TheNewyorker 10 Best Articles 2012

THE TOP TEN NEW YORKER STORIES OF 2012
THE TOP TEN NEW YORKER STORIES OF 2012 CONTENTS The Apostate..........................................................................................................................3 Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology...........................................................................3 by Lawrence Wright February 14, 2011 ...............................................................................3 .............................................................................................................................................53 The Obama Memos.............................................................................................................54 The making of a post-post-partisan Presidency...................................................................54 by Ryan Lizza January 30, 2012 ........................................................................................54 The Caging of America.......................................................................................................78 Why do we lock up so many people?..................................................................................78 by Adam Gopnik January 30, 2012 ....................................................................................78 The Story of a Suicide.........................................................................................................89 Two college roommates, a webcam, and a tragedy.............................................................89 by Ian Parker February 6, 2012 ..........................................................................................89 Spoiled Rotten...................................................................................................................116 Why do kids rule the roost?...............................................................................................116 by Elizabeth Kolbert July 2, 2012 ....................................................................................116 We Are Alive.....................................................................................................................123 Bruce Springsteen at sixty-two..........................................................................................123 by David Remnick July 30, 2012 .....................................................................................123 Big Med.............................................................................................................................154 Restaurant chains have managed to combine quality control, cost control, and innovation. Can health care?................................................................................................................154 by Atul Gawande August 13, 2012 ..................................................................................154 Super-Rich Irony...............................................................................................................175 Why do billionaires feel victimized by Obama?...............................................................175 by Chrystia Freeland October 8, 2012 ..............................................................................175 The Choice.........................................................................................................................186 by The Editors October 29, 2012 .....................................................................................186
The Apostate
Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology.
by Lawrence Wright February 14, 2011
On August 19, 2009, Tommy Davis, the chief spokesperson for the Church of Scientology International, received a letter from the film director and screenwriter Paul Haggis. For ten months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego, Haggis wrote. Before the 2008 elections, a staff member at Scientologys San Diego church had signed its name to an online petition supporting Proposition 8, which asserted that the State of California should sanction marriage only between a man and a woman. The proposition passed. As Haggis saw it, the San Diego churchs public sponsorship of Proposition 8, which succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens of Californiarights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our stateis a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally. Our public association with that hate-filled legislation shames us. Haggis wrote, Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent. He concluded, I hereby resign my membership in the Church of Scientology. Haggis was prominent in both Scientology and Hollywood, two communities that often converge. Although he is less famous than certain other Scientologists, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, he had been in the organization for nearly thirty-five years. Haggis wrote the screenplay for Million Dollar Baby, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2004, and he wrote and directed Crash, which won Best Picture the next yearthe only time in Academy history that that has happened. Davis, too, is part of Hollywood society; his mother is Anne Archer, who starred in Fatal Attraction and Patriot Games, among other films. Before becoming Scientologys spokesperson, Davis was a senior vice-president of the churchs Celebrity Centre International network. In previous correspondence with Davis, Haggis had demanded that the church publicly renounce Proposition 8. I feel strongly about this for a number of reasons, he wrote. You and I both know there has been a hidden anti-gay sentiment in the church for a long time. I have been shocked on too many occasions to hear Scientologists make derogatory remarks about gay people, and then quote L.R.H. in their defense. The initials stand for L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, whose extensive writings and lectures form the churchs scripture. Haggis related a story about Katy, the youngest of three

daughters from his first marriage, who lost the friendship of a fellow-Scientologist after revealing that she was gay. The friend began warning others, Katy is 1.1. The number refers to a sliding Tone Scale of emotional states that Hubbard published in a 1951 book, The Science of Survival. A person classified 1.1 was, Hubbard said, Covertly Hostilethe most dangerous and wicked leveland he noted that people in this state engaged in such things as casual sex, sadism, and homosexual activity. Hubbards Tone Scale, Haggis wrote, equated homosexuality with being a pervert. (Such remarks dont appear in recent editions of the book.)
In his resignation letter, Haggis explained to Davis that, for the first time, he had explored outside perspectives on Scientology. He had read a recent expos in a Florida newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, which reported, among other things, that senior executives in the church had been subjecting other Scientologists to physical violence. Haggis said that he felt dumbstruck and horrified, adding, Tommy, if only a fraction of these accusations are true, we are talking about serious, indefensible human and civilrights violations. Online, Haggis came across an appearance that Davis had made on CNN, in May, 2008. The anchor John Roberts asked Davis about the churchs policy of disconnection, in which members are encouraged to separate themselves from friends or family members who criticize Scientology. Davis responded, Theres no such thing as disconnection as youre characterizing it. And certainly we have to understand Well, what is disconnection? Roberts interjected.

Scientology is a new religion, Davis continued. The majority of Scientologists in the world, theyre first generation. So their family members arent going to be Scientologists. . . . So, certainly, someone who is a Scientologist is going to respect their family members beliefs Well, what is disconnection? Roberts said again. and we consider family to be a building block of any society, so anything thats characterized as disconnection or this kind of thing, its just not true. There isnt any such policy. In his resignation letter, Haggis said, We all know this policy exists. I didnt have to search for verificationI didnt have to look any further than my own home. Haggis reminded Davis that, a few years earlier, his wife had been ordered to disconnect from her parents because of something absolutely trivial they supposedly did twenty-five years ago when they resigned from the church. . . . Although it caused her terrible personal pain, my wife broke off all contact with them. Haggis continued, To see you lie so easily, I am afraid I had to ask myself: what else are you lying about? Haggis forwarded his resignation to more than twenty Scientologist friends, including Anne Archer, John Travolta, and Sky Dayton, the founder of EarthLink. I felt if I sent it to my friends theyd be as horrified as I was, and theyd ask questions as well, he says. That turned out to be largely not the case. They were horrified that Id send a letter like that. Tommy Davis told me, People started calling me, saying, Whats this letter Paul sent you? The resignation letter had not circulated widely, but if it became public it would likely cause problems for the church. The St. Petersburg Times expos had inspired a fresh series of hostile reports on Scientology, which has long been portrayed in the media as a cult. And, given that some well-known Scientologist actors were rumored to be closeted homosexuals, Haggiss letter raised awkward questions about the churchs attitude toward homosexuality. Most important, Haggis wasnt an obscure dissident; he was a celebrity, and the church, from its inception, has depended on celebrities to lend it prestige. In the past, Haggis had defended the religion; in 1997, he wrote a letter of protest after a French court ruled that a Scientology official was culpable in the suicide of a man who fell into debt after paying for church courses. If this decision carries it sets a terrible precedent, in which no priest or minister will ever feel comfortable offering help and advice to those whose souls are tortured, Haggis wrote. To Haggiss friends, his resignation from the Church of Scientology felt like a very public act of betrayal. They were surprised, angry, and confused. Destroy the letter, resign quietlythats what they all wanted, Haggis says.

Last March, I met Haggis in New York. He was in the editing phase of his latest movie, The Next Three Days, a thriller starring Russell Crowe, in an office in SoHo. He sat next to a window with drawn shades, as his younger sister Jo Francis, the films editor, showed him a round of cuts. Haggis wore jeans and a black T-shirt. He is bald, with a trim blond beard, pale-blue eyes, and a nose that was broken in a schoolyard fight. He always has several projects going at once, and there was a barely contained feeling of frenzy. He glanced repeatedly at his watch. Haggis, who is fifty-seven, was preparing for two events later that week: a preview screening in New York and a trip to Haiti. He began doing charitable work in Haiti well before the 2010 earthquake, and he has raised millions of dollars for that country. He told me that he was planning to buy ten acres of land in Port-au-Prince for a new school, which he hoped to have open in the fall. (In fact, the schoolthe first to offer free secondary education to children from the citys slumsopened in October.) In Hollywood, he is renowned for his ability to solicit money. The actor Ben Stiller, who has accompanied Haggis to Haiti, recalls that Haggis once raised four and a half million dollars in two hours. While watching the edits, Haggis fielded calls from a plastic surgeon who was planning to go on the trip, and from a priest in Haiti, Father Rick Frechette, whose organization is the main beneficiary of Haggiss charity. Father Rick is a lot like mea cynical optimist, Haggis told me. He also said of himself, Im a deeply broken person, and broken institutions fascinate me. Haggiss producing partner, Michael Nozik, says, Paul likes to be contrarian. If everyone is moving left, hell feel the need to move right. The actor Josh Brolin, who appeared in Haggiss film In the Valley of Elah (2007), told me that Haggis does things in extremes. Haggis is an outspoken promoter of social justice, in the manner of Hollywood activists like Sean Penn and George Clooney. The actress Maria Bello describes him as self-deprecating and sarcastic, but also deeply compassionate. She recalls being with him in Haiti shortly after the earthquake; he was standing in the bed of a pickup truck, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a big smile on his face, and absolutely no fear. Though Haggis is passionate about his work, he can be cool toward those who are closest to him. Lauren Haggis, the second daughter from his first marriage, said that he never connected with his children. Hes emotionally not there, she says. Thats funny, because his scripts are full of emotion. In the editing room, Haggis felt the need for a cigarette, so we walked outside. He is ashamed of this habit, especially given that, in 2003, while directing Crash, he had a heart attack. After Haggis had emergency surgery, his doctor told him that it would be four or five months before he could work again: It would be too much strain on your heart. He replied, Let me ask you how much stress you think I might be under as Im sitting at home while another director is finishing my fucking film! The doctor relented, but demanded that a nurse be on the set to monitor Haggiss vital signs. Since then, Haggis has

tried repeatedly to quit smoking. He had stopped before shooting The Next Three Days, but Russell Crowe was smoking, and that did him in. Theres always a good excuse, he admitted. Before his heart attack, he said, I thought I was invincible. He added, I still do. Haggis had not spoken publicly about his resignation from Scientology. As we stood in a chill wind on Sixth Avenue, he was obviously uncomfortable discussing it, but he is a storyteller, and he eventually launched into a narrative. Haggis wasnt proud of his early years. I was a bad kid, he said. I didnt kill anybody. Not that I didnt try. He was born in 1953, and grew up in London, Ontario, a manufacturing town midway between Toronto and Detroit. His father, Ted, had a construction company there, which specialized in pouring concrete. His mother, Mary, a Catholic, sent Paul and his two younger sisters, Kathy and Jo, to Mass on Sundaysuntil she spotted their priest driving an expensive car. God wants me to have a Cadillac, the priest explained. Mary responded, Then God doesnt want us in your church anymore. Haggis decided at an early age to be a writer, and he made his own comic books. But he was such a poor student that his parents sent him to a strict boarding school, where the students were assigned cadet drills. He preferred to sit in his room reading Ramparts, the radical magazine from Americathe place he longed to be. He committed repeated infractions, but he learned to pick locks so that he could sneak into the prefects office and eliminate his demerits. After a year of this, his parents transferred him to a progressive boys school in Bracebridge, Ontario, where there was very little system to subvert. Haggis grew his curly blond hair to his shoulders. He discovered a mentor in his art teacher, Max Allen, who was politically radical and gay. Flouting Ontarios strict censorship laws, Allen opened a theatre in Toronto that showed banned films; Haggis volunteered at the box office. Haggis got caught forging a check, and he soon left school. He was drifting, hanging out with hippies and drug dealers. Two friends died from overdoses. I had a gun pointed in my face a couple of times, he recalls. He attended art school briefly, then quit; after taking some film classes at a community college, he dropped out of that as well. He began working in construction full time for his father. He also was the manager of a hundred-seat theatre that his father had created in an abandoned church. On Saturday nights, he set up a movie screen onstage, introducing himself and other film buffs to the works of Bergman, Hitchcock, and the French New Wave. He was so affected by Michelangelo Antonionis Blow-Up that in 1974 he decided to move to England, in order to become a fashion photographer, like the hero of the movie. That lasted less than a year.

Back in London, Ontario, he fell in love with Diane Gettas, a nurse, and they began sharing a onebedroom apartment. He was starting to get his life together, but he was haunted by something that his grandfather had said to him on his deathbed. He was a janitor in a bowling alley, Haggis told me. He had left England because of some scandal we dont know about. He died when I was twelve or thirteen. He looked terrible. He turned to me and said, Ive wasted my life. Dont waste yours. One day in 1975, when he was twenty-two, Haggis was walking to a record store. When he arrived at the corner of Dundas and Waterloo Streets, a young man pressed a book into his hands. You have a mind, the man said. This is the owners manual. The man, whose name was Jim Logan, added, Give me two dollars. The book was Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, by L. Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Haggis began reading it, Dianetics had sold about two and a half million copies. Today, according to the church, that figure has reached more than twenty-one million. Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words Church of Scientology. Take me there, Haggis said to Logan. Haggis had heard about Scientology a couple of months earlier, from a friend who had called it a cult. The thought that he might be entering a cult didnt bother him. In fact, he said, it drew my interest. I tend to run toward things I dont understand. When he arrived at the churchs headquarters, he recalled, it didnt look like a cult. Two guys in a small office above Woolworths. At the time, Haggis and Gettas were having arguments; the Scientologists told him that taking church courses would improve the relationship. It was pitched to me as applied philosophy, Haggis says. He and Gettas took a course together and, shortly afterward, became Hubbard Qualified Scientologists, one of the first levels in what the church calls the Bridge to Total Freedom. The Church of Scientology says that its purpose is to transform individual lives and the world. A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights, are the aims of Scientology, Hubbard wrote. Scientology postulates that every person is a Thetanan immortal spiritual being that lives through countless lifetimes. Scientologists believe that Hubbard discovered the fundamental truths of existence, and they revere him as the source of the religion. Hubbards writings offer a technology of spiritual advancement and self-betterment that provides the means to attain true spiritual freedom and immortality. A church publication declares, Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life. Proof of this efficacy, the church says, can be measured by the accomplishments of its adherents. As Scientologists in all walks of life will

attest, they have enjoyed greater success in their relationships, family life, jobs and professions. They take an active, vital role in life and leading roles in their communities. And participation in Scientology brings to many a broader social consciousness, manifested through meaningful contribution to charitable and social reform activities. In 1955, a year after the churchs founding, an affiliated publication urged Scientologists to cultivate celebrities: It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if prime communicators benefitting from it would mention it. At the end of the sixties, the church established its first Celebrity Centre, in Hollywood. (There are now satellites in Paris, Vienna, Dsseldorf, Munich, Florence, London, New York, Las Vegas, and Nashville.) Over the next decade, Scientology became a potent force in Hollywood. In many respects, Haggis was typical of the recruits from that era, at least among those in the entertainment business. Many of them were young and had quit school in order to follow their dreams, but they were also smart and ambitious. The actress Kirstie Alley, for example, left the University of Kansas in 1970, during her sophomore year, to get married. Scientology, she says, helped her lose her craving for cocaine. Without Scientology, I would be dead, she has said. In 1975, the year that Haggis became a Scientologist, John Travolta, a high-school dropout, was making his first movie, The Devils Rain, in Durango, Mexico, when an actress on the set gave him a copy of Dianetics. My career immediately took off, he told a church publication. Scientology put me into the big time. The testimonials of such celebrities have attracted many curious seekers. In Variety, Scientology has advertised courses promising to help aspiring actors make it in the industry. One of those actors, Josh Brolin, told me that, in a moment of real desperation, he visited the Celebrity Centre and received auditingspiritual counselling. He quickly decided that Scientology wasnt for him. But he still wonders what the religion does for celebrities like Cruise and Travolta: Each has a good head on his shoulders, they make great business decisions, they seem to have wonderful families. Is that because they were helped by Scientology? This is the question that makes celebrities so crucial to the religion. And, clearly, there must be something rewarding if such notable people lend their names to a belief system that is widely scorned. Brolin says that he once witnessed John Travolta practicing Scientology. Brolin was at a dinner party in Los Angeles with Travolta and Marlon Brando. Brando arrived with a cut on his leg, and explained that he had injured himself while helping a stranded motorist on the Pacific Coast Highway. He was in pain. Travolta offered to help, saying that he had just reached a new level in Scientology. Travolta touched Brandos leg and Brando closed his eyes. I watched this process going onit was very physical, Brolin recalls. I was thinking, This is really fucking bizarre! Then, after ten minutes, Brando opens his eyes and

says, That really helped. I actually feel different! (Travolta, through a lawyer, called this account pure fabrication.) Many Hollywood actors were drawn into the church by a friend or by reading Dianetics; a surprising number of them, though, came through the Beverly Hills Playhouse. For decades, the resident acting coach there was Milton Katselas, and he taught hundreds of future stars, including Ted Danson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and George Clooney. Most of Hollywood went through that class, Anne Archer told me. In 1974, two years after her son Tommy Davis was born, she began studying with Katselas. She was a young mother in a dissolving marriage, coming off a television series (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) that had been cancelled after one season. Katselas had a transformative effect. She recalled discussions about life, people, and behavior, and said that Katselas said some things in class that were really smart. Some of the other students told her that Katselas was a Scientologist, so she began the Life Repair program at the Celebrity Centre. I went two or three times a week, probably for a couple of weeks, she said. I remember walking out of the building and walking down the street toward my car and I felt like my feet were not touching the ground. And I said to myself, My God, this is the happiest Ive ever been in my entire life. Ive finally found something that works. She added, Life didnt seem so hard anymore. I was back in the drivers seat. Jim Gordon, a veteran police officer in Los Angeles, and also an aspiring actor, spent ten years at the Playhouse, starting in 1990. He told me that Scientology recruited a ton of kids out of that school. Like Scientology, the Playhouse presented a strict hierarchy of study; under Katselass tutelage, students graduated from one level to the next. As Gordon advanced within the Playhouse, he began recognizing many students from the roles they were getting in Hollywood. You see a lot of people you know from TV, Gordon says. He began feeling the pull of the church. When you started off, they werent really pushing it, but as you progressed through the Playhouses levels Scientology became more of a focus, he told me. After a few years, he joined. Like the courses at the Playhouse, Scientology offered actors a method that they could apply to both their lives and their careers. Not long after Gordon became a Scientologist, he was asked to serve as an ethics officer at the Playhouse, monitoring the progress of other students and counselling those who were having trouble. He was good at pinpointing students who were struggling. Its almost like picking out the wounded chicks, he says. He sometimes urged a student to meet with the senior ethics officer at the Playhouse, a Scientologist who often recommended courses at the Celebrity Centre. My job was to keep the students active and make sure they were not being suppressed, Gordon says. In the rhetoric of Scientology, suppressive personsor S.P.sblock an individuals spiritual progress. Implicitly, the message to the students was that success awaited them if only they could sweep away the impediments to stardom,
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including S.P.s. Katselas received a ten-per-cent commission from the church on the money contributed by his students. Katselas died in 2008, and Scientology no longer has a connection with the Beverly Hills Playhouse. Anne Archer told me that the reputation of Katselass class as, in Gordons words, a Scientology clearinghouse is overblown. His classes averaged about fifty or sixty people, and there would be maybe seven to ten people in it who would be Scientologists, she says. But the list of Scientologists who have studied at the Playhouse is longit includes Jenna Elfman, Giovanni Ribisi, and Jason Leeand the many protgs Katselas left behind helped cement the relationship between Hollywood and the church. Haggis and I travelled together to L.A., where he was presenting The Next Three Days to the studio. During the flight, I asked him how high he had gone in Scientology. All the way to the top, he said. Since the early eighties, he had been an Operating Thetan VII, which was the highest level available when he became affiliated with the church. (In 1988, a new level, O.T. VIII, was introduced to members; it required study at sea, and Haggis declined to pursue it.) He had made his ascent by buying intensives bundled hours of auditing, at a discount rate. It wasnt so expensive back then, he said. David S. Touretzky, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has done extensive research on Scientology. (He is not a defector.) He estimates that the coursework alone now costs nearly three hundred thousand dollars, and, with the additional auditing and contributions expected of upperlevel members, the cumulative cost of the coursework may exceed half a million dollars. (The church says that there are no fixed fees, adding, Donations requested for courses at Church of Scientology begin at $50 and could never possibly reach the amount suggested.) I asked Haggis why he had aligned himself with a religion that so many have disparaged. I identify with the underdog, he said. I have a perverse pride in being a member of a group that people shun. For Haggis, who likes to see himself as a man of the people, his affiliation with Scientology felt like a way of standing with the marginalized and the oppressed. The church itself often hits this note, making frequent statements in support of human rights and religious freedom. Haggiss experience in Scientology, though, was hardly egalitarian: he accepted the privileges of the Celebrity Centre, which offers notables a private entrance, a V.I.P. lounge, separate facilities for auditing, and other perks. Indeed, much of the appeal of Scientology is the overt litism that it promotes among its members, especially celebrities. Haggis was struck by another paradox: Here I was in this very structured organization, but I always thought of myself as a freethinker and an iconoclast. During our conversations, we spoke about some events that had stained the reputation of the church while he was a member. For example, there was the death of Lisa McPherson, a Scientologist who died after a
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mental breakdown, in 1995. She had rear-ended a car in Clearwater, Floridawhere Scientology has its spiritual headquartersand then stripped off her clothes and wandered naked down the street. She was taken to a hospital, but, in the company of several other Scientologists, she checked out, against doctors advice. (The church considers psychiatry an evil profession.) McPherson spent the next seventeen days being subjected to church remedies, such as doses of vitamins and attempts to feed her with a turkey baster. She became comatose, and she died of a pulmonary embolism before church members finally brought her to the hospital. The medical examiner in the case, Joan Wood, initially ruled that the cause of death was undetermined, but she told a reporter, This is the most severe case of dehydration Ive ever seen. The State of Florida filed charges against the church. In February, 2000, under withering questioning from experts hired by the church, Wood declared that the death was accidental. The charges were dropped and Wood resigned. Haggis said that, at the time, he had chosen not to learn the details of McPhersons death. I had such a lack of curiosity when I was inside, Haggis said. Its stunning to me, because Im such a curious person. He said that he had been somewhere between uninterested in looking and afraid of looking. His life was comfortable, he liked his circle of friends, and he didnt want to upset the balance. It was also easy to dismiss people who quit the church. As he put it, Theres always disgruntled folks who say all sorts of things. He was now ashamed of this willed myopia, which, he noted, clashed with what he understood to be the ethic of Scientology: Hubbard says that there is a relationship between knowledge, responsibility, and control, and as soon as you know something you have a responsibility to act. And, if you dont, shame on you. Since resigning, Haggis had been wondering why it took him so long to leave. In an e-mail exchange, I noted that higher-level Scientologists are supposed to be free of neuroses and allergies, and resistant to the common cold. Dianetics also promises heightened powers of intelligence and perception. Haggis had told me that he fell far short of this goal. Did you feel it was your fault? I asked. Haggis responded that, because the auditing took place over a number of years, it was easy to believe that he might actually be smarter and wiser because of it, just as that might be true after years of therapy. It is all so subjective, how is one supposed to know? he wrote. How does it feel to be smarter today than you were two months ago? . . . But yes, I always felt false. He noted that a Scientologist hearing this would feel, with some justification, that he had misled his auditors about his progress. But, after hundreds of hours of auditing sessions, he said, I remember feeling I just wanted it over. I felt it wasnt working, and figured that could be my fault, but did not want the hours of repair auditing that they would tell me I needed to fix it. So I just went along, to my shame. I did what was easy . . . without asking them, or myself, any hard questions.
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When Haggis first turned to Scientology, he considered himself an atheist. Scientology seemed to him less a religion than a set of useful principles for living. He mentioned the ARC Triangle; ARC stands for Affinity, Reality, and Communication. Affinity, in this formulation, means the emotional response that partners have toward each other; reality is the area of common agreement. Together, these contribute to the flow of communication. The three parts together equal understanding, Haggis said. If youre having a disagreement with someone, your affinity drops quickly. Your mutual reality is shattered. Your communication becomes more halted. You begin to talk over each other. Theres less and less understanding. But all you need to do is to raise one part of the triangle and you increase the others as well. I still use that. Some aspects of Scientology baffled him. He hadnt been able to get through Dianetics: I read about thirty pages. I thought it was impenetrable. But much of the coursework gave him a feeling of accomplishment. He was soon commuting from London, Ontario, to Toronto to take more advanced courses, and, in 1976, he travelled to Los Angeles for the first time. He checked in at the old Chateau lyse, on Franklin Avenue. Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn had once stayed there, but when Haggis arrived it was a run-down church retreat called the Manor Hotel. (It has since been spectacularly renovated and turned into the flagship Celebrity Centre.) I had a little apartment with a kitchen I could write in, he recalls. There was a feeling of camaraderie that was something Id never experiencedall these atheists looking for something to believe in, and all these loners looking for a club to join. Recruits had a sense of boundless possibility. Mystical powers were forecast; out-of-body experiences were to be expected; fundamental secrets were to be revealed. Hubbard had boasted that Scientology had raised some peoples I.Q. one point for every hour of auditing. Our most spectacular feat was raising a boy from 83 I.Q. to 212, he told the Saturday Evening Post, in 1964. At the Manor Hotel, Haggis went Clear. The concept comes from Dianetics; it is where you start if you want to ascend to the upper peaks of Scientology. A person who becomes Clear is adaptable to and able to change his environment, Hubbard writes. His ethical and moral standards are high, his ability to seek and experience pleasure is great. His personality is heightened and he is creative and constructive. Someone who is Clear is less susceptible to disease and is free of neuroses, compulsions, repressions, and psychosomatic illnesses. The dianetic Clear is to a current normal individual as the current normal is to the severely insane. Going Clear was not life-changing, Haggis says. It wasnt, like, Oh, my God, I can fly! At every level of advancement, he was encouraged to write a success story saying how effective his training had been. He had read many such stories by other Scientologists, and they felt overly effusive, done in part
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to convince yourself, but also slanted toward giving somebody upstairs approval for you to go on to the next level. In 1977, Haggis returned to Canada to continue working for his father, who could see that his son was struggling. Ted Haggis asked him what he wanted to do with his life. Haggis said that he wanted to be a writer. His father recalls, I said, Well, there are only two places to do that, New York and Los Angeles. Pick one, and Ill keep you on the payroll for a year. Paul said, I think Ill go to L.A., because its warmer. Soon after this conversation, Haggis and Diane Gettas got married. Two months later, they loaded up his brown Camaro and drove to Los Angeles, where he got a job moving furniture. He and Diane lived in an apartment with her brother, Gregg, and three other people. In 1978, Diane gave birth to their first child, Alissa. Haggis was spending much of his time and money taking advanced courses and being audited, which involved the use of an electropsychometer, or E-Meter. The device, often compared in the press to a polygraph, measures the bodily changes in electrical resistance that occur when a person answers questions posed by an auditor. (Thoughts have a small amount of mass, the church contends in a statement. These are the changes measured.) In 1952, Hubbard said of the E-Meter, It gives Man his first keen look into the heads and hearts of his fellows. The Food and Drug Administration has compelled the church to declare that the instrument has no curative powers and is ineffective in diagnosing or treating disease. During auditing, Haggis grasped a cylindrical electrode in each hand; when he first joined Scientology, the electrodes were empty soup cans. An imperceptible electrical charge ran from the meter through his body. The auditor asked systematic questions aimed at detecting sources of spiritual distress. Whenever Haggis gave an answer that prompted the E-Meters needle to jump, that subject became an area of concentration until the auditor was satisfied that Haggis was free of the emotional consequences of the troubling experience. Haggis found the E-Meter surprisingly responsive. It seemed to gauge the kinds of thoughts he was havingwhether they were angry or happy, or if he was hiding something. The auditor often probed for what Scientologists call earlier similars. Haggis explained, If youre having a fight with your girlfriend, the auditor will ask, Can you remember an earlier time when something like this happened? And if you do then hell ask, What about a time before that? And a time before that? Often, the process leads participants to recall past lives. The goal is to uncover and neutralize the emotional memories that are plaguing ones behavior.
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Although Haggis never believed in reincarnation, he says, I did experience gains. I would feel relief from arguments Id had with my dad, things Id done as a teen-ager that I didnt feel good about. I think I did, in some ways, become a better person. I did develop more empathy for others. Then again, he admitted, I tried to find ways to be a better husband, but I never really did. I was still the selfish bastard I always was. Haggis was moving furniture during the day and taking photographs for church yearbooks on the weekends. At night, he wrote scripts on spec. He met Skip Press, another young writer who was a Scientologist. Press had read one of Haggiss scriptsan episode of Welcome Back, Kotter that he was trying to get to the shows star, John Travolta. Haggis and Press started hanging out with other aspiring writers and directors who were involved with Scientology. We would meet at a restaurant across from the Celebrity Centre called Two Dollar Bills, Press recalls. Chick Corea and other musicians associated with the church played there. Haggis and a friend from this circle eventually got a job writing for cartoons, including Scooby-Doo and Richie Rich. By now, Haggis had begun advancing through the upper levels of Scientology. The church defines an Operating Thetan as one who can handle things without having to use a body or physical means. An editorial in a 1959 issue of the Scientology magazine Ability notes that neither Lord Buddha nor Jesus Christ were O.T.s, according to the evidence. They were just a shade above Clear. According to several copies of church documents that have been leaked online, Hubbards handwritten instructions for the first level list thirteen mental exercises that attune practitioners to their relationship with others, such as Note several large and several small male bodies until you have a cognition. Note it down. In the second level, Scientologists engage in exercises and visualizations that explore oppositional forces:
Laughter comes from the rear half and calm from the front half simultaneously. Then they reverse. It gives one a sensation of total disagreement. The trick is to conceive of both at the same time. This tends to knock one out. Haggis didnt have a strong reaction to the material, but then he wasnt expecting anything too profound. Everyone knew that the big revelations resided in level O.T. III. Hubbard called this level the Wall of Fire. He said, The material involved in this sector is so vicious, that it is carefully arranged to kill anyone if he discovers the exact truth of it. . . . I am very sure that I was the first one that ever did live through any attempt to attain that material. The O.T. III candidate is expected to free himself from being overwhelmed by the disembodied, emotionally wounded spirits that have been implanted inside his body. Bruce Hines, a former high-level Scientology auditor who is now a research
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physicist at the University of Colorado, explained to me, Most of the upper levels are involved in exorcising these spirits. The process of induction is so long and slow that you really do convince yourself of the truth of some of these things that dont make sense, Haggis told me. Although he refused to specify the contents of O.T. materials, on the ground that it offended Scientologists, he said, If theyd sprung this stuff on me when I first walked in the door, I just would have laughed and left right away. But by the time Haggis approached the O.T. III material hed already been through several years of auditing. His wife was deeply involved in the church, as was his sister Kathy. Moreover, his first writing jobs had come through Scientology connections. He was now entrenched in the community. Success stories in the Scientology magazine Advance! added an aura of reality to the churchs claims. Haggis admits, I was looking forward to enhanced abilities. Moreover, he had invested a lot of money in the program. The incentive to believe was high. In the late seventies, the O.T. material was still quite secret. There was no Google, and Scientologys confidential scriptures had not yet circulated, let alone been produced in court or parodied on South Park. You were told that this information, if released, would cause serious damage to people, Haggis told me. Carrying an empty, locked briefcase, Haggis went to the Advanced Organization building in Los Angeles, where the material was held. A supervisor then handed him a folder, which Haggis put in the briefcase. He entered a study room, where he finally got to examine the secret documenta couple of pages, in Hubbards bold scrawl. After a few minutes, he returned to the supervisor. I dont understand, Haggis said. Do you know the words? the supervisor asked. I know the words, I just dont understand. Go back and read it again, the supervisor suggested. Haggis did so. In a moment, he returned. Is this a metaphor? he asked the supervisor. No, the supervisor responded. It is what it is. Do the actions that are required. Maybe its an insanity test, Haggis thoughtif you believe it, youre automatically kicked out. I sat with that for a while, he says. But when he read it again he decided, This is madness.
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The many discrepancies between L. Ron Hubbards legend and his life have overshadowed the fact that he was a fascinating man: an explorer, a best-selling author, and the founder of one of the few new religious movements of the twentieth century to have survived into the twenty-first. There are several unauthorized Hubbard biographiesmost notably, Russell Millers Bare-Faced Messiah, Jon Atacks A Piece of Blue Sky, and Bent Corydons L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman? All rely on stolen materials and the accounts of defectors, and the church claims that they present a false and fabricated picture of Hubbards life. For years, the church has had a contract with a biographer, Dan Sherman, to chronicle the founders life, but there is still no authorized book, and the church refused to let me talk to Sherman. (Hes busy, Davis told me.) The tug-of-war between Scientologists and anti-Scientologists over Hubbards legacy has created two swollen archetypes: the most important person who ever lived and the worlds greatest con man. Hubbard was certainly grandiose, but to label him merely a fraud is to ignore the complexity of his character. Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1911. His father, a naval officer, was often away, and Hubbard spent part of his childhood on his grandparents ranch, in Montana. When his father got posted to Guam, in 1927, Hubbard made two trips to see him. According to Hubbard, on the second trip he continued on to Asia, where he visited the Buddhist lamaseries in the Western Hills of China, watching monks meditate for weeks on end. In 1933, Hubbard married Margaret Grubb, whom he called Polly; their first child, Lafayette, was born the following year. He visited Hollywood, and began getting work as a screenwriter, very much as Paul Haggis did some forty years later. Hubbard worked on serials for Columbia Pictures, including one called The Secret of Treasure Island. But much of his energy was devoted to publishing stories, often under pseudonyms, in pulp magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction. During the Second World War, Hubbard served in the U.S. Navy, and he later wrote that he was gravely injured in battle: Blinded with injured optic nerves and lame with physical injuries to hip and back at the end of World War II, I faced an almost nonexistent future. I was abandoned by family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple. While languishing in a military hospital in Oakland, California, he said, he fully healed himself, using techniques that became the foundation of Scientology. I had no one to help me; what I had to know I had to find out, he wrote in an essay titled My Philosophy. And its quite a trick studying when you cannot see. In some editions of Hubbards book The Fundamentals of Thought, published in 1956, a note on the author says, It is a matter of medical record that he has twice been pronounced dead.
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After the war, Hubbards marriage dissolved, and he moved to Pasadena, where he became the housemate of Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist who belonged to an occult society called the Ordo Templi Orientis. An atmosphere of hedonism pervaded the house; Parsons hosted gatherings involving sex magick rituals. In a 1946 letter, Parsons described Hubbard: He is a gentleman, red hair, green eyes, honest and intelligent. Parsons then mentioned his wifes sister, Betty Northrup, with whom he had been having an affair. Although Betty and I are still friendly, she has transferred her sexual affections to Ron. One day, Hubbard and Northrup ran off together. In the official Scientology literature, it is claimed that Hubbard was assigned by naval intelligence to infiltrate Parsonss occult group. Hubbard broke up black magic in America, the church said in a statement. Hubbard and Northrup ended up in Los Angeles. He continued writing for the pulps, but he had larger ambitions. He began codifying a system of self-betterment, and set up an office near the corner of La Brea and Sunset, where he tested his techniques on the actors, directors, and writers he encountered. He named his system Dianetics. The book Dianetics appeared in May, 1950, and spent twenty-eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Written in a bluff, quirky style and overrun with footnotes that do little to substantiate its findings, Dianetics purports to identify the source of self-destructive behaviorthe reactive mind, a kind of data bank that is filled with traumatic memories called engrams, and that is the source of nightmares, insecurities, irrational fears, and psychosomatic illnesses. The object of Dianetics is to drain the engrams of their painful, damaging qualities and eliminate the reactive mind, leaving a person Clear. Dianetics, Hubbard said, was a precision science. He offered his findings to the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association but was spurned; he subsequently portrayed psychiatry and psychology as demonic competitors. He once wrote that if psychiatrists had the power to torture and kill everyone they would do so. Scientists dismissed Hubbards book, but hundreds of Dianetics groups sprang up across the U.S. and abroad. The Church of Scientology was officially founded in Los Angeles in February, 1954, by several devoted followers of Hubbards work. In 1966, Hubbardwho by then had met and married another woman, Mary Sue Whippset sail with a handful of Scientologists. The church says that being at sea provided a distraction-free environment, allowing Hubbard to continue his research into the upper levels of spiritual awareness. Within a year, he had acquired several oceangoing vessels. He staffed the ships with volunteers, many of them teen-
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agers, who called themselves the Sea Organization. Hubbard and his followers cruised the Mediterranean searching for loot he had stored in previous lifetimes. (The church denies this.) The defector Janis Grady, a former Sea Org member, told me, I was on the bridge with him, sailing past Greek islands. There were crosses lining one island. He told me that under each cross is buried treasure. The Sea Org became the churchs equivalent of a religious order. The group now has six thousand members. They perform tasks such as counselling, maintaining the churchs vast property holdings, and publishing its official literature. Sea Org initiatessome of whom are childrensign contracts for up to a billion years of service. They get a small weekly stipend and receive free auditing and coursework. Sea Org members can marry, but they must agree not to raise children while in the organization. As Scientology grew, it was increasingly attacked. In 1963, the Los Angeles Times called it a pseudoscientific cult. The church attracted dozens of lawsuits, largely from ex-parishioners. In 1980, Hubbard disappeared from public view. Although there were rumors that he was dead, he was actually driving around the Pacific Northwest in a motor home. He returned to writing science fiction and produced a tenvolume work, Mission Earth, each volume of which was a best-seller. In 1983, he settled quietly on a horse farm in Creston, California. Around that time, Paul Haggis received a message from the church about a film project. Hubbard had written a treatment for a script titled Influencing the Planet and, apparently, intended to direct it. The film was supposed to demonstrate the range of Hubbards efforts to improve civilization. With another Scientologist, Haggis completed a script, which he called quite dreadful. Hubbard sent him notes on the draft, but no film by that name was ever released. In 1985, with Hubbard in seclusion, the church faced two of its most difficult court challenges. In Los Angeles, a former Sea Org member, Lawrence Wollersheim, sought twenty-five million dollars for infliction of emotional injury. He claimed that he had been kept for eighteen hours a day in the hold of a ship docked in Long Beach, and deprived of adequate sleep and food. That October, the litigants filed O.T. III materials in court. Fifteen hundred Scientologists crowded into the courthouse, trying to block access to the documents. The church, which considers it sacrilegious for the uninitiated to read its confidential scriptures, got a restraining order, but the Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of the material and printed a summary. Suddenly, the secrets that had stunned Paul Haggis in a locked room were public knowledge. A major cause of mankinds problems began 75 million years ago, the Times wrote, when the planet Earth, then called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of ninety planets under the leadership of a
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despotic ruler named Xenu. Then, as now, the materials state, the chief problem was overpopulation. Xenu decided to take radical measures. The documents explained that surplus beings were transported to volcanoes on Earth. The documents state that H-bombs far more powerful than any in existence today were dropped on these volcanoes, destroying the people but freeing their spiritscalled thetanswhich attached themselves to one another in clusters. Those spirits were trapped in a compound of frozen alcohol and glycol, then implanted with the seed of aberrant behavior. The Times account concluded, When people die, these clusters attach to other humans and keep perpetuating themselves. The jury awarded Wollersheim thirty million dollars. (Eventually, an appellate court reduced the judgment to two and a half million.) The secret O.T. III documents remained sealed, but the Times report had already circulated widely, and the church was met with derision all over the world. The other court challenge in 1985 involved Julie Christofferson-Titchbourne, a defector who argued that the church had falsely claimed that Scientology would improve her intelligence, and even her eyesight. In a courtroom in Portland, she said that Hubbard had been portrayed to her as a nuclear physicist; in fact, he had failed to graduate from George Washington University. As for Hubbards claim that he had cured himself of grave injuries in the Second World War, the plaintiffs evidence indicated that he had never been wounded in battle. Witnesses for the plaintiff testified that, in one six-month period in 1982, the church had transferred millions of dollars to Hubbard through a Liberian corporation. The church denied this, and said that Hubbards income was generated by his book sales. The jury sided with Christofferson-Titchbourne, awarding her thirty-nine million dollars. Scientologists streamed into Portland to protest. They carried banners advocating religious freedom and sang We Shall Overcome. Scientology celebrities, including John Travolta, showed up; Chick Corea played a concert in a public park. Haggis, who was writing for the NBC series The Facts of Life at the time, came and was drafted to write speeches. I wasnt a celebrityI was a lowly sitcom writer, he says. He stayed for four days. The judge declared a mistrial, saying that Christofferson-Titchbournes lawyers had presented prejudicial arguments. It was one of the greatest triumphs in Scientologys history, and the church members who had gone to Portland felt an enduring sense of kinship. (A year and a half later, the church settled with Christofferson-Titchbourne for an undisclosed sum.) In 1986, Hubbard died, of a stroke, in his motor home. He was seventy-four. Two weeks later, Scientologists gathered in the Hollywood Palladium for a special announcement. A young man, David Miscavige, stepped onto the stage. Short, trim, and muscular, with brown hair and sharp features, Miscavige announced to the assembled Scientologists that, for the past six years, Hubbard had been
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investigating new, higher O.T. levels. He has now moved on to the next level, Miscavige said. Its a level beyond anything any of us ever imagined. This level is, in fact, done in an exterior state. Meaning that it is done completely exterior from the body. Thus, at twenty-hundred hours, the twenty-fourth of January, A.D. 36that is, thirty-six years after the publication of DianeticsL. Ron Hubbard discarded the body he had used in this lifetime. Miscavige began clapping, and led the crowd in an ovation, shouting, Hip hip hooray! Miscavige was a Scientology prodigy from the Philadelphia area. He claimed that, growing up, he had been sickly, and struggled with bad asthma; Dianetics counselling had dramatically alleviated the symptoms. As he puts it, he experienced a miracle. He decided to devote his life to the religion. He had gone Clear by the age of fifteen, and the next year he dropped out of high school to join the Sea Org. He became an executive assistant to Hubbard, who gave him special tutoring in photography and cinematography. When Hubbard went into seclusion, in 1980, Miscavige was one of the few people who maintained close contact with him. With Hubbards death, the curtain rose on a man who was going to impose his personality on an organization facing its greatest test, the death of its charismatic founder. Miscavige was twenty-five years old. In 1986, Haggis appeared on the cover of the Scientology magazine Celebrity. The accompanying article lauded his rising influence in Hollywood. He had escaped the cartoon ghetto after selling a script to The Love Boat. He had climbed the ladder of network television, writing movies of the week and childrens shows before settling into sitcoms. He worked on Diffrent Strokes and One Day at a Time, then became the executive producer of The Facts of Life. The magazine noted, He is one of the few writers in Hollywood who has major credits in all genres: comedy, suspense, human drama, animation. In the article, Haggis said of Scientology, What excited me about the technology was that you could actually handle life, and your problems, and not have them handle you. He added, I also liked the motto, Scientology makes the able more able. He credited the church for improving his relationship with Gettas. Instead of fighting (we did a lot of that before Scientology philosophy) we now talk things out, listen to each other and apply Scientology technology to our problems. Haggis told Celebrity that he had recently gone through the Purification Rundown, a program intended to eliminate body toxins that form a biochemical barrier to spiritual well-being. For an average of three weeks, participants undergo a lengthy daily regimen combining sauna visits, exercise, and huge doses of vitamins, especially niacin. According to a forthcoming book, Inside Scientology, by the journalist Janet Reitman, the sauna sessions can last up to five hours a day. In the interview, Haggis recalled being skepticalMy idea of doing good for my body was smoking low-tar cigarettesbut said that the Purification Rundown was WONDERFUL. He went on, I really did feel more alert and more aware
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and more at easeI wasnt running in six directions to get something done, or bouncing off the walls when something went wrong. Haggis mentioned that he had taken drugs when he was young. Getting rid of all those residual toxins and medicines and drugs really had an effect, he said. After completing the rundown I drank a diet cola and suddenly could really taste it: every single chemical! He recommended the Rundown to others, including his mother, who at the time was seriously ill. He also persuaded a young writer on his staff to take the course, in order to wean herself from various medications. She could tell Scientology worked by the example I set, Haggis told the magazine. That made me feel very good. Privately, he told me, he remained troubled by the churchs theology, which struck him as intergalactic spirituality. He was grateful, however, to have an auditor who was really smart, sweet, thoughtful. I could always go to talk to him. The confessionals were helpful. It just felt better to get things off my chest. Even after his incredulous reaction to O.T. III, he continued to move up the Bridge. He saw so many intelligent people on the path, and expected that his concerns would be addressed in future levels. He told himself, Maybe there is something, and Im just missing it. He felt unsettled by the lack of irony among many fellow-Scientologistsan inability to laugh at themselves, which seemed at odds with the character of Hubbard himself. When Haggis felt doubts about the religion, he recalled 16-mm. films he had seen of Hubbards lectures from the fifties and sixties. He had this amazing buoyancy, Haggis says. He had a deadpan humor and this sense of himself that seemed to say, Yes, I am fully aware that I might be mad, but I also might be on to something. Haggis finally reached the top of the Operating Thetan pyramid. According to documents obtained by WikiLeaks, the activist group run by Julian Assange, the final exercise is: Go out to a park, train station or other busy area. Practice placing an intention into individuals until you can successfully and easily place an intention into or on a Being and/or a body. Haggis expected that, as an O.T. VII, he would feel a sense of accomplishment, but he remained confused and unsatisfied. He thought that Hubbard was brilliant in so many ways, and that the failing must be his. At one point, he confided to a minister in the church that he didnt think he should be a Scientologist. She told him, There are all sorts of Scientologists, just as there are all sorts of Jews and Christians, with varying levels of faith. The implication, Haggis said, was that he could pick and choose which tenets of Scientology to believe. Haggis was a workaholic, and as his career took off he spent less and less time with his family. He never got home till late at night or early in the morning, his oldest daughter, Alissa, said. All the time I ever spent with him was on the set. Haggis frequently brought his daughters to work and assigned them odd jobs; Alissa earned her Directors Guild card when she was fifteen.
