, North Korea is believed to have large stockpiles of chemical weapons (mustard gas, sarin, VX nerve agent) and biological weapons (anthrax, botulism, cholera, hemorrhagic fever, plague, smallpox, typhoid, yellow fever). An actual war on the Korean peninsula would almost certainly be the bloodiest America has fought since Vietnam—possibly since World War II. In recent years Pentagon experts have estimated that the first ninety days of such a conflict might produce 300,000 to 500,000 South Korean and American military casualties, along with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. The damage to South Korea alone would rock the global economy.

All-out war, however, is not the only—or even the gravest—threat North Korea currently poses to U.S. security. For some years now the fear that has kept homeland-defense experts awake at night is that terrorists will detonate a nuclear bomb in an American city. In fact, the danger that Saddam Hussein would sell nukes to terrorists was a basic rationale for invading Iraq in at least some of the Bush administration's iterations of it. But North Korea is, if anything, more likely than Saddam to do so, if it hasn't already. The country's weak economy has owed its continued functioning in part to the income from vast smuggling networks (primarily for drugs and counterfeit foreign currency) and sales of missiles and other arms to such fellow outlaw nations as Libya, Iran, Syria, and Iraq. At some point the North Koreans may decide they have more than enough nuclear weapons for their own purposes and sell the extras for cash. The longer North Korea keeps producing nukes, in other words, the greater the likelihood that one will find its way to New York or Washington.

Unfortunately, trying to take out the regime's nuclear sites with surgical strikes—an iffy proposition at best, since we don't know where some of the sites are—might provoke a horrific war. And trying to create regional nuclear deterrence by allowing South Korea, Japan, and even Taiwan to become nuclear powers would undermine the global nonproliferation system that has been in place for more than forty years. The North Korean regime may be fundamentally undeterrable anyway: President Kim Jong Il has reportedly said that he would “destroy the world” or “take the world with me” before accepting defeat on the battlefield. And as bad as Kim is, what comes after him could be worse. A complete collapse of the regime might lead not only to enormous refugee problems for China and South Korea but also, in effect, to a weapons-of-mass-destruction yard sale for smugglers.

There are still other dangers. If we did successfully invade, our troops would be likely to eventually find themselves near North Korea's Chinese border. The last time that happened, in 1950, the Chinese counterinvaded. (A 1961 treaty obliges China to do so again in the event of an attack on North Korea.) Meanwhile, other nations—most notably Iran—are watching carefully to see whether North Korea will be allowed to become an official nuclear power without reprisal.

All of which is to say that any move in North Korea is fraught with potentially disastrous implications. Time is not on our side, as the shutdown of the Yongbyon reactor in April makes clear; the longer we wait to take action, the more nuclear weapons Kim Jong Il may build, and the more threatening he will become. Something needs to be done. But what?

* * *

The seeds of the current crisis were planted late in the winter of 1993, when North Korea declared that proposed International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of two of its nuclear sites represented an unwarranted violation of sovereignty. The Kim regime subsequently threatened to begin converting 8,000 spent fuel rods from its Yongbyon plant into weaponizable nuclear material. As tensions rose, Pyongyang became more belligerent, at one point reminding the South Koreans that it wouldn't be hard to turn Seoul into “a sea of fire.” The United States, for its part, contemplated pre-emptive strikes on Yongbyon.

By the spring of 1994 the United States was probably closer to nuclear war than it had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. On June 15 President Clinton and others sat in the White House Cabinet Room listening to Secretary of Defense William Perry present an array of military options against North Korea. Clinton was preparing to evacuate American civilians from the country when word came that Jimmy Carter—who was in Pyongyang as an independent citizen, not as an official emissary of the Clinton administration—had reached a preliminary deal with the North Koreans and was about to go on CNN to announce the terms. The parties returned to the negotiating table, and in October of 1994 they signed the so-called Agreed Framework. In exchange for North Korea's freezing nuclear-weapons development, the United States, South Korea, and Japan would supply Pyongyang with light-water nuclear reactors and with 500,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil annually.

Congressional Republicans attacked the agreement, calling it “appeasement.” The North Koreans eventually cheated on it, a fact nobody disputes; but some have argued that the Agreed Framework was a success despite the cheating. It averted an imminent war, and it shut down the North Korean plutonium program for nine years—thereby limiting Pyongyang's arsenal to one or two nuclear weapons as of 2002, rather than the nearly 100 it might otherwise have been able to develop by then.

In the summer of 2002 U.S. intelligence discovered that the North Koreans had secretly restarted their weapons development using highly enriched uranium. When Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly went to Pyongyang in October of 2002 to confront the North Koreans, he expected them to deny the existence of the uranium program. They didn't; in fact, evidently they soon restarted their plutonium program, by continuing to reprocess the 8,000 spent fuel rods from Yongbyon (which had been in storage since the signing of the Agreed Framework). In October of 2003 the North Koreans said they had finished the reprocessing—meaning, if true, that they had enough fissile material for up to six new nuclear weapons. The Bush administration, not wanting to appear to reward bad behavior, has since adamantly refused to negotiate directly with the North Koreans. Six-party talks involving China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea—regional powers that the Bush administration hoped could help hold the Kim regime to account—began in August of 2003, but after the third round of talks, last June, the North Koreans pulled out, demanding direct bilateral negotiations with the United States.

* * *

All this loomed in the background when, six days after Condoleezza Rice's visit to Command Post Tango, The Atlantic convened a North Korea war game of its own, in Washington, D.C. The assembled knowledge was extensive, and the range of Washington viewpoints more or less complete—hawk to dove, right to left, neocon to realist.

As in our Iran war game, Colonel Sam Gardiner led the proceedings. (Gardiner has run war games for more than twenty years at the National War College and various other military institutions; the strategy that General Tommy Franks used to seize Baghdad in 2003 had its origins in a game Gardiner had designed some fifteen years earlier.) And once again the premise of the game was a meeting of the “Principals Committee”—the highest-ranking national-security officials of an imaginary U.S. presidential administration—to generate recommendations for the president. Gardiner explained that he would be presenting to the principals a military briefing from the perspective of the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM).

Playing the part of the CIA director was David Kay—a man well equipped for this job. In the early 1990s Kay served as the chief nuclear-weapons inspector for the IAEA and the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq, and in June of 2003 he was asked by the actual CIA director to lead the Iraq Survey Group that searched for (and never found) WMD in Iraq after the U.S. invasion.

The secretary of state in this exercise was Robert Gallucci. The dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, at Georgetown University, Gallucci has extensive real-world experience in dealing with North Korea. In 1994 he served as the Clinton administration's chief negotiator with the North Koreans during the crisis that ultimately produced the Agreed Framework. Gallucci did not have to overtax his imagination for this simulation: he had been present at the real versions of such meetings in the White House, including one in June of 1994, when the president considered ordering military strikes on the Yongbyon reactor.

Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, who spent thirty-five years in the U.S. Air Force as a pilot, a commander, and a strategic planner, played the role of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. McInerney conducted flight reconnaissance missions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and later completed four tours of duty in Vietnam. From the late 1970s to the early 1990s he served predominantly in the Pacific theater. While there he watched by means of satellite photography as the North Koreans constructed bunkers and artillery installations in the mountains north of Seoul. A military analyst for Fox News, McInerney last year argued in Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror (written with Paul E. Vallelly) that the key to stopping the spread of terrorism is regime change. McInerney thinks we should invade not only North Korea (if it doesn't give up its nuclear program) but also Syria (if it doesn't end its support of terrorism and surrender the WMD that he believes were smuggled there from Iraq) and Saudi Arabia (if Islamic radicals seize power there).

Filling the newly created position of director of national intelligence was Jessica Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (Mathews and McInerney had clashed over Iraq, and their animosity was easy to see; this lent extra verisimilitude to the exercise, since personal disputes over policy often color debates within administrations.) Mathews directed the National Security Council's Office of Global Issues from 1977 to 1979, and served as deputy to the undersecretary of state for global affairs under President Clinton.

