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APRIL 2020
THEATLANTIC.COM

How to
Destroy a
Government
The president
is winning
his war on
American
institutions
By George Packer
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O F N O PA R T Y O R C L I Q U E
VOL. 325–NO. 3 APRIL 2020 CONTENTS

Features Cover Story

28
Something in the Water
Opposition to water
fluoridation, while vocal,
has been largely a fringe
crusade. But solid evidence
for fluoridation’s value is
surprisingly hard to find.
By Charles C. Mann

36
How to Tackle a Giraffe
The planet’s tallest animal
is in far greater danger than
people might think. Saving it
begins with a daunting act
of physical courage.
By Ed Yong

44
What Happened to
Jake Millison?
When a young rancher
went missing, his family said
he’d skipped town. But his
friends knew him better than
that, and refused to let him
simply disappear.
By Rachel Monroe

54
How to Destroy
a Government
Every member of FBI leadership who
investigated Trump for conspiracy
By George Packer
and obstruction of justice has since been
forced out of government service and The president is winning his war
subjected to a campaign of vilification.
Andrew McCabe, former acting director
on American institutions.
of the FBI, and his wife, Jill, are
still suffering the consequences.

PHOT OGR APH BY PE YTON FUL FORD 3

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APRIL 2020

Front Dispatches Culture & Critics Back

6
The Commons
9
OPENING ARGUMENT
76
OMNIVORE
88
ESSAY
Discussion & Debate Capitalism’s Addiction The Reigning Master Reiki Can’t Possibly
Problem of Family Drama Work. So Why Does It?
The biggest companies in the Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest What the ascendance of the
digital economy are getting film, his first set outside of 20th-century Japanese healing
their users hooked—and Japan, showcases the great therapy says about shifts in
undermining the pillars of director’s signature theme. thinking about health care
America’s market economy. By Terrence Rafferty By Jordan Kisner
By Maya MacGuineas

14 78
A Sight
100
Ode to Fallibility
SKETCH A poem by Billy Collins By James Parker
Tight With a Dollar
Mitch Daniels has kept Pur-
due’s tuition under $10,000
for seven straight years. How? 80
BOOKS
By Andrew Ferguson
Hilary Mantel Takes
Thomas Cromwell Down

17
MATERIAL WORLD
As the author’s remarkable
trilogy ends, her epic hero’s
self-mastery is newly in doubt.
It’s All So … Premiocre By Judith Shulevitz
A guide to the new age of
Potemkin luxury
By Amanda Mull
84
BOOKS

20
HUMAN NATURE
The World’s Favorite Drug
The dark history of how coffee
took over
On the Cover

The Perks of Being By Michael Pollan

a Weirdo
How not fitting in can lead to
creative thinking
By Olga Khazan PHOTO
RENDERING
BY

24
PATRICK
WHITE

VIEWFINDER
Fine Motor Skills
Photographs by
Christopher Payne

4 APRIL 2020
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THE
Behind the Cover: Art directors at The Atlantic are times. As we learn in George Packer’s startling cover story
asked, with some regularity these days, to perform symbolic about President Donald Trump’s attack on the civil service,
violence upon an emblem of the United States. This is not the future of American institutions hangs by a thread. So it
because of any dislike on the magazine’s part for the country seemed apt to depict a classical column—the kind seen
or its institutions. Rather, the destruction of national on countless government buildings—as a taut rope reaching
symbols has proved a useful metaphor for these parlous its breaking point. — Paul Spella, Art Director

daily. These letter writers—of

all ages, races, and genders—
have opened up about their
various trials and tribula-
tions, and how they’ve tried
to make peace with the shame
that often accompanies the
In the January/ neurological disorder of stut-
tering. I don’t know what the
February issue,
Why Won’t He John Hendrickson
answer is, other than to keep
talking about it. During a

Just Say It? wrote about CNN town hall in February,

Biden received an audience
Joe Biden’s stutter— question about stuttering
and his own. and spoke about his journey
in ways he had previously
avoided on national TV. The
response was profound. I’m not
sure what the future holds for
the former vice president, but
I’m glad his stutter is no longer
the elephant in the room.

Letters

A
As a fellow stutterer, I was moved I know I have been uncom- The Miseducation of
by reading your personal story fortable when others stutter, or the American Boy
alongside Joe Biden’s, and seeing have anxiously laughed or tried
how you have each approached to “help.” I want to apologize to Peggy Orenstein wrote about
your stutters differently. You those I have demeaned with my why boys crack up at rape
handled the subject matter with lack of understanding. jokes, think having a girlfriend
complexity and sensitivity, and it I now see Biden in an entirely is “gay,” and still can’t cry—
brought tears to my eyes. new light and will be cheering and why we need to give them
Maura Lammers him on from the sidelines. As a new and better models of mas-
Spokane, Wash. candidate, he’s not as progressive culinity (January/February).
as I’d like—but I’ll listen more
I stutter, and my 4-year-old son closely for content and less for To the extent that “toxic mas-
stutters, too. I recently told my form when I hear him now. culinity” is real, most men—
husband that I couldn’t stand clearly not all men—age out of
Anne Alftine
Mr. Biden’s narrative that I stut- Medford, Ore. it as they mature. Also, the kind
tered, I worked so hard, and now I of masculinity Peggy Orenstein
don’t. As Hendrickson writes, it’s J o hn He n d r ic kson describes is much less evident
a message to kids and adults who re p li e s: in other groups of teenage boys.
stutter that they must distance I had no idea what to expect Ms. Orenstein’s sample skewed
themselves from a piece of their when we published this almost entirely to young, white
identity to succeed. article. To date, I’ve received athletes. But had she spoken with
Alexis W. more than 500 emails about members of the debate team, for
Arlington, Mass. it, and new messages arrive instance, or the drama club, or

6 APRIL 2020
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C OM MONS
DISCUSSION

&
DEBATE

the school band, she might have Students largely agreed with them credit for, and that knowl- traumatize girls (and other
opened a window to a very dif- the observation that they do not edge concerns them. It should boys) for decades, sometimes for
ferent landscape. speak out against peers engaging not only concern us—the adults life. So I reject that “boys will
Harold G. Knutson
in demeaning speech. “No one around them—it should impel be boys” perspective. As to my
Chicago, Ill. changes when someone just tells an immediate change in our sample, in the first paragraphs
them they’re wrong,” one student actions and attitudes. of the article I wrote that the
While Orenstein brings up said. Perhaps adults need to show
Daniel Maloney
reporting for the book from
some good points, the fact that that minds can be changed, and Baltimore, Md. which it was adapted encom-
her sense of humor, life experi- that such changes are something passed young men of different
ences, and perspective differ so to celebrate. P e ggy O re n st e i n ethnicities, sexual orientations,
much from those of a teenage Finally, young men are in R e pl i e s: gender identities, and interests.
boy means that she is often see- desperate need of role models. Let’s say, for the sake of argu- Most were not athletes.
ing male culture from a female “I know there are bad forms of ment, that Harold G. Knutson As Daniel Maloney indi-
cultural perspective. As a teacher masculinity,” one of my bright- is correct that many guys will cates, young men are generally
of teenage boys, I don’t think that est students said, “but I’m kind “age out of ” the behaviors I not victims. They are, however,
teenagers making offensive jokes, of at a loss for what a good ver- describe (although given the individuals being raised in
testing boundaries, or joking sion looks like.” scope of sexual misconduct a gendered system that can
around with one another is nec- I do not want to make the exposed by the #MeToo move- undermine well-being and
essarily as ominous as she says. frankly ridiculous conservative ment, and the higher rates of skew relationships. All-male
Mary Vansuch
claim that “young men are the substance abuse, loneliness, environments can reinforce
St. Louis, Mo. victims,” but I did walk away and suicide among adult stereotypes and disconnection,
from these conversations feel- men as compared with adult or they can be crucibles of
I am an English teacher at an all- ing deeply sorry for these boys. women, it’s clear that far too change; that choice rests with
boys private school outside Balti- We’re leaving them dangerously many will not). I would still community leaders.
more. Peggy Orenstein’s incisive, immature and unprepared for ask: At what cost, and to
observational piece struck me so adult life. Boys understand whom? The harm that those To respond to Atlantic articles or
much that I assigned it to my themselves—good, bad, and boys who grow out of it inflict submit author questions to The Commons,
please email letters@theatlantic.com.
60 senior students. The discus- ugly—a little more than we give along their learning curve can Include your full name, city, and state.
sion that followed was one of the
most rewarding and interesting
of my teaching career. the time”; I couldn’t find a definition of sarced anywhere.
Many of my students held
a belief that when adults talked
about boys’ lack of vulnerability,
Q • & • A Could you please help me understand what the author
wanted to say? It might just be that I don’t know the
word, as I am not a native English speaker.
they were actually suggesting a The December 1976 issue of The Atlantic included the first — Lilia Festa-Zaripova, Prague, Czech Republic
lack of emotional complexity. published short story by a young writer named Tobias Wolff.
Of course, we adults understand It was called “Smokers,” and took place at a boarding school A Sarced out—pronounced “sarked”—was an expres-
that external vulnerability and where “the one category in the yearbook to which everyone sion used in my school for our competitive habit of put-
internal complexity are differ- aspired was ‘Most Sarcastic.’” Recently, a reader wrote to us ting one another down with sarcasm, especially if one of
ent, but it seems urgent that this with a question about the story. us said something innocent or unguardedly emotional
nuance be properly expressed to or openhearted. I wish I hadn’t included it in the story,
boys so as to enable more pro- Q I loved the story “Smokers.” But it seems there is as it’s caused more confusion than just about any other
ductive conversation. an error in the sentence “You get sarced out all line I’ve ever written. — Tobias Wolff

editorial offices & correspondence The Atlantic considers unsolicited manuscripts, fiction or nonfiction, and mail for the Letters column. Manuscripts will not be returned. For instructions on sending
manuscripts via email, see theatlantic.com/faq. By submitting a letter, you agree to let us use it, as well as your full name, city, and state, in our magazine and/or on our website. We may edit for clarity.
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A discount rate is available for students and educators. Please visit theatlantic.com/subscribe/academic. advertising offices The Atlantic, 60 Madison Avenue, Suite 800, New York, NY 10010, 646-539-6700.

7
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D I S PAT C H E S
OPE NING A RGU M E N T

C A P I TA L I S M ’ S
ADDICTION
P RO B L E M
The biggest, best-known
companies in the digital
economy are getting their
users hooked on their
products—and undermining
the pillars of America’s
market economy.
BY M AYA
MacGUINE AS

9
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Dispatches

it; opportunity, too, can be self-improving algorithms— are manifest. We are spending Tristan Harris, a former tech-
widened by smart public that actively undermine the more and more hours online, nology designer at Google—
choices. Fixing the system will principles that make capital- forgoing time with loved ones. and another former student
not be easy, but we have the ism a good deal for most peo- Deprived of a decent Wi-Fi of Fogg’s—is a co-founder of
tools we need, if we can find ple. Their aim is not merely connection, we grow irritable. the Center for Humane Tech-
the political will to use them. to gain and retain customers, We risk life and limb to send nology. Harris has likened
Capitalism faces another but to create a dependency on texts from the road. In a 2019 his iPhone to having “a slot
threat, however, and it may their products. Common Sense Media survey machine in my pocket,” and
prove more fundamental: Carmakers, appliance of 500 parents, 45 percent con- indeed many of its features
Americans’ growing reliance on manufacturers, and cosmetics fessed to feeling at least some- mimic those of the most addic-
technologies—smartphones, conglomerates have always been what addicted to their phone. tive games on any casino floor.
social media, gaming con- happy to prey upon their cus- Among parents whose children Harris has worked to reveal
soles, shopping sites—that tomers’ desires and insecurities had their own phone, 47 per- the tactics companies use to
have become predatory and if doing so might stoke an cent said they believed that their keep us hooked. On YouTube,
are quickly becoming more so. irrational desire to buy their kids were addicted too. for example, the auto-play
These gadgets and platforms products. But their methods— Many technology compa- function deprives viewers of
have been integrated into nearly advertising, primarily— are nies engineer their products a natural moment at which to
everything we do. Reaching crude compared with the to be habit-forming. A gen- disengage. But it’s not just that
for your phone to read a text, sophisticated tactics available eration of Silicon Valley exec- the site keeps queuing up new
peruse your Instagram feed, or to today’s tech giants. The utives trained at the Stanford clips for you to watch. You-
play a round of Candy Crush buzzes, badges, and streaks of Behavior Design Lab in the Tube’s algorithms are designed
has become second nature, an social media; the personalized Orwellian art of manipulating to hold your interest by serving
involuntary response to even “deals” of commerce sites; the the masses. The lab’s founder, up content you can’t resist, and
the shortest bout of boredom. camaraderie and thrilling com- the experimental psycholo- the algorithms have gotten very
This reliance—addiction is a petition of gaming; the algo- gist B. J. Fogg, has isolated good. As of 2017, users were
better word for it—is under- rithmic precision of the recom- the elements necessary to keep watching a collective 1 billion
mining basic tenets of the mendations on YouTube—all users of an app, a game, or a hours of YouTube videos a day,
American economic model. have been finely tuned to keep social network coming back more than 70 percent of which
In a well-functioning mar- us coming back for more. And for more. One former student, had been served to us in the
ket, consumers have the free- we are: The average person taps, Nir Eyal, distilled the discipline form of algorithmic recom-
dom to act in their own self- types, swipes, and clicks on his in Hooked: How to Build Habit- mendations. Pause over that
interest and to maximize their smartphone 2,617 times a day. Forming Products, an influen- number for a moment: Nearly
own well-being. Prices are trans- Ninety-three percent of people tial manual for developers. In three-quarters of the YouTube
parent, and people have a basic sleep with their devices within it, he describes the benefits of videos we’re watching have
level of trust that exchanges arm’s reach. Seventy-five per- enticements such as “variable been fed to us.
of goods, services, and money cent use them in the bathroom. rewards”—think of the rush of The advent of addic-
benefit all parties. Consumers, The sway these technolo- anticipation you experience as tion as the business model of
it is assumed, are discerning gies have over us is unhealthy, you wait for your Twitter feed some of the country’s larg-
and rational in the face of the and the ways in which they can to refresh, hoping to discover est companies— companies
market’s blandishments—an worsen our social relationships new likes and replies. Introduc- with which many Americans
assumption that is crucial to the and our discourse are worthy ing such rewards to an app or a interact every day—has funda-
whole system’s ability to produce subjects of public concern. But game, Eyal writes approvingly, mentally shifted the balance of
social good. Of course, markets addiction to technology poses “suppresses the areas of the power between consumers and
have never functioned in the another threat, too. When we brain associated with judgment producers. This was not always
real world exactly as they do in are too hooked on our phones and reason while activating the the most likely outcome of the
economics textbooks. But in the and feeds to make decisions parts associated with wanting digital revolution. In many fac-
U.S., the system has tended to that align with our own self- and desire.” Indeed, that brief ets of our lives, technology has
work, allocating resources effi- interest, the free market ceases lag between refresh and reveal improved transparency and
ciently, generating growth, and to be free. is not Twitter crunching data— given potential buyers access
improving the living conditions it’s an intentional delay written to a wealth of information they
and welfare of most people. W h e re a n a f f i n i t y ends into the code, designed to elicit previously lacked. In the ana-
But the new powers in the and addiction begins is not the response Eyal describes. log age, a car shopper would
digital age have built their busi- always clear, but when it comes A growing chorus of crit- have little more than the Kel-
ness models on strategies— to our relationships with tech- ics is warning of the dangers ley Blue Book—and his own
enabled and turbocharged by nology, the signs of addiction inherent in such manipulation. time and willingness to kick

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OPE NING A RGU M E N T

tires—to guide him to the best the promise of a free service. But heart rate and menstrual cycle information they have, whom
deal. Some of us appreciate that Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitch were passing that information they sell it to, and how they use
the Instagram algorithm knows can be considered free only if to Facebook, though the social it to manipulate our behavior.
whether we are 16 or 60 and we decide that our time, and network denied using the infor- And they do, in fact, manip-
whether we prefer Timberland the personal information we’re mation to its advantage.) ulate our behavior. As Harvard
or Tory Burch, and markets to providing, have no value. The suggestion that we need Business School’s Shoshana
us accordingly. to be protected from such tac- Zuboff has noted, the ultimate
But the more reliant we D i g i t a l l i f e , we must tics might seem paternalistic, goal of what she calls “surveil-
become on a given app or plat- remember, is still in its infancy, and if consumers were the ratio- lance capitalism” is to turn peo-
form, the more opportunities and the powers of the corpo- nal actors who populate econ ple into marionettes. In a recent
its makers have to observe our rations that govern that life textbooks, it might be: A person New York Times essay, Zuboff
behavior—and the better they are still growing. Companies could decide for herself whether pointed to the wild success of
understand our behavior, the are studying what we search to exchange some amount of Pokémon Go. Ostensibly a
better they become at manip- for, what nudges we respond privacy for the joy of viewing harmless game in which play-
ulating it to their own ends, to, and what times of day we friends’ photos or the conve- ers use smartphones to stalk
whether their business model engage in certain online behav- nience of tracking her heart their neighborhoods for the
is serving ads or selling to us iors. Soon, cameras and sensors rate. But the addiction econ- eponymous cartoon creatures,
directly. It’s a virtuous cycle for will likely be tracking what omy relies on an asymmetrical the app relies on a system of
the producers, and a vicious frightens, amuses, and arouses exchange of information. Users rewards and punishments to
one for the consumers. Often, us, allowing data collectors to are expected to blithely surren- herd players to McDonald’s,
we barely recognize that we’re know more about us than we der their private information Starbucks, and other stores that
participating in it, because the perhaps even know about our- for access to services. The data pay its developers for foot traf-
barriers to participation are so selves. (The Wall Street Jour- collectors, meanwhile, fiercely fic. In the addiction economy,
low. Many of the most addic- nal has reported that popular guard their own privacy, typi- sellers can induce us to show
tive platforms lure us in with iPhone apps that track users’ cally refusing to disclose what up at their doorstep, whether

ILLUST RATION BY MIKE L JASO / RENDER ING BY BO RJA ALEGRE 11

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Dispatches OPE NING A RGU M E N T

they sell their wares from a to an individual’s browsing that these and other tech behe- they can be consumed. Until
website or a brick-and-mortar history can increase profit by moths have hooked us on their recently, gambling was illegal
store. And if we’re not quite in 14.6 percent. services in order to profit from in most places, and closely reg-
the mood to make a purchase? Here, too, a fundamental us. But we’re also beginning to ulated. But Big Tech has largely
Well, they can manipulate that, benefit of capitalism is threat- recognize the scale of the time been left alone to insinuate
too. As Zuboff noted in her ened. Traditionally, buyers have we’ve lost. We’re dismayed addictive, potentially harmful
essay, Facebook has boasted of benefited from what econo- with how we’re spending our products into the daily lives of
its ability to subliminally alter mists call consumer surplus— days, but feel powerless to millions of Americans, includ-
our moods. the difference between what we abandon our new bad habits, ing children, by giving them
The company has denied would pay for a good and what away for free and even postur-
accusations that it uses this sellers actually charge. With ing as if they are a social good.
power to sell targeted ads; oth- their newfound information The most addictive new devices
ers, however, will surely take advantage, sellers can retain far and apps may need to be put
advantage of our vulnerabili- more of that surplus for them- THE MOST behind the counter, as it were—
ties. Consider “drunk shop- selves. Whether or not the aver- ADDICTIVE packaged with a stern warning
NEW DEVICES
ping,” a bad habit Americans age American understands the AND APPS MAY about the dangers inherent in
have acquired in the age of the concept of consumer surplus, NEED TO BE their use, and sold only to cus-
Buy It Now button: Various individualized pricing violates PACKAGED tomers of age.
surveys have suggested that it a sense of fairness: We’ve long WITH A STERN Perhaps the most imme-
is already a multibillion-dollar assumed—but can assume no WARNING diate and important change
phenomenon. It’s not difficult longer—that the price you pay ABOUT THEIR we can make is to introduce
to imagine any number of tech- is the price I pay. DANGERS AND transparency—and thus, trust—
SOLD ONLY
nology platforms determining TO CUSTOMERS to exchanges in the technologi-
when we’re likely to be tipsy— N o n e o f t h i s is an argu- OF AGE. cal realm. At present, many of
or discerning it from a slur ment against progress. Technol- the products and services with
in our speech or typos in our ogy has helped create a world the greatest power to manipu-
texts—and using that informa- of convenience and abun- late us are “free,” in the sense
tion to time their pitch. dance, and it will continue to that we don’t pay to use them.
Companies are also leverag- do so. Properly channeled, it as anyone who has deleted, But we are paying, in the form
ing our reliance on them—and can improve the functioning then reinstalled, the Facebook of giving up private data that
their knowledge of us—to get of a market economy. But for app can attest. we have not learned to prop-
us to pay more for their prod- society to harness technology’s Will these discontents push erly value and that will be used
ucts. By tracking our purchas- potential, we must understand people toward revolutionary in ways we don’t fully under-
ing patterns (what we will shell how it is reshaping our lives. backlash? Perhaps not. But that’s stand. We should start paying
out for an airline upgrade; how In the past, we may not almost beside the point. The for platforms like Facebook
sensitive we are to surge pric- have entirely trusted General capitalism that is taking shape with our dollars, not our data.
ing), they can make offers based Motors or General Electric, in this century—predatory, So far there is no better
on what each individual is will- but most people didn’t believe manipulative, extremely effec- system than market-based
ing to pay rather than what the they were warping our desires tive at short-circuiting our capitalism to balance freedom,
market will bear. One study or robbing us of our time and rationality—is a different beast fairness, efficient allocation
found that the price of head- agency. By contrast, the big- from the classical version taught of goods, and growth. Given
phones displayed in Google gest, best-known companies in university classrooms. It can- the fondness for free markets
search results varied depend- in the contemporary American not be regarded as beneficent that tends to dominate among
ing on users’ web history, with economy—Facebook, Ama- and should not be given the Silicon Valley executives, tech
prices going up—by a factor of zon, Google—are now viewed benefit of the doubt. Profit innovators ought to tread care-
four—when past searches sug- with growing suspicion and motive and the means to create fully if they want that system to
gested affluence. Another study, mixed emotions. A Pew sur- dependency is too dangerous survive.
by the Brandeis economist Ben- vey found that the percentage a combination.
jamin Reed Shiller, found that of Americans who think tech- American society has long
while a seller with access to nology companies have a net treated habit-forming products Maya MacGuineas is the
basic demographic informa- positive impact on the country differently from non-habit- president of the Committee
tion about a specific buyer can had fallen from 71 percent in forming ones. The government for a Responsible Federal
gain 0.3 percent more profit 2015 to 50 percent in 2019. restricts the age at which peo- Budget and runs its new
than the market price would In part, such sentiments flow ple can buy cigarettes and alco- program Capitalism, Technol-
produce, a seller with access from the dawning realization hol, and dictates places where ogy, and the Economy.

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P RO M OT I O N
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Dispatches

“I’ll tell you a funny story,” said with a garden glove he already Daniels became university about $15,000 to more than
Mitch Daniels, the president had instead of a store-bought, president, in 2013. The univer- $19,000—a jump of 28 per-
of Purdue University. It was $3 golf glove. His parsimoni- sity has also reduced the price cent after taking inflation into
the day before the first home ous nature, when applied to of food services and textbooks. account. Only health care
football game of the season public matters, is one reason he An undergraduate degree from rivals higher education as an
and he was sitting in his cor- received more votes than any Purdue, in other words, is less economic sector so consumed
ner office, overlooking the other officeholder in Indiana expensive today than it was by irrational inefficiencies and
postcard-perfect quad. history in 2008, when he won when Daniels arrived. runaway prices.
“So the cost of a year of reelection as governor, and it’s Only when seen against the The consequences are plain.
undergraduate college at Pur- why he and his university—a inflationary helix of Ameri- Students and their parents
due University, tuition and 150-year-old land-grant school can higher education can the have acquired debt totaling
fees, is $9,992. I’m proud of more than $1.5 trillion, more
that number. than all credit-card debt held
“One day I’m looking at in the U.S., and sufficiently
one of those college guides, large, according to the Federal
and it said, ‘Tuition and fees: Reserve, to be a drag on the
$10,002.’ I called up our economy. Roughly 70 percent
people and said, ‘Lookit here, of college students take out
SK ETC H
there’s a mistake. You got the loans to finance their educa-
wrong number.’ They said, tion. The average undergrad-
‘That’s not a mistake.’ I said, uate leaves school more than
‘Yes, it is. Believe me. I know.’ $25,000 in debt.
They went back and checked At Purdue, by contrast,
and they said, ‘No, that’s the TIGHT WITH nearly 60 percent of under-
right figure.’
“It just bugged me to death.
A DOLLAR grads leave school without any
debt at all.
Does Walmart have a special So how did Purdue do it?
and price it at $10.02? I found Mitch Daniels has kept
out what happened. There’s a Purdue’s tuition under “ I a lwa y s s a y it’s easier
second installment on a pre- $10,000 for seven straight years. to explain what we didn’t do,”
existing gym fee that got tacked How has he done it? Daniels told me. “We didn’t try
on. Ten dollars plus $9,992 to get more money from the
equals $10,002. BY A NDR EW FERGUSON state. We didn’t shift from full-
“Next time I’m at the gym, time faculty and fill the ranks
I ask the guy who runs it, with cheaper, part-time adjunct
‘How’s it going here?’ He said, faculty. We haven’t driven up
‘Membership’s up; we’re doing our percentage of international
well, making a little profit.’ I or out-of-state students,” who
thought, Okay, that’s all I needed pay more than in-staters. Each
to know. And the next meeting of these measures has been
of the board of trustees, they taken up by other public uni-
repealed that fee. versities, even as most have
“So now we’re back to increased their in-state tuition.
$9,992,” he said. There was in West Lafayette, Indiana— singularity of this achieve- Proud as he is of his num-
both self-deprecation and a are objects of curiosity and ment be fully appreciated. The ber, Daniels worries that all the
note of triumph in his chuckle. even wonderment in the world college-affordability crisis has attention paid to the tuition
“I don’t know why it bugged of higher education. become a staple of academic freeze scants the improvements
me so much, but it did.” Most of the attention cen- chin pulls, news stories, con- that the school says it has simul-
He may not know why, but ters on that all-important gressional hearings, and pop- taneously made in educational
I do, and so does everybody number, 9,992. Not only is ular books written in tones quality and financial health.
who’s followed Daniels in his that the dollar amount an in- of alarm and commiseration. Increased enrollment since
nearly 20-year public career. state student will pay Purdue From 2007 to 2017, the aver- the freeze has brought in an
He is notoriously tight with for tuition and fees next year; age annual cost of a degree extra $100 million, reckons
a dollar. Friends recall that as it is also the amount such a at a four-year public univer- Chris Ruhl, the university’s
a beginning golfer, he played student paid Purdue when sity like Purdue rose from treasurer and chief financial

14 APRIL 2020
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officer. The benefits of the federal budget, Daniels played the third. Then it became the a couple of big things, and lots
improved balance sheet can the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t thing we’re known for.” of little things.” Low-hanging
be seen across campus. Accord- Always Get What You Want” In Indianapolis, Daniels’s fruit was plucked early: The
ing to the university’s figures, over the loudspeaker. As gover- administration was known for residence halls, which housed
Purdue’s full-time faculty at nor, in his effort to balance the selecting successful business- young people who all owned
all levels has increased, result- budget and pile up a surplus, he people and placing them across cellphones, still used landlines,
ing in a student-teacher ratio devised a host of economizing state government. He’s done so they were quickly removed.
of 13 to 1, compared with the measures, including printing all the same at Purdue. Michael Payroll, which incredibly was
Big Ten average of more than state documents in the narrow- B. Cline, the former head of the still using paper time sheets,
15 to 1. Faculty pay is up too. est font he could find to save state’s transportation depart- was digitized. Food service
The salary of a full-time profes- on paper and ink. “No saving is ment, is now running Purdue’s was centralized.
sor at Purdue has increased by Daniels also addressed
12 percent over the past five complaints from students
years, against a conference- and faculty about the price of
average increase of 7 percent. textbooks. After six months
Meanwhile, a visitor can’t of weighing options, Purdue
help but notice that large struck a deal with Amazon to
stretches of Purdue’s campus provide textbooks, saving stu-
are construction sites: for new dents 30 percent on average
research facilities; new residence and more than $2 million in
halls; a learning center the size the first few years, according
of a power plant, which is what to the school. The arrangement
stood in its place until six years lapsed recently, but Amazon’s
ago. Applications for admission first brick-and-mortar store is
are up 37 percent. still on campus, and textbook
Tuition increases were once costs remain lower than before.
a fact of life at Purdue. The And so a virtuous circle
chair of the board of trust- was established, according
ees, Michael Berghoff, recalls to Purdue and its president.
his first meeting as a trustee, The predictably flat tuition
more than a decade ago, dur- attracted more students, creat-
ing which the school’s annual ing a larger student body that
tuition hike came up: “Most brought in increased revenue,
discussions were about how which allowed for the hiring of
much, very little about whether more and higher-quality faculty,
it was necessary.” whose research the university
A few years later, the could profitably license to the
board offered Daniels the private sector, where alumni,
presidency— a controver- delighted at the celebrated
sial choice, Berghoff told me, achievements of their alma
owing to Daniels’s lack of mater, helped increase dona-
academic experience beyond tions by 136 percent over six
his Princeton undergraduate years, which in turn has helped
degree and law degree from too small to disregard,” he said administrative operations, and keep the freeze in place.
Georgetown. During his eight then and says now. Ruhl, the former state budget While Daniels’s approach
years as governor, Daniels had So Berghoff wasn’t com- director, is now the university’s wins mostly praise on campus,
become famous for his penny- pletely surprised when Dan- CFO and treasurer. David Sanders, a biological-
pinching, as he had in his iels, at his first trustee meeting, What they described to sciences professor and frequent
previous job directing Presi- floated the idea of a tuition me could be a new model— critic of Daniels’s policies, told
dent George W. Bush’s bud- freeze. “I thought it would be a change in the culture—of me he hears quiet grumbles.
get office. Bush nicknamed a one-off, just to send a message finance in higher education, “The freeze is a marvelous
him “The Blade.” On the day that we could break this long, bringing market pressures to admissions marketing tool,”
when representatives of gov- long run of increases,” Dan- bear on processes that had Sanders said. But the surge in
ernment agencies came to pick iels told me. “It turned out we never faced them before. Sav- enrollment “puts a lot of stresses
up their copies of the annual could do it a second year, then ings came, Daniels said, “from on the city and the campus.”

ILLUS TRA TION BY A RINZE ST ANLEY 15

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Dispatches SK ETC H

In his own department of bio- Latino students alone account but not at all surprised by his university with a for-profit
logical sciences, despite the for 36 percent of the U.S. reference … to Black students business. “It’s an attempt to
campuswide improvement college-age population. as creatures. It afflicts me that inject free-market principles
in the student-teacher ratio, Daniels expresses frustration this is how he speaks even when into public education,” says
“introductory-class sizes are at the relative lack of progress. ‘boasting’ on students.” Bill Mullen, an American-
much larger,” requiring more A few years ago, he got the After complaining that studies professor. It’s “a way
students to monitor lectures idea for the university to spon- his figure of speech had been of blurring the lines between
remotely. And as resources get sor high schools in Indiana’s misinterpreted, Daniels took public and private. There’s less
reallocated, “there’s far more largest cities. “We realized we two weeks to issue an apology. of an appreciation for higher
competition between faculty had to build our own pipe- “The word in question was ill education as a public good.”
and between departments,” he line if we wanted to recruit chosen and imprecise and, in But Daniels appears unfazed
said. “The institution is less col- minorities and poor kids,” he retrospect, too capable of being by the criticism, and the larger
legial.” (Most faculty members said. “We couldn’t wait on the misunderstood,” Daniels wrote. Purdue community seems
contacted for this story declined public high schools to catch “I accept accountability for the quite happy with the way the
to comment.) poor judgment involved.” institution has grown in size
Beyond the new Purdue- and reputation. As it happens,
H o w ev e r w i d e ly t h e s e run high schools, the other Graham visited the campus
misgivings are shared, no one AT PURDUE, great populist initiative of Dan- last September, and we tagged
denies that the freeze and the NEARLY iels’s tenure—and perhaps the along as Daniels snaked his way
other innovations have set Pur- 60 PERCENT most controversial—is the pur- through the stadium parking
due in a new direction, one OF UNDER- chase, for $1, of the for-profit, lot, choked with tailgaters fuss-
much more in keeping with GRADS LEAVE mostly online Kaplan Uni- ing over grills the size of Ping-
Daniels’s brand of populism. SCHOOL versity, from the Washington, Pong tables. Young and old
“When I got here,” he WITHOUT D.C., businessman Donald greeted him like a rock star—a
ANY DEBT.
told me, “there was an effort Graham, in 2017. Overnight, short, balding rock star. No one
to become the ‘Stanford of Purdue Global, as it’s now called him by his title or his last
the Midwest,’ an elite institu- called, brought approximately name. Mitch!
tion along those lines,” which 30,000 online students, most of A grill master in a Purdue
would have meant shrinking up to us.” The original Purdue them part-time, into Purdue’s apron, Purdue sweatshirt, and
enrollment, cutting out kids at Polytechnic High School, in orbit and made the school one Purdue cap saw me scribbling
the low end of the class to skew Indianapolis, will graduate its of the largest online educators and offered a comment. His
the average toward the top. first class, of 115 kids, in 2021. in higher ed. name was Chuck, he said. He
Daniels speaks frequently “My dream is that we can slip a Daniels had long thought was from Green castle, and
of Purdue’s mission as a land- Purdue scholarship in with each that online education would his two kids had gone to Pur-
grant school, chartered under diploma,” he said. be crucial to expanding the due. “This man here,” he said,
Civil War–era legislation Even so, Daniels hasn’t school’s mission of accessibil- pointing at Daniels, who was
that helped establish colleges escaped the controversies that ity, but the idea of building grinning for an endless line of
devoted to teaching agricul- attend diversity issues in higher the infrastructure from scratch selfies, “saved me thousands
ture, engineering, and other education. Last November, was daunting. The purchase of of dollars.”
practical arts to the children Purdue’s student newspaper Kaplan U solved the problem. By the time we had crossed
of prairie pioneers. “We were released audio of Daniels dis- Kaplan—best known for its the parking lot, half an hour
put here to democratize higher cussing faculty hiring with a test-prep service—continues later, Don Graham was beam-
education,” he said. group of mostly minority stu- to provide back-end and mar- ing from his trip through the
The number of domes- dents. “At the end of this week,” keting services for Purdue delighted scrum of parents and
tic under graduate “under- he told them, “I’ll be recruit- Global in return for a percent- students and alumni.
represented minorities” ing one of the rarest creatures age of revenue. “These people love you,
at Purdue (URMs, in the in America—a leading, I mean Daniels presented the Mitch!”
acronym-happy world of col- a really leading, African Ameri- Kaplan deal to the Purdue Daniels shrugged but was
lege admissions) grew from can scholar.” community as a fait accompli; clearly pleased.
2,483 in 2012 to 3,461 in Social media erupted. The the trustees quickly approved “Well,” he said, “they know
2019. Yet as the student body hashtag #IAmNOTACreature it. Reaction ranged from sur- it’s reciprocated.”
has also grown, the percent- took off on Twitter. D’Yan prise to puzzlement to deep
age of URMs among under- Berry, the president of Purdue’s skepticism. Foremost was the
graduates has remained about Black Student Union, wrote worry about commingling Andrew Ferguson is a staff
10 percent—while black and that she was “disappointed the operations of a public writer at The Atlantic.