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In 1987, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the creators of the new series thirtysomething, hired Haggis to write scripts. When I talked to them recently, Herskovitz recalled, Paul walked in the door and said, I love the fact that you guys are doing a show all about emotions. I dont like talking about my emotions. In the shows first season, one of Haggiss scripts won an Emmy. Since he rarely discussed his religion, his bosses were surprised to learn of his affiliation. Herskovitz told me, The thing about Paul is his particular sense of humor, which is ironic, self-deprecating And raw! Zwick interjected. Its not a sense of humor you often encounter among people who believe in Scientology, Herskovitz continued. His way of looking at life didnt have that sort of straight-on, unambiguous, unambivalent view that so many Scientologists project. Observing Zwick and Herskovitz at work got Haggis interested in directing, and when the church asked him to make a thirty-second ad about Dianetics he seized the chance. He was determined to avoid the usual claim that Dianetics offered a triumphal march toward enlightenment. He shot a group of Scientologists talking about the practical ways that they had used Dianetics. It was very naturalistic, he recalls. Church authorities hated it. They thought it looked like an A.A. meeting. The spot never aired. In 1992, he helped out on the pilot for Walker, Texas Ranger, a new series starring Chuck Norris. It ran for eight seasons and was broadcast in a hundred countries. Haggis was credited as a co-creator. It was the most successful thing I ever did, he says. Two weeks of work. They never even used my script! With his growing accomplishments and wealth, Haggis became a bigger prize for the church. In 1988, Scientology sponsored a Dianetics car in the Indianapolis 500. David Miscavige was at the race. It was one of the few times that he and Haggis met. They sat near each other at a Scientology-sponsored dinner event before the race. Paul takes no shit from anybody, the organizer of the event recalled. Several times when Miscavige made some comment during the dinner, the organizer said, Paul challenged him in a lighthearted way. His tone was perceived as insufficiently deferential; afterward, Miscavige demanded to know why Haggis had been invited. (Miscavige declined requests to speak to me, and Tommy Davis says that Miscavige did not attend the event.) The organizer told me, You have to understand: no one challenges David Miscavige. Haggiss marriage had long been troubled, and he and his wife were entering a final state of estrangement. One day, Haggis flew to New York with a casting director who was also a Scientologist. They shared a kiss. Haggis felt bad about it, and confessed to it during an ethics session. He was given instruction on how to fix the problem. It didnt work. He had a series of liaisons, each of which he
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confessed. Yet, perhaps because of his fame, he was not made to atone for what Scientologists call out ethics behavior. Haggis and Gettas began a divorce battle that lasted nine years. Their three girls lived with Gettas, visiting Haggis occasionally. Gettas enrolled them in private schools that used Hubbards educational system, which is called Study Tech. It is one of the more grounded systems that he developed. There are three central elements. One is the use of clay, or other materials, to help make difficult concepts less abstract. Alissa explains, If Im learning the idea of how an atom looks, Id make an atom out of clay. A second concept is making sure that students dont face too steep a gradient, in Hubbards words. The schools are set up so that you dont go on to the next level until you completely understand the material, Alissa says. The third element is the frequent use of a dictionary to eliminate misunderstandings. Its really important to understand the words youre using. Lauren, the middle sister, initially struggled in school. I was illiterate until I was eleven, she told me. Somehow, that fact escaped her parents. I assume it was because of the divorce, she says. When the divorce became final, in 1997, Haggis and Gettas were ordered by the court to undergo psychological evaluationsa procedure abhorred by Scientologists. The court then determined that Haggis should have full custody of the children. His daughters were resentful. They had lived their entire lives with their mother. I didnt even know why he wanted us, Lauren says. I didnt really know him. Haggis put his daughters in an ordinary private school, but that lasted only six months. The girls werent entirely comfortable talking to people who werent Scientologists, and basic things like multiple-choice tests were unfamiliar. At a regular school, they felt like outsiders. The first thing I noticed that I did, that others didnt, is the Contact, Alissa told me, referring to a procedure the church calls Contact Assist. If you hurt yourself, the first thing I and other Scientology kids do is go quiet. Scientology preaches that, if you touch the wound to the object that caused the injury and silently concentrate, the pain lessens and a sense of trauma fades. The girls demanded to be sent to boarding school, so Haggis enrolled them at the Delphian School, in rural Oregon, which uses Hubbards Study Tech methods. The school, Lauren says, is on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. She added, I lived in a giant bubble. Everyone I knew was a Scientologist. For one course, she decided to write a paper about discrimination against various religions, including Scientology. I wanted to see what the opposition was saying, so I went online, she says. Another student turned her in to the schools ethics committee. Information that doesnt correspond to Scientology
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teachings is termed enthetameaning confused or destructive thinking. Lauren agreed to stop doing research. It was really easy not to look, she says. By the time she graduated from high school, at the age of twenty, she had scarcely ever heard anyone speak ill of Scientology. Alissa was a top student at Delphian, but she found herself moving away from the church. She still believed in some ideas promoted by Scientology, such as reincarnation, and she liked Hubbards educational techniques, but by the time she graduated she no longer defined herself as a Scientologist. Her reasoning was true to Hubbards philosophy. A core concept in Scientology is: Something isnt true unless you find it true in your own life, she told me. After starting boarding school, Alissa did not speak to her father for a number of years. She was angry about the divorce. Haggis mined the experience for the script of Million Dollar Baby, in which the lead character, played by Clint Eastwood, is haunted by his estrangement from his daughter. Im very proud of Alissa for not talking to me, Haggis told me, his eyes welling with tears. Think what that takes. It was the only time, in our many conversations, that he displayed such emotion. Haggis and Alissa slowly resumed communication. When Alissa was in her early twenties, she accepted the fact that, like her sister Katy, she was gay. She recalls, When I finally got the courage to come out to my dad, he said, Oh, yeah, I knew that. Now, Alissa says, she and Haggis have a working relationship. As she puts it, We do see each other for Thanksgiving and some meals. Recently, Alissa, who is also a writer, has been collaborating on screenplays with her father. Haggis also gave her the role of a murderous drug addict in The Next Three Days. In 1991, as his marriage to Gettas was crumbling, Haggis went to a Fourth of July party at the home of Scientologist friends. Deborah Rennard, who played J.R.s alluring secretary on Dallas, was at the party. Rennard had grown up in a Scientology household and joined the church herself at the age of seventeen. In her early twenties, she studied acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse and fell in love with Milton Katselas. They had recently broken up, after a six-year romance. When I first met Paul, he said he was having a crisis of faith, Rennard told me. He said hed raced up to the top of the Bridge on faith, but he hadnt gotten what he expected. Haggis admitted to her, I dont believe Im a spiritual being. I actually am what you see. They became a couple, and married in June, 1997, immediately after Haggiss divorce from Gettas became final. A son, James, was born the following year. Rennard, concerned about her husbands spiritual doubts, suggested that he do some more study. She was having breakthroughs that sometimes led her to discover past lives. There were images, feelings, and
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thoughts that I suddenly realized, Thats not here. Im not in my body, Im in another place, she told me. For instance, she might be examining what the church calls a contra-survival actionlike the time I clobbered Paul or threw something at him. And Id look for an earlier similar. Suddenly, Id realize I was doing something negative, and Id be in England in the eighteen-hundreds. Id see myself harming this person. It was a fleeting glimpse at what I was doing then. Examining these moments helped the emotional charge dissipate. Paul would say, Dont you think youre making this up? She wondered if that mattered. If it changed me for the better, who cares? she says. When you are working on a scene as an actor, something similar happens. You get connected to a feeling from who knows where. Haggis and Rennard shared a house in Santa Monica, which soon became a hub for progressive political fund-raisers. Haggis lent his name to nearly any cause that espoused peace and justice: the Earth Communications Office, the Hollywood Education and Literacy Project, the Center for the Advancement of Non-Violence. Despite his growing disillusionment with Scientology, he also raised a significant amount of money for it, and made sizable donations himself, appearing frequently on an honor roll of top contributors. The Church of Scientology had recently gained tax-exempt status as a religious institution, making donations, as well as the cost of auditing, tax-deductible. (Church members had lodged more than two thousand lawsuits against the Internal Revenue Service, ensnaring the agency in litigation. As part of the settlement, the church agreed to drop its legal campaign.) Over the years, Haggis estimates, he spent more than a hundred thousand dollars on courses and auditing, and three hundred thousand dollars on various Scientology initiatives. Rennard says that she spent about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on coursework. Haggis recalls that the demands for donations never seemed to stop. They used friends and any kind of pressure they could apply, he says. I gave them money just to keep them from calling and hounding me. A decade ago, Haggis moved into feature films. He co-wrote the scripts for the two most recent James Bond films, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. He claims that Scientology has not influenced his workthere are no evident references in his moviesbut his scripts often do have an autobiographical element. Im not good at something unless it disturbs me, he said. In Million Dollar Baby, he wrote about a boxing coach who pulls the plug on a paralyzed fighter. Haggis made a similar choice in real life with his best friend, who was brain dead from a staph infection. They dont die easily, he said. Even in a coma, he kicked and moaned for twelve hours. Haggis likes to explore contradictions, making heroes into villains and vice versa, as with the racist cop in Crash, played by Matt Dillon, who molests a woman in one scene and saves her life in another. In In the Valley of Elah, Tommy Lee Jones plays a father trying to discover who murdered his son, a heroic soldier just returned from Iraq, only to learn that the sadism of the war had turned his son into a willing torturer.
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In 2004, Haggis was rewriting Flags of Our Fathers, a drama about Iwo Jima, for Clint Eastwood to direct. (Haggis shared credit with William Broyles, Jr.) One day, Haggis and Eastwood visited the set of War of the Worlds, which Steven Spielberg was shooting with Tom Cruise. Haggis had met Cruise at a fund-raiser and, a second time, at the Celebrity Centre. Cruise says that he was introduced to the church in 1986 by his first wife, the actress Mimi Rogers. (Rogers denies this.) In 1992, he became the religions most famous member, telling Barbara Walters that Hubbards Study Tech methods had helped him overcome dyslexia. Hes a major symbol of the church, and I think he takes that very seriously, Haggis said. Tommy Davis, at Cruises request, was allowed to erect a tent on the set of Spielbergs War of the Worlds, where Scientology materials were distributed. That raised eyebrows in Hollywood. Haggis says that when he appeared on the set Spielberg pulled him aside. Its really remarkable to me that Ive met all these Scientologists, and they seem like the nicest people, Spielberg said. Haggis replied, Yeah, we keep all the evil ones in a closet. (Spielbergs publicist says that Spielberg doesnt recall the conversation.) A few days later, Haggis says, he was summoned to the Celebrity Centre, where officials told him that Cruise was very upset. It was a joke, Haggis explained. Davis offers a different account. He says that Cruise mentioned the incident to him only in passing, but that he himself found the remark offensive. He confronted Haggis, who apologized profusely, asking that his contrition be relayed to anyone who might have been offended. Davis has known Cruise since Davis was eighteen years old. They are close friends. The two men physically resemble each other, with long faces, strong jaws, and spiky haircuts. I saw him hanging out with Tom Cruise after the Oscars, Haggis recalls. At the Vanity Fair party, they were let in the back door. They arrived on motorcycles, really cool ones, like Ducatis. Cruise was also close to David Miscavige, and has said of him, I have never met a more competent, a more intelligent, a more tolerant, a more compassionate being outside of what I have experienced from L.R.H. And Ive met the leaders of leaders. In 2004, Cruise received a special Scientology award: the Freedom Medal of Valor. In a ceremony held in England, Miscavige called Cruise the most dedicated Scientologist I know. The ceremony was accompanied by a video interview with the star. Wearing a black turtleneck, and with the theme music from Mission: Impossible playing in the background, Cruise said, Being a Scientologist, you look at someone and you know absolutely that you can help them. So, for me, it really is K.S.W.initials that stand for Keeping Scientology Working. He went on, That policy to me has really gonephist! He made a vigorous gesture with his hand. Boy! Theres a time I went through and I said, You know what?
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When I read it, you know, I just went poo! This is it! Later, when the video was posted on YouTube and viewed by millions who had no idea what he was talking about, Cruise came across as unhinged. He did not dispel this notion when, in 2005, during an interview with Oprah Winfrey, he jumped up and down on a couch while declaring his love for the actress Katie Holmes. He and Holmes married in 2006, in Italy. David Miscavige was his best man. Proposition 8, the California initiative against gay marriage, passed in November, 2008. Haggis learned from his daughter Lauren of the San Diego chapters endorsement of it. He immediately sent Davis several e-mails, demanding that the church take a public stand opposing the ban on gay marriage. I am going to an anti Prop 8 rally in a couple of hours, he wrote on November 11th, after the election. When can we expect the public statement? In a response, Davis proposed sending a letter to the San Diego press, saying that the church had been erroneously listed among the supporters of Proposition 8. Erroneous doesnt cut it, Haggis responded. In another note, he remarked, The church may have had the luxury of not taking a position on this issue before, but after taking a position, even erroneously, it can no longer stand neutral. He demanded that the church openly declare that it supports gay rights. Anything less wont do. Davis explained to Haggis that the church avoids taking overt political stands. He also felt that Haggis was exaggerating the impact of the San Diego endorsement. It was one guy who somehow got it in his head it would be a neat idea and put Church of Scientology San Diego on the list, Davis told me. When I found out, I had it removed from the list. Davis said that the individual who made the mistakehe didnt divulge the namehad been disciplined for it. I asked what that meant. He was sat down by a staff member of the local organization, Davis explained. He got sorted out. Davis told me that Haggis was mistaken about his daughter having been ostracized by Scientologists. Davis said that he had spoken to the friend who had allegedly abandoned Katy, and the friend had ended the relationship not because Katy was a lesbian but because Katy had lied about it. (Haggis, when informed of this account, laughed.) As far as Davis was concerned, reprimanding the San Diego staff member was the end of the matter: I said, Paul, Ive received no press inquiries. . . . If I were to make a statement on this, it would actually be more attention to the subject than if we leave it be. Haggis refused to let the matter drop. This is not a P.R. issue, it is a moral issue, he wrote, in February, 2009. In the final note of this exchange, he conceded, You were right: nothing happenedit didnt flap at least not very much. But I feel we shamed ourselves.
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Haggis sent this note six months before he resigned. Because he stopped complaining, Davis felt that the issue had been laid to rest. But, far from putting the matter behind him, Haggis began his investigation into the church. His inquiry, much of it conducted online, mirrored the actions of the lead character he was writing for The Next Three Days; the character, played by Russell Crowe, goes on the Internet to find a way to break his wife out of jail. Haggis soon found on YouTube the video of Tommy Davis talking on CNN about disconnection. The practice of disconnection is not unique to Scientology. The Amish, for example, cut themselves off from apostates, including their own children; some Orthodox Jewish communities do the same. Rennard had disconnected from her parents twice. When she was a young child, her stepfather had got the family involved with Scientology. When she was in her twenties, and appearing on Dallas, her parents broke away from the church. Like many active members of Scientology, they had kept money in an account (in their case, twenty-five hundred dollars) for future courses they intended to take. Rennards mother took the money back. Thats a huge deal for the church, Rennard told me. She didnt speak to her parents for several years, assuming that they had been declared Suppressive Persons. In the early nineties, Rennard wrote to the International Justice Chief, the Scientology official in charge of such matters; she was informed that she could talk to her parents again. A decade later, however, she went to Clearwater, intending to take some upper-level courses, and was told that the previous ruling no longer applied. If she wanted to do more training, she had to confront her parents mistakes. The church recommended that she take a course called P.T.S./S.P., which stands for Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Persons. That course took a year, Rennard told me. She petitioned officials at the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles for help. They put me on a program that took two years to complete, she says. Still, nothing changed. If she failed to handle her parents, she would have to disconnect not only from them but also from everyone who spoke to them, including her siblings. It was that, or else I had to give up being a Scientologist, she says. Rennards parents were among four hundred claimants in a lawsuit brought against Scientology by disaffected members in 1987; the case was thrown out of court the following year, for lack of evidence. To make amends, Rennards parents had to denounce the anti-Scientologist group and offer a token restitution. The church prescribes a seven-step course of rehabilitation, called A to E, for penitents seeking to get back into its good graces, which includes returning debts and making public declarations of error. Rennard told her parents that if they wanted to remain in contact with her they had to follow the churchs procedures. Her parents, worried that they would also be cut off from their grandson, agreed to perform community service. They really wanted to work it out with me, she says.
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But the church wasnt satisfied. Rennard was told that if she maintained contact with her parents she would be labelled a Potential Trouble Sourcea designation that would alienate her from the Scientology community and render her ineligible for further training. It was clearly laid out for me, she says. A senior official counselled her to agree to have her parents formally branded as S.P.s. Until then, they wont turn around and recognize their responsibilities, he said. O.K., fine, Rennard said. Go ahead and declare them. Maybe itll get better. She was granted permission to begin upper-level coursework in Clearwater. In August, 2006, a notice was posted at the Celebrity Centre declaring Rennards parents Suppressive Persons, saying that they had associated with squirrels, which in Scientology refers to people who have dropped out of the church but continue to practice unauthorized auditing. A month later, Rennards parents sent her a letter: We tried to do what you asked, Deborah. We worked the whole months of July & Aug. on A-E. They explained that they had paid the church the twenty-five hundred dollars. After all that, they continued, a church adjudicator had told them to hand out three hundred copies of L. Ron Hubbards pamphlet The Way to Happiness to libraries; they had also been told to document the exchange with photographs. They had declined. If this cant be resolved, we will have to say Good-Bye to you & James will lose his Grand-Parents, her mother wrote. This is ridiculous. In April, 2007, Rennards parents sued for the right to visit their grandson. Rennard had to hire an attorney. Eventually, the church relented. She was summoned to a church mission in Santa Monica and shown a statement rescinding the ruling that her parents were S.P.s. Tommy Davis sent me some policy statements that Hubbard had made about disconnection in 1965. Anyone who rejects Scientology also rejects, knowingly or unknowingly, the protection and benefits of Scientology and the companionship of Scientologists, Hubbard writes. In Introduction to Scientology Ethics, Hubbard defined disconnection as a self-determined decision made by an individual that he is not going to be connected to another. Scientology defectors are full of tales of forcible family separations, which the church almost uniformly denies. Two former leaders in the church, Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, told me that families are sometimes broken apart. In their cases, their wives chose to stay in the church when they left. The wives, and the church, denounce Rathbun and Rinder as liars. A few days after sending the resignation letter to Tommy Davis, Haggis came home from work to find nine or ten of his Scientology friends standing in his front yard. He invited them in to talk. Anne Archer was there with Terry Jastrow, her husband, an actor turned producer and director. Paul had been such an ally, Archer told me. It was pretty painful. Everyone wanted to see if there could be some kind of
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resolution. Mark Isham, an Emmy-winning composer who has scored films for Haggis, came with his wife, Donna. Sky Dayton, the EarthLink founder, was there, along with several other friends and a church representative Haggis didnt know. His friends could have served as an advertisement for Scientology they were wealthy high achievers with solid marriages, who embraced the idea that the church had given them a sense of well-being and the skills to excel. Scientologists are trained to believe in their persuasive powers and the need to keep a positive frame of mind. But the mood in the room was downbeat and his friends questions were full of reproach. Jastrow asked Haggis, Do you have any idea that what you might do might damage a lot of pretty wonderful people and your fellow-Scientologists? Haggis reminded the group that he had been with them at the 1985 freedom march in Portland. They all knew about his financial support of the church and the occasions when he had spoken out in its defense. Jastrow remembers Haggis saying, I love Scientology. Archer had particular reason to feel aggrieved: Haggiss letter had called her son a liar. Paul was very sweet, she says. We didnt talk about Tommy. She understood that Haggis was upset about the way Proposition 8 had affected his gay daughters, but she didnt think it was relevant to Scientology. The church is not political, she told me. We all have tons of friends and relatives who are gay. . . . Its not the churchs issue. Ive introduced gay friends to Scientology. Isham was frustrated. We werent breaking through to him, he told me. Of all the friends present, Isham was the closest to Haggis. We share a common artistic sensibility, Isham said. When he visited Abbey Road Studios, in England, to record the score that he had written for In the Valley of Elah, Haggis went along with him. Haggis wanted him to compose the score for The Next Three Days. Now their friendship was at risk. Isham used Scientology to analyze the situation. In his view, Haggiss emotions at that moment ranked 1.1 on the Tone Scalethe state that is sometimes called Covertly Hostile. By adopting a tone just above itAngerIsham hoped to blast Haggis out of the psychic place where he seemed to be lodged. This was an intellectual decision, Isham said. I decided I would be angry. Paul, Im pissed off, Isham told Haggis. Theres better ways to do this. If you have a complaint, theres a complaint line. Anyone who genuinely wanted to change Scientology should stay within the organization, Isham argued, not quit; certainly, going public was not helpful. Haggis listened patiently. A fundamental tenet of Scientology is that differing points of view must be fully heard and acknowledged. When his friends finished, however, Haggis had his own set of grievances.
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He referred them to the expos in the St. Petersburg Times that had so shaken him: The Truth Rundown. The first installment had appeared in June, 2009. Haggis had learned from reading it that several of the churchs top managers had defected in despair. Marty Rathbun had once been inspector general of the churchs Religious Technology Center, which holds the trademarks of Scientology and Dianetics, and exists to protect the public from misapplication of the technology. Rathbun had also overseen Scientologys legal-defense strategy, and reported directly to Miscavige. Amy Scobee had been an executive in the Celebrity Centre network. Mike Rinder had been the churchs spokesperson, the job now held by Tommy Davis. One by one, they had disappeared from Scientology, and it had never occurred to Haggis to ask where they had gone. The defectors told the newspaper that Miscavige was a serial abuser of his staff. The issue wasnt the physical pain of it, Rinder said. Its the fact that the domination youre gettinghit in the face, kicked and you cant do anything about it. If you did try, youd be attacking the C.O.B.the chairman of the board. Tom De Vocht, a defector who had been a manager at the Clearwater spiritual center, told the paper that he, too, had been beaten by Miscavige; he said that from 2003 to 2005 he had witnessed Miscavige striking other staff members as many as a hundred times. Rathbun, Rinder, and De Vocht all admitted that they had engaged in physical violence themselves. It had become the accepted way of doing things, Rinder said. Amy Scobee said that nobody challenged the abuse because people were terrified of Miscavige. Their greatest fear was expulsion: You dont have any money. You dont have job experience. You dont have anything. And he could put you on the streets and ruin you. Assessing the truthfulness of such inflammatory statementsmade by people who deserted the church or were expelledwas a challenge for the newspaper, which has maintained a special focus on Scientology. (Clearwater is twenty miles northwest of downtown St. Petersburg.) In 1998, six years before he defected, Rathbun told the paper that he had never seen Miscavige hit anyone. Now he said, That was the biggest lie I ever told you. The reporters behind The Truth Rundown, Joe Childs and Thomas Tobin, interviewed each defector separately and videotaped many of the sessions. It added a measure of confidence, Childs told me. Their stories just tracked. Much of the alleged abuse took place at the Gold Base, a Scientology outpost in the desert near Hemet, a town eighty miles southeast of Los Angeles. Miscavige has an office there, and the site features, among other things, movie studios and production facilities for the churchs many publications. For decades, the bases location was unknown even to many church insiders. Haggis visited the Gold Base only once, in the early eighties, when he was about to direct his Scientology commercial. The landscape, he said, suggested a spa, beautiful and restful, but he found the atmosphere sterile and scary. Surrounded by a
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security fence, the base houses about eight hundred Sea Org members, in quarters that the church likens to those in a convent or seminary, albeit much more comfortable. According to a court declaration filed by Rathbun in July, Miscavige expected Scientology leaders to instill aggressive, even violent, discipline. Rathbun said that he was resistant, and that Miscavige grew frustrated with him, assigning him in 2004 to the Holea pair of double-wide trailers at the Gold Base. There were between eighty and a hundred people sentenced to the Hole at that time, Rathbun said, in the declaration. We were required to do group confessions all day and all night. The church claims that such stories are false: There is not, and never has been, any place of confinement . . . nor is there anything in Church policy that would allow such confinement. According to Rathbun, Miscavige came to the Hole one evening and announced that everyone was going to play musical chairs. Only the last person standing would be allowed to stay on the base. He declared that people whose spouses were not participants would have their marriages terminated. The St. Petersburg Times noted that Miscavige played Queens Bohemian Rhapsody on a boom box as the church leaders fought over the chairs, punching each other and, in one case, ripping a chair apart. Tom De Vocht, one of the participants, says that the event lasted until four in the morning: It got more and more physical as the number of chairs went down. Many of the participants had long been cut off from their families. They had no money, no credit cards, no telephones. According to De Vocht, many lacked a drivers license or a passport. Few had any savings or employment prospects. As people fell out of the game, Miscavige had airplane reservations made for them. He said that buses were going to be leaving at six in the morning. The powerlessness of everyone else in the room was nakedly clear. Tommy Davis told me that a musical-chairs episode did occur. He explained that Miscavige had been away from the Gold Base for some time, and when he returned he discovered that in his absence many jobs had been reassigned. The game was meant to demonstrate that even seemingly small changes can be disruptive to an organizationunderscoring an administrative policy of the church. The rest of the defectors accounts, Davis told me, was hoo-ha: Chairs being ripped apart, and people being threatened that theyre going to be sent to far-flung places in the world, plane tickets being purchased, and theyre going to force their spousesand on and on and on. I mean, its just nuts! Jefferson Hawkins, a former Sea Org member and church executive who worked with Haggis on the rejected Dianetics ad campaign, told me that Miscavige had struck or beaten him on five occasions, the first time in 2002. I had just written an infomercial, he said. Miscavige summoned him to a meeting where a few dozen members were seated on one side of a table; Miscavige sat by himself on the other
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side. According to Hawkins, Miscavige began a tirade about the ads shortcomings. Hawkins recalls, Without any warning, he jumped up onto the conference-room table and he launches himself at me. He knocks me back against a cubicle wall and starts battering my face. The two men fell to the floor, Hawkins says, and their legs became entangled. Let go of my legs! Miscavige shouted. According to Hawkins, Miscavige then stomped out of the room, leaving Hawkins on the floor, shocked and bruised. The others did nothing to support him, he claims: They were saying, Get up! Get up! I asked Hawkins why he hadnt called the police. He reminded me that church members believe that Scientology holds the key to salvation: Only by going through Scientology will you reach spiritual immortality. You can go from life to life to life without being cognizant of what is going on. If you dont go through Scientology, youre condemned to dying over and over again in ignorance and darkness, never knowing your true nature as a spirit. Nobody who is a believer wants to lose that. Miscavige, Hawkins says, holds the power of eternal life and death over you. Moreover, Scientologists are taught to handle internal conflicts within the churchs own justice system. Hawkins told me that if a Sea Org member sought outside help he would be punished, either by being declared a Suppressive Person or by being sent off to do manual labor, as Hawkins was made to do after Miscavige beat him. The church denies that Hawkins was mistreated, and notes that he has participated in protests organized by Anonymous, a hacktivist collective that has targeted Scientology. The group pugnaciously opposes censorship, and became hostile toward Scientology after the church invoked copyright claims in order to remove from the Internet the video of Tom Cruise extolling K.S.W. The church describes Anonymous as a cyber-terrorist group; last month, the F.B.I. raided the homes of three dozen members after Anonymous attacked the Web sites of corporations critical of WikiLeaks. (Two members of Anonymous have pleaded guilty to participating in a 2008 attack on a Scientology Web site.) The church provided me with eleven statements from Scientologists, all of whom said that Miscavige had never been violent. One of them, Yael Lustgarten, said that she was present at the meeting with Hawkins and that the attack by Miscavige never happened. She claims that Hawkins made a mess of his presentationHe smelled of body odor, he was unshaven, his voice tone was very low, and he could hardly be heardand was admonished to shape up. She says that Hawkins wasnt hit by anyone. The defector Amy Scobee, however, says that she witnessed the attackthe two men had fallen into her cubicle. After the altercation, she says, I gathered all the buttons from Jeffs shirt and the change from his pockets and gave them back to him. The church characterizes Scobee, Rinder, Rathbun, Hawkins, De Vocht, Hines, and other defectors I spoke with as discredited individuals, who were demoted for incompetence or expelled for corruption;
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the defectors accounts are consistent only because they have banded together to advance and support each others false stories. After reading the St. Petersburg Times series, Haggis tracked down Marty Rathbun, who was living on Corpus Christi Bay, in south Texas. Rathbun had been making ends meet by writing freelance articles for local newspapers and selling beer at a ballpark. Haggis complained that Davis hadnt been honest with him about Scientologys policies. I said, Thats not Tommy, he has no say, Rathbun told me. Miscavige is a total micromanager. I explained the whole culture. He says that Haggis was shocked by the conversation. The thing that was most troubling to Paul was that I literally had to escape, Rathbun told me. (A few nights after the musical-chairs incident, he got on his motorcycle and waited until a gate was opened for someone else; he sped out and didnt stop for thirty miles.) Haggis called several other former Scientologists he knew well. One of them said that he had escaped from the Gold Base by driving his caran Alfa Romeo convertible that Haggis had sold himthrough a wooden fence. The defector said that he had scars on his forehead from the incident. Still others had been expelled or declared Suppressive Persons. Haggis asked himself, What kind of organization are we involved in where people just disappear? When Haggis began casting for The Next Three Days, in the summer of 2009, he asked Jason Beghe to read for the part of a cop. Beghe was a gravel-voiced character actor who had played Demi Moores love interest in G.I. Jane. In the late nineties, Haggis had worked with Beghe on a CBS series, Family Law. Like so many others, Beghe had come to the church through the Beverly Hills Playhouse. In old promotional materials for the church, he is quoted as saying that Scientology is a rocket ride to spiritual freedom. Beghe told Haggis, You should know that Im no longer in Scientology. Actually, Im one of its most outspoken critics. The church would be very unhappy if you hire me. Haggis responded, Nobody tells me who I cast. He looked at a lengthy video that Beghe had posted on the Internet, in which he denounces the church as destructive and a ripoff. Haggis thought that Beghe had gone over the edge. But he asked if they could talk. The two men met at Patricks Roadhouse, a coffee shop on the beach in Pacific Palisades. Beghe was calmer than he had been in the video, which he called a snapshot of me having been out only three months. Even though Beghe had renounced the church, he continued to use Scientology methods when dealing with members and former members. Its almost like: I can speak Chinese, I understand the culture, he explained to me. In several meetings with Haggis, he employed techniques based on what
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Hubbard labelled Ethics Conditions. These range from Confusion at the bottom and ascend through Treason, Enemy, Doubt, Liability, and Emergency, eventually leading to Power. Each one of the conditions has a specific set of steps in a formula, and, once that formula is applied correctly, you will move up to the next-highest condition, Beghe explained. I assumed that Paul was in a condition of Doubt. Beghe joined Scientology in 1994. He told Haggis that, in the late nineties, he began having emotional problems, and the church recommended auditing and coursework. In retrospect, he felt that it had done no good. I was paying money for them to fuck me up, he said. I spent about five or six hundred thousand dollars trying to get better, and I continued to get worse. He says that when he finally decided to leave the church, in 2007, he told an official that the church was in a condition of Liability to him. Ordinarily, when a Scientologist does something wrong, especially something that might damage the image of the organization, he has to make amends, often in the form of a substantial contribution. But now the situation was reversed. Beghe recalls telling the official, You guys dont have any policies to make up the damage. He eventually suggested to the official that the church buy property and lease it to him at a negligible rate; the church now characterizes this as an attempt at extortion. Beghe was reluctant to use the word brainwashingwhatever the fuck that isbut he did feel that his mind had been somehow taken over. You have all these thoughts, all these ways of looking at things, that are L. Ron Hubbards, he explained. You think youre becoming more you, but within that is an implanted thing, which is You the Scientologist. Perhaps because Haggis had never been as much of a true believer as some members, he didnt feel as deeply betrayed as Beghe did. I didnt feel that some worm had buried itself in my ear, and if you plucked it out you would find L. Ron Hubbard and his thought, he told me. But, as he continued his investigation, he became increasingly disturbed. He read the churchs official rebuttal to the St. Petersburg Times series, in the Scientology magazine Freedom. It included an annotated transcript of conversations that had taken place between the reporters and representatives of the church, including Tommy Davis and his wife, Jessica Feshbach. In Freedoms rendition of those conversations, the reporters sources were not named, perhaps to shield Scientologists from the shock of seeing familiar names publicly denouncing the organization. Rathbun was called Kingpin and Scobee the Adulteress. At one point in the transcribed conversations, Davis reminded the reporters that Scobee had been expelled from the church leadership because of an affair. The reporters responded that she had denied having sexual contact outside her marriage. Thats a lie, Davis told them. Feshbach, who had a stack of documents, elaborated: She has a written admission [of] each one of her instances of extramarital indiscretion. . . . I believe there were five. When Haggis read this in Freedom, he presumed that the
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church had obtained its information from the declarations that members sometimes provide after auditing. Such confessions are supposed to be confidential. (Scientology denies that it obtained the information this way, and Davis produced an affidavit, signed by Scobee, in which she admits to having liaisons. Scobee denies committing adultery, and says that she did not write the affidavit; she says that she signed it in the hope of leaving the church on good terms, so that she could stay in touch with relatives.) In his letter to Davis, Haggis said that he was worried that the church might look through his files to smear him, too. Luckily, I have never held myself up to be anyones role model, he wrote. At his house, Haggis finished telling his friends what he had learned. He suggested that they should at least examine the evidence. I directed them to certain Web sites, he said, mentioning Exscientologykids.com, which was created by three young women who grew up in Scientology and subsequently left. Many stories on the site are from men and women who joined the Sea Org before turning eighteen. One of them was Jenna Miscavige Hill, David Miscaviges niece, who joined when she was twelve. For Hill and many others, formal education had stopped when they entered the Sea Org, leaving them especially ill-prepared, they say, for coping with life outside the church. The stories Haggis found on the Internet of children drafted into the Sea Org appalled him. They were ten years old, twelve years old, signing billion-year contractsand their parents go along with this? Haggis told me. Scrubbing pots, manual laborthat so deeply touched me. My God, it horrified me! The stories of the Sea Org children reminded Haggis of child slaves he had seen in Haiti. Many Sea Org volunteers find themselves with no viable options for adulthood. If they try to leave, the church presents them with a freeloader tab for all the coursework and counselling they have received; the bill can amount to more than a hundred thousand dollars. Payment is required in order to leave in good standing. Many of them actually pay it, Haggis said. They leave, theyre ashamed of what theyve done, theyve got no money, no job history, theyre lost, they just disappear. In what seemed like a very unguarded comment, he said, I would gladly take down the church for that one thing. The church says that it adheres to all child labor laws, and that minors cant sign up without parental consent; the freeloader tabs are an ecclesiastical matter and are not enforced through litigation. Haggiss friends came away from the meeting with mixed feelings. We all left no clearer than when we went in, Archer said. Isham felt that there was still a possibility of getting Haggis to behave himself. He said that Haggis had agreed that it wasnt helping anyone to continue distributing the letter, and had promised not to circulate it further. Unmentioned was the fact that this would be the last time most of them ever spoke to Haggis.
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I asked Isham if he had taken Haggiss advice and looked at the Web sites or the articles in the St. Petersburg Times. I started to, he said. But it was like reading Mein Kampf if you wanted to know something about the Jewish religion. In the days after the friends visited Haggiss home, church officials and members came to his office, distracting his colleagues, particularly his producing partner, Michael Nozik, who is not a Scientologist. Every day, for hours, he would have conversations with them, Nozik told me. It was August, 2009, and shooting for The Next Three Days was set to start in Pittsburgh at the end of the month; the office desperately needed Haggiss attention. But he felt a need to go through the process fully, Nozik says. He wanted to give them a full hearing. I listened to their point of view, but I didnt change my mind, Haggis says, noting that the Scientology officials became more livid and irrational. He added, I applied more Scientology in those meetings than they did. Davis and other church officials told Haggis that Miscavige had not beaten his employees; his accusers, they said, had committed the violence. Supposing that was true, Haggis said, why hadnt Miscavige stopped it? Haggis recalls that, at one meeting, he told Davis and five other officials, If someone in my organization is beating people, I would sure know about it. You think I would put up with it? And Im not that good a person. Haggis noted that, if the rumors of Miscaviges violent temper were true, it proved that everyone is fallible. Look at Martin Luther King, Jr., he said, alluding to Kings sexual improprieties. How dare you compare Dave Miscavige with Martin Luther King! one of the officials shouted. Haggis was shocked. They thought that comparing Miscavige to Martin Luther King was debasing his character, he says. If they were trying to convince me that Scientology was not a cult, they did a very poor job of it. (Davis says that Kings name never came up.) In October, 2009, Marty Rathbun called Haggis and asked if he could publish the resignation letter on his blog. Rathbun had become an informal spokesperson for defectors who believed that the church had broken away from Hubbards original teachings. Haggis was in Pittsburgh, shooting his picture. Youre a journalist, you dont need my permission, Haggis said, although he asked Rathbun to excise parts related to Katys homosexuality. Haggis says that he didnt think about the consequences of his decision: I thought it would show up on a couple of Web sites. Im a writer, Im not Lindsay Lohan. Rathbun got fifty-five thousand hits on his blog that afternoon. The next morning, the story was in newspapers around the world.
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At the time Haggis was doing his research, the F.B.I. was conducting its own investigation. In December, 2009, Tricia Whitehill, a special agent from the Los Angeles office, flew to Florida to interview former members of the church in the F.B.I.s office in downtown Clearwater, which happens to be directly across the street from Scientologys spiritual headquarters. Tom De Vocht, who spoke with Whitehill, told me, I understood that the investigation had been going on for quite a while. He says Whitehill confided that she hadnt told the local agents what the investigation was about, in case the office had been infiltrated. Amy Scobee spoke to the F.B.I. for two days. They wanted a full download about the abuse, she told me. Whitehill and Valerie Venegas, the lead agent on the case, also interviewed former Sea Org members in California. One of them was Gary Morehead, who had been the head of security at the Gold Base; he left the church in 1996. In February, 2010, he spoke to Whitehill and told her that he had developed a blow drill to track down Sea Org members who left Gold Base. We got wickedly good at it, he says. In thirteen years, he estimates, he and his security team brought more than a hundred Sea Org members back to the base. When emotional, spiritual, or psychological pressure failed to work, Morehead says, physical force was sometimes used to bring escapees back. (The church says that blow drills do not exist.) Whitehill and Venegas worked on a special task force devoted to human trafficking. The laws regarding trafficking were built largely around forced prostitution, but they also pertain to slave labor. Under federal law, slavery is defined, in part, by the use of coercion, torture, starvation, imprisonment, threats, and psychological abuse. The California penal code lists several indicators that someone may be a victim of human trafficking: signs of trauma or fatigue; being afraid or unable to talk, because of censorship by others or security measures that prevent communication with others; working in one place without the freedom to move about; owing a debt to ones employer; and not having control over identification documents. Those conditions echo the testimony of many former Sea Org members who lived at the Gold Base. Sea Org members who have failed to fulfill their ecclesiastical responsibilities may be sent to one of the churchs several Rehabilitation Project Force locations. Defectors describe them as punitive reducation camps. In California, there is one in Los Angeles; until 2005, there was one near the Gold Base, at a place called Happy Valley. Bruce Hines, the defector turned research physicist, says that he was confined to R.P.F. for six years, first in L.A., then in Happy Valley. He recalls that the properties were heavily guarded and that anyone who tried to flee would be tracked down and subjected to further punishment. In 1995, when I was put in R.P.F., there were twelve of us, Hines said. At the high point, in 2000, there were about a hundred and twenty of us. Some members have been in R.P.F. for more than a decade, doing manual labor and extensive spiritual work. (Davis says that Sea Org members enter R.P.F.
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by their own choosing and can leave at any time; the manual labor maintains church facilities and instills pride of accomplishment.) In 2009, two former Sea Org members, Claire and Marc Headley, filed lawsuits against the church. They had both joined as children. Claire became a member of the Sea Org at the age of sixteen, and was assigned to the Gold Base. She says she wasnt allowed to tell anyone where she was going, not even her mother, who was made to sign over guardianship. (Claires mother, who is still in the church, has issued a sworn statement denying that she lost contact with her daughter.) The security apparatus at the Gold Base intimidated Claire. Even though I had been in Scientology pretty much all my life, this was a whole new world, she told me. She says she was rarely allowed even a telephone call to her mother. Every last trace of my life, as I knew it, was thrown away, she said. It was like living in George Orwells 1984. Claire met Marc Headley, also a teen-ager, soon after her arrival. We had no ties to anyone not in Scientology, Claire said. It was a very closeted and controlled existence. Marc says it was widely known around the base that he was one of the first people Tom Cruise audited. In Scientology, the auditor bears a significant responsibility for the progress of his subject. If you audit somebody and that person leaves the organization, theres only one person whose fault that isthe auditor, Headley told me. (Cruises attorney says that Cruise doesnt recall meeting Marc.) Claire and Marc fell in love, and married in 1992. She says that she was pressured by the church to have two abortions, because of a stipulation that Sea Org members cant have children. The church denies that it pressures members to terminate pregnancies. Lucy James, a former Scientologist who had access to Sea Org personnel records, says that she knows of dozens of cases in which members were pressed to have abortions. In 2005, Marc Headley says, he was punched by Miscavige during an argument. He and his wife quit. (The church calls Marc Headley dishonest, claiming that he kept seven hundred dollars in profits after being authorized to sell Scientology camera equipment; Headley says that shipping costs and other expenses account for the discrepancy.) In 2009, the Headleys filed their suits, which maintained that the working conditions at the Gold Base violated labor and human-trafficking laws. The church responded that the Headleys were ministers who had voluntarily submitted to the rigors of their calling, and that the First Amendment protected Scientologys religious practices. The court agreed with this argument and dismissed the Headleys complaints, awarding the church forty thousand dollars in litigation costs. The court also indicated that the Headleys were technically free to leave the Gold Base. The Headleys have appealed the rulings. Defectors also talked to the F.B.I. about Miscaviges luxurious life style. The law prohibits the head of a tax-exempt organization from enjoying unusual perks or compensation; its called inurement. Tommy Davis refused to disclose how much money Miscavige earns, and the church isnt required to do so, but
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Headley and other defectors suggest that Miscavige lives more like a Hollywood star than like the head of a religious organizationflying on chartered jets and wearing shoes custom-made in London. Claire Headley says that, when she was in Scientology, Miscavige had five stewards and two chefs at his disposal; he also had a large car collection, including a Saleen Mustang, similar to one owned by Cruise, and six motorcycles. (The church denies this characterization and vigorously objects to the suggestion that Church funds inure to the private benefit of Mr. Miscavige.) Former Sea Org members report that Miscavige receives elaborate birthday and Christmas gifts from Scientology groups around the world. One year, he was given a Vyrus 985 C3 4V, a motorcycle with a retail price of seventy thousand dollars. These gifts are tokens of love and respect for Mr. Miscavige, Davis informed me. By contrast, Sea Org members typically receive fifty dollars a week. Often, this stipend is docked for small infractions, such as failing to meet production quotas or skipping scripture-study sessions. According to Janela Webster, who was in the Sea Org for nineteen years before defecting, in 2006, it wasnt unusual for a member to be paid as little as thirteen dollars a week. I recently spoke with two sources in the F.B.I. who are close to the investigation. They assured me that the case remains open. Last April, John Brousseau, who had been in the Sea Org for more than thirty years, left the Gold Base. He was unhappy with Miscavige, his former brother-in-law, whom he considered detrimental to the goals of Scientology. He drove across the country, to south Texas, to meet Marty Rathbun. I was there a couple of nights, he says. At five-thirty one morning, he was leaving the motel room where he was staying, to get coffee, when he heard footsteps behind him. It was Tommy Davis; he and nineteen church members had tracked Brousseau down. Brousseau locked himself in his room and called Rathbun, who alerted the police; Davis went home without Brousseau. In a deposition given in July, Davis said no when asked if he had ever followed a Sea Organization member that has blownfled the church. Under further questioning, he admitted that he and an entourage had flown to Texas in a jet chartered by Scientology, and had shown up outside Brousseaus motel room at dawn. But he insisted that he was only trying to see a friend of mine. Davis now calls Brousseau a liar. Brousseau says that his defection caused anxiety, in part because he had worked on a series of special projects for Tom Cruise. Brousseau maintained grounds and buildings at the Gold Base. He worked for fourteen months on the renovation of the Freewinds, the only ship left in Scientologys fleet; he also says
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that he installed bars over the doors of the Hole, at the Gold Base, shortly after Rathbun escaped. (The church denies this.) In 2005, Miscavige showed Cruise a Harley-Davidson motorcycle he owned. At Miscaviges request, Brousseau had had the vehicles parts plated with brushed nickel and painted candy-apple red. Brousseau recalls, Cruise asked me, God, could you paint my bike like that? I looked at Miscavige, and Miscavige agreed. Cruise brought in two motorcycles to be painted, a Triumph and a Honda Rune; the Honda had been given to him by Spielberg after the filming of War of the Worlds. The Honda already had a custom paint job by the set designer, Brousseau recalls. Each motorcycle had to be taken apart completely, and all the parts nickel-plated, before it was painted. (The church denies Brousseaus account.) Brousseau also says that he helped customize a Ford Excursion S.U.V. that Cruise owned, installing features such as handmade eucalyptus panelling. The customization job was presented to Tom Cruise as a gift from David Miscavige, he said. I was getting paid fifty dollars a week, he recalls. And Im supposed to be working for the betterment of mankind. Several years ago, Brousseau says, he worked on the renovation of an airport hangar that Cruise maintains in Burbank. Sea Org members installed faux scaffolding, giant banners bearing the emblems of aircraft manufacturers, and a luxurious office that was fabricated at church facilities, then reassembled inside the hangar. Brousseau showed me dozens of photographs documenting his work for Cruise. Both Cruises attorney and the church deny Brousseaus account. Cruises attorney says that the Church of Scientology has never expended any funds to the personal benefit of Mr. Cruise or provided him with free services. Tommy Davis says that these projects were done by contractors, and that Brousseau acted merely as an adviser. He also says, None of the Church staff involved were coerced in any way to assist Mr. Cruise. Church staff, and indeed Church members, hold Mr. Cruise in very high regard and are honored to assist him. Whatever small economic benefit Mr. Cruise may have received from the assistance of Church staff pales in comparison to the benefits the Church has received from Mr. Cruises many years of volunteer efforts for the Church. Yet this assistance may have involved many hours of unpaid labor on the part of Sea Org members. Miscaviges official title is chairman of the board of the Religious Technology Center, but he dominates the entire organization. His word is absolute, and he imposes his will even on some of the people closest to him. According to Rinder and Brousseau, in June, 2006, while Miscavige was away from the Gold Base, his wife, Shelly, filled several job vacancies without her husbands permission. Soon afterward, she disappeared. Her current status is unknown. Tommy Davis told me, I definitely know where she is, but he wont disclose where that is.
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The garden behind Anne Archer and Terry Jastrows house, in Brentwood, is filled with olive trees and hummingbirds. A fountain gurgles beside the swimming pool. When I visited, last May, Jastrow told me about the first time he met Archer, in Milton Katselass class. I saw this girl sitting next to Milton, Jastrow recalled. I said, Who is that? There was a cool wind blowing in from the Pacific, and Archer drew a shawl around her. We were friends for about a year and a half before we ever had our first date, Archer said. They were married in 1978. Our relationship really works, Jastrow said. We attribute that essentially a hundred per cent to applying Scientology. The two spoke of the techniques that had helped them, such as never being critical of the other and never interrupting. This isnt a creed, Archer said. These are basic natural laws of life. She described Hubbard as an engineer who had codified human emotional states, in order to guide people to feel a zest and a love for life. I asked them how the controversy surrounding Scientology had affected them. It hasnt touched me, Archer said. Its not that Im not aware of it. She went on, Scientology is growing. Its in a hundred and sixty-five countries. Translated into fifty languages! Jastrow added. Its the fastest-growing religion. He added, Scientologists do more good things for more people in more places around the world than any other organization ever. He continued, When you study the historical perspective of new faiths, historically, theyve all been Attacked, Archer said. Look what happened to the The Christians, Jastrow said, simultaneously. Think of the Mormons and the Christian Scientists. We talked about the churchs focus on celebrities. Hubbard recognized that if you really want to inspire a culture to have peace and greatness and harmony among men, you need to respect and help the artist to prosper and flourish, Archer said. And if hes particularly well known he needs a place where he can be comfortable. Celebrity Centres provide that. She blamed the press for concentrating too much on Scientology celebrities. Journalists, she said, dont write about the hundreds of thousands of other Scientologists Millions! Millions of other Scientologists. They only write about four friggin people!
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The church wont release official membership figures, but it informally claims eight million members worldwide. Davis says that the figure comes from the number of people throughout the world who have donated to the church. There is no process of conversion, there is no baptism, Davis told me. It was a simple decision: Either you are or you arent. A survey of American religious affiliations, compiled in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, estimates that only twenty-five thousand Americans actually call themselves Scientologists. Thats less than half the number who identify themselves as Rastafarians. Jastrow suggested that Scientologys critics often had a vested interest. He pointed to psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, drugmakers, pharmaciesall those people who make a living and profit and pay their mortgages and pay their college educations and buy their cars, et cetera, et cetera, based on people not being well. He cited a recent article in USA Today which noted that an alarmingly high number of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan had been hospitalized for mental illness. Drugs merely mask mental distress, he said, whereas Scientology will solve the source of the problem. The medical and pharmaceutical industries are prime funders and sponsors of the media, he said, and therefore might exert influence on people telling the whole and true story about Scientology just because of the profit motive. Scientology has perpetuated Hubbards antagonism toward psychiatry. An organization that the church co-founded, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, maintains a permanent exhibit in Los Angeles called Psychiatry: An Industry of Death, which argues that psychiatry contributed to the rise of Nazism and apartheid. The group is behind an effort to help achieve legislative protections against abusive psychiatric treatment and drugging of children. (Paul Haggis has hosted an event for the organization at his home. His defection from Scientology has not changed his view that psychotropic drugs are overprescribed for children.) Jastrow, in his back yard, told me, Scientology is going to be huge, and its going to help mankind right itself. He asked me, What else is there that we can hang our hopes on? Thats improving the civilization, Archer added. Is there some other religion on the horizon thats gonna help mankind? he said. Just tell me where. If not Scientology, where? Archer and Jastrow found their way into Scientology in the mid-seventies, but Tommy Davis was reared in Archers original faith, Christian Science. He never met L. Ron Hubbard. He was thirteen years old on January 24, 1986, the day Hubbard died. Although Davis grew up amid money and celebrity, he impressed people with his modesty and his idealism. Like Paul Haggis, Davis was first drawn to the
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church because of romantic problems. In 1996, he told Details that, when he was seventeen, he was having trouble with a girlfriend, and went to his mother for advice. Archer suggested that he go to the Celebrity Centre. After taking the Personal Values and Integrity course, Davis became a Scientologist. In 1990, Davis was accepted at Columbia University. But, according to the defector John Peelerwho was then the secretary to Karen Hollander, the president of the Celebrity Centrepressure was put on Davis to join the Sea Org. Hollander, Peeler says, wanted Tommy to be her personal assistant. Karen felt that because of who his parents were, and the fact that he already had close friendships with other celebrities, hed be a good fit, Peeler said. Whenever celebrities came in, there would be Anne Archers son. At first, Davis resisted. He wanted to go to college, Peeler said. That fall, Davis entered Columbia. He attended for a semester, then dropped out and joined the Sea Org. I always wanted to do something that helped people, Davis explained to me. I didnt think the world needed another doctor or lawyer. Archer and Jastrow say that they were surprised by Tommys decision. We were hoping hed get his college education, Jastrow said. Davis became fiercely committed to the Sea Org. He got a tattoo on one arm of its logotwo palm fronds embracing a star, supposedly the emblem of the Galactic Confederacy seventy-five million years ago. He began working at the Celebrity Centre, attending to young stars like Juliette Lewis, before taking on Tom Cruise. David Miscavige was impressed with Davis. Mike Rinder recalled, Miscavige liked the fact that he was young and looked trendy and wore Armani suits. Paul Haggis remembers first meeting Davis at the Celebrity Centre in the early nineties. He was a sweet and bright boy, Haggis said. Daviss rise within Scientology was not without difficulty. In 2005, Davis was sent to Clearwater to participate in something called the Estates Project Force. He was there at the same time as Donna Shannon, a veterinarian who had become an O.T. VII before joining the Sea Org. She had thought that she was attending a kind of boot camp for new Sea Org members, and was surprised to see veterans like Davis. She says that Davis, a pretty nice guy, was subjected to extensive hazing. He complained about scrubbing a Dumpster with a toothbrush till late at night, she recalls. Then hed be up at six to do our laundry. Only later did Shannon learn that Davis was Anne Archers son. Shannon and Davis worked together for a while in Clearwater, maintaining the grounds. I was supposedly supervising him, Shannon says. I was told to make him work really hard. At one point, Shannon says, Davis borrowed about a hundred dollars from her because he didnt have money for food.