Rounding out the Principals Committee was Kenneth Adelman, who would be serving as secretary of defense. A current member of the Defense Policy Board, Adelman has held a number of positions in Republican administrations. In the mid-1970s he was assistant to President Ford's secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld; later he was a key member of Ronald Reagan's foreign-policy team, serving for two years as deputy UN ambassador and for four years as head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Like Gallucci and Mathews, Adelman is a veteran of real NSC meetings.

* * *

“Let's play,” Sam Gardiner said. He announced that he had a memo from the Pentagon asking for a review of the status of our plans for North Korea. He reminded the group that it had been two and a half years since we had told the North Koreans we knew about their clandestine uranium-enrichment program, and nearly two years since international six-party talks had begun—yet the crisis had if anything only deepened.

Gardiner reviewed some of the basic facts about North Korea's conventional military capabilities. The North Korean People's Army, he observed, is the fifth biggest military in the world, with more than 1.2 million active-duty troops and 7 million reservists. One of the most notable components of the People's Army is its highly trained Special Operations Forces—the North Korean equivalent of Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard. Consisting of some 125,000 troops, the SOF may be the largest such force in the world. In the event of a conflict on the peninsula, Gardiner said, we would find ourselves not only engaging these troops along the border but also combating their sneak attacks from the rear. Displaying a PowerPoint slide that depicted North Korean tunneling operations along the demilitarized zone since the 1970s, Gardiner observed that the SOF would get behind the front lines not only through hidden tunnels that U.S. and South Korean intelligence agencies have yet to find (one of them, according to the journalist Jasper Becker's new book, Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea, is large enough for 30,000 infantrymen to pass through in an hour) but also in small aircraft, boats, and midget submarines. We're improving our ability to contend with the SOF, Gardiner said. But it remains a “big deal.”

Next he summarized the North Korean missile program: the medium-range No-Dong missiles that can hit Japan; the 1,200-mile Taepo Dong 1 missiles; and the Taepo Dong 2, which could theoretically strike the continental United States. The Taepo Dong 2, Gardiner said, “changes the strategic equation significantly.”

Gardiner paused to get initial assessments from the Principals Committee. CIA Director David Kay responded first, noting that what confounds policymaking on North Korea is how little anyone actually knows about the country. “We believe a lot,” he observed. “We actually know very little.” Kay thought that the principal objective of U.S. intelligence at this point should be to determine the extent of any connection between North Korea's nuclear program and groups outside the country.

Secretary of State Gallucci spoke next. “This is a country,” he said, “that has exported ballistic missiles when no other country on earth is exporting ballistic missiles—a country that has threatened explicitly to export nuclear material.” What is so frightening about this prospect, Gallucci said, is that traditional deterrent methods won't work. “If there's an incident,” he continued, “the worst we can imagine, the detonation of a weapon in an American city, will we have attribution? Will we be able to track it back to North Korea? Is there any deterrence against [the export of nuclear materials] by a desperate state?”

Secretary of Defense Adelman disagreed with the idea that we don't know what North Korea's intentions are. “We do know what North Korea's strategy is: it is obviously to deter us from attacking them like we attacked Iraq.” Adelman said he thought there was “no hope” of changing North Korea's behavior through conventional diplomacy. “Having talks as an objective of U.S. policy is a diplomatic move that gets you nothing,” he said. “I know Winston Churchill said it's better to jaw-jaw than to war-war, but there's lots of jaw-jawing that leads to war-war, or that has nothing to do with war-war. So let's not spend time on whether we should get back to ‘talks.’” Instead, Adelman said, we should try to induce the Chinese to lean on the North Koreans to give up their nuclear program. How? By scaring them with the prospect of a nuclear South Korea, a nuclear Japan, and possibly a nuclear Taiwan. Once the Chinese recognize that they'll soon be looking at multiple nuclear powers in the region if they don't force the North Koreans to disarm, Adelman argued, they'll be compelled to use leverage against North Korea—by, for example, cutting off its food and fuel supplies.

Director of National Intelligence Mathews returned to Kay's point regarding how little we really know of North Korea. We know far less about North Korea's nuclear program than we do about Iran's, she said. “Uncertainty is the thing that has to underlie the rest of our discussion. There's very little we can say that we know with confidence, either politically or technically, about North Korea.” She agreed with Kay and Gallucci about the real danger to our national security: “This is a regime that will sell anything.” And she disagreed with Adelman about whether the Chinese could effectively influence the North Koreans. The Chinese, she pointed out, would be reluctant to do anything that might topple the regime and cause a huge flow of refugees across their border.

Finally, Mathews said that we have never really tested whether the right combination of political promises, security assurances, and economic aid would induce the North Koreans to give up their nuclear weapons. “I'm not saying they would give up their nuclear weapons,” she said. “I'm saying we don't know the answer to this absolutely crucial question.” Before we resort to more extreme measures, she said, we ought to try to answer it. She proposed that we begin by offering to sign a treaty formally ending the Korean War. (Hostilities ceased in 1953 with the signing of an armistice and the drawing of the DMZ, along the 38th parallel—but no peace treaty was signed, which means that technically the United States and North Korea are still at war.)

“That would say something to a paranoid regime,” Mathews continued. “It doesn't mean anything to us; we don't think the Korean War is still going on. But it says something to them. It may be a very valuable bargaining chip, and we've never spent it.”

Joint Chiefs Chairman McInerney agreed that the greatest national-security threat posed by North Korea was nuclear transfer, and he echoed Gallucci's concern that deterrence will not protect against nuclear terrorism. General McInerney was more willing than the other principals to contemplate military action, and more sanguine about how easy a war with North Korea would be to win. “I don't think we're concerned that they could overrun the South, because they can't,” he said. “Militarily, we are far superior to them. Would there be a lot of carnage? Yes, there'd be a lot of carnage. Would we win? Yes, we would win. Would we win quicker than we did in Operation Iraqi Freedom? Optimistically, I'd say we could. More likely, it would take an extra month. But the fact is, we would win.”

To prevent North Korea's nuclear capability from creating an imbalance of power, McInerney proposed stationing U.S. nuclear weapons in South Korea and Japan. During the Cold War, he explained, various NATO countries “sat alert” on U.S. nuclear weapons. The weapons were on European aircraft, but the United States dictated when they could be deployed.

North Korea, he conceded, has the potential to use Seoul, which lies only thirty-five miles south of the DMZ, as a “hostage”—to threaten to turn it into that “sea of fire.” But he strenuously disagreed that this means “a military option is not thinkable,” as some U.S. policymakers say. “A military option is clearly thinkable, and doable," he argued. "If threatened with the transfer of nuclear weapons from North Korea to terrorists, we have to do something.”

* * *

Gardiner, in his role as PACOM commander, resumed his briefing. He displayed a map of Korea that depicted the expected North Korean attack routes. Because of the mountainous terrain along the border, the conventional forces of the People's Army would be limited to a few corridors that would be highly vulnerable to U.S. air power. The bottom line: we could easily repel a conventional ground attack.

But, he continued, there are two degrees of desirable victory: “swiftly defeating” the bad guys, and “winning decisively.” In a swift defeat escalation is controlled; victory is rapid enough that the conflict remains limited and conventional. In winning decisively the scope of the victory and the number of troops on the ground are sufficient to carry out postwar stability operations. In Iraq, U.S. forces swiftly defeated the enemy (the war was quick and didn't metastasize) but did not win decisively (a big reason why the military aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom has been so protracted).

