Category: Uncategorized

By Gay Talese — Esquire, 1966

In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era’s most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself.

Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra’s four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.

Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight; he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders; he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra—A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold.

Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.

For Frank Sinatra was now involved with many things involving many people—his own film company, his record company, his private airline, his missile-parts firm, his real-estate holdings across the nation, his personal staff of seventy-five—which are only a portion of the power he is and has come to represent. He seemed now to be also the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America, the man who can do anything he wants, anything, can do it because he has money, the energy, and no apparent guilt. In an age when the very young seem to be taking over, protesting and picketing and demanding change, Frank Sinatra survives as a national phenomenon, one of the few prewar products to withstand the test of time. He is the champ who made the big comeback, the man who had everything, lost it, then got it back, letting nothing stand in his way, doing what few men can do: he uprooted his life, left his family, broke with everything that was familiar, learning in the process that one way to hold a woman is not to hold her. Now he has the affection of Nancy and Ava and Mia, the fine female produce of three generations, and still has the adoration of his children, the freedom of a bachelor, he does not feel old, he makes old men feel young, makes them think that if Frank Sinatra can do it, it can be done; not that they could do it, but it is still nice for other men to know, at fifty, that it can be done.

But now, standing at this bar in Beverly Hills, Sinatra had a cold, and he continued to drink quietly and he seemed miles away in his private world, not even reacting when suddenly the stereo in the other room switched to a Sinatra song, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.”

It is a lovely ballad that he first recorded ten years ago, and it now inspired many young couples who had been sitting, tired of twisting, to get up and move slowly around the dance floor, holding one another very close. Sinatra’s intonation, precisely clipped, yet full and flowing, gave a deeper meaning to the simple lyrics—”In the wee small hours of the morning/while the whole wide world is fast asleep/you lie awake, and think about the girl….”—it was like so many of his classics, a song that evoked loneliness and sensuality, and when blended with the dim light and the alcohol and nicotine and late-night needs, it became a kind of airy aphrodisiac. Undoubtedly the words from this song, and others like it, had put millions in the mood, it was music to make love by, and doubtless much love had been made by it all over America at night in cars, while the batteries burned down, in cottages by the lake, on beaches during balmy summer evenings, in secluded parks and exclusive penthouses and furnished rooms, in cabin cruisers and cabs and cabanas—in all places where Sinatra’s songs could be heard were these words that warmed women, wooed and won them, snipped the final thread of inhibition and gratified the male egos of ungrateful lovers; two generations of men had been the beneficiaries of such ballads, for which they were eternally in his debt, for which they may eternally hate him. Nevertheless here he was, the man himself, in the early hours of the morning in Beverly Hills, out of range.

The two blondes, who seemed to be in their middle thirties, were preened and polished, their matured bodies softly molded within tight dark suits. They sat, legs crossed, perched on the high bar stools. They listened to the music. Then one of them pulled out a Kent and Sinatra quickly placed his gold lighter under it and she held his hand, looked at his fingers: they were nubby and raw, and the pinkies protruded, being so stiff from arthritis that he could barely bend them. He was, as usual, immaculately dressed. He wore an oxford-grey suit with a vest, a suit conservatively cut on the outside but trimmed with flamboyant silk within; his shoes, British, seemed to be shined even on the bottom of the soles. He also wore, as everybody seemed to know, a remarkably convincing black hairpiece, one of sixty that he owns, most of them under the care of an inconspicuous little grey-haired lady who, holding his hair in a tiny satchel, follows him around whenever he performs. She earns $400 a week. The most distinguishing thing about Sinatra’s face are his eyes, clear blue and alert, eyes that within seconds can go cold with anger, or glow with affection, or, as now, reflect a vague detachment that keeps his friends silent and distant.

Leo Durocher, one of Sinatra’s closest friends, was now shooting pool in the small room behind the bar. Standing near the door was Jim Mahoney, Sinatra’s press agent, a somewhat chunky young man with a square jaw and narrow eyes who would resemble a tough Irish plainclothesman if it were not for the expensive continental suits he wears and his exquisite shoes often adorned with polished buckles. Also nearby was a big, broad-shouldered two-hundred-pound actor named Brad Dexter who seemed always to be thrusting out his chest so that his gut would not show.

Brad Dexter has appeared in several films and television shows, displaying fine talent as a character actor, but in Beverly Hills he is equally known for the role he played in Hawaii two years ago when he swam a few hundred yards and risked his life to save Sinatra from drowning in a riptide. Since then Dexter has been one of Sinatra’s constant companions and has been made a producer in Sinatra’s film company. He occupies a plush office near Sinatra’s executive suite. He is endlessly searching for literary properties that might be converted into new starring roles for Sinatra. Whenever he is among strangers with Sinatra he worries because he knows that Sinatra brings out the best and worst in people—some men will become aggressive, some women will become seductive, others will stand around skeptically appraising him, the scene will be somehow intoxicated by his mere presence, and maybe Sinatra himself, if feeling as badly as he was tonight, might become intolerant or tense, and then: headlines. So Brad Dexter tries to anticipate danger and warn Sinatra in advance. He confesses to feeling very protective of Sinatra, admitting in a recent moment of self-revelation: “I’d kill for him.”

While this statement may seem outlandishly dramatic, particularly when taken out of context, it nonetheless expresses a fierce fidelity that is quite common within Sinatra’s special circle. It is a characteristic that Sinatra, without admission, seems to prefer: All the Way; All or Nothing at All. This is the Sicilian in Sinatra; he permits his friends, if they wish to remain that, none of the easy Anglo-Saxon outs. But if they remain loyal, then there is nothing Sinatra will not do in turn—fabulous gifts, personal kindnesses, encouragement when they’re down, adulation when they’re up. They are wise to remember, however, one thing. He is Sinatra. The boss. Il Padrone.

I had seen something of this Sicilian side of Sinatra last summer at Jilly’s saloon in New York, which was the only other time I’d gotten a close view of him prior to this night in this California club. Jilly’s, which is on West Fifty-second Street in Manhattan, is where Sinatra drinks whenever he is in New York, and there is a special chair reserved for him in the back room against the wall that nobody else may use. When he is occupying it, seated behind a long table flanked by his closest New York friends—who include the saloonkeeper, Jilly Rizzo, and Jilly’s azure-haired wife, Honey, who is known as the “Blue Jew”—a rather strange ritualistic scene develops. That night dozens of people, some of them casual friends of Sinatra’s, some mere acquaintances, some neither, appeared outside of Jilly’s saloon. They approached it like a shrine. They had come to pay respect. They were from New York, Brooklyn, Atlantic City, Hoboken. They were old actors, young actors, former prizefighters, tired trumpet players, politicians, a boy with a cane. There was a fat lady who said she remembered Sinatra when he used to throw the Jersey Observer onto her front porch in 1933. There were middle-aged couples who said they had heard Sinatra sing at the Rustic Cabin in 1938 and “We knew then that he really had it!” Or they had heard him when he was with Harry James’s band in 1939, or with Tommy Dorsey in 1941 (“Yeah, that’s the song, ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’—he sang it one night in this dump near Newark and we danced…”); or they remembered that time at the Paramount with the swooners, and him with those bow ties, The Voice; and one woman remembered that awful boy she knew then—Alexander Dorogokupetz, an eighteen-year-old heckler who had thrown a tomato at Sinatra and the bobby-soxers in the balcony had tried to flail him to death. Whatever became of Alexander Dorogokupetz? The lady did not know.

And they remembered when Sinatra was a failure and sang trash like “Mairzy Doats,” and they remembered his comeback and on this night they were all standing outside Jilly’s saloon, dozens of them, but they could not get in. So some of them left. But most of them stayed, hoping that soon they might be able to push or wedge their way into Jilly’s between the elbows and backsides of the men drinking three-deep at the bar, and they might be able to peek through and see him sitting back there. This is all they really wanted; they wanted to see him. And for a few moments they gazed in silence through the smoke and they stared. Then they turned, fought their way out of the bar, went home.

Some of Sinatra’s close friends, all of whom are known to the men guarding Jilly’s door, do manage to get an escort into the back room. But once they are there they, too, must fend for themselves. On the particular evening, Frank Gifford, the former football player, got only seven yards in three tries. Others who had somehow been close enough to shake Sinatra’s hand did not shake it; instead they just touched him on the shoulder or sleeve, or they merely stood close enough for him to see them and, after he’d given them a wink of recognition or a wave or a nod or called out their names (he had a fantastic memory for first names), they would then turn and leave. They had checked in. They had paid their respects. And as I watched this ritualistic scene, I got the impression that Frank Sinatra was dwelling simultaneously in two worlds that were not contemporary.

On the one hand he is the swinger—as he is when talking and joking with Sammy Davis, Jr., Richard Conte, Liza Minelli, Bernie Massi, or any of the other show-business people who get to sit at the table; on the other, as when he is nodding or waving to his paisanos who are close to him (Al Silvani, a boxing manager who works with Sinatra’s film company; Dominic Di Bona, his wardrobe man; Ed Pucci, a 300-pound former football lineman who is his aide-de-camp), Frank Sinatra is Il Padrone. Or better still, he is what in traditional Sicily have long been called uomini rispettati—men of respect: men who are both majestic and humble, men who are loved by all and are very generous by nature, men whose hands are kissed as they walk from village to village, men who would personally go out of their way to redress a wrong.