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One day, according to Shannon, she and Davis were taking the bus to a work project. She asked why he was in the E.P.F. I got busted, Davis told her. Using Scientology jargon, he said, I fucked up on Tom Cruises lines meaning that he had botched a project that Cruise was involved in. I just want to do my stuff and get back on post. Shannon recalled that, suddenly, it was like a veil went over his eyes, and he goes, I already said too much. Several months later, Davis paid her back the money. (Davis says that he does not recall meeting Shannon, has never scrubbed a Dumpster, and has never had a need to borrow money.) Davis ascended to his role as spokesman in 2007. He has since become known for his aggressive defenses of the church. In 2007, the BBC began reporting an investigative story about Scientology. From the start, the BBC crew, led by John Sweeney, was shadowed by a Scientology film crew. Davis travelled across the U.S. to disrupt Sweeneys interviews with Scientology dissidents. The two men had a number of confrontations. In an incident captured on video in Florida, Sweeney suggests that Scientology is a sadistic cult. Davis responds, For you to repeatedly refer to my faith in those terms is so derogatory, so offensive, and so bigoted. And the reason you kept repeating it is because you wanted to get a reaction like youre getting right now. Well, buddy, you got it! Right here, right now, Im angry! Real angry! The two men had another encounter that left Sweeney screaming as Davis goaded himan incident so raw that Sweeney apologized to his viewers. Shortly afterward, in March, 2007, Davis mysteriously disappeared. He was under considerable stress. According to Mike Rinder, Davis had told Sweeney that he reported to Miscavige every day, and that angered Miscavige, who wanted to be seen as focussed on spiritual matters, not public relations. According to Rinder, Davis blew. A few days later, he surfaced in Las Vegas. Davis was sent to Clearwater, where he was security-checked by Jessica Feshbach, a church stalwart. A security check involves seeking to gain a confession with an E-Meter, in order to rout out subversion. It can function as a powerful form of thought control. Davis claims that he never fled the church and was not in Las Vegas. He did go to Clearwater. I went to Florida and worked there for a year and took some time off, he told me. I did a lot of study, a lot of auditing. He and Feshbach subsequently got married. When I first contacted Tommy Davis, last April, he expressed a reluctance to talk, saying that he had already spent a month responding to Paul Haggis. It made little difference, he said. The last thing Im
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interested in is dredging all this up again. He kept putting me off, saying that he was too busy to get together, but he promised that we would meet when he was more available. In an e-mail, he said, We should plan on spending at least a full day together as there is a lot I would want to show you. We finally arranged to meet on Memorial Day weekend. I flew to Los Angeles and waited for him to call. On Sunday at three oclock, Davis appeared at my hotel, with Feshbach. We sat at a table on the patio. Davis has his mothers sleepy eyes. His thick black hair was combed forward, with a lock falling boyishly onto his forehead. He wore a wheat-colored suit with a blue shirt. Feshbach, a slender, attractive woman, anxiously twirled her hair. Davis now told me that he was not willing to participate in, or contribute to, an article about Scientology through the lens of Paul Haggis. I had come to Los Angeles specifically to talk to him, at a time he had chosen. I asked if he had been told not to talk to me. He said no. Feshbach said that she had spoken to Mark Isham, whom I had interviewed the day before. He talked to you about what are supposed to be our confidential scriptures. Any discussion of the churchs secret doctrines was offensive, she said. In my meeting with Isham, he asserted that Scientology was not a faith-based religion. I pointed out that, in Scientologys upper levels, there was a cosmology that would have to be accepted on faith. Isham said that he wasnt going to discuss the details of O.T. III. In the wrong hands, it can hurt people, he said. Everything I have to say about Paul, Ive already said, Davis told me. He agreed, however, to respond to written questions about the church. In late September, Davis and Feshbach, along with four attorneys representing the church, travelled to Manhattan to meet with me and six staff members of The New Yorker. In response to nearly a thousand queries, the Scientology delegation handed over forty-eight binders of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet. Davis, early in his presentation, attacked the credibility of Scientology defectors, whom he calls bitter apostates. He said, They make up stories. He cited Bryan Wilson, an Oxford sociologist, who has argued that testimony from the disaffected should be treated skeptically, noting, The apostate is generally in need of self-justification. He seeks to reconstruct his own past to excuse his former affiliations and to blame those who were formerly his closest associates.
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Davis spoke about Gerry Armstrong, a former Scientology archivist who copied, without permission, many of the churchs files on Hubbard, and who settled in a fraud suit against the church in 1986. Davis charged that Armstrong had forged many of the documents that he later disseminated in order to discredit the churchs founder. He also alleged that Armstrong had spread rumors of a 1967 letter in which Hubbard told his wife that he was drinking lots of rum and popping pinks and grays while researching the Operating Thetan material. Davis also noted that, in 1984, Armstrong had been captured on videotape telling a friend, I can create documents with relative ease. You know, I did for a living. Daviss decision to cite this evidence was curiousthough the quote cast doubt on Armstrongs ethics, it also suggested that forging documents had once been part of a Scientologists job. Davis passed around a photograph of Armstrong, which, he said, showed Armstrong sitting naked with a giant globe in his lap. This was a photo that was in a newspaper article he did where he said that all people should give up money, Davis said. Hes not a very sane person. Armstrong told me that, in the photo, he is actually wearing running shorts under the globe. The article is about his attempt to create a movement for people to abandon the use of currency. He said that he received eight hundred thousand dollars in the 1986 settlement and had given most of the money away. (The settlement prohibited Armstrong from talking about Scientology, a prohibition that he has ignored, and the church has won two breach-of-contract suits against him, including a five-hundred-thousanddollar judgment in 2004.) Davis also displayed photographs of what he said were bruises sustained by Mike Rinders former wife in 2010, after Rinder physically assaulted her in a Florida parking lot. (Rinder denies committing any violence. A sheriffs report supports this.) Davis also showed a mug shot of Marty Rathbun in a jailhouse jumpsuit, after being arrested in New Orleans last July for public drunkenness. Getting arrested for being drunk on the intersection of Bourbon and Toulouse? Davis cracked. Thats like getting arrested for being a leper in a leper colony. (Rathbuns arrest has been expunged.) Claire and Marc Headley were the most despicable people in the world; Jeff Hawkins was an inveterate liar. I asked how, if these people were so reprehensible, they had all arrived at such elevated positions in the church. They werent like that when they were in those positions, Davis responded. The defectors we were discussing had not only risen to positions of responsibility within the church; they had also ascended Scientologys ladder of spiritual accomplishment. I suggested to Davis that Scientology didnt seem to work if people at the highest levels of spiritual attainment were actually liars, adulterers, wife beaters, and embezzlers.
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Scientology, Davis said, doesnt pretend to be perfect, and it shouldnt be judged on the misconduct of a few apostates. I havent done things like that, Davis said. I havent suborned perjury, destroyed evidence, liedcontrary to what Paul Haggis says. He spoke of his frustration with Haggis after his resignation: If he was so troubled and shaken on the fundamentals of Scientology . . . then why the hell did he stick around for thirty-five years? He continued, Did he stay a closet Scientologist for some career-advancement purpose? Davis shook his head in disgust. I think hes the most hypocritical person in the world. We discussed the allegations of abuse lodged against Miscavige. The only people who will corroborate are their fellow-apostates, Davis said. He produced affidavits from other Scientologists refuting the accusations, and noted that the tales about Miscavige always hinged on inexplicable violent outbursts. Davis said, One would think that if such a thing occurredwhich it most certainly did notthered have to be a reason. I had wondered about these stories as well. While Rinder and Rathbun were in the church, they had repeatedly claimed that allegations of abuse were baseless. Then, after Rinder defected, he said that Miscavige had beaten him fifty times. Rathbun has confessed that, in 1997, he ordered incriminating documents destroyed in the case of Lisa McPherson, the Scientologist who died of an embolism. If these men were capable of lying to protect the church, might they not also be capable of lying to destroy it? Davis later claimed that Rathbun is in fact trying to overthrow Scientologys current leadership and take over the church. (Rathbun now makes his living by providing Hubbard-inspired counselling to other defectors, but he says that he has no desire to be part of a hierarchical organization. Power corrupts, he says.) Twelve other defectors told me that they had been beaten by Miscavige, or had witnessed Miscavige beating other church staff members. Most of them, like John Peeler, noted that Miscaviges demeanor changed like the snap of a finger. Others who never saw such violence spoke of their constant fear of the leaders anger. At the meeting, Davis brought up Jack Parsonss black-magic society, which Hubbard had supposedly infiltrated. Davis said, He was sent in there by Robert Heinleinthe science-fiction writerwho was running off-book intelligence operations for naval intelligence at the time. Davis said, A biography that just came out three weeks ago on Bob Heinlein actually confirmed it at a level that wed never been able to before. The book to which Davis was referring is the first volume of an authorized Heinlein biography, by William H. Patterson, Jr. There is no mention in the book of Heinleins sending Hubbard to break up the Parsons ring, on the part of naval intelligence or any other organization. Patterson says that he looked into the matter, at the suggestion of Scientologists, but found nothing.
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Davis and I discussed an assertion that Marty Rathbun had made to me about the O.T. III creation story the galactic revelations that Haggis had deemed madness. While Hubbard was in exile, Rathbun told me, he wrote a memo suggesting an experiment in which ascending Scientologists skipped the O.T. III level. Miscavige shelved the idea, Rathbun told me. Davis called Rathbuns story libellous. He explained that the cornerstone of Scientology was the writings of L. Ron Hubbard. Mr. Hubbards material must be and is applied precisely as written, Davis said. Its never altered. Its never changed. And there probably is no more heretical or more horrific transgression that you could have in the Scientology religion than to alter the technology. But hadnt certain derogatory references to homosexuality found in some editions of Hubbards books been changed after his death? Davis admitted that that was so, but he maintained that the current editions are one-hundred-per-cent, absolutely fully verified as being according to what Mr. Hubbard wrote. Davis said they were checked against Hubbards original dictation. The extent to which the references to homosexuality have changed are because of mistaken dictation? I asked. No, because of the insertion, I guess, of somebody who was a bigot, Davis replied. Somebody put the material in those? I can only imagine. . . . It wasnt Mr. Hubbard, Davis said, cutting me off. Who wouldve done it? I have no idea. Hmm. I dont think it really matters, Davis said. The point is that neither Mr. Hubbard nor the church has any opinion on the subject of anyones sexual orientation. . . . Someone inserted words that were not his into literature that was propagated under his name, and thats been corrected now? I asked. Yeah, I can only assume thats what happened, Davis said.
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After this exchange, I looked at some recent editions that the church had provided me with. On page 125 of Dianetics, a sexual pervert is defined as someone engaging in homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual sadism, etc. Apparently, the bigots handiwork was not fully excised. At the meeting, Davis and I also discussed Hubbards war record. His voice filling with emotion, he said that, if it was true that Hubbard had not been injured, then the injuries that he handled by the use of Dianetics procedures were never handled, because they were injuries that never existed; therefore, Dianetics is based on a lie; therefore, Scientology is based on a lie. He concluded, The fact of the matter is that Mr. Hubbard was a war hero. In the binders that Davis provided, there was a letter from the U.S. Naval Hospital in Oakland, dated December 1, 1945. The letter states that Hubbard had been hospitalized that year for a duodenal ulcer, but was technically pronounced fit for duty. This was the same period during which Hubbard claimed to have been blinded and lame. Davis had highlighted a passage: Eyesight very poor, beginning with conjunctivitis actinic in 1942. Lame in right hip from service connected injury. Infection in bone. Not misconduct, all service connected. Davis added later that, according to Robert Heinlein, Hubbards ankles had suffered a drumhead-type injury; this can result, Davis explained, when the ship is torpedoed or bombed. Davis acknowledged that some of Hubbards medical records did not appear to corroborate Hubbards version of events. But Scientology had culled other records that did confirm Hubbards story, including documents from the National Archives in St. Louis. The man who did the research, Davis said, was Mr. X. Davis explained, Anyone who saw J.F.K. remembers a scene on the Mall where Kevin Costners character goes and meets with a man named Mr. X, whos played by Donald Sutherland. In the film, Mr. X is an embittered intelligence agent who explains that the Kennedy assassination was actually a coup staged by the military-industrial complex. In real life, Davis said, Mr. X was Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty, who had worked in the Office of Special Operations. (Oliver Stone, who directed J.F.K., says that Mr. X was a composite character, based in part on Prouty.) In the eighties, Prouty worked as a consultant for Scientology. We finally got so frustrated with this point of conflicting medical records that we took all of Mr. Hubbards records to Fletcher Prouty, Davis told me. He actually solved the conundrum for us. According to Davis, Prouty explained to the church representatives that, because Hubbard had an intelligence background, his records were subjected to a process known as sheep-dipping. Davis explained that this was military parlance for what gets done to a set of records for an intelligence officer.
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And, essentially, they create two sets. He said, Fletcher Prouty basically issued an affidavit saying L. Ron Hubbards records were sheep-dipped. Prouty died in 2001. Davis later sent me a copy of what he said was a document that confirmed Hubbards heroism: a Notice of Separation from the U.S. Naval Service, dated December 6, 1945. The document specifies medals won by Hubbard, including a Purple Heart with a Palm, implying that he was wounded in action twice. But John E. Bircher, the spokesman for the Military Order of the Purple Heart, wrote to me that the Navy uses gold and silver stars, NOT a palm, to indicate multiple wounds. Davis included a photograph of medals that Hubbard supposedly won. Two of the medals in the photograph werent even created until after Hubbard left active service. After filing a request with the National Archives in St. Louis, The New Yorker obtained what archivists assured us were Hubbards complete military recordsmore than nine hundred pages. Nowhere in the file is there mention of Hubbards being wounded in battle or breaking his feet. X-rays taken of Hubbards right shoulder and hip showed calcium deposits, but there was no evidence of any bone or joint disease in his ankle. There is a Notice of Separation in the records, but it is not the one that Davis sent me. The differences in the two documents are telling. The St. Louis document indicates that Hubbard earned four medals for service, but they reflect no distinction or valor. In the church document, his job preference after the service is listed as Studio (screen writing); in the official record, it is uncertain. The church document indicates, falsely, that Hubbard completed four years of college, obtaining a degree in civil engineering. The official document correctly notes two years of college and no degree. On the church document, the commanding officer who signed off on Hubbards separation was Howard D. Thompson, Lt. Cmdr. The file contains a letter, from 2000, to another researcher, who had written for more information about Thompson. An analyst with the National Archives responded that the records of commissioned naval officers at that time had been reviewed, and there was no Howard D. Thompson listed. The church, after being informed of these discrepancies, said, Our expert on military records has advised us that, in his considered opinion, there is nothing in the Thompson notice that would lead him to question its validity. Eric Voelz, an archivist who has worked at the St. Louis archive for three decades, looked at the document and pronounced it a forgery. Since leaving the church, Haggis has been in therapy, which he has found helpful. Hes learned how much he blames others for his problems, especially those who are closest to him. I really wish I had
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found a good therapist when I was twenty-one, he said. In Scientology, he always felt a subtle pressure to impress his auditor and then write up a glowing success story. Now, he said, Im not fooling myself that Im a better man than I am. Recently, he and Rennard separated. They have moved to the same neighborhood in New York, so that they can share custody of their son. Rennard has also decided to leave the church. Both say that the divorce has nothing to do with their renunciation of Scientology. On November 9th, The Next Three Days premired at the Ziegfeld Theatre, in Manhattan. Movie stars lined up on the red carpet as photographers fired away. Jason Beghe, who plays a detective in the film, was there. He told me that he had taken in a young man, Daniel Montalvo, who had recently blown. He was placed in the Cadet Org, a junior version of the Sea Org, at age five, and joined the Sea Org at eleven. Hes never seen television, Beghe said. He doesnt even know who Robert Redford is. After the screening, everyone drifted over to the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel. Haggis was in a corner receiving accolades from his friends when I found him. I asked him if he felt that he had finally left Scientology. I feel much more myself, but theres a sadness, he admitted. If you identify yourself with something for so long, and suddenly you think of yourself as not that thing, it leaves a bit of space. He went on, Its not really the sense of a loss of community. Those people who walked away from me were never really my friends. He understood how they felt about him, and why. In Scientology, in the Ethics Conditions, as you go down from Normal through Doubt, then you get to Enemy, and, finally, near the bottom, there is Treason. What I did was a treasonous act. I once asked Haggis about the future of his relationship with Scientology. These people have long memories, he told me. My bet is that, within two years, youre going to read something about me in a scandal that looks like it has nothing to do with the church. He thought for a moment, then said, I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I dont know why I couldnt.
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The Obama Memos

The making of a post-post-partisan Presidency.
by Ryan Lizza January 30, 2012
On a frigid January evening in 2009, a week before his Inauguration, Barack Obama had dinner at the home of George Will, the Washington Post columnist, who had assembled a number of right-leaning journalists to meet the President-elect. Accepting such an invitation was a gesture on Obamas part that signalled his desire to project an image of himself as a post-ideological politician, a Chicago Democrat eager to forge alliances with conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. That week, Obama was still working on an Inaugural Address that would call for an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. Obama sprang coatless from his limousine and headed up the steps of Wills yellow clapboard house. He was greeted by Will, Michael Barone, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Lawrence Kudlow, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan. They were Reaganites all, yet some had paid tribute to Obama during the campaign. Lowry, who is the editor of the National Review, called Obama the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement. Krauthammer, an intellectual and ornery voice on Fox News and in the pages of the Washington Post, had written that Obama would be a president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely selfdiscipline of a Vladimir Putin, who would bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan. And Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and a former aide to Dan Quayle, wrote, I look forward to Obamas inauguration with a surprising degree of hope and good cheer. Over dinner, Obama searched for points of common ground. He noted that he and Kudlow agreed on a business-investment tax cut. He loves to deal with both sides of the issue, Kudlow later wrote. He revels in the back and forth. And he wants to keep the dialogue going with conservatives. Obamas view, shared with many people at the time, was that professional pundits were wrong about American politics. It was a myth, he said, that the two political parties were impossibly divided on the big issues confronting America. The gap was surmountable. Compared with some other Western countries, where Communists and far-right parties sit in the same parliament, the gulf between Democrats and Republicans was narrow.
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Obamas homily about conciliation reflected an essential component of his temperament and his view of politics. In his mid-twenties, he won the presidency of the Harvard Law Review because he was the only candidate who was trusted by both the conservative and the liberal blocs on the editorial staff. As a state senator in Springfield, when Obama represented Hyde Park-Kenwood, one of the most liberal districts in Illinois, he kept his distance from the most left-wing senators from Chicago and socialized over games of poker and golf with moderate downstate Democrats and Republicans. In 1998, after helping to pass a campaign-finance bill in the Illinois Senate, he boasted in his community paper, the Hyde Park Herald, that the process was truly bipartisan from the start.
A few years later, Obama ran for the U.S. Senate and criticized the pundits and the prognosticators who like to divide the country into red states and blue states. He made a speech against the invasion of Iraq but alarmed some in the distinctly left-wing audience by pointing out that he was not a pacifist, and that he opposed only dumb wars. At the 2004 Democratic Convention, in Boston, Obama delivered a retooled version of the stump speech about ideological comityThere is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America!and became a national political star. In 2006, Obama published a mild polemic, The Audacity of Hope, which became a blueprint for his 2008 Presidential campaign. He described politics as a system seized by two extremes. Depending on your tastes, our condition is the natural result of radical conservatism or perverse liberalism, he wrote. Tom DeLay or Nancy Pelosi, big oil or greedy trial lawyers, religious zealots or gay activists, Fox News or the New York Times. He repeated the theme later, while describing the fights between Bill Clinton and the Newt Gingrich-led House, in the nineteen-nineties: In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generationa tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of
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college campuses long agoplayed out on the national stage. Washington, as he saw it, was selfdefeatingly partisan. He believed that any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment were in. If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign, it was the idea of post-partisanship. He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock. In an essay published in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, a self-proclaimed conservative, reflected on Obamas heady appeal: Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take Americafinallypast the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. Obama was not exaggerating the toxic battle that has poisoned the culture of Washington. In the past four decades, the two political parties have become more internally homogeneous and ideologically distant. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote longingly about American politics in the mid-twentieth century, when both parties had liberal and conservative wings that allowed centrist coalitions to form. Today, almost all liberals are Democrats and almost all conservatives are Republicans. In Washington, the center has virtually vanished. According to the political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have devised a widely used system to measure the ideology of members of Congress, when Obama took office there was no ideological overlap between the two parties. In the House, the most conservative Democrat, Bobby Bright, of Alabama, was farther to the left than the most liberal Republican, Joseph Cao, of Louisiana. The same was true in the Senate, where the most conservative Democrat, Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, was farther to the left than the most liberal Republican, Olympia Snowe, of Maine. According to Poole and Rosenthals data, both the House and the Senate are more polarized today than at any time since the eighteen-nineties. It would be hard for any President to reverse this decades-long political trend, which began when segregationist Democrats in the SouthDixiecrats like Strom Thurmondleft the Party and became Republicans. Congress is polarized largely because Americans live in communities of like-minded people who elect more ideological representatives. Obamas rhetoric about a nation of common purpose and values no longer fits this country: there really is a red America and a blue America. Polarization also has affected the two parties differently. The Republican Party has drifted much farther to the right than the Democratic Party has drifted to the left. Jacob Hacker, a professor at Yale, whose 2006 book, Off Center, documented this trend, told me, citing Poole and Rosenthals data on congressional voting records, that, since 1975, Senate Republicans moved roughly twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats moved to the left and House Republicans moved roughly six times as far to the right as
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House Democrats moved to the left. In other words, the story of the past few decades is asymmetric polarization. Two well-known Washington political analysts, Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agree. In a forthcoming book about Washington dysfunction, Its Even Worse Than It Looks, they write, One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlierideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. Three years ago, when Obama explained to George Will and his guests his theory of a centrist Washington, he had some reason to believe it. After all, the pillars of his agenda seemed to enjoy bipartisan support. To some extent, his health-care plan had been designed and employed by a Republican governor, Mitt Romney, of Massachusetts. His policy for addressing climate change, known as cap and trade, had its roots in the first Bush White House. The Troubled Asset Relief Program, a bipartisan policy to rescue failing banks, was designed by the second Bush Administration. As for the economy, conservative and liberal economists agreed that fiscal stimulus was the necessary response to a recession; the only question was how much stimulus. Politics in America, Obama confidently told people in Washington just before taking office, is played between the forty-yard lines. As a new President, Obama did not anticipate how effectively his political opponents would cast him as a polarizing figure. Despite the bonhomie at Wills house, most Republicans viewed him as a wily Chicago politician cosseted by a sympathetic liberal media. The over-all description was a caricature, but there is enough in Obamas political biography for Republicans to make a case. In fact, his ascent from law professor to President in a decade was marked by a series of political decisions that undercut some of his claims on the subject of partisanship and political reform. In 1996, during his first run for office, in the Illinois State Senate, Obama defeated his former political mentor Alice Palmer by successfully challenging her nominating petitions and forcing her off the ballot, effectively ending her career. A few years later, Illinois Democrats, after toiling in the minority in the Senate, gerrymandered the state to produce a Democratic majority. While drafting the new political map, Obama helped redraw his own district northward to include some of Chicagos wealthiest citizens, making the district a powerful financial and political base that he used to win his U.S. Senate seat, a few years later. Another hard-edged decision helped make him the Democratic Presidential nominee. In early October, 2007, David Axelrod and Obamas other political consultants wrote the candidate a memo explaining
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how he could repair his floundering campaign against Hillary Clinton. They advised him to attack her personally, presenting a difficult choice for Obama. He had spent years building a reputation as a reformer who deplored the nasty side of politics, and now, he was told, he had to put that aside. Obamas strategists wrote that all campaign communications, even the sloganChange We Can Believe Inhad to emphasize distinctions with Clinton on character rather than on policy. The slogan was intended to frame the argument along the character fault line, and this is where we can and must win this fight, the memo said. Clinton cant be trusted or believed when it comes to change, because shes driven by political calculation not conviction, regularly backing away and shifting positions. . . . She embodies trench warfare vs. Republicans, and is consumed with beating them rather than unifying the country and building consensus to get things done. She prides herself on working the system, not changing it. The current goal, the memo continued, was to define Obama as the only authentic remedy to what ails Washington and stands in the way of progress. Obamas message promised voters, in what his aides called the inspiration, that Barack Obama will end the divisive trench warfare that treats politics as a game and will lead Americans to come together to restore our common purpose. Clinton was too polarizing to get anything done: It may not be her fault, but Americans have deeply divided feelings about Hillary Clinton, threatening a Democratic victory in 2008 and insuring another four years of the bitter political battles that have plagued Washington for the last two decades and stymied progress. Neera Tanden was the policy director for Clintons campaign. When Clinton lost the Democratic race, Tanden became the director of domestic policy for Obamas general-election campaign, and then a senior official working on health care in his Administration. She is now the president of the liberal Center for American Progress, perhaps the most important institution in Democratic politics. It was a character attack, Tanden said recently, speaking about the Obama campaign against Clinton. I went over to Obama, Im a big supporter of the President, but their campaign was entirely a character attack on Hillary as a liar and untrustworthy. It wasnt an issue contrast, it was entirely personal. And, of course, it worked. The fourth momentous decision of Obamas political career provided the financial boost that made him President. On June 19, 2008, he announced that he would be the first Presidential candidate since 1976 to forgo public funds, which allow candidates to run in the general election while limiting the corrupting influence of fund-raising. This was an awkward and hypocritical decision, given that in 2007 Obama had explicitly promised that he would stay in the system. David Plouffe, his campaign manager, wrote in his memoir, The Audacity to Win, that the promise had been a mistake: We were overly concerned with making sure the reform community and elites like the New York Times editorial board, which care deeply
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about these issues, would look favorably on our approach. Obama, Plouffe noted, was genuinely torn, but was eventually convinced that victory trumped idealism. Obamas choice allowed him to raise unlimited amounts of money while John McCain, who remained in the system, was limited to a check from the government for eighty-four million dollars. From September 1st to Election Day, Obama outspent McCain by almost three to one, and, as many Republicans are quick to note, ran more negative ads than any Presidential candidate in modern history. There are obvious justifications for these four decisions. Alice Palmer had used phony signatures to get on the ballot, and Obamas challenge was perfectly legal. The Democrats gerrymandering of Illinois was routine and no more outrageous than what happens in most other states. Compared with other Presidential primaries, Obamas attacks against Hillary Clinton were relatively mild. Finally, if McCain could have raised more money outside the public-financing system, he surely would have. Still, Obamas actual political biography is more partisan and ruthless than the version he has told over the years in countless post-partisan speeches and in The Audacity of Hope. At George Wills house, Obama impressed his companions. He got a big laugh when he teased David Brooks, a Times columnist who is a less orthodox conservative than the others, by asking him, What are you doing here? Kudlow said that the tone of the dinner was essentially Were going to disagree, but we wish you well. As the President-elect departed, Rich Lowry grabbed Obamas hand and said softly, Sir, Ill be praying for you. The premise of the Obama campaign was unusual. Change We Can Believe In wasnt just about a set of policies; it was more grandiose. Obama promised to transcend forty years of demographic and ideological trends and reshape Washington politics. In the past three years, though, he has learned that the Presidency is an office uniquely ill-suited for enacting sweeping change. Presidents are buffeted and constrained by the currents of political change. They dont control them. George C. Edwards III, a political scientist at Texas A. & M., who has sparked a quiet revolution in the ways that academics look at Presidential leadership, argues in The Strategic President that there are two ways to think about great leaders. The common view is of a leader whom Edwards calls the director of change, someone who reshapes public opinion and the political landscape with his charisma and his powers of persuasion. Obamas many admirers expected him to be just this. Instead, Obama has turned out to be what Edwards calls a facilitator of change. The facilitator is acutely aware of the constraints of public opinion and Congress. He is not foolish enough to believe that one man, even one invested with the powers of the Presidency, can alter the fundamentals of politics. Instead, facilitators understand the opportunities for change in their environments and fashion strategies
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and tactics to exploit them. Directors are more like revolutionaries. Facilitators are more like tacticians. Directors change the system. Facilitators work the system. Obamas first three years as President are the story of his realization of the limits of his office, his frustration with those constraints, and, ultimately, his education in how to successfully operate within them. A close look at the choices Obama made on domestic policy, based on a review of hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, reveals someone who is canny and toughbut who is not the President his most idealistic supporters thought they had elected. 2. AN ECONOMIC JUDGMENT Mario Cuomo said that Presidents campaign in poetry and govern in prose, and Obamas shift from Keats to Keynes was abrupt. Before he even entered office, he had to deal with an economic cataclysm. The initial debate was framed by a fifty-seven-page memo to the President-elect, dated December 15, 2008, written by Larry Summers, his incoming director of the National Economic Council. Marked Sensitive and Confidential, the document, which has never been made public, presents Obama with the scale of the crisis. The economic outlook is grim and deteriorating rapidly, it said. The U.S. economy had lost two million jobs that year; without a government response, it would lose four million more in the next year. Unemployment would rise above nine per cent unless a significant stimulus plan was passed. The estimates were getting worse by the day. Summers informed Obama that the government was already spending well beyond its means. Yet in the coming months Obama would have to sign, in addition to a stimulus bill, several pieces of legislation left over from the Bush Administration: a hundred-billion-dollar funding bill for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; perhaps three hundred and fifty billion dollars more in funds from Bushs TARP program, to prop up banks; and a four-hundred-and-ten-billion-dollar spending bill that was stuck in Congress. Obama would need resources to save G.M. and Chrysler, which were close to bankruptcy, and to address the collapsing housing market, which he was told would be hit with five million foreclosures during his first two years in office. Summers cautioned Obama, who had run as a fiscal conservative and attacked his Republican opponent for wanting to raise taxes, that he was about to preside over an explosion of government spending: This could come as a considerable sticker shock to the American public and the American political system, potentially reducing your ability to pass your agenda and undermining economic confidence at a critical time. Obama was told that, regardless of his policies, the deficits would likely be blamed on him in the long run. The forecasts were frightening, and jeopardized his ambitious domestic agenda, which had been based on unrealistic assumptions made during the campaign. Since January 2007 the medium-term budget deficit has deteriorated by about $250 billion annually, the memo said. If your campaign
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promises were enacted then, based on accurate scoring, the deficit would rise by another $100 billion annually. The consequence would be the largest run-up in the debt since World War II. There was an obvious tension between the warning about the extent of the financial crisis, which would require large-scale spending, and the warning about the looming federal budget deficits, which would require fiscal restraint. The tension reflected the competing concerns of two of Obamas advisers. Christina Romer, the incoming chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, drafted the stimulus material. A Berkeley economist, she was new to government. She believed that she had persuaded Summers to raise the stimulus recommendation above the initial estimate, six hundred billion dollars, to something closer to eight hundred billion dollars, but she was frustrated that she wasnt allowed to present an even larger option. When she had done so in earlier meetings, the incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, asked her, What are you smoking? She was warned that her credibility as an adviser would be damaged if she pushed beyond the consensus recommendation. Peter Orszag, the incoming budget director, was a relentless advocate of fiscal restraint. He was well known in Washington policy circles as a deficit hawk. Orszag insisted that there were mechanical limits to how much money the government could spend effectively in two years. In the Summers memo, he contributed sections about historic deficits and the need to scale back campaign promises. The RomerOrszag divide was the start of a rift inside the Administration that continued for the next two years. Since 2009, some economists have insisted that the stimulus was too small. White House defenders have responded that a larger stimulus would not have moved through Congress. But the Summers memo barely mentioned Congress, noting only that his recommendation of a stimulus above six hundred billion dollars was an economic judgment that would need to be combined with political judgments about what is feasible. He offered the President four illustrative stimulus plans: $550 billion, $665 billion, $810 billion, and $890 billion. Obama was never offered the option of a stimulus package commensurate with the size of the hole in the economyknown by economists as the output gapwhich was estimated at two trillion dollars during 2009 and 2010. Summers advised the President that a larger stimulus could actually make things worse. An excessive recovery package could spook markets or the public and be counterproductive, he wrote, and added that none of his recommendations returns the unemployment rate to its normal, pre-recession level. To accomplish a more significant reduction in the output gap would require stimulus of well over $1 trillion based on purely mechanical assumptionswhich would likely not accomplish the goal because of the impact it would have on markets.
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Paul Krugman, a Times columnist and a Nobel Prize-winning economist who persistently supported a larger stimulus, told me that Summerss assertion about market fears was a bang my head on the table argument. Hes invoking the invisible bond vigilantes, basically saying that investors would be scared and drive up interest rates. Thats a major economic misjudgment. Since the beginning of the crisis, the U.S. has borrowed more than five trillion dollars, and the interest rate on the ten-year Treasury bills is under two per cent. The markets that Summers warned Obama about have been calm. Summers also presumed that the Administration could go back to Congress for more. It is easier to add down the road to insufficient fiscal stimulus than to subtract from excessive fiscal stimulus, he wrote. Obama accepted the advice. This viewthat Congress would serve as a partner to a popular new President trying to repair the economyproved to be wrong. At a meeting in Chicago on December 16th to discuss the memo, Obama did not push for a stimulus larger than what Summers recommended. Instead, he pressed his advisers to include an inspiring moon shot initiative, such as building a national smart grida high-voltage transmission system sometimes known as the electricity superhighway, which would make Americas power supply much more efficient and reliable. Obama, still thinking that he could be a director of change, was looking for something bold and iconichis version of the Hoover Dambut Romer and others finally had a frank conversation with him, explaining that big initiatives for the stimulus were not feasible. They would cost too much, and not do enough good in the short term. The most effective ideas were less sexy, such as sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the dozens of states that were struggling with budget crises of their own. The stimulus was the first test of Obamas theory that politics is played in the center of the fieldand of the G.O.P.s ability to define him as a liberal wastrel. By late January, 2009, the bill had cleared the House without a single Republican vote, and was stuck in the Senate, where the reception from the right was also antagonistic. Senator Jim DeMint, of South Carolina, an emerging leader of the grassroots opposition to the President, declared that the stimulus was the worst piece of economic legislation Congress has considered in a hundred years. Not since the creation of the income tax, he said, has the United States seriously entertained a policy so comprehensively hostile to economic freedom, or so arrogantly indifferent to economic reality. Obama had loaded his bill with tax cuts in order to lure Republicans, but DeMint dismissed them. Think of it this way, he said. If nearly every Democrat in Congress supports a tax cut, its not really a tax cut. DeMint called his alternative to the Presidents plan the American Option. On February 1st, a day before Obama was scheduled to meet with congressional leaders from both parties to make his case for the stimulus, his advisers wrote him a memo recommending that he keep the stimulus
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package from growing: We believe that it is critical to draw a sharp line not to exceed $900 billion, so that the size of the package does not spiral out of control. Senators would likely amend the bill to add about forty billion dollars in personal projectssome worthy, some wasteful. At the same time, Obama hadnt abandoned his dream of a moon-shot project. He had replaced the smart grid with a request for twenty billion dollars in funding for high-speed trains. But including that request was risky. Critics may argue that such a proposal is not appropriate for a recovery bill because the funding we are proposing is likely to be spent over 10+ years, the advisers wrote. To find the extra moneyforty billion to satisfy the senators and twenty billion for Obamathe President needed to cut sixty billion dollars from the bill. He was given two options: he could demand that Congress remove a seventy-billion-dollar tax provision that was worthless as a stimulus but was important to the House leadership, or he could cut sixty billion dollars of highly stimulative spending. He decided on the latter. Obama was then presented with a chart of six stimulus policiesMaking Work Pay, a tax credit for jobholders that was a centerpiece of his campaign; education spending; state fiscal relief; funding for the National Institutes of Health; tax-credit bonds; and Social Security and veterans-benefits payments with recommendations for cuts in the programs that would save sixty-one billion dollars. Obamas advisers told him, A key part of the strategy involved in these savings is that you are putting your prioritiesfor example, Making Work Pay and educationon the table in order to get this deal done. His aides had hoped that the Senate would pass the legislation with eighty votes, including more than twenty Republicans. At the bottom of the chart, the President wrote OK. Even as the severity of the economic crisis became clear, Obama and Congress worked together to make the stimulus smaller. The bill, known as the Recovery Act, passed at $787 billion, with three Republican votes in the Senate, including that of Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, who later became a Democrat. It was the Administrations first recognition that congressional Republicans had little interest in the Presidents offer to meet them halfway. It turned out that the ideological divide he had set out to bridge was not just a psychodrama. 3. WORTH DISCUSSING Each night, an Obama aide hands the President a binder of documents to review. After his wife goes to bed, at around ten, Obama works in his study, the Treaty Room, on the second floor of the White House residence. President Bush preferred oral briefings; Obama likes his advice in writing. He marks up the decision memos and briefing materials with notes and questions in his neat cursive handwriting. In the morning, each document is returned to his staff secretary. She dates and stamps itBack from the
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OVALand
often e-mails an index of the Presidents handwritten notes to the relevant senior staff and
their assistants. A single Presidential comment might change a legislative strategy, kill the proposal of a well-meaning adviser, or initiate a bureaucratic process to answer a Presidential question. If the document is a decision memo, its author usually includes options for Obama to check at the end. The formatting is simple, but the decisions are not. As Obama told the Times, early in his first term, Presidents are rarely called on to make the easy choices. Somebody noted to me that by the time something reaches my desk, that means its really hard, he said. Because if it were easy, somebody else would have made the decision and somebody else would have solved it. On February 5, 2009, just as Obama was negotiating the final details of the stimulus package, Summers and Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, drafted a memo to the President outlining a plan to save the collapsing banks. TARP, they believed, wouldnt be enough. Seventy per cent of Americans assets were in four banks, three of which were in serious trouble. If the situation worsened, Obama might need to nationalize one or more institutions that were at the doorstep of failure. Indeed, there is a significant chance that Citigroup, Bank of America, and possibly others could ultimately end up in this category. Nationalization would expose the government to enormous financial risk and political peril. Obama would be forced to take actions to get the government a dominant ownership position, and the banks would then be subject to substantial restructuring and government control including the replacement of long-standing top management and long-standing directors. It was unclear whether such a takeover was legal. Moreover, there was a real risk that seizing control of banks could, in fact, destroy them. Obama would need congressional support if he pursued nationalization. Geithner and Summers recommended that, if necessary, the F.D.I.C., which provides deposit insurance to millions of Americans, be used to take over the troubled banks. The F.D.I.C. was partly funded by small community banks, which garnered more sympathy than Wall Street firms. They warned Obama, We may, by being proactive, be blamed for causing the problems we are seeking to preempt. Further, there is the risk that by attempting a program of this kind, we will pull the band-aid off a wound that we lack the capacity to sterilize and thus exacerbate problems. The plan was dropped in mid-March after a scandal erupted over lucrative bonuses paid to executives at A.I.G. At a pivotal meeting, according to the notes of someone who participated, Emanuel warned the President of sticker shock in Congress, and, he said, Theres just no appetite for more money. Obama, whose approval rating was still above sixty per cent, was more confident than his aides in his abilities to change public opinion and persuade Congress he needed the resources. Well, what if we really explain this very well? he asked. But the judgment of the political advisers prevailed. In hindsight,
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the case for nationalization was weak, but even if Obama had wanted to pursue it he couldnt have. For the second time in as many months, a more aggressive course of action on the economy was thwarted by fears of congressional disapproval. Obama began to subtly adjust his domestic strategy. Even as he fought the recession, he had decided to pursue health-care reform as well, and during the spring he had to make a series of decisions about the legislation. Its fate in the Senate was largely in the hands of Max Baucus, of Montana, the chairman of the Finance Committee, which had jurisdiction over much of the bill. White House aides noted in a March memo that Baucus was in many ways an Obama Democrat, someone who prefers to work out legislation on a bipartisan basis. There were two ways for the Senate to approach Obamas health-care plan: the normal process, which required sixty votes to pass the bill, or a shortcut known as reconciliation, which required only a simple majority and would bypass a possible filibuster. Baucus and several other key Senate Democrats opposed reconciliation, and Republicans decried its use on such major legislation as a partisan power grab. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, complained that using reconciliation would make it absolutely clear that Obama and the Democrats in Congress intend to carry out all of their plans on a purely partisan basis. On April 10th, Obamas aides sent him a memo asking him to decide the issue. The White House could still fashion a bipartisan bill, but it was important to have the fifty-one-vote option as a backup plan, in case they werent able to win any Republican support and faced a filibuster. They recommended that he insist on reconciliation instructions for health care. Below this language, Obama was offered three options: Agree, Disagree, Lets Discuss. The President placed a check mark on the line next to Agree. By the spring, Republicans had settled on a simple and effective plan of attack against Obama. His policies, they repeated over and over, spend too much, tax too much, and borrow too much. Obama, who made it all the way through his U.S. Senate campaign without ever having a single negative television advertisement aired about him, began to feel the effects of an energized opposition. As his approval rating declined through 2009, he looked for ways to restore his credibility as a moderate. He became intent on responding to critics of government spending and, as White House memos show, he settled into the role of a more transactional and less transformational leader. In February, he authorized his staff to plan a bipartisan fiscal summit that would include politicians, like the conservative Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, and think-tank policymakers, like the liberal Robert Greenstein. What are the follow-ups, takeaways afterwards? Obama wrote. They responded that he could publicly ask the attendees for a continued dialogue on the best way to address the fiscal crisis or he could create a fiscal task force that would tackle the issue comprehensively. They warned him that
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among Democrats who then ran the House and the Senate there was resistance to the task force. Rather than pick a fight with his friends over spending, he decided to start a conversation. The summit came and went, with nothing to show for it. The Presidents notes reflected a tension between his determination to pass his agenda and his hope of maintaining his reformist reputation. At the end of another memo about fiscal discipline after the summit, he asked his staff to seek out ideas from one of the most conservative members in the House. Have we looked at any of the other GOP recommendations (e.g. Paul Ryans) to see if any make sense? he wrote. Obama could be unsentimental toward liberal piety. In May, 2009, his advisers informed him that his budget for global health assistance, much of which goes to combat H.I.V., would increase by a hundred and sixty-five million dollars yet would still face opposition from the very vocal HIV/AIDS activist community. He wrote back, How can they complain when we are increasing funding? At the end, he added, In announcing this, we should be very complimentary of the Bush Administration. He also could be ruthless toward members of his party in Congress. When he was informed in a memo that Representative Jim Oberstar, a Minnesota Democrat, wanted to write a highway bill that included a hundred and fifteen billion dollars more in spending than Obama had proposed, and which would be funded by a gas-tax increase, Obama wrote No, and underlined it. When he was informed that the Census Bureau had spent six hundred million dollars over two years in a failed attempt to use handheld computers for the census, and is reverting to paper-based data collection, he wrote, This is appalling. Obama was eager to get credit as a penny-pincher. When his aides submitted a detailed plan to improve government performance and reduce waste, he wrote back, This is good stuffwe need to constantly publicize our successful efforts here. In June, 2009, he was told that Congress had whittled down by more than two thirds his ten-billion-dollar proposal to fund childhood nutrition, and he was asked if he would like to fund the initiative out of a thirty-five-billion-dollar pot that had appeared fortuitously during the budget process. The White House planned to use the money for community colleges and early education, and Obama was told that, if he didnt allocate some of the funds, he couldnt finance his child-nutrition agenda. His advisers suggested that he could make a point about political reform and offered him a plan to ask Congress to fund as much of your original request as possible through reductions in agriculture subsidies. They expected the ploy to fail but argued, You would be able to say that you had offered a serious plan to fund the full bill, and Congress had fallen short. Next to this more cynical option, Obama wrote, Yes. The Presidents caution, and his concern about business, can be seen in the way he dealt with major interest groups. His policy to limit global warming, cap and trade, threatened the oil companies. Health-
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care reform threatened insurers. Financial regulatory reform threatened the banks. With great specificity, the concerns of these and other interest groups were brought inside the Oval Office by Obamas aides. His health-insurance bill was crafted by building support from a delicate alliance of interest groups, and Obama personally guided the effort. On July 1, 2009, his top health-care adviser, Nancy-Ann DeParle, submitted a detailed nine-page policy memo asking whether the White House should consider including medical-malpractice reform in the legislation. Most Democrats opposed the idea, but the American Medical Association was pushing for it. Obviously, we shouldnt do anything that weighs down the overall effort, Obama wrote back, in his characteristically cautious and reasonable style, but if this helps the AMA stay on board, we should explore it. Later in the year, Geithner and Summers outlined the objections of the business lobby to Obamas plan to close corporate tax loopholes that benefitted multinational companies and to encourage American companies to create more jobs in the U.S. As you know, they wrote, our FY 2010 international tax proposal received a strong negative reaction from the business communityand in particular from large U.S. multinational firms. They offered him a modified plan that would raise sixteen billion dollars less, and that would address the business communitys arguably most reasonable concerns. They noted that some critics may argue that we are caving to the multinationals, but pointed out that the plan would still raise revenues from such conglomerates. They leaned on the opinion of Obamas most trusted political adviser. David Axelrod thinks it is important that we continue to voice our support for this proposal which was a key commitment you made before coming into office, they wrote. Next to this, Obama wrote, Agree. But Geithner and Summers warned that if Obama was not willing to personally defend the plan he should not send it to Congress. In that case, they offered him an even more defanged alternative, one that would be more responsive to the business communitys concerns but would certainly be criticized by some as caving. Campaign promises were easy, but, as President, Obama could fight only so many legislative battles. Next to the dramatically scaled-back option, Obama wrote, Worth discussing. But in the end it was only worth discussing. Obama didnt completely capitulate to the multinationals, and he adopted his aides modestly clipped package. 4. NEED TO BE CAREFUL HERE Obamas moderation didnt sway Republicans, nor did his attention to interest groups or his cuts to beloved liberal programs. Through the rest of 2009, as the anti-government Tea Party movement gathered strength, and conservative voters began to speak of creeping American socialism, Obamas aides quarrelled over how the President should respond. Romer wanted him to press the Keynesian case for his policiesto defend the proposition of increased government spending to fight the recession. Orszag
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argued that he needed more support from Washingtons deficit hawks, and urged him to create a deficit commission, partly because it can provide fiscal credibility during a period in which it is unlikely we would succeed in enacting legislation. It presented Obama with a common Presidential dilemma: Should he use the White House bully pulpit to change minds or should he accept popular opinion? He chose the latter. In his speeches, he began saying, Americans are making hard choices in their budgets. Weve got to tighten our belts in Washington, as well. Romer fought to get such lines removed from his speeches, arguing that it was exactly the wrong policy. She thought the President should emphasize that the government would seek to use taxpayer money wisely, and leave it at that. Instead, he seemed to be accepting the Republican case against stimulus and for austerity. She thought he was losing faith in Keynesianism itself. Obama was learning the same lesson of many previous occupants of the Oval Office: he didnt have the power that one might think he had. Harry Truman, one in a long line of Commanders-in-Chief frustrated by the limits of the office, once complained that the President has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues. . . . The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway. When it came time for Obama to write his fiscal 2011 budget, which was his next big opportunity to help the economy, he began to chip away at some dramatic campaign commitments. For instance, in 2008 he had promised a bold space program. As President, he had said, I will establish a robust and balanced civilian space program that not only will inspire the world with both human and robotic space exploration but also will again lead in confronting the challenges we face here on Earth, including global climate change, energy independence, and aeronautics research. In November, 2009, his advisers, in a memo, delivered some bad news: The 10-year deficit has deteriorated by roughly $6 trillion. The next sentence was in boldface type and underlined: Especially in light of our new fiscal context, it is not possible to achieve the inspiring space program goals discussed during the campaign. Obama was told that he should cancel NASAs Bush-era Constellation program, along with its support projects, like the Ares launch vehicles, which were designed to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. The program was behind schedule, over budget, and unachievable. He agreed to end it. During the stimulus debate, Obamas metaphorical moon-shot ideathe smart gridwas struck down as unworkable. Now the Administrations actual moon-shot program was dead, too. As he worked on his budget, Obama scoured his briefing materials for ways to cut spending. Next to a discussion of continuing spending levels associated with the Recovery Act, he wrote, Not possible.
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He even questioned funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is generally considered politically untouchable. It was going to receive a 7.2-per-cent increase, the largest two-year percentage increase in the departments budget in more than thirty years. Obama was informed that it would underscore the Administrations commitment to our veterans. Specifically, it will do so by continuing to improve care for our wounded warriors, expand programs to reduce and prevent the incidence of homelessness among veterans. Obama wrote, Given what we did last year, does the increase need to be this high? Obama knew that his most ardent supporters would attack the budget. He planned to increase Pentagon funding while decreasing some popular domestic programs. He was told that the proposal presented him with a broad vulnerability. For example, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps many poor people, especially in the Northeast, was to be cut in half. Not good, Obama wrote. The Small Business Administration should do more with what it has, he wrote. Poorly performing jobtraining centers have to be replaced w/ something that does work. He underlined does. His aides also recommended that he give back to the government two hundred and four million dollars left over from the Presidential Election Campaign Fund, the campaign-financing program that, in 2008, Obama had decided not to use. Obamas controversial decision now had a chance to save the government money, but there was a hitch. The program is financed by taxpayers who ask the I.R.S. to send three dollars from their annual taxes to the program. Rescinding the dollars in the fund may be seen as overriding taxpayer choice, he was told, and also as an attack on public financing that would decrease the funds available for the 2012 election. He wrote, Need to be careful here. One Cabinet official made it clear that she did not share the Presidents growing commitment to couponclipping: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She rejected the White Houses budget for her department, and wrote the President a six-page letter detailing her complaints. Some in the White House saw the long letter as a weapon, something that could be leaked if Clinton didnt get her way. At the proposed funding levels, Clinton wrote, we will not have the capacity to deliver either the full level of civilian staffing or the foreign assistance programs that underlie the civilian-military strategy you outlined for Afghanistan; nor the transition from U.S. Military to civilian programming in Iraq; nor the expanded assistance that is central to our Pakistan strategy. She went on, I want to emphasize that I fully understand the economic realities within which this budget is being constructed, and I share your commitment to fiscal responsibility. But I am deeply concerned about these funding levels. The letter contained indications of a real relationship between the former rivals. You and I often speak about the need to restore the capacity of civilian agencies, Clinton noted. But the general tone was stern and businesslike. It ended with an urgent plea for Obama to intervene on her behalf. There is little room
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for progress unless you provide guidance that you are open to an increase in overall funding levels, she wrote. Obama did indeed fight for some additional money for Clinton. A year into Obamas Presidency, a Gallup poll showed how starkly he had failed at reducing partisanship. Obama was the most polarizing first-year President in historythat is, the difference between Democratic approval of him and Republican disapproval was the highest ever recorded. The previous record-holder was Bill Clinton. Obama also faced an electorate with a historically low level of trust in government. Since the Vietnam War, faith in Washington has plummeted, and it always declines when the economy falters. On the eve of Obamas election, trust was at a record low. The public had turned sharply away from government at a moment when he was asking it to do more. Toward the end of 2009, the President continued to struggle with the hard compromises he would have to make in writing his budget and planning initiatives for the new year. David Axelrod, Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, and Mona Sutphen, Obamas deputy chief of staff, sent him a memo about how he could find his way out of his slump. They wrote:
The initial glow of the Obama Administration has yielded to the realization that the nations problems are stubborn and wont be solved painlessly or overnight. Even as a majority of Americans retain a high regard for you, there has been a resurgence of jaundice about Washingtons ability to deal with these problems responsibly, and a renewed anger over the continued dominance of hyper-partisanship and special interests. At the same time, Americans still yearn for a new era of responsibility. But an expensive stimulus plan, bank and auto bailouts, juxtaposed with their own daily struggles, have eroded their confidence that such an era is at hand. Despite this skepticism, the American people are receptive to a message that emphasizes that you have taken the tough steps that needed to be taken to pull the nation back from the brink. The State of the Union message would remind voters of the inspirational Obama of the 2008 campaign, and also make clear that he was listening to the publics concerns about the government. After a year of intense policymaking and legislating, Obamas political advisers were attempting to reassert authority over the economic team. The recommendations were heavy on public relations and attempted to reposition Obama to appear less hostile to the concerns of the anti-government right. Democratic Presidents rarely address small businesses in their message, they advised Obama, but you could use the opportunity to discuss what small businesses mean for the freedom to be your own boss, to pursue your own ideas and for our spirit of innovation.