Gardiner explained that to control escalation in North Korea, the United States, using its air power, would first have to take out North Korea's aging air force. Though many enemy aircraft are bunkered in mountain redoubts, this would be easy. But one major problem could keep us from taking rapid control of the peninsula: chemical weapons. Citing congressional testimony given by General Leon LaPorte, the commander of U.S. forces in Korea, Gardiner said that North Korea's chemical weapons could be a “showstopper.” “The chemical-weapon thing is big,” he said. “We have reason to believe that the chemical weapons are with the forward artillery units that are targeting Seoul. If we don't get those early, we end up with chemicals on Seoul.”

Next Gardiner projected a PowerPoint slide showing the range of a Taepo Dong 1 missile overlaid on a map of East Asia. It demonstrated that such a missile launched from the Korean peninsula could reach not only Tokyo, Okinawa, and Beijing but also the U.S. base in Guam. To prevent escalation, Gardiner said, we would need to take out the No-Dong and Taepo Dong missile sites quickly—which would not be easy, because we don't know where those missiles are. Many are hidden in underground bunkers throughout North Korea. The PACOM commander's conclusion: “It's a difficult target set, but we can do it.”

We would also, of course, need to take out the nuclear sites. Gardiner flashed a map of North Korea's known nuclear-related facilities on the screen, and then showed a series of satellite photos of various WMD targets. Many of the targets were tucked away in underground tunnels or at least partially obscured by what arrows on the photos labeled as “hill masses.” “You begin to see how difficult a target set this is,” Gardiner said.

“Is that a euphemism for undoable?” Secretary of Defense Adelman asked.

“No, not at all,” Gardiner said. General McInerney practically jumped out of his chair to say “No!”

Gardiner continued, explaining that the first few days of the fight would be critical if we were to have any chance of protecting Seoul. To do so, we would have to get the chemical-delivery systems, the missile sites, and the nuclear sites before the North Koreans had a chance to use them. To accomplish all this we would need to carry out 4,000 air sorties a day in the first days of the conflict. In Iraq, in contrast, we had carried out 800 a day.

Director of National Intelligence Mathews disagreed that Seoul could be shielded: “My understanding is that we cannot protect Seoul, at least for the first twenty-four hours of a war, and maybe for the first forty-eight.” McInerney disputed this, and Mathews asked him to explain.

McInerney: “There's a difference between ‘protecting’ Seoul and [limiting] the amount of damage Seoul may take.”

Mathews: “There are a hundred thousand Americans in Seoul, not to mention ten million South Koreans.”

McInerney: “A lot of people are going to die, Jessica. But you still prevail.”

Mathews: “I just think we've got to be really careful. We've got to protect Seoul. If your daughter were living in Seoul, I don't think you would feel the U.S. military could protect her in those first twenty-four hours.”

McInerney: “No, I do. I believe that we have the capability—whether from pre-emption or response—to minimize the casualties in Seoul.”

Mathews: “‘Minimize’ to roughly what level? A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand?”

McInerney: “I think a hundred thousand or less.”

Only a hard-nosed military strategist, of course, can contemplate 100,000 casualties as coolly as McInerney did. He went on to argue that—assuming 4,000 sorties a day, and given our current targeting technology, combined with the fact that the artillery systems firing on Seoul would be fairly concentrated around the DMZ—we would be able to mitigate the lethality of North Korean strikes on Seoul. Gallucci added that the North Koreans would be foolish to waste their artillery on Seoul. “It is insane for them if they are engaged in ground combat,” Gallucci said. “They're going to be in desperate need of that artillery for support of ground operations.”

McInerney agreed: “If they try to use Seoul as an artillery target, we would destroy their army that much quicker.”

Secretary of Defense Adelman was skeptical that the North Koreans would use the same strategy to “break through” that they had when they successfully overran the South in 1950. David Kay reminded everybody that one key difference between 1950 and today is that North Korea may now have “between one and ten nukes, and adequate delivery methods,” meaning “they can take out Seoul without using a single artillery round—and I haven't seen anything here that shows we can mitigate that.” When McInerney began to argue that maybe we could disable their nuclear missiles before they were fired, Kay retorted, “Our record of attacking mobile missiles in Iraq is not very good.”

“That's why our policy must clearly state that for every nuke they use, we will use a hundred,” McInerney said.

The other members of the Principals Committee seemed taken aback by this statement.

Gardiner tried to resume his briefing by summing up the sentiment of the committee. “None of the military options is easy—”

Adelman interrupted. “That's a euphemism. Let's talk directly: it would be disastrous.”

Mathews agreed. “We can only reach the targets we know about. You can't target targets you don't know about, and there are a whole bunch of them.”

“And some targets we do know about, but we don't know where they are,” Kay added. “And that's most of the missile force.”

The consensus was that Seoul could not be guaranteed protection. And McInerney, who dissented from that consensus, was projecting up to 100,000 casualties in South Korea in the first few days.

* * *

Gardiner moved on to the next phase of his briefing, which involved placing the North Korean situation in the context of the U.S. military's other global commitments. President Bush, he reminded the principals, has said that “all options are on the table” with respect to Iran. But if all options (including invasion) are truly on the table for dealing with Iran, Gardiner announced, “then I have to tell you that we cannot do this operation—either in defense or pre-emption—on the peninsula.” There simply aren't enough available troops. Hundreds of thousands of troops are tied up because of Iraq. Tens or hundreds of thousands more would be required for Iran, even if we intended only to make a credible show of force rather than actually invade.

Gardiner also pointed out that U.S. military planners have called for a drawdown in the number of American troops stationed in South Korea over the next few years—from 37,500 in 2004 to 25,000 by 2008. Because of our overwhelming air and naval superiority, we still have the “overmatching” capability to defeat a conventional attack. But, he said, “I can't assure that we can swiftly defeat or win decisively.” He also said that as the size of his force diminished, he was losing his capacity to deter a North Korean attack.

David Kay observed that since the greatest national-security threat, everyone agreed, was not a North Korean invasion of South Korea but, rather, the North Korean transfer of nuclear material to terrorists, the essential question was how big a force was needed for a pre-emptive attack, not how big a force was needed to deter invasion.

Gardiner argued that we have the capability to deter the North Koreans from either course by threatening to launch nuclear weapons at them. He emphasized that he wasn't recommending that we launch nukes—only saying that a nuclear deterrent might work on the peninsula the way it did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. McInerney agreed, and once again proposed lending some of our nuclear weapons to South Korea and Japan as a deterrent against the North. Gardiner recommended a strategy short of that: we should announce publicly, he suggested, that we are moving nuclear weapons—along with nuclear-capable aircraft and missiles—to Guam, and then keep them there as a deterrent while so many of our troops are tied down elsewhere.

Adelman said, “We have got to decide in this group whether to recommend to the president that we use the standard deterrence approach we have used for years”—that is, keeping a strong conventional force on the peninsula—“or whether we want to take a different approach and have less U.S. involvement in this thing.” Adelman recommended the latter course, which he said would compel the South Koreans, the Japanese, and the Chinese to deal with the problem.

“You're forgetting the whole history of U.S. nonproliferation policy,” Mathews said. “You're encouraging Japan to go nuclear.”

“I'm not forgetting,” Adelman said. “I may be overriding it.”

Nobody else was comfortable with the idea of a nuclear Japan; Kay and Mathews objected that it would undermine long-standing U.S. policy, and McInerney objected because he thought existing treaties obliged us to keep Japan and South Korea under our own nuclear umbrella. Mathews proposed that they move on to the next item, since it was clear that “on this point we're going to have to go to the president with divided opinion.”

Before moving on, however, Gardiner wanted to come to consensus about where to draw the “red line” (or lines), the crossing of which would trigger international sanctions—and perhaps ultimately a pre-emptive strike by U.S. forces. There was some discussion of whether a nuclear-weapons test would constitute a red-line violation. For Gallucci, it was the transfer of fissile material. “That needs not only to be laid down as a red line but reinforced repeatedly,” he said.