Frank Sinatra does things personally. At Christmas time, he will personally pick dozens of presents for his close friends and family, remembering the type of jewelry they like, their favorite colors, the sizes of their shirts and dresses. When a musician friend’s house was destroyed and his wife was killed in a Los Angeles mud slide a little more than a year ago, Sinatra personally came to his aid, finding the musician a new home, paying whatever hospital bills were left unpaid by the insurance, then personally supervising the furnishing of the new home down to the replacing of the silverware, the linen, the purchase of new clothing.

The same Sinatra who did this can, within the same hour, explode in a towering rage of intolerance should a small thing be incorrectly done for him by one of his paisanos. For example, when one of his men brought him a frankfurter with catsup on it, which Sinatra apparently abhors, he angrily threw the bottle at the man, splattering catsup all over him. Most of the men who work around Sinatra are big. But this never seems to intimidate Sinatra nor curb his impetuous behavior with them when he is mad. They will never take a swing back at him. He is Il Padrone.

At other times, aiming to please, his men will overreact to his desires: when he casually observed that his big orange desert jeep in Palm Springs seemed in need of a new painting, the word was swiftly passed down through the channels, becoming ever more urgent as it went, until finally it was a command that the jeep be painted now, immediately, yesterday. To accomplish this would require the hiring of a special crew of painters to work all night, at overtime rates; which, in turn, meant that the order had to be bucked back up the line for further approval. When it finally got back to Sinatra’s desk, he did not know what it was all about; after he had figured it out he confessed, with a tired look on his face, that he did not care when the hell they painted the jeep.

Yet it would have been unwise for anyone to anticipate his reaction, for he is a wholly unpredictable man of many moods and great dimension, a man who responds instantaneously to instinct—suddenly, dramatically, wildly he responds, and nobody can predict what will follow. A young lady named Jane Hoag, a reporter at Life’s Los Angeles bureau who had attended the same school as Sinatra’s daughter, Nancy, had once been invited to a party at Mrs. Sinatra’s California home at which Frank Sinatra, who maintains very cordial relations with his former wife, acted as host. Early in the party Miss Hoag, while leaning against a table, accidentally with her elbow knocked over one of a pair of alabaster birds to the floor, smashing it to pieces. Suddenly, Miss Hoag recalled, Sinatra’s daughter cried, “Oh, that was one of my mother’s favorite…”—but before she could complete the sentence, Sinatra glared at her, cutting her off, and while forty other guests in the room all stared in silence, Sinatra walked over, quickly with his finger flicked the other alabaster bird off the table, smashing it to pieces, and then put an arm gently around Jane Hoag and said, in a way that put her completely at ease, “That’s okay, kid.”

NOW SINATRA SAID A FEW words to the blondes. Then he turned from the bar and began to walk toward the poolroom. One of Sinatra’s other men friends moved in to keep the girls company. Brad Dexter, who had been standing in the corner talking to some other people, now followed Sinatra.

The room cracked with the clack of billiard balls. There were about a dozen spectators in the room, most of them young men who were watching Leo Durocher shoot against two other aspiring hustlers who were not very good. This private drinking club has among its membership many actors, directors, writers, models, nearly all of them a good deal younger than Sinatra or Durocher and much more casual in the way they dress for the evening. Many of the young women, their long hair flowing loosely below their shoulders, wore tight, fanny-fitting Jax pants and very expensive sweaters; and a few of the young men wore blue or green velour shirts with high collars and narrow tight pants, and Italian loafers.

It was obvious from the way Sinatra looked at these people in the poolroom that they were not his style, but he leaned back against a high stool that was against the wall, holding his drink in his right hand, and said nothing, just watched Durocher slam the billiard balls back and forth. The younger men in the room, accustomed to seeing Sinatra at this club, treated him without deference, although they said nothing offensive. They were a cool young group, very California-cool and casual, and one of the coolest seemed to be a little guy, very quick of movement, who had a sharp profile, pale blue eyes, blondish hair, and squared eyeglasses. He wore a pair of brown corduroy slacks, a green shaggy-dog Shetland sweater, a tan suede jacket, and Game Warden boots, for which he had recently paid $60.

Frank Sinatra, leaning against the stool, sniffling a bit from his cold, could not take his eyes off the Game Warden boots. Once, after gazing at them for a few moments, he turned away; but now he was focused on them again. The owner of the boots, who was just standing in them watching the pool game, was named Harlan Ellison, a writer who had just completed work on a screenplay, The Oscar.

Finally Sinatra could not contain himself.

“Hey,” he yelled in his slightly harsh voice that still had a soft, sharp edge. “Those Italian boots?”

“No,” Ellison said.

“Spanish?”

“No.”

“Are they English boots?”

“Look, I donno, man,” Ellison shot back, frowning at Sinatra, then turning away again.

Now the poolroom was suddenly silent. Leo Durocher who had been poised behind his cue stick and was bent low just froze in that position for a second. Nobody moved. Then Sinatra moved away from the stool and walked with that slow, arrogant swagger of his toward Ellison, the hard tap of Sinatra’s shoes the only sound in the room. Then, looking down at Ellison with a slightly raised eyebrow and a tricky little smile, Sinatra asked: “You expecting a storm?”

Harlan Ellison moved a step to the side. “Look, is there any reason why you’re talking to me?”

“I don’t like the way you’re dressed,” Sinatra said.

“Hate to shake you up,” Ellison said, “but I dress to suit myself.”

Now there was some rumbling in the room, and somebody said, “Com’on, Harlan, let’s get out of here,” and Leo Durocher made his pool shot and said, “Yeah, com’on.”

But Ellison stood his ground.

Sinatra said, “What do you do?”

“I’m a plumber,” Ellison said.

“No, no, he’s not,” another young man quickly yelled from across the table. “He wrote The Oscar.”

“Oh, yeah,” Sinatra said, “well I’ve seen it, and it’s a piece of crap.”

“That’s strange,” Ellison said, “because they haven’t even released it yet.”

“Well, I’ve seen it,” Sinatra repeated, “and it’s a piece of crap.”

Now Brad Dexter, very anxious, very big opposite the small figure of Ellison, said, “Com’on, kid, I don’t want you in this room.”

“Hey,” Sinatra interrupted Dexter, “can’t you see I’m talking to this guy?”

Dexter was confused. Then his whole attitude changed, and his voice went soft and he said to Ellison, almost with a plea, “Why do you persist in tormenting me?”

The whole scene was becoming ridiculous, and it seemed that Sinatra was only half-serious, perhaps just reacting out of sheer boredom or inner despair; at any rate, after a few more exchanges Harlan Ellison left the room. By this time the word had gotten out to those on the dance floor about the Sinatra-Ellison exchange, and somebody went to look for the manager of the club. But somebody else said that the manager had already heard about it—and had quickly gone out the door, hopped in his car and drove home. So the assistant manager went into the poolroom.

“I don’t want anybody in here without coats and ties,” Sinatra snapped.

The assistant manager nodded, and walked back to his office.

IT WAS THE MORNING AFTER. It was the beginning of another nervous day for Sinatra’s press agent, Jim Mahoney. Mahoney had a headache, and he was worried but not over the Sinatra-Ellison incident of the night before. At the time Mahoney had been with his wife at a table in the other room, and possibly he had not even been aware of the little drama. The whole thing had lasted only about three minutes. And three minutes after it was over, Frank Sinatra had probably forgotten about it for the rest of his life—as Ellison will probably remember it for the rest of his life: he had had, as hundreds of others before him, at an unexpected moment between darkness and dawn, a scene with Sinatra.

It was just as well that Mahoney had not been in the poolroom; he had enough on his mind today. He was worried about Sinatra’s cold and worried about the controversial CBS documentary that, despite Sinatra’s protests and withdrawal of permission, would be shown on television in less than two weeks. The newspapers this morning were full of hints that Sinatra might sue the network, and Mahoney’s phones were ringing without pause, and now he was plugged into New York talking to the Daily News’s Kay Gardella, saying: “…that’s right, Kay…they made a gentleman’s agreement to not ask certain questions about Frank’s private life, and then Cronkite went right ahead: ‘Frank, tell me about those associations.’ That question, Kay—out! That question should never have been asked….”

As he spoke, Mahoney leaned back in his leather chair, his head shaking slowly. He is a powerfully built man of thirty-seven; he has a round, ruddy face, a heavy jaw, and narrow pale eyes, and he might appear pugnacious if he did not speak with such clear, soft sincerity and if he were not so meticulous about his clothes. His suits and shoes are superbly tailored, which was one of the first things Sinatra noticed about him, and in his spacious office opposite the bar is a red-muff electrical shoe polisher and a pair of brown wooden shoulders on a stand over which Mahoney can drape his jackets. Near the bar is an autographed photograph of President Kennedy and a few pictures of Frank Sinatra, but there are none of Sinatra in any other rooms in Mahoney’s public-relations agency; there once was a large photograph of him hanging in the reception room but this apparently bruised the egos of some of Mahoney’s other movie-star clients and, since Sinatra never shows up at the agency anyway, the photograph was removed.