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Axelrod and other Obama political advisers saw anti-Keynesian rhetoric as a political necessity. They believed it was better to channel the anti-government winds than to fight them. As much as it enraged Romer and outside economists, the White House was on to something. A Presidents ability to change public opinion through rhetoric is extremely limited. George Edwards, after studying the successes of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan, concluded that their communications skills contributed almost nothing to their legislative victories. According to his study, Presidents cannot reliably persuade the public to support their policies and are unlikely to change public opinion. Obamas State of the Union speech, his aides said, was an opportune moment to pivot to themes of restraining government spending. They advised him to consider freezing or cutting the discretionary budget, instituting a senior-level government pay freeze, and cancelling some federal programs. They even noted that his government-reform efforts were the most dramatic since Reagans conservative downsizing. Finally, they warned that the process of securing the Presidents legislative agenda had damaged his distinctive brand. Perhaps more than in any other area, they wrote, it is essential that we use the SOTU to reclaim the high ground on challenging the status quo in Washington. They feared that Obama was being damaged by his association with the deal-making in Congress. The speech presents a moment when you can begin to distance the Administration from Congress on issues of special interest capture and transparency. In the end, Obamas entire economic team went along with the new push for austerity, at least symbolically. They recommended that Obama endorse the idea of a bipartisan fiscal commission, accepting a proposal that the President had rejected months earlierand he agreed. Ten days after the Axelrod memo, on December 20th, Summers, Orszag, Geithner, and even Romer advised the President on how to tackle the deficit in 2010. They told him that he needed to cut eighty-five billion dollars in spending in order to submit a fiscally credible budget to Congress. They ticked off a list of ideas. Instead of a one-year non-defense-spending freeze, as they had previously suggested, they recommended a three-year freeze. The freeze was controversial: liberals would call it mad to restrain federal spending during a recession; Republicans would call it trivial. But it would save twenty billion dollars. Your economic team believes that it is worth doing this, his aides wrote in another memo, both to reduce the deficit and indicate that the Administration is serious about fiscal discipline. Obama drew a check mark next to the recommendation. In the December 20th memo, they resorted to gimmickry. In his first budget, Obama had prided himself on honest budgeting, declining to employ the fanciful assumptions that the previous Administration had
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used to hide the costs of government. On disaster relief, for example, he had estimated that the government would need twenty billion dollars a year, a figure based on the statistical likelihood of major disasters requiring federal aid. Now Obamas aides reminded him that Congress had ignored his honest budgeting approach, and perhaps they should, too. They proposed $5 billion per year for disaster costs. Obama drew another check mark. The White House could also save billions by fiddling with the way it presented savings from Obamas health-care-reform bill. Check. Finally, Obamas economic team recommended a new five-per-cent taxwhat it called a bubble rate on people making more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per year. It would bring in eleven billion dollars in 2015. Here, Obama made another check mark, but he wrote, Best discuss. When his aides returned with a deeper analysis, it was clear that their tax idea would violate Obamas campaign pledge against raising taxes for the middle class. Obama rejected the tax hike. At about the same time, in January, 2010, just as the Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown was rising in the polls in the race to replace the late Senator Edward Kennedy, Orszag and Ezekiel Emanuel, the chief of staffs brother and a health-care adviser, recommended that the government pay federal employees to participate in a pilot program to study the most effective treatments for patients. Regardless of the merit and relatively low cost of the idea, Jim and Ax think it is not politically viable, Lisa Brown, Obamas staff secretary, wrote in a cover letter to the President, referring to Axelrod and to Jim Messina, the deputy chief of staff. She noted that the payments might look like a luxury for bureaucrats. Pfeiffer also thinks it could easily be caricatured by the right-wing press, she added. Final passage of Obamas health-care plan was in sight. It was not the time to hand Fox News a new antiObama story line. The President wrote at the end of the memo, almost apologetically, Unfortunately I think the political guys are right about how it would be characterized. Lets go back at it in future years, when the temperature on health care and the economy has gone down. Nine days later, Scott Brown won his election, making him the forty-first Republican in the Senate, and handing Obamas opposition the ability to filibuster health-care reform. At the end of the month, Obama released his budget, with its cuts and spending freeze. Republicans were not impressed. To me its totally meaningless, Senator James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, told The Hill, discussing the spending freeze. But its obvious why hes doing it. The idea is smart: Hes going to try to make people think hes concerned about spending, which he isnt. 5. DEAR PRESIDENT OBAMA Obamas aides include about ten letters from the public in his binder of briefing materials that he reads upstairs in the White House residence. The letters offer a powerful antidote to the policy minutiae and the political strategy that consume the rest of each day.
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On February 2, 2010, a woman from Virginia named Ginger wrote to the President. She generally voted Republican, but in 2008 she had supported Obama. With the help of many people like Gingerand several million dollars worth of attack ads against McCainObama won the state by six points. On February 5th, Obama read her letter. Dear President Obama, she wrote. Last evening on the news, we learned that you have decided to cut the Ares project which is part of the next generation space transport. My husband works on this project. How can our country support and fight two wars and cut funding for research which creates jobs? I was against the wars and still am. We will not win them. You were against them too before you became President. The wars have made our country weak. Now we will have an even bigger deficit and no future technology avenues to help pay it off. I voted for you. I supported you. But I am very disappointed in you. You are not the President I thought you were going to be. I thought you were going to be a leader such as Martin Luther King or JFK. Obama scribbled a note to his staff: Replycan I get a sense of how Ares fit in with our long term NASA strategy to effectively respond. A few days later, with that information in hand, Obama wrote to an aide, Draft a short letter for Ginger, answering her primary concernher husbands careerfor me to send. Gingers letter captured the fraught choices that have plagued Obamas past three years. Voters like her a shrinking share of the electorate that swings between the two partiesare often receptive to themes of bipartisanship, and they helped provide Obama with his margin of victory. And yet, if he had put bipartisanship ahead of legislative victories, his Presidency arguably would have failed to get any legislation passed. A month after his exchange with Ginger, Obamas health-care bill lay dormant, blocked by a Senate filibuster. Obama resurrected it using reconciliation, the parliamentary provision he had demanded Congress to adopt a year earlier, as a fail-safe measure. The bill passed, with the support of two hundred and nineteen Democrats in the House and fifty-six Democrats in the Senate. The most significant Democratic achievement since the nineteen-sixties garnered not a single Republican vote. Four months later, Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street-reform bill. Only three Republican senators voted for it. In the past year, every Republican leader in Congress and on the Presidential-campaign trail has promised to repeal both laws if given the chance. On May 5, 2010, Orszag, Summers, and Phil Schiliro, Obamas director of legislative affairs, informed the President that he needed to settle the dispute over whether the centerpiece of his economic plan was jobs or the deficit. His aides laid out the history of their indecision, using an automobile as a metaphor.
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This year, the Administration has strongly pushed two distinct messages on fiscal policy, they wrote. The first was providing more gas to help the recovery; the second was demonstrating fiscal discipline by cutting spending, or stepping on the brake. They agreed that the best policy should be gas now, brake later. But, with Democrats in Congress facing a midterm election in which federal spending was becoming a prominent issue, his advisers pushed for fiscal restraint. In fact, they argued that exploiting public opinion in favor of deficit reduction was the best way to gain support for stimulus. Given the growing perception that Washington is out of control on fiscal issues, they wrote, focusing more of our communications message on brake-related issues might increase our ability to achieve the gas now, brake later strategy. In other words, we may be more likely to succeed in enacting job creation measures this year if we highlight and propose additional deficit reduction measures for the medium term. Obama had been bold on health care. But, as Summers had noted in a previous memo, there wasnt enough bandwidth to pass many other priorities. Eighteen months into his Presidency, his economic advisers offered him essentially three paths: an ambitious new jobs package that he could personally advocate as an emergency expenditure; a fiscally significant (several hundred billion dollars over ten years) deficit reduction package; and an array of new policies that have greater symbolic than deficitreducing impact. The ambitious options were seen as impractical. Congress was unwilling to pass nearly as much fiscal stimulus as Obama wanted. A deficit-reduction package would be a very difficult undertaking that would entail resurrecting ideas you rejected in the budget process and could engender substantial political opposition, set up members of Congress for hard votes, and, possibly, produce a legislative defeat for the Administration. Obama decided against both of the more ambitious ideas. He was left with smaller, more symbolic efforts that are less politically risky, like reforming federal travel and cutting military spending on congressional junkets. The challenge here is to break through message-wise and convince the media, financial markets, and the public at large that these measures signify real efforts to restrain spending, Obamas economic team wrote. They gave him one other crucial piece of advice. The tax cuts passed by George Bush would soon expire. Obama favored extending Bushs middle-class cuts and ending the upper-income cuts. Tackling the deficit would be impossible otherwise. But his economic team warned that, given the political climate, the extension of all the Bush tax cuts could gain serious traction. Not to worry, his political team insisted. Pelosi would never allow that to occur. Were confident that the Speaker would not agree to this becoming law, Obama was assured. But the President had no way to get much more out of Congress in 2010gas, brakes, or tax cuts. That summer, he won a modest small-business bill and some legislation to save the jobs of teachers, but the
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big bang phase of his Presidency turned into a whimper as the midterm elections began to dominate the Administrations attention that summer and fall. When Republicans took over the House and expanded their ranks in the Senate, Obama lost much of his ability to legislate. In 2011, he proposed a stimulus measure called the American Jobs Act and gave a speech to Congress in which he demanded twenty times that legislators pass his jobs bill. But the plan didnt go anywhere. His successes came through foreignpolicy choices that largely circumvented Congress: the successful intervention in Libya; the withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan; the killing of Osama bin Laden. When Congress changed hands in 2010, the curtain had come down on Obamas domestic agenda. Crisis has often been the wellspring of political transformation in America. Obamas situation in 2009a discredited opposition party and an economic meltdownseemed remarkably similar to the circumstances that Franklin Roosevelt faced after he defeated Herbert Hoover, in 1932, and fashioned the modern welfare state; or when Lyndon Johnson took power after the trauma of John F. Kennedys assassination, in 1963, and pushed through the Great Society. But neither 9/11 nor the great recession transformed American politics in a way that overcame structural polarization. Despite the Republican takeover of the House, Obamas third year in office started with a flicker of bipartisanship. Obama, notwithstanding the dire warning of his team, accepted a deal to temporarily extend all the Bush tax cuts in exchange for some fiscal stimulus for the economy. But the Congress sworn into power in 2011 proved to be the most conservative in modern history. Obama was repeatedly rebuffed as he attempted to achieve a grand bargain on taxes and spending. In July, John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, came close to an agreement with Obama on a four-trillion-dollar plan to resolve the long-term deficit, but conservative colleagues rebelled, and Boehner withdrew. Predictions that Obama would usher in a new era of post-partisan consensus politics now seem not just nave but delusional. At this political juncture, there appears to be only one real model of effective governance in Washington: partisan dominance, in which a President with large majorities in Congress can push through an ambitious agenda. Despite Obamas hesitance and his appeals to Republicans, this is the model that the President ended up relying upon during his first two years in office. He had hoped to use a model of consensus politics in which factions in the middle form an alliance against the two extremes. But he found few players in the center of the field: most Republicans and Democrats were on their own ten-yard lines. (The Tea Party, meanwhile, was tearing down the goal posts and carrying them away.) This situation is not unprecedented. During much less polarized periods, when it was easier to build centrist coalitions, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson suffered similar fates. When Johnson lost 48 Democratic House seats in the 1966 election, he found himself, despite his alleged wizardry, in the same condition of stalemate that had thwarted Kennedy and, indeed, every Democratic President since
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1938, Arthur Schlesinger noted in his 1978 biography of Robert Kennedy. In the end, arithmetic is decisive. Most of Obamas conservative dinner companions from his evening at George Wills home now describe him and his Administration in the most caricatured terms. Will declared Obama a floundering naf and someone advancing lemon socialism. * Charles Krauthammer called Obama sanctimonious, demagogic, self-righteous, and arrogant. Lawrence Kudlow described him as presiding over a government of crony capitalism at its worst. Michael Barone called it Gangster Government. Rich Lowry said that Obama is the whiniest president ever. Peggy Noonan, correcting some interpretations of the President by her fellow-conservatives, wrote, He is not a devil, an alien, a socialist. He is a loser. Many of Obamas liberal allies have been disillusioned, too. When Steve Jobs last met the President, in February, 2011, he was most annoyed by Obamas pessimismhe seemed to dismiss every idea Jobs proffered. The president is very smart, Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. But he kept explaining to us reasons why things cant get done. It infuriates me. Yet our political system was designed to be infuriating. As George Edwards notes in his study of Presidents as facilitators, the American system is too complicated, power too decentralized, and interests too diverse for one person, no matter how extraordinary, to dominate. Obama, like many Presidents, came to office talking like a director. But he ended up governing like a facilitator, which is what the most successful Presidents have always done. Even Lincoln famously admitted, I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events controlled me. The White House staff memos show Obama scaling back his proposals in the face of the business lobby, designing a health-care bill to attract support from doctors, rejecting schemes from his aides that could be caricatured by the right, and in dozens of other ways making the unpleasant choices of governing in a system defined by its constraints. Obama made important mistakes in the first half of his term. He underestimated the severity of the recession and therefore the scale of the response it required, and he clung too long to his vision of postpartisanship, even in the face of a radicalized opposition whose stated goal was his defeat. The memos show a cautious President, someone concerned with his image. When, in 2009, he was presented with the windfall pot of thirty-five billion dollars that he could spend on one of his campaign priorities or use for deficit reduction, Obama wrote, I would opt for deficit reduction, but it doesnt sound like we would get any credit for it. At other moments, the memos show a President intensely focussed on trying to restrain the government Leviathan he inherited, despite an opposition that doesnt trust his intentions. When his aides submit a plan to save money on administrative efficiencies, Obama writes back, with some
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resignation, This is goodbut we should be careful not to overhype this given D.C. cynicism. He is frustrated with the irrational side of Washington, but he also leans on the wisdom of his political advisers when they make a strong case that a good policy is bad politics. The private Obama is close to what many people suspect: a President trying to pass his agenda while remaining popular enough to win relection. Obama didnt remake Washington. But his first two years stand as one of the most successful legislative periods in modern history. Among other achievements, he has saved the economy from depression, passed universal health care, and reformed Wall Street. Along the way, Obama may have changed his mind about his 2008 critique of Hillary Clinton. Working the system, not changing it and being consumed with beating Republicans rather than unifying the country and building consensus to get things done do not seem like such bad strategies for success after all. *Correction, February 9, 2012: George Will said that Obama was someone advancing lemon socialism, not Lenin-Socialism, as originally stated.
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A Critic at Large
The Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?
by Adam Gopnik January 30, 2012
A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramaticthe reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isnt the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in timeless time, because they alone arent serving time: they arent waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock. Thats why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoiaanxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards, Dylan sings, and while it isnt strictly truejust ask the prisonersit contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they wont let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized worldTexas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonmenttime becomes in every sense this thing you serve. For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kids arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a
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destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country todayperhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice systemin prison, on probation, or on parolethan were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under correctional supervision in America more than six millionthan were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a carceral state, in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal whos been mugged; a liberal is a conservative whos been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative whos in one. The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand mena full house at Yankee Stadiumwake in solitary confinement, often in supermax prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hours solo exercise. (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of
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the experience.) Prison rape is so endemicmore than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rapelike eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallowswill surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country. How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? Theres a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. Theres an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its reformist tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract Texas Tough: The Rise of Americas Prison Empire, traces two ancestral lines, from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline. In other words, theres the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners urge to reduce blacks to brutes. William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, procedural nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of postRockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; zero tolerance policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice systemmuch inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protg Madison was writing ours. The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of
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announcing general principlesno one should be accused of something that wasnt a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be doneit talks procedurally. You cant search someone without a reason; you cant accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you werent guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on cruel and unusual punishment was designed to protect cruel punishmentsflogging and brandingthat were not at that time unusual. The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. Thats why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (The bastard got off on a technicality, the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphiaa model prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinementstill resonates:
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. Not roused up to staythat was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget
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about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors prisons of old London were better than this. Dont take it personally!that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historians vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel. In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. Theres a lovely scene in The Castle, the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, Its . . . just the vibe of the thing. For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime. The other argumentthe Southern argumentis that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South, Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations. White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage, the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of formal control (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of invisible control. Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexanders grim conclusion: If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social controlspecifically, racial controlthen the system is a fantastic success. Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The
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companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. Its hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:
Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them. Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery. Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it. For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it), and it really did have bad effects.
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Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isnt. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that dont. So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteenseventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing worksthat rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximumsecurity federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow. And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself. All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimrings new book, The City That Became Safe, a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continentindeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanationsincluding demographic shifts simply cant account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies
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happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary. But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimrings analysis. The change didnt come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any Presto! effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didnt get much richer; it didnt get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. Broken windows or turnstile jumping policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for visible nonviolent crimee.g., street prostitution and public gamblingmostly went down through the period.) Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happenedhot-spot policing. The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of stop and friskdesigned to catch the sharks, not the dolphins, as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described itthat involved whats called pejoratively profiling. This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. The poor pay more and get more is Zimrings way of putting it. He believes that a light program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches. Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. In 1961, twenty six percent of New York Citys population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New Yorks population isand what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology, he says. By supply side criminology, he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was
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to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choicesa question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not. And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, youre less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. Theres no minimum wage in violent crime. In a sense, he argues, its recreational, part of a life style: Crime is a routine behavior; its a thing people do when they get used to doing it. And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages. Conservatives dont like this view because it shows that being tough doesnt help; liberals dont like it because apparently being nice doesnt help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry. One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave, Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of whitecollar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewars-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesnt naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology. Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain thingsjust as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafias Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the
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people on the other side think its a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself. Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions arent sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimrings research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some lesson learned in prison. At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimrings work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the netsto make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. Its obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that youll get arrested but that youll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment. The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal
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colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesnt mean it doesnt get lower in rich, homogeneous countriesjust that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break. Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: wed have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime. Oh, I have taken too little care of this! King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel. This changes; in Shakespeares time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickenss and Hugos time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the communitys life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change itwhich then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care.
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A Reporter at Large
The Story of a Suicide

Two college roommates, a webcam, and a tragedy.
by Ian Parker February 6, 2012
Dharun Ravi grew up in Plainsboro, New Jersey, in a large, modern house with wide expanses of wood flooring and a swimming pool out back. Assertive and athletic, he used DHARUNISAWESOME as a computer password and played on an Ultimate Frisbee team. At the time of his high-school graduation, in 2010, his parents bought space in the West Windsor and Plainsboro High School North yearbook. Dear Dharun, It has been a pleasure watching you grow into a caring and responsible person, the announcement said. You are a wonderful son and brother. . . . Keep up your good work. Hold on to your dreams and always strive to achieve your goals. We know that you will succeed. One day this fall, Ravi was in a courthouse in New Brunswick, fifteen miles to the north, awaiting a pretrial hearing. In a windowless room, he sat between two lawyers, wearing a black suit and a gray striped tie. His eyes were red. Although he is only nineteen, he has a peculiarly large-featured, fully adult face, and vaguely resembles Sacha Baron Cohen. When Ravi is seen in high-school photographs with a fiveoclock shadow, he looks like an impostor. His father, Ravi Pazhani, a slight man with metal-frame glasses, sat behind him. Some way to the right of Pazhani were Joseph and Jane Clementi. Jane Clementi, who has very straight bangs, wore a gold crucifix. She and her husband form a tall, pale, and formidable-looking couple. Their youngest son, Tyler, had died a year earlier, and the familys tragedy was the silent focus of everyone in the room. That September, Tyler Clementi and Ravi were freshman roommates at Rutgers University, in a dormitory three miles from the courtroom. A few weeks into the semester, Ravi and another new student, Molly Wei, used a webcam to secretly watch Clementi in an embrace with a young man. Ravi gossiped about him on Twitter: I saw him making out with a dude. Yay. Two days later, Ravi tried to set up another viewing. The day after that, Clementi committed suicide by jumping from the George Washington Bridge. Clementis death became an international news story, fusing parental anxieties about the hidden worlds of teen-age computing, teen-age sex, and teen-age unkindness. ABC News and others reported that a sex
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tape had been posted on the Internet. CNN claimed that Clementis room had become a prison to him in the days before his death. Next Media Animation, the Taiwanese company that turns tabloid stories into cartoons, depicted Ravi and Wei reeling from the sight of Clementi having sex under a blanket. Ellen DeGeneres declared that Clementi had been outed as being gay on the Internet and he killed himself. Something must be done. Enraged online commentary called for life imprisonment for Ravi and Wei, and Ravis home address and phone number were published on Twitter. Ravi was called a tormenter and a murderer. Garden State Equality, a New Jersey gay-rights group, released a statement that read, in part, We are sickened that anyone in our society, such as the students allegedly responsible for making the surreptitious video, might consider destroying others lives as a sport. Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, said, I dont know how those two folks are going to sleep at night, knowing that they contributed to driving that young man to that alternative. Senator Frank Lautenberg and Representative Rush Holt, both from New Jersey, introduced the Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act. Clementis story also became linked to the It Gets Better projectan online collection of video monologues expressing solidarity with unhappy or harassed gay teens. The site was launched the day before Clementis death, in response to the suicide, two weeks earlier, of Billy Lucas, a fifteen-year-old from Indiana who, for years, had been called a fag and told vicious things, including You dont deserve to live. That October, President Barack Obama taped an It Gets Better message, referring to several young people who were bullied and taunted for being gay, and who ultimately took their own lives.
It became widely understood that a closeted student at Rutgers had committed suicide after video of him having sex with a man was secretly shot and posted online. In fact, there was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet. But last spring, shortly before Molly Wei made a deal with prosecutors, Ravi was indicted
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on charges of invasion of privacy (sex crimes), bias intimidation (hate crimes), witness tampering, and evidence tampering. Bias intimidation is a sentence-booster that attaches itself to an underlying crime usually, a violent one. Here the allegation, linked to snooping, is either that Ravi intended to harass Clementi because he was gay or that Clementi felt hed been harassed for being gay. Ravi is not charged in connection with Clementis death, but he faces a possible sentence of ten years in jail. As he sat in the courtroom, his chin propped awkwardly on his fist, his predicament could be seen either as a states admirably muscular response to the abusive treatment of a vulnerable young man or as an attempt to criminalize teen-age odiousness by using statutes aimed at people more easily recognizable as hatemongers and perverts. Ravi had made four court appearances since his indictment. That mornings hearing was intended to set a trial date, and to consider motions previously submitted by Steven Altman, Ravis lawyer. Judge Glenn Berman announced that he was denying the defenses request to see various documents in the possession of the state, including a handwritten documentconceivably, a suicide notefound among Clementis things at Rutgers. Then, over the objections of Julia McClure, an attorney in the Middlesex County prosecutors office, Berman confirmed an earlier ruling: the defense should privately be given the full name of Clementis romantic partner on the night of the alleged offenses. The man, known in the public record as M.B., was a likely prosecution witness. Ravi was visibly anxious when the judge addressed him. Last May, Berman reminded him, he had rejected a plea offer made by McClure. You are presumed innocent, he said. But if you are found guilty, the exposurethe sentencing potentialis significant. For the charge of bias intimidation alone, the judge would be expected to sentence Ravi to between five and ten years. If Ravi accepted the plea offer, he would serve no more than five years. Berman asked Ravi if he understood. Ravi said yes, in an unexpectedly high voice, and gave a reflexive smile. He was not taking this deal. Berman set a trial date of February 21st. The Clementis waited for Ravi and his father to leave, then walked out, hand in hand. On a Saturday night in August, 2010, a week before starting college, Dharun Ravi decided to look online for his future Rutgers roommate. He was living with his parents in Plainsboro. Ravi, who was planning to major in math and economics, had learned that he had been assigned to Davidson Halla collection of single-story, barracks-like dorms on Busch campus, which is considered the dullest of the four Rutgers campuses in New Brunswick and neighboring Piscataway. He would be in Davidson Hall C, a coed dorm for about eighty students. He knew Clementis first name and that his last name started with C; he also
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knew his e-mail address, keybowvio@yahoo.comapparently, a distillation of musical termsand had e-mailed him but received no reply. Late that night, according to instant-message communications released by attorneys into the public record, Ravi Googled keybowvio. This set in motion a remote, electronic dynamic between the two students that was never quite overtaken by real-world engagementeven after they moved into a tiny room together. A little before midnight, Ravi began an I.M. exchange with Jason Tam, a high-school friend. Ravi had found some of Keybowvios posts on a Yahoo forum: something about fish tanks, Ravi told Tam, and something else pertaining to violins. If, with pertaining, Ravi was aiming for sly disdain, Tam struck a different note: Im calling it now. This guy is retarded. Ravi showed Tam a link to a page on a health forum where, three years earlier, Keybowvio had asked why his asthma symptoms had suddenly worsened, noting that he had prescriptions for Advair and Singulair. Nobody had replied. There was just Keybowvios follow-up: Anyone? (What a pussy, Tam wrote.) Ravi and Tam also found questions about anti-virus software and contributions to a Web site of counter-revolutionary peevishness called Anythingbutipod. In these old posts, at least, Keybowviowho was indeed Tyler Clementiseemed worried or defensive about computing. Ravi mocked his roommate for asking if he should boot linux everytime he surfs internet. Just before midnight, Ravi wrote to Tam: FUCK MY LIFE / Hes gay. He had found Keybowvios name on Justusboys, a gay-pornography site that also has discussion areas. Ravi sent Tam a link to a page that contained sex-tinged ads but was otherwise mundane. It was a conversation, from 2006, prompted by Keybowvios question about a problem with his computers hard drive. Keybowvio noted that his electronic folders were fastidiously organized; perhaps jokingly, he added, i have ocd. In the next few minutes, Ravi wrote wtfwhat the fuckseven times. He posted a link to the Justusboys page on his Twitter account: Found out my roommate is gay. But when Tam asked why do gaypornsites even have forums, Ravi laughedhahahaand wrote, its just a gay forum. That sounds like at least a stab at worldliness, and Ravi seems to have found it easy to drop the subject of Keybowvios apparent homosexuality. Two minutes after the Justusboys discovery, Ravi was making a new observation, perhaps based on Keybowvios worry about fixing his computer. Hes poor, Ravi wrote, adding a frowning emoticon. He then found Zazzle, a print-ondemand site where Keybowvio, probably years earlier, had created a T-shirt that read, If Opposites Attract Why Isnt Anyone Attracted to Me? Another said, I Love My Mommy . . . and, on the back, Do You? Ravi wrote, I feel bad for him.
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At six minutes past midnight, Tam offered Ravi a summary. The roommate was a gay person who asks a lot of questions, is mostly techno illiterate, and makes tshirt ideas. Ravi replied, Im literally the opposite of that / FUCK. Tam said that if he were in Ravis situation he would just die. Ravi said that he didnt feel anything: Im just like LOL / Maybe Im still a little buzzed. Tyler Clementi was not active on Facebook, and Ravi instead found the page of Tyler C. Picone, who was about to start at Rutgers, and who described himself as gay. He was good-looking, with long wavy hair sometimes held in place with a headband; video clips indicated that he was a talented singer. Tam wrote, wow this guy is REALLY fruity. Ravi said, Im such a thug compared to him. The school friends seemed slightly awed by Picones confidence and popularity, as well as by the attractiveness of his female friends. But they were also confused: Picone didnt look like an anxious asthmatic who wrote selflacerating T-shirt slogans. Tam remembered that Ravi had met a gay student named Carter during orientation at Rutgers, and had since spoken of him admiringly. Tam wrote, If gay people were like carter, there wouldnt b a problem with gay hatred / Its the fags like this guy that just cause all sorts of trouble. Ravi replied, I know. And then: He would be born in January / what a gay month. At about 2 A.M., Ravi and Tam changed the subject to video games. When Ravi picked up the conversation with Tam the next afternoon, he said, I still dont really care, except what my parents are going to say. My dad is going to throw him out the window. That day, Ravi also messaged with Bigeaglefan75a friend, unidentified in court documents, who observed that Picone looks like a freaking woman and was likely to blow you in your sleep. Ravis language was more restrained, and he replied to the oral-sex comment by saying, Im pretty sure hes majoring in theater. At one point, Bigeaglefan75 said of the roommate, What if he wants you / wont that get awk. Ravi replied, He probs would. / Why would it be awk. / Hed want me / I wouldnt want him. Bigeaglefan75 reinforced a thought from the previous night: Hell bring back mad hot girls to your room and then you can be like / ladies / im not gay. Ravi laughed and said, Im not really angry or sad, adding idcI dont care. But even as he struck this note of equanimity he mentioned that he had forwarded a video clip of Picone to everyone he knew. Ravi seems to have kept two ideas of Picone separate: Picone was someone he might come to like, but he was also material for a gay roommate news scoop. Ravi certainly appears to have cared a lot more about the reputational value of gossip than about Picones sexuality. (In witness statements taken for the Clementi case, nobody has recalled Ravi being contemptuous of gay people.) If this helps protect him from the charge of extreme prejudice, he might still be accused of lacking empathy: theres no sign that
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he was inhibited by the fear that he might cause his roommate embarrassment, or annoyance, by discussing him on Facebook and Twitter. His Twitter account@Dharunwas public and easy to find. Tyler Clementi read that first tweet about himself before he started at Rutgers. Ravi sent Tyler Picone a message, via Facebook. Picone wrote back, explaining that he was the wrong Tyler. The same day, Ravi finally heard from Clementi, by e-mail. Clementis delay in contacting Ravi may have been connected to the emotional complications of his last few days at home, when he tearfully came out to his family. After receiving the message, Ravi characterized Clementi to a friend as gay but regular gay. I recently met Tyler Picone in a crowded Au Bon Pain, on the Rutgers campus. Picone, who grew up in nearby South River, was charming and assured. I ran my high school, he said, smiling. President of the class, editor of the paperif you wanted to do anything, you had to go through me. He recalled his brief interaction with Ravi, and I showed him the I.M.s by Ravi, Tam, and Bigeaglefan75. Much of the exchangeincluding the bit about Januarys gaynessmade him laugh. When the language turned more abusive, he said, Yikes, calm down, and, This is so high school. When he finished reading, he said, Ive seen so much worse. And he discerned a tonal difference between Ravi and his friends. The stuff that Dharun says is understandable, in a sense. If you find youre sharing a room with somebody gay, and you havent been raised in an open home, youre going to say, Oh my God, what am I going to do? Hes probably going to want me. But his friends are assholes. Picone imagined that, had he and Ravi become roommates, they might have become friends. But he acknowledged that to speak so generously of Ravito unsettle the portrait of him as the perpetrator of hate crimeswas unwelcome at Rutgers. I wish the gay community wasnt so angry so angry. Im all about forgive but dont forget. He added, Dharun didnt want Tyler to die. Rather, he said, Ravi had probably wanted people to be amused by his actionsto think of him as this bro. Once Ravi understood that he would be living with Clementi, not Picone, he felt that he knew these essential facts: his roommate was gay, profoundly uncool, and not well off. If the first attribute presented both a complication and a happy chance to gossip, the second and third were perceived as failings. I was fucking hoping for someone with a gmail but no, Ravi wrote to Tam. Clementis Yahoo e-mail address symbolized a grim, dorky world, half seen, of fish tanks and violins. Ravis I.M.s about Tylers presumed poverty were far more blunt than those about sexual orientation. At one point during his exchanges with Tam that weekend, Ravi wrote, Dude I hate poor people.
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One evening not long ago, I visited Paul Mainardi, a lawyer with a professorial manner who lives in Philadelphia, in an apartment tower with a wide view of the Delaware River. Mainardi poured a whiskey. He is a business lawyer, not a criminal lawyer, but he is Jane Clementis cousin, and he has been helping her family since Tylers death. He has accompanied the Clementis to hearings, and issued occasional press statements. When I mentioned Ravis comment about poor people, Mainardi was a little shocked. He said that? he asked. The family is not well off, but theyre certainly not poor. The Clementis live in Ridgewood, sixteen miles northwest of the George Washington Bridge. The town, which is wealthy and white, was recently ranked fifteenth on a list of the top-earning towns in the country, one place below Greenwich, Connecticut. Last year, Ridgewood High School, which Tyler attended, was placed twenty-seventh in a Washington Post evaluation of New Jersey schools. (Ravis school was eighteenth.) A former classmate of Clementis described to me a world of hyperambitious parents and a line of Lexuses in the school parking lot. She noted the economic difference between the east and west sides of town. The Clementis live in a four-bedroom house on a pretty street, but its on the less affluent east side, within earshot of Route 17. At school, west siders are more popularthey know how to get connections, the former classmate said. The west side dresses differently. Ravi drove a BMW in high school; Clementi didnt have a car. Jane Clementi is a nurse. Joseph Clementi runs the public-works department in the nearby town of Hawthorne. They have two older sons, both of whom returned home after finishing college. Jane Clementi is active in the local Grace Church, which is affiliated with Willow Creek, the evangelical megachurch near Chicago. Mainardi described a quiet family. Theres no loudmouth, unlike some of my children, he said. Tyler was the quietest of all. I knew him, but I didnt know him, if you know what I mean. Very shy. Joseph Clementi recently told me that his son was physically slight, and that if someone wanted to hurt him he would have absolutely no idea of how to defend himself. Five feet six, with rigid posture, Tyler had short reddish hair, a prominent nose, and an open, earnest expression. In his mid-teens, he had the tastes and manners of a teen-ager from an earlier era. He contributed to online discussions about musicals and opera, gardening, and the care of African dwarf frogs. His computer desktop was decorated with the Playbill covers for Fiddler on the Roof and Journeys End. How should I broil Lobster Tails? he asked on one Web site. Drizzling olive oil over them and rosemary? Tyler was close to his mother. Mainardi recalled, I have a photograph of the two of them, where hes standing in front of hershes got her arms around him, grasping his hands. Tyler seemed to have more female than male friends, but none of them, he thought, were close, powerful friends.
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An acquaintance who memorialized Clementi online wrote, Tyler never said very much or interacted with the rest of the youth group at the church I attended with him. This post is accompanied by a photograph of Clementi on a church outing in 2007. Sitting on a bus, he is staring at the camera; behind him, a girl is laughing and putting on lipstick. He seems out of step even with his own bright-orange Tshirt, which reads Daytona Beach. Soon after starting at Rutgers, Clementi had a late-night I.M. conversation with someone who used the name Sam Cruz. The friendship seems to have been fairly new. I would love to have like 3 close friends, Clementi wrote to Cruz. He said that, because he valued solitude, people view me as always wanting to be alone, adding, but thats not true . . . i need some people in my life . . . just not as much as most people do. He went on, I NEED conversation . . its just that i cant DO it. Cruz tried to give advicehow to start a conversation, how to ask people about themselves. Clementi replied, Ive googled it like a million times / I kno all the rules. Clementi was, in fact, a very good violin player: he played in both the Bergen Youth Orchestra and the Ridgewood Symphony, an adult orchestra. But he was uncertain if he had the talent or focus necessary for a career in music. At fifteen, he worried online about his commitment to practicing, and added that, although he had sometimes been encouraged by Juilliard alumni to apply there, he wondered if, deeeeeeeeep down, he really wanted to go. By his senior year, Clementi had stopped considering a music degree. Online, he asked how to choose between Rutgers, Hartwick, and the University of Connecticut. I dont really have a major pinned down at all, either bio, pharm, accounting, or something, he said. Also toying with the idea of Community college, but the thought of getting away is very tempting too. I feel very defeated by HS and hated the whole thing. Paul Mainardi shared with me a memory of Tyler at a family gathering at the Clementis, about a year before his death. He could play the violin while riding a unicycle, he said. And I actually did witness that. It was quite impressive. As Mainardi drove home that day, he turned to his wife and said, Wow, who would have thought that that was in Tyler? If Clementi had a touch of middle-aged fastidiousness, Ravi was fully a teen-ager: rangy, physical, with a taste for public regard. By the fall of 2010, when he left Plainsboro for Rutgers, he had written more than two thousand messages on Twitter, twice as many as the most active of his friends. He had posted homemade videos and hundreds of comments at Bboy, a break-dancing site. (When i was like 8 i was trying to learn the helicopter . . . and i accidentally learned it in reverse.) At other sites, he posted his high S.A.T. scores, his 2.88 G.P.A., his long-jump record, and a photo of his fake New York drivers
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license. He spoke on Twitter about being stoned out of my mind. Across the Internet, Ravis written contributions tended to be unusually careful about grammar, and a little combativewith an element of teasing or insult and, sometimes, self-mockery. Ravi also used Formspring, a site that encourages its members to respond to questions posed by others, whose identities may be hidden. Its a place where teen-agers show themselves able, or not, to withstand online assaults. (Jamey Rodemeyera fourteen-year-old from upstate New York, who committed suicide in September, 2011, after contributing to the It Gets Better video archivehad read such Formspring comments as I wouldnt care if you died. No one would. So just do it.) On Formspring, Ravi aimed for nonchalance in the face of provocation. The first, anonymous question was Why are you a fag? (His answer: Because Im insecure.) The next: Why are you such a faggot? (Because it feels right!) Over the next few months, the questions included: Why dont you look at me when we make love? (I like to look at myself.) Do you love anyone besides yourself? (Nope.) I used to think you were the hottest indian guy ever . . . then i met you. (Im hot regardless of the fact that Im an asshole.) Who did you go with to prom last year? (I went alone.) At two court hearings last fall, the rows of public benches directly behind Dharun Ravi were only half filled. But at a third hearing, in December, the same space was packed. Two dozen men in suits, most of them South Asian, arrived and left in a group; family friends, after some private debate, had decided to show support. One member of that group, Anil Kappa, a friend of Ravis father, agreed to meet me at a caf in Princeton. When he sat down, he said that his heart went out to the Clementi family. He also talked, in a soft and dismayed voice, about Ravis arrest and vilification: Im reading about him being a jerk, being a bully, being a homophobe, but as a real person who Ive seen growing upI cant relate to any of these statements. He thought of Ravis actions as a kids prank that went wrong, in a culture of celebrity tweeting and American Pie (a comedy in which a young man sets up a secret webcam broadcast). The judicial system had taken things too far, he said. Ravis family had struggled to live a normal life since the arrest, and Raviwho is again living with his parentshad barely been able to leave the house. Hes been incarceratedhes an exile, Kappa said. Our minds are frozen right now. Like Dharuns father, Kappa is a software engineer. They met in the nineteen-nineties, when both still lived in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where they were born. Ravi Pazhani and his wife, Sabitha, a homemaker with a liberal-arts degree, were then in their twenties, and their son Dharun was a toddler. (Following Tamil convention, Dharun has his fathers first name as his surname.) In 1995, Kappa moved to America; two years later, he helped persuade Pazhani to do the same. The family first settled in Woodbridge, just east of New Brunswick, and Pazhani commuted to New York as a software consultant.
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That work continues, and Pazhani also owns, with Kappa, an information-technology company in New Jersey. Kappa described Pazhani as conservative, but couldnt account for Dharuns idea that his father would want to throw his gay roommate out the window. (Ravi and his parents declined to be interviewed for this article.) Dharuns brother, who goes by the name Jay, was born in 2002. He is the familys sole U.S. citizen. If Dharun is convicted, he could be deported, and this has influenced his thinking about a plea deal. A few years after Jays birth, the family moved to Plainsboro, which has an unusually high percentage of IndianAmericans. At poolside gatherings of family friends, Ravi was often the oldest child, and Kappa recalled that he was gracious with the younger ones, tossing them around, teaching them tricks . . . never pushing them away. Ravi, he added, had taught him how to rollerblade. But, by the time Ravi was a teen-ager, he could apparently be difficult or aggressive company. When he was thirteen, he blogged about an incident in which we gave this kid a football in the hall way and started yelling at him to go to the touchdown and score. we yelled at him for 5 minutes and he finally dropped the ball. we yelled FUMBLE. A young woman, Lucy Chen, recently wrote online about spending time with Ravi in 2008, at a camp in Pennsylvania run by the Center for Talented Youth. He wasnt openly nice to everyone, but he was nice to me, she wrote. Dharun and I ended up being best friends at camp. Inseparable! She went on, On the last day, all we did was hug. Well actually, I hugged him and he didnt hug back. The message was written in support of Ravi, but Chen added, I think he hacked my computer, although I have no evidence. Jason Tam has known Ravi since seventh grade. Now studying in New York, Tam is one of few people from high school who have kept in touch with Ravi since his arrest. Though Tam described their relationship as friendly, in a recent instant-message interview his tone was harsh. Ravi, he said, was boastful, untruthful, and obsessed with being perceived as wealthy. Though Ravi could be kind of funny at times, and good company, Tam said, hes a dick, adding, Id trust a rock more than dharun. Tams disparagement of Ravi, even as he awaits trial, raised the question of a falling out. Tam said no; like Ravi, he didnt seem to understand the value of self-censorship. (Dharun would be fine with anyone talking trash about him, he said.) But Tams lack of caution gives a kind of authority to his denial that Ravi was homophobic. As Tam put it, Hes so much of a jerk that it may seem like hes a homophobe but hes not. Molly Wei knew Ravi both from home and from Rutgers. She declined to be interviewed, but last April, in a statement to the police, she explained that, as middle-school students, she and Ravi were not really boyfriend and girlfriend but were really close. She said, I trusted him with a lot of things. By high school, however, she had come to see Ravi as slippery. She said that he claimed to have been the captain
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of an all-black basketball team that had won the state championship. And he told her that he was on billboards all over India, and that he was famous in Canada for snowboarding. She supposed that he was trying to impress herand she tried explaining to him that it would be better if he didnt try to. But I think he was really adamant about it. He was, like, No, this is who I am. Wei cut him off. During her senior year, Wei mentioned all this to Mark Lin, a mutual friend. Lin passed on what she had said, and, as Wei recalled to the police, Ravi got really mad, because no one ever confronts him about this stuff. She said that Ravi called her a lying bitch and a whore. When Wei arrived at Rutgers, with the aim of becoming a pharmacist, she was praying to god that she wouldnt see him there. On the day she moved into Davidson Hall, she saw the name Dharun taped to the door across the corridor, and asked herself, Crap, how many Dharuns do I know? Tyler Clementi had also looked for his roommate online. That summer, he reported to a friend, My roomates name is Dharun / I got an azn! Clementis correspondent, identified in court papers as H.Y., is Hannah Yang, a younger friend from his high-school orchestra, who is Asian. Clementi and Ravi moved into Room 30 of Davidson Hall on Saturday, August 28th. The room was sixteen feet by eleven feet. Clementi and his parents arrived within minutes of the official moving-in time, and after organizing Tylers things they left to eat. When they came back, Ravi and his family were there; Ravi was setting up his computer and, according to Joseph and Jane Clementi, he had to be nudged by his father to turn around and say hello. Clementis I.M. records offer a peculiarly intimate view of his first few hours with Ravi, after both sets of parents had left. As Ravi unpacked, Clementi was chatting with Yang. Im reading his twitter page and umm hes sitting right next to me, he wrote. I still dont kno how to say his name. Yang replied, Fail!!!!! thats hilarious. Clementi told Yang that Ravis parents had seemed sooo Indian first gen americanish, adding that they defs owna dunkina Dunkin Donuts. Clementi and Ravi seem to have responded in similarly exaggerated ways to perceived hints of modest roots in the other. There were windows at the end of the room, and along each side wall there was a bed, a desk, a dresser, and a free-standing closet. Clementi told Yang that Ravi had moved his closet to form a semi-private changing space; Clementi called it a cubby. (He later called the sight of Ravi changing the most awk thing youve ever seen.) Thanks to Twitter, Clementi knew that Ravi had seen his Justusboys postings, and he regarded the cubby as Ravis silent response, although the two didnt speak about Clementis sexuality.