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Dispatches

M AT ERIA L WOR LD
protect design as intellectual
property). Absent any real
information about what I’d
actually need to spend to end
up with something decent to
sit in, I was left to decide how
much it was worth to me to
announce to my visitors and
Instagram followers that I’m
also a mildly unimaginative
person who appreciates Eames.
The presence of many
nice-enough choices without
IT ’S ALL SO … PREMIOCRE any meaningful way to distin-
guish among them is a fun-
A guide to the new age of Potemkin luxury damental dysphoria of mod-
ern consumerism. Anybody
BY A M A NDA M U L L can track in intimate detail
how the wealthy and stylish
spend their money via social
media, and just when you’ve
learned exactly what you can’t
have, the internet swoops in
to offer a look-for-less utopia
of counterfeits, rip-offs, and
discount cashmere sweaters,
perfectly keyed to the perfor-
mance of a lifestyle that young
Americans desperately want
but can’t afford.

T
wo y e a r s ag o , and Ray Eames, the mid- popular reproductions costs I t wa s 2 0 1 7 , and Venkatesh
while trying to rent century designers who helped $595 from Herman Miller, Rao, a writer and management
and furnish a new introduce modernism to the the design’s original manu- consultant, was having lunch at
apartment, I was United States. The couple’s facturer. I needed at least four. a fast-casual vegan chain restau-
defeated repeatedly work has been central to the Nearly as quickly as the rant in Seattle when the phrase
by the answer to furniture style’s American internet dashed my hopes of premium mediocre popped into
the question How much could revival in the past 20 years, owning the coveted chairs, his head. It described the sensa-
it possibly cost? Getting a key but if you encounter high- it came to my rescue—by tion he was having as he tucked
cost $3,200 when it required end interior design mostly showing me the wares inside into his meal—one of a not-
paying a broker fee to some on Instagram and Pinter- its coat. In the days after I’d unpleasant artificial gloss (air-
guy named Steve. Four planks est, you probably know the spent a few minutes browsing line seating with extra legroom;
of wood and some metal pip- Eameses by their chairs. The for the real thing, ads on Ins- “healthy” chickpea chips that
ing cost $1,499 when they most famous pieces include a tagram, Facebook, and Google taste like Doritos; $40 scented
were a West Elm bookcase. I leather lounger-and-ottoman offered up identical chairs at candles) on an otherwise thor-
had moved and bought fur- set with a curved wooden base virtually every price level from oughly unspecial experience. I
niture before, of course, but that’s particularly beloved by discount decor retailers such had a similar eureka moment
the financial horror is fresh men who work at start-ups, as Wayfair and Overstock. I in early 2018, when the port-
every time. This go-round, as well as a series of dining could pay $35, $60, or $100 manteau premiocre came to
the kitchen chairs were what chairs with colorful molded- each for chairs with no dis- me while I was trying to parse
broke me. plastic bucket seats. Argu- cernible differences from one the discriminating features
Like a lot of young people ably the most recognizable another, or from the “Eiffel” among mid-priced bed linens
aspiring to move upward, I of the latter is nicknamed the they were legally aping (abet- from several start-up brands. I
was in the market for some “Eiffel” for its trussed-metal ted by copyright and patent found Rao’s observation while
furniture crafted by Charles leg structure; one of the most laws that make it difficult to checking to see whether, against

17
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Dispatches

all odds, I had come up with noticing a pervasive pattern of being chauffeured around of buying or making a whole
an original idea. Instead, I’d in everything from groceries town financially accessible, cake to enjoy over time or
noticed something that many to clothing, and entire styles yet requires that you brush share with family or friends.
others also saw wherever they of architecture in gentrify- thighs with strangers sharing Cupcakes look great in pho-
looked, once they had heard ing neighborhoods,” he told the back seat. tos, but as has been frequently
the idea articulated. me. Premium mediocrity, by Rao pegs the beginning of noted in the past decade, many
When Rao mentioned his definition, is a fancy tile premium mediocrity’s ascent of them are not exactly deli-
“premium mediocre” to his backsplash in an apartment’s to the 2008 financial collapse, cious. I remain unconvinced
wife, who was eating with tiny, nearly nonfunctional when cupcakes ruled the culi- that anyone ever took genuine
him that day, she immedi- kitchen, or french fries doused nary landscape. The cupcake is pleasure in eating a dry, fist-
ately got it. So did his Face- in truffle oil, which contains a classic example: It’s a single- size Crumbs Bake Shop cup-
book friends and Twitter fol- no actual truffles. It’s Uber serve dessert on demand, cake topped with a mountain
lowers. “People had started Pool, which makes the luxury minus the true indulgence of hardened buttercream.

18 PHO TOGRAPH B Y TAM ARA SH OPSIN AND JASON FU LFORD

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M AT ERIA L WOR L D

As with many aesthetically problem of class mobility that The meteoric popularity look-for-less products we buy
pleasing food trends that have consumer choices can’t change. of Instagram in the 2010s has work great. And when they
thrived in the era of constant The market has looked upon meant that not only can the do, you feel like you’re slipping
internet access, the value of a the people it serves and said, famous detail their favorite through a tear in the fabric of
deluxe cupcake isn’t necessar- “Let them eat cupcakes.” clothes, snacks, and skin-care capitalism. My $250 bookcase
ily in its physical consumption. lines for their fans, but so can displays my books—both in
Instead, it’s more like an edible S o c i a l s t r i v e r s h av e the run-of-the-mill wealthy, real life and in photographs—
Gucci logo belt, or a sprinkle- been buying knockoffs in who sometimes amass audi- just as well as the $1,499 one
topped boutique hotel with a America since modern con- ences in the six or seven fig- I balked at buying. I recently
beautifully decorated lobby bar sumerism took shape, in the ures. With that many fol- spent $35 on a viral hair gadget
and painfully cramped showers. decades after World War II. lowers, the random rich can that makes my hair look pro-
These goods are the least expen- The advent of industrialized charge brands to feature their fessionally styled in a way that
sive way to gain temporary manufacturing and mass media stuff—the upshot being that, my $300 blow-dryer never
entry to a particular consumer helped create marketing as we has. It’s intoxicating to believe
class—for example, Gucci belts know it, but it’s hard to imagine for a moment that maybe rich
cost $450, while one of the that the internet would be so people are the ones who have
brand’s bags could easily set bloated with speciously opu- been getting conned all along,
you back $3,500. The brand’s lent mid-priced home decor EVERY TIME spending their money on cars
belts are not any better at belt- and personal-wellness products I DARED and vacations and sweaters that
ing than many far less expen- if not for celebrities and, more TO DREAM aren’t that much nicer than
sive options, but they provide recently, Instagram. THAT I’D what regular people can afford.
a conduit for a person of mid- Rao is right to date the SOMEHOW Every time I dared to dream
dling means to transport herself acceleration of premium medi- HACKED TASTE that I had somehow hacked
into the lavish life she wants, if ocrity to the late 2000s, but it AFTER I taste in the year after I pur-
PURCHASED
only within the highly edited wasn’t just the recession that THE FAKE chased the fake Eames chairs,
confines of a carefully staged drove the phenomenon. The EAMES CHAIRS, the chairs quickly reminded me
Instagram photo. streets of Los Angeles and New THE CHAIRS of my hubris. Money buys you
Crumbs Bake Shop expan- York had turned into paparazzi QUICKLY plenty of advantages in a soci-
ded to 79 locations in the Uni- wonderlands, fueled by a mix- REMINDED ety built to reward its accumu-
ted States before it went out of ture of booming tabloid sales ME OF lation, and it almost certainly
business in 2014, but the value and new blockbuster gossip MY HUBRIS. buys you chairs that don’t need
system that enabled it remains: blogs such as TMZ. Photog- to be flipped over once a week
A plethora of subpar options raphers tailed Paris Hilton, to have their screws tightened.
is the foundation of modern Lindsay Lohan, and Nicole That’s what I regularly did
shopping. Most Millennials Richie while they bought lattes until a visiting friend tumbled
were too young to get a foot- and spilled out of nightclubs; absent a notable skill or exper- out of one and onto the floor,
hold in the economy before then journalists and bloggers tise, a passel of ordinary and at which point my embarrass-
it fell out from under them, detailed exactly what they were in many cases insipid people ment about my own premium
and now, confronted with the wearing, carrying, and driving parlay family wealth or a remu- mediocrity overtook the finan-
precariousness of working- and for a ravenous audience, often nerative marriage into a busi- cial worries that had consigned
middle-class life in the decade offering up “looks for less” to ness all its own. For many of me to it. I bought solid metal
after the Great Recession, the help readers imitate what they us, however, luxury is only cre- dining chairs, which were more
most many can do is playact saw. This was the first time ative artifice. In previous gen- expensive than my knockoffs
modern success for as long as most Americans got such an erations, fake it ’til you make but less likely to fail at their
possible while hoping the real exhaustive and unvarnished it might have meant embel- one job. In the end, the inter-
thing happens eventually. look at how famous people lishing your résumé to land net worked exactly as it’s been
All of the faux-Eames chairs behave when they’re not on a stable corporate job with a designed to: I caved to the thrill
the internet tried to sell me are the red carpet—a glimpse of pension. Now it means pair- of a deal that felt too good to be
props for this Kabuki theater: the wealth that had previously ing a Gucci belt with a Zara true, and when that turned out
things you buy because they’re been consigned to the pages wardrobe and hoping you’re to be the case, I went back out
masquerading as more excep- of glossy fashion magazines, hot enough to eventually hawk to shop again.
tional than they are. Some of where it was cleaned up and teeth-whitening gadgets.
these products are perfectly made tasteful, or to the per- Even if conspicuous con-
good at fulfilling their func- sonal knowledge of maids, sumption is a less-than-reliable Amanda Mull is a staff writer
tion, but they paper over a cooks, and assistants. career path, sometimes the at The Atlantic.

APRI L 2020 19
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H U M A N NAT U R E
the rejected participants drew
aliens that looked radically dif-
ferent from humans—they had
all of their appendages sticking
out of one side of their body, or
their eyes below their nose. The
outcasts’ drawings were more
creative, as rated by three inde-
pendent judges.
So rejection and creativity
THE PERKS OF were related, Kim determined.
BEING A WEIRDO But with a caveat. The advan-
tage was seen only among par-
ticipants who had an “indepen-
How not fitting in can lead to creative thinking dent self-concept”—meaning
they already felt they didn’t
BY OLGA K H A Z A N
belong. There appeared to be
something about being a weirdo
that could uncork your mind
and allow new ideas to flow.
For many people, that
effect starts in childhood.
When Arnold M. Ludwig, an
adjunct psychiatry professor at
Brown University, examined

M
the lives of more than 1,000
y childhood American kids do to losers. actually more creative, so she eminent people—including
was, by most Undeterred, my dad eagerly decided to test the theory by Frida Kahlo, Jean-Paul Sartre,
definitions, raked the toilet paper into a inviting some volunteers to and John Lennon—for his
pretty strange. garbage bag and put it in my her lab to complete a cou- book The Price of Greatness, he
I grew up a parents’ bathroom for future ple of exercises. Before they found that creative types, such
Russian Jewish use. “Free toilet paper!” he said began, Kim and her colleagues as artists and writers, were
immigrant in Midland, Texas, happily over dinner. “rejected” some of the study more likely than, say, business-
in a region whose biggest claims All I wanted to be was nor- subjects by telling them they people to be considered “odd
to fame are being the onetime mal. I wanted to be as Ameri- weren’t picked to work as part or peculiar” as children, and
home of George W. Bush and can as my classmates; I wanted of “the group.” There was no more likely than public offi-
the inspiration for Friday Night a past that, when I explained group—Kim and her team cials or soldiers to be consid-
Lights. In preschool, I got in it to people, compelled no just wanted to make them ered “different” as adults. In his
trouble for not praying before one to ask “Why?” about any feel left out. Others weren’t 1962 study of architects, the
eating my snack; later, I didn’t part of it. But with time, I’ve snubbed in the same way. psychologist Donald W. Mac-
know what this “Super Bowl” come to realize that there’s Kim asked the participants to Kinnon similarly found that
everyone kept talking about an upside to being different perform a pair of exercises on the families of more creative
was. I felt hopelessly different from everyone around you. In paper. In one, they were asked architects had moved around a
from everyone else in our town. fact, a body of social-science to determine what united a lot when they were kids, which
Even after we moved to a research suggests that being an series of seemingly unrelated appeared “to have resulted fre-
Dallas suburb, I never encoun- oddball or a social reject can words (fish, mine, and rush, for quently in some estrangement
tered another Russian immi- spark remarkable creativity. instance—the answer is gold). of the family from its imme-
grant kid like me. I rode the Sharon Kim, who teaches In the other, they were told to diate neighborhood,” he said.
bus alone. I spent almost every at Johns Hopkins Univer- draw an alien from a planet Not surprisingly, many of the
evening alone. I began talking sity’s business school, told very unlike our own. more creative architects said
to myself—a habit that has me she’d always noticed that The rejects, it turned out, they’d felt isolated as children.
unfortunately stuck. Once, some people credit their cre- were better at both exercises.
someone toilet-papered our ative successes to being lon- For the alien task, the non- An unusual childhood
house, and I had to explain to ers or rebels. Kim wondered rejected participants drew stan- is not the only thing that
my parents that this is what whether social pariahs are dard, cartoonish Martians. But can make you more creative.

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Dispatches

ILL UST RATION BY ALEX ME RTO 21

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Dispatches H U M A N NAT U R E

Being considered “weird” in frames of mind, rather than your mental capacity. It might about 80 percent. Perhaps the
your culture can also enhance exotic locales. In a small study, be weird for, say, a grizzly bear participants in those trials felt
an element of creativity called Rodica Damian, an assistant to invade your yard and destroy as though they and the dis-
“integrative complexity.” Peo- psychology professor at the your car. But rather than bask- senter could at least be weird
ple who are strong in inte- University of Houston, and ing in your newfound creativ- together. Interestingly, they
grative complexity tend to her colleagues had college ity afterward, you’re probably were less likely to conform
handle uncertainty well and students engage in a virtual- going to be calling your insur- even if the dissenter disagreed
excel at reconciling conflict- ance company. with the crowd but was still
ing information. They’re often Regardless, trying to think wrong. The dissenter appeared
able to see problems from about your weirdness in a posi- to give the participants permis-
multiple perspectives. tive way—a process called cog- sion to disagree.
Chris Crandall, a psychol- PEOPLE WHO nitive reappraisal—can help The liberating effect of dis-
ogy professor at the University ARE ON you cope with the adversity senting viewpoints has been
of Kansas, told me that peo- THE PERIPHERY that often comes with being an replicated in other studies,
ple who are on the periphery OF SOCIETY outlier. Reframing what makes and it underscores the value of
of society tend to be freer to TEND TO BE you weird as being what gives having a diverse array of people
FREER TO
innovate and change social INNOVATE AND you strength can, ultimately, around to poke holes in prevail-
norms. “Fashion norms come CHANGE SOCIAL make you happier. ing ideas. The reason minority
from the bottom up,” he said. NORMS. views are so potent, accord-
Outsiders are less concerned Unusual perspectives ing to research on persuasion,
with what the in-crowd thinks can also boost the decision- is that people tend to scrutinize
of them, so they have more lee- making power of the broader them more carefully. When we
way to experiment. group you’re a part of. Solo- hear a dissenting view, we think
In fact, people who don’t reality exercise in which the mon Asch’s famous experi- more critically about what’s
fit neatly into a particular laws of physics didn’t apply. In ments in the 1950s revealed being said, prompting a con-
group have been found, over this virtual world, things fell up the occasional ludicrousness sideration of different sides
and over, to perform better instead of down. When com- of conformity. When told to of an issue. Majorities, mean-
at outside-the-box thinking. pared with another group that match a line with one of three while, spur us to think only
Foreigners are often consid- performed an exercise in which other lines (two of which were about data that support the
ered strange, but there are the laws of physics functioned obviously different sizes), par- majority perspective. As Char-
psychological advantages to normally, those who had the ticipants selected a wrong lan Nemeth and Jack Goncalo
feeling like a stranger. Children physics-warping experience option about one-third of the put it in the book Rebels in
who are exposed to multiple were able to come up with time when others in the group, Groups, “Minorities stimulate
languages—perhaps because, more creative answers to the confederates working with the more originality while majori-
like me, they were raised in a question “What makes sound?” researcher, gave that wrong ties stimulate more conven-
country far from where they Damian has a theory she’s answer too. The experiment tionality of thought.”
were born—are better able researching: that all kinds of has become a classic example Unfortunately, though, when
to understand an adult’s per- unusual experiences can boost of how willingly people follow people stop being “weird,”
spective, and they may go on creativity. For example, people a crowd. When one participant these benefits go away. When
to become better communica- often report having break- was later asked why he con- people who were once in the
tors overall. In one experiment, throughs after magic-mushroom formed in this way, he said he minority become the major-
people who had lived abroad trips or extreme adventures. was worried about being seen ity, research shows that they
were especially good at find- “The idea behind this is that as “peculiar.” That is, he didn’t tend to become more closed-
ing hidden solutions to word once you’ve experienced things want to be considered weird. minded. Weirdness has its
and conceptual problems. That that violate norms and rules But less well known is a perks, but nothing is weird
might help explain why Pablo and expectations, you’re more variation of the experiment forever.
Picasso began experimenting open to more things like that,” in which Asch introduced
with Cubism in Paris, and Damian told me. “You expe- another variable—this time,
George Frideric Handel com- rienced that the world doesn’t one of the confederates gave
posed his Messiah while living have to work by your rules, so the right answer while the rest Olga Khazan is a staff writer
in England. you can break the rules.” of the crowd tried to mislead at The Atlantic. This article
Happily for those who have Of course, more weirdness is the participant. Having just is adapted from her forth-
never lived abroad, this creativ- not always better. If something one person who broke with coming book, Weird: The
ity boost can also happen for too jarring happens to you, just the majority reduced confor- Power of Being an Outsider
people who live in unusual dealing with it might use up all mity among the responses by in an Insider World.

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VIE W FIN DER

24 APRIL 2020
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Dispatches

Fine Motor Skills

Photographs by Christopher Payne

The workers at the Ward Leonard factory in Thomaston,

Connecticut, build motors for heavy industrial and mili-
tary use. Unlike most other motors manufactured these
days—those found in household appliances such as washing
machines and dryers, for example—Ward Leonard’s are
fabricated and assembled by hand, in accordance with a
painstaking process. That process involves inserting copper
coils into metal slots fitted with insulating paper, wrapping
the ends of the coils in tape, and dipping the whole thing
in resin. It is still the best way to ensure that the finished
motors are able to withstand the decades of wear they will
face on Navy ships, oil rigs, locomotives, freight elevators,
and the like. Some motors take two workers a full week
to complete.
In November, the photographer Christopher Payne
spent two days documenting the factory workers’ efforts.
American manufacturing is something of a preoccupation
for Payne; in 2016, he published Making Steinway, “a
deconstruction of the piano’s unseen constituent parts and
a glimpse into the skilled labor required to make them,”
and he is working on a forthcoming book that will collect
his photographs of factories around the country. Drawing
inspiration from the work of Alfred T. Palmer, the lead
photographer for the Office of War Information during
World War II, Payne says he aims to capture workers in
a heroic light.
At Ward Leonard, Payne was taken with the contrast
between the apparent disarray of the cascading coils and the
orderly structure to which they would ultimately conform.
“It seems chaotic,” Payne says, “but it’s really not—all
those little wires and coils have a very specific function
and a very specific place.”

— Amy Weiss-Meyer

The stator generates the magnetic field of the motor. The ends of its
copper coils are wrapped in tape for insulation and protection.

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Dispatches

Making motors by
hand enables a level
of customization that
is important to Ward
Leonard customers
such as the United
States Navy, whose
ships rely on motors
that can weather
harsh conditions.

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VIE W FIN DER

This motor will

eventually be
immersed in a
vacuum-pressurized
tank of resin. The
resin is absorbed
into the tape, then
hardened in an oven,
creating a sealed
insulation system.

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28 PHOTOG RAPHS BY SERGIY B ARCHUK

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SOMETHING

Opposition
to water
fluoridation,
while often
vocal, has
been largely a
fringe crusade.
But solid
evidence for
fluoridation’s
value is
surprisingly
hard to find.

IN THE

By Charles
C. Mann

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I b l a m e my dentists. Not for

poor dental care—Barbara and
Gordon do great work. I blame
them for sending me into a vortex
of dento-epistemological anxiety.
On a tooth-cleaning visit not
long ago, Barbara told me that in
the late 1970s, when she attended
dental school, her professors
expected that most middle-class
patients would lose a lot of their
teeth and need dentures by the
time they were in their 60s. Today,
she said, most middle-class people
keep their teeth until they are 80.
The main reason for this, Barbara
explained, was fluoridation—the
practice of putting fluoride com-
pounds in community drinking
water to combat tooth decay.
For reasons I can’t now recall,
I mentioned this remark on social
media. The inevitable but some-
how surprising response: People
I did not know troubled them-
selves to tell me that I was an
idiot, and that fluoridation was
terrible. Their skepticism made an
impression. I found myself staring
suspiciously, as I brushed, at my
Colgate toothpaste. strengthens
teeth with active fluoride, the
label promised. A thought popped
into my head: I am now rubbing
fluoride directly onto my teeth. So
why is my town also dumping it into
my drinking water?
Surely applying Colgate’s
meticulously packaged fluoride
paste directly onto my teeth, where
it bonds with the surface to cre-
ate a protective layer, was better
than the more indirect method of pouring fluoride the authorities must have taken into account the weird thirsty kid who guzzles
into reservoirs so that people drinking the water can water by the quart. But if they lower the dose to avoid harming that child,
absorb the fluoride, some of which then makes its where would that leave my mother-in-law, who for some reason has decided
way into their saliva. she no longer wants to drink much water at all? Is she getting shortchanged?
Then I wondered: How much fluoride is in my Fluoridation of public water supplies is backed by every mainstream
water, and how did public-health officials set the dose? dental organization in the nation and opposed by a lot of people who spend
Fluoride in large quantities is bad news. Potential too much time on YouTube. The most-watched anti-fluoridation video in
side effects, I quickly discovered, include joint pain, my YouTube search results—from the series Stuff They Don’t Want You to
bone fractures, sperm decline, dementia, premature Know—hauls out the specter of Nazi Germany before the one-minute mark.
puberty, gastrointestinal distress, immune-system dys- Another video, from the series Brainwash Update, states categorically that
function, (possibly) cancer, and (also possibly) lower “fluoride is poison.” It has the high production value one associates with its
IQ in children. Children have smaller bodies than sponsor, Russia Today. When I was growing up, anti-fluoridation campaigns
adults and thus are at risk of relatively greater exposure were the province of the John Birch Society and other right-wing cranks.
when they drink. In calculating the dose, I thought, Now I myself seemed to have become a candidate for the tinfoil-hat brigade.

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Yet the more I looked, the more I realized that fluoridation encapsulates gotten rid of by being jettisoned into city water systems.
several recurring medical dilemmas. How much trust should we give to expert Less understandably, some later anti-fluoridation activ-
judgment? How much potential harm can we expose one group to in the ists described the corporate embrace of fluoridation as
course of helping another? And how much evidence should be required before evidence of a Communist plot.
we allow governments to force people to do something for their own good? It was more like a capitalist plot. From 1921
to 1932, the secretary of the Treasury was Andrew
M o d e r n d e n t i s t r y is a formidable example of human progress. Our W. Mellon, a founder of the Aluminum Company
grandparents’ jaws used to hurt all the time. Tooth decay plagued everyone— of America, better known as Alcoa. The U.S. Public
rich and poor, famous and obscure. George Washington, an affluent planter, Health Service was then under the jurisdiction of the
had lost all but one of his teeth by age 57, when he was first sworn in as presi- Treasury Department. In January 1931, Alcoa chem-
dent. His quest to fill his mouth led him to wear sets of dentures made from ists discovered high levels of fluoride in the water in
his own pulled teeth, from animal teeth (donkey and horse up top, cow on the and around Bauxite, Arkansas, an Alcoa company
bottom), and from other people’s teeth, possibly including those of his slaves. town. By May, at Mellon’s urging, a Public Health
Washington was not alone. People on both sides of the Atlantic participated Service dentist had been assigned to examine the link
in a lively black market in cadavers’ teeth. Fortunately for denture customers, between fluoride and reduced cavities. Eight years
Europe had a ready supply. Scavengers followed wartime armies, according later, a biochemist at the Mellon Institute, in Pitts-
to the medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris. After the shooting stopped at the burgh, became the first researcher to call for the wide-
battle of Waterloo, many of the dead were toothless within hours. spread fluoridation of water.
The widespread introduction of sugar worsened society’s dental difficul- Additional impetus came during the Second World
ties. In the first decades of the 20th century, American dentists regularly War. The Manhattan Project—the crash effort to
made full sets of dentures for teenagers so that they would look presentable develop the atomic bomb—processed uranium by
at graduation. American soldiers were required to have a minimum number combining it with huge amounts of fluorine to form
of opposing teeth: six on the top, six on the bottom. Thousands of would-be uranium hexafluoride. Large quantities of other fluo-
doughboys and GIs were barred from service in the First and Second World ride compounds, including the DuPont refrigerant
Wars for failing to meet this standard. Freon, were needed. Accidents exposed employees to
So dire was the state of U.S. dentition that in 1901, Frederick McKay’s these little-understood substances, killing some and
discovery that many of his patients’ teeth were mottled with ugly brown sickening others. Fearing litigation, the Manhattan
stains generated little notice. McKay was a dentist in Colorado Springs. Project created a “medical section” to study fluorides.
Intrigued, he and two colleagues examined 2,945 schoolchildren for what Together with industry, it pushed for clinical trials of
they called “Colorado stain.” To their shock, 87.5 percent had stained teeth. fluoride’s effects. Under the guise of protecting teeth,
McKay contacted a famous Chicago dentist (famous in dental circles, any- the Manhattan Project set about obtaining data on
way) and got him to describe the syndrome to the Colorado state dental asso- long-term fluoride exposure.
ciation. Hardly anyone paid attention. Trying again, McKay and the Chicago Starting in 1945, tests were conducted in Grand
dentist evaluated students at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs. They Rapids, Michigan, and Newburgh, New York. Both
found that students raised in Colorado Springs had discolored teeth, whereas cities added fluoride to their water. In both cases,
students from other areas had normal teeth. Hardly anyone paid attention. the control was a nearby city that did not add fluo-
The two researchers then published an article, “An Investigation of Mottled ride. The experiments were supposed to continue for
Teeth: An Endemic Developmental Imperfection of the Enamel of the Teeth at least a decade, with dentists in each city examin-
Heretofore Unknown in the Literature of Dentistry.” Unknown in the Literature ing their patients to evaluate long-term effects. As
of Dentistry! Still, hardly anyone paid attention. it happened, one of the control cities fluoridated its
In the 1930s, McKay and others identified the staining agent: naturally water within seven years because its citizens had heard
occurring fluoride compounds in water supplies. (This kind of staining, rumors about the benefits.
along with the other negative effects of fluorine absorption by bones and Fluoridation took off. So did the anti-fluoride
ligaments, is now called fluorosis.) The researchers also discovered something movement, a loose coalition of Christian Scientists,
else: Although the staining looked terrible, people with fluoride stains had Boston society ladies, chiropractors, biochemists,
fewer decayed and missing teeth. A small group of dentists began agitating homeopaths, anti-Semites, and E. H. Bronner, the
to add low levels of fluoride to drinking water—low enough to avoid stain- spiritualist soap-maker. A woman named Golda Fran-
ing and also low enough to be safe. zen, from San Francisco, testified before Congress
Those dentists would soon get corporate reinforcement. Fluorine, a chemical in the early 1950s that fluoridation was a Commu-
element, is lethal in small doses and extremely reactive. Fluorides—compounds nist plot to turn Americans into a race of “moronic,
of fluorine—can be nearly as toxic but are much more stable. They are a com- atheistic slaves.” Franzen was later convicted of vio-
mon waste product of the fertilizer, pesticide, refrigeration, glass, steel, and lating state health laws for peddling a “cancer cure”
aluminum industries. In the ’30s, many of these industries were facing protests machine consisting of a speakerless tape recorder that
and lawsuits for poisoning workers, polluting the soil, and contaminating water vibrated as it played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
supplies. Understandably, executives were thrilled to discover that the chemicals The opposition mostly failed. At an annual cost
they had to get rid of because they could seep into city water systems might be of about $325 million, more than 70 percent of

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Americans now have fluoridated water. board, was blunt: “There’s really hardly any
Still more Americans get fluoride from evidence” that fluoridation works, he told
soft drinks, most of which are made with Newsweek. “And if anything there may be
fluoridated water. Some bottled water is some evidence the other way.” These find-
fluoridated too. In 2007, Grand Rap- ings were respectfully ignored.
ids, celebrating its historic role, erected In 2015, the Cochrane organization
a 33-foot-high powder-blue sculptural waded into the debate. Founded in 1993,
monument to fluoridation. Cochrane is a London-based global net-
The fluoride revolution was not work of about 30,000 medical research-
restricted to the United States. The Orga- ers in multiple countries that provides
nization for Economic Cooperation systematic analyses of medical issues. The
and Development regularly surveys the goal is to produce painstaking, rigorous
progress of its 36 member nations. One assessments of what research has—and
variable it tracked until recently was the hasn’t—established about a given subject.
number of decayed, missing, or filled adult Cochrane has a fiercely guarded reputa-
teeth in 12-year-olds, a measure of over- tion for impartiality and thoroughness. Its
all dental health. The top graph on the verdicts have global impact. Which may
next page depicts the results—uniformly be why the pushback on its fluoridation
positive—for six nations that have widely work was so strong.
adopted fluoridation. To evaluate the efficacy of water fluori-
Graphs like this help explain why the dation, the Cochrane researchers wanted
Centers for Disease Control and Preven- to select properly conducted scientific
tion in 1999 called fluoridation one of the research, discarding studies that were
top 10 public-health advances of the 20th badly designed (too few participants to
century. Curiously, they also help explain why fluorida- produce sound data, for example) or incompetently executed (for instance,
tion is opposed by the surprisingly durable cohort of the researchers didn’t follow their own protocols). To evaluate the studies,
activists who barraged me on social media. The bottom the team used two simple but strict criteria: They needed to have two large
graph on the next page, based on the same OECD sur- groups of subjects, one with fluoride (the intervention group) and one with-
veys, tracks the number of decayed, missing, or filled out (the control group), and each group had to be examined at least two
adult teeth in 12-year-olds from countries that have times. Moreover, the studies needed to be prospective (meaning the scien-
not embraced fluoridation in a significant way or at all. tists announced beforehand what they were looking for, then measured it)
The differences between the two graphs don’t leap as opposed to retrospective (meaning the scientists sifted through historical
out at the viewer. Nonfluoridated nations such as data looking for patterns). Scrutinizing medical databases, the Cochrane team
Belgium, Luxembourg, and Denmark actually have found 4,677 fluoridation studies. All but 155 of them—20 that focused on
better dental health by this measure than the United tooth decay, and 135 that focused on dental fluorosis—failed to meet the
States, one of the world’s fluoridation champions. two criteria. Worse, all of the tooth-decay studies and all but a handful of
Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the fluorosis studies were, in the jargon, “at high risk of bias”—for example,
and Switzerland tried fluoridation, abandoned it years variables such as age and income hadn’t been properly taken into account.
later—and saw no rise in tooth decay. What’s going on? The Grand Rapids study is an example of these problems. Not only was
it cut short when the control city, Muskegon, started fluoridating its water,
O n e o f t h e lesser-known advantages of but the experimenters had not established whether the two populations had
government-run health-care systems, such as Brit- similar incomes or ethnic backgrounds. Nor did the researchers evaluate
ain’s National Health Service, is the fact that because people’s teeth blindly, by taking X-rays to be examined by technicians who
taxpayers are funding everything, the government did not know which group a patient belonged to. Instead the study dentists
occasionally tries to determine whether the money is simply looked into patients’ mouths and subjectively reported what they
being spent usefully. In 1999, the government asked saw—a recipe for what is called “confirmation bias,” in which people tend
the NHS to “carry out an up-to-date expert scientific to interpret what they see in ways that reinforce their prior beliefs.
review of fluoride and health.” A research team based The Grand Rapids researchers cannot be much faulted for these lapses,
at the University of York evaluated every study of fluo- according to the Cochrane spokesperson Anne-Marie Glenny, a researcher
ridation it could find—about 3,200 of them. The at the University of Manchester School of Dentistry. In the late ’40s and
team’s conclusion was, it said, “surprising.” Despite early ’50s, the proper procedures for clinical trials were just being established.
the long fight over fluoridation, few of the thou- Few scientists understood how small imbalances between the intervention
sands of studies counted as “high-quality research.” and control groups could compromise an entire trial. And the researchers
The implication was that Britain had been tinkering definitely cannot be blamed for the unhappy fact that their experiment—
with its water supply with little empirical support. indeed, all of the original fluoride research—occurred before the introduction
Trevor Sheldon, the head of the York review’s advisory of Crest, the first fluoride toothpaste, in 1956. Today, given that almost all