“Would you do a pre-emptive attack if transfer happens?” Adelman asked.

“I would mean what I said: ‘We will not tolerate that. And we will act against you.’ That's all I would tell them.”

“But in this room what would you say?” Gardiner asked.

Gallucci responded haltingly. “I would strike at whatever facility—within the context of our capabilities, the protection of Seoul. And I would ask for good advice on how we would do this to protect ourselves. But I would, either immediately or in the fullness of time, use force to end that regime.”

McInerney was blunter. “I would say to the North Koreans, ‘If a nuclear weapon or weapons go off in the United States, you are a target’”—even if we don't know for sure that North Korea was responsible.

Gallucci didn't want to do that. “The idea that if a nuclear weapon were detonated in an American city without attribution, we would tell North Korea we were going to attack them, does not sound like the United States of America. We have to do better than that. And I don't want to wait, by the way, for the detonation of a weapon. Let me be clear here: the trigger for my action is not detonation; the trigger is incontrovertible evidence that the North Koreans have transferred fissile material to a terrorist group.”

“But you'll not get that incontrovertible evidence,” McInerney said. “That's my point.”

“I believe we have to begin to act before that happens,” Gallucci said. “I would advocate—and I am now going to use softer language—moving toward the use of military force to deal with the accumulation of fissile material even before transfer. When exactly you do that—I think that's got to be squishy. I'm not prepared to tell you exactly when that is.”

* * *

After a break in the proceedings, the game resumed. Gardiner explained how our understanding of the North Korean situation has changed in light of our experience in Iraq. Specifically, we now know how catastrophic “victory” can be. If the Kim regime were to collapse, the most urgent national-security priority would be securing all chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons facilities, to prevent smugglers and terrorists from seizing them. There would also be, he said, a monumental refugee and “internally displaced person” problem—North Koreans flooding south toward Seoul and north into China—that could become a large-scale tragedy if chemical weapons had been unleashed. And there would be the additional challenges—now quite familiar to us from Iraq—of restoring public security, figuring out how to reform existing security forces, establishing the basic outlines of a functional national government, and preventing a widespread humanitarian disaster.

Ken Adelman strongly disputed that the collapse of the Kim regime would be a problem. “When you win the lottery, you've got to worry about your tax payment. I'm just saying these are wonderful problems to have.”

“If you're prepared for them,” Kay said.

Gardiner presented some numbers. Given the North Korean population of 23 million, and the number of U.S. troops it has taken to (not very successfully) maintain order and prevent looting in Iraq (population: 26 million), he estimated that it would take 500,000 ground troops to carry out stability operations. “These don't all have to be Americans, but if the historical record is correct we've got to have five hundred thousand somebodies in the North,” he said.

Gardiner then came back to the question of timing. He displayed a graph that charted targeting difficulty and threat on the vertical axis against time on the horizontal axis. The graph showed that as time passes, and North Korea develops more nuclear weapons, the targeting challenges for the U.S. military grow considerably. It's hard enough to take out one or two—or eight or ten—nuclear devices if we don't know exactly where they are. The task of destroying fifteen or twenty, or eighty or a hundred, before any of them can be launched becomes substantially harder. And the threat that one of them will be sold to a terrorist greatly increases. “The problem of time is a very serious one,” Gardiner said.

Gardiner summarized his assessment so far, and gave his PACOM recommendation to the Principals Committee. “The targeting dilemma is growing,” he said. “We need to begin to plan seriously for the pre-emption option.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. “What did you just say?” Adelman asked.

“We should prepare to pre-empt and change the regime in North Korea” within the next twelve to eighteen months, Gardiner said. “From a military perspective, to kick this can down the street doesn't make sense.”

McInerney said pre-emption wouldn't be necessary if we had a strong enough nuclear deterrent. And Mathews said she thought everyone was too obsessively focused on the Korean threat, at the expense of attention to other dangers we risked exacerbating. “We have forty-five years of trying to build a world that's safe from nuclear weapons,” she said. “I think we ought to keep in mind that we have an equal threat long-term having five or six nuclear powers in Asia. I think it does mean the collapse of the nonproliferation regime, and that's a serious threat to U.S. interests.”

Kay remained more concerned about what would happen if the North Korean government fell. “The collapse of a nuclear, chemical, and biologically armed state is a serious national-security threat not just for us but for the whole world. We ought to have a contingency plan for what happens if that regime collapses. Because if you don't, Iraq is going to look like child's play.”

* * *

Gardiner asked everyone to summarize. Based on the discussion in this meeting, what would they recommend that the president do?

David Kay went first. “The first thing that's clear to me out of this discussion is the importance of reinvigorating the diplomatic approach. Now, we may disagree to some degree about whether it can be a solo Chinese effort as opposed to a combined effort, but I think we all agree: of all the alternatives we've explored, a diplomatic approach that led to something would be far better, and less risky, than any of the others. The president has got to be told he's got to try to do this seriously—and it's better to do it sooner rather than later.” Kay also observed that the North Korean crisis places an extraordinarily heavy burden on the intelligence system. If we agree that we would have to respond if North Korea transferred nuclear material to terrorists or accumulated more fissile material, then we've got to be able to know with a high degree of confidence when those things have occurred. To simply say we think the lines may have been crossed is not enough.

Once the red line gets crossed, Kay said, “then you do have to start thinking about pre-emption. You also have to think about what happens if you win.”

Robert Gallucci agreed about the need to “do something.” He argued that we should use the Chinese “as aggressively as we can, within reason”—as long as we also recognize that for diplomacy to have a chance, we need both carrots and sticks. If diplomatic options do not work, Gallucci added, we need to turn to military ones. He concluded by highlighting Jessica Mathews's point that if we're not careful we could end up in a world that has more nuclear states. “That,” he said, “would be catastrophic.”

Ken Adelman said again that he didn't think diplomacy could work without more leverage from China, and that he would recommend to the president that we actively draw down our force strength in the region, thereby compelling this to become a Chinese problem. “I don't want the United States to take the traditional approach of reinforcing troops, adding nuclear weapons—all the things we've done over the last forty years. We need to give the region more responsibility.”

Jessica Mathews disagreed with Gallucci that evidence of a transfer of nuclear material to terrorists would be grounds for war. “I think we get a real Pyrrhic victory,” she said. “I don't think you get support out of South Korea. You're asking them to die, to destroy their country, because of a potential threat that some amount of plutonium or highly enriched uranium [might end up in] Washington.”

McInerney asked her whether she would “rather wait until the first nuke goes off in the United States” before attacking.

“I'm just saying we're never going to have South Korean support for that policy,” Mathews said. “It's just insanely not in their interest.” (Gallucci disagreed, pointing out that in June of 1994 he thought the Clinton administration could have won South Korean support for military strikes on the Yongbyon complex, even though no one could have been sure that the conflict wouldn't escalate into a war.) Mathews advised that before we resort to pre-emption we should make absolutely sure we have truly tried all the diplomatic options. Until we do that, in her view, we won't be able to get international support for pre-emption. “I come back to a series of steps that would be low-cost,” she said. “They want us to sign a treaty ending the Korean War? Just say yes. What on earth does it cost us? I don't think we've used all our diplomatic chips in this at all. Before we try military options that have huge costs associated with them, we should try this and prove to ourselves that [diplomacy] fails.”

“The problem with that,” Adelman said, “is that you never ever know that it failed. You can always say, ‘Give me another five years, Mr. President.’ Nothing has ever ‘failed’ until there's an explosion.”

McInerney said the key thing we need is better intelligence, so that we can know when terrorists have acquired nuclear materials, and know where Korea's WMD are located. With better intelligence, he said, North Korea becomes an easy military problem to solve conventionally. He repeated his call for placing U.S. nuclear weapons on South Korean and Japanese planes, as a deterrent against attack. And, addressing David Kay, he remarked that he couldn't afford to put 500,000 troops in North Korea if the Kim regime collapsed. “I would like to do it,” he said, “but the resources aren't there.”