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Clementi set his desk at the foot of his bed, so that he faced the window. Ravi, to his right, pushed his desk against the side wall, so that his back was to Clementi and his computer screen faced the room. Clementi noticed that the webcam on top of Ravis monitor was pointed right at me. He said to Yang, I feel like hes watching me watching him. You should just start a conversation, Yang wrote. Like . . . hey, how the heck do I pronounce your name? Clementi said, I actually got it down pat I think / dah rune. The curtains on Ravis side of the room were closed, and Clementi felt unable to ask his roommate to open them. Yang offered guidance: Try hey, by any chance, would you mind opening the shades on your window? Thats too funny / your giving me scripted conversations, Clementi said. He called her the screenplay writer for my life. Ravi and Clementi lived together for three weeks, but seem to have barely had a conversation. In an I.M. exchange with Sam Cruz, Clementi said, I dont think Ive actually ever talked to him heheh . . . we kinda just ignore ea[ch] other. Ravi told police that, every time he spoke with Clementi, it was short and brief. I figured, Oh, he was just a shy kid. He added that Clementi didnt seem to have any friends. Ravi does seem to have recognized Clementis good nature. Tam showed me messages that Ravi wrote on August 29th: Hes mad nice and mad quiet, and I think my roommate likes his privacy so Ive been out of my room. And though Clementi was sometimes annoyed by Ravis messin one chat, he mentioned a yogurt container left out for dayshe also detected thoughtfulness and intelligence beneath Ravis swagger. He was impressed with his roommates tech skills; Ravi had written a speaking computer program called Jarvis, after the computer valet in the Iron Man films. Jarvis kept track of Ravis class schedule, and announced when university buses were due. (In an August conversation about his roommate, Ravi had joked, Ill have Jarvis warn me if he tries to rape me at night.) Clementi was intending to major in biology, but he kept up with the violin. He auditioned for the universitys second-rung orchestra but was offered a place in the Rutgers Symphony, which is made up largely of doctoral students in music. Its first concert, in October, was to include Berliozs tempestuous Symphonie Fantastique. Kynan Johns, the universitys director of orchestras, was very impressed by Clementis playing, and also noted his social awkwardness, which he regarded as typical freshman reserve. I was hoping he would eventually transfer over into a music major, Johns told me. In Davidson C, Clementi practiced his violin, despite being self-conscious about filling the corridor with sound. Ravi was often out carousing until five in the morning. Clementi was not, though he sometimes went to parties with a group of four teetotalling girls. I would die if I was forced to always have people around
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me, he told Cruz. The first week here was so hard b/c of that and my roommie purposely left me alone. Ravi, he noted, had been very considerate and perceptive. In high school, Clementi had not been widely regarded as gay. He had been posting messages at Justusboys since he was fourteen, but they were rarely sexual; rather, he exchanged views about television and compact cars with other affable contributors, some of whom used names like Bigpimpboy14. In one post, Clementi wrote, Call me a prude but I honestly dont think people are mature enough to be having sex prior to collegeish years in todays world. . . . Sex isnt something a 16 y/o should really need to spend much time debating. Then again, Im practically asexual, and considered myself such until about 17 (when I started puberty), so I guess I have a lot of bias. This post may well reflect the truth, but he wrote it when he was sixteen. After Clementis death, his parents learned that he had come out to a friend in the spring of 2010, and that in the summer he had apparently met romantic or sexual partners online. Three days before starting at Rutgers, he came out to his family. When he described that experience to Cruz, Clementi reported that his father was very accepting of his news, but added, Its a good thing dad is ok w/it or I would be in serious trouble / mom has basically completely rejected me. He later added that she had been very dismissive. Jane Clementi told me recently that Tyler announced his sexuality to her in a private, late-night conversation, which snowballed to cover his perceived shortage of friends and the uncertainty he had about his faith. At the end of their talk, she recalled, he cried, I cried, we hugged. They said that they loved each other. But, Jane Clementi said, I must admit, other than being surprised, I felt betrayed. He had not confided in her, though he had known he was gay since middle school. She told me that she and her husband had long assumed that Tylers brother James was gay, and had even discussed the matter with Tyler, asking him, Why wont he just talk about it? (James is now out.) The day after Tylers disclosure, she said, I guess part of me was grieving a little bit. I expected Tyler to be married one day, and be a father. She said, I was sad, I was quiet, and she wonders if this is what he was reacting to when he wrote rejected; the word hurt her. She recalled that she spent the rest of the week with him, delivered him to college, and, throughout September, spoke to him on the phone. And she was expecting to visit Tyler for Parent and Family Weekend: We had tickets to the football game. We had plans for the day. In September, Clementi attended at least one meeting of the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Alliance, a Rutgers student organization. As he put it to Cruz, I would consider myself out . . . if only there was
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someone for me to come out to. Though he may have been slow to develop sexually, by the time he reached Rutgers he had found a streak of boldness. This perhaps left him exposed: once he overcame his shyness, he was not shy at all. His sexual selfborn on the Internet, in the shadow of pornography seems to have been largely divorced from his social self. After Clementi died, Gawker found what appeared to be an account that he had opened at Cam4, a site where women and men put on sexual displays, by webcam. Clementi also used a hookup Web site called Adam4adam. On September 2nd, Cruz told him, U need to get away from the computer . . . specially adam. Two weeks later, Clementi described to Cruz a recent liaisonSOOO goodwith a man who visited him in Davidson Hall on September 16th, after the two of them had first considered renting a motel room. This was M.B., who will lose his anonymity if he gives evidence at Ravis trial. According to Clementi, M.B. was twenty-five, working two jobs, not out, and nervous about coming to the dorm. (Rooms could be reached only by walking through the student lounge.) Clementi, who said that he had texted Ravi to request use of the room, joked that it would be so awk if Ravi walked in while Im getting fucked, adding, At the same time i think I would just be like screw it. On September 19th, a Sunday, Clementi was expecting M.B. to visit again. As before, he asked Ravi for the room with a text message. That evening, Ravi played Ultimate Frisbee (a sport that, in one online discussion of the Clementi case, was predictably described as gayer than having sex with a dude). He returned to Davidson Hall at about nine. Ravi told the police he thought that Clementi was just having a friend over to hang out. Ravi started collecting things for a shower, down the hall, and Clementi asked, Do you need anything else? According to the statement made to the police by Wei, who spoke to Ravi a moment later, Ravi only then realized that he was being asked not to return; he recalled saying to Clementi, Oh, you want me to leave? At the start of the semester, Wei, overlooking Ravis past rudeness, had become friendly with him again. Upon leaving Room 30, Ravi apparently first made a quick visit to her room, across the hall. Wei said that he was agitated, asking, Why does he want the room all to himself? He then returned to his room, and was getting organized for his evenings exile when Clementi retrieved M.B. at the dormitory entrance and brought him to the room. Ravi said of his brief encounter with M.B., He didnt acknowledge me at all. He just sat on the bed, on Tylers bed. Ravi returned to Weis room. She recalled him saying, Its a really old-looking guy, like, What the heck, whats going on? Ravi thought that M.B. seemed really shady. She went on, He actually was kind of angry. Hes, like, If he steals my iPad Im going to make Tyler pay for it. And hes, like, Oh, and my roommates gay, like what if something else is going on? Speaking to the police, Ravi recalled M.B. as slightly overweight, with facial hair of some sort. Ravis reaction appears to have included some class
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prejudice: the man, apparently working-class, was a likely thief. He was random, as one of Molly Weis friends later put ithe was troublingly not of their world. If Ravi was as disoriented as Wei claims, one can perhaps see why: Clementi was hesitant to talk about curtains, but in a busy dorm, after less than a month of cohabitation, he had kicked out his roommate so that he could have a sexual encounter with an older man who made no pretense of being his boyfriend. Ravi also noted, perhaps, the contrast between his constant flutter of self-promotion and Clementis quiet, unswerving path to gratification. Jason Tam told me that hed never known Ravi to have a girlfriend. According to Tam, Ravi had already explored unorthodox uses of webcams. For a high-school physics project, Ravi had tried to link a webcam to a hobbyist coil gun. In the summer before college, he wrote a computer program that prompted webcams to snap photographs, at intervals, and upload them to a Web site. He disguised the program as something else, and tried to get friends to install it. Some did, Tam said, but they werent tricked: they noticed their webcam light turn on, so it was obvious. (Clementi, then, was apparently not the first subject of a webcam experiment.) Tam thinks that, by the evening of September 19th, Ravi had already told him that he intended to use a webcam to see why Clementi had begun asking for exclusive use of their room. An online video chat, using an application like iChat or Skype, starts like a phone call: one person requests a conversation, and the recipient must accept the request. But Ravi had tweaked his iChat settings so that the program could automatically accept incoming calls. According to Ravi, he had made this his computers usual setting. Whatever the case, that evening the program was set to auto-accept; he also turned off his monitor, or darkened it to black. At 9:13 P.M., he was beside Wei at her computer. He opened iChat, and clicked his name on her chat list. A few feet away, his computer accepted his request, and Ravi and Wei saw a live video image of Room 30. According to Wei, she and Ravi saw Tyler and his friend, or whoever that wastheir upper body. She remembered that the two men were fully dressed, standing against the door. (Ravi later said that they had their shirts off.) I couldnt see any faces, and they were just what seemed to be kissing, and then, after literally two seconds, we just turned it off. And we were kind of both kind of in shock, because for me, anyway, Ive never seen anything like that. Ravi told police, I just felt, like, really, like, really uncomfortable and, like, almost guilty that I saw it. Wei recalled, At first, we were both, like, Oh, my gosh, we cant tell anybody about this, were just going to pretend this never happened. Ravis resolve not to publicize the experience lasted for three or four minutes. At 9:17 P.M., he tweeted, Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into mollys room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay. Before Ravi locked down his Twitter account, a few days later, he had
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about a hundred and fifty followers, the bulk of them friends from high school. Its possible that he still thought of his Twitter audience as a group no larger than those followers. In truth, his audience could have included anyone who searched on Twitter for Dharun. Perhaps Ravi expected Clementi to read his tweet; or perhaps he didnt bother to consider that he might. This issue may become important to a jury, given the seeming conflict between a charge of invasion of privacy and a charge of bias intimidation, both charges that Ravi faces. Spying is secret, and intimidation is not. Soon after Ravis tweet, Molly Wei began an I.M. conversation with Austin Chung, her boyfriend, then a college student in Hoboken. Wei began, OMG AUSTIN and then: OH MY FKING GOD. She handed the keyboard over to Ravi, who told the storyguest, webcam, embracethen let Wei resume typing. Chung asked DID YOU TAKE A PIC, and she replied that they should have, but added, Nah that would be
TERRIBLE.
Chung said that the news made him want to throw up, even though Clementi was mad
nice. Wei replied, Hes NICE but hes kissing a guy right now / like THEY WERE GROPING EACH OTHER
EWWW.
It seems possible that Weis upper-case horror sprang not just from thoughts of homosexuality but from the nights many surprises: that Clementi, though nerdy, had sex; that he had turned Ravi out of his room; that his partner was not a student. Prosecutors, making the case for bias, and referring to Ravis tweet, have asked, If the word chick were substituted for dude in that same exact tweet, would it have generated the same interest? But one can imagine female partners in Room 30 whose age, appearance, or sexual tastes might also have inspired Ravi to write a sarcastic tweet. News spread beyond Weis roomby electronic and traditional means. Just after ten, a friend of Ravis from home posted @Dharun you perv! on Twitter. Ravi left the room, and later returned with a friend who lived in the dorm. Cassandra Cicco, Weis roommate, appeared, as did three other female friends. Ravi and his friend said that they were going out for a smoke. (Wei assumed that they were referring to pot.) In Ravis absence, the five young women in the room discussed taking another look. The consensus was no, according to Weis police statement, but one girl was really persistent so then I said okay. She turned it on. I clicked the video button and it came on again for, like, a second or two before we turned it off. We saw Tyler again. Clementi and M.B. had moved, and their tops were off and as soon as we saw that we turned it off. Wei said that they were wearing pants. Ravis computer monitor had remained dark all evening. But at one point Clementi noticed its webcam suddenly glowing green. When he moved toward Ravis desk, intending to turn the camera away, the light went out. (This must have been one of the viewings from across the hallthat night, Ravis
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computer made iChat connections only with Weis computer.) M.B. left around ten. Ravi came back to Weis room at about midnight, falling asleep in a chair. At two oclock, Wei urged him to return to his room. Clementi read Ravis Yay tweet the next day, and he made the connection to the flash of green light. That night, just before eleven-thirty, he and Hannah Yang began a long I.M. conversation. They talked largely about Ravis intrusion. Though Clementi may have been a bit of a loner, in Yang he appears to have had a thoughtful friend. (As he apparently had in Sam Cruz, who had reminded him, not long before, in a conversation about loneliness: u got my cell # and u could call me or txt if u need someone.) That night, Yang gently urged him to discuss the webcam spying with Ravi, even while she tried to protect him from alarm. I guess, Clementi said. But its not like he left the cam on or recorded or anything / he just like took a five sec peep lol. A recent paper by two scholars of new mediaAlice Marwick, of Harvard, and Danah Boyd, of N.Y.U. describes the tendency of teen-age girls to categorize even quite aggressive behavior as mere drama, in the same category as online gossip and jokes. Policy-makers and television anchors talk of bullies and the bullied, but teen-agers tend not to, in part because teens gain little by identifying as either, the scholars explain. Social stigmas prevent teens from recognizing that they are weak, and few people are willing to admit that they purposefully hurt others. . . . Drama also implies something not to be taken seriously, to be risen above, while the adult-defined bullying connotes childishness or immaturity to teenagers. The psychologist Dan Olweus has provided the standard definition of bullying: A person is bullied when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other persons, and he or she has difficulty defending himself or herself. Because Ravi was a teen-ager behaving brutishly, and because he used a computer, theres a temptation to draw this case into discussions about cyberbullying; but a brief, furtive intrusion, coupled with a few tweets, may not be easy to align with harassment that occurs repeatedly and over time. In any case, Clementi tried to shrug off his roommates behavior. He seems to have distracted himself from the ugliness of Ravis tweet by considering instead the brevity of the video viewing, and the fact that nothing had been taped. (He was right about that, but its not clear how he knew.) Clementi told Yang that Ravi had been just curious. Besides, he said, he didnt want Ravi to know that he was reading his Twitter feed. She pushed back: YANG: I would feel seriously violated. CLEMENTI: When I first read the tweet
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I defs felt violated but then when I remembered what actually happened . . . idk YANG: um CLEMENTI: doesnt seem soooo bad lol YANG: dude CLEMENTI: hahaha YANG: not only did he peep he told the entire world about it CLEMENTI: yah YANG: you okay with that? Two minutes later, Yang said, I really dont like dharun. Clementi laughed and said, Yah / hes a jerk. By 1 A.M., Clementis attitude seems to have hardened. He looked up the universitys code of student conduct, which included a section prohibiting secret audio or video recording that was likely to capture nudity or sexual activity. He was wondering if he should make a complaint that might result in Ravis expulsion:
YANG: CLEMENTI: YANG: CLEMENTI: hmmm idk I Ive and YANG: it or the CLEMENTI: could b/c
im you
not why said
encouraging you dont
this not? feel
. violated
. anymore
hahah
feel tried to he be
like be
. nice hasnt
. to
. him yah
interpreted development
as
hate
crime of
hahaha
hate
crime
lol
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YANG: CLEMENTI: white heehee YANG: youre CLEMENTI: yah Clementis conversation with Yang ended at 1:37 A.M. Forty-five minutes later, Clementi wrote a message to Justusboys. He was clearly pained, but theres little to support the idea that he was mortified by the thought that hed been outed. There are only hints of Clementis mood in the previous weeks and months. There was his claim that he hated high school, and there were three files on his computer, written in July and early September, whose contents are unknown but whose file names are Gah.docx, sorry.docx, and Why is everything so painful.docx. It may be significant that, on his initiative, he and his mother had taken excursions to bridges around New York; he kept photographs he had taken of the George Washington Bridge on his phone. Paul Mainardi, the lawyer, wondered if Tyler was in the thinking-about-suicide world sometime before college. Now Clementi saw a risk in turning a creepy episode into a scandal that he was not equipped to handle. He had things to protect: a fresh start at school, a new lover, a new home. In person, he and Ravi had maintained a wary coexistence, and it was built on not discussing what they knew and said of each other online. Ravi was sneaky, but sneakiness is a form of discretion; he was nice enough face to face. On Justusboys, Clementi asked what to do next: gay. . . heheh that people would never be get so yah! fun hated
I could just be more careful next time . . . make sure to turn the cam away . . . buttt Im and idk kinda . . . pissed if I . at could . . him . it . . (rightfully would be so nice . to . I get think, him . in no?) trouble
but idk if I have enough to get him in trouble, i mean . . . he never saw anything pornographic he never recorded anything I feel like the only thing the school might do is find me another roommate, probably with me moving out . . . and id probably just end up with somebody worse than him. . . . I mean aside from being an asshole from time to time, hes a pretty decent roommate.
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He quickly received a few friendly replies. One urged him not to report Ravi, for fear that he would stir up more drama. Just before four in the morning, with Ravi probably asleep a few feet away, Clementi went online to the Rutgers housing site and requested a room change. (His reason: roommate used webcam to spy on me.) Soon afterward, he was back posting at Justusboys. He had apparently read what Ravis friends had written on Twitter or Facebook, and he was dismayed that nobody in Ravis circle seemed to challenge his behavior. Clementi wrote, other people have commented on his profile with things like how did you manage to go back in there? are you ok. The friends were treating my making out with a guy as the scandal whereas i mean come on . . . he was SPYING ON ME. . . . do they see nothing wrong with this? At quarter to five, he asked for advice on Yahoo Answers. Someone identified as Jennifer replied, Report him. What he is doing is completely inappropriate. She added, Im not trying to be mean but if you dont have the guts to take control of the situation it is not going to get better. Clementi weighed his dilemma. It was nearly dawn when he wrote, Im just not a great self advocate and am afraid that if I go to the wrong party, I wont get the help I need. He went on, Im just worried about things becoming a huge mess after this cuz i mean, someone reports you and then you might have to spend the rest of the semester living with them anyway because of stupid administration and then theres the chance I could get a new roommate thats even worse. On Tuesday, September 21st, Clementi invited M.B. back to his dorm room. In the late afternoon, he texted Ravi: Could I have the room again like 9:30 till midnight? Ravi replied, Yeah no problem, and then sent a text to Molly Wei: He wants the room again. She replied, ?!? WTF. Ravi now went into full impresario mode, in a way that may present the greatest challenge to his attorney. Invasion of privacy is a Peeping Tom statute. A fourth-degree invasion-of-privacy charge refers to the act of observing someone, without consent, under circumstances in which a reasonable person would know that another may expose intimate parts or engage in sexual penetration or sexual contact. A thirddegree charge pertains to disclosing images without consenta photograph, film, videotape, recording, or other reproduction of someone whose intimate parts were exposed or who was engaged in sexual contact. Ravi is charged with having done both these things on September 19th, and with having attempted to repeat them on September 21st. (On both dates, bias intimidation is attached, creating the risk of a long prison sentence.) In assessing Ravis actions on September 19th, one could perhaps mount the argument that sexual contact was not expected, that he did not tape anything, that the transmission was extremely limited in time and reach, and that nobody saw sex or intimate body parts. On the twentyfirst, however, Ravi tried to set up a viewing.
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At 5:20 P.M., Ravi tweeted, 6 foot wall of lobster crab and shrimp. I love rutgers. (It was King Neptune Night in the dining hall.) At 6:39 P.M., he followed this up with Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, its happening again. Alissa Agarwal, a student living in Davidson C, walked across campus with Ravi, and others, after supper that evening. She told police that although she had been zoning him out, she heard him bragging about his plan to broadcast Clementis date. The group went to Agarwals room. Prosecutors allege that, at 7:44 P.M., Ravi used Agarwals computer to check the iChat connection with his own computer. That evening, Ravi also texted with Michelle Huang, a high-school friend who was at Cornell. I have it pointed at his bed and the monitor is off so he cant see you, he wrote. And, Its set to automatically accept, I just tested it and it works. He later added, be careful it could get nasty, and people are having a viewing party. (Huang did not take up the offer.) At around eight-thirty, Ravi left Davidson C for Ultimate Frisbee practice. Clementi read Ravis happening again tweet sometime before mid-eveningand this seems to have ended his doubts about taking action. Just before M.B. was due to arrive, Clementi went to see Raahi Grover, a resident adviser. Grover took him seriously, and asked him to repeat his story in an e-mail. He also offered him a spare bed in his own room for that night. Clementi declined, and returned to his room. He unplugged Ravis computer. In a text sent at 9:41 P.M., he told Yang, I was afraid he might have hidden another webcam so I also shut down and turned off the power strip. Prosecutors, pursuing a bias charge, have claimed that afraid, in this context, constitutes evidence of fear. Ravi contends that, by this time, he had changed his mind about the broadcast, and had disabled his webcam. Yet he was still referring to a viewing party after leaving the dorm for Frisbee, and, when he texted Huang the next day, he said, it got messed up and didnt work LOL. M.B. arrived at 10:19 P.M. Clementi did not tell him about what had happened on Sunday. Ravi came back to the dorm, and waited in Agarwals room. Just after eleven, he texted Clementi to ask if he was still using the room. At eleven-forty-eight, Clementi replied, were done. About fifteen minutes later, Clementi sent a formal e-mail to Grover. He described the two incidents, quoted Ravis Twitter messages, and wrote, I feel that my privacy has been violated and I am extremely uncomfortable sharing a room with someone who would act in this wildly inappropriate manner. That night, at Justusboys, he wrote, I havent even seen my roommate since sunday when i was asking for the room the first time . . . and him doing it again just set me off. . . . so talking to him just didnt seem like an option. He added, Meanwhile I turned off and unplugged his computer, went crazy looking for
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other hidden cams. . . . and then had a great time. A few minutes later, he responded to the suggestion that he should take a screen shot of Ravis Twitter feed: Oh haha already there baby. Late the next morning, Clementi spoke to his mother on the phone. He sounded normal, she says, although there were some more thoughtful moments. He also received an e-mail from the Rutgers housing office, asking him to call. That afternoon, he spent three hours rehearsing the Symphonie Fantastique. Kynan Johns, who ran the rehearsal, saw nothing remarkable in Clementis behavior, and even had some good news to share: hed secured Clementi free violin lessons. Paul Mainardi told me that Clementi sat next to this girl in the violin section that he always sat next to. They were discussing the difficulties of a particular passage, making notes in their music, and even discussing some events that were upcoming. Everything was, on its face, so typically typical. Ravi had no classes that day, and spent much of it in his room. In the afternoon, Raahi Grover, the R.A., visited him there, and told him about Clementis complaint. According to Grovers statement to police, Ravi tried to defend himself, but Grover cut him off. Ravi seemed quite upset and confused, Grover said. Ravi was in the room when, sometime after five oclock, Clementi returned to Davidson C. This may have been the first time they had interacted since Sunday. Ravi later recalled Clementi doing something by his desk. Thats where police found the handwritten note, inside Clementis backpack. (The notes contents have not yet been disclosed to the Clementi family.) Ravi and Clementi were there together for less than an hour. Its not known if they talkedthere is no electronic record. Ravi told police that he was called away from the room by a friend. When he came back, Clementi was gone, although his bag was still there. He figured, Oh, maybe he just went to grab food, or whatever. If Clementi and Ravi had argued, Ravi showed no sign of stress when he texted with Jason Tam, who was in New York, between 5:40 and 6:30 P.M. Ravi encouraged him to visit Rutgers: Come to RU faggot. Tam replied, No, ru is gay. Mainardi told me what he knew of the next hours. Clementi went to the campus food court, bought a burger, and, at about six-thirty, took the university shuttle bus to the rail station, where he took a train to New York, then a subway uptown. He headed toward the George Washington Bridge. He was carrying his phone, and he installed the Facebook appthis action was reportedly documented on his news feed. At eight-forty-two, he posted a status update: Jumping off the gw bridge sorry. Mainardi was told that there were no witnesses; people saw Clementi on the south path and then saw that he wasnt
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there. The fall, from the center of the bridge, is about two hundred feet. His phone and wallet were found on the bridge. Five minutes after Clementi posted to Facebook, Ravi sent him a long text. (Ravi later said that he saw the Facebook posting only on the following day.) He told Clementi that, on Sunday night, he was showing Wei his webcam setup when hed caught an accidental glimpse of Clementi, adding, Obviously I told people what occurred so they could give me advice. He said of Tuesday night, I turned my camera away and put my computer to sleep so even if anyone tried it wouldnt work. I wanted to make amends for sunday night. Im sorry if you heard something distorted and disturbing but I assure you all my actions were good natured. Ten minutes later, Ravi wrote again, in a less weaselly way. This message is something that one wishes had been written three weeks before: Ive known you were gay and I have no problem with it. In fact one of my closest friends is gay and he and I have a very open relationship. I just suspected you were shy about it which is why I never broached the topic. I dont want your freshman year to be ruined because of a petty misunderstanding, its adding to my guilt. You have a right to move if you wish but I dont want you to feel pressured to without fully understanding the situation. That evening, the Port Authority police, after finding Clementis possessions on the bridge, alerted his parents, who, in turn, called Rutgers. Police officers drove to Davidson C, but there was no reply when they knocked at Room 30. Wei, noticing the commotion, phoned Ravi eight or nine times. When he finally picked up, he told her that he was in his room and shed awakened him, adding, Im really tired, I want to go back to sleep. But he did then talk to the police. He gave them a description of M.B., saying of him, I was worried that maybe he was involved with something. That night, Ravi deleted the yay tweet and replaced Tuesdays dare you to chat me tweet with one that said, Roommate asked for room again. Its happening again. People with ichat dont you dare video chat me from 930 to 12. And then he wrote, Everyone ignore that last tweet. Stupid drafts. Ravi claimed that he had accidentally published a stored draft. If so, its not clear why he didnt delete it. It seems more likely that he was being evasive. He knew that a less incriminating version of his tweet would have a Wednesday time stamp. The draft tweet would help to explain Wednesdays delivery of a Tuesday tweet. The deletion of the two earlier tweets, along with text-message conversations that Ravi had with Huang and Wei, form part of the indictment against him. By ten-thirty that night, the Clementis had been told that, apparently, Tyler had jumped from the George Washington Bridge. Mainardi described a few nerve-racking days, where you wondered whether maybe it was a fake by him. He remembered a conversation with an investigator in the office of the prosecutors,
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when we were still waiting for his body to be discovered, exploring the various possibilities: what if he didnt jump? What if hes living with some guy in New York City, and its the only way he can find a way to do it? And I said, If he did that, Im going to kill him. He gave a sad laugh. On September 29th, Jim Swimm, who lives in northern Manhattan, was taking a lunchtime walk in Inwood Hill Park when he saw a body floating in the Hudson. A park ranger called the police, who dispatched a boat that picked up the body near a Columbia University athletic complex. Swimm, who is gay, said, Not to sound all metaphysical about it, but I feel as if he was speaking to me that daysaying, people need to pay attention to whats happening. Six days before Clementis body was discovered, a delegation of Rutgers staff members visited Ravi in his room, and urged him to go home to Plainsboro. I want to stay and defend my honor, he said, but he was persuaded to leave. That afternoon, Wei was being interviewed by Rutgers police. During a break in questioning, she received a text from Ravi:
RAVI: WEI: what Where friend
Did Yeah
you . we is
tell .
them well were tyler
we
did that gonna .
it we
on see . to be
purpose? didnt know
RAVI: Because I said we were just messing around with the camera. He told me he wanted to have a over and I didnt realize they wanted all private. WEI: Omg dharun why didnt u talk to me first i told them everything He asked, Did you say anything about tuesday because I turned off my computer that day. Wei asked what had happened on Tuesday. Nothing, Ravi replied. This exchange, too, is included in the indictment, as an alleged act of witness tampering. Despite being pressed by detectives, Wei has insisted that although she knew Clementi had asked for the room on Tuesday, she had missed all the talk of a viewing party. Ravi was asleep at home when the police came to Plainsboro. His father woke him, and Ravi agreed to be taken back to New Brunswick, where he spoke to the police after waiving his right to a lawyer. He again claimed that he had abandoned the Tuesday viewing, and tried to explain the business of the deleted tweets. The detective became impatient: Its up to you which way you want this to go. You want to lie to us?
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If prosecutors had been able to charge Ravi with shiftiness and bad faithif the criminal law exactly reflected common moral judgments about kindness and reliabilitythen to convict him would be easy. The long indictment against Ravi can be seen as a kind of regretful commentary about the absence of such statutes. Similarly, the enduring false belief that Ravi was responsible for outing Tyler Clementi, and for putting a sex tape on the Internet, can be seen as a collective effort to balance a terrible event with a terrible cause. On September 28th, the Middlesex County prosecutors office charged Ravi and Wei with invasion of privacy for the momentary viewing on September 19th. Ravi alone was charged for an attempted viewing on September 21st. Even if one doubts that these charges would have been brought if Clementi had not died, or questions that men are revealing sexual parts by removing their shirts, the charges made some legal sense: Ravi and Wei had admitted seeing the video images. But to some an invasion of privacy charge seemed insufficient; Equality Forum, a national gay-rights organization, released a statement that called the actions of Ravi and Wei shocking, malicious, and heinous, and urged the prosecutor to file murder by reckless manslaughter charges. Paula Dow, then New Jerseys Attorney General, said, Sometimes the laws dont always adequately address the situation. That may come to pass here. Bruce J. Kaplan, the Middlesex County prosecutor, announced, We will be making every effort to assess whether bias played a role in the incident. In April, 2011, a grand jury indicted Ravi on fifteen counts, including two charges of second-degree bias intimidation. Two weeks later, Wei made a deal with prosecutors: the charges against her would be dropped if she agreed to attend counselling, serve three hundred hours of community service, and testify against Ravi, if called. Before the end of May, Ravi was offered a plea bargain for a three-to-five-year sentence; he rejected it. A second offer was made in December: no jail time, an effort to protect him against deportation, and six hundred hours of community service. This, too, was rejected. You want to know why? Steven Altman, Ravis lawyer, said to reporters, outside the courthouse, on December 9th. Simple answer, simple principle of law, simple principle of life: hes innocent. Ravis trial, starting a week before his twentieth birthday, is expected to last a month. He is waiting at home in Plainsboro. Altman said that he has been taking online courses. Ravi told Jason Tam that he has designed a door lock that employs fingerprint recognition. (Be proud of me, he told Tam.) Anil Kappa, the family friend, cautions that, even with an acquittal, Ravi would still face this for the rest of his life, adding, Hes going to keep paying the price. Plugged In, an entertainment Web site published by Focus on the Family, the Christian conservative group, recently ran what it called a rundown of pop cultures biggest shakers and breakers of 2011. At No. 6, between Rebecca Black and Tim Tebow, was Tyler Clementi, whose death was a critical
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reminder that, even when we disagree with someones choices or lifestyle, we must always treat that person with respect, dignity and compassion. The entry was illustrated with Clementis Facebook photograph: self-shot, in his sunny Ridgewood bedroom, it shows him with cropped hair, glasses, and a hesitant smile. As the story of Clementi has become a popular parable of teen-age good and evil, that yellow-toned photograph has become an icon of adolescent distress. One afternoon last October, a year after Clementis death, the image was projected onto two giant screens in a hall in a student center at Rutgers. CNN was taping a special, Bullying: It Stops Here, hosted by Anderson Cooper. The audience consisted mostly of Rutgers studentsTyler Picone sat in the front row and they listened courteously as a floor manager called out Are you guys excited to be on TV? and Youre a good-looking group, then coached them on how to express shock or grief while watching the panel. The discussion, involving Dr. Phil McGraw, Kelly Ripa, and Robert Faris, a sociologist at U.C.-Davis, and others, began with Cooper declaring that Tyler Clementis life had been thrown onto the Internet. Then, in what may have been quiet recognition that the source of Clementis despair was unknown, and may remain unknown, the show barely mentioned Clementi again. Its primary subject was the meanness of middle-school students. Clementi was a totem, but not part of the story. Outside, I spoke to Eric Thor, a junior, and the president of Delta Lambda Phi, a gay-oriented fraternity. Bullying is trying to be a label that covers all negative interrelations between students, he said. If you say the word enough, it starts to lose meaning. He noted that Clementi had lacked a close ally at Rutgers. Everyone needs a sidekick. I dont think he had that. I returned to New Brunswick a few weeks ago. In a diner on Route 1, I had lunch with Joseph and Jane Clementi, who had just attended another pre-trial hearing. The Clementis are likable, thoughtful people. They were wearing gold-colored wristbands distributed by the Tyler Clementi Foundation, which they launched last year to raise awareness of teen-age suicide, cyberbullying, and the difficulties of gay youth. Joseph Clementi was wearing a pink tie. They didnt want to discuss the case, beyond saying that they were satisfied with the charges against Ravi. What we want to see is justice, Joseph Clementi said. That doesnt necessarily mean the punishment has to be harsh. He talked about Tylers senior year in high school. I would characterize him as a child growing up, he said. He was getting more into being fashion-conscious. Now, this kid, he had to dress for orchestra since he was seven, he was wearing suits and ties. But he was getting more trendy, in the last year or so. Jane Clementi recalled that, not long before his death, Tyler had bought a spectacular new pair of glasses bright green on the inside of the stems. His father said, He was definitely trying to express himself.
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They never saw any sign of depression, and cant even see it retrospectively. As a parent, what it says to me is that what you think you know, you dont know, Joseph Clementi said. And thats a hard thing, because we all think, I know what my kids up to. You dont. On the night Jane Clementi learned that Tyler was gay, she said, I told him not to hurt himself. Not long before, a girl from his school had committed suicide. We had talked about it briefly that summer, and for some reason that thought came to mind. And all I said was Dont hurt yourself, and he looked me right in the eye and he laughed, and said, I would never do anything like that.
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Books
Spoiled Rotten
Why do kids rule the roost?
by Elizabeth Kolbert July 2, 2012
In 2004, Carolina Izquierdo, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, spent several months with the Matsigenka, a tribe of about twelve thousand people who live in the Peruvian Amazon. The Matsigenka hunt for monkeys and parrots, grow yucca and bananas, and build houses that they roof with the leaves of a particular kind of palm tree, known as a kapashi. At one point, Izquierdo decided to accompany a local family on a leaf-gathering expedition down the Urubamba River. A member of another family, Yanira, asked if she could come along. Izquierdo and the others spent five days on the river. Although Yanira had no clear role in the group, she quickly found ways to make herself useful. Twice a day, she swept the sand off the sleeping mats, and she helped stack the kapashi leaves for transport back to the village. In the evening, she fished for crustaceans, which she cleaned, boiled, and served to the others. Calm and self-possessed, Yanira asked for nothing, Izquierdo later recalled. The girls behavior made a strong impression on the anthropologist because at the time of the trip Yanira was just six years old. While Izquierdo was doing field work among the Matsigenka, she was also involved in an anthropological study closer to home. A colleague of hers, Elinor Ochs, had recruited thirty-two middleclass families for a study of life in twenty-first-century Los Angeles. Ochs had arranged to have the families filmed as they ate, fought, made up, and did the dishes. Izquierdo and Ochs shared an interest in many ethnographic issues, including child rearing. How did parents in different cultures train young people to assume adult responsibilities? In the case of the Angelenos, they mostly didnt. In the L.A. families observed, no child routinely performed household chores without being instructed to. Often, the kids had to be begged to attempt the simplest tasks; often, they still refused. In one fairly typical encounter, a father asked his eight-year-old son five times to please go take a bath or a shower. After the fifth plea went unheeded, the father picked the boy up and carried him into the bathroom. A few minutes later, the kid, still unwashed, wandered into another room to play a video game.
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In another representative encounter, an eight-year-old girl sat down at the dining table. Finding that no silverware had been laid out for her, she demanded, How am I supposed to eat? Although the girl clearly knew where the silverware was kept, her father got up to get it for her. In a third episode captured on tape, a boy named Ben was supposed to leave the house with his parents. But he couldnt get his feet into his sneakers, because the laces were tied. He handed one of the shoes to his father: Untie it! His father suggested that he ask nicely. Can you untie it? Ben replied. After more back-and-forth, his father untied Bens sneakers. Ben put them on, then asked his father to retie them. You tie your shoes and lets go, his father finally exploded. Ben was unfazed. Im just asking, he said. A few years ago, Izquierdo and Ochs wrote an article for Ethos, the journal of the Society of Psychological Anthropology, in which they described Yaniras conduct during the trip down the river and Bens exchange with his dad. Juxtaposition of these developmental stories begs for an account of responsibility in childhood, they wrote. Why do Matsigenka children help their families at home more than L.A. children? And Why do L.A. adult family members help their children at home more than do Matsigenka? Though not phrased in exactly such terms, questions like these are being askedsilently, imploringly, despairinglyevery single day by parents from Anchorage to Miami. Why, why, why? With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world. Its not just that theyve been given unprecedented amounts of stuffclothes, toys, cameras, skis, computers, televisions, cell phones, PlayStations, iPods. (The market for Burberry Baby and other forms of kiddie couture has reportedly been growing by ten per cent a year.) Theyve also been granted unprecedented authority. Parents want their kids approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents approval, Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, both professors of psychology, have written. In many middle-class families, children have one, two, sometimes three adults at their beck and call. This is a social experiment on a grand scale, and a growing number of adults fear that it isnt working out so well: according to one poll, commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents think that their children are spoiled. The notion that we may be raising a generation of kids who cant, or at least wont, tie their own shoes has given rise to a new genre of parenting books. Their titles tend to be either dolorous (The Price of Privilege) or downright hostile (The Narcissism Epidemic, Mean Moms Rule, A Nation of Wimps). The books are less how-to guides than how-not-tos: how not to give in to your toddler, how
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not to intervene whenever your teen-ager looks bored, how not to spend two hundred thousand dollars on tuition only to find your twenty-something graduate back at home, drinking all your beer. Not long ago, Sally Koslow, a former editor-in-chief of McCalls, discovered herself in this last situation. After four years in college and two on the West Coast, her son Jed moved back to Manhattan and settled into his old room in the familys apartment, together with thirty-four boxes of vinyl LPs. Unemployed, Jed liked to stay out late, sleep until noon, and wander around in his boxers. Koslow set out to try to understand why he and so many of his peers seemed stuck in what she regarded as permanent adultescence. She concluded that one of the reasons is the lousy economy. Another is parents like her. Our offspring have simply leveraged our braggadocio, good intentions, and overinvestment, Koslow writes in her new book, Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-So-Empty Nest (Viking). They inhabit a broad savannah of entitlement that weve watered, landscaped, and hired gardeners to maintain. She recommends letting the grasslands revert to forest: The best way for a lot of us to show our love would be to learn to un-mother and un-father. One practical tip that she offers is to do nothing when your adult child finally decides to move out. In the process of schlepping Jeds stuff to an apartment in Carroll Gardens, Koslows husband tore a tendon and ended up in emergency surgery. Madeline Levine, a psychologist who lives outside San Francisco, specializes in treating young adults. In Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success (HarperCollins), she argues that we do too much for our kids because we overestimate our influence. Never before have parents been so (mistakenly) convinced that their every move has a ripple effect into their childs future success, she writes. Paradoxically, Levine maintains, by working so hard to help our kids we end up holding them back. Most parents today were brought up in a culture that put a strong emphasis on being special, she observes. Being special takes hard work and cant be trusted to children. Hence the exhausting cycle of constantly monitoring their work and performance, which in turn makes children feel less competent and confident, so that they need even more oversight. Pamela Druckerman, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, moved to Paris after losing her job. She married a British expatriate and not long after that gave birth to a daughter. Less out of conviction than inexperience, Druckerman began raising her daughter, nicknamed Bean, lAmricaine. The result, as she recounts in Bringing Up Bb (Penguin Press), was that Bean was invariably the most illbehaved child in every Paris restaurant and park she visited. French children could sit calmly through a three-course meal; Bean was throwing food by the time the apritifs arrived.
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Druckerman talked to a lot of French mothers, all of them svelte and most apparently well rested. She learned that the French believe ignoring children is good for them. French parents dont worry that theyre going to damage their kids by frustrating them, she writes. To the contrary, they think their kids will be damaged if they cant cope with frustration. One mother, Martine, tells Druckerman that she always waited five minutes before picking up her infant daughter when she cried. While Druckerman and Martine are talking, in Martines suburban home, the daughter, now three, is baking cupcakes by herself. Bean is roughly the same age, but it wouldnt have occurred to me to let her do a complicated task like this all on her own, Druckerman observes. Id be supervising, and shed be resisting my supervision. Also key, Druckerman discovered, is just saying non. In contrast to American parents, French parents, when they say it, actually mean it. They view learning to cope with no as a crucial step in a childs evolution, Druckerman writes. It forces them to understand that there are other people in the world, with needs as powerful as their own. Not long ago, in the hope that our sons might become a little more Matsigenka, my husband and I gave them a new job: unloading the grocery bags from the car. One evening when I came home from the store, it was raining. Carrying two or three bags, the youngest, Aaron, who is thirteen, tried to jump over a puddle. There was a loud crash. After Id retrieved what food could be salvaged from a Molotov cocktail of broken glass and mango juice, I decided that Aaron needed another, more vigorous lesson in responsibility. Now, in addition to unloading groceries, he would also have the task of taking out the garbage. On one of his first forays, he neglected to close the lid on the pail tightly enough, and it attracted a bear. The next morning, as I was gathering up the used tissues, ant-filled raisin boxes, and slimy Saran Wrap scattered across the yard, I decided that I didnt have time to let my kids help out around the house. (My husband informed me that Id just been kiddie-whipped.) Ochs and Izquierdo noted, in their paper on the differences between the family lives of the Matsigenka and the Angelenos, how early the Matsigenka begin encouraging their children to be useful. Toddlers routinely heat their own food over an open fire, they observed, while three-year-olds frequently practice cutting wood and grass with machetes and knives. Boys, when they are six or seven, start to accompany their fathers on fishing and hunting trips, and girls learn to help their mothers with the cooking. As a consequence, by the time they reach puberty Matsigenka kids have mastered most of the skills necessary for survival. Their competence encourages autonomy, which fosters further competencea virtuous cycle that continues to adulthood. The cycle in American households seems mostly to run in the opposite direction. So little is expected of kids that even adolescents may not know how to operate the many labor-saving devices their homes are filled with. Their incompetence begets exasperation, which results in still less being asked of them (which
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leaves them more time for video games). Referring to the Los Angeles families, Ochs and Izquierdo wrote, Many parents remarked that it takes more effort to get children to collaborate than to do the tasks themselves. One way to interpret these contrary cycles is to infer that Americans have a lower opinion of their kids capacities. And, in a certain sense, this is probably true: how many parents in Park Slope or Brentwood would trust their three-year-olds to cut the grass with a machete? But in another sense, of course, its ridiculous. Contemporary American parentsparticularly the upscale sort that unparenting books are aimed attend to take a highly expansive view of their kids abilities. Little Ben may not be able to tie his shoes, but that shouldnt preclude his going to Brown. In A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting (Broadway), Hara Estroff Marano argues that college rankings are ultimately to blame for what ails the American family. Her argument runs more or less as follows: High-powered parents worry that the economic opportunities for their children are shrinking. They see a degree from a top-tier school as one of the few ways to give their kids a jump on the competition. In order to secure this advantage, they will do pretty much anything, which means not just taking care of all the cooking and cleaning but also helping their children with math homework, hiring them S.A.T. tutors, and, if necessary, suing their high school. Marano, an editor-at-large at Psychology Today, tells about a high school in Washington State that required students to write an eight-page paper and present a ten-minute oral report before graduating. When one senior got a failing grade on his project, his parents hired a lawyer. Todays parents are not just helicopter parents, a former school principal complains to Marano. They are a jet-powered turbo attack model. Other educators gripe about snowplow parents, who try to clear every obstacle from their childrens paths. The products of all this hovering, meanwhile, worry that they may not be able to manage college in the absence of household help. According to research conducted by sociologists at Boston College, todays incoming freshmen are less likely to be concerned about the rigors of higher education than about how they will handle the logistics of everyday life. One of the offshoots of the L.A. family study is a new book, Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology), which its authorsthe anthropologists Jeanne Arnold, of U.C.L.A., Anthony Graesch, of Connecticut College, and Elinor Ochsdescribe as a visual ethnography of middle-class American households. Lavishly illustrated with photographs (by Enzo Ragazzini) of the families houses and yards, the book offers an intimate glimpse into the crap-strewn core of American culture.
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After a few short years, the text notes, many families amass more objects than their houses can hold. The result is garages given over to old furniture and unused sports equipment, home offices given over to boxes of stuff that havent yet been stuck in the garage, and, in one particularly jam-packed house, a shower stall given over to storing dirty laundry. Children, according to Life at Home, are disproportionate generators of clutter: Each new child in a household leads to a 30 percent increase in a familys inventory of possessions during the preschool years alone. Many of the kids rooms pictured are so crowded with clothes and toys, so many of which have been tossed on the floor, that there is no path to the bed. (One little girls room contains, by the authors count, two hundred and forty-eight dolls, including a hundred and sixty-five Beanie Babies.) The kids possessions, not to mention their dioramas and their T-ball trophies, spill out into other rooms, giving the houses what the authors call a very child-centered look. When anthropologists study cultures like the Matsigenkas, they tend to see patterns. The Matsigenka prize hard work and self-sufficiency. Their daily rituals, their child-rearing practices, and even their folktales reinforce these values, which have an obvious utility for subsistence farmers. Matsigenka stories often feature characters undone by laziness; kids who still dont get the message are rubbed with an itchinducing plant. In contemporary American culture, the patterns are more elusive. What values do we convey by turning our homes into warehouses for dolls? By assigning our kids chores and then rewarding them when they screw up? By untying and then retying their shoes for them? It almost seems as if were actively trying to raise a nation of adultescents. And, perhaps without realizing it, we are. As Melvin Konner, a psychiatrist and anthropologist at Emory University, points out in The Evolution of Childhood (Belknap), one of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens is its prolonged juvenile period. Compared with other apes, humans are altricial, which is to say immature at birth. Chimpanzees, for instance, are born with brains half their adult size; the brains of human babies are only a third of their adult size. Chimps reach puberty shortly after theyre weaned; humans take another decade or so. No one knows when exactly in the process of hominid evolution juvenile development began to slow down, but even Homo ergaster, who evolved some 1.8 million years ago, seems to have enjoyedif thats the right worda protracted childhood. Its often argued by anthropologists that the drawn-out timetable is what made humans human in the first place. Its the fact that we grow up slowly that makes acquiring language and building complicated social structures possible. The same trend that appears in human prehistory shows up in history as well. The farther back you look, the faster kids grew up. In medieval Europe, children from seven on were initiated into adult work.
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Compulsory schooling, introduced in the nineteenth century, pushed back the age of maturity to sixteen or so. By the middle of the twentieth century, college graduation seemed, at least in this country, to be the new dividing line. Now, if Judd Apatow is to be trusted, its possible to close in on forty without coming of age. Evolutionarily speaking, this added delay makes a certain amount of sense. In an increasingly complex and unstable world, it may be adaptive to put off maturity as long as possible. According to this way of thinking, staying forever young means always being ready for the next big thing (whatever that might be). Or adultesence might be just the opposite: not evidence of progress but another sign of a generalized regression. Letting things slide is always the easiest thing to do, in parenting no less than in banking, public education, and environmental protection. A lack of discipline is apparent these days in just about every aspect of American society. Why this should be is a much larger question, one to ponder as we take out the garbage and tie our kids shoes.
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Profiles
We Are Alive
Bruce Springsteen at sixty-two.
by David Remnick July 30, 2012
Nearly half a century ago, when Elvis Presley was filming Harum Scarum and Help! was on the charts, a moody, father-haunted, yet uncannily charismatic Shore rat named Bruce Springsteen was building a small reputation around central Jersey as a guitar player in a band called the Castiles. The band was named for the lead singers favorite brand of soap. Its members were from Freehold, an industrial town half an hour inland from the boardwalk carnies and the sea. The Castiles performed at sweet sixteens and Elks-club dances, at drive-in movie theatres and ShopRite ribbon cuttings, at a mobile-home park in Farmingdale, at the Matawan-Keyport Rollerdrome. Once, they played for the patients at a psychiatric hospital, in Marlboro. A gentleman dressed in a suit came to the stage and, in an introductory speech that ran some twenty minutes, declared the Castiles greater than the Beatles. At which point a doctor intervened and escorted him back to his room. One spring afternoon in 1966, the Castiles, with dreams of making it big and making it quick, drove to a studio at the Brick Mall Shopping Center and recorded two original songs, Baby I and Thats What You Get. Mainly, though, they played an array of covers, from Glenn Millers In the Mood to the GClefs I Understand. They did Sonny and Cher, Sam and Dave, Don & Juan, the Who, the Kinks, the Stones, the Animals. Many musicians in their grizzled late maturity have an uncertain grasp on their earliest days on the bandstand. (Not a few have an uncertain grasp on last week.) But Springsteen, who is sixty-two and among the most durable musicians since B. B. King and Om Kalthoum, seems to remember every gaudy night, from the moment, in 1957, when he and his mother watched Elvis on The Ed Sullivan ShowI looked at her and I said, I wanna be just . . . like . . . that to his most recent exploits as a multimillionaire populist rock star crowd-surfing the adoring masses. These days, he is the subject of historical exhibitions; at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, in Cleveland, and at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, his lyric sheets, old cars, and faded performing duds have been displayed like the snippets of the Shroud. But, unlike the Rolling Stones, say, who have not written a
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great song since the disco era and come together only to pad their fortunes as their own cover band, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately, new songs. His latest album, Wrecking Ball, is a melodic indictment of the recessionary moment, of income disparity, emasculated workers, and what he calls the distance between the American reality and the American dream. The work is remote from his early operettas of humid summer interludes and abandon out on the Turnpike. In his desire to extend a counter-tradition of political progressivism, Springsteen quotes from Irish rebel songs, Dust Bowl ballads, Civil War tunes, and chain-gang chants.
Early this year, Springsteen was leading rehearsals for a world tour at Fort Monmouth, an Army base that was shut down last year; it had been an outpost since the First World War of military communications and intelligence, and once employed Julius Rosenberg and thousands of militarized carrier pigeons. The twelve-hundred-acre property is now a ghost town inhabited only by steel dummies meant to scare off the ubiquitous Canada geese that squirt a carpet of green across middle Jersey. Driving to the far end of the base, I reached an unlovely theatre that Springsteen and Jon Landau, his longtime manager, had rented for the rehearsals. Springsteen had performed for officers children at the Fort Monmouth teen club (dancing, no liquor) with the Castiles, forty-seven years earlier. The atmosphere inside was purposeful but easygoing. Musicians stood onstage noodling on their instruments with the languid air of outfielders warming up in the sun. Max Weinberg, the bands volcanic drummer, wore the sort of generous jeans favored by dads at weekend barbecues. Steve Van Zandt, Springsteens childhood friend and guitarist-wingman, keeps up a brutal schedule as an actor and a d.j., and he seemed weary, his eyes drooping under a piratical purple head scarf. The bass player Garry Tallent, the organist Charlie Giordano, and the pianist Roy Bittan horsed around on a roller-rink tune
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while they waited. The guitarist Nils Lofgren was on the phone, trying to figure out flights to get back to his home, in Scottsdale, for the weekend. Springsteen arrived and greeted everyone with a quick hello and his distinctive cackle. He is five-nine and walks with a rolling rodeo gait. When he takes in something newa visitor, a thought, a passing car in the distancehis eyes narrow, as if in hard light, and his lower jaw protrudes a bit. His hairline is receding, and, if one had to guess, he has, over the years, in the face of high-def scrutiny and the fight against time, enjoined the expensive attentions of cosmetic and dental practitioners. He remains dispiritingly handsome, preposterously fit. (He has practically the same waist size as when I met him, when we were fifteen, says Steve Van Zandt, who does not.) Some of this has to do with his abstemious inclinations; Van Zandt says Springsteen is the only guy I knowI think the only guy I know at all who never did drugs. Hes followed more or less the same exercise regimen for thirty years: he runs on a treadmill and, with a trainer, works out with weights. It has paid off. His muscle tone approximates a fresh tennis ball. And yet, with the tour a month away, he laughed at the idea that he was ready. Im not remotely close, he said, slumping into a chair twenty rows back from the stage. Preparing for a tour is a process far more involved than middle-aged workouts designed to stave off premature infarction. Think of it this way: performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes, Springsteen said. And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning. His style in performance is joyously demonic, as close as a white man of Social Security age can get to James Brown circa 1962 without risking a herniated disk or a shattered pelvis. Concerts last in excess of three hours, without a break, and he is constantly dancing, screaming, imploring, mugging, kicking, windmilling, crowd-surfing, climbing a drum riser, jumping on an amp, leaping off Roy Bittans piano. The display of energy and its depletion is part of what is expected of him. In return, the crowd participates in a display of communal adoration. Like pilgrims at a gigantic outdoor Massthink John Paul II at Gdanskthey know their role: when to raise their hands, when to sway, when to sing, when to scream his name, when to bear his body, hand over hand, from the rear of the orchestra to the stage. (Van Zandt: Messianic? Is that the word youre looking for?) Springsteen came to glory in the age of Letterman, but he is anti-ironical. Keith Richards works at seeming not to give a shit. He makes you wonder if it is harder to play the riffs for Street Fighting Man or to dangle a cigarette from his lips by a single thread of spit. Springsteen is the opposite. He is all about flagrant exertion. There always comes a moment in a Springsteen concert, as there always did with James Brown, when he plays out a dumb show of the conflict between exhaustion and the urge to go on. Brown enacted it by dropping to his knees, awash in sweat, unable to dance another step, yet shooing away his
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cape bearer, the aide who would enrobe him and hustle him offstage. Springsteen slumps against the mike stand, spent and still, then, regaining consciousness, shakes off the sweatNo! It cant be!and calls on the band for another verse, another song. He leaves the stage soaked, as if he had swum around the arena in his clothes while being chased by barracudas. I want an extreme experience, he says. He wants his audience to leave the arena, as he commands them, with your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated! So the display of exuberance is critical. For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself, he says. Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in. Music, when its really great, pries that shit back open and lets people back in, it lets light in, and air in, and energy in, and sends people home with that and sends me back to the hotel with it. People carry that with them sometimes for a very long period of time. The band rehearses not so much to learn how to play particular songs as to see what songs work with other songs, to figure out a basic set list (with countless alternatives) that will fill all of Springsteens demands: to air the new work and his latest themes; to play the expected hits for the casual fans; to work up enough surprises and rarities for fans who have seen him hundreds of times; and, especially, to pace the show from frenzy to calm and back again. In the past several years, Springsteen has been taking requests from the crowd. He has never been stumped. You can take the band out of the bar, but you cant take the bar out of the band, Van Zandt says. The E Street Band members are not Springsteens equals. This is not the Beatles, as Weinberg puts it. They are salaried musicians; in 1989, they were fired en masse. They await his call to record, to tour, to rehearse. And so when Springsteen sprang out of his chair and said, O.K., time to work, they straightened up and watched for his cue. Huh . . . two . . . three . . . four. As the anthemic opener, We Take Care of Our Own, washed over the empty seats, I stood at the back of the hall next to the sound engineer, John Cooper, a rangy, unflappable Hoosier, who was monitoring a vast soundboard and a series of laptops. One hard drive contains the lyrics and keys for hundreds of songs, so that when Springsteen calls for something off the cuff the song quickly appears on TelePrompters within sight of him and his bandmates. (The crutch is hardly uniqueSinatra, in late career, used a TelePrompter, and so do the Stones and many other bands.) Although more than half the show will be the same from night to night, the rest is up for grabs.