Still, Sinatra seems ever present, and if Mahoney did not have legitimate worries about Sinatra, as he did today, he could invent them—and, as worry aids, he surrounds himself with little mementos of moments in the past when he did worry. In his shaving kit there is a two-year-old box of sleeping tablets dispensed by a Reno druggist—the date on the bottle marks the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra, Jr. There is on a table in Mahoney’s office a mounted wood reproduction of Frank Sinatra’s ransom note written on the aforementioned occasion. One of Mahoney’s mannerisms, when he is sitting at his desk worrying, is to tinker with the tiny toy train he keeps in front of him—the train is a souvenir from the Sinatra film, Von Ryan’s Express; it is to men who are close to Sinatra what the PT-109 tie clasps are to men who were close to Kennedy—and Mahoney then proceeds to roll the little train back and forth on the six inches of track; back and forth, back and forth, click-clack-click-clack. It is his Queeg-thing.

Now Mahoney quickly put aside the little train. His secretary told him there was a very important call on the line. Mahoney picked it up, and his voice was even softer and more sincere than before. “Yes, Frank,” he said. “Right…right…yes, Frank….”

When Mahoney put down the phone, quietly, he announced that Frank Sinatra had left in his private jet to spend the weekend at his home in Palm Springs, which is a sixteen-minute flight from his home in Los Angeles. Mahoney was now worried again. The Lear jet that Sinatra’s pilot would be flying was identical, Mahoney said, to the one that had just crashed in another part of California.

ON THE FOLLOWING Monday, a cloudy and unseasonably cool California day, more than one hundred people gathered inside a white television studio, an enormous room dominated by a white stage, white walls, and with dozens of lights and lamps dangling: it rather resembled a gigantic operating room. In this room, within an hour or so, NBC was scheduled to begin taping a one-hour show that would be televised in color on the night of November 24 and would highlight, as much as it could in the limited time, the twenty-five-year career of Frank Sinatra as a public entertainer. It would not attempt to probe, as the forthcoming CBS Sinatra documentary allegedly would, that area of Sinatra’s life that he regards as private. The NBC show would be mainly an hour of Sinatra singing some of the hits that carried him from Hoboken to Hollywood, a show that would be interrupted only now and then by a few film clips and commercials for Budweiser beer. Prior to his cold, Sinatra had been very excited about this show; he saw here an opportunity to appeal not only to those nostalgic, but also to communicate his talent to some rock-and-rollers—in a sense, he was battling The Beatles. The press releases being prepared by Mahoney’s agency stressed this, reading: “If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons…it should be refreshing, to consider the entertainment value of a video special titled Sinatra—A Man and His Music….”

But now in this NBC studio in Los Angeles, there was an atmosphere of anticipation and tension because of the uncertainty of the Sinatra voice. The forty-three musicians in Nelson Riddle’s orchestra had already arrived and some were up on the white platform warming up. Dwight Hemion, a youthful sandy-haired director who had won praise for his television special on Barbra Streisand, was seated in the glass-enclosed control booth that overlooked the orchestra and stage. The camera crews, technical teams, security guards, Budweiser ad men were also standing between the floor lamps and cameras, waiting, as were a dozen or so ladies who worked as secretaries in other parts of the building but had sneaked away so they could watch this.

A few minutes before eleven o’clock, word spread quickly through the long corridor into the big studio that Sinatra was spotted walking through the parking lot and was on his way, and was looking fine. There seemed great relief among the group that was gathered; but when the lean, sharply dressed figure of the man got closer, and closer, they saw to their dismay that it was not Frank Sinatra. It was his double. Johnny Delgado.

Delgado walks like Sinatra, has Sinatra’s build, and from certain facial angles does resemble Sinatra. But he seems a rather shy individual. Fifteen years ago, early in his acting career, Delgado applied for a role in From Here to Eternity. He was hired, finding out later that he was to be Sinatra’s double. In Sinatra’s latest film, Assault on a Queen, a story in which Sinatra and some fellow conspirators attempt to hijack the Queen Mary, Johnny Delgado doubles for Sinatra in some water scenes; and now, in this NBC studio, his job was to stand under the hot television lights marking Sinatra’s spots on the stage for the camera crews.

Five minutes later, the real Frank Sinatra walked in. His face was pale, his blue eyes seemed a bit watery. He had been unable to rid himself of the cold, but he was going to try to sing anyway because the schedule was tight and thousands of dollars were involved at this moment in the assembling of the orchestra and crews and the rental of the studio. But when Sinatra, on his way to his small rehearsal room to warm up his voice, looked into the studio and saw that the stage and orchestra’s platform were not close together, as he had specifically requested, his lips tightened and he was obviously very upset. A few moments later, from his rehearsal room, could be heard the pounding of his fist against the top of the piano and the voice of his accompanist, Bill Miller, saying, softly, “Try not to upset yourself, Frank.”

Later Jim Mahoney and another man walked in, and there was talk of Dorothy Kilgallen’s death in New York earlier that morning. She had been an ardent foe of Sinatra for years, and he became equally uncomplimentary about her in his nightclub act, and now, though she was dead, he did not compromise his feelings. “Dorothy Kilgallen’s dead,” he repeated, walking out of the room toward the studio. “Well, guess I got to change my whole act.”

When he strolled into the studio the musicians all picked up their instruments and stiffened in their seats. Sinatra cleared his throat a few times and then, after rehearsing a few ballads with the orchestra, he sang “Don’t Worry About Me” to his satisfaction and, being uncertain of how long his voice could last, suddenly became impatient.

“Why don’t we tape this mother?” he called out, looking up toward the glass booth where the director, Dwight Hemion, and his staff were sitting. Their heads seemed to be down, focusing on the control board.

“Why don’t we tape this mother?” Sinatra repeated.

The production stage manager, who stands near the camera wearing a headset, repeated Sinatra’s words exactly into his line to the control room: “Why don’t we tape this mother?”

Hemion did not answer. Possibly his switch was off. It was hard to know because of the obscuring reflections the lights made against the glass booth.

“Why don’t we put on a coat and tie,” said Sinatra, then wearing a high-necked yellow pullover, “and tape this….”

Suddenly Hemion’s voice came over the sound amplifier, very calmly: “Okay, Frank, would you mind going back over….”

“Yes, I would mind going back,” Sinatra snapped.

The silence from Hemion’s end, which lasted a second or two, was then again interrupted by Sinatra saying, “When we stop doing things around here the way we did them in 1950, maybe we…” and Sinatra continued to tear into Hemion, condemning as well the lack of modern techniques in putting such shows together; then, possibly not wanting to use his voice unnecessarily, he stopped. And Dwight Hemion, very patient, so patient and calm that one would assume he had not heard anything that Sinatra had just said, outlined the opening part of the show. And Sinatra a few minutes later was reading his opening remarks, words that would follow “Without a Song,” off the large idiot-cards being held near the camera. Then, this done, he prepared to do the same thing on camera.

“Frank Sinatra Show, Act I, Page 10, Take 1,” called a man with a clapboard, jumping in front of the camera—clap—then jumping away again.

“Did you ever stop to think,” Sinatra began, “what the world would be like without a song?… It would be a pretty dreary place…. Gives you something to think about, doesn’t it?…”

Sinatra stopped.

“Excuse me,” he said, adding, “Boy, I need a drink.”

They tried it again.

“Frank Sinatra Show, Act I, Page 10, Take 2,” yelled the jumping guy with the clapboard.

“Did you ever stop to think what the world would be like without a song?…” Frank Sinatra read it through this time without stopping. Then he rehearsed a few more songs, once or twice interrupting the orchestra when a certain instrumental sound was not quite what he wanted. It was hard to tell how well his voice was going to hold up, for this was early in the show; up to this point, however, everybody in the room seemed pleased, particularly when he sang an old sentimental favorite written more than twenty years ago by Jimmy Van Heusen and Phil Silvers—”Nancy,” inspired by the first of Sinatra’s three children when she was just a few years old.

If I don’t see her each day

I miss her….

Gee what a thrill

Each time I kiss her….

As Sinatra sang these words, though he has sung them hundreds and hundreds of times in the past, it was suddenly obvious to everybody in the studio that something quite special must be going on inside the man, because something quite special was coming out. He was singing now, cold or no cold, with power and warmth, he was letting himself go, the public arrogance was gone, the private side was in this song about the girl who, it is said, understands him better than anybody else, and is the only person in front of whom he can be unashamedly himself.

Nancy is twenty-five. She lives alone, her marriage to singer Tommy Sands having ended in divorce. Her home is in a Los Angeles suburb and she is now making her third film and is recording for her father’s record company. She sees him every day; or, if not, he telephones, no matter if it be from Europe or Asia. When Sinatra’s singing first became popular on radio, stimulating the swooners, Nancy would listen at home and cry. When Sinatra’s first marriage broke up in 1951 and he left home, Nancy was the only child old enough to remember him as a father. She also saw him with Ava Gardner, Juliet Prowse, Mia Farrow, many others, has gone on double dates with him….

She takes the winter

And makes it summer….

Summer could take

Some lessons from her….

Nancy now also sees him visiting at home with his first wife, the former Nancy Barbato, a plasterer’s daughter from Jersey City whom he married in 1939 when he was earning $25 a week singing at the Rustic Cabin near Hoboken.