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toothpaste contains fluoride, and that most people brush their teeth, assess- The Cochrane group reported its work carefully.
ing the impact of fluoridated water remains highly problematic. The evidence, it said, is poor and sparse, but what lit-
“It’s a really difficult area to evaluate,” Glenny told me. “You can’t really tle there is “indicates” that the fluoridation of water
do the ideal experimental study,” because it is next to impossible to assemble reduces cavities in children. But, the group said, “these
two large, similar groups of people, one of which is not drinking fluoridated results are based predominantly on old studies”—from
water or brushing their teeth. On top of that, “measuring the confounders— before 1975—“and may not be applicable today.” For
sugar consumption, socioeconomic status, and so on—is really tricky.” How adults, there is “insufficient evidence,” old or new, to
much, I asked, of the improved dental health of the ’60s and ’70s was due to determine whether fluoridation is effective. The report
water fluoridation? How much was due to the soaring popularity of fluoride did not support or attack fluoridation; it only asked for
toothpaste and mouthwash? And how much was due to rising affluence, more research.
which generally translates into more visits to the dentist? “I’m not sure you Nonetheless, it set off an uproar. A blog post on the
can answer that question,” Glenny said. Cochrane website attracted so many vitriolic comments
from anti-fluoridation zealots that
the organization eventually removed
Tooth Decay in Countries
it. When a writer for Harvard Public
With Fluoridated Water
Average decayed, missing, or filled adult teeth in 12-year-olds

7
Australia
Chile
Health magazine used the Cochrane
Ireland report to ask “Is Fluoridated Drink-
New Zealand
United Kingdom
ing Water Safe?,” the heads of the
6
United States American Dental Association, the
American Public Health Associa-
5 tion, the American Dental Educa-
tion Association, the American Asso-
4 ciation of Public Health Dentistry,
the American Association for Dental
3
Research, and the Harvard School of
Dental Medicine demanded that the
article be amended or taken down.
2
(The story included earlier versions
of the two charts on this page.)
1
Fluoride, Glenny told me, is “the
only topic that I’ve been involved
0 in that has created so much angst
1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2014

and controversy.” The responses

also critiqued the Cochrane report
itself. The president of the Ameri-
Tooth Decay in Countries
Average decayed, missing, or filled adult teeth in 12-year-olds

8 Austria
can Dental Association said that it
Without Fluoridated Water Belgium
Czech Republic was “shaped by its unusually narrow
7 Denmark
inclusion criteria, excluding 97 per-
Finland
France cent of the more than 4,000 relevant
6 Germany
studies that it identified.” In a joint
Greece
Hungary letter, the president of the Ameri-
5 Iceland
can Dental Education Association
Italy
Japan and the executive directors of the
Luxembourg
American Dental Association and
A D A P T E D F R O M H A R V A R D P U B L I C H E A L T H M A G A Z IN E

4
Mexico
The Netherlands the American Association for Den-
3 Norway
tal Research concurred, scoffing at
Portugal
Slovak Republic Cochrane’s “rigid inclusion criteria.”
2 Slovenia
But the inclusion criteria were not
Sweden
Switzerland “unusually narrow” or “rigid”—they
1 were based on those in a standard
textbook, now in its fourth edi-
0 tion. The implication of the dental
1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

2014

experts’ critique seemed to be that if

only statistical analysts would lower
How much difference does water fluoridation make? It’s hard to tell whether improvement in dental health has their standards, everything would
been caused by adding fluoride to public water systems or by better dental hygiene. look good.

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T h e d e n ta l e s ta b l i s h m e n t ’s argument for are very young or very old, or are unlucky genetically, or have nutritional
fluoridating water in a society where a majority of deficiencies. Nor, Greenland said, would it “take into account the errors you
people use fluoridated toothpaste and go to the dentist always expect in a large-scale system, where there are accidents that put in too
boils down to a contention that fluoridation will likely much, and the monitoring is not that good.”
help people who are unable to afford good dental care. Howard Pollick, an ADA spokesperson and a dental scientist at the
The idea is that poor children don’t brush their teeth, UC San Francisco School of Dentistry, defended water fluoridation in a
and fluoridation will fill the gap—a notion, inciden- recent interview: “The water systems are operated by professionals. With
tally, that the Cochrane team found no good evidence the new equipment, they can control the fluoride level within a very narrow
to support. (Last year, JAMA Pediatrics published a range.” As for general safety, he noted, “there’s a 2015 review by the U.S.
large, careful study that suggested fluoridation gave Public Health Service that looked at this. I’m comfortable with it.”
extra benefit to poor children and adolescents, but it, Matters get more complex for less well-documented risks. In October,
too, had limitations—the authors could not establish a research team published the results of a long-term study in Canada that
whether the different families in the study ate similar correlated concentrations of fluoride in the urine of pregnant women with
amounts of sugar, for instance.) Still, the argument the IQ scores, three to four years later, of their children. The IQs of the boys
runs, it is ethically acceptable to force a majority to (but not the girls) in fluoridated communities were, roughly speaking, one
do something potentially useless if it might benefit a to three points lower than those of boys in nonfluoridated communities.
minority. Unless, of course, fluoridation at current Another long-term study, published in 2017, had found a similar effect in
levels is unsafe in some way, and the many are harmed Mexico (where the fluoride exposure was higher than in Canada). An analy-
in pursuit of a potential benefit for the few. sis in 2012 of 27 fluoride-IQ studies from China had also found effects on
Is it safe? Some fluoride perils are well documented. cognition (these were retrospective studies, though).
Over the long run, the body incorporates fluoride Fluoridation advocates rightly point out that the IQ studies have limi-
into bone, making it more prone to fracture, and into tations. However, their position necessarily involves making the gymnas-
ligaments and joints, making them less flexible and tic argument that you should put fluoride in water because its positive
sometimes making movement very painful. effects have been shown in a bunch of
Severe cases of fluorosis are crippling; most mostly retrospective studies, but you
victims are elderly. As a result, fluoridation should ignore the risk to IQ because the
advocates and people in government must negative effects have been shown only in
thread a needle: enough fluoride to pro- a bunch of mostly retrospective studies.
tect against tooth decay in children, but not How should one weigh the potential small
enough to cause problems in the long term. harm to a broad population against the
Alas, epidemiologists have been com- potential broad benefit to a small popu-
plaining about the safety studies for decades, lation? What if neither the harm nor the
according to Sander Greenland, an emeritus benefit is well established? What if con-
professor of epidemiology and statistics at straints (moral, financial, logistical) on
UCLA. Greenland, who is a co-author of our ability to experiment with human
the standard textbook Modern Epidemiol- beings mean that these questions can
ogy, began his own fluoridation work in the never be answered definitively?
’70s by examining a “typical crap ecologi- I asked Anne-Marie Glenny whether
cal study” supposedly showing that fluoride there were other ways of reaching poor
caused cancer. “But then I got into the litera- children who can’t go to dentists—training
ture, just because I wanted to do a thorough them to brush their teeth in school, for
job, and I noticed there was really no safety instance. Or providing free dental care in
information. They didn’t have any good impoverished communities. She said she
rationale for the dose.” The current U.S. was unaware of any research that com-
recommendation is 0.7 milligrams per liter. pared the outcomes of fluoridation with
Greenland went on: “Since they didn’t these alternatives.
have any good long-term data, the precau- Given all the uncertainties, I asked,
tionary approach would be ‘What’s the can we really say that fluoridation works?
smallest amount we can put in [so that] “There’s no argument that fluoridation
we get most of the benefit and minimize doesn’t work,” Glenny said. “The question is
the likelihood of long-term harm?’ Instead, whether it is still the right way forward.”
that mentality was totally absent from the
literature.” Moreover, a seemingly prudent
level doesn’t account for the possibility Charles C. Mann is a contributing writer at
that certain people may be extra-sensitive The Atlantic. His books include The Wizard
to fluoride’s negative effects, because they and the Prophet (2018) and 1491 (2005).

34 APRIL 2020
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prevent
wildfires,
for the
love of the
outdoors.
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HOW TO
TACKLE
A
36 APRIL 2020
 GIRAFFE
The planet’s tallest animal is in far
greater danger than people might
think. Saving it begins with a
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daunting act of physical courage.

By Ed Yong

37
 T
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he giraffe is nearly down. Two men have stretched a thick black

rope in front of the animal, to trip her up. The giraffe hits the
rope, and the plan seems to be working until she gains a second
wind and breaks into a fresh run. Her body sways backward and
forward like a rocking horse being pulled along on a dolly. Six
more people grab onto the ends of the rope, and the group runs
behind her, holding tight, pitting their meager strength against
her weight. It would be no contest, were her veins not coursing
with tranquilizer. She loses her footing and careens forward, her
legs splaying out behind her. But her seven-foot-long neck still
stretches resolutely skyward. A woman leaps from behind her
back, collides with her neck midair, and rugby-tackles it to the
ground. People run over, carrying a hood and a drill. The giraffe—
an emblem of verticality—is now fully horizontal.
The team of people who have drugged, tripped, and tackled
the giraffe is a mix of scientists, veterinarians, and rangers who
study giraffes in the few parts of the world where the animals
still live. Giraffes are so beloved and familiar that it’s tempting
to think their numbers are solid and their future secure. Neither
is true. Giraffe populations have decreased by 30 percent over
the past three decades. Only 111,000 individuals remain. There
are at least four African elephants for every giraffe. To safeguard
a future for giraffes, researchers need basic information about
how far they roam. GPS trackers can offer answers, but to get a
tracker on a giraffe, one must first take it down.
This is harder than it sounds, and it sounds hard. Etorphine—
an opioid about 1,000 times more potent than morphine—is the
preferred anesthetizing agent, but some giraffes resist doses that
would knock out an elephant. And unlike elephants, many of
them respond by breaking into a run. Also, etorphine depresses
a giraffe’s breathing, reduces its heart rate, and increases its blood
pressure. The drug is tolerable in the short term, but after only 15
minutes, it can cause problems for an animal whose heart must
pump blood up a seven-foot neck. A darted giraffe must be tripped
as quickly as possible. Once it’s horizontal and restrained, the team
can immediately reverse the etorphine with a second drug, while
attaching a tracker.
“You want it to stand up as soon as possible,” says Sara Fer-
guson, a vet for the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, and the
woman who body-slammed the giraffe’s neck. Though they look
slender, giraffes are massive, sturdy animals. The head and neck
alone can weigh 600 pounds—more than a large black bear.
When males fight over mates, they swing their necks in long arcs
to bludgeon each other with their reinforced heads. Their necks
can take the impact of one airborne vet.
Until recently, giraffes have suffered from surprising scien-
tific neglect. Few researchers have studied them in the wild,
so even basic aspects of their lives remain mysterious. Perhaps
that’s because giraffes live in what researchers suspect are pro-
tean societies lacking the cohesiveness of elephant herds or lion
prides. Whatever the reason, one of the world’s most conspicuous
creatures has somehow been overlooked. The same goes for its
impending extinction. And without fanfare, many other major
animal groups—insects, birds, and amphibians—have also declined
precipitously. Quite a few of the public’s favorite wild animals,

38 APRIL 2020
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I
including lions, cheetahs, and gorillas, are in greater peril than is m ag i n e y o u a re one of these giraffes. You are the tall-
widely realized. But, according to a 2018 study, this gap between est thing for miles. Everything about you defies gravity.
rose-tinted perceptions and dire reality is greatest for giraffes. Their Your hips and shoulders are level with the tops of many
prevalence in the zeitgeist has masked their disappearance from the acacia trees, which to shorter mammals are the world’s
planet. In 2010, eight times as many Sophie the Giraffe teething ceiling. Your head rises 19 feet into the air. As your sharp
toys were sold in France alone as there are actual remaining giraffes. gaze sweeps over vast swaths of savannah, you see five jeeps driv-
In 2016, the number of Britons who watched a giraffe kick a lion ing toward you.
in Planet Earth II exceeded the giraffe population by more than a Riding in the jeeps, we head toward a group of giraffes. I’m in
hundredfold. That same year, the International Union for Conser- one of the back jeeps, standing next to two men from the Kenya
vation of Nature reclassified the giraffe as “vulnerable” to extinction. Wildlife Service. We watch the animals graze quietly, using their
Even this grave assessment might be too optimistic: New genetic long, prehensile, bizarrely bluish tongues to rip foliage from the
evidence suggests that the giraffe may actually be four separate spe- trees’ thorny branches. Giraffes evolved from short-necked ances-
cies that have been evolving on their own for 1 million to 2 million tors, and whether they stretched to feed on leaves that are beyond
years. The iconic animal faces several falls instead of one. the reach of competitors, or to swing their head with greater force
Ferguson and her colleagues are trying to find out how the during ritual combat, or to keep an eye on approaching preda-
giraffe became so endangered, and how to save it while they still tors, they ended up with a neck that’s more than twice as long
have time. They’re traveling across the few parts of Africa where as that of any other living animal. They’re tall in a way that the
giraffes still exist, to affix trackers to several hundred individuals. planet hasn’t otherwise seen since the dinosaurs’ reign. On Kenya’s
The process is exhilarating, but also dangerous—for both humans Laikipia Plateau, where the landscape is all flat-bottomed clouds
and giraffes. Julian Fennessy, the foundation’s founder and director, and flat-topped acacia trees, they tend to stick out.
only recently recovered from three broken ribs and a dislocated From the lead jeep, Dominic Mijele, an experienced vet from
shoulder, sustained when the neck of a stumbling giraffe fell across the Kenya Wildlife Service, selects a female—the one that Fer-
his torso. He sometimes has to reassure tourists on safari that he guson will later tackle—and uses a tranquilizer gun to shoot a
is not a poacher. On occasion, his team has had to free tranquil- pink-tufted dart at her. His aim is perfect. The dart embeds in
ized giraffes that got stuck in trees, or steer them away from rivers. the giraffe’s right shoulder and delivers its etorphine payload.

Giraffe herds may have a mix of males and females or be segregated by sex. We still know strikingly little about the animals’ range and behavior.

PHOTOG RA PH BY DAV IS HUBER 39

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The female twitches nonchalantly, as if bitten by a horsefly, and

returns to eating. For a few minutes, nothing happens. Then,
she starts running.
Unexpectedly, a calf runs behind her. It can’t be more than
two weeks old, but it was born taller than most of the people
pursuing it. Its presence complicates matters, but it quickly takes
itself out of the equation by crouching and hiding, flattening its
neck in a most un-giraffelike way. Its mother, meanwhile, leads
the jeeps on a chase.
We tear after her, swerving between the trees and occasion-
ally bulldozing them. When the terrain allows, we leap out and
sprint after her, ducking branches covered in inch-long thorns.
If the giraffe falls backwards, she risks serious injury to her head
and neck. Taking a page from The Empire Strikes Back’s playbook,
the team tries to wrap ropes around her legs and guide her into
a safer forward stumble.
After Ferguson brings her down, four rangers sit astride her
neck like bobsledders. Someone slips a hood over the giraffe’s
head so she can’t see. Another threads a device into a nostril to
collect data on the animal’s breathing. More than a dozen people
surround the giraffe to measure her, collect samples of her skin
and DNA, and pick off ticks, while sloshing water on her side
to keep her cool. With the effects of the etorphine reversed, the
animal is fully conscious, but calm. Nonetheless, everyone stays
back from her long and powerful legs, which can deliver a lion-
disemboweling kick.
At the giraffe’s head, Fennessy kneels down and begins to
attach the tracking device—a black box, no bigger than a pack
of cards. Some people call it a collar, but it’s not meant for the
animal’s neck. Nearly two decades ago, when Fennessy’s team
first tried tracking giraffes with GPS, it used gigantic collars
adapted from those used on elephants, but the giraffes just bent
their heads and slipped the devices off. It also tried fixing the

(T O P T O B O T T O M) 1, 2, 5: D AV I S H U B E R. 3, 4: T Y L E R S C H I F F M A N.
collars in place with elastic straps, but feared this might restrict
the animal’s esophagus. Head harnesses weren’t quite universal
enough to fit the unique head shapes of each giraffe species,
and creating one for each species was too expensive. Eventu-
ally, the team hit upon the perfect solution: Fix the tracker to
a giraffe’s ossicones, the pair of hornlike structures on top of
the animal’s head.
Giraffes hit each other with their ossicones, so these structures
are thick, bony, and insensitive, with only one nerve at their base.
When Fennessy drills a hole in one of them, his subject barely
reacts. He threads a steel bolt through the hole, and fastens the
unit in place. Once it’s secure, the hood is removed, the men on
the neck get off, and the giraffe lifts her head. The seven vertebrae
in her neck—the same number as in a human’s—are connected
by ball-and-socket joints like those in our shoulders, so instead
of lifting up like a rigid beam, her neck snakes upward in an
almost reptilian way. She staggers up, and Fennessy slaps her
on the rump to get her moving. After a few unsteady steps, she
walks off. Somehow, whether through her reportedly excellent
(but seldom tested) eyesight, or through low, infrasonic calls (that
have long been suspected but never documented), the mother A whole crew of scientists and veterinarians is required for the giraffe-collaring
detects her hidden calf, and makes a beeline toward it. process, during which the 1,500-pound animal is kept awake and stabilized.

40 APRIL 2020
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W
h e n I ’d a r r i v e d i n K e n ya , I’d assumed that lifestyle. Constrained and marginalized, they now compete with
the primary threat to giraffes was poaching. And peo- giraffes for the same dwindling resources, through the same climatic
ple do kill giraffes, with guns, bows, and spears. They upheavals. Conflict is inevitable, and the giraffes almost always lose.
snag their legs using circular traps lined with thorns “All of these things make the animals immune-compromised
or metal shards. They strip the wires from vehicle tires and more susceptible to disease,” says Maureen Kamau, a veteri-
to make snares that they dangle from trees or scatter on the ground. nary fellow with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.
In Uganda, Ferguson desnared dozens of giraffes just last summer. Giraffes across East Africa have been known to carry a mysterious
“We’ve swept an area and come back literally the next day to skin disease that causes oozing, crusty lesions on their limbs and
find new snares,” she says. Four of the 11 giraffes the team collared necks. Other species are experiencing similar problems: In Laikipia,
in Kenya in 2017 were likely poached, “a much higher rate than a previously healthy population of wild dogs was all but wiped out
anyone suspected,” says Jared Stabach of the Smithsonian Conser- in 2017 by a virus that spread from domestic canines.
vation Biology Institute. Unlike elephants, rhinos, and pangolins, These combined stresses are especially costly for giraffes,
giraffes aren’t poached to supply a big, illegal, international market which reproduce only a few times in their lives, and gestate for
in body parts. Instead, in countries like Kenya, people mostly kill 15 months. “Anything happens during that period and it’ll lose
giraffes for their meat—to feed themselves, their families, their the young one, and when it’s got all these other threats, it won’t
villages. “They’re a shitload of food,” Fennessy says. breed,” Fennessy says.
Poaching is only one threat among many to giraffes. It’s a signifi-

I
cant threat, it’s easy to visualize, and it offers an antagonist to focus f a n i m a l s c a n n o t m o v e through a fragmented
on—but there are less direct and dramatic ways of killing a giraffe. world, humans may have to move them. In August 2018,
Since the 1970s, Kenya’s human population has more than people living along a particular road in northern Uganda
quadrupled, and it is projected to double again by 2050. Livestock were treated to a peculiar sight: a large green truck with
populations have also ballooned, and now collectively outnumber shrubbery strapped to its sides, five Nubian giraffes peer-
wildlife biomass by a factor of eight. Not coincidentally, wildlife ing out through its open roof. The driver went slowly so as not
numbers have declined by about 70 percent. As the human world to hit any bumps. The giraffes, for their part, were remarkably
expands, the world for wildlife contracts. Giraffes are left with few calm during the 10-hour drive. “We drove past schools, and kids
resources as more land is dedicated to agriculture and livestock. would flood out,” Ferguson says. “It was the first time many of
Humans’ and other animals’ very presence can make life harder them had seen a giraffe, let alone five driving through their town.”
for giraffes. They flood the landscape with loud noises, divert Nubian giraffes are a subspecies of northern giraffe, and just
water for irrigation, and overgraze the land. “They chop down 2,645 are left in the wild. More than half of those live in Mur-
trees for charcoal, so there’s nothing to eat,” says Symon Masiaine, chison Falls National Park. The Uganda Wildlife Authority has
who leads a team called Twiga Walinzi, or “Giraffe Guards.” “The relocated small groups to other protected areas, and all the popu-
livestock disturb [giraffes] from grazing. The dogs chase them.” lations are now growing. But this strategy has limits, because the
People block giraffe migration routes with fences and roads. new and growing populations are still isolated islands in a chang-
Growing human populations and the fragmentation of the ing world. And in some countries, the giraffes have nowhere to
landscape are the biggest culprits behind the decline of giraffes. go. Kenya’s national parks and reserves cover just 8 percent of the
David O’Connor, who researches population sustainability at San country, and most big mammals—including almost all reticulated
Diego Zoo Global, points out the problem on three maps. The giraffes—live outside them. If the giraffes are to survive, they will
first shows where giraffes lived in the 18th century—a broad, con- have to do so in the presence of people.
tinuous brushstroke sweeping over much of Africa. The second The trick is to make the presence of giraffes more valuable to
shows their current whereabouts—a few pathetic splotches total- local communities than either their flesh or their absence. Con-
ing just 10 percent of their former range. The third superimposes sider Niger. In the mid-1990s, it was home to the last 49 West
all of Kenya’s ongoing and planned development projects onto African giraffes, all of which lived outside national parks and on
that shrunken range, which becomes further fragmented. The pat- community-owned lands. Conservation groups supported those
tern reminds me of the one I’ve been staring at for days: the islands communities by offering loans, building wells, and providing
of tawny brown on a giraffe’s hide, separated by unbroken white ecotourism opportunities. Such measures, together with a strict
lines. It’s as if the giraffe’s woes have been etched onto its skin. government-enforced ban on killing, brought the West African
“When the land is not open, it reduces the animals’ ability to giraffe back from the brink. Today, 600 of them graze the croplands.
be flexible to change,” Fennessy says. And change is certainly upon In Kenya, many communities have turned their lands into
them. Kenya’s temperatures are set to rise by an estimated 2 degrees conservancies—areas where livestock grazing is more care-
Celsius by 2060. Giraffes, already confined to the driest regions fully managed. In exchange for giving wildlife refuge, some
that are untouched by agriculture, must now contend with shorter communities receive revenue from ecotourism operators or
rainy seasons, more erratic rainfall, and more severe and prolonged development programs run by conservation organizations; the
droughts. Pastoralists, who once had free rein of Kenya’s lands, must state-operated Kenya Wildlife Service offers veterinary support
deal with the same challenges. Decades of decisions by British colo- and ranger training. This model, first developed decades ago,
nialists and the postcolonial government have severely restricted their has bloomed exponentially in the past two decades, such that

41
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community conservancies now cover more land

than Kenya’s national parks. THE STORY tranquilizer dart doesn’t fully penetrate its tar-
get, and Mijele is forced to pick a second. The
Most conservancies aren’t fenced, though,
and animals can easily move beyond them. OF THE darts fall off both animals, and they run into
a grove of trees that are tall enough to obscure
“They come back with injuries,” says Mijele,
the vet—if they come back at all. Each conser- GIRAFFE’S even their lofty profiles. The jeeps lose track of
them, and the convoy is forced to drive through
vancy is still a fragment, but some are starting
to connect, creating large, continuous refuges. DECLINE thick bush. Finally, one of the animals breaks
into the distinctive etorphine-induced run,
The famous Maasai Mara National Reserve is
now surrounded by community conservan- IS NOT and vaults a ditch that the trucks can’t pass.
We get out and run again, in sweltering mid-
cies in the northern areas that cover almost as
much ground as the reserve itself. The North- ONE OF morning heat and through thick grass. David
O’Connor twists his ankle. The rangers get the
ern Rangelands Trust is an especially successful
umbrella group of 39 conservancies that cover VILLAINOUS giraffe down, and Fennessy yells for someone
to inject the reversal drug, but it’s in a jeep that
more than 10 million acres. Slowly, the land is
being defragmented. POACHERS became separated from the main group.
Fennessy is visibly and audibly annoyed
The collaring team hopes that its data can
help. By showing where giraffes go, the team can AND about how long it takes for the drug to arrive.
He’s not pleased that some of the rangers are
help conservation groups prioritize areas that
need the most protection. Jenna Stacy-Dawes, MURDERED kneeling on the animal’s neck instead of sitting
on it—a position that he says places less pressure
a research coordinator from San Diego Zoo
Global, shows me a map of the privately owned ANIMALS. on joints and blood vessels. The Kenyan team,
meanwhile, finds Fennessy’s attitude patron-
area where the team has tagged giraffes. Squig-
gly colored lines snake across its borders, each IT IS A izing. “We’ve done this hundreds of times
before,” Lenguro tells me. After some tense
representing a tracked giraffe. Most eventually
roam outward, into community-owned lands. STORY debriefings, egos deflate, and the team settles
into a groove. It doesn’t lose a single animal.
One yellow line heads north and abruptly ends.
The giraffe’s tracker stopped transmitting in OF TWO The seventh and final giraffe—a young
male—doesn’t even run. It takes the dart,
June 2017, just a few weeks after it was attached.
The giraffe guards went up to investi- SPECIES walks 100 yards, and slumps against a tree.
It looks preposterous, its body slack but sup-
gate, and discovered that the giraffe had been
poached for food near a primary school in DEALING ported, its neck stuck in the branches. The
long thorns can’t pierce its thick skin, but
Morijo. The team responded by organizing
education days focused on giraffe conservation, WITH THE they probably aren’t pleasant either. The etor-
phine is still coursing through his body, and
starting wildlife clubs, and donating desks and
textbooks—the school’s first educational mate- SAME clearly having a stronger effect than anyone
anticipated. Working urgently, the team
rials. “People there are now some of the biggest
supporters of giraffes,” Stacy-Dawes says. “And CROWDED, wraps a rope around the body and, with at
least six people pulling, drags the giraffe to the
they’re seeing that giraffes are providing for
their families in other ways.” The story of the RAPIDLY ground. The drug is reversed, the hood goes
on, and everything proceeds as planned.
giraffe’s decline is not one of villainous poach-
ers and murdered animals. It is a story of two CHANGING Imagine what a shock it would be to be
that giraffe, to come to in a posture that you
species dealing with the same crowded, rapidly
changing world. Only through coexistence will WORLD. haven’t experienced since you dropped out of
your mother and first got to your feet. What-
the tale have a happy ending. ever was fogging your senses has cleared, but
your eyes are still covered. You lash out with a

T
owa rd t h e e n d of the collaring hoof, connecting with nothing but air. A loud
expedition, I ride with Steve Len- drilling noise rumbles through your skull, and
guro, a vet from the Kenya Wildlife you lash out again. Your vision returns. You lift
Service. He points out a giraffe, but your head, snake your neck upward, and rise
all I see is a tree. Then the tree turns to your proper place—upright, aloft, above
to look at us. all things.
Over three days, the team fixes tracking
units to seven giraffes. Every collaring is chal-
lenging in its own way. On one occasion, the Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

42 APRIL 2020
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W H AT H A PPE N E D TO
Illustrations by HOKYOUNG KIM

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JAKE
Millison ?

WHEN A YOUNG RANCHER WENT MISSING, HIS FA MILY SAID

HE’D SKIPPED TOW N. BUT HIS FRIENDS KNEW HIM BETTER
THAN THAT, AND THEY REFUSED TO LET HIM SIMPLY DISAPPEAR.

45
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I T WA S W E I R D T H AT NO ON E H A D H E A R D
FROM JA K E M IL LISON IN A FE W D AY S .