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This is about the only live music left, with a few exceptions, Cooper said. Lip-synchers are legion. Coldplay thickens its sound with heaps of pre-taped instruments and synthesizers. The one artificial sound in Springsteens act is a snare-drum sound in We Take Care of Our Own that seemed to elude easy reproduction. That afternoon at Fort Monmouth, Springsteen was intent on nailing the opening four, the first songs, which come rapid fire. The band and the crew gave particular attention to those lingering seconds between songs when the keys modulate and the guitar techs pass different instruments to the musicians. It is intricate work; the technicians have to move with the precision of a Daytona pit crew. Before the tour officially began, in Atlanta, there were a few smaller venues to play, including the Apollo Theatre, in Harlem. There are usually more African-Americans onstage than in the seats, but Springsteen is steeped in black music, and he was especially eager to play the date in Harlem. All of our teachers stood on those boards at the Apollo, he said. The essence of the way this band moves is one of soul. Its supposed to be overwhelming. You shouldnt be able to catch your breath. Thats what being a front man is all aboutthe idea of having something supple underneath you, that machine that roars and can turn on a dime. Rock tours generally have a theme: a bands coltish arrival, a new style or look, a reunion, a new set of songs, a political moment. Springsteen was salting the show with the political material from Wrecking Ball, but the most vivid theme on this tour was to be time passing, age, death, and, if Springsteen could manage it, a sense of renewal. The surviving core of the bandVan Zandt, Tallent, Weinberg, Bittan, and Springsteenhad been playing together since the Ford Administration; Lofgren and Patti Scialfa, Springsteens wife, who is a singer and guitar player, joined in the eighties. The run of tragedy, debility, and erosion has seemed relentless in recent years. Nils Lofgren has had both hips replaced, and both his shoulders are a wreck. Max Weinberg has endured open-heart surgery, prostate-cancer treatment, two failed back operations, and seven hand operations. The morning after a concert, he told me, he feels like the Nick Nolte character in the football movie North Dallas Forty: bruised and barely able to move. Lofgren has compared the backstage area to a MASH unit, with ice packs, heating pads, Bengay tubes, and masseuses on call. More alarmingly, Jon Landau, Springsteens manager and closest friend, was recovering from brain surgery. There have been deeper, permanent losses. In 2008, Danny Federici, who played organ and accordion with Springsteen for forty years, died of melanoma. Springsteens body man on tour, a Special Forces veteran named Terry Magovern, died the year before. Springsteens trainer died at the age of forty.
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The most shocking loss came last year, when Clarence Clemons, Springsteens saxophone player and onstage foil and protector, died of a stroke. Clemons was a colossussix-four, a former football player. As a musician, he possessed a raspy tone reminiscent of King Curtis. He was not a great improviser, but his solos, painstakingly scripted over long hours in the studio with Springsteen, were set pieces in every show. Then, there was his sheer stage presence. Clemons gave Springsteen a mythic companion who embodied the fraternal spirit of the band. Standing next to Clarence was like standing next to the baddest ass on the planet, Springsteen said of him in tribute. You felt like no matter what the day or the night brought, nothing was going to touch you. Clemonss life style was considerably less disciplined than Springsteens, and, in recent years, his body had been breaking down, requiring hip replacements, knee replacements, back surgery. On the last tour, Clemons was driven around the arena tunnels in a golf cart. Onstage, he was spending less time exerting himself on the horn and more time resting on a stool and banging on a tambourine. When he did play, it was clear that he was losing the high notes. After one of his last concerts, he told a friend, I deserve a God-damned Academy Award. He said that he felt like Mickey Rourkes character in The Wrestler; he was portraying a powerful figure onstage even as he was falling apart physically. At the funeral, held in a chapel in Palm Beach, Springsteen paid passionate homage to Clemons, recalling that he had put up with a world where it still wasnt so easy to be big and black. He recalled his friends raunchy mysticism, his appetites, even his dressing room, which was draped in exotic scarves and dubbed the Temple of Soul: A visit there was like a trip to a sovereign nation that had just struck huge oil reserves. At the same time, Springsteen gestured toward Clemonss erratic family life (he was married five times) and the occasional tensions in their relationship. Speaking to Clemonss sons, he said, C lived a life where he did what he wanted to do, and he let the chips, human and otherwise, fall where they may. Like a lot of us, your pop was capable of great magic and also of making quite an amazing mess. Months later, Springsteen was still feeling the loss. He was twenty-two when he met Clemons, on the Asbury Park music circuit. Losing Clemons was like losing the sea and the stars, and it was clear that Springsteen was anxious about performing without him. How do we continue? I think we discussed this more than anything in our history, Van Zandt told me. The basic concept was, we need to reinvent ourselves here a little bit. You cant just replace a guy. Clemons was replaced not by a musician but by a contingenta five-man horn section. Rehearsals were partly a matter of figuring out how to acknowledge the losses without turning the concert into a lugubrious memorial service. The band is a little community up there, Springsteen said, and it
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gathers together, and we try to heal the parts that God broke and honor the parts that are no longer with us. During the breaks, I noticed that one of the horn players, a young tenor player wearing a considerable Afro, oblong eyewear, and an intent expression, was wandering around, nervously playing snatches of familiar solos on his horn: Tenth Avenue Freeze Out, Jungleland, Badlands, Thunder Road. This was Jake Clemons, Clarences thirty-two-year-old nephew. For years, Jake had been touring second-rate halls and clubs with his own band. Now he had the assignment of filling his uncles shoes in front of audiences of fifty thousand. He would do so literally. Jake wore his uncles size-16 shoessnakeskin boots, slick loafers, whatever was left to him. Nearly all of his horns, too, had been gifts from Uncle Clarence. In January, Springsteen invited Jake to his house, and they played long into the night. Bruce introduced the idea of his joining the band. But you have to understand, Springsteen told him. When you blow that sax onstage with us, people wont compare you to Clarence on the last tour. Theyll compare you to their memory of Clarence, to their idea of Clarence. That gave Jake Clemons pause. Raised on gospel in a family led by a Marine-band officer, he knew Springsteens catalogue only casually. The audience would know the songs, not to mention the history of the band, much more intimately than he did. After Clarence died, Jake did a few tribute shows, and he could sense the audience making comparisons. I dont know if anyone can perform in the shadow of a legend, Jake said. To me, Clarence is still on that stage, and I dont want to step on his toes. Springsteen believed that these worries, and the larger sense of loss and injury, might provide an energy that the tour could draw on. After all these years onstage, he can stand back from his performances with an analytic remove. Youre the shaman, a little bit, youre leading the congregation, he told me. But you are the same as everybody else in the sense that your troubles are the same, your problems are the same, youve got your blessings, youve got your sins, youve got the things you can do well, youve got the things you fuck up all the time. And so youre a conduit. There was a series of elements in your life some that were blessings, and some that were just chaotic cursesthat set fire to you in a certain way. When Springsteen was touring behind the Born to Run album, in the mid-seventies, he would stand at the lip of the stage in a spotlight, vamping on a chord, and tell the story of growing up in a dingy twofamily house next to a gas station in a working-class section of Freehold known as Texas, because it was first populated by hillbilly migrants from the South. I was in the balcony at a show, in November, 1976, at the Palladium, on Fourteenth Street, when Springsteen laid things out in the starkest terms:
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My mom, she was a secretary, and she worked downtown. . . . And my father, he worked a lot of different places. He worked in a rug mill for a while, he drove a cab for a while, and he was a guard down at the jail for a while. I can remember when he worked down there, he used to always come home real pissed off, drunk, sit in the kitchen. At night, nine oclock, he used to shut off all the lights, every light in the house, and he used to get real pissed off if me or my sister turned any of them on. And hed sit in the kitchen with a six-pack, a cigarette. . . . Hed make me sit down at that table in the dark. In the wintertime, he used to turn on the gas stove and close all the doors, so it got real hot in there. And I remember just sitting in the dark. . . . No matter how long I sat there, I could never ever see his face. Wed start talking about nothing much, how I was doing. Pretty soon, he asked me what I thought I was doing with myself. And wed always end up screaming at each other. My mother, shed always end up running in from the front room crying, and trying to pull him off me, try to keep us from fighting with each other. . . . Id always end up running out the back door and pulling away from him. Pulling away from him, running down the driveway screaming at him, telling him, telling him, telling him, how it was my life and I was going to do what I wanted to do. At the end of the story, an entirely accurate one, Springsteen would segue into Its My Life, by the Animals, a spine-jangling declaration of independence. In Springsteens voice, it was a declaration of independence from a household in which threats were shouted, telephones were ripped off the wall, and the police were summoned. Doug Springsteen was an Army driver in Europe during the Second World War who came home and seethed at his crabbed circumstances. Van Zandt told me that Springsteens father was scary and best avoided. In those days, all fathers were scary, Van Zandt said. The torture we put these poor guys through, when you think of it now. My father, Bruces fatherthese poor guys, they never had a chance. There was no precedent for us, none, in history, for their sons to become these long-haired freaks who didnt want to participate in the world they built for them. Can you imagine? It was the World War Two generation. They built the suburbs. What gratitude did we have? Were, like, Fuck you! Were gonna look like girls, and were gonna do drugs, and were gonna play crazy rock and roll! And theyre, like, What the fuck did we do wrong? They were scared of what we were becoming, so they felt they had to be more authoritarian. They hated us, you know? Doug Springsteen grew up shadowed by the death of his five-year-old sister, Virginia, who was hit by a truck while riding a tricycle, in Freehold in 1927. His parents, according to a forthcoming biography of Springsteen by Peter Ames Carlin, were ravaged by grief. Doug dropped out of school after ninth grade. In 1948, he married Adele Zerilli. Bruce was born the next year. For long stretches of Bruces childhood,
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his grandparents lived with his family, and, as Springsteen told Carlin, he always sensed that much of the affection he received from them was a way to replace the lost child, which was confusing: The dead daughter was a big presence. Her portrait was on the wall, always front and center. Decades after the event, the whole familythe grandparents, Doug and Adele, Bruce and his sister Ginnywent to the cemetery every weekend to visit Virginias grave. In biographies and clippings, Doug Springsteen is described with adjectives like taciturn and disappointed. In fact, he seems to have been bipolar, and he was capable of terrible rages, often aimed at his son. Doctors prescribed drugs for his illness, but Doug didnt always take them. The mediator in the house, the source of optimism and survival, and the steadiest earner, was Bruces mother, Adele, who worked as a legal secretary. Still, Bruce was deeply affected by his fathers paralyzing depressions, and worried that he would not escape the thread of mental instability that ran through his family. That fear, he says, is why he never did drugs. Doug Springsteen lives in his sons songs. In Independence Day, the son must escape his fathers house because we were just too much of the same kind. In the ferocious Adam Raised a Cain, the father walks these empty rooms / looking for something to blame / You inherit the sins / You inherit the flames. The songs were a way of talking to the silent father. My dad was very nonverbalyou couldnt really have a conversation with him, Springsteen told me. I had to make my peace with that, but I had to have a conversation with him, because I needed to have one. It aint the best way to go about it, but that was the only way I could, so I did, and eventually he did respond. He might not have liked the songs, but I think he liked that they existed. It meant that he mattered. Hed get asked, What are your favorite songs? And hed say, The ones that are about me. The past, though, is anything but past. My parents struggles, its the subject of my life, Springsteen told me at rehearsal. Its the thing that eats at me and always will. My life took a very different course, but my life is an anomaly. Those wounds stay with you, and you turn them into a language and a purpose. Gesturing toward the band onstage, he said, Were repairmenrepairmen with a toolbox. If I repair a little of myself, Ill repair a little of you. Thats the job. The songs of escape on Born to Run, the portrait of post-industrial struggle on Darkness on the Edge of Town were part of that job of early repair. Doug and Adele Springsteen left Freehold for northern California when Bruce was nineteen, and they were puzzled when, several years later, their son, a long-haired misfit in their eyes, came visiting, as he puts it, lugging a treasure chest behind and telling them to buy the biggest house around. The one satisfaction you get is that you do get your See, I told you so moment, Springsteen said. Of course, all the deeper things go unsaid, that it all could have been a little different.
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Doug Springsteen died in 1998, at seventy-three, after years of illness, including a stroke and heart disease. I was lucky that modern medicine gave him another ten years of life, Springsteen said. TBone Burnett said that rock and roll is all about Daaaaddy! Its one embarrassing scream of Daaaaddy! Its just fathers and sons, and youre out there proving something to somebody in the most intense way possible. Its, like, Hey, I was worth a little more attention than I got! You blew that one, big guy! The redemptive moments in Springsteens youth were musical: the songs coming out of the transistor radio and the television set; his mother taking out a bank loan for sixty dollars to buy him a Kent guitar when he was fifteen. Springsteen became one of those kids who escape into an obsession. He believed, as he sings in No Surrender, We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school. At St. Rose of Lima, the Catholic school in Freehold, he was a screwup, disdained by the nuns. The hip, literary kids were far away. (I didnt hang around with no crowd that was talking about William Burroughs, he told Dave Marsh, an early biographer.) After graduating from high school, Springsteen attended classes at Ocean County Community College, where he started reading novels and writing poems, but he quit after a nervous administrator, on the lookout for hippies and other undesirables, made it plain to Springsteen that there had been complaints that he was strange. Remember, we didnt go into this life because we were courageous or brilliant, Van Zandt said. We were the last guys standing. Anyone with a choice to do something elsebe a dentist, get a real job, whatevertook it! The place where Springsteen went looking for his future was just a short drive east of Freeholdthe Asbury Park music scene. In the sixties and seventies, there were dozens of bands that played in the bars along the boardwalk. Asbury Park became Springsteens Liverpool, his Tupelo, his Hibbing. On a spring afternoon, I stood out in front of the best-known club in Asbury Park, the Stone Pony, and waited for an aging drummer named Vini (Mad Dog) Lopez, the unluckiest man in the E Street saga. Lopez was thrown out of the Springsteen band just before they hit it big. Springsteens bandmates may be employees, but they have been handsomely paid and are worth many millions of dollars each. The drummer who made it for the long haul, Max Weinberg, owns houses in the New Jersey countryside and Tuscany. Lopez works as a caddy. On weekends, he plays in a band called License to Chill. The bands mascot is Tippy the Banana. Were at the bottom of the food chain, Lopez told me. We like to say that were exclusive but inexpensive. Lopez pulled up to the Pony in a beat-up Saturn. He climbed out of the car creakily, as if out of a space capsule after an interplanetary voyage. He squinted in the ocean light and limped toward me. Hed been in a car wreck on the way home from a memorial concert for Clarence Clemons. His knee was shot, and so was his back. Also, someone had dropped an amplifier on his foot at a gig a couple of nights before. That didnt help, he said.
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We walked along the boardwalk for a while and settled on a place to eat. On the way, and throughout lunch, people stopped him to say hello, to get an autograph. In 1969, Lopez invited Springsteen to jam at an after-hours loft, called the Upstage, above a Thom McAn shoe store in Asbury Park. Eventually, Springsteen and Lopez formed a band called Child, which they soon renamed Steel Mill. It featured Lopez on drums, Danny Federici on organ and accordion, and Steve Van Zandt on bass. The boys lived for a while in a surfboard factory run by their manager. Bruce lived in the front office, and Danny and I had daybeds in the bathrooms, Lopez said. They made around fifty dollars a week. Some of the band members held manual jobs to make ends meet: Van Zandt worked construction, Lopez put in time at a boatyard and on commercial fishing boats. Springsteen declined. The future working-class clarion never really worked. Lopez took a long sip of his Bloody Mary and stared out at the ocean, where a surfer bobbed on a wave and fell. Springsteen still throws some extra royalties his way from the first two albumsHe does it out of the goodness of his heart, Lopez saidbut its not a living. The Springsteen Lopez describes was a young man of uncommon ambition who was also prone to bouts of withdrawal. For all the girls around, for all the late-night Monopoly games and pinball marathons, Springsteen wasnt easily distracted. Bruce would come to a party where people were doing all kinds of things, and he would just go off with his guitar, Lopez said. For Van Zandt, that intensity was a lure. He recognized in Springsteen a drive to create original work. In those days, he said, you were judged by how well you could copy songs off the radio and play them, chord for chord, note for note: Bruce was never good at it. He had a weird ear. He would hear different chords, but he could never hear the right chords. When you have that ability or inability, you immediately become more original. Well, in the long run, guess what: in the long run, original wins. Asbury Park, for all its brassy bar bands and boardwalk barkers, was not immune to the times. On the July 4th weekend in 1970, race riots broke out. Young blacks in town were especially angry that most of the summer jobs in the restaurants and stores along the boardwalk were going to white kids. Springsteen and his bandmates watched the flames on Springwood Avenue from a water tower near their surfboardfactory home. Nevertheless, Bruces crowd remained almost completely apolitical. The riots just meant that certain clubs didnt open and certain ones did, Van Zandt said. As Steel Mill dissolved, Springsteen dreamed up a temporary lark: Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, a kind of Noahs-ark carnival act, with two of everythingguitarists, drummers, singersplus Garry Tallent on
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tuba, a baton twirler, and two guys from the Upstage who played Monopoly onstage. Then Springsteen got serious. He formed his own band. He called it the Bruce Springsteen Band. A week after closing down rehearsals at Fort Monmouth, Springsteen and the band start rehearsing at the Sun National Bank Center, the home of the Trenton Titans, a minor-league hockey team. The theatre at Fort Monmouth was secluded and cheap, but not nearly large enough for the crew to set up the full travelling stage, with all the proper lights, risers, ramps, and sound system. Inside the arena, Springsteen is walking around the empty seats, a microphone in his hand, giving stage directions. We cant see the singers from this angle, he says. One step to the right, Cindy! The crew moves the riser. Cindy Mizelle, the most soulful voice in the new, seventeen-piece version of the E Street Band, takes one step to the right. Springsteen lopes to another corner, and, as he sets his gaze on the horn section, a thought occurs to him. Do we have some chairs for those guys when they arent playing? he says. His voice ricochets around the empty seats. Chairs appear. The band gets in position and starts to rip through the basic set list in preparation for the Apollo show. Lofgren plays the slippery opening riff of We Take Care of Our Owna recession anthem in the key of Gand the band is off. Springsteen rehearses deliberately, working out all the spontaneous-seeming moves and postures: the solemn lowered head and raised fist, the hoisted talismanic Fender, the betweensongs patter, the look of exultation in a single spotlight that he will enact in front of an audience. (Its theatre, you know, he tells me later. Im a theatrical performer. Im whispering in your ear, and youre dreaming my dreams, and then Im getting a feeling for yours. Ive been doing that for forty years.) Springsteen has to do so muchlead the band, pace the show, sing, play guitar, command the audience, project to every corner of the hall, including the seats behind the stagethat to wing it completely is asking for disaster. In the midst of the fifth song in the set, he introduces the band. As they run through a vamp of People Get Ready, the old Curtis Mayfield tune, Springsteen grabs a mike and strolls across the stage. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, he says to the empty arena. Im so glad to be here in your beautiful city tonight. The E Street Band has come back to bring the power, hour after hour, to put a whup-ass session on the recession. We got some old friends, and we got some new friends, and weve got a story to tell you . . . The tune, thick with horns and vocal harmonies, elides into My City of Ruins, one of the elegiac, gospel-tinged songs on the 9/11 album, The Rising. The voices sing Rise up! Rise up! and there
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comes a string of horn solos: trombone, trumpet, sax. Then back to the voices. Springsteen quickly introduces the E Street horns and the singing collective. Then he says, Roll call! And, with the music rising bit by churchly bit, he introduces the core of the band: Professor Roy Bittan is in the house. . . . Charlie Giordano is in the house. . . . When he finishes the roll call, there is a long ellipsis. The band keeps vamping. Are we missing anybody? Two spotlights are now trained on the organ, where Federici once sat, and at the mike where Clemons once stood. Are we missing anybody? Then again: Are we missing anybody? . . . Thats right. Thats right. Were missing some. But the only thing I can guarantee tonight is that if youre here and were here, then theyre here! He repeats this over and over, the volume of the piano and the bass rising, the drums hastening, the voices rising, until finally the song overwhelms him, and, if Springsteen has calculated correctly, there will not be an unmoved soul in the house. For the next hour and a half, the band plays through a set that alternates tales of economic pain with party-time escape. While the band plays the jolly opening riff of Waiting on a Sunny Day, Springsteen practices striding around the stage, beckoning the imaginary hordes everywhere in the arena to sing along. There is a swagger in his stride. He is the rare man of sixty-two who is not shy about showing his assan ass finely sausaged into a pair of alarmingly tight black jeansto twenty thousand paying customers. Go, Jakie! he cries, and brings Jake Clemons downstage to solo. He practically has to kick him into the spotlight. A bunch of songs later, after a run-through of the set-ending Thunder Road, Springsteen hops off the stage, drapes a towel around his neck, and sits down in the folding chair next to me. The top of the show, see, is a kind of welcoming, and you are getting everyone comfortable and challenging them at the same time, he says. Youre setting out your themes. Youre getting them comfortable, because, remember, people havent seen this band. There are absences that are hanging there. Thats what were about right now, the communication between the living and the gone. Those currents even run through the dream world of pop music!
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Its a sweet day for Springsteen. Wrecking Ball is the No. 1 album in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom, passing Adeles blockbuster 21. This is great news, but well see where we are in a few weeks, Landau says. Springsteen will never again have huge sellers like Born in the U.S.A., but he will always get an initial burst of sales from his fan base. How sales sustain over time is the question. (The answer is that they dont: after a month, Wrecking Ball dropped to No. 19. By summer, it had fallen off the charts.) What makes Springsteen an economic power at this point is his status as a live performer. Onstage, an impromptu party is forming. The crew passes out flutes of champagne and plates of cake to celebrate the news about Wrecking Ball. That never gets old, Springsteen says, before heading off to join the party. Im still excited hearing the music on the radio! I remember the first time I ever saw someone hearing me on the radio. We were in Connecticut playing at some college. A guy was in his car, a warm summer night, and his window was rolled down, and Spirit in the Night a song from Springsteens dbut albumwas coming out of the car. Wow. I remember thinking, Thats it, Ive realized at least a part of my rock-and-roll dreams. It still feels the same to me. To hear it come out of the radioits an all-points bulletin. The songs going out . . . there! By 1972, Springsteen was fronting a band and writing songs to be performed solo. He wasnt a big reader at the time, but he was so consumed by Bob Dylans songs that he read Anthony Scadutos biography. He was impressed by Dylans coming-to-New York saga: the snowstorm arrival, in 1961, from the Midwest; the pilgrimages to Woody Guthries bedside at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital; the first appearances at Caf Wha? and Gerdes Folk City; and then the audition for John Hammond, the legendary Columbia Records executive. This was what he wanted, some version of it. Springsteens manager at the time was a rambunctious hustler named Mike Appel. Before joining Springsteen, Appel wrote jingles for Kleenex and a song for the Partridge Family. Appel was old school passionate but exploitative. He signed Springsteen to lopsided contracts. And yet he was so ballsy and unhinged in his devotion to his client that he would do wild things on his behalf, like calling a producer at NBC to suggest that the network have Springsteen perform his antiwar song Balboa vs. the Earth Slayer at the Super Bowl. (NBC declined.) Somehow, Appel did manage to get an appointment with John Hammond. On May 2, 1972, Springsteen travelled to the city by bus, carrying a borrowed acoustic guitar with no case. The meeting didnt begin well. Hammond, a patrician of Vanderbilt stock, made it clear that he was pressed for time, and he was repelled when Appel put on the hard sell about the singers lyrical gifts. But
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the vibe changed when Springsteen, sitting on a stool across from the desk, sang a string of songs ending with If I Was a Priest:
Well, now, if Jesus was the sheriff And I was the priest, If my lady was an heiress and my mama was a thief . . . Bruce, thats the damnedest song Ive ever heard, Hammond said, delighted. Were you brought up by nuns? Columbia signed Springsteen to a record contract and tried to promote him as the new Dylan. He was not the only one. John Prine, Elliot Murphy, Loudon Wainwright III, and other singer-songwriter sensitivos were also getting the new Dylan label. (The old Dylan was only thirty, so I dont even know why they needed a fucking new Dylan, Springsteen says.) To Hammonds disappointment, Springsteen recorded his first two albumsGreetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shufflewith a band made up of his Jersey Shore mates, including Vini Lopez, on drums, and Clarence Clemons, on tenor sax. Hammond was convinced that the solo demos were better. Despite boosts from a few critics and d.j.s, the albums hardly sold at all. Springsteen was, at best, a gifted obscurity, a provincial who was running out of chances. In June, 1973, when I was fourteen, I got on a Red & Tan 11-C bus in north Jersey with a couple of friends and went to the city to see a resolutely un-hip and unaccountably popular band called Chicago, at Madison Square Garden. I am not quite sure why I went. We were Dylan fanatics. Howl, the Stanley Brothers, Otis Redding, Naked Lunch, Hank Williams, Odettapractically anything I knew or read or heard seemed to come through the auspices of Dylan. Chicago was about as far from the Dylan aesthetic as you could get. All the same, Id paid my four dollars, and I was going to see whatever I could glimpse from our seats. Out trundled the opening act: someone named Bruce Springsteen. The conditions were abysmal, as they often are for opening acts: the houselights were up, the crowd was alternately inattentive and hostile. What I remember was a bandleader as frenetic as Mick Jagger or James Brown, a singer bursting with almost self-destructive urgency, trying to bust through the buzzy indifference of the crowd. After that show, Springsteen swore to Appel that he would never open or play big venues again. I couldnt stand it everybody was so far away and the band couldnt hear, he told Dave Marsh. It was time to woodshed,
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time to build an audience through constant, intense performance in clubs, small theatres, and university gyms. These were lean times. After Appel had paid expenses and taken his considerable cut, the pay was next to nothing. Sometimes the band slept in the van. Clemons nearly got arrested before a gig for failing to pay child support. Lopez was especially vocal about playing for seeds: What if I want to take my girlfriend out for a burger? In the late afternoon, after lunch, Lopez and I were driving around Asbury Park and he started laughing and pointing. Thats where we went to get food stampsall of us, Bruce, too, he said. Lopez was a lot of drummer, too much drummer, perhapsa chaotic Ginger Baker type. He was also fiery in his style of labor unrest. In early 1974, he roughed up Mike Appels brother in a dispute over money (I did push him a little). Soon afterward, Springsteen told Lopez that he was fired. I used to keep his guitars at my house, and he had to come get them, Lopez said. I asked for a second chance, and he said, Vini, there are no second chances. Christ. Danny got all kinds of second chances after being a bad boyfor drugs, for not showing up or for being late. But for me no second chances. The argument grew more heated, and Springsteen finally suggested that Lopez was an inadequate drummer. I put his guitars down in front of him, and I said, Theres the door. You know what its used for. To this day we havent talked about it. Theres nothing to talk about. Id have been in the biggest band in the land if that hadnt happened. But, historically, at least, I was in the E Street Band. Bruce knows that, and everyone knows that. We drove past the low-slung building that used to house the surfboard factory where Lopez lived with Springsteen. The sign on the door now reads, Immunostics Inc: Quality microbiological, serological and immunological reagents. Around ten times over the years, Springsteen has had Lopez sit in with the band, including at Giants Stadium for a rendition of Spirit in the Night. When Lopez asked if he could start a band that played all the old Steel Mill songs, Springsteen smiled and said sure, go ahead. But its hard to sell Steel Mill now, Lopez said. People know that Bruce wrote all the stuff and so they expect Bruce to show up, and that just aint gonna happen. If Vini Lopez is the unluckiest drummer in American history, Jon Landau is surely the most fortunate of rock critics. During a break in the rehearsals for the 2012 tour, I drove up to northern Westchester, where Landau lives with his wife, Barbara. Landau is just three years older than Springsteen, but he is a man of
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more ordinary physical presence. Landau has been getting a healthy cut of the Springsteen business for more than thirty years. The profits did not go up his nose; they went on the walls. His art collection (mainly Renaissance painting and sculpture, with some nineteenth-century French painting thrown into the mix) is what is called important. At the risk of alarming his insurance company, I can report the presence of works by, among others, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo, Donatello, Ghiberti, Gricault, Delacroix, Corot, and Courbet. But Landau has not escaped time unscathed. Last year, he had a growth surgically removed from his brain, and, because the growth was lodged near a tangle of optic nerves, he lost the vision in one eye. The recovery was not easy, and, at times, as we toured the paintings, Landau seemed winded. After the surgery, Springsteen was with Landau nearly every day. He knew I was going through something, and I thought I was going to die, Landau said. It wasnt rational, but the fear was there. . . . We shared a lot of deep talk. Then he smiled. The deep thinkers did some deep thinking. Landau began his life in a profession that didnt really exist. Even by 1966, three years after the rise of the Beatles, there really was no such thing as rock criticism. That year, Landau, a precocious teen-ager from Lexington, Massachusetts, was working in a Cambridge music store called Briggs & Briggs. His father was a left-wing history teacher who moved the family from Brooklyn during the blacklists and got a job at Acoustic Research. Landau grew up on folk music, and in high school he went to every rock concert he could afford. At Briggs & Briggs, he met a Swarthmore student named Paul Williams, who had just started a mimeographed, three-staple magazine called Crawdaddy!, perhaps the first publication devoted to rock criticism. As an undergraduate at Brandeis, Landau wrote for Crawdaddy! When he was a junior, Jann Wenner invited him to write a column for a biweekly he was starting, to be called Rolling Stone. As a critic, Landau was nothing if not bold. For the inaugural issue of Rolling Stone, in 1967, he panned Jimi Hendrixs classic Are You Experienced? The next year, he walloped Cream for the loose bombast of their live shows, adding that Eric Clapton, the bands lead guitarist, was a master of the blues clichs of all the post-World War II blues guitarists . . . a virtuoso at performing other peoples ideas. At the time, Clapton was known as God. The review gave God a fit of self-doubt. The ring of truth just knocked me backward; I was in a restaurant and I fainted, Clapton said years later. And after I woke up, I immediately decided that that was the end of the band. Cream broke up. Landau loved the well-wrought single, whether by the Beatles or Sam and Dave; he was suspicious of arty self-indulgence. More and more people expect of rock what they used to expect of philosophy, literature, films, and visual art, he wrote. Others expect of rock what they used to get out of drugs. And
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in my opinion, rock cannot withstand that kind of burden because it forces onto rock qualities which are the negation of what rock was all about in the first place. In those days, there wasnt a sharp line between the rock industry and rock journalism; in 1969, Jann Wenner produced a Boz Scaggs record. Landau produced albums with Livingston Taylor and the MC5. Landau admired musically savvy executives, like Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, and he approved of musicians who understood the virtues of popularity. In his senior honors thesis at Brandeis, he wrote admiringly of Otis Reddings willingness to be an entertainer openly and honestly concerned with pleasing crowds and being successful. By the end of 1971, Landau was living in Boston and married to the critic Janet Maslin. Although he had Crohns disease and was ailing, he was the energetic center of a circle of emerging young critics: Dave Marsh, John Rockwell, Robert Christgau, Paul Nelson, Greil Marcus. Landau took notice of Springsteens first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, assigning the review to Lester Bangs, in Rolling Stone; he reviewed the second, The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, in the alternative weekly The Real Paper, calling Springsteen the most impressive new singer-songwriter since James Taylor, but he added that the album is not as well-produced as it ought to have been. It was a mite thin or trebly-sounding, especially when the band moves into the breaks. Landau, who was twenty-six at the time, accepted an invitation from Dave Marsh to go to Charleys, a club in Cambridge, to check out Springsteens act. I went to this club, and it was completely empty, he told me. He had the smallest of cult followings. Before the show, I asked the guys in the bar where Bruce was, and they pointed outside. Springsteen was standing in the colda skinny bearded guy in jeans and a T-shirt, hopping up and down to keep warm. He was reading Landaus record review, which the management had put in the window. I stood next to him and said, What do you think? Landau recounted. And he said, This guy is usually pretty good, but Ive seen better. I introduced myself, and we had a good laugh. The next day, he got a call from Springsteen. We talked for hours, Landau said. About music, about philosophy. The core of him then was the same as it is now. And, you know, weve been having that conversation for the rest of our lives: about growth, about thinking big thoughts, about big things. A month later, Landau went to see Springsteen at the Harvard Square Theatre, where he was opening for Bonnie Raitt. It was the eve of Landaus twenty-seventh birthday, and he was feeling prematurely worn out. His career was at a standstill. The Crohns disease was making it hard to eat or work. His marriage was falling apart. But that night, May 9, 1974, he felt rejuvenated as Springsteen played everything from
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the old Fats Domino tune Let the Four Winds Blow to a new song about escape and liberation called Born to Run. The article that Landau wrote for The Real Paper is the most famous review in the history of rock criticism:
Last Thursday, at the Harvard Square Theatre, I saw my rock n roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time. . . . He is a rock n roll punk, a Latin street poet, a ballet dancer, an actor, a joker, bar band leader, hot-shit rhythm guitar player, extraordinary singer, and a truly great rock n roll composer. He leads a band like he has been doing it forever. . . . He parades in front of his all-star rhythm band like a cross between Chuck Berry, early Bob Dylan, and Marlon Brando. Columbia Records used the line I saw rock and roll future as the centerpiece of an ad campaign. Springsteen befriended Landau, who came to stay with him at his ramshackle house, in Long Branch. Modest doesnt even begin to describe the house, Landau recalled. There was a couch, his bed, a guitar, and his records. And we were up till 8 A.M. talking. The two men listened to music and talked about Springsteens third record. Columbia was not likely to keep investing in Springsteen if the third record failed. Springsteen appreciated Appels loyalty, but his way of making high-handed judgments grated. Landau was more subtle, asking questions, flattering, suggesting, recommending. Springsteen invited Landau into the studio, where he helped Springsteen cut Thunder Road from seven minutes to four and advised him to revise the opening of Jungleland. I had a youthful conviction that I knew what I was doing, Landau said. Springsteen told Appel that he was bringing in Landau as co-producer. Born to Run, which was released in August, 1975, transformed Springsteens career, and the ten-show stand at the Bottom Line early in the tour remains a rock date to rival James Brown at the Apollo or Dylan at Newport. At the Bottom Line, Springsteen became himself. By adding Van Zandt as a second guitar player, he was liberated from some of his musical duties, and he became a full-throttle front man, leaping off amps and pianos, frog-hopping from one tabletop to the next. Landau quit his job as a critic and became, in essence, Springsteens adjutant: his friend, his adviser in all things, his producer, and, by 1978, his manager. After a prolonged legal battle that kept Springsteen out of the studio for two years, Appel was bought off and cast out.
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Landau fed Springsteens curiosity about the world beyond music. He gave Springsteen books to read Steinbeck, Flannery OConnorand movies to see, particularly John Ford and Howard Hawks Westerns. Springsteen started to think in larger terms than cars and highways; he began to look at his own story, his familys story, in terms of class and American archetypes. The imagery, the storytelling, and the sense of place in those novels and films helped fuel his songs. Landau was also a catalyst in making Springsteen into a big business, pressing him to play bigger halls, overcoming his nightmarish early performances at Madison Square Garden. And he pressed him to think of himself the way Otis Redding didas both an artist and an entertainer on a large stage. Some critics have depicted Landau as an avaricious Svengali, a Colonel Parker, or worse. But the people Ive talked to in the music business dismiss any idea of malign or overweening influence on Springsteen. The idea that hed be manipulated is so preposterous, Danny Goldberg, who has known Springsteen for more than thirty years, says. As Goldberg, who has managed Nirvana and Sonic Youth, puts it, Its Bruce who uses Jon, to achieve complete artistic control. Landau is sensitive to any claim that he is somehow controlling his client or responsible for his trajectory. The first principle of being a manager is being a fiduciary for the artisthis interests come first, he says. So when you are working with him, no matter what the issue is, the first question is, Whats the best thing for Bruce? Springsteen, he went on, is the smartest person Ive ever knownnot the most informed or the most educatedbut the smartest. If you are ever confronted with a situationa practical matter, an artistic problemhis read of the people involved is exquisite. He is way ahead. At one point a decade ago, Springsteen rewarded Landau, who had once dreamed of becoming a rock star himself, by calling him onstage. Bruce told me one night I should strap on a guitar when we got to Dancing in the Dark, and for five or six nights I came out, Landau told me one night backstage. Its just a tremendous high. But then on the seventh night he said, You know, its great you comin out onstage. But I was thinking that maybe we should give that a rest tonight. You mean Im fired? Landau said. Springsteen smiled and said, Well, yeah. Thats about the size of it. As Springsteen grew more worldly, he became far more political. He did not start out that way. In 1972, he played a small benefit for George McGovern, at a movie theatre in Red Bank, but, as a young man, his interest in the music was almost completely as a source of personal liberation. He had not made the connection between his fathers drift and the politics of unemployment, the depression of Freehold and the wave of deindustrialization.
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A political consciousness could be felt on Darkness on the Edge of Town, and it grew in the years that followed. He began to find the voice for that by readingLandaus enthusiasms played a role hereand by travelling, and, crucially, by listening to country and folk music: to Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. Springsteen knew he had run out of things to say about desperate nights on the Turnpike; he wanted to write songs he could sing as an adult, about marriage, about being a father, and about larger social issues. As he listened again and again to Hank Williams, he said, the songs went from archival to alive. What had seemed cranky and old-fashioned now had depth and darkness; Williams represented the adult blues, and the music of the working class. Country by its nature appealed to me, country was provincial, and so was I, Springsteen said in a recent speech, in Austin. I felt I was an average guy with a slightly above-average gift . . . and country was about the truth emanating out of your sweat, out of your local bar, your corner store. He read Joe Kleins biography of Guthrie. He read memoirs by the civilrights lawyer Morris Dees and the antiwar activist Ron Kovic. All this fed into the working-class anthems of Darkness on the Edge of Town, the acoustic howl of Nebraska, and even the anthemic pop of Born in the U.S.A. He was singing now about Vietnam veterans, migrant workers, class, social divisions, deindustrialized cities, and forgotten American towns, but never in an idiom that threatened Brucethe iconic family-friendly rock star. From the stage, he began to deliver paeans to his causes and ask for donations to local food banks, but the language was never threatening or alienating, and the gate receipts and record sales were beyond fabulous. Some detected in all this the stink of sanctimony. In 1985, James Wolcott, a punk and New Wave enthusiast, found himself weary of Springsteens cornball sincerity and the level of praise accorded him by the city-slick Establishment. Piety has begun to collect around Springsteens curly head like mist around a mountaintop, Wolcott wrote in Vanity Fair. The mountain cant be blamed for the mist, but stillthe reverence is getting awfully thick. For Tom Carson, the problem was insufficient radicalism the fact that Springsteen remained, at heart, conventionally liberal. Springsteen thought rock and roll was basically wholesome, Carson wrote in L.A. Weekly. It was an alternative, an escapebut not a rebellion, either as a route to forbidden sexual or social fruit, or, by extension, as a rejection of conventional society. To him, rock redeemed conventional society. In the marketplace of arena rock, that measure of conventionality was a strength, not a limitation. By the mid-eighties, Springsteen was the biggest rock star in the world, capable of selling out Giants Stadium ten shows in a row. He was so unthreatening to American values that, in 1984, George Will went to see him. Wearing a bow tie, a double-breasted blazer, and earplugs, Will watched Springsteen perform in Washington and wrote a column called A Yankee Doodle Springsteen: I have not got a clue about Springsteens politics. . . . He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: Born in the U.S.A.! A week later, Ronald
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Reagan went to New Jersey to give a campaign speech. Taking his cue from Will, Reagan said, Americas future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jerseys own Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen was appalled. He later said that Born in the U.S.A. was the most misunderstood song since Louie, Louie, and he began to sing an acoustic version that leached it of its bombast and made its dark shadings plainer. From the stage, he said, Well, the President was mentioning my name in his speech the other day, and I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album of mine mustve been, you know? I dont think it was the Nebraska album. I dont think hes been listening to this one. Springsteen played Johnny 99, the bleak story of a laid-off Jersey autoworker who, in drunken despair, kills a night clerk in a botched robbery. Someone once said to Paul McCartney that the Beatles were anti-materialistic. McCartney had to laugh. Thats a huge myth, he replied. John and I literally used to sit down and say, Now, lets write a swimming pool. With the Born in the U.S.A. album, Springsteen combined political virtue and popular appeal, protest and party time. When he was writing the songs for the album that became Born in the U.S.A., Landau told him that they had a great record, but they still didnt have a swimming pool. They needed a hit. Look, Ive written seventy songs, Springsteen replied. You want another one, you write it! Then he sulkily retreated to his hotel suite and wrote Dancing in the Dark. The lyrics reflected the played-out frustration of an artist who aint got nothing to say, but the musica pop confection buttressed by a hummable synthesizer linewent down easy. It went as far in the direction of pop music as I wanted to goand probably a little farther, Springsteen recalled in a text for his book of lyrics, Songs. My heroes, from Hank Williams to Frank Sinatra to Bob Dylan, were popular musicians. They had hits. There was value in trying to connect with a large audience. Born in the U.S.A. went platinum and became the best-selling record of 1985 and of Springsteens career. When Springsteen and Van Zandt were young, they had pink Cadillac dreams, fantasies of wealth and rock-and-roll glory. I knew I was never going to be Woody Guthrie, Springsteen recalled, in Austin. I liked Elvis, I liked the pink Cadillac too much, I like the simplicity and the tossed-off temporary feeling of pop hits, I like a big fuckin noise, and, in my own way, I like the luxuries, and the comforts, of being a star. He bought a fourteen-million-dollar estate in Beverly Hills. He remained friends with his old running mates from Jersey, but he also made new friends, famous friends. When he married an actress named Julianne Phillips, in 1985, they honeymooned at Gianni Versaces villa on Lake Como. Later,
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there were vintage cars and motorcycles, a state-of-the-art home recording studio, horses, and, the ultimate sign of class ascent, organic farming. Tours grew to corporate scale: private jets, five-star hotels, elaborate catering, massage therapists, efficient management. Springsteen was aware of the comical contradiction: the multimillionaire who, in his theatrical selfpresentation, is the voice of the dispossessed. Very occasionally, twinges of discomfort about this have leaked into his lyrics. In the late eighties, Springsteen played Aint Got You, which appeared on his album Tunnel of Love, for Van Zandt. The lyrics tell of a fellow who gets paid a kings ransom for doin what comes naturallywhos got the fortunes of heaven and a house full of Rembrandt and priceless artbut lacks the affections of his beloved. Van Zandt recognized the self-mockery but didnt care. He was aghast. We had one of our biggest fights of our lives, Van Zandt recalled. Im, like, What the fuck is this? And hes, like, Well, what do you mean, its the truth. Its just who I am, its my life. And Im, like, This is bullshit. People dont need you talking about your life. Nobody gives a shit about your life. They need you for their lives. Thats your thing. Giving some logic and reason and sympathy and passion to this cold, fragmented, confusing worldthats your gift. Explaining their lives to them. Their lives, not yours. And we fought and fought and fought and fought. He says Fuck you, I say Fuck you. I think something in what I said probably resonated. Springsteen was also experiencing intervals of depression that were far more serious than the occasional guilt trip about being a rich man in a poor mans shirt, as he sings in Better Days. A cloud of crisis hovered as Springsteen was finishing his acoustic masterpiece Nebraska, in 1982. He drove from the East Coast to California and then drove straight back. He was feeling suicidal, Springsteens friend and biographer Dave Marsh said. The depression wasnt shocking, per se. He was on a rocket ride, from nothing to something, and now you are getting your ass kissed day and night. You might start to have some inner conflicts about your real self-worth. Springsteen began questioning why his relationships were a series of drive-bys. And he could not let go of the past, eithera sense that he had inherited his fathers depressive self-isolation. For years, he would drive at night past his parents old house in Freehold, sometimes three or four times a week. In 1982, he started seeing a psychotherapist. At a concert years later, Springsteen introduced his song My Fathers House by recalling what the therapist had told him about those nighttime trips to Freehold: He said, What youre doing is that something bad happened, and youre going back, thinking that you can make it right again. Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right. And I sat there and I said, That is what Im doing. And he said, Well, you cant.
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Extreme wealth may have satisfied every pink-Cadillac dream, but it did little to chase off the black dog. Springsteen was playing concerts that went nearly four hours, driven, he has said, by pure fear and selfloathing and self-hatred. He played that long not just to thrill the audience but also to burn himself out. Onstage, he held real life at bay. My issues werent as obvious as drugs, Springsteen said. Mine were different, they were quieterjust as problematic, but quieter. With all artists, because of the undertow of history and self-loathing, there is a tremendous push toward self-obliteration that occurs onstage. Its both things: theres a tremendous finding of the self while also an abandonment of the self at the same time. You are free of yourself for those hours; all the voices in your head are gone. Just gone. Theres no room for them. Theres one voice, the voice youre speaking in. Springsteens life in the past two decades has been, from all appearances, notably stable. In 1991, he married Patti Scialfa, a denizen of the Asbury Park music scene who had joined the band as a singer. Scialfas father was a real-estate developer, and she had studied music at N.Y.U. While Springsteen was on the road, I drove to Colts Neck, where he and Patti live on a three-hundredand-eighty-acre farm. They have three children, two sons and a daughter, and when the kids were small the family lived closer to the shore, in Rumson, New Jersey. Rumson is wealthy in a suburban way. Colts Neck looks more like Middleburg, Virginia. Horsey people live there. So does Queen Latifah. The Springsteens also own houses in Beverly Hills and in Wellington, Florida. Springsteen is hardly immune to the charms of his own good fortune (I live high on the hog), yet Patti, who grew up near him but with a great deal more money, has a grander eye. When they moved to Colts Neck, she hired Rose Tarlow, an interior designer who had worked for their friend David Geffen, to do the house. When I arrived, a security guard led me to a garage complex that had been re-made into a recording studio and a series of sitting rooms. The walls are decorated with photographs of, most conspicuously, Bruce Springsteen; the tables and shelves are heavy on the literature of popular music, with an emphasis on Presley, Dylan, Guthrie, and Springsteen. Theres a big TV, an espresso machine, and a framed walking stick that Presley once owned and, in 1973, shattered in a fit of pique. Patti Scialfa showed up after a while, trailed by two big, shambly German shepherds. A tall, slender woman in her late fifties with a startling shock of red hair, she was warm and smiling, offering water in the modern way; she also seemed a little nervous. Scialfa, like her husband, enjoys a magnificently cosseted life, but hers is a strange position and she doesnt often talk about it publicly. At concerts, she performs two microphones to her husbands left, a perfect vantage point from which to inspect, night after night, the thousands of hungry eyes directed his way. Scialfa has recorded three albums of her own. In the
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E Street Band, which she joined twenty-eight years ago, she plays acoustic guitar and sings, but, as she told me, I have to say that my place in the band is more figurative than it is musical. Onstage, her guitar is barely audible, and she is one of many supporting voices. Yet no one in the crowd is unaware that she is Springsteens wifehis Jersey girl, his red-headed woman, as the songs goand, at any given theatrical moment onstage, she can flirt, rebuff, swoon, or dance. The E Street Band is an ensemble of characters, as well as musicians, and Scialfa expertly plays her role as Love Interest and Bemused Wife, just as Steve Van Zandt plays his as Best Friend. Sometimes my frustration comes when I would like to bring something to the table that is more unique, she said, but the band, in the context of the band, has no room for that. On the last couple of tours, Scialfa has been an intermittent presence. She skips concerts to be with the children: the eldest, Evan, just graduated from Boston College; their daughter, Jessica, is at Duke and rides on an international equestrian circuit; and the youngest, Sam, will be a freshman this fall at Bard College. Being around for the kids has been a priority. When I was young, I felt really, really vulnerable, Scialfa said. So I wanted things to be relaxed and stable and have somebody in the house and make sure they felt supported when they went off to school. She added, The hardest part is splitting yourself, the feeling that youre never doing any one job really well. It took some doing to get Springsteen, an isolationist by nature, to settle into a real marriage, and resist the urge to dwell only in his music and onstage. Now I see that two of the best days of my life, he once told a reporter for Rolling Stone, were the day I picked up the guitar and the day that I learned how to put it down. Scialfa smiled at that. When you are that serious and that creative, and non-trusting on an intimate level, and your art has given you so much, your ability to create something becomes your medicine, she said. Its the only thing thats given you that stability, that joy, that self-esteem. And so you are, like, This part of me no one is going to touch. When youre young, that works, because it gets you from A to B. When you get older, when you are trying to have a family and children, it doesnt work. I think that some artists can be prone to protecting the well that they fetched their inspiration from so well that they are actually protecting malignant parts of themselves, too. You begin to see that something is broken. Its not just a matter of being the mythological lone wolf; something is broken. Bruce is very smart. He wanted a family, he wanted a relationship, and he worked really, really, really hard at itas hard as he works at his music. I asked Patti how he finally succeeded. Obviously, therapy, she said. He was able to look at himself and battle it out. And yet none of this has allowed Springsteen to pronounce himself free and clear.