The first Mrs. Sinatra, a striking woman who has never remarried (“When you’ve been married to Frank Sinatra…” she once explained to a friend), lives in a magnificent home in Los Angeles with her younger daughter, Tina, who is seventeen. There is no bitterness, only great respect and affection between Sinatra and his first wife, and he has long been welcome in her home and has even been known to wander in at odd hours, stoke the fire, lie on the sofa, and fall asleep. Frank Sinatra can fall asleep anywhere, something he learned when he used to ride bumpy roads with band buses; he also learned at that time, when sitting in a tuxedo, how to pinch the trouser creases in the back and tuck the jacket under and out, and fall asleep perfectly pressed. But he does not ride buses anymore, and his daughter Nancy, who in her younger days felt rejected when he slept on the sofa instead of giving attention to her, later realized that the sofa was one of the few places left in the world where Frank Sinatra could get any privacy, where his famous face would neither be stared at nor cause an abnormal reaction in others. She realized, too, that things normal have always eluded her father: his childhood was one of loneliness and a drive toward attention, and since attaining it he has never again been certain of solitude. Upon looking out the window of a home he once owned in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, he would occasionally see the faces of teen-agers peeking in; and in 1944, after moving to California and buying a home behind a ten-foot fence on Lake Toluca, he discovered that the only way to escape the telephone and other intrusions was to board his paddle boat with a few friends, a card table and a case of beer, and stay afloat all afternoon. But he has tried, insofar as it has been possible, to be like everyone else, Nancy says. He wept on her wedding day, he is very sentimental and sensitive….

WHAT THE HELL are you doing up there, Dwight?”

Silence from the control booth.

“Got a party or something going on up there, Dwight?”

Sinatra stood on the stage, arms folded, glaring up across the cameras toward Hemion. Sinatra had sung Nancy with probably all he had in his voice on this day. The next few numbers contained raspy notes, and twice his voice completely cracked. But now Hemion was in the control booth out of communication; then he was down in the studio walking over to where Sinatra stood. A few minutes later they both left the studio and were on the way up to the control booth. The tape was replayed for Sinatra. He watched only about five minutes of it before he started to shake his head. Then he said to Hemion: “Forget it, just forget it. You’re wasting your time. What you got there,” Sinatra said, nodding to the singing image of himself on the television screen, “is a man with a cold.” Then he left the control booth, ordering that the whole day’s performance be scrubbed and future taping postponed until he had recovered.

SOON THE WORD SPREAD like an emotional epidemic down through Sinatra’s staff, then fanned out through Hollywood, then was heard across the nation in Jilly’s saloon, and also on the other side of the Hudson River in the homes of Frank Sinatra’s parents and his other relatives and friends in New Jersey.

When Frank Sinatra spoke with his father on the telephone and said he was feeling awful, the elder Sinatra reported that he was also feeling awful: that his left arm and fist were so stiff with a circulatory condition he could barely use them, adding that the ailment might be the result of having thrown too many left hooks during his days as a bantamweight almost fifty years ago.

Martin Sinatra, a ruddy and tattooed little blue-eyed Sicilian born in Catania, boxed under the name of “Marty O’Brien.” In those days, in those places, with the Irish running the lower reaches of city life, it was not uncommon for Italians to wind up with such names. Most of the Italians and Sicilians who migrated to America just prior to the 1900’s were poor and uneducated, were excluded from the building-trades unions dominated by the Irish, and were somewhat intimidated by the Irish police, Irish priests, Irish politicians.

One notable exception was Frank Sinatra’s mother, Dolly, a large and very ambitious woman who was brought to this country at two months of age by her mother and father, a lithographer from Genoa. In later years Dolly Sinatra, possessing a round red face and blue eyes, was often mistaken for being Irish, and surprised many at the speed with which she swung her heavy handbag at anyone uttering “Wop.”

By playing skillful politics with North Jersey’s Democratic machine, Dolly Sinatra was to become, in her heyday, a kind of Catherine de Medici of Hoboken’s third ward. She could always be counted upon to deliver six hundred votes at election time from her Italian neighborhood, and this was her base of power. When she told one of the politicians that she wanted her husband to be appointed to the Hoboken Fire Department, and was told, “But, Dolly, we don’t have an opening,” she snapped, “Make an opening.”

They did. Years later she requested that her husband be made a captain, and one day she got a call from one of the political bosses that began, “Dolly, congratulations!”

“For what?”

“Captain Sinatra.”

“Oh, you finally made him one—thank you very much.”

Then she called the Hoboken Fire Department.

“Let me speak to Captain Sinatra,” she said. The fireman called Martin Sinatra to the phone, saying, “Marty, I think your wife has gone nuts.” When he got on the line, Dolly greeted him:

“Congratulations, Captain Sinatra!”

Dolly’s only child, christened Francis Albert Sinatra, was born and nearly died on December 12, 1915. It was a difficult birth, and during his first moment on earth he received marks he will carry till death—the scars on the left side of his neck being the result of a doctor’s clumsy forceps, and Sinatra has chosen not to obscure them with surgery.

After he was six months old, he was reared mainly by his grandmother. His mother had a full-time job as a chocolate dipper with a large firm and was so proficient at it that the firm once offered to send her to the Paris office to train others. While some people in Hoboken remember Frank Sinatra as a lonely child, one who spent many hours on the porch gazing into space, Sinatra was never a slum kid, never in jail, always well-dressed. He had so many pants that some people in Hoboken called him “Slacksey O’Brien.”

Dolly Sinatra was not the sort of Italian mother who could be appeased merely by a child’s obedience and good appetite. She made many demands on her son, was always very strict. She dreamed of his becoming an aviation engineer. When she discovered Bing Crosby pictures hanging on his bedroom walls one evening, and learned that her son wished to become a singer too, she became infuriated and threw a shoe at him. Later, finding she could not talk him out of it—”he takes after me”—she encouraged his singing.

Many Italo-American boys of his generation were then shooting for the same star—they were strong with song, weak with words, not a big novelist among them: no O’Hara, no Bellow, no Cheever, nor Shaw; yet they could communicate bel canto. This was more in their tradition, no need for a diploma; they could, with a song, someday see their names in lights…Perry Como…Frankie Laine…Tony Bennett…Vic Damone…but none could see it better than Frank Sinatra.

Though he sang through much of the night at the Rustic Cabin, he was up the next day singing without a fee on New York radio to get more attention. Later he got a job singing with Harry James’s band, and it was there in August of 1939 that Sinatra had his first recording hit— “All or Nothing at All.” He became very fond of Harry James and the men in the band, but when he received an offer from Tommy Dorsey, who in those days had probably the best band in the country, Sinatra took it; the job paid $125 a week, and Dorsey knew how to feature a vocalist. Yet Sinatra was very depressed at leaving James’s band, and the final night with them was so memorable that, twenty years later, Sinatra could recall the details to a friend: “…the bus pulled out with the rest of the boys at about half-past midnight. I’d said good-bye to them all, and it was snowing, I remember. There was nobody around and I stood alone with my suitcase in the snow and watched the taillights disappear. Then the tears started and I tried to run after the bus. There was such spirit and enthusiasm in that band, I hated leaving it….”

But he did—as he would leave other warm places, too, in search of something more, never wasting time, trying to do it all in one generation, fighting under his own name, defending underdogs, terrorizing top dogs. He threw a punch at a musician who said something anti-Semitic, espoused the Negro cause two decades before it became fashionable. He also threw a tray of glasses at Buddy Rich when he played the drums too loud.

Sinatra gave away $50,000 worth of gold cigarette lighters before he was thirty, was living an immigrant’s wildest dream of America. He arrived suddenly on the scene when DiMaggio was silent, when paisanos were mournful, were quietly defensive about Hitler in their homeland. Sinatra became, in time, a kind of one-man Anti-Defamation League for Italians in America, the sort of organization that would be unlikely for them because, as the theory goes, they rarely agreed on anything, being extreme individualists: fine as soloists, but not so good in a choir; fine as heroes, but not so good in a parade.

When many Italian names were used in describing gangsters on a television show, The Untouchables, Sinatra was loud in his disapproval. Sinatra and many thousands of other Italo-Americans were resentful as well when a small-time hoodlum, Joseph Valachi, was brought by Bobby Kennedy into prominence as a Mafia expert, when indeed, from Valachi’s testimony on television, he seemed to know less than most waiters on Mulberry Street. Many Italians in Sinatra’s circle also regard Bobby Kennedy as something of an Irish cop, more dignified than those in Dolly’s day, but no less intimidating. Together with Peter Lawford, Bobby Kennedy is said to have suddenly gotten “cocky” with Sinatra after John Kennedy’s election, forgetting the contribution Sinatra had made in both fundraising and in influencing many anti-Irish Italian votes. Lawford and Bobby Kennedy are both suspected of having influenced the late President’s decision to stay as a house guest with Bing Crosby instead of Sinatra, as originally planned, a social setback Sinatra may never forget. Peter Lawford has since been drummed out of Sinatra’s “summit” in Las Vegas.

“Yes, my son is like me,” Dolly Sinatra says, proudly. “You cross him, he never forgets.” And while she concedes his power, she quickly points out, “He can’t make his mother do anything she doesn’t want to do,” adding, “Even today, he wears the same brand of underwear I used to buy him.”