Maybe someone who didn’t know him, an outsider to Gunnison, “unfounded”—nothing to see here. But Jake’s friends kept insisting
a small Colorado town on the western slope of the Rockies, might that something was wrong. A week later, Mykol called the ranch
assume he was flaky or unreliable. At 29, Jake still lived with his again. This time, Deb admitted that she and her son had been argu-
mom and spent most nights at the local dive bar, the Alamo. ing; he was almost 30 and still living at home, after all. He’d grabbed
But Jake’s friends knew he was deliberate, a creature of routine. some camping equipment, a gun, and a wad of cash, then gotten
If you had plans to go to the movies on Saturday, he’d text you into a car with someone she didn’t recognize. She figured he was in
on Wednesday: What time should I pick you up? And then again Nevada looking for work, or in California with friends, or in New
on Thursday and Friday just to confirm. On a motorcycle trip Mexico with his father; she’d stopped trying to keep tabs on him.
to California, Jake was the one who brought tarps and first-aid But Deb’s story only left Jake’s friends more confused. It was
kits. He definitely wasn’t the fall-off-the-face-of-the-Earth type. as if she were talking about an entirely different person from the
Jake had spent most of his life on the 7-11 Ranch, his family’s Jake they knew.
property just outside Gunnison. He’d drive into town most eve-
nings, work out at the gym, then stop by the Alamo. He always I n t h e s k i m e c c a of Crested Butte, the median price for
sat at the same table and always ordered the same drink: a Coke, a house is $750,000; Gunnison is its more rugged, affordable
because anything stronger made him nervous. His friends, a close- neighbor 30 miles south, a windswept town of hunting outfitters
knit group of half a dozen guys, would show up after their shifts at and craft breweries, and the home of Western Colorado Univer-
the mechanic shop or the lumberyard. They’d shoot pool for a cou- sity (motto: “Learning, elevated”). Gunnison’s 6,500 inhabitants
ple of hours, then Jake would head home to the ranch. “Everything are an eclectic mix of hippies, hunters, college kids, ranchers,
was like clockwork with him,” his friend Antranik Ajarian told me. and professional mountain bikers. At the Trader’s Rendezvous,
On Wednesday, May 20, 2015—five days since anyone had you can pick up an antique rifle or a taxidermied wildebeest; a
heard from Jake—his friends Nate Lopez and Randy Martinez few blocks down the street is Shamans Corner, a combination
drove out to the 7-11 Ranch. They turned into the driveway, massage parlor, tattooist, and metaphysical gift shop.
then drove past the barn decorated with the antlers of deer, elk, When I visited Gunnison in November 2018, the big news
and moose, testaments to the property’s glory days as a hunting was a local ranch’s cattle relocation: “Cows will be walking down
camp. They didn’t see Jake, although they did spy his truck, his HWY 135 … between 9-noonish,” the Gunnison Regional 911
motorcycles, and his dog, Elmo. Center’s Facebook page warned. “With the snow please be safe
In the horse corral, they spotted Jake’s mother, Deb, a wiry and budget a few extra minutes as the girls make fast retreat down
woman whose frail frame belied her stubborn strength. Deb told valley. Thanks for the patience.”
Lopez and Martinez that Jake had gone to Reno, Nevada, to train Jake’s parents split up when he was 6 and his sister, Stephaine,
at a mixed-martial-arts gym; he wasn’t responding to their texts was 7. His father, Ray, whom Ajarian described as “an old crazy
because he’d dropped his phone in an irrigation ditch and left it gun guy” (he meant this as a compliment), eventually moved
behind to dry out in a bag of rice. Her explanation was logical to rural New Mexico. Deb got remarried, to Rudy Rudibaugh,
enough. But the more they thought about it, the more it didn’t a widowed rancher two decades her senior. When I stopped by
sit right with them. Trader’s Rendezvous, everyone had a story about Rudy. He was a
Another few days passed, and still no word from Jake. His “tough little turd,” as one man put it, who had served as a frogman
friends called and stopped by the ranch. They weren’t sure what in World War II, lurking in rice paddies and breathing through
else to do. I’ll let you know when he’s back, Deb would say. Were a straw as he stalked the enemy. After the war, Rudy bought the
they paranoid, or did she seem annoyed to see them? The situa- 7-11 Ranch and based a successful hunting business there.
tion felt weird, they kept saying to one another. It just felt weird. Rudy was known for doing things his own way. In the pre-
After about a week, a Gunnison County patrol sergeant named cellphone era, he used carrier pigeons to send messages between
Mark Mykol, alerted to Jake’s sudden disappearance, called the hunting camps. When Jake and Steph were little, Rudy and Deb
ranch. Deb said her son had taken off with a friend whose name bought an African lion cub; they kept it chained in the horse corral
she didn’t know. She thought they were headed to Reno to go and fed it a diet of roadkill. Neighbors complained that it fright-
camping. He did this sometimes, just up and vanished, and she ened the livestock; eventually somebody shot and killed it from the
seemed less worried than irritated. Mykol marked the case status as highway—the Gunnison County equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

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Jake and Stephaine were homeschooled by Deb, in part so they County, not far from the 7-11 Ranch, the billionaire business-
could help out on the ranch. There was always plenty of work man Bill Koch built his own private replica of an Old West town,
on the 700 acres: branding calves, baling hay, repairing tractors, complete with a saloon, church, jail, and train station; the prop-
leading hunting trips, caring for the horses. As Rudy got older, he erty’s 21,000-square-foot mansion is stocked with memorabilia,
had a harder time keeping up—and Jake was expected to pick up including firearms that belonged to Jesse James and Sitting Bull.
the slack. The family was often the last to finish putting up their News accounts would later refer to 7-11 as a “$3 million
hay for the season, because Rudy and Jake handled all the work ranch,” but when Jake disappeared, “it was kind of a junkyard,”
themselves, Jake’s friend and former neighbor Adam Katheiser Lopez told me. Jake lived in the lodge, a building that had been
told me. And when Rudy was no longer able, it was just Jake. intended for big gatherings and camp suppers; now it was so
As a teenager, Jake began attending public school for the first cluttered with Deb and Rudy’s collections—stuffed rattlesnakes,
time. Early on, he got in trouble for the rifle in the back of his truck; old bits and bridles, ancient guns, antique machines with unclear
he hadn’t realized you weren’t supposed to bring firearms to school. uses—that it barely had enough room for his bed.
After spending much of his youth isolated on the ranch, Jake began Jake once asked Katheiser to help brand calves. Katheiser had
to amass a group of friends. He and Ajarian, both introverts, found helped friends out before, and knew that typically a calf was herded
it easy to be quiet around each other. Their crew grew to include into a mechanical chute, where a clamp closed around the animal’s
other guys with similarly low-key temperaments. They went camp- neck, immobilizing it and then flipping it on its side. Katheiser
ing, fiddled with their motorcycles, and made fun of one another was surprised to see that the 7-11 Ranch had no such equipment.
for all the project vehicles that never quite got all the way fixed. It was a day of rough, physical work—snagging the calves with a
After high school, Jake stayed at the ranch while most of the rope, wrestling them to the ground, then holding them down to
crew rented apartments in town. Jake could be standoffish with be branded. The corral itself needed maintenance. But Jake could
strangers, but he was inseparable from his friends. He seemed to never get to it, “because the fences need fixing, the truck needs
have a boundless—occasionally exhausting—appetite for hang- fixing, and we’ve got to brand all these cows now,” Katheiser said.
ing out. He could be a know-it-all, and if he thought you were Faced with more than they could handle, the family sold
doing something stupid, he wouldn’t hesitate to tell you so. His off much of their livestock and stopped hosting hunting trips.
friends sometimes rolled their eyes, but they appreciated that they Money became a source of tension between Deb and her son. Jake
always knew where they stood with him. “We used to say, ‘Yeah didn’t receive a paycheck for the hours he put in at the ranch; his
he’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole,’” Ajarian said. eventual inheritance of the property was supposed to be payment
Jake was 23 when Rudy died, in 2009. Stephaine had already enough. In the meantime, if he wanted to go to the movies or
received an inheritance of $30,000. Jake didn’t get any money; the Alamo, he’d have to ask Deb for cash.
the assumption was that he and his stepbrother, Shane—Rudy’s Frustrated, Jake found other ways to scrounge up money. He
son from his first marriage, who lived in Texas—would eventu- cut and sold firewood. He worked part-time for a landscaping
ally inherit the ranch. Now the full burden of maintaining the company. He came up with a scheme to grow marijuana to sell
property fell on Jake’s shoulders. If he thought about shirking his to college students, which his friends found hilarious: Dude,
obligations, he never did. “Gunnison ranchers don’t move away,” you don’t smoke weed—how are you going to test your product? He
Jake’s friend Tom Page told me. Jake was tied to the land, to his cultivated psychedelic mushrooms and looked into starting a
family—and to a dying way of life. chimney-sweeping business.
One summer, Jake made good money working on a commercial
T h o u g h t h e m y t h o l o g y of the American rancher fishing boat in Alaska—but when he returned home, he ended
looms large in our national imagination, economic pressures up giving Deb $15,000 to help keep the ranch afloat. “He was
and climate change have made small-scale ranching ever more always pissed off about that,” Ajarian told me. “He always said he
precarious. Since 2000, the Colorado River Basin has suffered should’ve just said Fuck the ranch and kept it.” But while Jake may
an unprecedented period of drought, and low commodity prices have talked about the property as if it were an anchor dragging him
and the rising cost of living haven’t helped matters. The suicide down, he was unwilling to walk away. What if the ranch was a once-
rate in Gunnison and other rural Colorado counties is more than in-a-lifetime opportunity? What if he could restore it to greatness?
twice the national average. However much Jake worked, it wasn’t enough for his mother.
Faced with a deficit of water, Colorado’s booming cities have If the ranch wasn’t thriving the way it had under Rudy, it wasn’t
turned to a “buy and dry” policy, in which farmers agree to let their due to the drought or the economy or any of the other forces
land lie fallow and lease their water rights to thirsty urban areas that plagued ranchers across the western states. The problem was
hundreds of miles away. By the time Jake took charge of the family that her son wasn’t trying hard enough. She complained that he
ranch, the gulf between rural and urban Colorado was vast: the slept too late and left jobs unfinished. “Whenever you were out
agricultural land of the Rockies’ western slope lying uncultivated there,” Ajarian said, “they’d be at each other’s throats.”
and slowly drying up, while in Denver so many new buildings When Jake vanished, some of his friends hoped that he’d
were being erected that there was a waiting list to rent a crane. finally reached his limit and taken off: Fine, you guys deal with this
Ranch life was becoming the purview of wealthy hobbyists place. It was nice to imagine him somewhere sunny, California
who could afford to indulge in cowboy fantasies. In Gunnison maybe, free to do as he pleased. But that daydream never quite felt

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plausible. Maybe he would’ve abandoned his family, Jake’s friends different with Steph’s husband, Dave. Where Jake was reserved,
thought, but he never would’ve abandoned them. Dave was cocky. Everything about him seemed to grate on Jake,
including Dave’s car—a white Ford station wagon with flames
I n J u n e , J a k e’s f r i e n d Max Matheny and his sister, Molly, painted on it. Jake’s friends say his annoyance was undergirded
met with Mykol at the sheriff’s-department headquarters. Molly with fear; he saw Dave as unpredictable, potentially violent. He
had called Ray, Jake’s dad; he said he hadn’t heard from his son made awkward half-jokes about keeping a gun nearby in case
in weeks, and suggested that she file a missing-person report. Dave attacked him.
Mykol didn’t think that was necessary. Everything Deb had Jake began training at a jiu-jitsu gym in Gunnison. He took
said had checked out so far: It seemed that Jake had just taken to it right away; the tactics and technicalities and focus on self-
off. But the sheriff’s office did reopen the case, and alerted law mastery suited his temperament. “Jiu-jitsu translates as ‘gentle
enforcement in Reno to be on the lookout for Jake. art,’ ” Page, who trained at the same gym, told me. “There’s no
Ajarian, too, says he tried to file a missing-person report. The striking—it’s all about distance management, leverage, control.
sheriff’s department, Ajarian told me, “kept saying the family It’s like playing chess with the human body.” Jake had always
doesn’t want it.” Several of Jake’s friends said they were told that
only family members could file such reports, although according
to Colorado law “any person with relevant, credible information
suggesting that a person is missing may make a missing person
report to a law enforcement agency.” JAKE’S FRIENDS FOUND THEMSELVES
Nate Lopez spent “a lot of time” talking with local law enforce- BUMPING UP AGAINST AN UNCOMFORTABLE
ment. “They just told me that the only people they can really
POSSIBILITY: THAT HIS FAMILY WAS
believe is the family. If they say that Jake went on a trip, and
they’re the last people to see him, that’s what you have to go COMPLICIT IN HIS DISAPPEARANCE.
by until there’s evidence that shows otherwise,” Lopez told me.
Jake’s friends refused to let the matter go. Steph messaged
one of her brother’s friends—“do you have any idea who keeps been chubby and withdrawn; jiu-jitsu helped him grow more
reporting jake missing? I would really like [if they] could just call comfortable in his body, more used to asserting himself.
mom instead,” she wrote. But Jake’s friends called the ranch so Jiu-jitsu emphasizes personal development in all areas of life,
often that the sheriff told them to knock it off. and Jake became preoccupied with bettering himself. He adopted
It was dismaying, if not surprising, that law enforcement a strict diet and chided his friends when they ate at Taco Bell. He
seemed slow to wonder whether Jake Millison had been the victim chugged a gallon of water a day for a few weeks, briefly convinced
of a crime. Most murder victims in the U.S. are male—typically that hydration was the secret to health. His mania for improve-
young men of color—but you wouldn’t know that from watch- ment extended to the ranch, which he periodically tried to clean
ing TV, where the victims who get the most airtime tend to be up, whether his mother liked it or not. He told Ajarian he was
young, attractive white women. As a culture, we’re not as attuned bringing junk into town on the sly and tossing it into Dumpsters.
to young men’s vulnerability to violence. With Dave and Steph back on the ranch, things could get
While law enforcement seemed to accept Jake’s family’s story, heated. One day, Jake plowed snow into huge banks that blocked
his friends found themselves bumping up against an uncomfort- Dave’s car; in the argument that ensued, Dave took off his jacket,
able possibility: that one of his family members was complicit in revealing a gun. (Dave later claimed that he was planning to set
his disappearance. the gun aside so they could fight with their fists.) That afternoon,
Three years before Jake went missing, Steph, who had been Jake filed for an order of protection against his brother-in-law.
living in Denver, moved back to Gunnison with her husband and Had it gone into effect, it would have essentially banned Dave
son. She earned money taking tourists on horseback rides, and from the ranch. Jake withdrew his complaint a few days later,
dreamed of giving her son a country upbringing—crisp mountain but the animosity between the two men remained so strong that
mornings; lying in the tall grass, aiming a rifle at soda cans. Though Deb declared they couldn’t be on the property at the same time.
Steph described herself as “not good with backhoe things,” she was Steph was furious when she and Dave had to move to an
a skilled horsewoman who identified as a country girl. apartment in town. “My younger brother is trying to ruin my
Despite their shared upbringing, Steph and Jake never got life,” she wrote on the website Moms.com in 2014. “How can
along. “Yes hes mellow with his friends but with family he is a I make [my mom] see that it is unhealthy for him to be there
complete dick most of the time,” Steph texted a friend around controlling her and her property like he owns it?”
the time she moved back to Gunnison. Jake made it clear he was By the following year, Deb seemed to have taken her daughter’s
unhappy that his sister was back in town. Steph had already used advice. “My mom might be kicking my brother out soon,” Steph
her inheritance to put a down payment on her house in Denver; messaged a friend on Wednesday, May 13. That Friday night was
now he worried she was trying to stake a claim on the ranch, too. the last time anyone saw Jake. A few days after that, Steph posted
Steph and Jake had worked out a kind of sibling détente, which on Facebook: “Have you ever been woken up with such awesome
is to say that they mostly avoided each other. But things were news you wanted to run outside screaming?”

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“No more jake????” a friend replied. figure he got in over his head with something and is either in wit-
“Apparently Reno,” Steph wrote. “Long story tell you soon.” ness protection or in hiding or dead,” she later told investigators.
Ajarian created a Facebook page called “Where is Jake Mil-
A s t h e w e e k s t i c k e d b y, Jake’s friends grew more and lison.” He posted photos from their motorcycle trip out West—
more frustrated. No one seemed to be treating Jake’s absence as Jake posing next to a giant redwood; Jake wearing a helmet,
the emergency they felt it was. Steph and Dave moved back to making goofy faces—and asked people to share any information
the 7-11 Ranch and were acting like nothing was wrong. If the that might be useful. Someone reported seeing Deb, Steph, and
sheriff’s own son had vanished, Ajarian couldn’t help thinking, the Dave burning Jake’s mattress days after he vanished. Someone
deputies would certainly be doing more than they were. Finally, else pointed out that shortly after Jake disappeared, Dave had
the friends decided they couldn’t rely on official channels for help. changed his Facebook profile picture; in the new photo, he was
Ajarian was in the hardware-store parking lot when he spotted posed on one of Jake’s motorcycles—another thing Jake never
the first significant clue: Jake’s beloved 1976 Harley Sportster, would have tolerated. The tips that came in to the Facebook group
albeit with a new, slapdash paint job and a modified gas tank. were shared with law enforcement. The accumulation of facts,
Dave was riding it. “If Jake ever saw Dave Jackson breathing on plus Jake’s friends’ persistence, began to convince the department
his motorcycle, it would’ve been the end of the world,” Ajarian “that this was a serious matter here,” Mykol said.
told me. “And this guy is riding around on it. And why is it spray- Winter brought “bad times” out at the 7-11 Ranch, Dave texted
painted all these shitty different colors?” a friend. With Jake gone, much of the work fell to him. “I’m sick
Two other friends were shopping for used bikes when they of being a slave for [Steph] and her mother on this ranch while she
discovered a couple more of Jake’s motorcycles for sale in a is in the lodge warm cozy f****** around on her phone,” he wrote.
local shop. They obtained a copy of the title to one, a Honda, When he threatened to leave, Steph brandished a gun and fired a
which had both Jake’s and Deb’s signatures on it. To Ajarian’s bullet at the floor. Around the same time, Deb’s health began to
eye, Jake’s looked like a blatant forgery. “You could see Deb’s deteriorate. Within a year, she was admitted to the hospital for a
signature and you could see Jake’s signature underneath it, and collapsed lung; a biopsy revealed that she had Stage 4 breast cancer.
it’s the same fricking handwriting,” he said. To Jake’s friends, Despite Jake’s friends’ attempts to keep the investigation ener-
these motorcycle clues were a blatant sign that Deb’s story didn’t gized, months passed without much development. A year went
make sense. If Jake’s family expected him to return, why were by, and then another. Ajarian was alarmed to realize that he’d got-
they selling his stuff? ten used to Jake being gone. He and his friends sometimes joked
One day, Ajarian ran into Deb at the grocery store. He bar- about a gray-haired Jake popping up in 50 years, cackling about
raged her with questions: Where was Jake? And if she didn’t the epic prank he’d played on them, but the unspoken truth was
know, why hadn’t she filed a missing-person report? She muttered that they all assumed he was dead. Not knowing why or how, or
something about not wanting to get in trouble for filing a false where his body was, was maddening. There had been no funeral
report if Jake turned up. where they could make speeches about how much he’d mattered
Finally, three months after Jake was last seen, Deb Rudibaugh to them and cry together for his loss. His family continued to live
officially reported her son missing, claiming that his interest in as if he’d never existed. With no official action, it was hard not to
martial arts had brought him into contact with a bad crowd. “I feel as though Jake’s disappearance—and his life—didn’t matter.

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The friend group slowly began to disperse: Lopez moved to Texas; straw. She waited until he fell asleep that night and shot him in
Katheiser was in Colorado Springs. Sometimes Ajarian thought the head. She claimed that she disposed of his body on her own.
of Jake almost as a ghost—there and not there at the same time. The investigators pressed her on this point. How was this pos-
Although the investigation stalled for years, the Gunnison sible, considering how small and frail she was? “Yankee ingenuity,”
County sheriff’s department disputes the idea that it didn’t take Deb said. She had rolled his body in a plastic sheet, then used
Jake’s friends’ concerns seriously. “We were working pretty hard,” tow straps and a winch to maneuver it out of the lodge and onto
Mykol told me. “It just takes a really long time. You can’t just an ATV. She insisted that Steph and Dave had known nothing.
show up somewhere and search—there’s a thing called the Fourth When investigators told Steph that her mother had confessed
Amendment, you know what I mean?” Mykol also pointed out to murdering Jake, she broke down. “Oh my God,” she said, sob-
that the department had only one investigator for the entire county. bing. “Are you fucking serious? I can’t breathe.”
Finally, the sheriff’s department asked the Colorado Bureau But the officers suspected that she knew more than she was
of Investigation for help on the case. Two years after Jake’s dis- letting on. There was that Facebook post about “awesome news”
appearance, Ajarian met with a CBI agent who told him they once Jake was gone, and her apparent lack of concern for her
were making progress. “She said, ‘I can’t tell you anything—but brother. They kept pressing her.
things are in the works for you guys.’ ” “Okay,” Steph said eventually. “Honestly I didn’t know any-
On July 17, 2017, official vehicles crowded the county high- thing until a couple months ago.” Dave had been digging in the
way by the 7-11 Ranch. As ambulances and fire trucks waited, manure pile when he’d uncovered the body of what looked at
search teams and dogs spread out over the 700 acres. “Later on first like a large animal, she said. It was partially mummified, and
that day there are reports that they’ve found a body, and you just wrapped in plastic. Dave had encountered plenty of carcasses
know,” Katheiser recalled. “There’s not another reason for a body while living on the ranch, but this one unnerved him. He could
to be out there.” see parts of a rib cage poking out. He’d called Steph over. “Is that
The news spread fast across the small town. While Jake’s what you think it is?” he asked.
friends had been calling the sheriff, visiting the ranch, posting on “Maybe,” Steph replied. “I’m going to call Mom.”
Facebook—for nearly all of that time, his body had been wrapped Deb told her daughter to stay away from the body, Steph said,
in a tarp and buried in a manure pile in the corral. claiming that it was a mountain lion or a bear Jake had shot. “It’s
illegal game; that’s all I’m going to say,” Deb said. She told her
T h e fa c t t h at Jake’s body was found on the 7-11 Ranch daughter to cover it back up with manure and leave it alone.
seemed to confirm that at least one member of his family had In the ensuing weeks, Steph and Dave made awkward jokes
played a role in his death. But which one? There were almost too about what they’d found. They said they talked about calling the
many potential motives: Steph’s lifetime of animosity toward her police but never did. Then the investigation ramped up again. With
brother, plus the tension over who would inherit the ranch; the officers sniffing around the ranch, Steph insisted that the remains be
constant clashes between Deb and her son. And then, of course, reburied somewhere more secure. The family avoided articulating
there was Dave. In the weeks before he vanished, Jake had told what they were really discussing. Sometimes they called the body
friends that if anything ever happened to him, Dave would “it”; sometimes they referred to it as “the bear.” But Steph eventu-
be responsible. ally admitted that was a ruse. “I knew in my heart it was Jake,” she
Investigators questioned Deb, Steph, and Dave separately said. One afternoon, Dave used the backhoe to dig a hole inside
many times. Their stories were contradictory, confusing, and self- the corral. A couple of days later, the “bear” was gone from the
serving. Everyone agreed that Jake had once been his mother’s manure pile, and the hole was packed with fresh dirt.
favorite, but that in the years before his death, the dynamics in There were reasons to doubt each of these accounts. Accord-
the family had shifted; Deb began complaining to Steph about ing to Deb’s medical records, she weighed 97 pounds at the time
Jake, and Steph was happy to egg her on. As Deb told investiga- of Jake’s murder, and was still weak from the gallbladder surgery
tors, Steph was insistent that her mother evict Jake. He was a she’d had nine days before. At work, she’d been assigned to “light
freeloader, she argued. Without tough love, he’d never become duty”; at the ranch, she wasn’t able to lift a bale of hay. When her
independent. Sometimes she hinted that more drastic measures doctor examined her a few days after the murder, none of her
might be necessary. “The only way that he’s going to leave here stitches had torn. Jake had weighed at least 170 pounds. Would
voluntarily,” Deb claimed Steph had said, “is if he’s in a body bag.”
Steph’s efforts at persuasion seemed to work. Investigators
found an amended version of Deb’s will, dated three weeks before
Jake vanished. Instead of leaving the ranch to Jake and Shane, WITH NO OFFICIAL ACTION,
the property—and everything else she owned—would now go IT WAS HARD NOT TO FEEL AS
to Steph. Jake would get nothing. THOUGH JAKE’S DISAPPEARANCE—
Deb told investigators that the week Jake went missing, she
had been exhausted from working the night shift at a nursing AND HIS LIFE—DIDN’T MATTER.
home. She’d asked Jake to take care of an errand; he’d left the job
half finished, then gone into town. This, she said, was the last

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it have been physically possible for her to drag his body from the happen to Stephaine. She was scheduled to go on trial for first-
second story of the lodge all the way to the manure pile, even with degree murder the next fall, but Ajarian worried that she, like her
a winch and straps? mother, would end up getting a plea deal. The official version
Many of Jake’s friends assumed that Deb, dying of cancer, was of Jake’s death, codified in plea agreements and court filings,
covering for her daughter, and perhaps also her son-in-law. Ray, didn’t strike him as the full story; without a trial, he feared he’d
Jake and Steph’s dad, also resisted the idea that Deb had murdered never know what had really happened to his friend, or why. Sure
Jake. “No matter how bad it was, I just can’t see her shooting her enough, several months after my visit, Steph pleaded guilty to
own boy,” he told investigators. Cellphone records showed that tampering with a dead body. In November, Deb Rudibaugh died
Steph had been awake in the early-morning hours when Jake was in jail; two days later, Steph was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
killed. “Deborah didn’t gain anything by killing Jacob,” a CBI agent Ultimately the system had worked: Law enforcement had located
later testified in a court hearing. But Steph, who would gain “sole the body, elicited a confession, and secured convictions. But even
ownership of the ranch after Deborah passes,” did have a motive. after the case was legally closed, it still felt unsettled, incomplete.
One thing was clear. Whoever pulled the trigger, whoever One evening, I met Ajarian at a pizza place. Under his mechan-
helped bury the body, they were banking on the idea that every- ic’s uniform, he wore a T-shirt that said punker than you, and
one else would see Jake the way they did—as insignificant, even his dark hair was styled in messy spikes. His grief over his friend’s
disposable. That no one would raise a fuss over the disappearance death expressed itself as a kind of grasping for purpose. When
of a quiet, working-class guy who lived with his mother off a rural Jake had first disappeared, when his friends were searching for
county highway. clues and urging the sheriff’s department to act, they’d been of use.
Now there was nothing left to do—except maybe hold a memo-
Our families are supposed to be the people who know us rial service for Jake. Perhaps that would help him feel as though
best, but that often isn’t the case. Sometimes the hardest people his friend had finally been put to rest. But where would he host
to see clearly are the ones we’re closest to. such an event? Gunnison was too full of bitter memories—but
After the discovery of Jake’s body, and the multiple and confus- it was also Jake’s only home.
ing confessions from his family members, what seemed to upset The next day, I met Katheiser in his tidy basement apartment
his friends most was how they mischaracterized Jake. According in Colorado Springs. He, too, was plagued with thoughts of what
to Deb, her son was a drug addict and a drunk, a violent MMA might have been. “A lot of mornings when I wake up, I think about
fighter, someone who physically assaulted her and threatened Jake, what his life would have been,” he told me. “I like to think
to kill his sister and her family. According to Steph, Jake was a that he could’ve sold the ranch for quite a bit of money and maybe
worthless waste of space, lazy and useless. No wonder Jake clung just gone and worked a regular job somewhere. Bought a house.
so strongly to his friends. His chosen family was perfectly aware of Maybe he would’ve met a girl and whatever. And he doesn’t get that
his flaws—his stubbornness, his arrogance—but equally attuned opportunity. That’s what I would have hoped for him. Just that he
to his loyalty, generosity, and dedication. could’ve gotten into a life that he wasn’t frustrated at every day.”
On May 13, 2019, almost four years after her son’s death, Deb
pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a 40-year
sentence. Dave Jackson had already been sentenced to a decade Rachel Monroe is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and
in prison for his role in moving Jake’s body. When I visited Gun- the author of Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women,
nison last fall, the question on everyone’s mind was what would Crime, and Obsession.

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“This book will be enjoyed by anyone “Brilliant, fun, and profound. “A masterful analysis of the ways in
who wants a glimpse of how modern Other people influence us a lot which federalism has accelerated inequality
physicists are thinking about some of more than we think, which is a big and polarization in the United States.”
the hardest problems in the universe.” problem but also a terrific opportunity.” —Francis Fukuyama, author of Identity
—Sean Carroll, author of —Cass R. Sunstein, author of On Freedom
Something Deeply Hidden

“Not Born Yesterday is a fascinating “A provocative yet compelling “Catão and Obstfeld’s book offers
and important book for our time.” remedy to the populist challenge valuable insights into what
—Steven Pinker, author of to modern American democracy.” globalization can and cannot deliver.”
Enlightenment Now —Elisabeth R. Gerber, Gerald R. Ford —Carmen M. Reinhart, coauthor of
School of Public Policy, This Time Is Different
University of Michigan
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54 PHOTO RENDERI NG BY PAT RICK WHIT E

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HOW TO DESTROY
A G O V E R N M E N T
THE PRESIDENT IS WINNING HIS
WA R ON AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS.

BY GE OR GE PAC K E R

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WHEN
DONALD TRUMP
CAME INTO
OFFICE,
THERE
WAS A SENSE
THAT HE
WOULD BE
OUTMATCHED
BY THE
VAST
GOVERNMENT
HE HAD
JUST
INHERITED.
The new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost that they can protect the institution against the president because
chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned, they understand the rules and regulations and how it’s supposed
shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions. They to work, and that they will be able to defend the institution that
knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or they love or served in previously against what they perceive to be,
prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was I will say neutrally, the inappropriate actions of the president. And
chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history, but it I think they are fooling themselves. They’re fooling themselves.
didn’t really matter as long as “the adults” were there to wait out He’s light-years ahead of them.”
the president’s impulses and deflect his worst ideas and discreetly The adults were too sophisticated to see Trump’s special politi-
pocket destructive orders lying around on his desk. cal talents—his instinct for every adversary’s weakness, his fanati-
After three years, the adults have all left the room—saying cal devotion to himself, his knack for imposing his will, his sheer
just about nothing on their way out to alert the country to the staying power. They also failed to appreciate the advanced decay
peril—while Trump is still there. of the Republican Party, which by 2016 was far gone in a nihil-
James Baker, the former general counsel of the FBI, and a istic pursuit of power at all costs. They didn’t grasp the readiness
target of Trump’s rage against the state, acknowledges that many of large numbers of Americans to accept, even relish, Trump’s
government officials, not excluding himself, went into the admin- contempt for democratic norms and basic decency. It took the
istration convinced “that they are either smarter than the presi- arrival of such a leader to reveal how many things that had always
dent, or that they can hold their own against the president, or seemed engraved in monumental stone turned out to depend

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on those flimsy norms, and how much the norms depended on questions about presidential actions go to be answered, usually in
public opinion. Their vanishing exposed the real power of the the president’s favor. The office had approved the most extreme
presidency. Legal precedent could be deleted with a keystroke; law wartime powers under George W. Bush, including torture, before
enforcement’s independence from the White House was optional; rescinding some of them. Newland was a civil libertarian and a
the separation of powers turned out to be a gentleman’s agree- skeptic of broad presidential power. Her hiring showed that the
ment; transparent lies were more potent than solid facts. None of Obama Justice Department welcomed heterodox views.
this was clear to the political class until Trump became president. The election in November changed her, freed her, in a way
But the adults’ greatest miscalculation was to overestimate that she understood only much later. If Hillary Clinton had won,
themselves—particularly in believing that other Americans saw Newland likely would have continued as an ambitious, risk-averse
them as selfless public servants, their stature derived from a high- government lawyer on a fast track. She would have felt pressure
minded commitment to the good of the nation. not to antagonize her new bosses, because elite Washington law-
When Trump came to power, he believed that the regime was yers keep revolving through one another’s lives—these people
his, property he’d rightfully acquired, and that the 2 million civilians would be the custodians of her future, and she wanted to rise
working under him, most of them in obscurity, owed him their total within the federal government. But after the election she realized
loyalty. He harbored a deep suspicion that some of them were plot- that her new bosses were not likely to be patrons of her career.
ting in secret to destroy him. He had to bring them to heel before They might even see her as an enemy.
he could be secure in his power. This wouldn’t be easy—the per- She decided to serve under Trump. She liked her work and her
manent government had defied other leaders and outlasted them. colleagues, the 20 or so career lawyers in the office, who treated
In his inexperience and rashness—the very qualities his supporters one another with kindness and respect. Like all federal employ-
loved—he made early mistakes. He placed unreliable or inept com- ees, she had taken an oath to support the Constitution, not the
missars in charge of the bureaucracy, and it kept running on its own. president, and to discharge her office “well and faithfully.” Those
But a simple intuition had propelled Trump throughout his life: patriotic duties implied certain values, and they were what kept
Human beings are weak. They have their illusions, appetites, vani- her from leaving. In her mind, they didn’t make her a conspira-
ties, fears. They can be cowed, corrupted, or crushed. A government tor of the “deep state.” She wouldn’t try to block the president’s
is composed of human beings. This was the flaw in the brilliant policies—only hold them to a high standard of fact and law. She
design of the Framers, and Trump learned how to exploit it. The doubted that any replacement would do the same.
wreckage began to pile up. He needed only a few years to warp his Days after Trump’s inauguration, Newland’s new boss, Curtis
administration into a tool for his own benefit. If he’s given a few Gannon, the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, gave
more years, the damage to American democracy will be irreversible. a seal of approval to the president’s ban, bigoted if not illegal,
This is the story of how a great republic went soft in the middle, on travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries. At least one
lost the integrity of its guts and fell in on itself—told through gov- lawyer in the office went out to Dulles Airport that weekend to
ernment officials whose names under any other president would protest it. Another spent a day crying behind a closed office door.
have remained unknown, who wanted no fame, and who faced Others reasoned that it wasn’t the role of government lawyers to
existential questions when Trump set out to break them. judge the president’s motives.
Employees of the executive branch work for the president, and
a central requirement of their jobs is to carry out the president’s
policies. If they can’t do so in good conscience, then they should
leave. At the same time, there’s good reason not to leave over the

1. results of an election. A civil service that rotates with the party

in power would be a reversion to the 19th-century spoils system,
whose notorious corruption led to the 1883 Pendleton Act, which
“WE’RE NOT NAZIS” created the modern merit-based, politically insulated civil service.
In Trump’s first year an exodus from the Justice Department
began, including some of Newland’s colleagues. Some left in the
honest belief that they could no longer represent their client,
whose impulsive tweets on matters such as banning transgender
people from the military became the office’s business to justify,
Erica Newland went to work at the Department of Justice in but they largely kept their reasons to themselves. Almost every
the last summer of the Obama administration. She was 29 and consideration—future job prospects, relations with former col-
arrived with the highest blessings of the meritocracy—a degree leagues, career officials’ long conditioning in anonymity—goes
from Yale Law School and a clerkship with Judge Merrick Gar- against a righteous exit.
land of the D.C. Court of Appeals, whom President Obama had Newland didn’t work on the travel ban. Perhaps this distance
recently nominated to the Supreme Court (and who would never allowed her to hold on to the idea that she could still achieve some
get a Senate hearing). Newland became an attorney-adviser in the good if she stayed inside. Her obligation was to the country, the
Office of Legal Counsel, the department’s brain trust, where legal Constitution. She felt she was fighting to preserve the credibility

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of the Justice Department. That first year, she saw her memos She hated going to work. In the lobby of the Justice Department
and arguments change outcomes. building, six blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White
Things got worse in the second year. It seemed as if more than House, Newland had to pass under a large portrait of the president.
half of the Office of Legal Counsel’s work involved limiting the Every morning as she entered the building, she avoided looking at
rights of noncitizens. The atmosphere of open discussion dissipated. Trump, or she used side doors, where she wouldn’t be confronted
The political appointees at the top, some of whom had voiced skep- with his face. At night she slept poorly, plagued by regrets. Should
ticism early on about the legality of certain policies, were readier she have pushed harder on a legal issue? Should she engage her
to make excuses for Trump, to give his fabrications the benefit colleagues in the lunchroom again? How could she live with the
of the doubt. Among career officials, fear set in. They saw what cruelty and bigotry of executive orders and other proposals, even
was happening to colleagues in the legal ones, that crossed her desk?
FBI who had crossed the president She was angry and miserable, and
during the investigation into Rus- her friends told her to leave. She
sian election interference—careers continued to find reasons to stay:
and reputations in ruins. For those worries about who would replace
with security clearances, speaking AMONG CAREER her, a determination not to aban-
up, or even offering a snarky eye OFFICIALS, FEAR don ship during an emergency, a
roll, felt particularly risky, because
the bar for withdrawing a clearance
SET IN. THEY SAW sense of patriotism. Through most
of 2018 she deluded herself that
was low. Steven Engel, appointed WHAT WAS HAPPENING she could still achieve something
to lead the office, was a Trump loy- TO COLLEAGUES by staying in the job.
alist who made decisions without In 1968, James C. Thomson,
much consultation. Newland’s col- IN THE FBI WHO a former Asia expert in the Ken-
leagues found less and less reason HAD CROSSED THE nedy and Johnson administrations,
to advance arguments that they
knew would be rejected. People
PRESIDENT. published an essay in this magazine
called “How Could Vietnam Hap-
began to shut up. pen? An Autopsy.” Among the rea-
One day in May 2018, New- sons Thomson gave for the war was
land went into the lunchroom “the ‘effectiveness’ trap”—the belief
carrying a printout of a White among officials that it’s usually wis-
House press release titled “What You Need to Know About the est to accept the status quo. “The inclination to remain silent or to
Violent Animals of MS-13.” At a meeting about Central Ameri- acquiesce in the presence of the great men—to live to fight another
can gangs a few days earlier, Trump had used the word animals to day, to give on this issue so that you can be ‘effective’ on later
describe undocumented immigrants, and in the face of criticism issues—is overwhelming,” he wrote. The trap is seductive, because
the White House was digging in. Animals appeared 10 times in it carries an impression of principled tough-mindedness, not cow-
the short statement. Newland wanted to know what her col- ardice. Remaining “effective” also becomes a reason never to quit.
leagues thought about it.
Eight or so lawyers were sitting around a table. They were all As the executive orders and other requests for the office’s
career people—the politicals hadn’t come to lunch yet. Newland approval piled up, many of them of dubious legality, one of New-
handed the printout to one of them, who handed it right back, land’s supervisors took to saying, “We’re just following orders.”
as if he didn’t want to be seen with it. She put the paper faceup He said it without irony, as a way of reminding everyone, “We
on the table, and another lawyer turned it over, as if to protect work for the president.” He said it once to Newland, and when
Newland: “That way, if Steve walks in …” she gave him a look he added, “I know that’s what the Nazis said,
Newland turned it over again. “It’s a White House press release but we’re not Nazis.”
and I’m happy to explain why it bothers me.” The conversation “The president has said that some of them are very fine peo-
quickly became awkward, and then muted. Colleagues who had ple,” Newland reminded him.
shared Newland’s dismay in private now remained silent. It was “Attorney General Sessions never said that,” the supervisor
the last time she joined them in the lunchroom. replied. “Steve never said that, and I’ve never said that. We’re
No one risked getting fired. No one would become the target not Nazis.” That she could still have such an exchange with a
of a Trump tweet. The danger might be a mediocre performance supervisor seemed in itself like a reason not to leave.
review or a poor reference. “There was no sense that there was But Newland, who is Jewish, sometimes asked herself: If she
anything to be gained by standing up within the office,” Newland and her colleagues had been government lawyers in Germany
told me recently. “The people who might celebrate that were in the 1930s, what kind of bureaucrat would each of them have
not there to see it. You wouldn’t be able to talk about it. And if been? There were the ideologues, the true believers, like one Clar-
you’re going to piss everyone off within the department, you’re ence Thomas protégé. There were the opportunists who went
not going to be able to get out” and find a good job. along to get ahead. There were a handful of quiet dissenters. But

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After Erica Newland concluded that her work in the Justice Department involved saving Trump from
his own lies, she resigned. Photographed at home in Maryland, February 11, 2020.