Kay replied, “General, all I would say is that when [U.S. Army Chief of Staff] General Eric Shinseki told the secretary of defense [Rumsfeld] how many troops it would require in Iraq to maintain stability, he did the nation a great service. The secretary of defense did not [do a great service] by saying, ‘We can't do it.’ Because the problem was there.”

“David, we may or may not agree on that number,” McInerney said. “Our problem in Iraq has historically been intelligence. This is a small-unit problem—we need five hundred thousand or a million troops. And we don't have that.” This conformed with Gardiner's earlier assessment: our military is in danger of being stretched so thin that the troops simply wouldn't be available.

Gardiner called time out, and the official part of the game was over.

* * *

At this point various experts who had been invited to watch the war game were asked to offer their observations. Chris Chyba, a former NSC staffer and the co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, spoke first. “There's a ticking clock,” he said. “Unfortunately, we don't know how much time is left on the clock.” In his view, the biggest problem was how to deal with a red-line violation (namely, transfer of material to terrorists) that we aren't likely to know has occurred.

The next two observers were active-duty military officers who had also commented on The Atlantic's Iran war game. Marine Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, a counterinsurgency expert and the author of The Sling and the Stone, pointed out that everyone at the table kept saying it was unacceptable for North Korea to become a nuclear power—but everyone also seemed to believe that it already is a nuclear power. “So we're having a really stupid argument,” he said. “We're the only people we're fooling.”

Hammes disagreed with Ken Adelman's plan to have China pressure the North Koreans by cutting off their food supply. He argued that first, Kim Jong Il has already proved he doesn't care how many people he starves, and second, if we really do crank up the pressure on him we increase the likelihood of a “spasm attack” on Seoul. He also disagreed that we would need to ship 500,000 American troops to the peninsula for stability operations if the regime collapsed. “There are about five hundred thousand South Korean infantrymen who can be mobilized in about four days,” he noted—infantrymen who, unlike most American peacekeeping troops, happen to speak Korean.

Army Major Donald Vandergriff, whose most recent book is The Path to Victory, worried that we could be caught off guard by a surprise attack on the South. U.S. intelligence has failed spectacularly in this regard before—think not just of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 but also of the North Korean invasion in 1950. And, he asked, what if North Korea doesn't even try to fight a conventional war but resorts instead to “fourth-generation war,” relying heavily on commandoes, assassins, and sleeper cells in the South?

Ray McGovern, the co-founder of a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, wanted to know why the Bush administration seemed so unwilling to use the diplomatic measures at its disposal.

“Let's for goodness' sake make our best effort at this,” Gallucci said, responding to McGovern's question. “I remember briefing Jimmy Carter once, and he asked me in the middle of this briefing, just before he went to Pyongyang in June of 1994: ‘If we make a deal, will they honor it?’ And I said, ‘I actually have no idea.’ Well, now I do have an idea. You cannot count on it. Any deal we cut has to have verification elements in it. I would argue that we really were not hurt by that deal in 1994, that it actually did pretty well—even though they cheated. So I'm not sorry that we did that deal.” Gallucci said we should even be willing to offer the North Koreans a security assurance as part of a deal.

“If you're saying we're going to guarantee a Communist regime in North Korea, that's a pretty lousy idea,” Adelman said.

“Is that what I said?” Gallucci responded, his choler rising. “I believe I said a ‘security assurance,’ and that I have always understood we would not attack them provided they abided by the deal. And that's an assurance that I would be prepared to give. When we talked to them, I had an eye-to-eye opportunity to tell them what I thought of their regime. Kang Sok Ju [the leading North Korean negotiator] said to me, ‘You're trying to strangle us.’ And I said, ‘Don't get two things confused. If this works, we're not going to be trying to strangle you; we're going to be going into a new relationship. But don't misunderstand me. We deplore your regime. We believe it is horrendous. We believe you treat your people horribly.’”

Jessica Mathews suggested that one reason diplomacy has not yet been successful is that our own policymakers have been so divided on how to proceed. (This was most starkly revealed in March of 2001, when, one day after announcing that the Bush administration would continue the negotiations begun under Clinton, Secretary of State Colin Powell was humiliatingly contradicted by the president. “We don't negotiate with evil,” Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly said in a meeting on North Korea; “we defeat it.”) “Any negotiation is a two-part deal,” Mathews said. “The first part you have with yourself. I would submit that this conversation makes it clear that we have not had that. We have no sense within this country of what it makes sense to do if you're going to try to engage the North Koreans.”

“We used to call that, and still do, ‘appeasement,’” General McInerney said.

“I didn't say anything about appeasement,” Mathews replied.

“I know, and you won't say anything about it,” McInerney said. “One's got to be very careful in taking the diplomatic route. Look, I commend Bob [Gallucci] for the work the Clinton administration tried in ‘94. But let's not live on the good ship Lollipop and think that we're going to be able to do this again once they have shown that they are not going to negotiate [in good faith]. They cheated us.”

“What they have shown is if they can get away with cheating, they'll cheat,” Mathews said. “Our job is to be smarter than that. Their having cheated gives us an opportunity to give them a tougher deal.”

“This is precisely the discussion that needs to take place,” David Kay said as the session ended. “And it is very clear why the president of the United States has to be present at the discussion. Otherwise we have an absolute stalemate. We don't win on a stalemate in this case. And so you've got to decide what risk you're willing to run now to avoid a greater risk later on. And only the president can make that decision.”

* * *

During the next few weeks I had conversations with all the members of the Principals Committee. What had they taken away from the war game? Despite the disputatiousness of the proceedings, was there any consensus about the lessons that could be drawn from the exercise?

There was. The first lesson was no surprise: This is not a situation that is going to get better with time. “Anyone who walks through the North Korea crisis comes through absolutely convinced that it is only going to get worse,” David Kay told me. He came away from the exercise convinced of the situation's urgency—and convinced that the United States has wasted several years, effectively doing nothing while it hoped the regime would collapse. Kay believes that the administration's reluctance to engage the matter diplomatically is dangerous. And that was the second lesson at least three of the principals agreed on: We need—soon—to make a serious attempt at negotiating. “The Bush administration believes that the North Koreans cannot be relied upon to abide by international agreements,” Kay said. “They also believe there are groups so bad that you harm yourself by talking to them. North Korea is a horrible regime—in human-rights terms, one of the worst on earth. But talking to them in no way compromises our moral beliefs.” We need to take another crack at direct negotiation before we go the military route, he said.

For Jessica Mathews, this second lesson was the most important. She felt that the administration was hurting itself by insisting on participating only in multilateral talks, as opposed to direct negotiations with North Korea. “There's nothing in our national-security interest that is better served by multilateral versus bilateral talks. That's a shape-of-the-table issue. If we wanted to say, ‘Okay, they want to have bilateral talks? Fine. We'll have a bilateral subcommittee within the six-party talks’—how long would that take to figure out? Half an hour.” She added, “It's kind of odd that this administration, of all administrations, wants to outsource this policy issue to the Chinese.”

A third lesson was that the transfer of nuclear material to terrorists is the biggest danger we face. General McInerney agreed with that, and with the idea that North Korea was an urgent matter (though he thought Iran was more pressing). But he disagreed on the importance of pursuing talks. In his view, people like Mathews and Gallucci, who are willing to pursue bilateral negotiations, are being naive. He also believes that it's important for Kim Jong Il to know what our military capabilities are, and to know we are willing to use them—which is why he believes that the “bleeding hearts” who say “Oh, God, we couldn't do this” about a war with North Korea (because of the threat to Seoul) interfere with our deterrent message to Kim. Kim needs to know that if he sells nuclear technology to terrorists, “he will get nuclear weapons on North Korea.”