Today Dolly Sinatra is seventy-one years old, a year or two younger than Martin, and all day long people are knocking on the back door of her large home asking her advice, seeking her influence. When she is not seeing people and not cooking in the kitchen, she is looking after her husband, a silent but stubborn man, and telling him to keep his sore left arm resting on the sponge she has placed on the armrest of a soft chair. “Oh, he went to some terrific fires, this guy did,” Dolly said to a visitor, nodding with admiration toward her husband in the chair.

Though Dolly Sinatra has eighty-seven godchildren in Hoboken, and still goes to that city during political campaigns, she now lives with her husband in a beautiful sixteen-room house in Fort Lee, New Jersey. This home was a gift from their son on their fiftieth wedding anniversary three years ago. The home is tastefully furnished and is filled with a remarkable juxtaposition of the pious and the worldly—photographs of Pope John and Ava Gardner, of Pope Paul and Dean Martin; several statues of saints and holy water, a chair autographed by Sammy Davis, Jr. and bottles of bourbon. In Mrs. Sinatra’s jewelry box is a magnificent strand of pearls she had just received from Ava Gardner, whom she liked tremendously as a daughter-in-law and still keeps in touch with and talks about; and hung on the wall is a letter addressed to Dolly and Martin: “The sands of time have turned to gold, yet love continues to unfold like the petals of a rose, in God’s garden of life…may God love you thru all eternity. I thank Him, I thank you for the being of one. Your loving son, Francis….”

Mrs. Sinatra talks to her son on the telephone about once a week, and recently he suggested that, when visiting Manhattan, she make use of his apartment on East Seventy-second Street on the East River. This is an expensive neighborhood of New York even though there is a small factory on the block, but this latter fact was seized upon by Dolly Sinatra as a means of getting back at her son for some unflattering descriptions of his childhood in Hoboken.

“What—you want me to stay in your apartment, in that dump?” she asked. “You think I’m going to spend the night in that awful neighborhood?”

Frank Sinatra got the point, and said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Fort Lee.”

After spending the week in Palm Springs, his cold much better, Frank Sinatra returned to Los Angeles, a lovely city of sun and sex, a Spanish discovery of Mexican misery, a star land of little men and little women sliding in and out of convertibles in tense tight pants.

Sinatra returned in time to see the long-awaited CBS documentary with his family. At about nine p.m. he drove to the home of his former wife, Nancy, and had dinner with her and their two daughters. Their son, whom they rarely see these days, was out of town.

Frank, Jr., who is twenty-two, was touring with a band and moving cross country toward a New York engagement at Basin Street East with The Pied Pipers, with whom Frank Sinatra sang when he was with Dorsey’s band in the 1940’s. Today Frank Sinatra, Jr., whom his father says he named after Franklin D. Roosevelt, lives mostly in hotels, dines each evening in his nightclub dressing room, and sings until two a.m., accepting graciously, because he has no choice, the inevitable comparisons. His voice is smooth and pleasant, and improving with work, and while he is very respectful of his father, he discusses him with objectivity and in an occasional tone of subdued cockiness.

Concurrent with his father’s early fame, Frank, Jr. said, was the creation of a “press-release Sinatra” designed to “set him apart from the common man, separate him from the realities: it was suddenly Sinatra, the electric magnate, Sinatra who is supernormal, not superhuman but supernormal. And here,” Frank, Jr. continued, “is the great fallacy, the great bullshit, for Frank Sinatra is normal, is the guy whom you’d meet on a street corner. But this other thing, the supernormal guise, has affected Frank Sinatra as much as anybody who watches one of his television shows, or reads a magazine article about him….

“Frank Sinatra’s life in the beginning was so normal,” he said, “that nobody would have guessed in 1934 that this little Italian kid with the curly hair would become the giant, the monster, the great living legend…. He met my mother one summer on the beach. She was Nancy Barbato, daughter of Mike Barbato, a Jersey City plasterer. And she meets the fireman’s son, Frank, one summer day on the beach at Long Branch, New Jersey. Both are Italian, both Roman Catholic, both lower-middle-class summer sweethearts—it is like a million bad movies starring Frankie Avalon. . . .

“They have three children. The first child, Nancy, was the most normal of Frank Sinatra’s children. Nancy was a cheerleader, went to summer camp, drove a Chevrolet, had the easiest kind of development centered around the home and family. Next is me. My life with the family is very, very normal up until September of 1958 when, in complete contrast to the rearing of both girls, I am put into a college-preparatory school. I am now away from the inner family circle, and my position within has never been remade to this day…. The third child, Tina. And to be dead honest, I really couldn’t say what her life is like….”

The CBS show, narrated by Walter Cronkite, began at ten p.m. A minute before that, the Sinatra family, having finished dinner, turned their chairs around and faced the camera, united for whatever disaster might follow. Sinatra’s men in other parts of town, in other parts of the nation, were doing the same thing. Sinatra’s lawyer, Milton A. Rudin, smoking a cigar, was watching with a keen eye, an alert legal mind. Other sets were watched by Brad Dexter, Jim Mahoney, Ed Pucci; Sinatra’s makeup man, “Shotgun” Britton; his New York representative, Henri Gine; his haberdasher, Richard Carroll; his insurance broker, John Lillie; his valet, George Jacobs, a handsome Negro who, when entertaining girls in his apartment, plays records by Ray Charles.

And like so much of Hollywood’s fear, the apprehension about the CBS show all proved to be without foundation. It was a highly flattering hour that did not deeply probe, as rumors suggested it would, into Sinatra’s love life, or the Mafia, or other areas of his private province. While the documentary was not authorized, wrote Jack Gould in the next day’s New York Times, “it could have been.”

Immediately after the show, the telephones began to ring throughout the Sinatra system conveying words of joy and relief—and from New York came Jilly’s telegram: “WE RULE THE WORLD!”

THE NEXT DAY, STANDING in the corridor of the NBC building where he was about to resume taping his show, Sinatra was discussing the CBS show with several of his friends, and he said, “Oh, it was a gas.”

“Yeah, Frank, a helluva show.”

“But I think Jack Gould was right in The Times today,” Sinatra said. “There should have been more on the man, not so much on the music….”

They nodded, nobody mentioning the past hysteria in the Sinatra world when it seemed CBS was zeroing in on the man; they just nodded and two of them laughed about Sinatra’s apparently having gotten the word “bird” on the show—this being a favorite Sinatra word. He often inquires of his cronies, “How’s your bird?”; and when he nearly drowned in Hawaii, he later explained, “Just got a little water on my bird”; and under a large photograph of him holding a whisky bottle, a photo that hangs in the home of an actor friend named Dick Bakalyan, the inscription reads: “Drink, Dickie! It’s good for your bird.” In the song, “Come Fly with Me,” Sinatra sometimes alters the lyrics—”…just say the words and we’ll take our birds down to Acapulco Bay….”

Ten minutes later Sinatra, following the orchestra, walked into the NBC studio, which did not resemble in the slightest the scene here of eight days ago. On this occasion Sinatra was in fine voice, he cracked jokes between numbers, nothing could upset him. Once, while he was singing “How Can I Ignore the Girl Next Door,” standing on the stage next to a tree, a television camera mounted on a vehicle came rolling in too close and plowed against the tree.

“Kee-rist!” yelled one of the technical assistants.

But Sinatra seemed hardly to notice it.

“We’ve had a slight accident,” he said, calmly. Then he began the song all over from the beginning.

When the show was over, Sinatra watched the rerun on the monitor in the control room. He was very pleased, shaking hands with Dwight Hemion and his assistants. Then the whisky bottles were opened in Sinatra’s dressing room. Pat Lawford was there, and so were Andy Williams and a dozen others. The telegrams and telephone calls continued to be received from all over the country with praise for the CBS show. There was even a call, Mahoney said, from the CBS producer, Don Hewitt, with whom Sinatra had been so angry a few days before. And Sinatra was still angry, feeling that CBS had betrayed him, though the show itself was not objectionable.

“Shall I drop a line to Hewitt?” Mahoney asked.

“Can you send a fist through the mail?” Sinatra asked.

He has everything, he cannot sleep, he gives nice gifts, he is not happy, but he would not trade, even for happiness, what he is….

He is a piece of our past—but only we have aged, he hasn’t…we are dogged by domesticity, he isn’t…we have compunctions, he doesn’t…it is our fault, not his….

He controls the menus of every Italian restaurant in Los Angeles; if you want North Italian cooking, fly to Milan….

Men follow him, imitate him, fight to be near him…there is something of the locker room, the barracks about him…bird…bird….

He believes you must play it big, wide, expansively— the more open you are, the more you take in, your dimensions deepen, you grow, you become more what you are—bigger, richer….

“He is better than anybody else, or at least they think he is, and he has to live up to it.” —Nancy Sinatra, Jr.

“He is calm on the outside—inwardly a million things are happening to him.” —Dick Bakalyan

“He has an insatiable desire to live every moment to its fullest because, I guess, he feels that right around the corner is extinction.” —Brad Dexter

“All I ever got out of any of my marriages was the two years Artie Shaw financed on an analyst’s couch.” —Ava Gardner

“We weren’t mother and son—we were buddies.” —Dolly Sinatra

“I’m for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel.” —Frank Sinatra

FRANK SINATRA WAS TIRED of all the talk, the gossip, the theory—tired of reading quotes about himself, of hearing what people were saying about him all over town. It had been a tedious three weeks, he said, and now he just wanted to get away, go to Las Vegas, let off some steam. So he hopped in his jet, soared over the California hills across the Nevada flats, then over miles and miles of desert to The Sands and the Clay-Patterson fight.