PH OTOGRA PHS BY PEYTON FULFORD 59

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many in the office just tried to survive by keeping their heads

down. “I guess I know what kind I would have been,” Newland
told me. “I would have stayed in the Nazi administration ini- 2.
CASHING IN
tially and then fled.” She thinks she would have been the kind of
official who pushed for carve-outs in the Nuremberg Race Laws,
preserving citizenship rights for Germans with only partial Jewish
ancestry. She would have felt that this was better than nothing—
that it justified having worked in the regime at the beginning.

Newland and her colleagues were saving Trump from his own
lies. They were using their legal skills to launder his false state- There’s always been corruption in Washington, and everywhere that
ments and jury-rig arguments so that presidential orders would power can be found, but it became institutionalized starting in the
pass constitutional muster. When she read that producers of The late 1970s and early ’80s, with the rise of the lobbying industry. The
Apprentice had had to edit episodes in order to make Trump’s corruption that overtook the capital during that time was pecuniary
decisions seem coherent, she realized that the attorneys in the and mostly legal, a matter of norm-breaking—of people’s willing-
Office of Legal Counsel were doing something similar. Loyalty ness to do what wasn’t done. Robert Kaiser, a former Washington
to the president was equated with legality. “There was hardly Post editor and the author of the 2010 book So Damn Much Money:
any respect for the other departments of government—not for The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Govern-
the lower courts, not for Congress, and certainly not for the ment, locates an early warning sign in Gerald Ford’s readiness to
bureaucracy, for professionalism, for facts or the truth,” she told “sign up for every nasty piece of work that everybody offered him
me. “Corruption is the right word for this. It doesn’t have to be to cash in on being an ex-president.” Cashing in—once known
pay-to-play to be corrupt. It’s a departure from the oath.” as selling out—became a common path out of government, and
In the fall of 2018, Newland learned that she and five col- then back in and out again. “There was a taboo structure,” Kaiser
leagues would receive the Attorney General’s Distinguished told me. “You don’t go from a senior Justice Department position
Service Award for their work on executive orders in 2017. The to a senior partner in Lloyd Cutler’s law firm and then go back. It
news made her sick to her stomach; her office probably thought was a one-way trip. That taboo is no more.”
she would feel honored by the award. She marveled at how the Former members of Congress and their aides cashed in as
administration’s conduct had been normalized. But she also sus- lobbyists. Retired military officers cashed in with defense con-
pected that department higher-ups were using the career people to tractors. Justice Department officials cashed in at high-paying
justify policies such as the travel ban—at least, the award would law firms. Former diplomats cashed in by representing foreign
be seen that way. Newland and another lawyer stayed away from interests as lobbyists or public-relations strategists. A few years
the ceremony where the awards were presented, on October 24. high up in the Justice Department could translate into tens of
On October 27, an anti-Semitic extremist killed 11 people at millions of dollars in the private sector. Obscure aides on Capitol
a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Before the shooting, he berated Jews Hill became millionaires. Trent Lott abandoned his Senate seat
online for enabling “invaders” to enter the United States from early in order to get ahead of new restrictions on how soon he
Mexico. That same week, the Office of Legal Counsel was working could start his career as a lobbyist. Ex-presidents gave six-figure
on an order that, in response to the “threat” posed by a large caravan speeches and signed eight-figure book deals.
of Central Americans making its way north through Mexico, tem- As partisanship turned rabid, making money remained the
porarily refused all asylum claims at the southern border. Newland, one thing that Democrats and Republicans could still do together.
who could imagine being shot in a synagogue, felt that her office’s Washington became a city of expensive restaurants, where bright
work was sanctioning rhetoric that had inspired a mass killer. young people entered government to do some good and then get
She tendered her resignation three days later. By Thanksgiving rich. Luke Albee, a former chief of staff for two Democratic sena-
she was gone. In the new year she began working at a nonprofit tors, learned to avoid hiring aides he would lose too quickly. “I
called Protect Democracy. looked out for who’s going to come in and spin out after 18 months,
The asylum ban was the last public act of Attorney General to renew and refresh their contacts in order to increase their retain-
Jeff Sessions. Trump fired him immediately after the midterm ers,” he told me. The revolving door didn’t necessarily induce indi-
elections. Newland felt that Sessions—who had recused himself vidual officeholders to betray their oath—they might be scrupu-
from the Russia investigation because he had spoken with Rus- lously faithful public servants between turns at the trough. But, on
sian officials as an adviser in the Trump campaign—cared about a deeper level, the money aligned government with plutocracy. It
protecting some democratic rights, but only for white Americans. also made the public indiscriminately cynical. And as the public’s
He was eventually replaced by William Barr, a former attorney trust in institutions plunged, the status of bureaucrats fell with it.
general with a reputation for intellect and competence. But Barr The swamp had been pooling between the Potomac and
quickly made Sessions seem like a paragon of integrity. After the Anacostia for three or four decades when Trump arrived in
watching him run her former department for a year, Newland Washington, vowing to drain it. The slogan became one of his
wondered why she had stayed inside at all. most potent. Fred Wertheimer, the president of the nonprofit

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Democracy 21 and an activist for good government since the Nixon of the suburbs, a Duke graduate, a lawyer at a small New Jersey
presidency, says of Trump: “He was ahead of a lot of national poli- firm. The bureau attracted him because of the human drama that
ticians when he saw that the country sees Washington as rigged investigations uncovered, the stories elicited from people who had
against them, as corrupted by money, as a lobbyist’s game— crossed the line between the safe and predictable life of McCabe’s
which is a game he played his whole life, until he ran against it. upbringing and the shadow world beyond the law. His wife, Jill,
People wanted someone to take this on.” By then the federal govern- who was training in pediatric medicine, encouraged him to apply.
ment’s immune system had been badly compromised. Trump, in He took a 50 percent salary cut to join the bureau. At Quantico,
the name of a radical cure, set out to spread a devastating infection. it was almost a pleasure for him to be subsumed into the uniform
To Trump and his supporters, and discipline and selflessness of
the swamp was full of scheming an agent’s training.
conspirators in drab D.C. office McCabe specialized in Russian
wear, coup plotters hidden in plain organized crime and then terror-
sight at desks, in lunchrooms, and ism. He rose swiftly through the
on jogging paths around the fed- ranks of the bureau and stayed
eral capital: the deep state. A for- TRUMP out of the public eye. He had
mer Republican congressional aide a reputation for intellect and
named Mike Lofgren had intro- BELIEVED HE HAD unflappability, a natural manager.
duced the phrase into the political TO CRUSH THE In early 2016—by then McCabe
bloodstream with an essay in 2014
and a book two years later. Lofgren
BUREAUCRACY was in his late 40s, trim from tri-
athlon competitions, his short
meant the nexus of corporations, OR ELSE IT WOULD hair going gray, the frames of
banks, and defense contractors that DESTROY HIM. his glasses black above and clear
had gained so much financial and below—James Comey promoted
political control—sources of Wash- him from head of the Washing-
ington’s corruption. But conserva- ton field office to deputy director,
tives at Breitbart News, Fox News, the highest career position in the
and elsewhere began applying the bureau, responsible for overseeing
term to career officials in law- its day-to-day operations. In ordi-
enforcement and intelligence agencies, whom they accused of nary times the FBI’s No. 2 remains invisible to the public, but
being Democratic partisans in cahoots with the liberal media first McCabe’s new job gave him a role in overseeing the investigation
to prevent and then to undo Trump’s election. Like fake news and of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, just as the 2016 presi-
corruption, Trump reverse-engineered deep state into a weapon dential race was entering its consequential phase. By summer the
against his enemies, real or perceived. FBI would be digging into Trump’s campaign as well.
The moment Trump entered the White House, he embarked In July, Comey decided to announce the closing of the email
on a colossal struggle with his own bureaucracy. He had to crush case, calling Clinton’s conduct “extremely careless” but not crimi-
it or else it would destroy him. His aggrieved and predatory cor- nal. McCabe supported this extraordinary departure from normal
tex impelled him to look for an official to hang out in public as a procedure (the FBI doesn’t comment on investigations, especially
warning for others who might think of crossing him. Trump found ones that don’t result in prosecution) because the Clinton email
one who had been nameless and faceless throughout his career. case, played out on the front pages in the middle of the campaign,
was anything but normal. Comey was a master at conveying ethi-
cal rectitude—he would rise above the din to his commanding
height and convince the American people that the investigation
had been righteous.

3. But Comey’s statement created fury on both the left and the
right and badly damaged the FBI’s credibility. McCabe came

“HOW IS YOUR WIFE?”

to regret Comey’s decision and his own role in it. “We believed
that the American people believed in us,” McCabe later wrote.
“The FBI is not political.” But he should have known. He had
worked on the wildly overblown Benghazi case in the aftermath
of the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya in 2012, which
“revealed the surreal extremes to which craven political posturing
had gone,” and led to the equally overblown email case.
Andrew McCabe joined the FBI in 1996, when he was 28, a Having spent two decades as an upstanding G-man in a hierar-
year younger than Erica Newland was when she entered govern- chical institution, McCabe didn’t understand what the country had
ment service. He was the son of a corporate executive, a product become. He was unarmed and unready for what was about to happen.

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When Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, found himself in the president’s crosshairs,
his world turned upside down. Photographed in Washington, D.C., February 10, 2020.

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Jill McCabe, a pediatric emergency-room doctor, had run for told me recently, “so maybe he’ll just leave us alone now. For,
a seat in the Virginia Senate as a Democrat in 2015 in order like, a moment I thought that.”
to work for Medicaid expansion for poor patients. She lost the As Trump prepared to take power, the Russia investigation
race. On October 23, 2016, two weeks before the presidential closed in on people around him, beginning with Michael Flynn,
election, The Wall Street Journal revealed that her campaign had his choice for national security adviser, who lied to FBI agents
received almost $700,000 from the Virginia Democratic Party about phone calls with the Russian ambassador. Trump made it
and the political-action fund of Governor Terry McAuliffe, a Clin- clear that he expected the FBI to drop the Flynn case and shield
ton friend who had encouraged her to run. “Clinton Ally Aided the White House from the tightening circle of investigation. At
Campaign of FBI Official’s Wife,” read the headline, with more a White House dinner for two, the new president told his FBI
innuendo than substance. McCabe had properly insulated himself director that he wanted loyalty. Comey replied with a promise of
from the campaign and knew nothing about the donations. FBI honesty. Trump then asked if McCabe “has a problem with me.
ethics people had cleared him to oversee the Clinton investiga- I was pretty rough on him and his wife during the campaign.”
tion, which he didn’t start doing until months after Jill’s race had Comey called McCabe “a true professional,” adding: “FBI people,
ended. One had nothing to do with the other. But Trump tweeted whatever their personal views, they strip them away when they
about the Journal story, and on October 24 he enraged a crowd in step into their bureau roles.”
St. Augustine, Florida, with the made-up news that Clinton had But Trump didn’t want true professionals. Either you were loyal
corrupted the bureau and bought her way out of jail through “the or you were not, and draining the swamp turned out to mean get-
spouse—the wife—of the top FBI official who helped oversee the ting rid of those who were not. His understanding of human moti-
investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s illegal email server.” He snarled vation told him that, after his “pretty rough” treatment, McCabe
and narrowed his eyes, he tightened his lips and shook his head, couldn’t possibly be loyal—he would want revenge, and he would
he walked away from the microphone in disgust, and the crowd get it through an investigation. In subsequent conversations with
shrieked its hatred for Clinton and the rigged system. Comey, Trump kept returning to “the McCabe thing,” as if fix-
This was the first time Trump referred to the McCabes. He ated on the thought that he had created an enemy in his own FBI.
didn’t use their names, but the scene was chilling. “We knew that we were doomed,” Jill McCabe told me. “Our
Within a few days, The Wall Street Journal was preparing to days were numbered. It was gradual, but by May we knew it
run a second story with damaging information about the FBI could end really terribly.”
and McCabe—this time, that he had told agents to “stand down” On May 9, 2017, McCabe was summoned across the street
in a secret investigation of the Clinton Foundation. The sources to the office of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who informed
appeared to be senior agents in the FBI’s New York field office, him that Trump had just fired Comey. McCabe was now acting
where anti-Clinton sentiment was expressed openly. But the story director of the FBI.
was wrong: McCabe had wanted to continue the investigation Trump wanted to see him that evening. Comey had told
and had simply been following Justice Department policy to keep McCabe about Trump’s demands for loyalty, his attempts to inter-
agents from taking any overt steps, such as issuing subpoenas, that fere with the Russia investigation, and his suspicion of McCabe
might influence an upcoming election. For the second time in a himself. McCabe fully expected to be fired any day. When he
week, his integrity—the lifeblood of an official in his position— was ushered into the Oval Office, he found the president seated
was unjustly maligned in highly public fashion. He authorized behind his imposing desk, with his top advisers—the vice presi-
his counsel, Lisa Page, and the chief FBI spokesperson, Michael dent, the chief of staff, the White House counsel—perched sub-
Kortan, to correct the story by disclosing to the reporter a con- missively before him in a row of small wooden chairs, where
versation between McCabe and a Justice Department official—an McCabe joined them. Trump asked McCabe whether he dis-
authorization he believed to be appropriate, because it was in the agreed with Comey’s decision to close the Clinton email case
FBI’s interest as well as his own. in July. No, McCabe said; he and Comey had worked together
The leak inadvertently confirmed the existence of an investiga- closely. Trump kept pushing: Was it true that people at the FBI
tion into the Clinton Foundation, and it upset Comey. The direc- were unhappy about the decision, unhappy with Comey’s leader-
tor was already unhappy with the revelations about Jill McCabe’s ship? McCabe said that some agents disagreed with Comey’s han-
campaign. He prepared to order McCabe to recuse himself from dling of the Clinton case, but that he had generally been popular.
the Clinton email investigation, which the FBI reopened on Octo- “Your only problem is that one mistake you made,” McCabe
ber 28, 11 days before the election. Comey later claimed that when later recalled Trump saying. “That thing with your wife. That one
he’d asked McCabe about the leak, McCabe had said something mistake.” McCabe said nothing, and Trump went on: “That was
like “I don’t know how this shit gets in the media.” (McCabe later the only problem with you. I was very hard on you during my
said that he’d told Comey he had authorized the leak.) campaign. That money from the Clinton friend—I was very hard.
This incident, so slight amid the large dramas of those months, I said a lot of tough things about your wife in the campaign.”
set in motion a series of fateful events for McCabe. “I know,” McCabe replied. “We heard what you said.” He told
When Trump won, the McCabes thought that the new presi- Trump that Jill was a dedicated doctor, that running for office
dent might drop the conspiracy theory about Jill’s campaign had been another way for her to try to help her patients. He and
and stop his attacks on them. “He got what he wanted,” she their two teenage children had completely supported her decision.

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“Oh, yeah, yeah. She’s great. Everybody I know says she’s general counsel, told me. McCabe had two urgent tasks. The first
great. You were right to support her. Everybody tells me she’s a was to reassure the 37,000 employees now working under him
terrific person.” that the organization would be all right. On May 11, in a televised
The next morning, while McCabe was meeting with his Senate hearing, he was asked whether White House assertions
senior staff about the Russia investigation, the White House of Comey’s unpopularity in the bureau were true. McCabe had
called—Trump was on the line. This was disturbing in itself. prepared his answer. “I can tell you that I hold Director Comey
Presidents are not supposed to call FBI directors, except about in the absolute highest regard,” he said. “I can tell you also that
matters of national security. To prevent the kind of political Director Comey enjoyed broad support within the FBI and still
abuses uncovered by Watergate, Justice Department guidelines does to this day.” He was saying to the country and his own
dating back to the mid-’70s dictate a narrow line of communi- people what he couldn’t say to Trump’s face.
cation between law enforcement and the White House. Trump The second task was to protect the Russia investigation. Comey’s
had repeatedly shown that he either didn’t know or didn’t care. firing, and the White House lies about the reason—that it was over
The president was upset that McCabe had allowed Comey to the Clinton email case, when all the evidence pointed to the Rus-
fly back from Los Angeles on the FBI’s official plane after being sia investigation—raised the specter of obstruction of justice. On
fired. McCabe explained the decision, and Trump exploded: May 15, McCabe met with his top aides—Baker, Lisa Page, and
“That’s not right! I never approved that!” He didn’t want Comey two others—and concluded that they had to open an investigation
allowed into headquarters—into any FBI building. Trump raged into Trump himself. They had to find out whether the president
on. Then he said, “How is your wife?” had been working in concert with Russia and covering it up.
“She’s fine.” The case was under the direction of the deputy attorney gen-
“When she lost her election, that must have been very tough eral, Rod Rosenstein. McCabe doubted that Rosenstein, whose
to lose. How did she handle losing? Is it tough to lose?” memo Trump had used to justify firing Comey, could be trusted
McCabe said that losing had been difficult but that Jill was to withstand White House pressure to shut down the investiga-
back to taking care of children in the emergency room. tion. He urged Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel to take
“Yeah, that must have been really tough,” the president told over the case. Then it would be beyond the reach of the White
his new FBI director. “To lose. To be a loser.” House and the Justice Department. If Trump tried to kill it, the
As McCabe held the phone, his aides saw his face go tight. world would know. McCabe pressed Rosenstein several times,
Trump was forcing him into the humiliating position of not but Rosenstein kept putting him off.
being able to stand up for his wife. It was a kind of Mafia move: On May 17, McCabe informed a small group of House and
asserting dominance, emotional blackmail. Senate leaders that the FBI was opening a counterintelligence inves-
“It elevates the pressure of this idea of loyalty,” McCabe told tigation into Trump for possible conspiracy with Russia during the
me recently. “If I can actually insult your wife and you still agree 2016 campaign, as well as a criminal investigation for obstruction
with me or go along with whatever it is I want you to do, then I of justice. Rosenstein then announced that he was appointing
have you. I have split the husband and the wife. He first tried to Robert Mueller to take over the case as special counsel.
separate me from Comey—‘You didn’t agree with him, right?’ That night McCabe was chauffeured in the unfamiliar silence
He tried to separate me from the institution—‘Everyone’s happy of the director’s armored Suburban to his house in the Virginia
at the FBI, right?’ He boxes you into a corner to try to get you to exurbs beyond Dulles Airport. Jill was making dinner while their
accept and embrace whatever bullshit he’s selling, and if he can daughter did her homework at the kitchen island. McCabe took
do that, then he knows you’re with him.” off his jacket, loosened his tie, and opened a beer. Ever since
McCabe would return to the conversation again and again, ask- Comey’s firing he’d felt as though he were sprinting toward a
ing himself if he should have told Trump where to get off. But he goal—to make the Russia investigation secure and transparent.
had an organization in crisis to run. “I didn’t really need to get into “We’ve done what we needed to do,” he said. “The president is
a personal pissing contest with the president of the United States.” going to be out for blood and it’s going to be mine.”
Far from being the political conspirator of Trump’s dark “You did your job,” Jill said. “That’s the important thing.”
imaginings, McCabe was out of his depth in an intensely politi- In the coming months, when things grew dark for the McCabes,
cal atmosphere. When Trump demanded to know whom he’d Jill would remind Andy of that evening together in the kitchen.
voted for in 2016, McCabe was so shocked that he could only
answer vaguely: “I played it right down the middle.” The lame The tweets abruptly resumed on July 25: “Problem is that the
remark embarrassed McCabe, and he later clarified things with acting head of the FBI & the person in charge of the Hillary
Trump: He was a lifelong Republican, but he hadn’t voted in investigation, Andrew McCabe, got $700,000 from H for wife!”
2016, because of the FBI investigations into the two candidates. By now Trump knew McCabe’s name, but Jill would always be
This straightforward answer only deepened Trump’s suspicions. the “wife.” The next day, more tweets: “Why didn’t A.G. Sessions
But the professionalism that left McCabe exposed to Trump’s replace Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend
bullying served him as he took charge of the FBI amid the who was in charge of Clinton investigation but got … big dollars
momentous events of that week. “Once Jim got fired, Andy’s ($700,000) for his wife’s political run from Hillary Clinton and
focus and resolve were quite amazing,” James Baker, then the FBI her representatives. Drain the Swamp!”

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The tweets mortified McCabe. He had no way of answering “Was she ever authorized to speak to reporters in this time
the false charge without calling more attention to it. He went period?” a lawyer asked.
into headquarters and made a weak joke about the day’s news “Not that I’m aware of.”
and tried to keep himself and his organization focused on work This wasn’t true. McCabe himself had authorized Page to speak
while knowing that everyone he met with was thinking about to the Journal reporter. But he had stopped paying attention to
the tweets. Baker, who also became a target of Trump’s tweets, the lawyers’ questions, which weren’t supposed to have come up at
described their effect to me. “It’s just a very disorienting, strange all—he wanted to put an end to them. He had to think through
experience for a person like me, who doesn’t have much of a how he was going to deal with this new emergency. The Page-Strzok
public profile,” he said. “You can’t help having a physiological texts were bound to leak, and they would be claimed by Trump
reaction, like getting nervous, sweating. It’s frightening, and you and his partisans as proof that the FBI was a cesspool of bias and
don’t know what it’s going to mean, and suddenly people start corruption. Page and Strzok would be personally destroyed. In
talking about you, and you feel very exposed—and not in a New York City that day, Trump made his remark about Central
positive way.” American “animals,” and he urged law-enforcement officers to
The purpose of Trump’s tweets was not just to punish McCabe rough up suspected gang members. The bureau would have to
for opening the investigation, but to taint the case. “He attacks formulate a response and reaffirm its code of integrity. And the
people to make his misdeeds look like they were okay,” Jill said. McCabes were back in the president’s crosshairs.
“If Andrew was corrupt, then the McCabe had the sense that
investigation was corrupt and the everything was falling apart. It’s
investigation was wrong. So they not hard to imagine the state of
needed to do everything they mind that led him to say, “Not
could to prove Andrew McCabe that I’m aware of.” He had done it
was corrupt and a liar.” before, on the other terrible day of
Three days after the tweets “THE PRESIDENT that year, May 9, when a different
resumed, on July 28, McCabe was
urgently summoned to the Justice
IS GOING TO internal investigation had blind-
sided him with the same question
Department. Lawyers from the BE OUT FOR BLOOD about the long-ago Journal leak,
Office of the Inspector General AND IT’S GOING and McCabe had given the same
who were looking into the Clin- inaccurate answer. A right-down-
ton email investigation had found TO BE MINE,” the-middle career official, his integ-
thousands of text messages between M C CABE SAID. rity under continued assault, might
McCabe’s counsel, Lisa Page, and well make such a needless mistake.
the bureau’s ace investigator, Peter That was a Friday. Over the
Strzok. Both of them had been cen- weekend he realized that he had
tral to the Clinton and Russia cases; left the lawyers with a false impres-
Strzok was now working for Muel- sion. On Tuesday he called the
ler. During the campaign, Page and inspector general’s office to cor-
Strzok had exchanged scathing comments about Trump. They rect it. That same week the Senate confirmed Christopher Wray
had also been having an extramarital affair. Page and Strzok were as the new FBI director, and McCabe went back to being the
among McCabe’s closest colleagues; Page was his trusted friend. deputy. After 21 years as an agent, he planned to retire as soon
This was all news to him—terrible news. as he was eligible, in March 2018, when he turned 50, and go
The lawyers fired off questions about the texts. Because into the private sector. But it was already too late.
McCabe was a subject of the inspector general’s investigation of On December 19, testifying before a House committee,
the Clinton case, he told the lawyers in advance that he wouldn’t McCabe confirmed Comey’s account of Trump’s attempt to kill
answer questions about his involvement without his personal the Russia investigation. Two days later, before another House
attorney present. In spite of this, their questions suddenly veered committee, he was asked how attacks on the FBI had affected
to the second Wall Street Journal article, with its suggestion that him. “I’ll tell you, it has been enormously challenging,” McCabe
McCabe had been corrupted by Clinton. One of the lawyers said. He described how his wife—“a wonderful, brilliant, caring
wondered whether “CF” in a text from Page referred to the Clin- physician”—had run for office to help expand health insurance
ton Foundation. “Do you happen to know?” he asked McCabe. for poor people. “And having started with that noble intention,
“I don’t know what she’s referring to.” to have gone through what she and my children have experienced
“Or perhaps a code name?” over the last year has been—it has been devastating.”
“Not one that I recall,” McCabe said, “but this thing is, like, Two days before Christmas, Trump let fly a menacing tweet: “FBI
right in the middle of the allegations about me, and so I don’t Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with
really want to get into discussing this article with you. Because it full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!” No personnel issue was too small for
just seems like we’re kind of crossing the strings a little bit there.” the president’s attention if it concerned a bureaucrat he considered

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an enemy. Another tweet that same day and one on Christmas Eve pension. He became unemployable, and “radioactive” among his
repeated the old falsehoods about Jill’s campaign. She couldn’t former colleagues—almost no one at headquarters would have
stop blaming herself for all the trouble that had come to her family. contact with him. Worst of all, the Justice Department referred
Just after the holidays, McCabe learned that his part of the the inspector general’s report to the U.S. attorney for Washing-
inspector general’s report on the Clinton email investigation ton, D.C. A criminal indictment in such cases is almost unheard
would be released separately. Instead of later in the spring, the of, but the sword of the law hung over McCabe’s head for two
McCabe piece would be finished in just a couple of months. In years, an abnormally long time, while prosecutors hardly uttered
January 2018, Wray, the new director, forced McCabe out of a word. Last September, McCabe learned from media reports
the deputy’s job. Rather than accept a lower position, he went that a grand jury had been convened to vote on an indictment.
on leave in anticipation of his retirement in mid-March. At the He and Jill told their children that their father might be hand-
end of February, the inspector general completed his 35-page cuffed, the house might be searched, he might even be jailed.
report with its devastating conclusion: McCabe had shown “lack The grand jury met, and the grand jury went home, and noth-
of candor” on four occasions in his statements about the Wall ing happened. The silence implied that the jurors had found no
Street Journal leak. The Office of Professional Responsibility rec- grounds to indict. One of the prosecutors dropped off the case,
ommended that he be fired. To some in the Justice Department, unusual at such a crucial stage, and another left for the private
this represented accountability for a senior official. sector, reportedly unhappy about political pressure. Still, the U.S.
McCabe received the case file on March 9. FBI guidelines gen- Attorney’s Office kept the case open until mid-February, when
erally grant the subject 30 days to respond, but the Justice Depart- it was abruptly dropped.
ment seemed determined to satisfy McCabe discusses his situa-
the White House and get ahead of tion with the oddly calm manner
McCabe’s retirement. He was given of the straight man in a Hitchcock
a week. On Thursday, March 15, movie who can’t quite fathom the
he met with a department official
and argued his case: He’d been
“THERE’S nightmare in which he’s trapped.
Jill, who is more demonstrative,
blindsided by questions about an A LOT OF PEOPLE compares the ordeal to an abusive
episode that he’d forgotten in the OUT THERE WHO relationship: Every time she feels
nonstop turmoil of the following
months, and when he realized that
ARE UNWILLING like she can finally breathe a little,
another blow lands. On any given
he’d made an inaccurate statement, TO STAND UP night, a Fox News host can still be
he had come forward voluntarily AND DO THE RIGHT heard denouncing her husband.
to correct it. McCabe thought he Just recently, a reporter for a right-
made a solid argument, but he THING, BECAUSE wing TV network, One America
knew what was coming. THEY DON’T WANT News, announced on the White
On Friday night, watching
CNN, McCabe learned that he
TO BE THE NEXT House lawn that McCabe had had
an affair with Lisa Page. It was a
had been fired from the organiza- ANDREW M C CABE.” lie, and the network was forced to
tion where he had worked for 21 retract it, but not before McCabe
years. He was 26 hours away from had to call his daughter at school
his 50th birthday. and warn her that she would see
An hour after the news broke, the story on the internet.
Trump broadcast his delight: “Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great McCabe has written a book, and he appears regularly on
day for the hard working men and women of the FBI—A great CNN, and he volunteers his time with the Innocence Project,
day for Democracy.” It was his eighth tweet about McCabe; there working on the cases of wrongly convicted prisoners. Jill is get-
have been 33 since then, and counting. ting an M.B.A. while continuing to do the overnight shift at
“To be fired from the FBI and called a liar—I can’t even the emergency room. But they’ve come to accept that they will
describe to you how sick that makes me to this day,” McCabe told never be entirely free.
me, nearly two years later. “It’s so wildly offensive and humiliat- Every member of the FBI leadership who investigated Trump
ing and just horrible. It bothers me as much today as it did on has been forced out of government service, along with officials in
March 16, when I got fired. I’ve thought about it for thousands the Justice Department, and subjected to a campaign of vilifica-
of hours, but it still doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.” tion. Even James Baker, who was never accused of wrongdoing,
The extraordinary rush to get rid of McCabe ahead of his found himself too controversial to be hired in the private sector.
retirement, with the president baying for his scalp, appalled many But it is McCabe’s protracted agony that provides the most vivid
lawyers both in and out of government. “To engineer the process warning of what might happen to other career officials if their
that way is an unforgivable politicization of the department,” the professional duties ever collide with Trump’s personal interests.
legal expert Benjamin Wittes told me. McCabe lost most of his It struck fear in Erica Newland and her colleagues in the Office

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of Legal Counsel. It chilled officials farther afield, in the State chaired an interagency committee to fight document requests
Department. “There’s a lot of people out there,” Jill said, “who and assert executive privilege.
are unwilling to stand up and do the right thing, because they One target of Barr’s displeasure was the Office of the Inspector
don’t want to be the next Andrew McCabe.” General, created by Congress in 1978 as an independent watchdog
in executive-branch agencies. “For a guy like Barr, this goes to the
core of the unitary executive—that there’s this entity in there that
reports to Congress,” says Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor
who served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel under George