Ken Adelman seemed less willing than any of the other participants to contemplate pre-emptive war with Pyongyang. But he remained unwilling to put much stock in negotiations of any kind, and continued to rest his hopes on the Chinese. He thought the North Korean situation was so intractable that it needed an unconventional approach to shake it loose; the analogy he used was the way Ronald Reagan shook loose the arms-control debate in the 1980s by conceiving of “Star Wars” missile defense. For Adelman the most surprising thing about the war game was that the debate didn't come down to a typical right-left divide. He noted in particular that he had been surprised to find himself to the left of Robert Gallucci in terms of willingness to use force.

Gallucci, for his part, said he was “surprised at how surprised Adelman was that we—those of us who favor negotiation—could end up in a position where we would favor the use of military force.” Gallucci was emphatic that we urgently have to try to negotiate, as a prelude to possible military action, and was frustrated that the Bush administration and some of the war-game principals were unwilling to recognize that. To put his frustration in context, he told me a story.

“When I came back with the Agreed Framework deal and tried to sell it,” he said, “I ran into the same people sitting around that table—the general to my right, Ken across from me. They hated the idea of trying to solve this problem with a negotiation.

“And I said, ‘What's your—pardon me—your fucking plan, then, if you don't like this?’

“‘We don't like—’

“I said, ‘Don't tell me what you don't like! Tell me how you're going to stop the North Korean nuclear program.’

“‘But we wouldn't do it this way—’

“‘Stop! What are you going to do?’

“I could never get a goddamn answer. What I got was ‘We wouldn't negotiate.’”

I pointed out that the North Koreans had—as McInerney emphasized—cheated on the 1994 agreement. “Excuse me,” Gallucci said, “the Soviets cheated on virtually every deal we ever made with them, but we were still better off with the deal than without it.”

To people who say that negotiating with the North Koreans rewards bad behavior, Gallucci says, “Listen, I'm not interested in teaching other people lessons. I'm interested in the national security of the United States. If that's what you're interested in, are you better off with this deal or without it? You tell me what you're going to do without the deal, and I'll compare that with the deal.”

He was adamant that we were better off under the Agreed Framework—cheating and all—than we are now. “When the Clinton folks went out of office, the North Koreans only had the plutonium they had separated in the previous Bush administration. Now they've got a whole lot more. What did all this 'tough' shit give us? It gave us a much more capable North Korea. Terrific!”

For his part, Sam Gardiner came away with one overriding message. “I left the game with a firm conviction that the United States is focusing on the wrong problem,” he told me. “Iran is down the road. Korea is now, and growing. We can't wait to deal with Korea.” The president needs to engage the North Korean question for a very simple reason: “The military situation on the peninsula,” he said, “is not under control.”

“Knifed”

2004-05-01T12:00:00-04:00

On November 5, 1968, Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey for the presidency of the United States by less than one percentage point of the popular vote (43.42 to 42.72)—slightly more than half a million of the 73 million votes cast nationwide. George Wallace, running as an independent, received 10 million votes, or 13.52 percent. But in the Electoral College, Humphrey's defeat was resounding. Nixon won thirty-two states, for 301 electoral votes, whereas Humphrey—the sitting Vice President—won only thirteen states (and the District of Columbia), for 191 electoral votes. Wallace, a race-baiting demagogue, won five states, for forty-six votes. Given these results, the election could be viewed as a repudiation of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Racial unrest, the riots of 1967 and 1968, the Vietnam War, the unfulfilled promise of the War on Poverty, and the chaos at the Democratic convention in Chicago in August—all this had combined to curdle much of the idealistic pro-Democratic sentiment that had until recently prevailed.

From Atlantic Unbound:

Interviews: "The Call to Service" (April 9, 2004)
Scott Stossel, the author of Sarge, talks about the life and legacy of Sargent Shriver.

And yet it is not hard to imagine the 1968 election's having gone a different way. It is well known that events surrounding Vietnam (specifically, the likelihood that a peace settlement was imminent) had turned the tide in Humphrey's favor in the weeks before the election—and that the tide turned back at least in part because Republican operatives meddled unethically, trying to persuade the South Vietnamese government to pull back from negotiations with suggestions that a Nixon Administration would generate a more favorable settlement.

There was another factor as well—one that might have tilted the election to Humphrey in spite of the stalling of the Paris peace talks. It was the matter of Humphrey's vice-presidential selection.

In the spring of 1968 Sargent Shriver—the founding director of the Peace Corps, the head of Johnson's War on Poverty, and, as the husband of Eunice Kennedy, a brother-in-law of John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy—was appointed U.S. ambassador to France. His appointment was not without controversy in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party—and in his own extended family.

The problem was that during the fall of 1967 Bobby Kennedy had begun contemplating challenging Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy had been increasingly opposed to LBJ's handling of Vietnam, and he and Johnson had never had much use for each other; Kennedy had to stifle his distaste when his brother selected LBJ as his running mate in 1960. Even though their mutual dislike was no secret, for the most part the two had maintained an outward truce, and Kennedy had resisted seeking the nomination for fear of creating a damaging rift within the party. Late in 1967, however, Senator Eugene McCarthy, of Minnesota, began his own campaign; now RFK could not be held solely to blame for any rift.

In late January of 1968 the Tet Offensive destroyed any remaining credibility LBJ had with liberal Democrats and lost him the support of the American people generally. Johnson had been insisting for months that victory in Vietnam was nearly at hand; the penetration of 67,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong deep into South Vietnam that winter suddenly made an American victory seem very distant, if not impossible. McCarthy's previously anemic campaign got a burst of energy as he became the repository of Democratic hopes for ending the war. Kennedy knew if he wanted to make a move, he had to do it soon.

The President had offered the ambassadorship to Shriver earlier that winter. So while Kennedy was considering whether to run against Johnson, Shriver was considering whether to go to Paris. Shriver monitored Kennedy's deliberations closely. It clearly bothered Kennedy that his brother-in-law had remained in the Johnson Administration long after many other former JFK aides and Cabinet members (including RFK himself) had left. But as long as the veneer of a truce existed between LBJ and RFK, Shriver could stay with impunity. If that truce were broken by Kennedy's entering the Democratic race, however, Shriver would be seen as sleeping with the enemy if he continued to serve the Administration in any capacity.

From the archives:

"The Unfinished War" (December 1988)
A product of the conflicting ambitions of the men who shaped it, the War on Poverty was ill-fated. By Nicholas Lemann

"The Unfinished War (Part two)" (January 1989)
An inside look at how personal enmity, political calculation, and policy misjudgments prevented any effective prosecution of the War on Poverty by either Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. Part two of a two-part article. by Nicholas Lemann

It was a no-win situation. Ever since John F. Kennedy's assassination, when Johnson had reached out to him in an effort to signal continuity with the Kennedy Administration, almost anything Shriver did (or didn't do) for Johnson had been fraught with symbolic weight. For good or ill, both sides saw him as The Kennedy in the Johnson Administration. Shriver had always supported the Kennedy family's political aspirations, but he was still working for Johnson, and he believed it was his patriotic duty to serve the President's interests. Meanwhile, although he remained unwaveringly devoted to the anti-poverty program, that wasn't enough for the President, who pressured him to accept the Paris appointment. As LBJ's adviser Joseph Califano observed in his book The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (1991), the President "couldn't look at Shriver without trying to see whether Robert Kennedy was in the shadows behind his brother-in-law." It was bad enough, in Johnson's view, that Bobby Kennedy, who had once served as his Attorney General, was now threatening to run against him; he didn't want another member of the Kennedy family, one who was still working in his Administration, to join an opposing campaign. He wanted Shriver out of the country—and out of RFK's orbit.