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That didnt scare me, Scialfa said. I suffered from depression myself, so I knew what that was about. Clinical depressionI knew what that was about. I felt very akin to him. In their early days as a couple, Bruce and Pattis idea of a perfect vacation was to get in the car and drive to Death Valley, rent a cheap hotel room with no TV and no phone, and just hang out. Now they are more likely to take a trip with the kids or cruise the Mediterranean on David Geffens yacht. I remember when my family became pretty wealthy, and some people tried to make us feel bad about being wealthy, she said. Heres the bottom line. If your art is intact, your art is intact. Who wrote Anna Karenina? Tolstoy? He was an aristocrat! Did that make his work any less true? If you are lucky enough to have a real talent and youve fed it and mined it and protected it and been vigilant about it, can you lose it? Well, you can lose it by sitting outside and drinking Ripple! It doesnt have to be the high life. As Springsteen sees it, the creative talent has always been nurtured by the darker currents of his psyche, and wealth is no guarantee of bliss. Im thirty years in analysis! he said. Look, you cannot underestimate the fine power of self-loathing in all of this. You think, I dont like anything Im seeing, I dont like anything Im doing, but I need to change myself, I need to transform myself. I do not know a single artist who does not run on that fuel. If you are extremely pleased with yourself, nobody would be fucking doing it! Brando would not have acted. Dylan wouldnt have written Like a Rolling Stone. James Brown wouldnt have gone Unh! He wouldnt have searched that one-beat down that was so hard. Thats a motivation, that element of I need to remake myself, my town, my audiencethe desire for renewal. Wrecking Ball is as political a record as Whats Going On?, Rage Against the Machine, or It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. After Springsteens political run-ins in the eighties, he grew even more engaged with social issues. He sang of AIDS (Streets of Philadelphia), dislocation (The Ghost of Tom Joad), abandonment (Spare Parts), and Iraq (Last to Die). He made speeches from the stage about rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeas corpus. For his trouble, he was attacked by Bill OReilly, Glenn Beck, and even a Times columnist, John Tierney, who wrote, The singer who recorded Greetings from Asbury Park seems to have made an ideological crossing of the Hudson: Greetings from Central Park West. In 2004, he campaigned for John Kerry and, in 2008, he was even more enthusiastic about Barack Obama, posting a statement on his Web site saying that Obama speaks to the America Ive envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country thats interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. At a concert at the Lincoln Memorial before Obamas inauguration, Springsteen sang The Rising with a gospel choir and, with Pete Seeger, Woody Guthries This Land Is Your Land, including, at Seegers suggestion, the two last, radical verses. (There was a
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great high wall there / that tried to stop me; / A great big sign there / Said private property; / But on the other side / It didnt say nothing; / That side was made for you and me.) The songs on Wrecking Ball were written before the Occupy Wall Street movement, but they echo its rage against the lack of accountability. We Are Alive draws a line between ghosts of oppressed strikers, civil-rights marchers, and workers, while the chorus is a kind of communion among the dead and a call to the living: We are alive / And though our bodies lie alone here in the dark / Our spirits rise / To carry the fire and light the spark. For all that, the political visionin Wrecking Ball, as in its predecessors isnt really radical. Its shot through with a liberal insistence that American patriotism has less to do with the primacy of markets than with a Rooseveltian sense of fairness and a communal sense of belonging. One night, I asked Springsteen what he hoped his political songs would do for people who come to concerts for a good time. He shook his head and said, They function at the very edges of politics at best, though they try to administer to its center. You have to be satisfied with that. You have to understand its a long road, and there have been people doing some version of what were doing on this tour going all the way back, and there will be people doing it after us. I think one thing this record tries to do is to remind people that there is a continuity that is passed on from generation to generation, a set of ideas expressed in myriad different ways: books, protests, essays, songs, around the kitchen table. So these ideas are everpresent. And you are a raindrop. Springsteen admires Obama for the health-care bill, for rescuing the automobile industry, for the withdrawal from Iraq, for killing Osama bin Laden; he is disappointed in the failure to close Guantnamo and to appoint more champions of economic fairness, and he sees an unseemly friendliness toward corporationsthe usual liberal points of praise and dispraise. Hes wary about joining another campaign. I did it twice because things were so dire, he said. It seemed like if I was ever going to spend whatever small political capital I had, that was the moment to do so. But that capital diminishes the more often you do it. While Im not saying never, and I still like to support the President, you know, its something I didnt do for a long time, and I dont have plans to be out there every time. Springsteen has been faulted for taking himself too seriously, and the microworld around him takes him so seriously that to an outsider it can occasionally seem like a cocoon of piety. But Springsteen can also be funny about himself. Two years ago, on Jimmy Fallons show, he agreed to dress up as himself circa Born to Runbeard, aviator shades, floppy pimp cap, leather jacketand went on with Fallon, who was dressed as Neil Young, to sing a mock-serious version of the Willow Smith ditty Whip My Hair. Its hard to imagine, say, Bob Dylan putting on a Bob Dylan work shirt circa The Times They Are AChangin and sending up his younger self. In a more recent show, Fallon, again dressed as Neil Young, again brought out Springsteen, this time dressed in his muscled-up eighties regular-Jersey-guy regalia
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complete with sleeveless denim shirt. They sang a duet of the party-song pop duo LMFAOs Sexy and I Know It: Im in a Speedo tryin t tan my cheeks. . . . Im sexy and I know it! As a writer and as a performer, Springsteen is in command of a variety of themes and moods: comic and grandiose, political and mindless. As the tour developed, he altered the set lists so that each show felt specific to the occasion. At the Apollo, he declared that soul music had been the bands education: We studied all our subjects. Geography? We learned the exact location of Funky Broadway. History? A Change Is Gonna Come. Math? 99 and a Half Wont Fucking Do. In Austin, Springsteen celebrated the centenary of Woody Guthries birth by opening the show with Woodys itinerant workers lament I Aint Got No Home and closed it with This Land Is Your Land. In Tampa, Springsteen played American Skin (41 Shots), which was written in the wake of the police shooting of Amadou Diallo, but was now for Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teen-ager who was killed in Sanford, Florida. On the first of two nights in Philadelphia, Springsteen paid homage to his Shore roots by playing two semi-obscurities from his first years as a recording musician, Seaside Bar Song and Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street? On one foray into the audience, he found Max Weinbergs ninety-seven-year-old mother and gave her a kiss. The next night, he pulled his eighty-sevenyear-old mother, Adele, onto the stage and danced with her to Dancing in the Dark. In New Jersey, Springsteen heightened the tribute to Clarence Clemons. During the final song, Tenth Avenue Freeze Out, he stopped the music after the line The Big Man joined the band, and a film of Clemons rolled on the screens above the stage. (Man, I could barely stand that, the percussionist Everett Bradley told me later. I was crying so bad!) At each show, the most striking musical difference between the old E Street Band and the new was the increasing prominence given to Jake Clemons. His playing grew stronger, his willingness to take center stage more pronounced. After a few performances, he was moon-walking across the stage. And yet every time Springsteen paid tribute to Clarence Clemons Jake seemed overcome, pounding his chest with a double tap of respect for his uncle and appreciation of the crowds response. Everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves, Jake said. A Springsteen show is a lot of things, and its partly a religious experience. Maybe he comes from the line of David, a shepherd boy who could play beautiful music, so that the crazy become less crazy and Saul the king finally chills out. Religion is a system of rules and order and expectations, and it unites people in a purpose. There really is a component of Bruce that is supernatural. Bruce is Moses! He led the people out of the land of disco! One night, as Springsteen was waiting to perform, I asked how he thought his inner constitution led to his being the artist and performer he is. I probably worked harder than anybody else I saw, he said. But there was, he thought, a core psychological component as well: I searched out something that I needed to
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do. Its a job thats filled with ego and vanity and narcissism, and you need all those things to do it well. But you cant let those things completely swamp you, either. You need all those things but in relative check. And in relative check for me, if you ask some of my friends or some members of my family, might not be considered in check to them! Its in relative check as far as people who do what I do. But you need those things, because you are driven by your needs out therethe raw hunger and the raw need of exciting people and exciting yourself into some higher state. People have pursued that throughout the history of civilization. Its a strange job, and for a lot of people its a dangerous job. But those things are at the root of it. In May, the tour set off for a three-month run of stadium performances in Europe. In Barcelona, Springsteen was staying in a suite, with a private deck and a Jacuzzi, at the Florida, a glorious hillside hotel overlooking the city; the band and the crew stayed at the Hotel Arts, a five-star hotel on the beach. A caravan of black Mercedes vans whisked the musicians (some band members have their own travelling assistants) to the Olympic Stadium in the afternoon for sound check. Banish any images of rock legend: forget about dissipated drummers slumped in a junkie haze in some stadium locker room, forget roadies hurling televisions and empty bottles of Jack Daniels from hotel balconies into the pool. The Springsteen road show is about as decadent as the Ice Capades. Band members talk about missing their kids, jet lag, Wi-Fi reception at the hotel. To be a success these days, you are more likely to be an athlete than a drug addict, Van Zandt told me. You go through the phase of drugs and drinking, and if you get through it you see that all the rewards are in longevity. Longevity is more fun than the drugs. Then, theres the business. For that you need a clean head. The upper echelon of the pop-music touring business is, like Silicon Valley, dominated by a small number of enterprises: Lady Gaga, Madonna, U2, Jon Bon Jovi, Jay-Z, and a very few others. The dropoff in scale from there is precipitous. Springsteen is no longer in the Beatlemania phase of the mideightiesa period of mini-riots around his hotelsbut he is still able to sell out stadiums on the I-95 corridor and other cities in the United States. He is even more popular in Europe. The rhythmic stomping of his fans at Ullevi, a football venue in Gothenburg, in 1985, damaged the foundation, an episode known in Springsteen lore as the time Bruce broke a stadium. In Europe, that spirit persists. The Wrecking Ball tour is likely to go on for a year. James Brown played many more shows a year, but he never played so long or with such absolute exertion. Some nights, Springsteen stays a little longer in his dressing room, ginning himself up for all the running, jumping, and screaming, but there is never the thought of taking a pass.
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Once people have bought those tickets, I dont have that option, he told me. We were alone in a vast, makeshift dressing room in Barcelona. Remember, were also running a business here, so there is a commercial exchange, and that ticket is my handshake. That ticket is me promising you that its gonna be all the way every chance I get. Thats my contract. And ever since I was a young guy I took that seriously. Although there are nights when, in the dressing room, he feels tapped out, the stage always works its magic: Suddenly the fatigue disappears. A transformation takes place. Thats what were selling. Were selling that possibility. Its half a joke: I go out onstage andsnapAre you ready to be transformed? What? At a rock show? By a guy with a guitar? Part of it is a goof, and part of it is, Lets do it, lets see if we can. One kindness that Springsteen has afforded his body is more days off, leaving time for his family, for exercise, for listening to music, watching movies, reading. Lately, he has been consumed with Russian fiction. Its compensatorywhat you missed the first time around, he said. Im sixty-some, and I think, There are a lot of these Russian guys! Whats all the fuss about? So I was just curious. That was an incredible book: The Brothers Karamazov. Then I read The Gambler. The social play in the first half was less interesting to me, but the second half, about obsession, was fun. That could speak to me. I was a big John Cheever fan, and so when I got into Chekhov I could see where Cheever was coming from. And I was a big Philip Roth fan, so I got into Saul Bellow, Augie March. These are all new connections for me. Itd be like finding out now that the Stones covered Chuck Berry! Springsteen was sitting near a low table covered with picks, capos, harmonicas, and sheets of paper with lists of songs written in thick black marker. After sound check, he tries to imagine that nights performance. The rest of the band and the crew are down the hall at cateringan improvised commissary. Tonight, the menu is veal shank, grouper, and various vegetarian options, to say nothing of half a dozen kinds of salad and a ptisserie of desserts. (Did you try that Spanish banana thingy? Amazing!) The band members wait for Springsteen to distribute the nights set list. The old-timers are calm, but the newer members wait with a measure of anxiety. Im always flipping out, having nightmares that hes gonna call something that I never even heard of fifteen minutes before we go onstage, Jake Clemons said. Thousands of fans, many of whom had been waiting outside since morning, were allowed to enter the stadium grounds at six oclock for a show that would not begin until ten. I noticed a few young Spaniards carrying a sign, in English, reading, Bruce, Thanks for Making Our Lives Better. I tried to imagine a sign like that forwhom? Lou Reed? AC/DC? Bon Jovi? (Richie Sambora, Thanks for making our lives better. Doubtful.) The ultra-sincere interchange between Springsteen and his fans, which looks treacly to
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the uninitiated and the uninterested, is what distinguishes him and his performances. Forty years on, and an hour before going onstage yet again, he was trying to make sense of that transaction. You are isolated, yet you desire to talk to somebody, Springsteen said. You are very disempowered, so you seek impact, recognition that you are alive and that you exist. We hope to send people out of the building we play in with a slightly more enhanced sense of what their options might be, emotionally, maybe communally. You empower them a little bit, they empower you. Its all a battle against the futility and the existential loneliness! It may be that we are all huddled together around the fire and trying to fight off that sense of the inevitable. Thats what we do for one another. I try to put on the kind of show that the kid in the front row is going to come to and never forget, he went on. Our effort is to stay with you, period, to have you join us and to allow us to join you for the ridethe whole ride. Thats what weve been working on the whole time, and this show is the latest installment, and, in many ways, its the most complicated installment, because in many ways it has to do with the end of that ride. There are kids who are coming to the show who will never have seen the band with Clarence Clemons in it or Danny Federicipeople who were in the band for thirty years. So our job is to honor the people who stood on that stage by putting on the best show weve ever put on. To do that, youve got to acknowledge your losses and your defeats as well as your victories. There is a finiteness to it, though the end may be a long time away. We end the night with a party of sorts, but its not an uncomplicated party. Its a life partythats what we try to deliver up. A couple of weeks earlier, one of Springsteens beloved aunts died. And now, the day before the first concert in Barcelona, Mary Van Zandt, Steves mother, died, in Red Bank. When I was a child, deaths came regularly, Springsteen said. Then theres a period, unless accidents happen, death doesnt happen, and then you reach a period where it just happens regularly again. Weve entered that part. A little while later, having changed from his regular jeans to his stage jeans, Springsteen walked with the band through a stadium tunnel and toward the stage. The last thing he saw before heading to the mike and a blast of stage lights was a sign taped to the top step that read Barcelona. A few years ago, at an arena show in Auburn Hills, he kept greeting the crowd with shouts of Hello, Ohio! Finally, Van Zandt pulled him aside and told him they were in Michigan. Springsteen glanced at the step and stepped into the spotlight. Hola, Barcelona! he cried out to a sea of forty-five thousand people. Hola, Catalunya!
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Annals of Health Care
Big Med
Restaurant chains have managed to combine quality control, cost control, and innovation. Can health care?
by Atul Gawande August 13, 2012
It was Saturday night, and I was at the local Cheesecake Factory with my two teen-age daughters and three of their friends. You may know the chain: a hundred and sixty restaurants with a catalogue-like menu that, when I did a count, listed three hundred and eight dinner items (including the forty-nine on the Skinnylicious menu), plus a hundred and twenty-four choices of beverage. Its a linen-napkin-andtablecloth sort of place, but with something for everyone. Theres wine and wasabi-crusted ahi tuna, but theres also buffalo wings and Bud Light. The kids ordered mostly comfort foodpot stickers, mini crab cakes, teriyaki chicken, Hawaiian pizza, pasta carbonara. I got a beet salad with goat cheese, white-bean hummus and warm flatbread, and the miso salmon. The place is huge, but its invariably packed, and you can see why. The typical entre is under fifteen dollars. The dcor is fancy, in an accessible, Disney-cruise-ship sort of way: faux Egyptian columns, earth-tone murals, vaulted ceilings. The waiters are efficient and friendly. They wear all white (crisp white oxford shirt, pants, apron, sneakers) and try to make you feel as if it were a special night out. As for the foodcan I say this without losing forever my chance of getting a reservation at Per Se?it was delicious. The chain serves more than eighty million people per year. I pictured semi-frozen bags of beet salad shipped from Mexico, buckets of precooked pasta and production-line hummus, fish from a box. And yet nothing smacked of mass production. My beets were crisp and fresh, the hummus creamy, the salmon like butter in my mouth. No doubt everything we ordered was sweeter, fattier, and bigger than it had to be. But the Cheesecake Factory knows its customers. The whole table was happy (with the possible exception of Ethan, aged sixteen, who picked the onions out of his Hawaiian pizza).
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I wondered how they pulled it off. I asked one of the Cheesecake Factory line cooks how much of the food was premade. He told me that everythings pretty much made from scratchexcept the cheesecake, which actually is from a cheesecake factory, in Calabasas, California. Id come from the hospital that day. In medicine, too, we are trying to deliver a range of services to millions of people at a reasonable cost and with a consistent level of quality. Unlike the Cheesecake Factory, we havent figured out how. Our costs are soaring, the service is typically mediocre, and the quality is unreliable. Every clinician has his or her own way of doing things, and the rates of failure and complication (not to mention the costs) for a given service routinely vary by a factor of two or three, even within the same hospital. Its easy to mock places like the Cheesecake Factoryrestaurants that have brought chain production to complicated sit-down meals. But the casual dining sector, as it is known, plays a central role in the ecosystem of eating, providing three-course, fork-and-knife restaurant meals that most people across the country couldnt previously find or afford. The ideas start out in lite, upscale restaurants in major cities. You could think of them as research restaurants, akin to research hospitals. Some of their enthusiasms miso salmon, Chianti-braised short ribs, flourless chocolate espresso cakespread to other high-end restaurants. Then the casual-dining chains rengineer them for affordable delivery to millions. Does health care need something like this?
Big chains thrive because they provide goods and services of greater variety, better quality, and lower cost than would otherwise be available. Size is the key. It gives them buying power, lets them centralize common functions, and allows them to adopt and diffuse innovations faster than they could if they were a bunch of small, independent operations. Such advantages have made Walmart the most successful retailer on earth. Pizza Hut alone runs one in eight pizza restaurants in the country. The Cheesecake Factorys
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major competitor, Darden, owns Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, Red Lobster, and the Capital Grille; it has more than two thousand restaurants across the country and employs more than a hundred and eighty thousand people. We can bristle at the idea of chains and mass production, with their homogeneity, predictability, and constant genuflection to the value-for-money god. Then you spend a bad night in a quaint one of a kind bed-and-breakfast that turns out to have a manic, halitoxic innkeeper who cant keep the hot water running, and its right back to the Hyatt. Medicine, though, had held out against the trend. Physicians were always predominantly self-employed, working alone or in small private-practice groups. American hospitals tended to be community-based. But thats changing. Hospitals and clinics have been forming into large conglomerates. And physicians facing escalating demands to lower costs, adopt expensive information technology, and account for performancehave been flocking to join them. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only a quarter of doctors are self-employedan extraordinary turnabout from a decade ago, when a majority were independent. Theyve decided to become employees, and health systems have become chains. Im no exception. I am an employee of an academic, nonprofit health system called Partners HealthCare, which owns the Brigham and Womens Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital, along with seven other hospitals, and is affiliated with dozens of clinics around eastern Massachusetts. Partners has sixty thousand employees, including six thousand doctors. Our competitors include CareGroup, a system of five regional hospitals, and a new for-profit chain called the Steward Health Care System. Steward was launched in late 2010, when Cerberusthe multibillion-dollar private-investment firm bought a group of six failing Catholic hospitals in the Boston area for nine hundred million dollars. Many people were shocked that the Catholic Church would allow a corporate takeover of its charity hospitals. But the hospitals, some of which were more than a century old, had been losing money and patients, and Cerberus is one of those firms which specialize in turning around distressed businesses. Cerberus has owned controlling stakes in Chrysler and GMAC Financing and currently has stakes in Albertsons grocery stories, one of Austrias largest retail bank chains, and the Freedom Group, which it built into one of the biggest gun-and-ammunition manufacturers in the world. When it looked at the Catholic hospitals, it saw another opportunity to create profit through size and efficiency. In the past year, Steward bought four more Massachusetts hospitals and made an offer to buy six financially troubled hospitals in south Florida. Its trying to create what some have called the Southwest Airlines of health carea network of high-quality hospitals that would appeal to a more cost-conscious public.
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Stewards aggressive growth has made local doctors like me nervous. But many health systems, for-profit and not-for-profit, share its goal: large-scale, production-line medicine. The way medical care is organized is changingbecause the way we pay for it is changing. Historically, doctors have been paid for services, not results. In the eighteenth century B.C., Hammurabis code instructed that a surgeon be paid ten shekels of silver every time he performed a procedure for a patricianopening an abscess or treating a cataract with his bronze lancet. It also instructed that if the patient should die or lose an eye, the surgeons hands be cut off. Apparently, the Mesopotamian surgeons lobby got this results clause dropped. Since then, weve generally been paid for what we do, whatever happens. The consequence is the system we have, with plenty of individual transactionsprocedures, tests, specialist consultationsand uncertain attention to how the patient ultimately fares. Health-care reformspublic and privatehave sought to reshape that system. This year, my employers new contracts with Medicare, BlueCross BlueShield, and others link financial reward to clinical performance. The more the hospital exceeds its cost-reduction and quality-improvement targets, the more money it can keep. If it misses the targets, it will lose tens of millions of dollars. This is a radical shift. Until now, hospitals and medical groups have mainly had a landlord-tenant relationship with doctors. They offered us space and facilities, but what we tenants did behind closed doors was our business. Now its their business, too. The theory the country is about to test is that chains will make us better and more efficient. The question is how. To most of us who work in health care, throwing a bunch of administrators and accountants into the mix seems unlikely to help. Good medicine cant be reduced to a recipe. Then again neither can good food: every dish involves attention to detail and individual adjustments that require human judgment. Yet, some chains manage to achieve good, consistent results thousands of times a day across the entire country. I decided to get inside one and find out how they did it. Dave Luz is the regional manager for the eight Cheesecake Factories in the Boston area. He oversees operations that bring in eighty million dollars in yearly revenue, about as much as a medium-sized hospital. Luz (rhymes with fuzz) is forty-seven, and had started out in his twenties waiting tables at a Cheesecake Factory restaurant in Los Angeles. He was writing screenplays, but couldnt make a living at it. When he and his wife hit thirty and had their second child, they came back east to Boston to be closer to family. He decided to stick with the Cheesecake Factory. Luz rose steadily, and made a nice living. I wanted to have some business skills, he saidhe started a film-production company on the sideand there was no other place I knew where you could go in, know nothing, and learn top to bottom how to run a business.
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To show me how a Cheesecake Factory works, he took me into the kitchen of his busiest restaurant, at Prudential Center, a shopping and convention hub. The kitchen design is the same in every restaurant, he explained. Its laid out like a manufacturing facility, in which raw materials in the back of the plant come together as a finished product that rolls out the front. Along the back wall are the walk-in refrigerators and prep stations, where half a dozen people stood chopping and stirring and mixing. The next zone is where the cooking gets donetwo parallel lines of countertop, forty-some feet long and just three shoe-lengths apart, with fifteen people pivoting in place between the stovetops and grills on the hot side and the neatly laid-out bins of fixings (sauces, garnishes, seasonings, and the like) on the cold side. The prep staff stock the pullout drawers beneath the counters with slabs of marinated meat and fish, serving-size baggies of pasta and crabmeat, steaming bowls of brown rice and mashed potatoes. Basically, the prep crew handles the parts, and the cooks do the assembly. Computer monitors positioned head-high every few feet flashed the orders for a given station. Luz showed me the touch-screen tabs for the recipe for each order and a photo showing the proper presentation. The recipe has the ingredients on the left part of the screen and the steps on the right. A timer counts down to a target time for completion. The background turns from green to yellow as the order nears the target time and to red when it has exceeded it. I watched Mauricio Gaviria at the broiler station as the lunch crowd began coming in. Mauricio was twenty-nine years old and had worked there eight years. Hed got his start doing simple prepchopping vegetablesand worked his way up to fry cook, the pasta station, and now the saut and broiler stations. He bounced in place waiting for the pace to pick up. An order for a hibachi steak popped up. He tapped the screen to open the order: medium-rare, no special requests. A ten-minute timer began. He tonged a fat hanger steak soaking in teriyaki sauce onto the broiler and started a nest of sliced onions cooking beside it. While the meat was grilling, other orders arrived: a Kobe burger, a blue-cheese B.L.T. burger, three old-fashioned burgers, five veggie burgers, a farmhouse burger, and two Thai chicken wraps. Tap, tap, tap. He got each of them grilling. I brought up the hibachi-steak recipe on the screen. There were instructions to season the steak, saut the onions, grill some mushrooms, slice the meat, place it on the bed of onions, pile the mushrooms on top, garnish with parsley and sesame seeds, heap a stack of asparagus tempura next to it, shape a tower of mashed potatoes alongside, drop a pat of wasabi butter on top, and serve. Two things struck me. First, the instructions were precise about the ingredients and the objectives (the steak slices were to be a quarter of an inch thick, the presentation just so), but not about how to get there. The cook has to decide how much to salt and baste, how to sequence the onions and mushrooms and meat so theyre done at the same time, how to swivel from grill to countertop and back, sprinkling a pinch of
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salt here, flipping a burger there, sending word to the fry cook for the asparagus tempura, all the while keeping an eye on the steak. In producing complicated food, there might be recipes, but there was also a substantial amount of whats called tacit knowledgeknowledge that has not been reduced to instructions. Second, Mauricio never looked at the instructions anyway. By the time Id finished reading the steak recipe, he was done with the dish and had plated half a dozen others. Do you use this recipe screen? I asked. No. I have the recipes right here, he said, pointing to his baseball-capped head. He put the steak dish under warming lights, and tapped the screen to signal the servers for pickup. But before the dish was taken away, the kitchen manager stopped to look, and the system started to become clearer. He pulled a clean fork out and poked at the steak. Then he called to Mauricio and the two other cooks manning the grill station. Gentlemen, he said, this steak is perfect. It was juicy and pink in the center, he said. The grill marks are excellent. The sesame seeds and garnish were ample without being excessive. But the tower is too tight. I could see what he meant. The mashed potatoes looked a bit like something a kid at the beach might have molded with a bucket. You dont want the food to look manufactured, he explained. Mauricio fluffed up the potatoes with a fork. I watched the kitchen manager for a while. At every Cheesecake Factory restaurant, a kitchen manager is stationed at the counter where the food comes off the line, and he rates the food on a scale of one to ten. A nine is near-perfect. An eight requires one or two corrections before going out to a guest. A seven needs three. A six is unacceptable and has to be redone. This inspection process seemed a tricky task. No one likes to be second-guessed. The kitchen manager prodded gently, being careful to praise as often as he corrected. (Beautiful. Beautiful! The pattern of this pesto glaze is just right.) But he didnt hesitate to correct. Were getting sloppy with the plating, he told the pasta station. He was unhappy with how the fry cooks were slicing the avocado spring rolls. Gentlemen, a half-inch border on this next time. He tried to be a coach more than a policeman. Is this three-quarters of an ounce of Parm-Romano? And that seemed to be the spirit in which the line cooks took him and the other managers. The managers had all risen through the ranks. This earned them a certain amount of respect. They in turn seemed respectful of the cooks skills and experience. Still, the oversight is tight, and this seemed crucial to the success of the enterprise.
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The managers monitored the pace, tooscanning the screens for a station stacking up red flags, indicating orders past the target time, and deciding whether to give the cooks at the station a nudge or an extra pair of hands. They watched for wastewasted food, wasted time, wasted effort. The formula was Business 101: Use the right amount of goods and labor to deliver what customers want and no more. Anything more is waste, and waste is lost profit. I spoke to David Gordon, the companys chief operating officer. He told me that the Cheesecake Factory has worked out a staff-to-customer ratio that keeps everyone busy but not so busy that theres no slack in the system in the event of a sudden surge of customers. More difficult is the problem of wasted food. Although the company buys in bulk from regional suppliers, groceries are the biggest expense after labor, and the most unpredictable. Everythingthe chicken, the beef, the lettuce, the eggs, and all the resthas a shelf life. If a restaurant were to stock too much, it could end up throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of food. If a restaurant stocks too little, it will have to tell customers that their favorite dish is not available, and they may never come back. Groceries, Gordon said, can kill a restaurant. The companys target last year was at least 97.5-per-cent efficiency: the managers aimed at throwing away no more than 2.5 per cent of the groceries they bought, without running out. This seemed to me an absurd target. Achieving it would require knowing in advance almost exactly how many customers would be coming in and what they were going to want, then insuring that the cooks didnt spill or toss or waste anything. Yet this is precisely what the organization has learned to do. The chain-restaurant industry has produced a field of computer analytics known as guest forecasting. We have forecasting models based on historical datathe trend of the past six weeks and also the trend of the previous year, Gordon told me. The predictability of the business has become astounding. The company has even learned how to make adjustments for the weather or for scheduled events like playoff games that keep people at home. A computer program known as Net Chef showed Luz that for this one restaurant food costs accounted for 28.73 per cent of expenses the previous week. It also showed exactly how many chicken breasts were ordered that week ($1,614 worth), the volume sold, the volume on hand, and how much of last weeks order had been wasted (three dollars worth). Chain production requires control, and theyd figured out how to achieve it on a mass scale. As a doctor, I found such control alienpossibly from a hostile planet. We dont have patient forecasting in my office, push-button waste monitoring, or such stringent, hour-by-hour oversight of the work we do, and we dont want to. I asked Luz if he had ever thought about the contrast when he went to see a doctor. We were standing amid the bustle of the kitchen, and the look on his face shifted before he answered.
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I have, he said. His mother was seventy-eight. She had early Alzheimers disease, and required a caretaker at home. Getting her adequate medical care was, he said, a constant battle. Recently, shed had a fall, apparently after fainting, and was taken to a local emergency room. The doctors ordered a series of tests and scans, and kept her overnight. They never figured out what the problem was. Luz understood that sometimes explanations prove elusive. But the clinicians didnt seem to be following any cordinated plan of action. The emergency doctor told the family one plan, the admitting internist described another, and the consulting specialist a third. Thousands of dollars had been spent on tests, but nobody ever told Luz the results. A nurse came at ten the next morning and said that his mother was being discharged. But his mothers nurse was on break, and the discharge paperwork with her instructions and prescriptions hadnt been done. So they waited. Then the next person they needed was at lunch. It was as if the clinicians were the customers, and the patients job was to serve them. We didnt get to go until 6 P.M., with a tired, disabled lady and a long drive home. Even then she still had to be changed out of her hospital gown and dressed. Luz pressed the call button to ask for help. No answer. He went out to the ward desk. The aide was on break, the secretary said. Dont you dress her yourself at home? He explained that he didnt, and made a fuss. An aide was sent. She was short with him and rough in changing his mothers clothes. She was manhandling her, Luz said. I felt like, Stop. Im not one to complain. I respect what you do enormously. But if there were a video camera in here, youd be on the evening news. I sent her out. I had to do everything myself. Im stuffing my moms boob in her bra. It was unbelievable. His mother was given instructions to check with her doctor for the results of cultures taken during her stay, for a possible urinary-tract infection. But when Luz tried to follow up, he couldnt get through to her doctor for days. Doctors are busy, he said. I get it. But come on. An office assistant finally told him that the results wouldnt be ready for another week and that she was to see a neurologist. No explanations. No chance to ask questions. The neurologist, after giving her a two-minute exam, suggested tests that had already been done and wrote a prescription that he admitted was of doubtful benefit. Luzs family seemed to encounter this kind of disorganization, imprecision, and waste wherever his mother went for help. It is unbelievable to me that they would not manage this better, Luz said. I asked him what he would do if he were the manager of a neurology unit or a cardiology clinic. I dont know anything about medicine, he said. But when I pressed he thought for a moment, and said, This is pretty obvious. Im
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sure you already do it. But Id study what the best people are doing, figure out how to standardize it, and then bring it to everyone to execute. This is not at all the normal way of doing things in medicine. (Youre scaring me, he said, when I told him.) But its exactly what the new health-care chains are now hoping to do on a mass scale. They want to create Cheesecake Factories for health care. The question is whether the medical counterparts to Mauricio at the broiler stationthe clinicians in the operating rooms, in the medical offices, in the intensive-care unitswill go along with the plan. Fixing a nice piece of steak is hardly of the same complexity as diagnosing the cause of an elderly patients loss of consciousness. Doctors and patients have not had a positive experience with outsiders second-guessing decisions. How will they feel about managers trying to tell them what the best practices are? In March, my mother underwent a total knee replacement, like at least six hundred thousand Americans each year. Shed had a partial knee replacement a decade ago, when arthritis had worn away part of the cartilage, and for a while this served her beautifully. The surgeon warned, however, that the results would be temporary, and about five years ago the pain returned. Shes originally from Ahmadabad, India, and has spent three decades as a pediatrician, attending to the children of my small Ohio home town. Shes chatty. She cant go through a grocery checkout line or get pulled over for speeding without learning peoples names and a little bit about them. But she didnt talk about her mounting pain. I noticed, however, that she had developed a pronounced limp and had become unable to walk even moderate distances. When I asked her about it, she admitted that just getting out of bed in the morning was an ordeal. Her doctor showed me her X-rays. Her partial prosthesis had worn through the bone on the lower surface of her knee. It was time for a total knee replacement. This past winter, she finally stopped putting it off, and asked me to find her a surgeon. I wanted her to be treated well, in both the technical and the human sense. I wanted a place where everyone and everything from the clinic secretary to the physical therapistsworked together seamlessly. My mother planned to come to Boston, where I live, for the surgery so she could stay with me during her recovery. (My father died last year.) Boston has three hospitals in the top rank of orthopedic surgery. But even a doctor doesnt have much to go on when it comes to making a choice. A place may have a great reputation, but its hard to know about actual quality of care. Unlike some countries, the United States doesnt have a monitoring system that tracks joint-replacement statistics. Even within an institution, I found, surgeons take strikingly different approaches. They use different makes of artificial joints, different kinds of anesthesia, different regimens for post-surgical pain control and physical therapy.
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In the absence of information, I went with my own hospital, the Brigham and Womens Hospital. Our big-name orthopedic surgeons treat Olympians and professional athletes. Nine of them do knee replacements. Of most interest to me, however, was a surgeon who was not one of the famous names. He has no national recognition. But he has led what is now a decade-long experiment in standardizing jointreplacement surgery. John Wright is a New Zealander in his late fifties. Hes a tower crane of a man, six feet four inches tall, and so bald he barely seems to have eyebrows. Hes informal in attireI dont think Ive ever seen him in a tie, and he is as apt to do rounds in his zip-up anorak as in his white coatbut he exudes competence. Customization should be five per cent, not ninety-five per cent, of what we do, he told me. A few years ago, he gathered a group of people from every specialty involvedsurgery, anesthesia, nursing, physical therapyto formulate a single default way of doing knee replacements. They examined every detail, arguing their way through their past experiences and whatever evidence they could find. Essentially, they did what Luz considered the obvious thing to do: they studied what the best people were doing, figured out how to standardize it, and then tried to get everyone to follow suit. They came up with a plan for anesthesia based on research studiesincluding giving certain pain medications before the patient entered the operating room and using spinal anesthesia plus an injection of local anesthetic to block the main nerve to the knee. They settled on a postoperative regimen, too. The day after a knee replacement, most orthopedic surgeons have their patients use a continuous passivemotion machine, which flexes and extends the knee as they lie in bed. Large-scale studies, though, have suggested that the machines dont do much good. Sure enough, when the members of Wrights group examined their own patients, they found that the ones without the machine got out of bed sooner after surgery, used less pain medication, and had more range of motion at discharge. So Wright instructed the hospital to get rid of the machines, and to use the money this saved (ninety thousand dollars a year) to pay for more physical therapy, something that is proven to help patient mobility. Therapy, starting the day after surgery, would increase from once to twice a day, including weekends. Even more startling, Wright had persuaded the surgeons to accept changes in the operation itself; there was now, for instance, a limit as to which prostheses they could use. Each of our nine knee-replacement surgeons had his preferred type and brand. Knee surgeons are as particular about their implants as professional tennis players are about their racquets. But the hardware is easily the biggest cost of the operationthe average retail price is around eight thousand dollars, and some cost twice that, with no solid evidence of real differences in results.
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Knee implants were largely perfected a quarter century ago. By the nineteen-nineties, studies showed that, for some ninety-five per cent of patients, the implants worked magnificently a decade after surgery. Evidence from the Australian registry has shown that not a single new knee or hip prosthesis had a lower failure rate than that of the established prostheses. Indeed, thirty per cent of the new models were likelier to fail. Like others on staff, Wright has advised companies on implant design. He believes that innovation will lead to better implants. In the meantime, however, he has sought to limit the staff to the three lowestcost knee implants. These have been hard changes for many people to accept. Wright has tried to figure out how to persuade clinicians to follow the standardized plan. To prevent revolt, he learned, he had to let them deviate at times from the default option. Surgeons could still order a passive-motion machine or a preferred prosthesis. But I didnt make it easy, Wright said. The surgeons had to enter the treatment orders in the computer themselves. To change or add an implant, a surgeon had to show that the performance was superior or the price at least as low. I asked one of his orthopedic colleagues, a surgeon named John Ready, what he thought about Wrights efforts. Ready was philosophical. He recognized that the changes were improvements, and liked most of them. But he wasnt happy when Wright told him that his knee-implant manufacturer wasnt matching the others prices and would have to be dropped. Its not ideal to lose my prosthesis, Ready said. I could make the switch. The differences between manufacturers are minor. But thered be a learning curve. Each implant has its quirkshow you seat it, what tools you use. Its probably a ten-case learning curve for me. Wright suggested that he explain the situation to the manufacturers sales rep. Im my reps livelihood, Ready said. He probably makes five hundred dollars a case from me. Ready spoke to his rep. The price was dropped. Wright has become the hospitals kitchen managernot always a pleasant role. He told me that about half of the surgeons appreciate what hes doing. The other half tolerate it at best. One or two have been outright hostile. But he has persevered, because hes gratified by the results. The surgeons now use a single manufacturer for seventy-five per cent of their implants, giving the hospital bargaining power that has helped slash its knee-implant costs by half. And the start-to-finish standardization has led to vastly better outcomes. The distance patients can walk two days after surgery has increased from fifty-three to eighty-five feet. Nine out of ten could stand, walk, and climb at least a few stairs independently by the time of discharge. The amount of narcotic pain medications they required fell by a third. They could also leave the hospital nearly a full day earlier on average (which saved some two thousand dollars per patient).
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My mother was one of the beneficiaries. She had insisted to Dr. Wright that she would need a week in the hospital after the operation and three weeks in a rehabilitation center. That was what shed required for her previous knee operation, and this one was more extensive. Well see, he told her. The morning after her operation, he came in and told her that he wanted her getting out of bed, standing up, and doing a specific set of exercises he showed her. Hes pushy, if you want to say it that way, she told me. The physical therapists and nurses were, too. They were a team, and that was no small matter. I counted sixty-three different people involved in her care. Nineteen were doctors, including the surgeon and chief resident who assisted him, the anesthesiologists, the radiologists who reviewed her imaging scans, and the junior residents who examined her twice a day and adjusted her fluids and medications. Twenty-three were nurses, including her operating-room nurses, her recovery-room nurse, and the many ward nurses on their eight-to-twelve-hour shifts. There were also at least five physical therapists; sixteen patient-care assistants, helping check her vital signs, bathe her, and get her to the bathroom; plus X-ray and EKG technologists, transport workers, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants. I didnt even count the bioengineers who serviced the equipment used, the pharmacists who dispensed her medications, or the kitchen staff preparing her food while taking into account her dietary limitations. They all had to cordinate their contributions, and they did. Three days after her operation, she was getting in and out of bed on her own. She was on virtually no narcotic medication. She was starting to climb stairs. Her knee pain was actually less than before her operation. She left the hospital for the rehabilitation center that afternoon. The biggest complaint that people have about health care is that no one ever takes responsibility for the total experience of care, for the costs, and for the results. My mother experienced what happens in medicine when someone takes charge. Of course, John Wright isnt alone in trying to design and implement this kind of systematic care, in joint surgery and beyond. The Virginia Mason Medical Center, in Seattle, has done it for knee surgery and cancer care; the Geisinger Health Center, in Pennsylvania, has done it for cardiac surgery and primary care; the University of Michigan Health System standardized how its doctors give blood transfusions to patients, reducing the need for transfusions by thirty-one per cent and expenses by two hundred thousand dollars a month. Yet, unless such programs are ramped up on a nationwide scale, they arent going to do much to improve health care for most people or reduce the explosive growth of health-care costs. In medicine, good ideas still take an appallingly long time to trickle down. Recently, the American Academy of Neurology and the American Headache Society released new guidelines for migraine-
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headache-treatment. They recommended treating severe migraine suffererswho have more than six attacks a monthwith preventive medications and listed several drugs that markedly reduce the occurrence of attacks. The authors noted, however, that previous guidelines going back more than a decade had recommended such remedies, and doctors were still not providing them to more than twothirds of patients. One study examined how long it took several major discoveries, such as the finding that the use of beta-blockers after a heart attack improves survival, to reach even half of Americans. The answer was, on average, more than fifteen years. Scaling good ideas has been one of our deepest problems in medicine. Regulation has had its place, but it has proved no more likely to produce great medicine than food inspectors are to produce great food. During the era of managed care, insurance-company reviewers did hardly any better. Weve been stuck. But do we have to be? Every six months, the Cheesecake Factory puts out a new menu. This means that everyone who works in its restaurants expects to learn something new twice a year. The March, 2012, Cheesecake Factory menu included thirteen new items. The teaching process is now finely honed: from start to finish, rollout takes just seven weeks. The ideas for a new dish, or for tweaking an old one, can come from anywhere. One of the Boston prep cooks told me about an idea he once had that ended up in a recipe. David Overton, the founder and C.E.O. of the Cheesecake Factory, spends much of his time sampling a range of cuisines and comes up with many dishes himself. All the ideas, however, go through half a dozen chefs in the companys test kitchen, in Calabasas. They figure out how to make each recipe reproducible, appealing, and affordable. Then they teach the new recipe to the companys regional managers and kitchen managers. Dave Luz, the Boston regional manager, went to California for training this past January with his chief kitchen manager, Tom Schmidt, a chef with fifteen years experience. They attended lectures, watched videos, participated in workshops. It sounded like a surgical conference. Where I might be taught a new surgical technique, they were taught the steps involved in preparing a Santorini farro salad. But there was a crucial difference. The Cheesecake instructors also trained the attendees how to teach what they were learning. In medicine, we hardly ever think about how to implement what weve learned. We learn what we want to, when we want to. On the first training day, the kitchen managers worked their way through thirteen stations, preparing each new dish, and their performances were evaluated. The following day, they had to teach their regional managers how to prepare each dishSchmidt taught Luzand this time the instructors assessed how well the kitchen managers had taught.
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The managers returned home to replicate the training session for the general manager and the chief kitchen manager of every restaurant in their region. The training at the Boston Prudential Center restaurant took place on two mornings, before the lunch rush. The first day, the managers taught the kitchen staff the new menu items. There was a lot of poring over the recipes and videos and fussing over the details. The second day, the cooks made the new dishes for the servers. This gave the cooks some practice preparing the food at speed, while allowing the servers to learn the new menu items. The dishes would go live in two weeks. I asked a couple of the line cooks how long it took them to learn to make the new food. I know it already, one said. I make it two times, and thats all I need, the other said. Come on, I said. How long before they had it down pat? One day, they insisted. Its easy. I asked Schmidt how much time he thought the cooks required to master the recipes. They thought a day, I told him. He grinned. More like a month, he said. Even a month would be enviable in medicine, where innovations commonly spread at a glacial pace. The new health-care chains, though, are betting that they can change that, in much the same way that other chains have. Armin Ernst is responsible for intensive-care-unit operations in Stewards ten hospitals. The I.C.U.s he oversees serve some eight thousand patients a year. In another era, an I.C.U. manager would have been a facilities expert. He would have spent his time making sure that the equipment, electronics, pharmacy resources, and nurse staffing were up to snuff. He would have regarded the I.C.U. as the doctors workshop, and he would have wanted to give them the best possible conditions to do their work as they saw fit. Ernst, though, is a doctora new kind of doctor, whose goal is to help disseminate good ideas. He doesnt see the I.C.U. as a doctors workshop. He sees it as the temporary home of the sickest, most fragile people in the country. Nowhere in health care do we expend more resources. Although fewer than one in four thousand Americans are in intensive care at any given time, they account for four per cent of national health-care costs. Ernst believes that his job is to make sure that everyone is collaborating to provide the most effective and least wasteful care possible.
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He looked like a regular doctor to me. Ernst is fifty years old, a native German who received his medical degree at the University of Heidelberg before training in pulmonary and critical-care medicine in the United States. He wears a white hospital coat and talks about drips and ventilator settings, like any other critical-care specialist. But he doesnt deal with patients: he deals with the people who deal with patients. Ernst says hes not telling clinicians what to do. Instead, hes trying to get clinicians to agree on precise standards of care, and then make sure that they follow through on them. (The word consensus comes up a lot.) What I didnt understand was how he could enforce such standards in ten hospitals across three thousand square miles. Late one Friday evening, I joined an intensive-care-unit team on night duty. But this team was nowhere near a hospital. We were in a drab one-story building behind a meat-trucking facility outside of Boston, in a back section that Ernst called his I.C.U. command center. It was outfitted with millions of dollars worth of technology. Banks of computer screens carried a live feed of cardiac-monitor readings, radiologyimaging scans, and laboratory results from I.C.U. patients throughout Stewards hospitals. Software monitored the stream and produced yellow and red alerts when it detected patterns that raised concerns. Doctors and nurses manned consoles where they could toggle on high-definition video cameras that allowed them to zoom into any I.C.U. room and talk directly to the staff on the scene or to the patients themselves. The command center was just a few months old. The team had gone live in only four of the ten hospitals. But in the next several months Ernsts tele-I.C.U. team will have the ability to monitor the care for every patient in every I.C.U. bed in the Steward health-care system. A doctor, two nurses, and an administrative assistant were on duty in the command center each night I visited. Christina Monti was one of the nurses. A pixie-like thirty-year-old with nine years experience as a cardiac intensive-care nurse, she was covering Holy Family Hospital, on the New Hampshire border, and St. Elizabeths Medical Center, in Bostons Brighton neighborhood. When I sat down with her, she was making her rounds, virtually. First, she checked on the patients she had marked as most critical. She reviewed their most recent laboratory results, clinical notes, and medication changes in the electronic record. Then she made a visit, flicking on the two-way camera and audio system. If the patients were able to interact, she would say hello to them in their beds. She asked the staff members whether she could do anything for them. The tele-I.C.U. team provided the staff with extra eyes and ears when needed. If a crashing patient diverts the staffs attention, the members of the remote team can keep an eye on the other patients. They can handle
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computer paperwork if a nurse falls behind; they can look up needed clinical information. The hospital staff have an OnStar-like button in every room that they can push to summon the tele-I.C.U. team. Monti also ran through a series of checks for each patient. She had a reference list of the standards that Ernst had negotiated with the people running the I.C.U.s, and she looked to see if they were being followed. The standards covered basics, from hand hygiene to measures for stomach-ulcer prevention. In every room with a patient on a respirator, for instance, Monti made sure the nurse had propped the head of the bed up at least thirty degrees, which makes pneumonia less likely. She made sure the breathing tube in the patients mouth was secure, to reduce the risk of the tubes falling out or becoming disconnected. She zoomed in on the medication pumps to check that the drips were dosed properly. She was not looking for bad nurses or bad doctors. She was looking for the kinds of misses that even excellent nurses and doctors can make under pressure. The concept of the remote I.C.U. started with an effort to let specialists in critical-care medicine, who are in short supply, cover not just one but several community hospitals. Two hundred and fifty hospitals from Alaska to Virginia have installed a version of the tele-I.C.U. It produced significant improvements in outcomes and costsand, some discovered, a means of driving better practices even in hospitals that had specialists on hand. After five minutes of observation, however, I realized that the remote I.C.U. team wasnt exactly in command; it was in negotiation. I observed Monti perform a video check on a middle-aged man who had just come out of heart surgery. A soft chime let the people in the room know she was dropping in. The man was unconscious, supported by a respirator and intravenous drips. At his bedside was a nurse hanging a bag of fluid. She seemed to stiffen at the chimes sound. Hi, Monti said to her. Im Chris. Just making my evening rounds. How are you? The bedside nurse gave the screen only a sidelong glance. Ernst wasnt oblivious of the issue. He had taken pains to introduce the command centers team, spending weeks visiting the units and bringing doctors and nurses out to tour the tele-I.C.U. before a camera was ever turned on. But there was no escaping the fact that these were strangers peering over the staffs shoulders. The bedside nurses chilliness wasnt hard to understand. In a single hour, however, Monti had caught a number of problems. She noticed, for example, that a patients breathing tube had come loose. Another patient wasnt getting recommended medication to prevent potentially fatal blood clots. Red alerts flashed on the screena patient with an abnormal potassium level that could cause heart-rhythm problems, another with a sudden leap in heart rate.