4. W. Bush. When Barr became attorney general in 1991, he made

sure that the inspector general’s office in the Justice Department

ENDS AND MEANS

had as little power as possible to investigate misconduct.
Barr has even expressed skepticism about the guidelines, estab-
lished after Watergate, that insulate the Justice Department from
political interference by the White House. In a 2001 oral his-
tory Barr said, “I think it started picking up after Watergate, the
idea that the Department of Justice has to be independent …
My experience with the department is that the most political
Nothing constrained Trump more than independent law enforce- people in the Department of Justice are the career people, the
ment. Nothing would strengthen him like the power to use it least political are the political appointees.” In Barr’s view, politi-
for his own benefit. “The authoritarian leader simply has to get cal interference in law enforcement is almost a contradiction in
control over the coercive apparatus of the state,” Susan Hen- terms. Since presidents (and their appointees) are subject to vot-
nessey and Benjamin Wittes write in their new book, Unmaking ers, they are better custodians of justice than the anonymous and
the Presidency. “Without control of the Justice Department, the unaccountable bureaucrats known as federal prosecutors and FBI
would-be tyrant’s tool kit is radically incomplete.” investigators. Barr seemed unconcerned about what presidents
When Trump nominated William Barr to replace Jeff Sessions might do between elections.
as attorney general, the Washington legal establishment exhaled The Iran-Contra scandal that took place under Ronald Rea-
a collective sigh of relief. Barr had held the same job almost 30 gan shadowed Bush’s presidency in the form of an investiga-
years earlier, in the last 14 months of the first Bush presidency. tion conducted by the independent counsel Lawrence Walsh.
He was now 68 and rich from years in the private sector. He Barr despised independent counsels as trespasses on the unitary
had nothing to prove and nothing to gain. He was considered executive. A month before Bush left office, Barr persuaded the
an “institutionalist”—quite conservative, an advocate of strong president to issue full pardons of several Reagan-administration
presidential power, but not an extremist. Because he was intimi- officials who had been found guilty in the scandal, in addition to
datingly smart and bureaucratically skillful, he would protect the one—former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger—who had
Justice Department from Trump’s maraudings far better than been indicted and might have provided evidence against Bush
the intellectually inferior Sessions and his ill-qualified tempo- himself. The appearance of a cover-up didn’t trouble Barr. But
rary replacement, Matthew Whitaker. Barr told a friend that he six years later, when the independent counsel Kenneth Starr was
agreed to come back because the department was in chaos and investigating President Bill Clinton for perjury and obstruction
needed a leader with a bulletproof reputation. in a sex scandal, Barr, by then a corporate lawyer, criticized the
Before Barr’s confirmation hearings, Neal Katyal, a legal Clinton White House for attacks on Starr that could impede the
scholar who was acting solicitor general under Obama, warned investigation and even intimidate jurors and witnesses.
a group of Democratic senators not to be fooled: Barr’s views were Here is a glimpse of the second strand in Barr’s thinking:
well outside mainstream conservatism. He could prove more dan- partisanship. Less conspicuous than the first, which sheathes it in
gerous than any of his predecessors. And the reasons for concern constitutional principles, it never disappears. Barr is a persistent
could be found by anyone who took the trouble to study Barr’s critic of independent counsels—except when they’re investigat-
record, which was made of three durable, interwoven strands. ing a Democratic president. He’s a vocal defender of presidential
The first was his expansive view of presidential power, some- authority—when a Republican is in the White House.
times called the theory of the “unitary executive”—the idea This partisanship has to be understood in relation to the third
that Article II of the Constitution gives the president sole and enduring strand of Barr’s thinking: He is a Catholic—a very con-
complete authority in the executive branch, with wide latitude servative one. John R. Dunne, who ran the Justice Department’s
to interpret laws and make war. When Barr became head of the civil-rights division when Barr was attorney general under Bush,
Office of Legal Counsel under George H. W. Bush, in 1989, he calls him “an authoritarian Catholic.” Dunne and his wife once
wrote an influential memo listing 10 ways in which Congress had dinner at Barr’s house and came away with the impression
had been trespassing on Article II, arguing, “Only by consis- of a traditional patriarch whom only the family dog disobeyed.
tently and forcefully resisting such congressional incursions can Barr attended Columbia University at the height of the anti-war
executive branch prerogatives be preserved.” He created and movement, and he drew a lesson from those years that shaped

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many other religious conservatives as well: The challenge to tra- view of Article II, it was nearly impossible for Trump to obstruct
ditional values and authority in the 1960s sent the country into justice at all.
a long-term moral decline. Writing that memo was a strange thing for a former attor-
In 1992, as attorney general, Barr gave a speech at a right-wing ney general to do with his spare time. Six months later, Trump
Catholic conference in which he blamed “the long binge that nominated Barr to his old job.
began in the mid-1960s” for soaring rates of abortion, drug use,
divorce, juvenile crime, venereal disease, and general immorality. After Barr assumed office, his advocacy for Trump intensi-
“The secularists of today are clearly fanatics,” Barr said. He called fied. When Mueller completed his report, in March 2019, Barr
for a return to “God’s law” as the basis for moral renewal. “There is rushed to tell the world not only that the report cleared Trump
a battle going on that will decide who we are as a people and what of conspiring with Russia, but that the lack of an “underlying
name this age will ultimately bear.” One of Barr’s speechwriters crime” cleared the president of obstruction as well—despite 10
at the time was Pat Cipollone, who is now Trump’s White House damning examples of possible crimes in the report, which Barr
counsel and served as one of his defenders during impeachment. finally released, lightly redacted, three weeks later. Those extra
In 1995, as a private citizen, Barr published the same argument, weeks allowed Trump a crucial moment to claim complete exon-
with the same military metaphors, as an essay in the journal then eration. Then he turned his rhetorical gun on his pursuers. He
called The Catholic Lawyer. “We are locked in a historic struggle wanted them brought down.
between two fundamentally different systems of values,” he wrote. Two investigations of the investigators were already in the
“In a way, this is the end product of the Enlightenment.” The works—one by the Justice Department’s inspector general, focus-
secularists’ main weapon in their war on religion, Barr continued, ing on electronic surveillance of a Trump-campaign adviser (Barr
is the law. Traditionalists would have to fight back the same way. called it “spying”), and a broader review by John Durham, the
What does this apocalyptic U.S. attorney for Connecticut,
showdown have to do with Arti- under Barr’s supervision. In an
cle II and the unitary executive? interview with CBS in May, Barr
It raises the stakes of politics to prejudged the outcome of Dur-
eschatology. With nothing less ham’s review, strongly implying
than Christian civilization at stake,
the faithful might well conclude
BARR AND TRUMP that the Russia investigation had
been flawed from the start. He
that the ends justify the means. ARE COLLABORATING located the misconduct in the
Barr spent the quarter century TO DESTROY THE deep state: “Republics have fallen
between Presidents Bush and because of [a] Praetorian Guard
Trump in private practice, serving INDEPENDENCE OF mentality where government offi-
on corporate boards, and caring for ANYTHING THAT cials get very arrogant, they iden-
the youngest of his three daughters
as she battled lymphoma. Barr and
COULD RESTRAIN THE tify the national interest with their
own political preferences, and they
Cipollone also sat together on the PRESIDENT. feel that anyone who has a differ-
board of the Catholic Information ent opinion, you know, is some-
Center, an office in Washington how an enemy of the state. And,
closely affiliated with Opus Dei, you know, there is that tendency
a far-right Catholic organization that they know better and that,
with influential connections in you know, they’re there to protect
politics and business around the world. During those years, the as guardians of the people. That can easily translate into essen-
Republican Party sank into its own swamp of moral relativism, tially supervening the will of the majority and getting your own
hitting bottom with Trump’s presidency. way as a government official.”
Trump’s arrival brought Barr out of semi-retirement as a Even if this were true of the Russia case, the attorney general
reliable advocate. When Comey reopened the Clinton email had no business foreshadowing the result of investigations. And
investigation 11 days before the election, Barr wrote an approv- when, in December, the inspector general released his report,
ing op-ed. When Trump fired Comey six months later, sup- finding serious mistakes in the applications for surveillance war-
posedly for mishandling the same investigation, Barr published rants but no political bias—no “Praetorian Guard”—in the Rus-
another approving op-ed. The only consistent principle seemed sia investigation, Barr wasn’t satisfied. He announced that he
to be what benefited Trump. Then, in June 2018, Barr wrote disagreed with the report.
a 19-page memo and sent it, unsolicited, to Rod Rosenstein. Barr uses his official platform to gaslight the public. In a
The memo argued that Robert Mueller could not charge Trump speech to the conservative Federalist Society in Washington in
with obstructing justice for taking actions that came under the November, he devoted six paragraphs to perhaps the most con-
president’s authority, including asking Comey to back off the temptuously partisan remarks an attorney general has ever made.
Flynn investigation and then firing Comey. In Barr’s expansive Progressives are on a “holy mission” in which ends justify means,

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President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr at the White House, November 26, 2019

while conservatives “tend to have more scruple over their political Barr and Trump are pursuing very different projects—the one
tactics,” Barr claimed. “One of the ironies of today is that those a crusade to align government with his idea of religious authority,
who oppose this president constantly accuse this administration the other a venal quest for self-aggrandizement. But they serve
of ‘shredding’ constitutional norms and waging a war on the rule each other’s purpose by collaborating to destroy the independence
of law. When I ask my friends on the other side, ‘What exactly of anything—federal agencies, the public servants who work in
are you referring to?,’ I get vacuous stares, followed by sputtering them, even the other branches of government—that could restrain
about the travel ban or some such thing.” the president.
The core of the speech was a denunciation of legislative and “Barr is perhaps the most political attorney general we’ve ever
judicial encroachments on the authority of the executive—as if had,” a longtime government lawyer told me. He described the
presidential power hasn’t grown enormously since 9/11, if not the devastating effects on law enforcement of Trump’s unending assault
New Deal, and as if Trump’s conduct in office falls well within the and Barr’s complicity. “I know from talking to friends that many
boundaries of Article II. In October, at Notre Dame, the attorney of the career people are distressed about two related things. One
general recycled his old jeremiad on religious war. For Barr the is the sense that legal decisions are being driven to an exceptional
year is always 1975, Congress is holding hearings to enfeeble degree by politics.” The Justice Department, disregarding the views
DOUG MILLS / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX

the presidency, and the secular left is destroying the American of career lawyers, has taken extreme positions—for example, that
family. He is using his short time remaining onstage to hold off the White House could refuse to provide any evidence in the
the coming darkness, and if Providence has played the cosmic impeachment hearings, and that neither the House of Represen-
joke of vesting righteous power in the radically flawed person of tatives nor the Manhattan district attorney can subpoena Trump’s
Donald Trump, Barr will do what he must to protect him: distort personal financial records. The other cause of distress, the lawyer
the Mueller report; impugn Justice Department officials; try to said, is Barr’s willingness to attack his own people, joining Trump
keep the Ukraine whistle-blower’s complaint from Congress via in accusing government officials of conspiring against the president.
spurious legal arguments; give cover to White House stonewalling Even far afield from Washington, morale has suffered. A federal
of the impeachment inquiry; create an official channel for the prosecutor in the middle of the country told me that he and his col-
delivery of political dirt on the president’s opponents; overrule leagues can no longer count on their leaders to protect them from
his prosecutors on behalf of Trump’s friend Roger Stone. unfair accusations or political meddling. Any case with a hint of

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political risk is considered untouchable. The White House’s agenda while ambassadorships had become a common way for presidents
is driving more and more cases, especially those related to immigra- to thank big donors. “This wasn’t invented in the beginning of
tion. And there’s a palpable fear of retaliation for any whiff of criti- 2017 with this administration,” William Burns, a deputy secretary
cism. Prosecutors worry that Trump’s attacks on law enforcement of state under Obama, told me. “Unqualified political appointees
are having a corrosive effect in courtrooms, because jurors no longer have been with us long before Donald Trump. As in so many areas,
trust FBI agents or other government officers serving as witnesses. what he’s done is accelerated that problem and made it a lot worse.”
As a result, many of the prosecutor’s colleagues are thinking of Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, bled the depart-
leaving government service. “I hear a lot of people say, ‘If there’s a ment dry. To purge it of bloat, he tried to gut the budget, froze
second term, there’s no possible way I can wait it out for another hiring, and pushed out a large cadre of senior diplomats. Offices
four.’ A lot of people feared how bad it could be, but we had no and hallways in the headquarters on C Street grew deserted.
idea it would be this bad. It’s hard to weather that storm.” What When Pompeo became secretary, he promised to restore “swag-
keeps this prosecutor from leaving is a commitment to his cases, ger” to diplomacy. He ended the hiring freeze, promoted career
to the department’s mission, and to the thought “not so much officials, and began to fill empty positions at the top—but he
that you could make a difference in this administration, because brought in mostly political appointees. According to Ronald
that doesn’t seem possible anymore, but so you can be here in Neumann, a retired career ambassador who is now the president
place when what we think will be a need to rebuild comes.” of the American Academy of Diplomacy, the politicization of the
When Trump launched his campaign, he was suspected of seek- State Department represents “the destruction of a 100-year effort,
ing only to enrich himself. The point of the presidency was more from Teddy Roosevelt on, to build professional government sepa-
high-paying guests at the Trump International Hotel, down the rate from the spoils system.” The destruction, Neumann told
street from the White House. If Trump’s tax returns and financial me, is a “deliberate process, based on the belief that the federal
records are ever made public, we’ll know just how much the presi- government is hostile, and now you have to put in loyal people
dency was worth to him. across the board in senior positions to control the bastards—the
But Trump’s ambitions have swelled since the election. He hasn’t career bureaucrats. In the past it has been primarily a frustration
crushed the independence of the Justice Department simply to be that the bureaucracy is sclerotic, that it is not agile. But it was
able to squeeze more money out of his businesses. Financial self- not about loyalty, and that’s what it’s about now.”
interest “is why he ran,” Fred Wertheimer, of Democracy 21, says. Under Pompeo, 42 percent of ambassadors are political
“But power is a drug. Power is an addiction—exercising power, appointees, an all-time high (before the Trump presidency the
flying around in Air Force One, having motorcades, having people number was about 30 percent). They “are chosen for their loyalty
salute you. He thinks he is the country.” to Trump,” Elizabeth Jones, a retired career ambassador, told me.
“They’ve learned that the only way to succeed is to be 100 percent
loyal, 1,000 percent. The idea that you’re out there to work for the
American people is an alien idea.” Of the department’s positions
at the level of assistant secretary and above, only 8 percent are held

5. by career officials, and only one Foreign Service officer has been
confirmed by the Senate to a senior position since Trump took

“NO STATEMENT”
office—the others are in acting positions, a way for the admin-
istration to sap the independence of its senior officials. Many
mid-level diplomats now look for posts outside Washington, in
foreign countries that the president is unlikely to tweet about.
The story of how the first family, Rudy Giuliani, his two for-
mer business associates, a pair of discredited Ukrainian prosecu-
tors, and the right-wing media orchestrated a smear campaign
As a candidate, Trump learned that a foreign country can provide to force Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch out of her post in Kyiv
potent help in subverting an American election. As president, he because she stood in the way of their corrupt schemes has become
has the entire national-security bureaucracy under his command, famous as the origin of Trump’s impeachment. The story of how
but he needed several years to find its weak spot—to figure out Yovanovitch’s colleagues in the State Department responded to
that the State Department could be as corruptible as Justice, and the crisis is less well known. It reveals the full range of behavior
as useful to his hold on power. among officials under unprecedented pressure from the top. It
When Mike Pompeo took over as secretary of state, in shows how an agency with a long, proud history can be hollowed
April 2018, the State Department was already ailing. Diplomacy has out and broken by its own leaders.
been an atrophying muscle of American power for several decades, Tom Malinowski, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey
and the status of Foreign Service officers has steadily diminished. and former State Department official, was born in Communist
In the mid-1970s, 60 percent of the positions at the level of assis- Poland to a family that had lived through World War II. “I’ve
tant secretary and above were filled by career officials. By the time often asked myself the alternative-history question of what might
of the Obama administration, the figure was down to 30 percent, happen if the Nazis took over America,” he told me. “Who would

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become, out of opportunism or maybe even shared outlook, one for closing the Clinton investigation. On the same day the first
of them? Some people would. Most people would keep their Hill story about Yovanovitch was published, diGenova appeared
head down. Some number of people would be courageous and on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and said that Yovanovitch “has
do useful things. A smaller number would do recklessly useful bad-mouthed the president of the United States to Ukrainian
things. And then some number, hopefully also small, would take officials and has told them not to listen or worry about Trump
advantage of the situation to help themselves.” policy because he’s going to be impeached. This woman needs
Masha Yovanovitch, like Andy McCabe, had no public profile to be called home to the United States—” “Oh, immediately,”
but was widely respected among colleagues. She joined the For- Hannity interjected. Two nights later, Laura Ingraham repeated
eign Service in 1986, when she was 28 years old, and rose through the story on her show. Victoria Toensing, diGenova’s law part-
the ranks of the State Department to become the U.S. ambas- ner (and wife) and a frequent Fox News guest, texted one of
sador to Kyrgyzstan, then Armenia, and then, in 2016, Ukraine. Giuliani’s cronies: “Is the Wicket [sic] Witch gone?” On March 24,
At the embassy in Kyiv she became in a tweet, Donald Trump Jr. called
known as a dedicated fighter of Yovanovitch a “joker.”
the corruption rampant among The State Department called
Ukrainian political and business The Hill’s original story a “complete
leaders. And, as with McCabe, her fabrication.” But as the lies spread
professionalism left her vulnerable TRUMP NEEDED among conservative media, trigger-
when a gang of thugs set out to SEVERAL YEARS TO ing a barrage of attacks, Yovano-
destroy her career. Corruption,
the theme of her work in Ukraine,
FIGURE OUT THAT vitch found herself in a crisis.
Hale, the department’s No. 3 and
was also the theme of its abrupt THE STATE DEPARTMENT its senior career diplomat, sent an
end. “You’re going to think that COULD BE AS email to two colleagues: “I believe
I’m incredibly naive,” she told the
House during her testimony, “but CORRUPTIBLE AS THE Masha should deny on the record
saying anything disrespectful and
I couldn’t imagine all the things JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, reaffirm her loyalty as Ambassador
that have happened.” AND AS USEFUL TO HIS and FSO to POTUS and Constitu-
In early March 2019, David tion.” Gordon Sondland, a Trump
Hale, the undersecretary of state HOLD ON POWER. donor who, with no relevant expe-
for political affairs, paid a visit to rience, had been made ambassador
the embassy in Kyiv. He asked to the European Union, gave her
Yovanovitch, who planned to end the same advice directly. “Tweet
her tour that summer and then out there that you support the pres-
retire, to stay another year. With Ukrainian elections coming ident, and that all these are lies,” Yovanovitch recounted him saying
up, the embassy couldn’t afford to be temporarily leaderless. She during her impeachment testimony. “You know the sorts of things
thought about it overnight and agreed. that he likes. Go out there battling aggressively and praise him.”
Two weeks later, on March 20, The Hill, a Washington news- Yovanovitch felt that she couldn’t do it. Like Erica Newland, she
paper, published an interview with Yuriy Lutsenko, one of the had taken an oath to defend the Constitution, not the president.
dirty Ukrainian prosecutors who had been thwarted by Yovano- Instead of tweeting allegiance to Trump, Yovanovitch recorded a
vitch. Lutsenko accused her of trying to stop legitimate prosecu- public service announcement urging Ukrainians to vote in that
tions. The article also reported that the ambassador was heard country’s upcoming presidential election. She tried to connect this
to have openly criticized Trump. The president retweeted the civic duty to her role as a nonpartisan government official. “Dip-
story, which was composed almost entirely of lies. It was fol- lomats like me make a pledge to serve whomever the American
lowed by several more articles filled with conspiracy theories people, our fellow citizens, choose,” she told the camera. Presidents
about Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 election on behalf of Bush and Obama had both appointed her to ambassadorships,
Hillary Clinton. The reporter, John Solomon (who stands by “and I promote and carry out the policies of President Trump and
his stories), was getting his information from Giuliani and his his administration. This is one of the marks of a true democracy.”
associates. Solomon had come to The Hill from Circa News, a Whatever impression this civics lesson made on Ukrainians, it
right-wing site that had published an identical falsehood about did nothing to stop the vicious campaign against her back home.
McCabe—that he had openly trashed Trump in a meeting—two The United States was no longer the democracy that American
years earlier. The Russia and Ukraine scandals are best understood diplomats hold up as a model to foreigners.
as a single web of corruption and abuse of office, and Solomon On March 24, unable to function in her post, Yovanovitch
is one of many strands connecting them. wrote a desperate email to David Hale. She asked for a statement
Another is Joseph diGenova, a right-wing Washington law- from the secretary of state saying that she had his full confidence,
yer, former appointee of Barr, and friend of Giuliani’s who had that she spoke for the president and the country. Hale called
asserted in 2016 that FBI agents were furious with James Comey Yovanovitch that afternoon and asked her to put her concerns

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in writing. She sent a longer email, describing the figures who in battle is made easier by speed, adrenaline, comrades. “Moral
were attacking her—including Giuliani and Lutsenko—and courage—you have, in many cases, lots of time, it’s a solitary act,”
attempting to interpret their motives. he said. “You are fully aware of potential repercussions to your
The next day, at a weekly meeting of senior officials in the career, and it’s harder. It shouldn’t be harder—you’re not going
secretary’s office, Hale brought up Yovanovitch’s request. Pom- to get killed—but that’s the way it is.”
peo was confronted with a dilemma—stand up for his people or Things quieted down for a few weeks. On April 21 Volody-
appease the White House. He solved it by punting, saying that no myr Zelensky, who ran on an anti-corruption platform, was
statement would be made on her behalf until Giuliani, Hannity, elected president of Ukraine in a landslide. Right away, the White
and others were asked for their evidence. Later that week Hale House let Pompeo know that Trump wanted Yovanovitch gone.
sent word to the European bureau: “No statement.” The media storm kicked up again. On the evening of April 24,
Yovanovitch herself never got an answer from Hale. “Basically, Yovanovitch hosted an embassy event to honor a young Ukrainian
we moved on,” Hale said during his testimony at the impeachment woman, an anti-corruption activist who had died after a sulfuric-
inquiry. “For whatever reason, we stopped working on that—at acid attack and whose murder remained unsolved. After midnight,
least, I stopped working on that issue. I was not involved in doing a call came in from the State Department: Yovanovitch was to get
it, so I wasn’t paying a great deal of on the next plane home. She asked
attention to it.” Expressing support for a reason but was given none,
for Yovanovitch might have made other than concern for her security.
things worse, he noted. “One She was back in Washington on
point of view was that it might April 26. That was the day Pom-
even provoke a public reaction MORE THAN peo, with great fanfare, unveiled
from the president himself about his “Ethos” initiative, which
the ambassador.” 1,000 SCIENTISTS included a new mission statement
HAVE LEFT THE that the secretary himself recited
A couple of bureaucratic levels
below Hale, George Kent, the
ENVIRONMENTAL before hundreds of Foreign Ser-
vice officers: “I am a champion
deputy assistant secretary of state PROTECTION AGENCY, of American diplomacy … I act
for Europe, was fighting on behalf THE DEPARTMENT with uncompromising personal
of the besieged ambassador. Kent
had been her second in command OF AGRICULTURE, AND and professional integrity. I take
ownership of and responsibility
at the embassy in Kyiv, where cor- OTHER AGENCIES. for my actions and decisions. And
ruption had been his major focus. I show unstinting respect in word
He knew all the Ukrainian players and deed for my colleagues and all
involved in the campaign against who serve alongside me.” Pompeo
her, and he was outraged by the didn’t meet with his ambassador to
slanders, which had begun to tar Ukraine after summarily recalling
his name as well. He had strengthened the original State Depart- her, or ever again, nor did he say a public word on her behalf. Other
ment response to the first Hill article, inserting the phrase complete officials told Yovanovitch that she had done nothing wrong but
fabrication, and when the attacks intensified he told Hale that had somehow “lost the confidence of the president.” The depart-
the department needed to stand behind Yovanovitch. He spoke ment found her a temporary teaching post at Georgetown, but
up despite his vulnerable status as a mid-level officer in line for a her career as a diplomat was over.
promotion to a senior position. “I, on a personal level, felt awful for her,” Kent told the
“Moments like this test people; they bring out one’s true impeachment inquiry, “because it was within two months of
character,” said Malinowski, who, as a member of the House us asking her—the undersecretary of state asking her—to stay
Foreign Affairs Committee, heard days of testimony from ex- another year.” When, in late May, Giuliani resumed his campaign
colleagues during the impeachment inquiry. “In normal times, of lies, telling Ukrainian journalists that Yovanovitch and Kent
it’s hard to know who would do what under those circumstances.” were part of a plot against Trump led by George Soros, there was
Kent’s first impulse was to prevent American policy from being no rebuttal from the State Department. Hale sent word that Kent
corrupted in Kyiv and Washington. Hale, in a more powerful should keep his head down and lower his profile on Ukraine. Kent
job, put bureaucratic hierarchy and his own secure place in it canceled several scheduled appearances at Washington think tanks.
first. As a result, Yovanovitch had no one to press the urgency of By then America’s Ukraine policy had fallen out of the regu-
her case with her leadership. lar State Department channels and into the hands of the “three
“I believe moral courage is more difficult than physical cour- amigos”—Ambassadors Gordon Sondland and Kurt Volker and
age,” Ronald Neumann, the retired ambassador, told me. “I was Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Volker, the special envoy to Ukraine,
an infantry officer in Vietnam. Some courageous officers on the wanted to arrange a meeting between Zelensky and Trump, and
battlefield became very cautious bureaucrats.” Physical courage in July he told Kent that he was going to see Giuliani to discuss

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Ukrainian investigations of former Vice President Joe Biden’s out a statement on Yovanovitch?” Pompeo listened, and then he
family and the 2016 election. Kent later said that when he asked said, “Thank you.” The conversation lasted about three minutes.
Volker why he would do that, Volker replied, “If there’s nothing In the last days of September, McKinley kept pushing for a
there, what does it matter? And if there is something there, it statement praising Yovanovitch’s professionalism and courage. He
should be investigated.” Kent told him, “Asking another country heard from eight or 10 colleagues that the State Department’s
to investigate a prosecution for political reasons undermines our silence in the face of an ugly presidential attack was demoralizing.
advocacy of the rule of law.” But if this principle had ever had On September 28 he emailed five senior colleagues, including
currency in the Trump administration, it no longer did. Hale, insisting that the department needed to say something.
On July 25, after Ukraine’s parliamentary elections, Trump Four wrote back agreeing. Hale didn’t reply; he told a colleague
called Zelensky and asked for “a favor”—an investigation of that he didn’t think McKinley’s effort would go anywhere. A few
the Bidens that was tantamount to Ukrainian interference hours later Pompeo’s spokesperson informed McKinley that, in
in the U.S. presidential campaign in exchange for the release order to protect Yovanovitch from undue attention, the secretary
of American military aid and a personal meeting in the Oval would not release a statement.
Office. A day or two later, Kent heard about the call from Lieu- The next day, a Sunday, McKinley told his wife that, after 37
tenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert years in the Foreign Service, he had to get out right away. Though
in the White House, who had been among those—including he never spoke publicly until he was subpoenaed to appear before
Pompeo—listening in. Vindman told Kent that Trump had the House during the impeachment inquiry, his departure was so
called Yovanovitch “bad news,” and that the conversation had sudden that it had the quality of a resignation in protest. Pompeo,
gone into highly sensitive matters—so sensitive that Vindman known in the department for his temper and bullying, spent 20
couldn’t share them with his colleague. Kent didn’t try to learn minutes on the phone from Europe with McKinley and gave
more. For all his outspokenness in Yovanovitch’s defense, Kent him a tough time. Later, the secretary lied in an interview with
wasn’t the type of official who wanted “to be in the middle of ABC, saying that McKinley could have come to see him about
everything.” In his impeachment testimony, he never mentioned Yovanovitch anytime but never had.
writing a dissenting cable, or speaking to the inspector general. Before leaving, McKinley paid a visit to Hale and told
He carefully avoided the media. him, one Foreign Service officer to another, that the depart-
The professional code of Foreign Service officers nearly kept ment’s silence was having a terrible effect on morale. Hale flatly
the story of Trump’s attempted shakedown of Zelensky a secret. disagreed—he asserted that morale was high. Afterward, Hale
“It’s not in their DNA” to go public, Tom Malinowski said. Only met with Pompeo and identified a different threat to morale—
one bureaucrat—the whistle-blower—made it possible for the McKinley’s negativity.
American people to find out about the quid pro quo. The com- “I was flying solo,” McKinley told the House during the
plaint surfaced on September 9, just days before Zelensky was impeachment inquiry. “I didn’t know what the rules of engage-
scheduled to meet CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to discuss an interview, ment were. But I did know that, as a Foreign Service officer, I
during which he likely would have announced the investigations would be feeling pretty alone at this point.” So he got in touch
that Trump wanted. with Yovanovitch, whom he knew, and with Kent, whom he
On September 25, the White House released a rough transcript didn’t. McKinley wanted to find out how they were doing. He
of the July 25 call. In it, Trump said that “the former ambassador was surprised to learn that he was the first senior official to contact
from the United States, the woman, was bad news” and “she’s them about the transcript of the Ukraine call. Kent was picking
going to go through some things.” During the impeachment apples with his wife in Virginia when McKinley reached him.
inquiry Hale explained, in high bureaucratese, “That was not an Afterward, he had to Google McKinley to find out who he was.
operational comment that had been operationalized in any way.” “He appeared to me … to be a genuinely decent person who
was concerned about what was happening,” Kent said in his
At the State Department, Ambassador Michael McKinley read impeachment testimony.
the transcript and had a visceral, almost physical reaction: He In early October, after House committees issued subpoenas
was appalled. McKinley was Pompeo’s senior adviser, having been for documents and scheduled depositions, the State Department
brought back from his post in Brazil to serve as a link between ordered its personnel not to cooperate. Pompeo sent a letter to
the secretary and the Foreign Service. He and Hale were the only Congress calling the requests “an attempt to intimidate, bully, and
career officers among the department’s leadership, but he never treat improperly the distinguished professionals of the Depart-
made it into the secretary’s inner circle of political appointees, ment of State.” He also said publicly that Congress had prevented
which included Pompeo’s former business partners. Until Sep- Foreign Service officers from talking to the department’s lawyers,
tember 25, McKinley hadn’t paid enough attention to connect which wasn’t true—the lawyers wouldn’t talk to Kent, who had
the dots of the Ukraine story. Now he found that Trump’s words received a subpoena and was willing to testify. Kent felt bullied
spoke for themselves. not by Congress, but by his own agency.
The next day, McKinley picked up where Kent had left off On October 3, the State Department’s European bureau met to
the previous spring. According to his impeachment testimony, discuss how to respond to the subpoenas. When Kent noted that
he went to see Pompeo and asked, “Wouldn’t it be good to put the department was being unresponsive to Congress, a department

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lawyer raised his voice at Kent in front of 15 colleagues, then called In his fourth year in power, Trump has largely succeeded in
him into the hall to yell some more. He was putting Kent on notice making the executive branch work on his personal behalf. He
not to cooperate. Kent wrote a memo about the encounter, which hasn’t done it by figuring out how to operate the bureaucratic
he gave to McKinley, who sent it to Hale and others … and then levers of power, or by installing leaders with a vision of policy
the memo disappeared into the files with all the other documents that he shares, or by channeling a popular groundswell into gov-
that the department refused to turn over to Congress. ernment action. He’s done it by punishing perceived enemies,
The career people testified anyway. None of them had ever co-opting craven allies, and driving out career officials of compe-
received this kind of public scrutiny. Some were being regularly tence and integrity. The result is a thin layer of political loyalists
attacked by name on social media and right-wing websites. All on top of a cowed bureaucracy.
of them were facing steep lawyers’ bills. (Former colleagues set Justice and State were obvious targets for Trump, but the rest
up a legal fund and raised several hundred thousand dollars.) of the executive branch is being similarly, if more quietly, bent
Pompeo and his State Department continued to say nothing in to his will. One of every 14 political appointees in the Trump
their defense. But one after another they came forward. Marie administration is a lobbyist; they largely run domestic policy.
Yovanovitch, whose mother had just died, didn’t lose her compo- Trump’s biggest donors now have easy access to agency heads
sure when Representative Adam Schiff read aloud a nasty tweet and to the president himself, as they swell his reelection coffers.
Trump had just written about her. George Kent testified in a bow In the last quarter of 2019, while being impeached, Trump raised
tie and matching pocket square like a throwback from an era of nearly $50 million. His corruption of power, unprecedented in
great diplomacy, saying with a wry recent American history, only
smile, “You can’t promote princi- compounds the money corrup-
pled anti-corruption action without tion that first created the swamp.
pissing off corrupt people.” David Within the federal government,
Hale, pale and terse, also testified. career officials are weighing outside
Toward the end of his testimony, job opportunities against their pen-
Democratic Representative Denny FOUR YEARS sion plans and their commitment
Heck of Washington begged Hale
to say that Yovanovitch was a
OF TRUMP IS to their oaths. More than 1,000 sci-
entists have left the Environmental
courageous patriot and that what AN EMERGENCY. Protection Agency, the Department
had happened to her was wrong. EIGHT YEARS of Agriculture, and other agencies,
Hale’s voice faltered as he replied, according to The Washington Post.
“I believe that she should have been IS A PERMANENT Almost 80 percent of employees at
able to stay at post and continue to CONDITION. the National Institute of Food and
do the outstanding work—” Agriculture have quit. The Labor
Heck wasn’t having it. “What Department has made deep cuts
happened to her was wrong?” in the number of safety inspectors,
“That’s right,” Hale said. and worker deaths nationwide have
“Thank you for clarifying the increased dramatically, while recalls
record. Because I wasn’t sure where of unsafe consumer products have
it was that she could go to set the record straight if it wasn’t you, dropped off. When passing laws and changing regulations prove
sir, or where she could go to get her good name and reputation onerous, the Trump administration simply guts the government of
back if it wasn’t you, sir.” expertise so that basic functions wither away, the well-connected
Tom Malinowski, listening to his former colleagues, thought feed on the remains, and the survivors keep their heads down, until
that their testimony said something about what has happened to the day comes when they face the same choice as McCabe and
the State Department. “There’s a lot of pent-up anger and trauma, Yovanovitch: do Trump’s dirty work or be destroyed.
and this was an outlet for the institution,” he said. “These men Four years is an emergency. Eight years is a permanent condi-
and women were speaking for their colleagues about more than tion. “Things can hold together to the end of the first term, but
just what happened with Ukraine.” after that, things fall apart,” Malinowski said. “People start leaving
Bureaucrats never received such public praise as they did during in droves. It’s one thing to commit four years of your life to the
the weeks of the impeachment inquiry. But the hearings left a mis- institution in the hope that you can be there for its restoration.
leading impression. The Ukraine story, like the Russia story before It’s another to commit eight years. I can’t even wrap my head
it, did not represent a morality tale in which truth and honor stood around what that would be like.”
up to calumny and corruption and prevailed. Yovanovitch is gone,
and so is her replacement, William Taylor Jr., and so are McKinley
and others—Lieutenant Colonel Vindman was marched out of the George Packer is an Atlantic staff writer and the author, most
White House in early February—while Pompeo is still there and, recently, of Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the
above him, so is the president. Trump is winning. American Century.