In the second week of March, Shriver told Johnson he would accept the ambassadorship, pending the approval of the French government. Then he left with Eunice for a vacation in Spain. A few days later, on March 16, LBJ's fear was realized: Bobby Kennedy announced that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination. On March 22 Secretary of State Dean Rusk called Shriver in Madrid seeking reassurance that Shriver still wished the President to submit his name to the Senate for confirmation; he and Johnson were worried that Kennedy's announcement might have caused Shriver to reconsider. But Shriver had made up his mind: he would go to Paris.

Although Shriver accepted the appointment without any malign intent, some of those close to RFK saw his decision as an insult to their candidate. What's more, Shriver, citing his diplomatic obligations, declined to work for the Kennedy campaign—even after Johnson withdrew from the race, on March 31. To some in the Kennedy circle, this was an unforgivable violation of the family code.

Nor was it his first. In early 1964 Johnson had leaked word to the press that Shriver topped his list of potential running mates for that year's election. LBJ believed that in making this known he could keep Bobby Kennedy off the ticket (there was considerable pressure to put him on it) and inoculate himself against attacks from Kennedy's wing of the party. But to Kennedy, for one of his in-laws to even contemplate joining LBJ's ticket constituted a betrayal. In late July of 1964 the former JFK aide Kenny O'Donnell was meeting with Johnson in the Oval Office when the voice of Bill Moyers, who had worked for Shriver at the Peace Corps and was now a top aide to LBJ, came over the intercom on the President's desk. Moyers reported that Shriver would be willing to join the ticket, and that Bobby Kennedy would not object. "The hell he wouldn't!" O'Donnell exclaimed. Not long after this incident, according to a New York Times report some years later, "Robert Kennedy sat in icy silence aboard the Kennedy plane on the way to Hyannis Port deliberately ostracizing his brother-in-law."

In the event, Shriver went to Paris in May and played no role in Kennedy's campaign. Eunice campaigned hard for her brother while standing resolutely by her husband's decision. Her campaigning put her husband in an awkward position—after all, he was still working for Johnson and his Vice President, Humphrey, who had entered the race in April. However, her support did not placate RFK's aides, who remained furious with Shriver.

Then, tragically, everything changed. A few minutes after midnight on June 5, 1968, moments after he had given a speech in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, celebrating his victory over Eugene McCarthy in the California primary, Bobby Kennedy was shot. He died in the hospital the next day. LBJ sent Air Force One to transport Kennedy's body to New York, and the Shrivers flew to La Guardia to join family members and Kennedy's aides. When Shriver tried to help unload the casket from the plane, some of the aides pushed him away, bitter in their grief.

Kennedy's former advisers soon dispersed to the campaigns of the remaining candidates for the Democratic nomination, among whom the two leading contenders were now McCarthy and Humphrey. But the "Kennedy movement," as the journalist Theodore White called it, longed for Ted Kennedy to enter the race, or at least to make himself available as a running mate. The American people, especially Democrats, craved a Kennedy on the 1968 ticket. If Ted was not going to step forward, however, the order of succession—which had previously run from Joe Jr. to Jack to Bobby to Ted—was no longer clear. For Kennedy supporters outside Bobby's inner circle, the next best alternative was Shriver: a Kennedy in-law who shared RFK's commitment to social programs and who had something of JFK's dash and style. By the third week in June newspapers were reporting that Shriver was one of Humphrey's top choices for a running mate. On June 21 Humphrey told reporters that he was "very interested" in allying himself with Shriver.

A Shriver nomination would be politically tricky, because no one knew exactly what the Kennedys wanted and whether or not they would approve. Nevertheless, the first signs were positive. Bill Moyers, who had left the Johnson Administration in 1967 and was now the publisher of Newsday, wrote to Shriver on June 27, 1968.

I had a long and private meeting Tuesday with Fred Dutton [a former aide to JFK who had remained close to the Kennedy family] and asked him how the hardcore Kennedy people would react to you as Vice President. I went over the reasons why your selection would be good for Humphrey and the country, hitting hard on the symbolic meaning it would have for the young, the poor, and the black. He thought this made sense, and expressed the belief that the idea would be accepted by most of the people around Kennedy, himself (Dutton) included.

In mid-July, Bill Josephson, the former general counsel of the Peace Corps, met discreetly on Shriver's behalf with Max Kampelman, one of Humphrey's close advisers. As Josephson later reported to Shriver, Kampelman said that Humphrey "definitely" wanted Shriver in any Humphrey Administration and then brought up the subject of the vice-presidency. Presumably, however, the Kennedys would have to give their blessing before Humphrey made any official move.

On July 17 Don Petrie, a well-connected business executive and a longtime friend of Shriver's, sent word to Paris that the Shriver-for-VP trial balloons sent up by the Humphrey camp through leaks to the press had produced "generally favorable comment." Everyone, however, was waiting for Ted. The Kennedy movement was waiting for Ted to say that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination. The Humphrey campaign was waiting to see whether Ted would be available for the vice-presidency. Shriver and company were waiting to see whether Ted would support Shriver for the vice-presidency.

For the moment Ted wasn't saying anything. But Petrie had told Shriver about a conversation that one of his colleagues had had with Shriver's brother-in-law Steve Smith (the husband of Jean Kennedy, Eunice and Ted's sister), in which Smith had said that although it was obvious that Ted Kennedy could win the nomination, he didn't want it. Nor did he want to be Humphrey's running mate. So who did Smith think Humphrey would pick? "It looks like Sarge," Smith responded. "But the family resents it."

Finally, in late July, Ted announced that he would not seek or accept the presidential or vice-presidential nomination. On August 9 Josephson, Shriver's emissary, met again with Kampelman. Kampelman got right to the point: "Let's talk turkey about Shriver." He told Josephson that if Humphrey were to select Shriver, several issues would need to be addressed. One of them was that the selection "would alienate the Kennedy family and their surrounding politicos." Josephson replied that Humphrey needed to identify someone "who speaks authoritatively for the Kennedy family" and get "a reliable report of what he or she says." He told Kampelman that "if, for example, Rose Kennedy, Eunice Kennedy, or Ethel Kennedy were asked," he was "reasonably sure that they would be strongly positive about Sarge's candidacy." On the other hand, "if Steve Smith were asked, he would be negative."

At this, as Josephson recorded in his notes immediately following the meeting, "Max's eyebrows shot up." Kampelman said that "Steve was negative toward Sarge and that Steve and the Vice President had dined together recently." Kenny O'Donnell, Kampelman agreed, was "also knocking Sarge." Humphrey was influenced by these opinions, Kampelman said, because he saw the importance of "not losing the enthusiasm and competence of the Kennedy supporters nationwide."

Josephson suggested that "probably Ted Kennedy was the only person who could and would speak authoritatively for the family." Kampelman agreed that Ted's views would carry great weight, not only with Humphrey but also with those party leaders—for example, the mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley—who refused to give up on the idea of Ted as Vice President. But Kennedy proved elusive. He agreed to make a discreet side trip to Paris to meet with Shriver during a European vacation the second week of August, but he never showed up.

On August 20 Moyers sent Humphrey a memo that he had written with Josephson and other Shriver supporters. The memo made a strong case for Shriver, and finessed the question of his being a "Kennedy candidate" without the support of certain Kennedy people.

Shriver would appeal to the young, the memo argued, because as the creator of the Peace Corps, Head Start, and other programs he had become "the personal symbol for the idealism those programs inspired." In the spring of 1968 Shriver, alone among LBJ's high-ranking officials, could appear on college campuses without being picketed. Shriver could also reach out to black voters: two years earlier he had ridden past 10,000 spectators through the riot-scarred streets of Watts, in Los Angeles, in a car on which his hosts had written "Sargent Shriver—The Man Who Has Done the Most for the Negro." Shriver was a proven administrator, a forceful campaigner, and a nationally known figure—and he had not been "a casualty of the Vietnam war." The memo stated, "As a member of the Administration he could not and did not denounce the war, but he appeals to critics of the war because he has been totally involved in the two Kennedy-Johnson programs most remote from and opposite to the war: The Peace Corps and the Economic Opportunity Programs." Finally, Shriver got along well with Humphrey, and as the "prototype of the modern American Catholic," he could help win the crucial blue-collar ethnic vote.