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Monti made sure that the team wasnt already on the case and that the alerts werent false alarms. Checking the computer, she figured out that a doctor had already ordered a potassium infusion for the woman with the low level. Flipping on a camera, she saw that the patient with the high heart rate was just experiencing the stress of being helped out of bed for the first time after surgery. But the unsecured breathing tube and the forgotten blood-clot medication proved to be oversights. Monti raised the concerns with the bedside staff. Sometimes they resist. You have got to be careful from patient to patient, Gerard Hayes, the tele-I.C.U. doctor on duty, explained. Pushing hard on one has ramifications for how it goes with a lot of patients. You dont want to sour whole teams on the tele-I.C.U. Across the country, several hospitals have decommissioned their systems. Clinicians have been known to place a gown over the camera, or even rip the camera out of the wall. Remote monitoring will never be the same as being at the bedside. One nurse called the command center to ask the team not to turn on the video system in her patients room: he was delirious and confused, and the sudden appearance of someone talking to him from the television would freak him out. Still, you could see signs of change. I watched Hayes make his virtual rounds through the I.C.U. at St. Annes Hospital, in Fall River, near the Rhode Island border. He didnt yet know all the members of the hospital staffthis was only his second night in the command center, and when he sees patients in person its at a hospital sixty miles north. So, in his dealings with the on-site clinicians, he was feeling his way. Checking on one patient, he found a few problems. Mr. Karlage, as Ill call him, was in his mid-fifties, an alcoholic smoker with cirrhosis of the liver, severe emphysema, terrible nutrition, and now a pneumonia that had put him into respiratory failure. The I.C.U. team injected him with antibiotics and sedatives, put a breathing tube down his throat, and forced pure oxygen into his lungs. Over a few hours, he stabilized, and the I.C.U. doctor was able to turn his attention to other patients. But stabilizing a sick patient is like putting out a house fire. There can be smoldering embers just waiting to reignite. Hayes spotted a few. The ventilator remained set to push breaths at near-maximum pressure, and, given the patients severe emphysema, this risked causing a blowout. The oxygen concentration was still cranked up to a hundred per cent, which, over time, can damage the lungs. The team had also started several broad-spectrum antibiotics all at once, and this regimen had to be dialled back if they were to avoid breeding resistant bacteria. Hayes had to notify the unit doctor. An earlier interaction, however, had not been promising. During a video check on a patient, Hayes had introduced himself and mentioned an issue hed noticed. The unit doctor stared at him with folded arms, mouth shut tight. Hayes was a former Navy flight surgeon with
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twenty years experience as an I.C.U. doctor and looked to have at least a decade on the St. Annes doctor. But the doctor was no greenhorn, either, and gave him the brushoff: The morning team can deal with that. Now Hayes needed to call him about Mr. Karlage. He decided to do it by phone. Sounds like youre having a busy night, Hayes began when he reached the doctor. Mr. Karlage is really turning around, huh? Hayes praised the doctors work. Then he brought up his three issues, explaining what he thought could be done and why. He spoke like a consultant brought in to help. This went over better. The doctor seemed to accept Hayess suggestions. Unlike a mere consultant, however, Hayes took a few extra steps to make sure his suggestions were carried out. He spoke to the nurse and the respiratory therapist by video and explained the changes needed. To carry out the plan, they needed written orders from the unit doctor. Hayes told them to call him back if they didnt get the orders soon. Half an hour later, Hayes called Mr. Karlages nurse again. She hadnt received the orders. For all the millions of dollars of technology spent on the I.C.U. command center, this is where the plug meets the socket. The fundamental question in medicine is: Who is in charge? With the opening of the command center, Steward was trying to change the answerit gave the remote doctors the authority to issue orders as well. The idea was that they could help when a unit doctor got too busy and fell behind, and thats what Hayes chose to believe had happened. He entered the orders into the computer. In a conflict, however, the on-site physician has the final say. So Hayes texted the St. Annes doctor, informing him of the changes and asking if hed let him know if he disagreed. Hayes received no reply. No thanks or got it or O.K. After midnight, though, the unit doctor pressed the video call button and his face flashed onto Hayess screen. Hayes braced for a confrontation. Instead, the doctor said, So Ive got this other patient and I wanted to get your opinion. Hayes suppressed a smile. Sure, he said. When he signed off, he seemed ready to high-five someone. He called us, he marvelled. The command center was gaining credibility. Armin Ernst has big plans for the command centera rollout of full-scale treatment protocols for patients with severe sepsis, acute respiratory-distress syndrome, and other conditions; strategies to reduce unnecessary costs; perhaps even computer forecasting of patient volume someday. Steward is already extending the command-center concept to in-patient psychiatry. Emergency rooms and surgery may be next. Other health systems are pursuing similar models. The command-center concept provides the possibility of, well, command.
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Today, some ninety super-regional health-care systems have formed across the countrylarge, growing chains of clinics, hospitals, and home-care agencies. Most are not-for-profit. Financial analysts expect the successful ones to drive independent medical centers out of existence in much of the country either by buying them up or by drawing away their patients with better quality and cost control. Some small clinics and stand-alone hospitals will undoubtedly remain successful, perhaps catering to the luxury end of health care the way gourmet restaurants do for food. But analysts expect that most of us will gravitate to the big systems, just as we have moved away from small pharmacies to CVS and Walmart. Already, there have been startling changes. Cleveland Clinic, for example, opened nine regional hospitals in northeast Ohio, as well as health centers in southern Florida, Toronto, and Las Vegas, and is now going international, with a three-hundred-and-sixty-four-bed hospital in Abu Dhabi scheduled to open next year. It reached an agreement with Lowes, the home-improvement chain, guaranteeing a fixed price for cardiac surgery for the companys employees and dependents. The prospect of getting better care for a lower price persuaded Lowes to cover all out-of-pocket costs for its insured workers to go to Cleveland, including co-payments, airfare, transportation, and lodging. Three other companies, including Kohls department stores, have made similar deals, and a dozen more, including Boeing, are in negotiations. Big Medicine is on the way. Reinventing medical care could produce hundreds of innovations. Some may be as simple as giving patients greater e-mail and online support from their clinicians, which would enable timelier advice and reduce the need for emergency-room visits. Others might involve smartphone apps for coaching the chronically ill in the management of their disease, new methods for getting advice from specialists, sophisticated systems for tracking outcomes and costs, and instant delivery to medical teams of up-to-date care protocols. Innovations could take a system that requires sixty-three clinicians for a knee replacement and knock the number down by half or more. But most significant will be the changes that finally put people like John Wright and Armin Ernst in charge of making care coherent, cordinated, and affordable. Essentially, were moving from a Jeffersonian ideal of small guilds and independent craftsmen to a Hamiltonian recognition of the advantages that size and centralized control can bring. Yet it seems strange to pin our hopes on chains. We have no guarantee that Big Medicine will serve the social good. Whatever the industry, an increase in size and control creates the conditions for monopoly, which could do the opposite of what we want: suppress innovation and drive up costs over time. In the past, certainly, health-care systems that pursued size and market power were better at raising prices than at lowering them. A new generation of medical leaders and institutions professes to have a different aim. But a lesson of the past century is that government can influence the behavior of big corporations, by requiring transparency
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about their performance and costs, and by enacting rules and limitations to protect the ordinary citizen. The federal government has broken up monopolies like Standard Oil and A.T. & T.; in some parts of the country, similar concerns could develop in health care. Mixed feelings about the transformation are unavoidable. Theres not just the worry about what Big Medicine will do; theres also the worry about how society and government will respond. For the changes to live up to our hopeslower costs and better care for everyoneliberals will have to accept the growth of Big Medicine, and conservatives will have to accept the growth of strong public oversight. The vast savings of Big Medicine could be widely sharedor reserved for a few. The clinicians who are trying to reinvent medicine arent doing it to make hedge-fund managers and bondholders richer; they want to see that everyone benefits from the savings their work generatesand that wont be automatic. Our new models come from industries that have learned to increase the capabilities and efficiency of the human beings who work for them. Yet the same industries have also tended to devalue those employees. The frontline worker, whether he is making cars, solar panels, or wasabi-crusted ahi tuna, now generates unprecedented value but receives little of the wealth he is creating. Can we avoid this as we revolutionize health care? Those of us who work in the health-care chains will have to contend with new protocols and technology rollouts every six months, supervisors and project managers, and detailed metrics on our performance. Patients wont just look for the best specialist anymore; theyll look for the best system. Nurses and doctors will have to get used to delivering care in which our own convenience counts for less and the patients experience counts for more. Well also have to figure out how to reward people for taking the time and expense to teach the next generations of clinicians. All this will be an enormous upheaval, but its long overdue, and many people recognize that. When I asked Christina Monti, the Steward tele-I.C.U. nurse, why she wanted to work in a remote facility tangling with staffers who mostly regarded her with indifference or hostility, she told me, Because I wanted to be part of the change. And we are seeing glimpses of this change. In my mothers rehabilitation center, miles away from where her surgery was done, the physical therapists adhered to the exercise protocols that Dr. Wrights knee factory had developed. He didnt have a video command center, so he came out every other day to check on all the patients and make sure that the staff was following the program. My mother was sure shed need a month in rehab, but she left in just a week, incurring a fraction of the costs she would have otherwise. She walked out the door using a cane. On her first day at home with me, she climbed two flights of stairs and walked around the block for exercise.
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The critical question is how soon that sort of quality and cost control will be available to patients everywhere across the country. Weve let health-care systems provide us with the equivalent of greasyspoon fare at four-star prices, and the results have been ruinous. The Cheesecake Factory model represents our best prospect for change. Some will see danger in this. Many will see hope. And thats probably the way it should be.
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The Political Scene
Super-Rich Irony
Why do billionaires feel victimized by Obama?
by Chrystia Freeland October 8, 2012
One night last May, some twenty financiers and politicians met for dinner in the Tuscany private dining room at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. The eight-course meal included blinis with caviar; a fennel, grapefruit, and pomegranate salad; cocoa-encrusted beef tenderloin; and blue-cheese panna cotta. The richest man in the room was Leon Cooperman, a Bronx-born, sixty-nine-year-old billionaire. Cooperman is the founder of a hedge fund called Omega Advisors, but he has gained notice beyond Wall Street over the past year for his outspoken criticism of President Obama. Cooperman formalized his critique in a letter to the President late last year which was widely circulated in the business community; in an interview and in a speech, he has gone so far as to draw a parallel between Obamas election and the rise of the Third Reich. The dinner was the highlight of the fourth annual SkyBridge Alternatives Conference, known as SALT, a convention orchestrated by the fund manager Anthony Scaramucci; it brings together fund managers with brand-name speakers and journalists for four days of talking and partying. The star guest at the dinner was Al Gore, who was flanked by Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, and the New York hedge-fund investor Orin Kramer, a friend of Gores and a top Obama fund-raiser. Discussion that night was wide-ranging. The group talked about Apple, on whose board Gore sits, and Google, where Gore is a senior adviser, as well as climate change and energy policy. The most electric moment of the evening, though, was an exchange between Cooperman and Gore. Heavyset, with a lumbering gait, Cooperman does not look like a hedge-fund plutocrat: Scaramucci affectionately describes him as the worst-dressed billionaire on planet earth. Coopermans business model isnt flashy, either. He began his finance career as an analyst of consumer companies at Goldman Sachs, and went on to make his fortune at Omega as a traditional stock-picker. He searches for companies that are cheap and which he hopes to sell when they become dear. (In 1998, Cooperman made a foray into emerging markets, investing more than a hundred million dollars as part of a bid to take over Azerbaijans state oil company, but it went badly wrong. His firm lost most of its money and paid five hundred
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thousand dollars to settle a U.S.-government bribery investigation.) Cooperman had come to the dinner to give Gore a copy of the letter hed written to President Obama. Id like you to read this, he told the former Vice-President. You owe me a small favor. I voted for you, he said, referring to Gores Presidential run, in 2000. In the letter, Cooperman argued that Obama has needlessly antagonized the rich by making comments that are hostile to economic success. The prose, rife with compound metaphors and righteous indignation, is a good reflection of Coopermans table talk. The divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at this point as much visceral as philosophical, between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them, Cooperman wrote. It is a gulf that is at once counterproductive and freighted with dangerous historical precedents.
At the dinner, Al Gore was diplomatic when presented with the letter, and asked Cooperman if he would accept higher taxes. Cooperman said that he wouldif he was treated with respect, and the government didnt squander his money. Cooperman asked Gore what he thought the top marginal tax rate should be. Gores reply was noncommittal, but he pleased the group by suggesting that no matter who wins in November the victor should surround himself with advisers with experience in the private sector. Kramer, the hedge-fund manager and Obama fund-raiser, was quiet, but others in the room were enthusiastic. Villaraigosa gave Cooperman his direct phone number. Barry Sternlicht, the founder of the W hotel chain, and an Obama donor in 2008, said that he agreed totally with Cooperman. Scaramucci, the organizer of the dinner, told me the next day that the guests had witnessed the activation of a sleeper cell of hedge-fund managers against Obama. Thats what you see happening in the hedge-fund community, because they now have the power, because of Citizens United, to aggregate capital into political-action committees and to influence the debate, he said. The President has a philosophy of
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disdain toward wealth creation. Thats just obvious, O.K.? We talked about it all night. He later said, If theres a pope of this movement, its Lee Cooperman. The growing antagonism of the super-wealthy toward Obama can seem mystifying, since Obama has served the rich quite well. His Administration supported the seven-hundred-billion-dollar TARP rescue package for Wall Street, and resisted calls from the Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and others on the left, to nationalize the big banks in exchange for that largesse. At the end of September, the S. & P. 500, the benchmark U.S. stock index, had rebounded to just 6.9 per cent below its all-time pre-crisis high, on October 9, 2007. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have found that ninety-three per cent of the gains during the 2009-10 recovery went to the top one per cent of earners. Those seated around the table at dinner with Al Gore had done even better: the top 0.01 per cent captured thirty-seven per cent of the total recovery pie, with a rebound in their incomes of more than twenty per cent, which amounted to an additional $4.2 million each. Notwithstanding Occupy Wall Streets focus on the one per cent, or Obamas choice of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars as the level at which taxes on family income should rise, the salient dividing line between rich and not rich is much higher up the income-distribution scale. Hostility toward the President is particularly strident among the ultra-rich. This is the group that has benefitted most from the winner-take-all economy: the 0.1 per cent, whose share of the national income was 7.8 per cent in 2009, according to I.R.S. data. Moreover, even as the shifting tides of the global economy have rewarded the richest while squeezing the middle class, the U.S. tax system has favored the very top, as the tax returns of the Republican Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, have illustrated. In 2011, Romney paid an effective tax rate of just 14.1 per cent, and his income of $13.7 million places him in the 0.01-per-cent group. When Obama first ran for President, four years ago, Wall Street formed an important and lucrative part of his base: he raised about sixteen million dollars from the financial sector, compared with McCain, who raised about nine million. Employees of Goldman Sachs contributed more to Obamas campaign than workers at any other firm, on Wall Street or beyond. Like many others in the financial-services industry, Leon Cooperman was impressed when he first saw Obama in action, at a Goldman Sachs event at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, in May, 2007. Goldman had assembled a group of hedge-fund managers to meet the junior senator from Illinois who had the temerity to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Cooperman said he was impressed by Obamas reply to a question about what he would do to taxes on the rich if he were elected. Raise em. Just like that. Raise em, Cooperman recalled Obama saying.
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Although he voted for McCain in 2008, Cooperman was not compelled to enter the political debate until June, 2011, when he saw the President appear on TV during the debt-ceiling battle. Obama urged Americas millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share, pointing out that they were doing well at a time when both the American middle class and the American federal treasury were under pressure. If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge-fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been. They are lower than they have been since the nineteen-fifties, the President said. You can still ride on your corporate jet. Youre just going to have to pay a little more. Cooperman regarded the comments as a declaration of class warfare, and began to criticize Obama publicly. In September, at a CNBC conference in New York, he compared Hitlers rise to power with Obamas ascent to the Presidency, citing disaffected majorities in both countries who elected inexperienced leaders. A month before, Cooperman had written a mock, nine-point Presidential platform, outlining his political convictions, which he distributed to his investors. In it, he called for a freeze on entitlements, a jump in the retirement age to seventy for everyone except those that work at hard labor, and a temporary tax increase for the super-rich to help pay down the debt. He also called for significant spending cuts, so that the growth in government spending could be restricted to one per cent less than the increase in G.D.P. In November, he drafted the letter to the President. It was fifteen hundred words and took him two weeks to write. Im not a gifted writer, Cooperman recalled. I spent a lot of time using a dictionary and a thesaurus. I wanted to sound intelligent. He got help from a friend, a former Omega employee. He also showed the letter to his wife, Toby. The letter begins by acknowledging that Obama inherited an economic mess, but what Cooperman seems to object to most is not the Presidents policies but the highly politicized idiom in which the debate surrounding them was being conducted:
You should endeavor to rise above the partisan fray and raise the level of discourse to one that is both more civil and more conciliatory.... Capitalism is not the source of our problems, as an economy or as a society, and capitalists are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be. As a group we employ many millions of taxpaying people, pay their salaries, provide them with healthcare coverage, start new companies, found new industries, create new products, fill store shelves at Christmas, and keep the wheels of commerce and progress (and indeed of government, by generating the income whose taxation funds it) moving. To frame the debate as one of rich-and-entitled versus poor-and-dispossessed is to both miss the point and further inflame an already incendiary environment. Evident throughout the letter is a sense of victimization prevalent among so many of Americas wealthiest people. In an extreme version of this, the rich feel that they have become the new, vilified underclass. T.
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J. Rodgers, a libertarian and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has taken to comparing Barack Obamas treatment of the rich to the oppression of ethnic minoritiesan approach, he says, that the President, as an African-American, should be particularly sensitive to. Clifford S. Asness, the founding partner of the hedge fund AQR Capital Management, wrote an open letter to the President in 2009, after Obama blamed a small group of speculators for Chryslers bankruptcy. Asness suggested that hedge funds really need a community organizer, and accused the White House of bullying the financial sector. Dan Loeb, a hedge-fund manager who supported Obama in 2008, has compared his Wall Street peers who still support the President to battered wives. He really loves us and when he beats us, he doesnt mean it; he just gets a little angry, Loeb wrote in an e-mail in December, 2010, to a group of Wall Street financiers. The purported activation of the fund-manager sleeper cell is more than the self-aggrandizement of the super-rich. It is having a material and intellectual impact on the 2012 campaign. Historically, incumbent Presidents have enjoyed a strong fund-raising advantage. Going into this years race, President Obama had the further benefit of his record-breaking haul in 2008. Yet the Republican National Committee and Romney, a mechanical campaigner whose ability to inspire passion in the Republican base was widely questioned during the primaries, hold a huge cash advantage over Obama. The biggest shift has been among wealthy businesspeople, particularly in financial services. Romneys advantage is compounded by the advent of Super PACs in this Presidential campaign, which are not subject to the same contribution limits as parties or candidates. The Republican-aligned Restore Our Future, for instance, has raised ninety-six million dollars this election season, and many of its top donors, who give a million dollars or more, work in finance. The President, in Coopermans view, draws political support from those who are dependent on government. Last October, in a question-and-answer session at a Thomson Reuters event, Cooperman said, Our problem, frankly, is as long as the President remains anti-wealth, anti-business, anti-energy, anti-private-aviation, he will never get the business community behind him. The problem and the complication is the forty or fifty per cent of the country on the dole that support him. Framing the political debate as job creators on one side and the President and the fifty per cent of Americans who are supported by the state on the other was striking at the time. It has become even more so since Mitt Romney was secretly recorded at a closed-door fund-raiser in Florida, in May, saying that forty-seven per cent of Americans dont pay income taxes, are dependent on the government, and will vote for President Obama no matter what. Romneys comment has been widely criticized as a mistake that could cost him the election, with even Republicans accusing their candidate of incompetence. Coopermans statement six months earlier shows
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that Romneys forty-seven-per-cent remark wasnt an undisciplined slip by a gaffe-prone politician but, instead, the assertion of a view that is widely held by people of Romneys class. Americas super-rich feel aggrieved in part because they believe themselves to be fundamentally different from a leisured, hereditary gentry. In his letter, Cooperman detailed a Horatio Alger biography that has made him an avatar for the new super-rich. While I have been richly rewarded by a life of hard work (and a great deal of luck), I was not to-the-manor-born, he wrote, going on to describe his humble beginnings in the South Bronx, as the son of working-class parentshis father was a plumberwho had emigrated from Poland. Cooperman makes it known that he gets up at 5:20 A.M. and is at his desk at Omegas offices in lower Manhattan, on the thirty-first floor of a building overlooking the East River and Brooklyn, by 6:40 A.M. He rarely gets home before 9 P.M., and most evenings he has a business dinner after leaving the office. I say that I date my wife on the weekends, he told me one August afternoon at his office. The space is defiantly modest, furnished with nineteen-nineties-era glass coffee tables, unfashionable yellow couches, and family photographs. Coopermans pride in his work ethic is one source of his disdain for Obama. When he ran for President, hed never worked a day in his life. Never held a job, he said. Obama had, of course, workedas a business researcher, a community organizer, a law professor, and an attorney at a law firm, not to mention an Illinois state legislator and a U.S. senator, before being elected President. But Cooperman was unimpressed. He went into government service right out of Harvard, he said. He never made payroll. Hes never built anything. Cooperman differs from many of his fellow super-rich in one important regard. He understands that he isnt just smart and hardworking but that he has also been lucky. I joined the right firm in the right industry, he said. I started an investment partnership at the right time. In the fall of 1963, he enrolled in dental school at the University of Pennsylvania, but within the first week he began to have doubts, and he dropped out soon afterward. My father, may he rest in peace, was going to work saying, My son, the dentist, Cooperman said. It was a total embarrassment amongst his friends. Cooperman went on to make a series of fortunate choices. Chief among those was entering the financial markets, after graduating in 1967 from Columbia Business School. In the sixties, Wall Street wasnt yet the obvious destination for the smart and ambitious, but it was on the verge of becoming the most lucrative industry in America. Cooperman became an analyst at Goldman Sachs, at the time a scrappy partnership that had nearly failed during the Great Depression. In 1976, Cooperman was named a partner. He went on to found Goldmans asset-management business, but, after twenty-five years at the firm, he decided to start his own hedge fund. Between 1991, when Cooperman founded Omega, and the 2008 financial crisis was the best time in history to make a fortune in finance. Coopermans partners who
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stayed behind at Goldman Sachs are hardly paupersand those who stuck around for the 1999 I.P.O. are probably multimillionairesbut the real windfalls on Wall Street have been made by the financiers who founded their own investment firms in the period that Cooperman did. Toby Cooperman grew up five miles away from her husband, in the west Bronx. She asked Cooperman out after they met in French class at Hunter College. Toby has two graduate degrees, in education and as a reading specialist, and works three days a week at a special-needs school in Chatham, New Jersey. Growing up lower-middle-class Jewish in the Bronx, I never knew a Republican, Toby Cooperman recalled. Everybody loved Roosevelt. She is still a liberal, a position that puts her in the minority in their social circle. She can be a socialist because shes married to a capitalist, Cooperman says of his wife, who is strongly pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. She calls Todd Akin, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry morons, and she worries about the underclass. I care more about the disadvantaged people of America, she said, comparing her politics with those of her husband. I have friends who are very dependent on Medicare. Even so, Toby, who voted for Obama in 2008, defers to her husband when it comes to taxation, and she admires his letter to Obama. He used a lot of good words, she said. The New York Post published an abridged version of the letter, and Cooperman e-mailed it to some of his friends and colleagues. It quickly went viral. Within a couple of weeks, Cooperman was being courted by everyone from CNBC and Fox to Al Jazeera. I would say, unequivocally, I never got as much response in anything Ive ever done, in business or outside of business, that I got in that letter, Cooperman said. Cooperman keeps a bulging manila folder of congratulatory notes in his office at Omega. He received hundreds and hundreds of e-mails. According to Cooperman, only one was nasty: If I knew where you lived, Id put a bomb in your car. The folder includes a letter from a former chief of Goldman Sachs and another from a current boss of one of the nations top five banks. There are succinct letters of support from fellow Wall Street titans, typed on thick, embossed paper, and signed with a flourish, and long, angry screeds, which warn, as a ninety-two-year-old lawyer from Fort Worth, Texas, put it, that Barack Obama is a Communist pure and simple, with a determined plan to convert America into a Communistic nation. Like his wife, Cooperman doesnt approve of the rights blurring of the line between church and state, or its stance on gay marriage and abortion. Romney, he told me, has got to appease the conservative wing of his party. But I dont think hes nuts like all those guys are. Like other plutocrats, Cooperman presents his complaint not as a selfish defense of his pocketbook but as a concern about the degradation of the
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American dream. Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JP Morgan Chase, who was widely criticized this spring for the firms highly risky trade that has led to at least six billion dollars in losses, has echoed Coopermans view of the Obama Administration. Speaking on Meet the Press in May, Dimon said that he didnt mind paying higher taxes and wanted a more equitable society. But the anti-business behavior, the sentiment, the attacks on work ethic and successful people by some Democrats had alienated Dimon so much that he said he would now call himself a barely Democrat. Its a question of tone, Cooperman said. The President makes it sound like the problems of the ninetynine per cent are caused by the one per cent, and thats not the case. Yet some of the harshest language of this election cycle has come from the super-rich. Comparing Hitler and Obama, as Cooperman did last year at the CNBC conference, is something of a meme. In 2010, the private-equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, of the Blackstone Group, compared the Presidents as yet unsuccessful effort to eliminate some of the preferential tax treatment his sector receives to Hitlers invasion of Poland. After Cooperman made his Hitler comment, he has said, his wife called him a schmuck. But he couldnt resist repeating the analogy when we spoke in May of this year. You know, the largest and greatest country in the free world put a forty-seven-year-old guy that never worked a day in his life and made him in charge of the free world, Cooperman said. Not totally different from taking Adolf Hitler in Germany and making him in charge of Germany because people were economically dissatisfied. Now, Obamas not Hitler. I dont even mean to say anything like that. But it is a question that the dissatisfaction of the populace was so great that they were willing to take a chance on an untested individual. Its easy to see how even a resolutely unflashy billionaire like Cooperman can acquire a sense of entitlement. In a single hour at his desk one morning in April, the C.E.O.s of two well-known public companies were on the phone to Cooperman lobbying for his support. (He is a major investor in their firms.) Companies courting his investment dollars pick up Cooperman at Teterboro Airport in their private jets to give him a tour of their projects. The Coopermans have chosen an emphatically low-key life style, but when they went to visit a grandchild in Vermont one summer weekend they flew in a private plane. Last July, before he had written the letter, Cooperman was invited to the White House for a reception to honor wealthy philanthropists who had signed Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffetts Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least fifty per cent of their net worth to charity. At the event, Cooperman handed the President two copies of Inspired: My Life (So Far) in Poems, a self-published book written by Courtney Cooperman, his fourteen-year-old granddaughter. Cooperman was surprised that the President didnt send him a thank-you note or that Malia and Sasha Obama, for whom the books were intended as a gift and to whom Courtney wrote a separate letter, didnt write to Courtney. (After
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Cooperman grumbled to a few friends, including Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, Michelle Obama did write. Booker, who was also a recipient of Courtneys book, promptly wrote her a very nice note, Cooperman said.) When Cooperman told me the story of his lucky escape from dental school, he concluded, I probably make more than a thousand dentists, summed up. (A thousand dentists would need to work for a decade and pay no taxes or living expensesto collectively earn Coopermans net worth.) During another conversation, Cooperman mentioned that over the weekend an acquaintance had come by to get some friendly advice on managing his personal finances. He was a seventy-two-year-old world-renowned cardiologist; his wife was one of the countrys experts in womens medicine. Together, they had a net worth of around ten million dollars. It was shocking how tight he was going to be in retirement, Cooperman said. He needed four hundred thousand dollars a year to live on. He had a home in Florida, a home in New Jersey. He had certain habits he wanted to continue to pursue. Im just saying that its not an impressive amount of capital for two people that were leading physicians for their entire work life, Cooperman went on. You know, I lost more today than they spent a lifetime accumulating. One billionaire who is not part of Coopermans sleeper cell is Warren Buffett. In 1982, Buffett sent Cooperman a note, praising one of the research reports he had written at Goldman Sachs. It hangs on Coopermans office wall. Cooperman clearly cherishes the opportunities that the Giving Pledge has given him to spend time with Buffett. He also admires Buffetts life style, which is similar to his own. But Buffetts embrace of the rule that bears his namePresident Obamas proposal that no millionaire should pay less than thirty per cent of his income in taxessets him apart from his peers. Cooperman pointed out that Buffett had adroitly minimized his personal taxes for many years until his late-life star turn as the Presidents favorite billionaire. Im more charitable to him than most, because I have enormously high regard for him, Cooperman said. There are a lot of people who think hes become extraordinarily hypocritical. . . . If he thinks its so wrong, people say, Well, why doesnt he just give his money to the government? Many billionaires have come to view charity as privatized taxation, paid at a level they determine, and to organizations they choose. All things being equal, youd rather have control of the money than the government, Cooperman said. Even if youre giving it away, youd rather give it away the way you want to give it away rather than the way the government gives it away. Cooperman and his wife focus their giving on Jewish issues, education, and their local community in New Jersey, and he is also setting
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up a foundation that will allow his children and grandchildren to support their own chosen causes after he dies. Foster Friess, a retired mutual-fund investor from Wyoming who was the backer of the main Super PAC supporting the Republican primary candidate Rick Santorum, expounded on this view in a video interview in February. People dont realize how wealthy people self-tax, he said. If you have a certain cause, an art museum or a symphony, and you want to support it, it would be nice if you had the choice. The middle class anonymously and nervously pays its thirty-five per cent to the I.R.S., while the superrich pay fourteen per cent, and are then praised for giving five or ten per cent more to pet causes, often with the perk of having their names engraved above the door. Cooperman repeatedly emphasizes his willingness in principle to pay higher taxes, though he sees nothing wrong with paying at the lowest possible rate the law allows. Although Toby still lives in New Jersey, Cooperman told me that he has moved for most of the year to Florida, because I had arthritis, and I just needed the warmer weather. He added, Not to say theres no benefit of a zero state income tax versus ten. Nick Hanauer is a Seattle entrepreneur and venture capitalist who was one of the first investors in Amazon. In a book published this year, he argues that since the Reagan era American capitalists have enjoyed a uniquely supportive set of ideological, political, and economic conditions. Their personal enrichment came to be seen as a precondition for the enrichment of everyone else. Lower taxes for them were a social good, rather than a selfish perk. If you are a job creator, your fifteen-per-cent tax rate is righteous. If you arent, it is a con job, Hanauer told me. The idea that the rich deserve to be rich is a very comforting idea if you are rich. Referring to Obamas You didnt build that remark, at a rally in Virginia in July, which became a flashpoint with the right, Hanauer said that the notion that you built it yourself is what you need to believe to feel comfortable with yourself and your desire not to pay too much in taxes. I asked Cooperman whether Romney should disclose his tax returns. Beyond 2011 and 2010, he has not released any others. Only a fool pays taxes that you dont have to pay, Cooperman said. So what am I going to learn? He made a lot of money and he paid less taxes than the average person, but he did it from legal means. Does that make me think less of him? Itll make me think more of him. Cooperman observed that the smart reaction to Romneys low effective tax rate would be to ask him for the name of his tax lawyer.
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Cooperman prides himself both on not being partisan and on his streetwise Bronx kids suspicion of politicians in general. But hes genuinely enthusiastic about Romney. He approves of Romneys commitment to his family and he admires Romneys private-sector experience. Hes an accomplished businessman, Cooperman said. The fact that hes wealthy and successful I think is good, not bad. Cooperman told me that he thought this was the most important election of his lifetime. In June, he made his biggest ever political contribution, when he wrote a fifty-thousand-dollar check supporting Mitt Romneys Presidential bid after Romneys brother, Scott, visited the Omega offices. Now Cooperman is planning another political volley. With his Omega partner Steven Einhorn and fellow-billionaire Ken Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot, he has drafted a second open letter, which he hopes will be cosigned by a large group of self-made billionaires, and published as a newspaper advertisement in some swing states. Cooperman estimates that it will cost around a million dollars, a sum he says the group will split. Its going to be, you know, We are the one per cent that came from the ninety-nine per cent, and we want to see more of the ninety-nine per cent move in our direction, but we fear the Presidents policies discourage that from happening, Cooperman said. At the SALT conference in Las Vegas, there was no shortage of wealthy financiers who shared Coopermans view. At a Titans of Wall Street panel, Barry Sternlicht, the W hotel-chain founder, appeared with Dan Loeb, the hedge-fund manager who compared Wall Street supporters of Obama to battered wives, and who has given three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Republican Super PACs and thousands more to Republican candidates this campaign cycle. Their session was off the record, but attendees said that the two investors inveighed passionately against the Presidents anti-business attitude. Another panelist suggested that Sternlicht and Loeb form a pro-business ticket and make a run for the White House. The audience cheered. On the final day, Cooperman delivered a presentation on his top stock picks. A few hours later, the conference concluded in the Bellagios grand ballroom, with the most billionaire-friendly speaker of all: Sarah Palin. She strode onto the stage and opened her talk with a rousing greeting, Hello, one per cent! How yall doing!
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Comment
The Choice
by The Editors October 29, 2012
The morning was cold and the sky was bright. Aretha Franklin wore a large and interesting hat. Yo-Yo Ma urged his frozen fingers to play the cello, and the Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, a civil-rights comrade of Martin Luther King, Jr.,s, read a benediction that began with Lift Every Voice and Sing, the segregation-era lamentation of American realities and celebration of American ideals. On that day in WashingtonInauguration Day, January 20, 2009the blustery chill penetrated every coat, yet the discomfort was no impediment to joy. The police estimated that more than a million and a half people had crowded onto the Mall, making this the largest public gathering in the history of the capital. Very few could see the speakers. It didnt matter. People had come to be with other people, to mark an unusual thing: a historical event that was elective, not befallen. Just after noon, Barack Hussein Obama, the forty-seven-year-old son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan, an uncommonly talented if modestly credentialled legislator from Illinois, took the oath of office as the forty-fourth President of the United States. That night, after the inaugural balls, President Obama and his wife and their daughters slept at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a white house built by black men, slaves of West African heritage. Obama succeeded George W. Bush, a two-term President whose misbegotten legacy, measured in the money it squandered and the misery it inflicted, has become only more evident with time. Bush left behind an America in dire condition and with a degraded reputation. On Inauguration Day, the United States was in a downward financial spiral brought on by predatory lending, legally sanctioned greed and pyramid schemes, an economic policy geared to the priorities and the comforts of what soon came to be called the one per cent, and deregulation that began before the Bush Presidency. In 2008 alone, more than two and a half million jobs were lostup to three-quarters of a million jobs a month. The gross domestic product was shrinking at a rate of nine per cent. Housing prices collapsed. Credit markets collapsed. The stock market collapsedand, with it, the retirement prospects of millions. Foreclosures and evictions were ubiquitous; whole neighborhoods and towns emptied. The automobile industry appeared to be headed for bankruptcy. Banks as large as Lehman Brothers were dead, and other banks
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were foundering. It was a crisis of historic dimensions and global ramifications. However skillful the management in Washington, the slump was bound to last longer than any since the Great Depression. At the same time, the United States was in the midst of the grinding and unnecessary war in Iraq, which killed a hundred thousand Iraqis and four thousand Americans, and depleted the federal coffers. The political and moral damage of Bushs duplicitous rush to war rivalled the conflicts price in blood and treasure. Americas standing in the world was further compromised by the torture of prisoners and by illegal surveillance at home. Al Qaeda, which, on September 11, 2001, killed three thousand people on American soil, was still strong. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, was, despite a global manhunt, living securely in Abbottabad, a verdant retreat near Islamabad.
As if to intensify the sense of crisis, on Inauguration Day the national-security apparatus informed the President-elect that Al Shabaab, a Somali affiliate of the Al Qaeda network, had sent terrorists across the Canadian border and was planning an attack on the Mall, possibly on Obama himself. That danger proved illusory; the others proved to be more onerous than anyone had imagined. The satirical paper The Onion came up with a painfully apt inaugural headline: BLACK MAN GIVEN NATIONS WORST JOB. Barack Obama began his Presidency devoted to the idea of post-partisanship. His rhetoric, starting with his Red State, Blue State Convention speech, in 2004, and his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, was imbued with that idea. Just as in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, he had tried to reconcile the disparate pasts of his parents, Obama was determined to bring together warring tribes in Washington and beyond. He extended his hand to everyone from the increasingly radical leadership of the congressional Republicans to the ruling mullahs of the Iranian theocracy. The Republicans, however, showed no greater interest in working with Obama than did the ayatollahs. The Iranian regime went on enriching uranium and crushing its opposition, and the Republicans, led by Dickensian scolds, including the Senate Minority
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Leader, Mitch McConnell, committed themselves to a single goal: to engineer the Presidents political destruction by defeating his major initiatives. Obama, for his part, did not always prove particularly adept at, or engaged by, the arts of retail persuasion, and his dream of bipartisanship collided with the reality of obstructionism. Perhaps inevitably, the President has disappointed some of his most ardent supporters. Part of their disappointment is a reflection of the fantastical expectations that attached to him. Some, quite reasonably, are disappointed in his policy failures (on Guantnamo, climate change, and gun control); others question the morality of the persistent use of predator drones. And, of course, 2012 offers nothing like the ecstasy of taking part in a historical advance: the relection of the first African-American President does not inspire the same level of communal pride. But the relection of a President who has been progressive, competent, rational, decent, and, at times, visionary is a serious matter. The President has achieved a run of ambitious legislative, social, and foreign-policy successes that relieved a large measure of the human suffering and national shame inflicted by the Bush Administration. Obama has renewed the honor of the office he holds. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009the $787-billion stimulus packagewas well short of what some economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, thought the crisis demanded. But it was larger in real dollars than any one of Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal measures. It reversed the job-loss trendaccording to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as many as 3.6 million privatesector jobs have been created since June, 2009and helped reset the course of the economy. It also represented the largest public investment in infrastructure since President Eisenhowers interstatehighway program. From the start, though, Obama recognized that it would reap only modest political gain. Its very hard to prove a counterfactual, he told the journalist Jonathan Alter, where you say, You know, things really could have been a lot worse. He was speaking of the bank and auto-industry bailouts, but the problem applies more broadly to the stimulus: harm averted is benefit unseen. As for systemic reform, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Obama signed into law in July, 2010, tightened capital requirements on banks, restricted predatory lending, and, in general, sought to prevent abuses of the sort that led to the crash of 2008. Against the counsel of some Republicans, including Mitt Romney, the Obama Administration led the takeover, rescue, and revival of the automobile industry. The Administration transformed the countrys student-aid program, making it cheaper for students and saving the federal government sixty-two billion dollarsmore than a third of which was put back into Pell grants. AmeriCorps, the countrys largest public-service program, has been tripled in size.
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Obamas most significant legislative achievement was a vast reform of the national health-care system. Five Presidents since the end of the Second World War have tried to pass legislation that would insure universal access to medical care, but all were defeated by deeply entrenched opposition. Obama bolstered by the political cunning of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosisucceeded. Some critics urged the President to press for a single-payer systemMedicare for all. Despite its ample merits, such a system had no chance of winning congressional backing. Obama achieved the achievable. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the single greatest expansion of the social safety net since the advent of Medicaid and Medicare, in 1965. Not one Republican voted in favor of it. Obama has passed no truly ambitious legislation related to climate change, shying from battle in the face of relentless opposition from congressional Republicans. Yet his environmental record is not as barren as it may seem. The stimulus bill provided for extensive investment in green energy, biofuels, and electric cars. In August, the Administration instituted new fuel-efficiency standards that should nearly double gas mileage; by 2025, new cars will need to average 54.5 miles per gallon. President Obamas commitment to civil rights has gone beyond rhetoric. During his first week in office, he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which protects women, minorities, and the disabled against unfair wage discrimination. By ending the militarys ban on the service of those who are openly gay, and by endorsing marriage equality, Obama, more than any previous President, has been a strong advocate of the civil rights of gay men and lesbians. Finally, Obama appointed to the Supreme Court two highly competent women, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the Courts first Hispanic. Kagan and Sotomayor are skilled and liberal-minded Justices who, abjuring dogmatism, represent a sober and sensible set of jurisprudential values. In the realm of foreign policy, Obama came into office speaking the language of multilateralism and reconciliationso much so that the Nobel Peace Prize committee, in an act as patronizing as it was premature, awarded him its laurels, in 2009. Obama was embarrassed by the award and recognized it for what it was: a rebuke to the Bush Administration. Still, the Norwegians were also getting at something more affirmative. Obamas Cairo speech, that same year, tried to help heal some of the wounds not only of the Iraq War but, more generally, of Western colonialism in the Middle East. Speaking at Cairo University,* Obama expressed regret that the West had used Muslim countries as pawns in the Cold War game of Risk. He spoke for the rights of women and against torture; he defended the legitimacy of the State of Israel while offering a straightforward assessment of the crucial issue of the Palestinians and their need for statehood, citing the humiliationslarge and smallthat come with occupation. It was an edifying speech, but Obama was soon instructed in the limits of unilateral good will. Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hu Jintao, and other autocrats hardened his spirit. Still,
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he proved a sophisticated and reliable diplomat and an effective Commander-in-Chief. He kept his promise to withdraw American troops from Iraq. He forbade torture. And he waged a far more forceful campaign against Al Qaeda than Bush hada campaign that included the killing of Osama bin Laden. He negotiatedand won Senate approval ofa crucial strategic-arms deal with the Russians, slashing warheads and launchers on both sides and increasing the transparency of mutual inspections. In Afghanistan, he has set a reasonable course in an impossible situation. The unsettled situations in Egypt and Libya, following the Arab Spring of 2010, make plain that that regions political trajectory is anything but fixed. Syria shames the worlds inaction and confounds its hopes of decisive intervention. This is where Obamas respect for complexity is not an indulgence of intellectual vanity but a requirement for effective action. In the case of bin Laden, it was necessary to act alone and at once; in Libya, in concert with the Europeans; in Iran, cautiously but with decisive measures. One quality that so many voters admired in Obama in 2008 was his unusual temperament: inspirational, yet formal, cool, hyper-rational. He promised to be the least crazy of Presidents, the least erratic and unpredictable. The triumph of that temperament was in evidence on a spring night in 2011, as he performed his duties, with a standups precision and preternatural lan, at the White House Correspondents Dinner, all the while knowing that he had, with no guarantee of success, dispatched Navy SEAL Team Six to kill bin Laden. In the modern era, we have had Presidents who were known to seduce interns (Kennedy and Clinton), talk to paintings (Nixon), and confuse movies with reality (Reagan). Obamas restraint has largely served him, and the country, well. But Obama is also a human being, a flawed and complicated one, and as the world has come to know him better we have sometimes seen the downside of his temperament: a certain insularity and self-satisfaction; a tendency at timesas in the first debate with Mitt Romneyto betray disdain for the unpleasant tasks of politics. As a political warrior, Obama can be withdrawn, even strangely passive. He has sometimes struggled to convey the human stakes of the policies he has initiated. In the remaining days of the campaign, Obama must be entirely, and vividly, present, as he was in the second debate with Romney. He must clarify not only what he has achieved but also what he intends to achieve, how he intends to accelerate the recovery, spur employment, and allay the debt crisis; how he intends to deal with an increasingly perilous situation in Pakistan; what he will do if Iran fails to bring its nuclear program into line with international strictures. Most important, he needs to convey the larger vision that matches his outsized record of achievement. There is another, larger counterfactual to considerthe one represented by Obamas Republican challenger, Willard Mitt Romney. The Republican Partys nominee is handsome, confident, and articulate. He made a fortune in business, first as a consultant, then in private equity. After running for the
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Senate in Massachusetts, in 1994, and failing to unseat Edward Kennedy, Romney relaunched his public career by presiding successfully over the 2002 Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City. (A four-hundredmillion-dollar federal bailout helped.) From 2003 to 2007, he was the governor of Massachusetts and, working with a Democratic legislature, succeeded in passing an impressive health-care bill. He has been running for President full time ever since. In the service of that ambition, Romney has embraced the values and the priorities of a Republican Party that has grown increasingly reactionary and rigid in its social vision. It is a party dominated by those who despise government and see no value in public efforts aimed at ameliorating the immense and rapidly increasing inequalities in American society. A visitor to the F.D.R. Memorial, in Washington, is confronted by these words from Roosevelts second Inaugural Address, etched in stone: The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have too little. Romney and the leaders of the contemporary G.O.P. would consider this a call to class warfare. Their effort to disenfranchise poor, black, Hispanic, and student voters in many states deepens the impression that Romneys remarks about the forty-seven per cent were a matter not of inelegant expression, as he later protested, but of genuine conviction. Romneys conviction is that the broad swath of citizens who do not pay federal income taxa category that includes pensioners, soldiers, low-income workers, and those who have lost their jobsare parasites, too far gone in sloth and dependency to be worth the breath one might spend asking for their votes. His descent to this cynical viewfurther evidenced by his selection of a running mate, Paul Ryan, who is the epitome of the contemporary radical Republicanhas been dishearteningly smooth. He in essence renounced his greatest achievement in public lifethe Massachusetts health-care lawbecause its national manifestation, Obamacare, is anathema to the Tea Party and to the G.O.P. in general. He has tacked to the hard right on abortion, immigration, gun laws, climate change, stem-cell research, gay rights, the Bush tax cuts, and a host of foreign-policy issues. He has signed the Grover Norquist no-taxhike pledge and endorsed Ryans winner-take-all economics. But what is most disquieting is Romneys larger political vision. When he said that Obama takes his political inspiration from Europe, and from the socialist democrats in Europe, he was not only signalling Obamas otherness to one kind of conservative voter; he was suggesting that Obamas liberalism is in conflict with a uniquely American strain of individualism. The theme recurred when Romney and his allies jumped on Obamas observation that no entrepreneur creates a business entirely alone (You didnt build that). The Republicans continue to insist on the Atlas Shrugged fantasy of the solitary entrepreneurial genius who creates jobs and wealth with no assistance at all from government or society.
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If the keynote of Obamas Administration has been public investmentwhether in infrastructure, education, or healththe keynote of Romneys candidacy has been private equity, a realm in which efficiency and profitability are the supreme values. As a business model, private equity has had a mixed record. As a political template, it is stunted in the extreme. Private equity is concerned with rewarding winners and punishing losers. But a democracy cannot lay off its failing citizens. It cannot be content to leave any of its citizens behindand certainly not the forty-seven per cent whom Romney wishes to fire from the polity. Private equity has served Romney wellhe is said to be worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Wealth is hardly unique in a national candidate or in a President, but, unlike Franklin Rooseveltor Teddy Roosevelt or John KennedyRomney seems to be keenly loyal to the perquisites and the presumptions of his class, the privileged cadre of Americans who, like him, pay extraordinarily low tax rates, with deductions for corporate jets. They seem content with a system in which a quarter of all earnings and forty per cent of all wealth go to one per cent of the population. Romney is among those who see business success as a sure sign of moral virtue. The rest of us will have to take his word for it. Romney, breaking with custom, has declined to release more than two years of income-tax returnsa refusal of transparency that he has not afforded his own Vice-Presidential nominee. Even without those returns, we know that he has taken advantage of the tax codes gray areas, including the use of offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. For all his undoubted patriotism, he evidently believes that money belongs to an empyrean far beyond such territorial attachments. But holding foreign bank accounts is not a substitute for experience in foreign policy. In that area, he has outsourced his views to mediocre, ideologically driven advisers like Dan Senor and John Bolton. He speaks in Cold War jingoism. On a brief foray abroad this summer, he managed, in rapid order, to insult the British, to pander crudely to Benjamin Netanyahu in order to win the votes and contributions of his conservative Jewish and Evangelical supporters, and to dodge ordinary questions from the press in Poland. On the thorniest of foreign-policy problemsfrom Pakistan to Syriahis campaign has offered no alternatives except a set of tough-guy slogans and an oft-repeated faith in American exceptionalism. In pursuit of swing voters, Romney and Ryan have sought to tamp down, and keep vague, the extremism of their economic and social commitments. But their signals to the Republican base and to the Tea Party are easily read: whatever was accomplished under Obama will be reversed or stifled. Bill Clinton has rightly pointed out that most Presidents set about fulfilling their campaign promises. Romney, despite his pose of chiselled equanimity, has pledged to ravage the safety net, oppose progress on marriage equality, ignore all warnings of ecological disaster, dismantle health-care reform, and appoint right-wing judges to
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the courts. Four of the nine Supreme Court Justices are in their seventies; a Romney Administration may well have a chance to replace two of the more liberal incumbents, and Romneys adviser in judicial affairs is the embittered far-right judge and legal scholar Robert Bork. The rightward drift of a court led by Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alitoa drift marked by appalling decisions like Citizens Unitedwould only intensify during a Romney Presidency. The consolidation of a hard-right majority would be a mortal threat to the ability of women to make their own decisions about contraception and pregnancy, the ability of institutions to alleviate the baneful legacies of past oppression and present prejudice, and the ability of American democracy to insulate itself from the corrupt domination of unlimited, anonymous money. Romney has pronounced himself severely conservative. There is every reason to believe him. The choice is clear. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents a constricted and backward-looking vision of America: the privatization of the public good. In contrast, the sort of public investment championed by Obamaand exemplified by both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Acttakes to heart the old civil-rights motto Lifting as we climb. That effort cannot, by itself, reverse the rise of inequality that has been under way for at least three decades. But weve already seen the future that Romney represents, and it doesnt work. The relection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romneya first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obamas Americaone that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equalityrepresents the future that this country deserves. * Obamas speech was given at Cairo University, not at Al Azhar University.
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