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Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film, The Truth,

ends as many of his films do, with a group
of people walking. Some of them are
related; some are not. Some know exactly
where they’re going and why; others are
just tagging along, enjoying the exercise
and the company. The person who seems
most determined, surest of what she’s
doing, is a septuagenarian movie star
named Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve), in
whose wake the others appear to follow.
She’s on her way to a film studio to reshoot
an emotional scene that she feels she didn’t
get right the day before—though every-
one else thought it marvelous—because
her real life has intervened. The previ-
ous night, at the end of a long, cathartic
heart-to-heart with her daughter, Lumir
(Juliette Binoche), Fabienne suddenly sat
up straight and blurted out, “Why didn’t
I play it like this? Why didn’t I think of
it!” And in that moment, this great French
actor expresses the essential subject of this
great Japanese director’s art: people won-
dering how to play their lives, and why
they can’t seem to get it right the first time.
Kore-eda has been writing and direct-
ing gorgeous, slyly challenging dramatic
features in his native Japan since the
O M NIVOR E
1990s, winning awards at festivals all
over the world without gaining much of
a following among U.S. moviegoers. His
profile has risen lately, since his 13th dra-
The Reigning Master matic feature, Shoplifters, won the Palme
d’Or at the 2018 Cannes festival and was
of Family Drama nominated last year for an Oscar for Best
Foreign Language Film. That wrenching
movie, about a makeshift family living on
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest film, his first set outside of Japan, the margins of society, didn’t play in a lot
showcases the great director’s signature theme. of the big American multiplexes—these
days, almost no foreign films do.
But those who managed to see it in a
By Terrence Rafferty theater or found it on Amazon or Hulu
were moved by its vibrant lower-depths

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realism, its surprising humor, and what might be called eldest—12-year-old Akira—assuming the role of father.
its moral grace. Some viewers might have sought out They’re even further off the grid than the ragtag aggre-
his earlier work and discovered other, equally affect- gation of Shoplifters, yet they make of their grim situ-
ing family dramas such as Maborosi (1995), Nobody ation, for a while, a reasonable facsimile of normality.
Knows (2004), Still Walking (2008), I Wish (2011), Kore-eda doesn’t romanticize childhood as Words-
Our Little Sister (2015), and After the Storm (2016). worth did, but he clearly sees it as a crucial time, as a
The Truth, though it’s set in France in a culturally rar- sort of laboratory of identity. He respects children, not
efied milieu that Kore-eda has never shown the slightest out of some reverence for their innocence, or because
interest in before, is very much of a piece with the mov- they are—as speechmakers never tire of reminding
ies he’s made in his own land and language. He’s not an us—“our future,” but because they’re interesting. That’s
artist who loses his identity when he’s away from home. why he’s the best director of kids since François Truf-
And that, I think, is because the idea of home and faut; he understands that they’re natural actors, that
the twisty paradoxes of identity are the subjects he’s making believe is what they do and how they grow.
been exploring for his entire career. At this strange That growth is a slow process, of course. But
moment in history, with so many people (voluntarily Kore-eda is fascinated by process, and he has no prob-
or not) far from home, and seemingly every nation in lem with slow. The rhythms of his films are more
the grip of an identity crisis, Kore-eda’s research could deliberate than many viewers are accustomed to. (He’s
be of some use. Near the end of the beautiful After the the sole credited editor on all his dramatic films save
Storm, a serious boy asks his father, “Are you who you his first, Maborosi.) There’s a lot of walking around in
wanted to be?” The dad, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), who his pictures; a good deal of talking about, preparing,
sees his son only once a month and has never been a and eating food; and a pervasive low-level sense of
paragon of responsibility, ruefully replies, “I’m not who expectation—of people waiting for something, keep-
I want to be yet.” (He’s in his late 30s or thereabouts.) ing alert for it as they go through their daily routines.
Then, after a thoughtful pause, he says, “What matters In the world Kore-eda, who started out making documentaries for
is to live my life trying to become what I want to be.” Japanese television, watches and waits along with his
As in all of Kore-eda’s films, the simple statement’s of Kore-eda’s characters, strolling with them, taking his sweet time.
weight comes from the accumulation of ordinary films, a tried-on Then, when time is running out, his people get a lit-
moments that have preceded it. Through that quotid- identity can, tle desperate. While the kids play, the grown-ups brood
ian stuff, the movie shows us exactly why Ryota says over time, and fret, and those nearing the end of life grow melan-
what he says to his son: He has a growing sense that choly or bitter. The elderly parents in Still Walking are
he is helplessly turning into his own late and fiercely turn into the fearsomely unpleasant: the father grumpy and unyield-
unreliable father; he’s painfully conscious of his failure genuine article. ing, the mother a monster of passive-aggression. Fabi-
to write a second novel after a prizewinning first; and enne, in The Truth, is a world-class passive-aggressor too.
he’s recently been shocked by his ex-wife’s accusation For all her success, she is a restless, unhappy woman. She
that he only acts like a real father. He does, as it hap- can’t help giving everyone around her—her daughter,
pens, love the boy, and now, approaching middle age, her son-in-law (Ethan Hawke), her staff, the film crew—
he wants to become the part he’s been playing. And in the feeling that somehow they’re letting her down. Her
the world of Kore-eda’s films, a tried-on identity can, tea, whoever serves it, is never the right temperature.
over time, turn into the genuine article. Actors know Ryota’s widowed mother, in After the Storm, is
that. So do children when they’re playing—pretending kinder, more self-effacing, but prone to attacks of
hard, as if they could imagine themselves into what they ruefulness. At one point late in the film, as her son,
want to be. Becoming who you’re going to be begins, grandson, and former daughter-in-law take shelter in
for all of us, as play but ends as work: doing take after her apartment from a howling typhoon, she muses qui-
take after take until it feels right, feels like yourself. etly, “I really just can’t understand why things turned
out like this.” You feel, in that heartbreaking moment,
C h i l d r e n a r e often right at the center of Kore- her deep sense of too-lateness, her regret that few dis-
eda’s dramatic films, and usually, like Ryota’s pensive coveries about her life or herself are left to be made.
son, they’re trying furiously to figure out the peculiar
worlds they live in, and what roles they’ll need to play F o r K o re - e d a , the direst affliction a human being
to survive in them. In I Wish, which is Kore-eda’s fun- can have is the feeling that one’s identity is settled, that
niest movie, a pair of brothers perform some pretty the rest of the story is simply unspooling, of its own
strenuous magical thinking in an attempt to reunite momentum, toward an inevitable ending. That’s like
their divorced parents. In Nobody Knows, which is living in a state of permanent denouement. As a story-
his saddest, four siblings abandoned by their mother teller, Kore-eda doesn’t traffic much in denouements
do their best to act like a real, intact family, with the or, for that matter, climaxes. What he cares about is

APRI L 2020 77
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Culture & Critics O M NIVOR E

how we move a little farther toward ourselves, take a

few more halting steps forward. In the whimsical After
Life (1998), he even allows himself to fantasize that the
process goes on, at least for a while, after death. In that
film, the newly deceased are required, as a condition of
admission to heaven, to select a single memory from
their earthly lives to hold on to for eternity. Naturally, A Sight
he’s interested not in heaven per se, but in how the dead
might imagine an afterlife of their own choosing, a story By Billy Collins
of who they were when they were most themselves.
In his 1996 documentary, Without Memory, Last night I watched a documentary on war,
Kore-eda tells the story of a man named Hiro-
shi Sekine who has a neurological condition called and the part I carry with me today
Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome and is unable to retain was the spectacle of a line
the memories of recent experiences. He can remember
of maybe 20 blinded soldiers
his life prior to the onset of the disorder, but next to
nothing of what he did a day or even an hour before. being led, single-file,
“If I’m really here, inside this flow of time,” Sekine away from a yellow cloud of gas.
says, “if I really exist or not, I just don’t know.” Every-
thing is new to him, all the time. His life is a perpetual
reinvention. He’s an extreme case, in other words, of That must be what accounts
the qualities that draw Kore-eda to children and, in for this morning’s brightness—
his latest film, to actors—to those dedicated to the
constant reimagining of experience, to endless revi- sunlight slathered over everything
sions of the self. The trick, for his fictional characters, from the royal palms to the store awnings,
is to do what the real-life subject of Without Memory
from the blue Corolla at the curb
cannot: to find a sense of continuity in the chaos.
His movies don’t presume to tell us how to do that to a purple flower climbing a fence,
trick—only that it has to be done, somehow. A lovely one gift of sight after another.
moment arrives near the end of The Truth when Fabi-
enne’s little granddaughter, Charlotte (Clémentine Gre-
nier), tells her grandma quite earnestly that she’d like to I couldn’t see their bandaged faces,
be an actress too, when she grows up. Fabienne is visibly but each man had one hand
moved by this demonstration of generational conti-
nuity, which apparently skipped her daughter (who resting on the shoulder
was “lousy” in her school play, and became a writer of the man in front of him
instead). She might be even more pleased to know, as
so that every man was guiding
the audience learns soon after, that Charlotte is already
an actress: The child was playing a scene scripted for her and being guided at the same time,
by her mother, and playing it to perfection. and in the same tempo,
“True” or not, Charlotte’s declaration seems to do
Fabienne a world of good. It puts a spring in her step given the unison of their small, cautious steps.
as she marches with her entourage to reshoot her own
scene. This filmmaker constructs his stories so that they
arrive not at a clear resolution but at witty, paradoxical
moments like this one. He never leaves us unsatisfied,
Billy Collins is a former U.S. and New York State poet laureate.
though. For those of us who are trying to understand
His new collection, Whale Day, will be published in September.
why things turned out like this—most of the current
human residents of Earth, these days—Kore-eda offers,
as he always has, sound advice: Keep imagining, keep
playing, and, most of all, keep walking.

Terrence Rafferty is the author of The Thing Happens,

a collection of writings about movies.

78 APRIL 2020
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Culture & Critics

In the first two novels of her trilogy about Thomas

Cromwell, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary
Mantel sings, as it were, the poem of his rise. This
is Cromwell as epic hero. The son of a blacksmith
and brewer from the hamlet of Putney, Cromwell
has become both chief minister to King Henry VIII
and the most powerful man in England aside from
the king; some say he is more powerful than the
king. Mantel’s Cromwell is omniscient—he has spies
everywhere—and omnicompetent. He excels at iron-
work, the culinary arts, the cloth trade, finance, civil
engineering, legislation, and diplomacy. His wit is
quick and endearing, except when it’s cutting. Above
all, he plays Henry’s court with consummate dexterity,
always several moves ahead of potential opponents.
In The Mirror & the Light, which closes the tril-
ogy, we witness Cromwell’s fall. This is not a spoiler.
You can Google his fate in eight seconds. Mantel’s
job is to make the inevitable suspenseful, which she
does by turning her protagonist into a tragic hero. In
tragedy, the hero is blind to how he brings about his
own doom, either because of hubris or because the
gods have willed his ignorance, or both. Cromwell
has become almost cocky. He has taken risks before,
but he always exhibited near-perfect self-mastery. His
profession requires dealing with “grandees who, if they
could, would destroy him with one vindictive swipe,”
Mantel writes in the middle novel. “Knowing this, he
is distinguished by his courtesy [and] calmness.” Now
he allows himself treasonous thoughts: “It is I who tell
[the king] who he can marry and unmarry and who
he can marry next, and who and how to kill.” And he
records too-candid observations in a volume of advice
for his protégés, “The Book Called Henry.” Mantel
makes us wonder: Does Cromwell have himself fully
in hand? If not, why not? What strange forces drive
him; does he understand them; and, most important,
BO OKS
can he control them in time?
When we leave Cromwell at the end of Bring
Up the Bodies, he has just destroyed a queen, doing
maximal damage in the process. The king, having
tired of his second wife, Anne Boleyn, and fallen in
love with Jane Seymour, told Cromwell to deal with
the situation. Cromwell did—he always does—but
Hilary Mantel Takes his methods were extreme. He choreographed the
trials and convictions of Anne and her alleged lovers
Thomas Cromwell Down on either trumped-up or wildly exaggerated charges
of adultery and incest. The public was treated to
scenes of what can only be characterized as royal
As the author’s remarkable trilogy ends, pornography, all of which turned on the theme of
her epic hero’s self-mastery is newly in doubt. the king’s sexual inadequacy. Five men, including
Anne’s brother, were beheaded. Cromwell plucked
four of them out of the swirl of court gossip not
By Judith Shulevitz because he thought they were guilty but to avenge
his beloved late master, Cardinal Wolsey, who fell

80 ILLUS TRATION B Y AARON MARIN

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from power seven years earlier and whom the young brief. Cromwell soon has to scour Europe for a bride
men ridiculed for the court’s amusement. who both suits Henry’s tastes and is willing to marry
As The Mirror & the Light opens, Cromwell is back an aging, bloated monarch who cast off one queen and
at the scene of the execution. Anne’s body “swims in a killed another. This is as difficult as it sounds.
pool of fluid crimson,” and he seems his usual hearty Cromwell has other problems. A large rebellion
self, thinking about his second breakfast. In the back- has broken out in the north, but the casus belli is not
ground, however, Mantel is darkening the mood. In Henry. It’s him, Cromwell, with his low birth, anti-
the previous novel, Anne’s attendants, veiled so as not papistry, and suspiciously Jewish-seeming aptitude for
to be tainted by association with her death, used their making money. The depth of the public’s hatred makes
bodies to block the men approaching the corpse. “We him vulnerable. Is the king annoyed? Are his friends still
do not want men to handle her,” they said. Now the his friends? Has the king understood Cromwell’s com-
shrouded women are silent, stylized; they force the men mitment to the new evangelicalism (i.e., Protestantism)?
back with palms upturned. They could be dancers in a Another, more serious source of strain in the
Greek chorus, or the Furies. minister-king relationship is in danger of becoming
Beneath his bluster, Cromwell feels uneasy. When apparent: Henry has grown bloodthirsty. Cromwell
Anne had climbed the scaffold a few moments earlier, pleads for lives, but when he fails, he gets the blame.
he’d found himself admiring her poise. But now other “The king never does an unpleasant thing,” notes Queen
men make crude remarks. These offend him—he who Jane. “Lord Cromwell does it for him.” Worse, he’s
planted the filthy thoughts in their head. “I’d have put having a hard time suppressing his disgust for Henry.
her on a dunghill,” says Charles Brandon, the Duke of Cromwell rehearses the catechism of sacred kingship,
Suffolk. “And the brother underneath her.” Cromwell but elevated thoughts all too quickly turn gross. Con-
berates Brandon for lacking mercy. “By God,” says the Cromwell’s templating the king as the embodiment of the state,
duke, a rival. “You read me a lesson? I? A peer of the which makes his very “piss and stool … the property
realm? And you, from the place where you come from?”
angle of vision of all England,” Cromwell envisions Henry’s doctors
Cromwell spits out: “I stand just where the king has put on his late- carrying away the bedpan of royal shit every morning.
me.” Then he asks himself, “Cromwell, what are you medieval Cromwell’s dislike bursts into the open when it seems
doing?” But he waves away his disquiet: “If you cannot world is oddly possible that the king will return to the Church. “Even
speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?” if Henry does turn, I will not turn,” he tells a woman he
Thomas Cromwell, speaking truth to a man who
familiar, even considers an ally. “I am not too old to take a sword in
could harm him? We weren’t expecting that, and as will if his Tudor my hand.” This is the most disloyal statement Cromwell
become clear, now is not the moment to be imprudent. mores are ever makes, and it will not be forgotten.
The Mirror & the Light covers four years of Cromwell’s alien. We
life, from 1536 to 1540. He is at the peak of his career. M a n t e l h a s been praised for upending a centu-
The king has made him a baron and appointed him the
can identify. ries-old consensus that Cromwell was a man driven
lord keeper of the privy seal, an office that gives him only by greed and lust for power. Partial credit for
even more access to the king. Henry has also let him her revisionism goes to a historian named Geoffrey
hold on to the titles of master secretary and vicegerent, Elton, from whom Mantel takes her cues. Younger
a powerful new position in the English Church. “It scholars have chipped away at Elton’s reassessment,
is a thing never seen before,” says Queen Jane. “Lord but Mantel stands by her source. Their Cromwell is
Cromwell is the government, and the church as well.” a true evangelical, a great statesman, and an advocate
Cromwell does what he did earlier, a manic whirl of of good governance. He laid the groundwork for the
endeavors that include filling the king’s coffers with English Reformation, created the bureaucratic state,
revenue from monasteries confiscated from the Vati- empowered Parliament, and fought for hospitals, poor
can and trying to reinforce England’s independence laws, and a census, among other admirable causes.
from the pope. His “cause,” as he calls it, is to publish But that’s Cromwell the public figure. Mantel’s chal-
a translation of the Bible. Everyone in the king’s realm lenge is to give him an inner life. In a Paris Review inter-
should be able to read the Bible in English—if only view in 2015, six years after Wolf Hall was published,
to see what isn’t in it: popes, monks, counterfeit relics she described the moment he came into focus. She sat
used by priests to fleece the poor. down to write, and out flowed the first paragraphs of
Cromwell’s main duty, as ever, is to keep the king the series. The boy Cromwell is being beaten nearly to
happy. That entails managing Henry’s volatile emotions: death by his crazed father. The ferocity of the assault is
anxiety about begetting a legitimate male heir, shame at conveyed by a detailed sketch of footwear: “The stitch-
growing old and obese, eruptions of self-pity. For once, ing of his father’s boot is unraveling. The twine has
the king has no qualms about his queen, but Jane’s sprung clear of the leather, and a hard knot in it has
tenure is, for Henry and his people, heartbreakingly caught his eyebrow and opened another cut.” Then

APRI L 2020 81
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Culture & Critics

Mantel stopped writing and asked herself, “Where am “Women, their bodies, their reproductive capacities,
I?” The answer, of course, is behind Cromwell’s eyes, their animal nature, are central to the story,” Mantel
which lie inches from the ground. “At that point,” she wrote. Like his author, Cromwell understands that the
said, “all the decisions about the book were made, about royal enterprise rests on women’s backs, their opened
how to tell the story.” legs, their wombs.
The one-person perspective gives the books their Mantel doesn’t use Cromwell’s insights about
grip, because Cromwell’s charisma is never allowed to women to preach, however. On the contrary: His
dissipate. At the same time, Mantel has plenty of room empathy contributes to his undoing. Over 50 and wid-
for invention. The Cromwell record has large holes owed, Cromwell is lonelier than he realizes, and lack
in it, probably because as soon as he got into trouble, of self-knowledge is perilous for a man in his position.
his supporters burned or carted away as many papers Acting out of pity, or so he tells himself, as well as an
as they could. Mantel works hard to root her imagi- oath to her mother and the desire to restrain his “can-
nation in the material and psychological realities of nibal king,” he steps in to help the Lady Mary, Henry’s
the period. “I’m very concerned about not pretending spurned first daughter, who has enraged the king and
they’re like us,” she told The Paris Review. “That’s the risks execution. The intensity of his efforts gives rise
whole fascination—they’re just not. It’s the gap that’s to rumors that he presumes to woo her, which could
so interesting.” arouse the king’s wrath against him. But he ignores
And yet, Cromwell is like us. At least, it feels that warnings, and his enemies will make use of a friendship
way. His angle of vision on his late-medieval world is that does have undertones of deeper feeling.
oddly familiar, even if his Tudor mores are alien. We More personally devastating evidence of Crom-
can identify. He’s an early-modern globalist, Homo well’s emotional purblindness comes to light when he
economicus. He understands that the age of the brave arranges a match between his son, Gregory, and Bess,
and noble knight is being brought to an end by capi- Queen Jane’s sister. During negotiations with Bess’s
talism. In Wolf Hall, the profligate Harry Percy, Earl brother, Cromwell somehow forgets to say which
of Northumberland, informs Cromwell that he, THE Cromwell is getting engaged, father or son. Mantel has
Percy, is immune from financial ruin and loss of title M I R RO R already suggested that Thomas Cromwell is attracted
&
by “ancient rights,” and because “bankers have no THE LIGHT to Bess, who is witty and perceptive. Eventually the
armies.” Cromwell muses, comedy of errors sorts itself out, but at the wedding,
Hilary Mantel Cromwell’s mild-mannered son sharply requests that
How can he explain to him? The world is not run his father stay away from his wife.
from where he thinks … Not from castle walls, but It was a mistake, Cromwell protests. Then he prom-
from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but HENRY HOLT ises to avoid Bess. “I am a man of my word,” he adds.
by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click “So many words,” Gregory says.
of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the
pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for So many words and oaths and deeds that when folk
the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot. read of them in time to come they will hardly believe
such a man as Lord Cromwell walked the earth. You do
The paradox of Mantel’s historical trilogy is that everything. You have everything. You are everything.
Cromwell’s anachronisms strengthen his credibility So I beg you, grant me an inch of your broad earth,
as a character. He has a more highly developed class- Father, and leave my wife to me.
consciousness than a man of his era ought to have. But
we are willing to suspend disbelief, because his uncanny Cromwell is stunned. What should he make of it, “that
powers of observation have been so well established a son can think evil of his father, as if he is a stranger
that he transcends his world, immersed in it as he is. and you cannot tell what he might do”?
It would be going too far to call Cromwell a femi-
nist, but he does have a rare ability to see past kings to O u r p r o b l e m , as readers, is what to make of
queens—to their miserable lot and uncredited impor- Cromwell’s lapses. Does he know what he’s doing? Does
tance. In The Mirror & the Light, a diplomat advises he know why? Or does he know and not know, like an
Cromwell not to “pull the women into it.” “The women analysand in a state of disavowal? A self so divided gives
are already in it,” he replies. “It’s all about women. What Cromwell a depth at once Shakespearean and modern-
else is it about?” In 2013, Mantel published an essay ist. He could be Hamlet, or the title character of one of
in the London Review of Books titled “Royal Bodies,” Freud’s case studies. The hero of Wolf Hall and Bring
which begins with Kate Middleton (the Duchess of Up the Bodies was a man of action. “I think it was
Cambridge), then moves on to the grim existence of Faulkner who says, Write down what they say and write
princesses and queens, especially in the Tudor era. down what they do,” Mantel said in The Paris Review

82 APRIL 2020
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BO OKS

interview. “I don’t have pages and pages in which I say be. Doubling is one of the dominant themes of the
Cromwell thought. I tell you what he says, I tell you novel. Cromwell serves as the king’s alter ego, but
what he does, and you read between the lines.” that’s one refraction among many. Cromwell’s pres-
This is not quite true. Cromwell thinks a great deal ent begins to echo his past; old figures reappear in
in those novels, but mostly about the business at hand. new guises. Henry, for instance, becomes a version
The Cromwell of The Mirror & the Light, though, is of Cromwell’s abusive father. Oddly but aptly, in this
just as likely to be found ruminating and soliloquiz- novel, Cromwell’s doubles are feline. One is especially
ing. His subjects include the past; his revered fellow disturbing: a starving, caged leopard anonymously
reformer William Tyndale, the great Bible translator deposited in his courtyard. And Mantel has a double
burned as a heretic; himself. Mostly, though, he thinks too, of course—Cromwell.
about the dead, especially those whose deaths he is Mantel doesn’t indulge in overt self-reflexivity,
responsible for. Cromwell dreams of Anne Boleyn but one scene midway through the novel could be
as a Christ figure: Her severed head leaves its bloody read as catching her in the act of, well, reflecting on
imprint on the linen it’s wrapped in, as if the cloth the process of creation. The setting is eerie. Dusk has
were the Shroud of Turin. George Boleyn, Anne’s late arrived in the countryside, “when earth and sky melt”
brother, weighs on Cromwell, literally. When Crom- and “the eyes of cats shine in the dark.” Inside, where
well interrogates a prisoner in the Tower, George’s Cromwell sits, “colour bleeds from sleeve and gown
spirit intercepts and grabs onto Cromwell, “head into the darkening air.” The imagery turns bookish,
heavy on his shoulder, tears seeping into his linen then dreamlike: “The page grows dim and letter forms
and leaving a residual salt damp that lasts till he can elide and slip into other conformations, so that as the
change his shirt.” People in the 16th century believed page is turned the old story slides from sight and a
in ghosts, but they are so real to him, it’s as if he has strange and slippery confluence of ink begins to flow.”
crossed over into their world. I take this to be the Cromwell recommences his incessant dialogue with
figurative expression of a death wish—an appropri- his selves, the present and the half-remembered, the
ate affliction, given the atrocities he has committed. imagined and the unbounded. His train of thought
Mantel changes her prose style to accommodate reminds the reader that Cromwell is also his own
her more haunted Cromwell. In the earlier novels, the author, having fashioned a high minister out of the
sentences were blunt and propulsive; in this one, she unlikely material of a ruffian from the streets.
slows them down, unlaces them. The language is more With a novelist’s wonderment at a character who
elegiac, almost mystical, though as precise as ever. It defies understanding, Cromwell sees that he can’t solve
now has to trace the wavering edges of a once well- the riddle of himself. “You look back into your past
defined self. The dissolution of Cromwell coincides and say, is this story mine?,” he thinks, and Mantel
with his unmooring in time. Past and future flow into could be brooding alongside him:
the present. Cromwell flows with them. One moment
he is sucked into his childhood; the next, he is hurled Is that flitting figure mine, that shape easing itself
into the sphere of the angels. Indeed, the afterlife occa- through alleys, evader of the curfew, fugitive from
sions some of the loveliest writing in this beautifully the day? Is this my life, or my neighbour’s conflated
written book. Cromwell wonders how he’ll recognize with mine, or a life I have dreamed and prayed for;
his own lost loved ones on the day of his judgment, is this my essence, twisting into a taper’s flame, or
but just when he needs to, he knows: have I slipped the limits of myself—slipped into eter-
nity, like honey from a spoon? Have I dreamt myself,
He sees how they are visible, and how they shine. undone myself, have I forgotten too well?
They are distilled into a spark, into an instant. There
is air between their ribs, their flesh is honeycombed Yes to all of the above. By the end of these three
with light, and the marrow of their bones is molten books, we have been with Cromwell as he lived or
with God’s grace. revisited most of his life, and we haven’t exhausted his
mystery. Nor, obviously, has he. It is a testament to
As Mantel brings her series to a close, she makes it Mantel’s demiurgic imagination, her ability to mul-
almost obsessively reflective—a word that is impos- tiply ambiguities, that by the time Cromwell achieves
sible to avoid. Mirrors are not just in the title of this something like self-knowledge, there is more to him
novel; they’re all over the place. Cromwell tells the than it is possible to know.
king that he’s the “mirror and the light of other kings”
(he’s lying, of course). Henry owns more than 100
looking glasses, peering into them in an attempt to Judith Shulevitz is the author of The Sabbath World:
catch a glimpse of the handsome prince he used to Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.

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The World’s Favorite Drug

The dark history of how coffee took over

By Michael Pollan

Four hundred years ago, Coffea arabica, a tropical shrub The effects of caffeine mesh with the needs of capi-
bearing glossy green leaves and bright-red berries, was talism in myriad ways. Before the arrival of coffee and
virtually unknown outside of the Arab world and the tea in the West in the 1600s, alcohol—which was
corner of Ethiopia where it had been discovered in more sanitary than water—was the drug that domi-
the ninth century—by a goatherd who, legend has it, nated, and fogged, human minds. This might have
noticed that his animals would get frisky and stay up been acceptable, even welcome, when work meant
all night after nibbling its berries. In the years since physical labor performed out of doors (beer breaks
people figured out that coffee could affect us in similar were common), but alcohol’s effects became a problem
ways, the plant has done a great deal for our species, when work involved machines or numbers, as more
and our species in turn has done a great deal for the and more of it did.
plant. We have given it more than 27 million acres of Enter coffee, a drink that not only was safer than
new habitat all around the world, assigned 25 million beer and wine (among other things, the water it
farming families to its care and feeding, and bid up its was made with had to be boiled) but turned out to
price until it became one of the most valuable globally improve performance and stamina. In 1660, only a
traded crops. Not bad for a shrub that is neither edible few years after coffee became available in England,
nor particularly beautiful or easy to grow. one observer noted:
Coffee owes its global ascendancy to a fortuitous
evolutionary accident: The chemical compound that ’Tis found already, that this coffee drink hath caused
the plant makes to defend itself against insects happens a greater sobriety among the Nations. Whereas for-
to alter human consciousness in ways we find desirable, merly Apprentices and clerks with others used to take
making us more energetic and industrious—and nota- their morning’s draught of Ale, Beer, or Wine, which,
bly better workers. That chemical of course is caffeine, by the dizziness they Cause in the Brain, made many
which is now the world’s most popular psychoactive unfit for business, they use now to play the Good-
drug, used daily by 80 percent of humanity. (It is the fellows in this wakeful and civil drink.
only such drug we routinely give to our children, in the
form of soda.) Along with the tea plant, which produces “This wakeful and civil drink” also freed us from
the same compound in its leaves, coffee has helped the circadian rhythms of our body, helping to stem the
create exactly the kind of world that coffee needs to natural tides of exhaustion so that we might work lon-
thrive: a world driven by consumer capitalism, ringed ger and later hours; along with the advent of artificial
by global trade, and dominated by a species that can light, caffeine abetted capitalism’s conquest of night.
now barely get out of bed without its help. It’s probably no coincidence that the minute hand on

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Culture & Critics

clocks arrived at roughly the same historical moment Actually the choice wasn’t initially quite so
as coffee and tea did, when work was moving indoors stark. Even the lands newly planted with coffee still
and being reorganized on the principle of the clock. offered plenty of free food for the picking. “Veins of
nourishment”—in the form of cashews, guavas, papa-
T h e i n t r i c at e synergies of coffee and capitalism yas, jocotes, figs, dragon fruits, avocados, mangoes,
form the subtext of the historian Augustine Sedge- plantains, tomatoes, and beans—“ran through the cof-
wick’s thoroughly engrossing first book, Coffeeland: fee monoculture, and wherever there was food, how-
One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our ever scant, there was freedom, however fleeting, from
Favorite Drug. At the center of Sedgewick’s narra- work,” Sedgewick writes. The planters’ solution to this
tive is James Hill, an Englishman born in the slums “problem”—the problem of nature’s bounty—was to
of industrial Manchester in 1871 who, at 18, sailed eliminate from the landscape any plant that was not
for Central America to make his fortune. There, he coffee, creating an ever more totalitarian monoculture
built a coffee dynasty by refashioning the Salvadoran in which nothing else was permitted to grow. When
countryside in the image of a Manchester factory. a chance avocado tree did manage to survive in some
Hill became the head of one of the “Fourteen Fami- overlooked corner, the campesino caught tasting its
lies” who controlled the economy and politics of El fruit would be accused of theft and beaten if he was
Salvador for much of the 20th century; at the time of lucky, or shot if he was not. Thus was the concept of
his death, in 1951, his 18 plantations employed some private property impressed upon the Indians.
5,000 people and produced more than 2,000 tons of In Sedgewick’s words, “What was needed to harness
export-ready coffee beans from more than 2,500 acres the will of the Salvadoran people to the production of
of rich soil on the slopes of the Santa Ana volcano. For coffee, beyond land privatization, was the plantation’s
many years, much of what Hill (or rather his workers) Caffeine production of hunger itself.” James Hill did the math
produced ended up in the familiar red tins of Hills is now the and found that workers showed up most promptly
Brothers coffee. world’s most and worked most diligently if he paid them partly in
“What does it mean to be connected to faraway cash—15 cents a day for women and double that for
people and places through everyday things?” Sedge- popular men—and partly in food: breakfast and lunch, which
wick asks in his early pages. Coffeeland offers a fas- psychoactive consisted of two tortillas topped with as many beans as
cinating meditation on that question, by rendering drug, used could be balanced on them. (The local diet became as
once-obscure lines of connection starkly visible. daily by monotonous as the landscape.) Hill thus transformed
Filling those cans of Hills Brothers coffee involved thousands of subsistence farmers and foragers into wage
a few different forms of brutality. Because growing 80 percent of laborers, extracting quantities of surplus value that
coffee requires a tremendous amount of labor—for the world’s would be the envy of any Manchester factory owner.
planting, pruning, picking, and processing—a planter’s population. The whole notion of surplus value of course is
success depends on finding enough people in the coun- Karl Marx’s and, as Sedgewick points out, emerged
tryside willing to work. The essential question facing from Marx and Friedrich Engels’s analysis of industrial
any would-be capitalist, as Sedgewick reminds us, has capitalism in James Hill’s birthplace. Communism
always and ever been “What makes people work?” was another Manchester export that found its way to
Chattel slavery had provided a good answer for Santa Ana, this one arriving during the Great Depres-
Brazil’s coffee farmers, but by the time Hill arrived sion, when coffee prices collapsed and unemployed
in El Salvador, in 1889, slave labor was no longer coffee workers could no longer eat from the land. It
an option. A smart and unsentimental businessman, turns out that leftists were also able “to transform hun-
Hill understood that he needed wage labor, lots of it, ger into power.” The climax of Sedgewick’s narrative
and as a son of the Manchester slums, he knew that comes in the early 1930s, when thousands of mozos,
the best answer to the question of what will make a organized by homegrown Communists who had spent
person work was in fact simple: hunger. time abroad, rose up against the coffee barons, seizing
There was only one problem. Rural Salvadorans, plantations and occupying town halls.
most of whom were Indians called “mozos,” weren’t Revolution was afoot, at least until 1932, when
hungry. Many of them farmed small plots of commu- the Salvadoran government, again at the behest
nally owned land on the volcano, some of the most fer- of the coffee planters, launched a vicious counter-
tile in the country. This would have to change if El Sal- insurgency. Rounding up anyone who looked like an
vador was to have an export crop. So at the behest of the Indian, soldiers herded them into town squares and
coffee planters and in the name of “development,” the then opened fire with machine guns. The government’s
government launched a program of land privatization, campaign against the coffee workers came to be known
forcing the Indians to either move to more marginal as La Matanza—“The Massacre”—and its memory
lands or find work on the new coffee plantations. burns bright in the Salvadoran countryside. When