On the eve of the fight he stayed up all night and slept through most of the afternoon, though his recorded voice could be heard singing in the lobby of The Sands, in the gambling casino, even in the toilets, being interrupted every few bars however by the paging public address: “…Telephone call for Mr. Ron Fish, Mr. Ron Fish…with a ribbon of gold in her hair…. Telephone call for Mr. Herbert Rothstein, Mr. Herbert Rothstein…memories of a time so bright, keep me sleepless through dark endless nights….”

Standing around in the lobby of The Sands and other hotels up and down the strip on this afternoon before the fight were the usual prefight prophets: the gamblers, the old champs, the little cigar butts from Eighth Avenue, the sportswriters who knock the big fights all year but would never miss one, the novelists who seem always to be identifying with one boxer or another, the local prostitutes assisted by some talent in from Los Angeles, and also a young brunette in a wrinkled black cocktail dress who was at the bell captain’s desk crying, “But I want to speak to Mr. Sinatra.”

“He’s not here,” the bell captain said.

“Won’t you put me through to his room?”

“There are no messages going through, Miss,” he said, and then she turned, unsteadily, seeming close to tears, and walked through the lobby into the big noisy casino crowded with men interested only in money.

Shortly before seven p.m., Jack Entratter, a big grey-haired man who operates The Sands, walked into the gambling room to tell some men around the blackjack table that Sinatra was getting dressed. He also said that he’d been unable to get front-row seats for everybody, and so some of the men—including Leo Durocher, who had a date, and Joey Bishop, who was accompanied by his wife—would not be able to fit in Frank Sinatra’s row but would have to take seats in the third row. When Entratter walked over to tell this to Joey Bishop, Bishop’s face fell. He did not seem angry; he merely looked at Entratter with an empty silence, seeming somewhat stunned.

“Joey, I’m sorry,” Entratter said when the silence persisted, “but we couldn’t get more than six together in the front row.”

Bishop still said nothing. But when they all appeared at the fight, Joey Bishop was in the front row, his wife in the third.

The fight, called a holy war between Muslims and Christians, was preceded by the introduction of three balding ex-champions, Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, Sonny Liston—and then there was “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by another man from out of the past, Eddie Fisher. It had been more than fourteen years ago, but Sinatra could still remember every detail: Eddie Fisher was then the new king of the baritones, with Billy Eckstine and Guy Mitchell right with him, and Sinatra had been long counted out. One day he remembered walking into a broadcasting studio past dozens of Eddie Fisher fans waiting outside the hall, and when they saw Sinatra they began to jeer, “Frankie, Frankie, I’m swooning, I’m swooning.” This was also the time when he was selling only about 30,000 records a year, when he was dreadfully miscast as a funny man on his television show, and when he recorded such disasters as “Mama Will Bark,” with Dagmar.

“I growled and barked on the record,” Sinatra said, still horrified by the thought. “The only good it did me was with the dogs.”

His voice and his artistic judgment were incredibly bad in 1952, but even more responsible for his decline, say his friends, was his pursuit of Ava Gardner. She was the big movie queen then, one of the most beautiful women in the world. Sinatra’s daughter Nancy recalls seeing Ava swimming one day in her father’s pool, then climbing out of the water with that fabulous body, walking slowly to the fire, leaning over it for a few moments, and then it suddenly seemed that her long dark hair was all dry, miraculously and effortlessly back in place.

With most women Sinatra dates, his friends say, he never knows whether they want him for what he can do for them now—or will do for them later. With Ava Gardner, it was different. He could do nothing for her later. She was on top. If Sinatra learned anything from his experience with her, he possibly learned that when a proud man is down a woman cannot help. Particularly a woman on top.

Nevertheless, despite a tired voice, some deep emotion seeped into his singing during this time. One particular song that is well remembered even now is “I’m a Fool to Want You,” and a friend who was in the studio when Sinatra recorded it recalled: “Frank was really worked up that night. He did the song in one take, then turned around and walked out of the studio and that was that….”

Sinatra’s manager at that time, a former song plugger named Hank Sanicola, said, “Ava loved Frank, but not the way he loved her. He needs a great deal of love. He wants it twenty-four hours a day, he must have people around—Frank is that kind of guy.” Ava Gardner, Sanicola said, “was very insecure. She feared she could not really hold a man…twice he went chasing her to Africa, wasting his own career….”

“Ava didn’t want Frank’s men hanging around all the time,” another friend said, “and this got him mad. With Nancy he used to be able to bring the whole band home with him, and Nancy, the good Italian wife, would never complain—she’d just make everybody a plate of spaghetti.”

In 1953, after almost two years of marriage, Sinatra and Ava Gardner were divorced. Sinatra’s mother reportedly arranged a reconciliation, but if Ava was willing, Frank Sinatra was not. He was seen with other women. The balance had shifted. Somewhere during this period Sinatra seemed to change from the kid singer, the boy actor in the sailor suit, to a man. Even before he had won the Oscar in 1953 for his role in From Here to Eternity, some flashes of his old talent were coming through—in his recording of “The Birth of the Blues,” in his Riviera-nightclub appearance that jazz critics enthusiastically praised; and there was also a trend now toward L.P.’s and away from the quick three-minute deal, and Sinatra’s concert style would have capitalized on this with or without an Oscar.

In 1954, totally committed to his talent once more, Frank Sinatra was selected Metronome’s “Singer of the Year,” and later he won the U.P.I. disc-jockey poll, unseating Eddie Fisher—who now, in Las Vegas, having sung “The Star-Spangled Banner,” climbed out of the ring, and the fight began.

Floyd Patterson chased Clay around the ring in the first round, but was unable to reach him, and from then on he was Clay’s toy, the bout ending in a technical knockout in the twelfth round. A half hour later, nearly everybody had forgotten about the fight and was back at the gambling tables or lining up to buy tickets for the Dean Martin-Sinatra-Bishop nightclub routine on the stage of The Sands. This routine, which includes Sammy Davis, Jr. when he is in town, consists of a few songs and much cutting up, all of it very informal, very special, and rather ethnic—Martin, a drink in hand, asking Bishop: “Did you ever see a Jew jitsu?”; and Bishop, playing a Jewish waiter, warning the two Italians to watch out “because I got my own group—the Matzia.”

Then after the last show at The Sands, the Sinatra crowd, which now numbered about twenty—and included Jilly, who had flown in from New York; Jimmy Cannon, Sinatra’s favorite sports columnist; Harold Gibbons, a Teamster official expected to take over if Hoffa goes to jail—all got into a line of cars and headed for another club. It was three o’clock. The night was young.

They stopped at The Sahara, taking a long table near the back, and listened to a baldheaded little comedian named Don Rickles, who is probably more caustic than any comic in the country. His humor is so rude, in such bad taste, that it offends no one—it is too offensive to be offensive. Spotting Eddie Fisher among the audience, Rickles proceeded to ridicule him as a lover, saying it was no wonder that he could not handle Elizabeth Taylor; and when two businessmen in the audience acknowledged that they were Egyptian, Rickles cut into them for their country’s policy toward Israel; and he strongly suggested that the woman seated at one table with her husband was actually a hooker.

When the Sinatra crowd walked in, Don Rickles could not be more delighted. Pointing to Jilly, Rickles yelled: “How’s it feel to be Frank’s tractor?… Yeah, Jilly keeps walking in front of Frank clearing the way.” Then, nodding to Durocher, Rickles said, “Stand up Leo, show Frank how you slide.” Then he focused on Sinatra, not failing to mention Mia Farrow, nor that he was wearing a toupee, nor to say that Sinatra was washed up as a singer, and when Sinatra laughed, everybody laughed, and Rickles pointed toward Bishop: “Joey Bishop keeps checking with Frank to see what’s funny.”

Then, after Rickles told some Jewish jokes, Dean Martin stood up and yelled, “Hey, you’re always talking about the Jews, never about the Italians,” and Rickles cut him off with, “What do we need the Italians for—all they do is keep the flies off our fish.”

Sinatra laughed, they all laughed, and Rickles went on this way for nearly an hour until Sinatra, standing up, said, “All right, com’on, get this thing over with. I gotta go.”

“Shaddup and sit down!” Rickles snapped. “I’ve had to listen to you sing….”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” Sinatra yelled back.

“Dick Haymes,” Rickles replied, and Sinatra laughed again, and then Dean Martin, pouring a bottle of whisky over his head, entirely drenching his tuxedo, pounded the table.

“Who would ever believe that staggering would make a star?” Rickles said, but Martin called out, “Hey, I wanna make a speech.”

“Shaddup.”

“No, Don, I wanna tell ya,” Dean Martin persisted, “that I think you’re a great performer.”

“Well, thank you, Dean,” Rickles said, seeming pleased.

“But don’t go by me,” Martin said, plopping down into his seat, “I’m drunk.”

“I’ll buy that,” Rickles said.