Around the same time, Ted Kennedy weighed in. He talked to Shriver by phone in France for about half an hour. On the question of whether the family would support Shriver on the Humphrey ticket, Kennedy was ultimately inconclusive. But the substance of the conversation, as Shriver described it the next day in a letter to one of his closest friends, was revealing. Shriver wrote, "Many K[ennedy] boosters really are sore at me—even bitter—because I didn't help more [on RFK's campaign]." Ted agreed to "keep in close touch" with Shriver through the convention and said that if Steve Smith was the source of negative comments about Shriver, he would "slow him down or shut him up." Shriver now realized, however, that there was a fundamental problem: "those who had staked most of their personal hopes on RFK are extremely frustrated—& the prospect of anyone 'in the family' who didn't impale him—or herself—on a picket fence without regard to the consequences—suddenly being in a position to pick up all the marbles—that prospect is galling!" Shriver concluded his letter with uncharacteristic bile: "Clearly ... the same clique who opposed [the Peace Corps] as an independent agency—the same palace guard (now without a palace) (or a pretender) find it hard to accept the prospect of a prodigal in-law (let alone son) sitting down to their feast."

"All I asked Teddie was for neutrality," Shriver wrote.

I said frankly I had never asked him or Steve or anyone else in the family for anything—which is true—Now all I suggested was that it brought no credit to anyone for Steve or others to attack me. I can't report that Teddie explicitly stated he would be neutral—My belief is this: He will try to be neutral ... but his neutrality would be neutrality for [Maine Senator Edmund] Muskie or [South Dakota Senator George] McGovern or [Maryland Senator] Joe Tydings and neutrality against [Oklahoma Senator] Fred Harris or me.

Humphrey was evidently convinced that Shriver had all the qualifications he was seeking in a running mate; Max Kampelman recalled in a memoir, "Hubert was very fond of Sarge, whose genial and charming exterior hid a strong sense of principle, personal integrity, and stubborn independence." But he felt he could not choose him without the Kennedy family's unequivocal blessing. Still, a few days before the convention began, Fred Harris told Moyers that Humphrey had narrowed the list to Shriver and himself.

From the archives:

"The Democrats's Dilemma" (March 1974)
There is less to the Party's prospects than meets the eye. By David Broder

The convention opened on Monday, August 26. By Wednesday morning it looked as though Humphrey had the nomination sewn up. That afternoon delegates heatedly debated Vietnam; that evening violence erupted on the streets outside. War protesters, civil-rights activists, and college students of various persuasions had descended on the city at the start of the convention. That day they whipped themselves into an almost insurrectionist frenzy, and were then brutalized by National Guardsmen and the Chicago police, acting under Mayor Daley's direction. At 8:05 on Wednesday night Theodore White jotted this sentence in his notebook: "The Democrats are finished." Just under four hours later Humphrey was officially nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate.

Over breakfast with Humphrey on Wednesday morning, Daley—having finally accepted that Kennedy would not run for Vice President—had strongly urged him to pick Shriver. The Chicago Daily News that day enthusiastically trumpeted Shriver's qualifications. In Paris, Shriver had been meeting with Averell Harriman and Cyrus Vance, LBJ's leading negotiators in the Paris peace talks, to discuss what sort of peace plan he would urge on Humphrey if offered a place on the ticket. He began thinking about how, if nominated, he would proffer an olive branch to the peace movement generally, and to the protesters who had been beaten and jailed in Chicago in particular.

But late Wednesday night, as Harris Wofford, who had worked for JFK in the White House and for Shriver at the Peace Corps, recorded in a memoir, Senator Walter Mondale, of Minnesota, called him from Humphrey's suite to say that "Kennedy family opposition to Shriver's nomination was weighing heavily against his selection." (Wofford suspected that Kenny O'Donnell was speaking in the family name, "perhaps without prior authority." Indeed, as Kampelman later recalled, O'Donnell made clear to Humphrey during the convention that "the family would consider it an unfriendly act" if he were to select Shriver.) Wofford told Mondale that this "former Palace Guard" had "no monopoly on the Kennedy legacy." Besides, he asked, did Mondale really think that a man as decent as Ted Kennedy would impede the electoral aspirations of his own brother-in-law?

In fact, it seems, Kennedy already had. Earlier in the day, according to Humphrey's aides, he had called Humphrey and promised his support. But notes Josephson took on a conversation with Kampelman that September make clear that the support did not extend to Shriver. According to the notes, which I obtained from Josephson recently, Kampelman recalled Humphrey's exact words after getting off the phone with Kennedy: "I sensed Teddy was not adamant [in his opposition to Shriver], but led [me] to believe better not."

Reflecting on these events nearly forty years later, Ted Kennedy acknowledges having been disappointed at Shriver's decision not to participate in RFK's campaign. But he insists that he did not veto Shriver's nomination for Vice President. He says that he does not clearly recollect the telephone conversation with Humphrey about Shriver, but that he will never forget how he felt at the time. His brother Bobby's death had been devastating to him; he was in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. Having had two brothers assassinated while campaigning, Ted wanted to get as far away from politics as possible until his wounds could heal. His distress and his desire to retreat from politics, Kennedy believes, account for any negative vibrations Humphrey may have received when they spoke.

Whatever Ted intended, on Thursday morning Humphrey's people let Shriver's people know that the choice for VP was down to Harris and Muskie. (Ultimately Humphrey chose Muskie.) "We needed the good will of the Kennedys more than we needed Sarge," one of Humphrey's advisers said at the time. "His name was effectively vetoed."

Would Shriver's presence on the ticket have changed the outcome of the election? First, consider that Humphrey lost Illinois by only 135,000 votes out of 4.6 million cast. With Shriver, who could claim to be a native son (he had lived there for fifteen years, during which time he had been a significant political force), Humphrey would most likely have won that state's twenty-six electoral votes, instantly narrowing the electoral-vote count to 275-217. Second, consider that many of the Catholic and ethnic voters who had been so crucial to the Democrats' victory in 1960 switched their allegiance to Nixon in 1968. As one of the nation's most prominent lay Catholics, Shriver would most likely have fared better than Muskie among Catholic voters. More votes from Catholics in, say, Wisconsin (which Humphrey lost by 61,000 votes out of 1.7 million) and Ohio (which he lost by 90,000 votes out of 4 million) could have given the Democrats those states, which had twelve and twenty-six electoral votes respectively. A win in any two of those three states, or in some combination of several closely contested others, would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives, a heavily Democratic body where Humphrey would easily have prevailed.

In addition, by far the most pressing issue on most voters' minds was Vietnam. If Shriver had been on the ticket and had carried through with his plan to press for a negotiated peace—a plan concocted with the help of Harriman and Vance, the negotiators themselves—who knows how many additional votes might have gone Humphrey's way?

Most important, Humphrey had wanted Shriver on the ticket for largely the same reason he had wanted Ted Kennedy: after the deaths of JFK and RFK, many Americans were hungry for another Kennedy—as a reminder of what the New Frontier had been like before hope and optimism had withered. With Ted declining to run and various members of the Kennedy circle apparently opposed to Shriver, Humphrey had to do without the help of the Kennedy mystique. How many votes would that mystique have been worth?

Two years after the 1968 convention Max Kampelman had lunch with Shriver in Washington. As Kampelman recorded in a letter soon afterward, "We ... talked about 1968 and Chicago. I again made it clear to [Shriver] that he was knifed and I believe he knows that. I believe he also knows who did it."