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El Salvador erupted for a second time half a century workers and should therefore be counted as work time.
later, the coffee barons were under siege again; James As for the phrase coffee break, it entered the vernacu-
Hill’s grandson, Jaime Hill, was kidnapped by rebels lar through a 1952 advertising campaign by the Pan-
and held for a multimillion-dollar ransom, which the American Coffee Bureau, a trade group organized by
family had no trouble paying. Central American growers. Their slogan: “Give yourself
a coffee-break … and get what coffee gives to you.”
I ’m m a k i n g Sedgewick’s story sound more sche- Near the end of Coffeeland, Sedgewick attempts to
matic than it really is. Though his analysis of coffee’s quantify exactly how much value a pound of coffee
political economy does owe a debt to Marx, his literary gives an employer (or, put another way, extracts from
gifts and prodigious research make for a deeply satisfy- an employee), using Los Wigwam and Hill’s planta-
ing reading experience studded with narrative surprise. tion as examples. He estimates that it takes 1.5 hours
Sedgewick has a knack for the sparkling digression and of Salvadoran labor to produce a pound of coffee.
arresting jump cut, hopping back and forth between That’s enough to make 40 cups of coffee, or supply
El Salvador and the wider world, where coffee was two coffee breaks for Wigwam’s 20 employees, which
being consumed in ever-increasing quantities. He is Greinetz calculated yielded the equivalent of 30 addi-
especially good on the marketing of coffee to Ameri- tional hours of labor. In other words, the six cents that
cans, going back to independence, when the country Hill’s plantation paid for an hour and a half of labor
broke from England’s tea habit and drinking coffee in 1954 was transformed into $22.50 worth of value
became a patriotic act. He shows how coffee has long for Phil Greinetz, an alchemy that reflects both the
been promoted in America less as a tasty beverage or remarkable properties of caffeine and the brute facts
pleasurable experience than as a means to an end: “a of exploitation.
form of instant energy—a work drug.” But the symbiotic relationship that coffee and
American scientists studied coffee intensively in the capitalism have enjoyed for the past several centuries
COFFEELAND:
early years of the 20th century, seeking to understand ONE MAN’S
may now be coming to a sad close. Coffea arabica is
how a beverage that contained virtually no calories DARK EMPIRE a picky plant, willing to grow only in the narrowest
AND THE
could nevertheless supply energy to the human ani- MAKING OF range of conditions: Sunlight, water, drainage, and
mal, seemingly in violation of the laws of thermo- O U R F AV O R I T E even altitude all have to be just so. The world has only
DRUG
dynamics. Coffee had the extraordinary ability to so many places suitable for coffee production. Climate
generate surplus value not only in its production but Augustine scientists estimate that at least half of the acreage now
in its consumption as well, as an episode in the history Sedgewick producing coffee—and an even greater proportion in
of the coffee break makes clear. Latin America—will be unable to support the plant by
Sedgewick tells the story of a small Denver necktie PENGUIN PRESS 2050, making coffee one of the crops most immedi-
maker called Los Wigwam Weavers. When the com- ately endangered by climate change. Capitalism may
pany lost its best young male loom operators to the be killing the golden goose.
war effort in the early 1940s, the owner, Phil Greinetz, Yet capitalism is nothing if not resourceful.
hired older men to replace them, but they lacked the Employers who now offer coffee breaks might, some-
dexterity needed to weave the intricate patterns in day soon, instead hand out tablets of synthetic caf-
Wigwam’s ties. Next he hired middle-aged women, feine, one in the morning, another in the afternoon.
and while they could produce ties to his standards, This would offer the employer several advantages. Pills
they lacked the stamina to work a full shift. When are cheaper than coffee, and less messy. And because
Greinetz called a company-wide meeting to discuss they take mere seconds to ingest, the coffee break itself
the problem, his employees had a suggestion: Give us would no longer be necessary, giving the company
a 15-minute break twice a day, with coffee. every reason to claw back the 30 precious minutes
Greinetz instituted the coffee breaks and imme- the courts bequeathed to the American worker 64
diately noticed a change in his workers. The women years ago. The fate of the coffee workers in El Salva-
began doing as much work in six and a half hours as dor will likely be far worse, but perhaps the “veins of
the older men had done in eight. Greinetz made the nourishment”—nature’s edible bounty—will flow
coffee breaks compulsory, but he decided he didn’t again after the monocultures of coffee collapse.
need to pay his workers for the half hour they were
on break. This led to a suit from the Department of
Labor and, eventually, to a 1956 decision by a fed- Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of Caffeine,
eral appeals court that enshrined the coffee break in an original audiobook, and How to Change Your
American life. The court ruled that because the coffee Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches
breaks “promote more efficiency and result in a greater Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depres-
output,” they benefited the company as much as the sion, and Transcendence.

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ESSAY “When I started it, they

all just called it that crap.
Reiki Can’t Like, ‘Oh, they’re over
Possibly Work.
So Why Does It? there doing that crap.’”
The 20th-century
Japanese healing
This nurse, whom I’ll
therapy is now
available in many
call Jamie, was on the
hospitals. What its
ascendance says line from a Veterans
about shifts in how
American patients Affairs medical center
and doctors think
about health care. in the Northeast. She’d
By
Jordan Kisner
been struggling for a
few minutes between
the impulse to tout the
program she’d piloted,
which offers Reiki to vets
as part of their medical
care, and the impulse to
“tread lightly,” because
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some of the doctors, nurses, and adminis- thought it was pseudoscience and out of This is fine, but right then it wasn’t
trators she works with still think that Reiki step with the general culture of the VA, what I wanted. What I wanted was
is quackery or—you know. where people are inclined to be suspicious to lie there and not use my brain, and
Reiki, a healing practice codified in of anything that might be described as believe someone was trying to help me,
the early 20th century in Japan, was until “woo woo.” But she insisted that the also not with his or her brain. I under-
recently an unexpected offering for a VA VA—which also offers yoga, acupunc- stand how this sounds. But you have to
medical center. In Japanese, rei roughly ture, massage, clinical hypnosis, and remember that I had been trying to use
translates to “spiritual”; ki is commonly tai chi—should explore any supplemen- my brain on my problems for twenty
translated as “vital energy.” A session often tary treatment for chronic pain and PTSD years … I was over my brain. I was over
looks more like mysticism than medicine: that doesn’t involve pharma ceuticals, everybody’s brain.
Healers silently place their hands on or especially narcotics. The veterans started
over a person’s body to evoke a “universal coming, slowly, and the ones who came Reading this, I felt a prick of inter-
life force.” A Reiki treatment can even, started coming back. Jamie didn’t promise est. I, too, was over my brain, which has
practitioners believe, be conducted from anything other than that it might help always been as much the cause of my
miles away. them feel calm or help them with pain. problems as the solution. What would it
Reiki’s growing popularity in the The Reiki practitioner she hired was a be like to admit the possibility of being
U.S.—and its acceptance at some of the local woman, somewhat hard-nosed, not made better by something that wasn’t
most respected American hospitals—has inclined to offer anyone crystals. Soon pharmacological or physiotherapeutic
placed it at the nexus of large, uneasy after the program began, Jamie was get- or any of the many polysyllabic options
shifts in American attitudes toward our ting calls from doctors and nurses: “Hey, is readily available at my doctors’ offices? I
own health care. Various non-Western the lady here? Someone wants that crap.” believe, I suppose, in the spirit; and if I
practices have become popular comple- The effects were startling, Jamie told believe that people have a spirit as well as
ments to conventional medicine in the me. Veterans who complained that their a body, then I might be willing to believe
past few decades, chief among them body had “forgotten how to sleep” came that feeling better or being well isn’t only
yoga, meditation, and acupuncture, all in for Reiki and were asleep on the table a matter of adjusting the body.
of which have been the subject of rigor- within minutes. Others reported that This notion felt mildly outré in 2013,
ous scientific studies that have established their pain declined from a 4 to a 2, or that though the idea had long anchored West-
and explained their effectiveness. Reiki is they felt more peaceful. One patient, a ern medicine, until it parted ways in the
the latest entrant into the suite of com- man with a personality disorder who suf- 19th century with the holistic approach
mon additional treatments. Its presence fers from cancer and severe pain, tended of Chinese medicine and the Hindu sys-
is particularly vexing to naysayers because to stop his normal routine of screaming tem of Ayurveda. Roberta Bivins points
Reiki delivers demonstrable salutary effects and yelling at the staff when he came in out in her history of alternative medicine
without a proven cause. for his Reiki sessions. that for most of Western history, medical
Over the past two decades, a number Popular though her program has wisdom held that physical health relied
of studies have shown that Reiki treat- become, Jamie still hears from colleagues on the balance of the four humors (blood,
ments help diminish the negative side who dismiss the results of Reiki as either black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm).
effects of chemotherapy, improve surgi- incomprehensible or attributable to the Those in turn were affected by emotions,
cal outcomes, regulate the autonomic placebo effect. As we talked, a little noise weather, the position of the stars, and faith
nervous system, and dramatically alter of frustration came through the phone just as much as by diet, age, activity, and
people’s experience of physical and emo- line. We take people seriously when they environment. Reiki’s healing touch also
tional pain associated with illness. But say they’re in terrible pain, even though has precedent. In the fourth or fifth cen-
no conclusive, peer-reviewed study has we can’t measure that, she said. “Why do tury b.c., a Greek physician, possibly Hip-
explained its mechanisms, much less con- we have a problem accepting when some- pocrates, included the following observa-
firmed the existence of a healing energy body says, ‘I feel better; that helped’?” tion in some notes on his profession:
that passes between bodies on command.
Nevertheless, Reiki treatment, training, I f i r s t l e a r n e d of Reiki six or seven It is believed by experienced doctors that
and education are now available at many years ago from a slim memoir by the the heat which oozes out of the hand,
esteemed hospitals in the United States, writer Amy Fusselman. In 8: All True, on being applied to the sick, is highly
including Memorial Sloan Kettering, Unbelievable, she describes receiving salutary … It has often appeared, while
Cleveland Clinic, New York Presbyterian, Reiki after years of psychotherapy and I have been soothing my patients, as
the Yale Cancer Center, the Mayo Clinic, visits to doctors failed to ease what ailed if there was a singular property in my
and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. her. “Doctors, in my experience, touch hands to pull and draw away from
When Jamie introduced Reiki at the you with the desire to examine you, and the affected parts aches and diverse
VA center 10 years ago, she overrode then they use their brains to figure out im purities … Thus it is known to
the objections of some colleagues who what to do,” Fusselman writes. some of the learned that health may be

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implanted in the sick by certain gestures, century, those who put stock in health body. We were putting adaptogens in
and by contact, as some diseases may care that wasn’t based in hard science were our coffee, collagen in our smoothies,
be communicated from one to another. deemed ignorant. Physicians are still frus- jade eggs in our vaginas. We were micro-
trated by such resistance today, Rogers said, dosing, supplementing, biohacking,
This passage is now part of what’s but now when patients insist on a course of juicing, cleansing, and generally trying
called the Hippocratic Corpus, a series action other than what the doctor recom- to make ourselves immaculate from the
of texts written by or closely linked to mends, they’re called noncompliant. inside out. I also noticed that the yoga
Hippocrates, commonly known as the The ranks of such patients have studios and “healing spaces” in Brooklyn
father of Western medicine. The precepts steadily grown, Bivins notes. Disillusion- had begun to incorporate new kinds of
laid down there form the foundations of ment with established medicine has offerings: breath work, energy healing,
the medical philosophies that shape our been mounting for decades, fueled by and especially Reiki.
health care today. the rising costs and more depersonal-
The Hippocratic Corpus also contains ized care that have gone hand in hand T h e p o p u l a r i t y of Reiki made sense
one of the earliest articulations of causal as part of a backlash to the wellness explo-
determinism, or the idea that all phe- sion, which had lately come in for its
nomena have a preexisting material cause. share of debunking: It was a new form of
In the section titled “On the Sacred Dis- consumption, critics argued, one that was
ease,” the author insists that the illness we more bound up with class, gender, anxi-
now recognize as epilepsy wasn’t a divine ety, and late-stage capitalism than with
affliction at all, as it was believed to be at actual health. Reiki takes only an hour
the time, but a physical ailment like any or less; it entails no gear, no subscription,
other, only with as-yet-mysterious causes. Veterans who no purchases (other than the healer’s fee,
“Under a close examination spontaneity which is often on a sliding scale according
disappears,” the author writes, “for every- complained that to income), no list of dietary strictures or
thing that occurs will be found to do so their body had dubious supplements. The practice could
through something.” “ forgotten how hardly be better pitched for the political
The text doesn’t explicitly juxtapose to sleep” came and cultural mood: an anticonsumerist,
these two notions—healing energy egalitarian rite, available to everyone
and causal determinism—or attempt in for Reiki and through mere breath and hands.
to resolve any friction that may exist were asleep Reiki looked like the culmination of
between them. Instead, it suggests that on the table a broader trend that Rogers told me had
both are true at once: Everything that within minutes. been on the rise over the past 40 years,
happens has a natural cause, and some a development she calls a “black box”
people have a radiating heat in their attitude toward healing. We submit to
hands that has curative power. a treatment, it works on us mysteriously
Even in the early and mid-19th cen- (as if in a black box), and we feel better.
tury, physicians were still using humoral Rogers noted that we are most comfort-
theory and competing with homeopaths able relinquishing ourselves to methods
and botanists for patients; surgeons were we don’t understand when the author-
a crude last resort. This changed with the ity figure recommending them seems to
ascendancy of germ theory later in the care about us. What’s more, we have been
century, when physicians—now focused with stunning technological advances acclimated to this form of trust by ortho-
on professionalizing their field—advanced and treatment breakthroughs. Eastern dox medicine.
a new, scientific medicine that they said medicine and holistic healing models Precision genetic medicine is inscru-
was beyond dogma. It stood superior to provided attractive alternatives to what table to laypeople, Rogers pointed out.
its competitors because it was experi- critics in the late 1960s called the “medi- Much of psychiatry resembles the black-
mental and rational, requiring no faith— cal industrial complex,” and by the new box model too. So little is known, even by
medicine as anti-mysticism. millennium extramedical “wellness” had prescribing psychiatrists, about how and
Since then, the Yale historian of medi- become big business. why psychotropic medications work in
cine Naomi Rogers told me, what is often By the time I signed up last May to the brain. Yet the number of Americans
called orthodox medicine has staked out learn Reiki at a wellness center in Brook- who take SSRIs has been steadily rising
“quackery” as its enemy. People contin- lyn, where I live, a $4.2 trillion global over the past 30 years, despite a scientific
ued to go to homeopaths and other extra- wellness industry had already harnessed consensus that the “serotonin imbalance”
medical practitioners with their health the collective American obsession with theory of depression is flawed—and
problems, of course. But after the 19th optimizing the experience of having a despite a well-publicized controversy

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about whether the drugs are any more “You can talk to a tree!” one of the come to the surface and require resolu-
effective than placebos for most patients. masters said. “You should always ask the tion; people suddenly lose their tolerance
Reiki is the perfect enactment of the tree’s permission. Maybe it will tell you to for alcohol or other drugs; friends, able
black box, the healing gesture stripped Reiki the next tree.” I glanced around the to sense vibrations “on a different fre-
to its essentials: a virtuous person sitting room for raised eyebrows, but there were quency,” distance themselves.
with you, intending your well-being in only more eager questions: Can you Reiki And then, the moment for attunement
real time. someone who has transitioned to the after- having arrived, we were led in small groups
I signed up for instruction in two life? Yes. Can you Reiki your food to make to a narrow, darkened room. Before we
of Reiki’s three training levels. The first it healing? Yes, and you should. passed through the doorway, one of the
enables you to do hands-on practice on We were told that once the mas- masters traced Reiki symbols in the air
yourself as well as friends and family (and ters attuned us, our bodies and spirits over each of us. “You guys,” said the other,
pets); the second introduces the mental would vibrate at a higher frequency than making what I hoped was a joke, “we’re
technique for practicing at a distance. before, and we would stay on that higher going to visit some other planets.” I can’t
(Master training equips you to teach and describe what happened next, because our
“initiate” others.) The studio was a ware- eyes were closed while the masters per-
house space, with whitewashed brick walls formed silent rituals that aren’t explained
and plywood floors, exposed piping, and to nonmasters.
brightly colored garlands hanging along
the windows. The windowsills were strewn A f e w w e e k s l a t e r , I met with
with crystals, shells, and small bottles of
Touch-based Pamela Miles, an international Reiki
oil diffusing into the air. healing master and the leading expert on incor-
Once everyone had settled on seat simulates the porating Reiki into medical care. Miles
cushions arranged in a large circle on the most archetypal has been practicing Reiki since 1986. She
floor, the two women leading the training has introduced programs into prestigious
introduced the core belief: Reiki energy
care gestures. hospitals and taught Reiki at academic
exists throughout the universe, and when Several scientists medical centers such as Harvard, Yale, and
the body is attuned to Reiki, it can act I interviewed the National Institutes of Health. Miles
as a sort of lightning rod through which mentioned the has the soft voice, long hair, loose cloth-
others can receive that energy. They ing, slow gestures, and easy smile char-
told us to picture Reiki energy entering
way their mother acteristic of someone involved in heal-
through the top of our head and exit- would lay a ing arts. She also has the sharpness one
ing through our hands, suffusing us and hand on their sometimes observes in people who have
whomever we touch with the intention head when they devoted their life to a discipline—an exac-
to heal. The healer’s job is not to con- titude and authority. When I told Miles
trol the Reiki or to make decisions about
had a fever. about my training, she looked incredu-
healing. “We’re just the channel,” one of lous. “When they said you were going to
the masters said. “The healing is a con- have energy shooting through your head
tract between the person who needs to from the universe, were you scared?” This
be healed and the higher power.” Reiki, afternoon, she was patiently attempting
they stressed, can never harm anyone. It to reeducate me.
should also be used only as a comple- Miles falls on the conservative end of
ment to conventional medicine, never as frequency for the rest of our life. This Reiki evangelists in that she’s careful not
a replacement. “We are not doctors,” they would constitute a permanent transi- to make claims about its mechanisms or
said several times. “We cannot diagnose tion in our physical and spiritual states. efficacy that can’t be supported in a scien-
anyone with anything.” I was silently indignant: I do not believe tific context. She does not, for example,
You can do Reiki on animals, they told in permanently alterable personal vibra- subscribe to the belief that Reiki energy
us. “Cats are extra attuned to Reiki—cats tions, whatever that means, and anyway is a substance that can be given, received,
almost do Reiki on their own. They can I wanted mine left alone. or measured. No evidence of this has
heal you.” No one questioned this. The The masters warned us that once been confirmed, she pointed out. “Reiki
same goes for plants, the masters sug- they had opened us to Reiki energy, we is a spiritual practice,” she said. “That’s
gested. Get two roses and give Reiki to should expect to feel a little emotionally what it was to the founder, Mikao Usui.
one; that rose will live longer. A student drained and perhaps light-headed. They And all spiritual practices have healing
raised her hand. “But you told us never also suggested that many people experi- by-products because spiritual practice
to give Reiki without consent. How can ence drastic life changes after their first restores balance, bringing us back to our
you get consent from a flower or a tree?” attune ment. Major emotional issues center, and enhancing our awareness of

APRI L 2020 93
 UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws

our core selves.” When I asked her to responsiveness to placebos, rather than a it open, altering it, stitching it back
explain what that meant practically, she mere trick of the mind, can be traced to a together, and then asking it to heal.
chose her words carefully. “Through an complex series of measurable physiologi- Chemotherapy causes the body to fall
unknown mechanism, when a Reiki prac- cal reactions in the body; certain genetic to pieces; it can damage the brain, wreck
titioner places their hands—mindfully makeups in patients even correlate with internal organs, and destroy nerve end-
and with detachment—it evokes the greater placebo response. Ted Kaptchuk, ings, sometimes permanently. Medicine
healing response from deep within the a Harvard Medical School professor and is necessary, but it can also be brutal. Lin,
system,” she said. “We really don’t know one of the lead researchers, theorizes that like several of the physicians I spoke with,
why this happens.” the placebo effect is, in the words of the emphasized that healing is something
This agnosticism is not shared by all of Times article, “a biological response to an that happens within the body, enabled
Reiki’s powerful advocates in the United act of caring; that somehow the encounter rather than imposed by medicine. When
States. The array of psychologists, physi- itself calls forth healing and that the more we are traumatized, survival is the prior-
cists, and physiologists on the boards of intense and focused it is, the more healing ity and our healing mechanisms are on
various national Reiki organizations I it evokes.” lockdown, Miles observed. “We have to
spoke with—many of whom are eager to To note that touch-based healing pull out of that stress state and get into a
develop a standardized method of training therapies, including Reiki, simulate the parasympathetic-dominant state before
and accreditation—champion different most archetypal care gestures is hardly a the body is able to self-heal and actively
forms of energy measurement. In conver- revelation. Several scientists I interviewed partner with conventional medicine.”
sations, I heard quantum physics invoked, about their work on Reiki mentioned the Many physicians and scientists still
as well as biophotons, sodium channels, and way their mother would lay a hand on believe that allowing Reiki to share space
“magnetic stuckness,” and tools like EEGs their head when they had a fever or kiss a with medicine is at best silly and at worst
and gamma-ray detectors. Ann Baldwin, scraped knee and make the pain go away. dangerous. In 2014, David Gorski, a sur-
a physiology professor at the University It is not hard to imagine that a hospital gical oncologist, and Steven Novella, a
of Arizona and the editor in chief at the patient awaiting surgery or chemotherapy neurologist, co-wrote an article call-
Center for Reiki Research, suggested might feel relieved, in that hectic and ing for an end to clinical trials of Reiki
that people who claim to have measured stressful setting, to have someone place and other forms of energy medicine. To
Reiki using energy-sensing machinery are a hand gently and unhurriedly where the assess approaches rooted in “prescientific
instead measuring something else, such as hurt or fear is with the intention of alle- thinking” with tools designed to evaluate
heat—but she holds out hope that some- viating any suffering. That this increased “well-supported science- and evidence-
day we may be able to measure Reiki. calm might translate into lowered blood based” treatments, they argued, degrades
Research this for too long, and you pressure or abated pain, anxiety, or “the scientific basis of medicine.” It saps
start to sound vaguely stoned. Is Reiki bleeding—as has been observed in hos- resources from research into valid thera-
real? Does it matter whether Reiki is real? pital patients who undergo Reiki—seems pies, and misleads patients.
And whose definition of real are we work- logical, too. Other doctors and researchers have
ing with: Is it real according to the pre- The ailments that Reiki seems to treat accepted the line of argument that Miles
siding scientific and medical framework, most effectively are those that orthodox and many other Reiki advocates have put
which tells us that phenomena need to medicine struggles to manage: pain, anxi- forward: The practice has no known neg-
be measurable to be taken seriously, or is ety, chronic disease, and the fear or dis- ative side effects, and has been shown by
it real in the looser, unquantifiable way comfort of facing not only the suffering of various studies that pass evidentiary mus-
of spiritual practice? illness but also the suffering of treatment. ter to help patients in a variety of ways
There are those who will tell you that “What conventional medicine is excel- when used as a complementary practice.
Reiki is absolutely real because people lent at is acute care. We can fix broken Unlike the many FDA-approved medica-
experience it to be real. It is real because bones, we can unclog arteries, we can help tions that barely beat a placebo in stud-
we feel it, and feelings are produced in somebody survive a significant trauma, ies and carry negative side effects, Reiki
the body. Skeptics are quick to point to and there are medicines for all sorts of is cheap and safe to implement. Does
the placebo effect: The body’s capacity to symptoms,” Yufang Lin, an integrative- its exact mechanism need to be under-
heal itself after receiving only the simu- medicine specialist at Cleveland Clinic, stood for it to be accepted as a useful
lated experience of medication or therapy told me. But medicine, she said, is less suc- therapeutic option? For decades, experts
is well documented. But precisely because cessful at recognizing the way that emo- weren’t precisely sure how acetaminophen
that capacity is so well documented, reflex- tion, trauma, and subjective experience (Tylenol) eases pain, but Americans still
ive dismissal of the placebo effect as “fake can drive physical health—and the way took billions of doses every year. Many
medicine” demands scrutiny—and is now that they can affect recovery from acute medical treatments are adopted for their
receiving it. In late 2018, The New York medical care. efficacy long before their mechanisms are
Times Magazine reported on a group of Lifesaving surgery is miraculous but known or understood. Why should this
scientists whose research suggests that requires drugging the body, cutting be different?

94 APRIL 2020
 UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws

I n t h e R e i k i t r a i n i n g I attended, in Western traditions, people tend to see afterward, but did I feel healed? Healed
the moment came when we began to disparate phenomena as distinct, discrete, of what? Healed by what? I’d spent even
practice on one another for the first time. and contradictory,” the authors of the more time breathing deeply and plac-
Taking turns, students would hop up on study later wrote. “Most people resolve ing hands on a stranger’s solar plexus,
the table, and four or five others would that disparity by denying or suppress- or the crown of her head, or the arch of
cluster around. The masters told us to ing the existence of one of the poles.” her foot. In that time, I had sometimes
breathe deeply, gather our intention, But through Reiki, the subjects entered felt nothing other than the comfort of
and begin. After one or two minutes of a liminal state, in which their thoughts human touch. Other times I had felt odd
uncertain silence, a woman a few tables seemed both like their own and not; time things: the sensation of magnetic attrac-
away from me spoke up. “What are we tion or repulsion between my hand and
supposed to be thinking?” a rib cage, a burning heat that came and
I was relieved someone had asked. My went suddenly. When I gently cupped
entire reason for being in the class was to my hands around a woman’s jaw, the tips
learn what a person is doing when prac- of my right fingers buzzed as if from an
ticing Reiki. But our teachers hadn’t said electrical current, tickling me.
what, precisely, was supposed to trans- I had spent two days in and out of the
form the act of hovering our hands over liminal state the UT study described, and
one another into Reiki. I felt more sensitive to the world. I had
“You don’t have to be thinking any- That we were also spent some meaningful time being
thing,” one master said. “You are just simply there to touched kindly by strangers and touching
there to love them.” them kindly, and thinking about what it
I thought to myself, more or less be loving one might be like to feel well, to stop reporting
simultaneously, Oh brother and Of course. another sounded to the doctor every year the same minor
That we were simply there to be loving like the worst ailments: a tweaked shoulder, a tight jaw,
one another sounded like the worst ste- stereotype of general nervousness, scattered attention, my
reotype of pseudo-spiritual babble. At the idiosyncratic imbalances and deficiencies. I
same time, this recalled the most cutting- pseudo-spiritual didn’t personally “believe” in Reiki as a uni-
edge, Harvard-stamped science I’d read babble. versal energy channeled through the hands,
in my research: Ted Kaptchuk’s finding available to cats and plants and the dead.
that the placebo effect is a real, measur- But I believed Yufang Lin and other phy-
able, biological healing response to “an sicians who attest that the body—helped
act of caring.” The question of what Reiki by medicine and nutrition and all sorts of
is introduces—or highlights—an elision things—does the work of healing, and I
between the spiritual and the scientific believed Miles when she said that Reiki
that has, as yet, no resolution. practice, through some unknown mecha-
In 2002, two professors at the Univer- nism, may help the body to do it.
sity of Texas Health Science Center, in Every once in a while, friends will hear
Houston, gathered a group of people in moved both very fast and very slowly; that I’m Reiki-trained and ask whether
order to document and study the qualita- their bodies seemed no longer separate I’ll “do it” on them. They usually ask
tive experience of receiving a Reiki treat- from the practitioner’s body, though they whether it’s real, and I say I don’t know,
ment. The study participants didn’t have also remembered that their bodies were but that at a minimum, I’ll have spent
any shared belief in Reiki or its possible their own. some time quietly and gently focusing on
results, or any particular need for healing; At the end of my training, I did not the idea of them being well. They usually
they simply received a session and then feel invested with any new power, but I answer that this sounds good.
described what they felt. did feel raw and buzzy. Though plenty of
After treatment, the subjects spoke things in my training had seemed flatly
more slowly. They described their expe- impossible to believe, I had spent lots of
rience in the language of paradoxes. “In time on a table as a practice body for my Jordan Kisner is the author of Thin
the normal state of awareness, especially classmates. I’d felt more relaxed and calm Places: Essays From In Between.

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multiscreen hive—they saw it. Sorry,

Pukki. Sorry, universe. Wind back the
spool of joy. No goal.
Watching VAR happen, watching
December this huge, technocratic toad lower its
clumsy haunches onto the beautiful
2019, and mobile game of soccer, I feel ill.
Fans of the NBA, the NFL, Major
Norwich, League Baseball, and the other leagues
using this kind of surveillance will
England. understand. I feel, as William James
put it, menaced and negated in the
springs of my innermost life.
I think about all the layers of fin-

ODE
icking supervision and overweening
Floodlit winter brilliance. Scintillat- scrutiny to which we subject our-
ing figures with dragon breath, some selves: the preposterous standards,
in yellow, some in blue. Norwich City the insensate judgments, the malign
is playing Tottenham Hotspur in the fantasy of perfectibility that has over-
Premier League. Teemu Pukki, Nor- taken even our moments of play. And
wich’s fiercely scurrying Finnish striker, it is a fantasy. Mike Riley, the chief
receives—or magnetically attracts—a referee of the Premier League, recently
long, searching ball from Mario Vrančić identified four instances in which valid
onto his chest; angles it into his own decisions by on-field officials had been
path; and then, slicing between two overruled by video review. to
Tottenham defenders, zeroes it past As for the Pukki decision, it might
the scrambling goalkeeper and into have been, in the narrowest and most
the back of the net. Beautiful. The metrical sense, right. But everything
goal-scorer wheels away in triumph, else about it is wrong: the second- FALLIBILITY
the home crowd goes nuts, shazam—a guessing, the flow-reversal, the sheer
lightning ripple of sport-induced glad- bummer of the process. The VAR
ness zips around the world. world—with its obscure vectors and
But wait, hang on … Oh, Christ. subatomic infringements—is just not
VAR. The Video Assistant Referee what soccer is. Not what reality is.
system, reviled innovation of the So here’s to being fallible, to honor-
current Premier League season, is ing the possibilities of the ever-running By James Parker
“checking” the goal. One hundred moment by accepting that some of
fifty miles away, in London, footage those possibilities are wrong. We live
is being reviewed. We’re in limbo. A our lives in negotiation with entropy,
vacuum occupies the broadcast booth; do we not? A tolerance for error is a
the crowd shifts, grumbles, in a haze must. Not for injustice, not for corrup-
of spoiling endorphins. Then, on tion, but for the honest mistake, made
the big screen, there it is: goal dis- in real time. Solomon himself blew a
allowed. A haggard roar goes up. It call now and again. So what? It’s a uni-
has been determined that Pukki, at versal condition. It’s the universal condi-
the moment that Vrančić sent the tion. You don’t hit Pause and summon
ball his way, was microscopically— the immaculate arbitrators. You don’t
with perhaps the outer edge of his wait for the screen to tell you what hap-
shoulder—ahead of the deepest-lying pened. You don’t stop the game until
Spurs defender. In other words, he the game is over.
was offside. The referee didn’t see it;
the linesmen didn’t see it; the crowd
didn’t see it; the Tottenham players
didn’t see it. Nobody saw it. But the James Parker is a staff writer at
faceless invigilators of VAR, in their The Atlantic.

10 0 APRIL 2020
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