BY FOUR A.M. FRANK SINATRA led the group out of The Sahara, some of them carrying their glasses of whisky with them, sipping it along the sidewalk and in the cars; then, returning to The Sands, they walked into the gambling casino. It was still packed with people, the roulette wheels spinning, the crapshooters screaming in the far corner.

Frank Sinatra, holding a shot glass of bourbon in his left hand, walked through the crowd. He, unlike some of his friends, was perfectly pressed, his tuxedo tie precisely pointed, his shoes unsmudged. He never seems to lose his dignity, never lets his guard completely down no matter how much he has drunk, nor how long he has been up. He never sways when he walks, like Dean Martin, nor does he ever dance in the aisles or jump up on tables, like Sammy Davis.

A part of Sinatra, no matter where he is, is never there. There is always a part of him, though sometimes a small part, that remains Il Padrone. Even now, resting his shot glass on the blackjack table, facing the dealer, Sinatra stood a bit back from the table, not leaning against it. He reached under his tuxedo jacket into his trouser pocket and came up with a thick but clean wad of bills. Gently he peeled off a one-hundred-dollar bill and placed it on the green-felt table. The dealer dealt him two cards. Sinatra called for a third card, overbid, lost the hundred.

Without a change of expression, Sinatra put down a second hundred-dollar bill. He lost that. Then he put down a third, and lost that. Then he placed two one-hundred-dollar bills on the table and lost those. Finally, putting his sixth hundred-dollar bill on the table, and losing it, Sinatra moved away from the table, nodding to the man, and announcing, “Good dealer.”

The crowd that had gathered around him now opened up to let him through. But a woman stepped in front of him, handing him a piece of paper to autograph. He signed it and then he said, “Thank you.”

In the rear of The Sands’ large dining room was a long table reserved for Sinatra. The dining room was fairly empty at this hour, with perhaps two dozen other people in the room, including a table of four unescorted young ladies sitting near Sinatra. On the other side of the room, at another long table, sat seven men shoulder-to-shoulder against the wall, two of them wearing dark glasses, all of them eating quietly, speaking hardly a word, just sitting and eating and missing nothing.

The Sinatra party, after getting settled and having a few more drinks, ordered something to eat. The table was about the same size as the one reserved for Sinatra whenever he is at Jilly’s in New York; and the people seated around this table in Las Vegas were many of the same people who are often seen with Sinatra at Jilly’s or at a restaurant in California, or in Italy, or in New Jersey, or wherever Sinatra happens to be. When Sinatra sits to dine, his trusted friends are close; and no matter where he is, no matter how elegant the place may be, there is something of the neighborhood showing because Sinatra, no matter how far he has come, is still something of the boy from the neighborhood—only now he can take his neighborhood with him.

In some ways, this quasi-family affair at a reserved table in a public place is the closest thing Sinatra now has to home life. Perhaps, having had a home and left it, this approximation is as close as he cares to come; although this does not seem precisely so because he speaks with such warmth about his family, keeps in close touch with his first wife, and insists that she make no decision without first consulting him. He is always eager to place his furniture or other mementos of himself in her home or his daughter Nancy’s, and he also is on amiable terms with Ava Gardner. When he was in Italy making Von Ryan’s Express, they spent some time together, being pursued wherever they went by the paparazzi. It was reported then that the paparazzi had made Sinatra a collective offer of $16,000 if he would pose with Ava Gardner; Sinatra was said to have made a counter offer of $32,000 if he could break one paparazzi arm and leg.

While Sinatra is often delighted that he can be in his home completely without people, enabling him to read and think without interruption, there are occasions when he finds himself alone at night, and not by choice. He may have dialed a half-dozen women, and for one reason or another they are all unavailable. So he will call his valet, George Jacobs.

“I’ll be coming home for dinner tonight, George.”

“How many will there be?”

“Just myself,” Sinatra will say. “I want something light, I’m not very hungry.”

George Jacobs is a twice-divorced man of thirty-six who resembles Billy Eckstine. He has traveled all over the world with Sinatra and is devoted to him. Jacobs lives in a comfortable bachelor’s apartment off Sunset Boulevard around the corner from Whiskey à Go Go, and he is known around town for the assortment of frisky California girls he has as friends—a few of whom, he concedes, were possibly drawn to him initially because of his closeness to Frank Sinatra.

When Sinatra arrives, Jacobs will serve him dinner in the dining room. Then Sinatra will tell Jacobs that he is free to go home. If Sinatra, on such evenings, should ask Jacobs to stay longer, or to play a few hands of poker, he would be happy to do so. But Sinatra never does.

THIS WAS HIS SECOND night in Las Vegas, and Frank Sinatra sat with friends in The Sands’ dining room until nearly eight a.m. He slept through much of the day, then flew back to Los Angeles, and on the following morning he was driving his little golf cart through the Paramount Pictures movie lot. He was scheduled to complete two final scenes with the sultry blonde actress, Virna Lisi, in the film Assault on a Queen. As he maneuvered the little vehicle up the road between the big studio buildings, he spotted Steve Rossi who, with his comedy partner Marty Allen, was making a film in an adjoining studio with Nancy Sinatra.

“Hey, Dag,” he yelled to Rossi, “stop kissing Nancy.”

“It’s part of the film, Frank,” Rossi said, turning as he walked.

“In the garage?”

“It’s my Dago blood, Frank.”

“Well, cool it,” Sinatra said, winking, then cutting his golf cart around a corner and parking it outside a big drab building within which the scenes for Assault would be filmed.

“Where’s the fat director?” Sinatra called out, striding into the studio that was crowded with dozens of technical assistants and actors all gathered around cameras. The director, Jack Donohue, a large man who has worked with Sinatra through twenty-two years on one production or other, has had headaches with this film. The script had been chopped, the actors seemed restless, and Sinatra had become bored. But now there were only two scenes left—a short one to be filmed in the pool, and a longer and passionate one featuring Sinatra and Virna Lisi to be shot on a simulated beach.

The pool scene, which dramatizes a situation where Sinatra and his hijackers fail in their attempt to sack the Queen Mary, went quickly and well. After Sinatra had been kept in the water shoulder-high for a few minutes, he said, “Let’s move it, fellows—it’s cold in this water, and I’ve just gotten over one cold.”

So the camera crews moved in closer, Virna Lisi splashed next to Sinatra in the water, and Jack Donohue yelled to his assistants operating the fans, “Get the waves going,” and another man gave the command, “Agitate!” and Sinatra broke out in song. “Agitate in rhythm,” then quieted down just before the cameras started to roll.

Frank Sinatra was on the beach in the next situation, supposedly gazing up at the stars, and Virna Lisi was to approach him, toss one of her shoes near him to announce her presence, then sit near him and prepare for a passionate session. Just before beginning, Miss Lisi made a practice toss of her shoe toward the prone figure of Sinatra sprawled on the beach. As she tossed her shoe, Sinatra called out, “Hit me in my bird and I’m going home.”

Virna Lisi, who understands little English and certainly none of Sinatra’s special vocabulary, looked confused, but everybody behind the camera laughed. She threw the shoe toward him. It twirled in the air, landed on his stomach.

“Well, that’s about three inches too high,” he announced. She again was puzzled by the laughter behind the camera.

Then Jack Donohue had them rehearse their lines, and Sinatra, still very charged from the Las Vegas trip, and anxious to get the cameras rolling, said, “Let’s try one.” Donohue, not certain that Sinatra and Lisi knew their lines well enough, nevertheless said okay, and an assistant with a clapboard called, “419, Take 1,” and Virna Lisi approached with the shoe, tossed it at Frank lying on the beach. It fell short of his thigh, and Sinatra’s right eye raised almost imperceptibly, but the crew got the message, smiled.

“What do the stars tell you tonight?” Miss Lisi said, delivering her first line, and sitting next to Sinatra on the beach.

“The stars tell me tonight I’m an idiot,” Sinatra said, “a gold-plated idiot to get mixed up in this thing….”

“Cut,” Donohue said. There were some microphone shadows on the sand, and Virna Lisi was not sitting in the proper place near Sinatra.

“419, Take 2,” the clapboard man called.

Miss Lisi again approached, threw the shoe at him, this time falling short—Sinatra exhaling only slightly—and she said, “What do the stars tell you tonight?”

“The stars tell me I’m an idiot, a gold-plated idiot to get mixed up in this thing….” Then, according to the script, Sinatra was to continue, “…do you know what we’re getting into? The minute we step on the deck of the Queen Mary, we’ve just tattooed ourselves,” but Sinatra, who often improvises on lines, recited them: “…do you know what we’re getting into? The minute we step on the deck of that mother’s-ass ship….”

“No, no,” Donohue interrupted, shaking his head, “I don’t think that’s right.”

The cameras stopped, some people laughed, and Sinatra looked up from his position in the sand as if he had been unfairly interrupted.

“I don’t see why that can’t work…” he began, but Richard Conte, standing behind the camera, yelled, “It won’t play in London.”

Donohue pushed his hand through his thinning grey hair and said, but not really in anger, “You know, that scene was pretty good until somebody blew the line….”

“Yeah,” agreed the cameraman, Billy Daniels, his head popping out from around the camera, “it was a pretty good piece….”

“Watch your language,” Sinatra cut in. Then Sinatra, who has a genius for figuring out ways of not reshooting scenes, suggested a way in which the film could be used and the “mother” line could be recorded later. This met with approval. Then the cameras were rolling again, Virna Lisi was leaning toward Sinatra in the sand, and then he pulled her down close to him. The camera now moved in for a close-up of their faces, ticking away for a few long seconds, but Sinatra and Lisi did not stop kissing, they just lay together in the sand wrapped in one another’s arms, and then Virna Lisi’s left leg just slightly began to rise a bit, and everybody in the studio now watched in silence, not saying anything until Donohue finally called out:

“If you ever get through, let me know. I’m running out of film.”

Then Miss Lisi got up, straightened out her white dress, brushed back her blonde hair and touched her lipstick, which was smeared. Sinatra got up, a little smile on his lips, and headed for his dressing room.

Passing an older man who stood near a camera, Sinatra asked, “How’s your Bell & Howell?”

The older man smiled.

“It’s fine, Frank.”

“Good.”

In his dressing room Sinatra was met by an automobile designer who had the plans for Sinatra’s new custom-built model to replace the $25,000 Ghia he has been driving for the last few years. He also was awaited by his secretary, Tom Conroy, who had a bag full of fan mail, including a letter from New York’s Mayor John Lindsay; and by Bill Miller, Sinatra’s pianist, who would rehearse some of the songs that would be recorded later in the evening for Sinatra’s newest album, Moonlight Sinatra.

While Sinatra does not mind hamming it up a bit on a movie set, he is extremely serious about his recording sessions; as he explained to a British writer, Robin Douglas-Home: “Once you’re on that record singing, it’s you and you alone. If it’s bad and gets you criticized, it’s you who’s to blame—no one else. If it’s good, it’s also you. With a film it’s never like that; there are producers and scriptwriters, and hundreds of men in offices and the thing is taken right out of your hands. With a record, you’re it….”

But now the days are short

I’m in the autumn of the year

And now I think of my life

As vintage wine

From fine old kegs….

It no longer matters what song he is singing, or who wrote the words—they are all his words, his sentiments, they are chapters from the lyrical novel of his life.

Life is a beautiful thing

As long as I hold the string….

When Frank Sinatra drives to the studio, he seems to dance out of the car across the sidewalk into the front door; then, snapping his fingers, he is standing in front of the orchestra in an intimate, airtight room, and soon he is dominating every man, every instrument, every sound wave. Some of the musicians have accompanied him for twenty-five years, have gotten old hearing him sing “You Make Me Feel So Young.”

When his voice is on, as it was tonight, Sinatra is in ecstasy, the room becomes electric, there is an excitement that spreads through the orchestra and is felt in the control booth where a dozen men, Sinatra’s friends, wave at him from behind the glass. One of the men is the Dodgers’ pitcher, Don Drysdale (“Hey, Big D,” Sinatra calls out, “hey, baby!”); another is the professional golfer Bo Wininger; there are also numbers of pretty women standing in the booth behind the engineers, women who smile at Sinatra and softly move their bodies to the mellow mood of his music:

Will this be moon love

Nothing but moon love

Will you be gone when the dawn

Comes stealing through….

After he is finished, the record is played back on tape, and Nancy Sinatra, who has just walked in, joins her father near the front of the orchestra to hear the playback. They listen silently, all eyes on them, the king, the princess; and when the music ends there is applause from the control booth, Nancy smiles, and her father snaps his fingers and says, kicking a foot, “Ooba-deeba-boobe-do!”

Then Sinatra calls to one of his men. “Hey, Sarge, think I can have a half-a-cup of coffee?”

Sarge Weiss, who had been listening to the music, slowly gets up.

“Didn’t mean to wake ya, Sarge,” Sinatra says, smiling.

Then Weiss brings the coffee, and Sinatra looks at it, smells it, then announces, “I thought he’d be nice to me, but it’s really coffee….”

There are more smiles, and then the orchestra prepares for the next number. And one hour later, it is over.

The musicians put their instruments into their cases, grab their coats, and begin to file out, saying good-night to Sinatra. He knows them all by name, knows much about them personally, from their bachelor days, through their divorces, through their ups and downs, as they know him. When a French-horn player, a short Italian named Vincent DeRosa, who has played with Sinatra since The Lucky Strike “Hit Parade” days on radio, strolled by, Sinatra reached out to hold him for a second.

“Vicenzo,” Sinatra said, “how’s your little girl?”

“She’s fine, Frank.”

“Oh, she’s not a little girl anymore,” Sinatra corrected himself, “she’s a big girl now.”

“Yes, she goes to college now. U.S.C.”

“That’s great.”

“She’s also got a little talent, I think, Frank, as a singer.”

Sinatra was silent for a moment, then said, “Yes, but it’s very good for her to get her education first, Vicenzo.”

Vincent DeRosa nodded.

“Yes, Frank,” he said, and then he said, “Well, good-night, Frank.”

“Good-night, Vicenzo.”

After the musicians had all gone, Sinatra left the recording room and joined his friends in the corridor. He was going to go out and do some drinking with Drysdale, Wininger, and a few other friends, but first he walked to the other end of the corridor to say good-night to Nancy, who was getting her coat and was planning to drive home in her own car.

After Sinatra had kissed her on the cheek, he hurried to join his friends at the door. But before Nancy could leave the studio, one of Sinatra’s men, Al Silvani, a former prizefight manager, joined her.

“Are you ready to leave yet, Nancy?”

“Oh, thanks, Al,” she said, “but I’ll be all right.”

“Pope’s orders,” Silvani said, holding his hands up, palms out.

Only after Nancy had pointed to two of her friends who would escort her home, and only after Silvani recognized them as friends, would he leave.

THE REST OF THE MONTH was bright and balmy. The record session had gone magnificently, the film was finished, the television shows were out of the way, and now Sinatra was in his Ghia driving out to his office to begin coordinating his latest projects. He had an engagement at The Sands, a new spy film called The Naked Runner to be shot in England, and a couple more albums to do in the immediate months ahead. And within a week he would be fifty years old….

Life is a beautiful thing

As long as I hold the string

I’d be a silly so-and-so

If I should ever let go…

Frank Sinatra stopped his car. The light was red. Pedestrians passed quickly across his windshield but, as usual, one did not. It was a girl in her twenties. She remained at the curb staring at him. Through the corner of his left eye he could see her, and he knew, because it happens almost every day, that she was thinking, It looks like him, but is it?

Just before the light turned green, Sinatra turned toward her, looked directly into her eyes waiting for the reaction he knew would come. It came and he smiled. She smiled and he was gone.

Read more of the greatest Esquire stories ever published—in their entirety.

By George W. S. Trow — The New Yorker, 1984

The Harvard Black Rock Forest

IT is my plan to begin in the middle of things, with a man alone on a tract of land. It is 1892. The man is young and healthy; the land has been damaged. The young man is a forester, hired to work on this land. Now he is joined by a second young man, the owner of the land—a young man who is enormously rich. Together they look around at the tract of damaged land, which could have been damaged by anyone; then they look up at a house that is being built. It is an astonishing house: only a rich person could build it.

All the rest of this essay takes place within the set of circumstances I have just described: two friends, one a forester, one an enormously rich young man, looking first at a large tract of damaged land and then at an astonishing limestone palace.

The young man alone on the tract of land is Gifford Pinchot, the first American to be trained as a forester, and, I think, one of the important men in the history of the United States. The young man who joins him is George Washington Vanderbilt, of that rich family. As an old man, Gifford Pinchot wrote a description of George Washington Vanderbilt as he was at the time of the building of the limestone house, called Biltmore:

Pinchot described the tract of land, near Asheville, North Carolina:

Pinchot described the limestone house:

The rich young man who had the palace built, however, also put his forest under management. Pinchot wrote:

When I said that I thought that Gifford Pinchot was one of the important men in the history of the United States, I was thinking not only of his importance in the history of forestry and conservation but, even more, of his quality of mind. He was an amateur. At all moments in his career, he was fond of wearing a wide-brimmed slouch hat that made him look like a Westerner and an Easterner both. At all moments in his career, he failed to please one professional or another who was in possession of: the facts—political, scientific, or practical. Now we are living with a hunger for certainty. We want to be certain. Or, rather, we are hungry for certainty, but, despairing of attaining it ourselves, we want to know that someone else is certain. If this should change—that is, if we allow ourselves to doubt consciously whether we can be certain—we may need to try to regain an understanding of how men like Gifford Pinchot looked at American life.

One thing Gifford Pinchot understood was that in America an effective man must not blame farmers who damage their land or very rich young men who want to build (and sometimes do build) limestone palaces. He may have learned some part of this from Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect, who also worked at Biltmore, and who guided and encouraged him. “It was Mr. Olmsted who was responsible for the plan to make Biltmore Estate the nest egg for practical Forestry in America,” Pin-chot wrote, and he explained:

EVERYONE lives somewhere, but not everyone feels that he is living in one particular place. The man on the street with an earphone-connected-to-music in his ear—where is he living? Even ambitious people have, in recent times, wanted to overcome the limitations implicit in living in one place. Already, I need a distinction: between the person who is thoughtlessly impelled to place a popular-culture webbing over the place where he is and the person who sees that his work, when it is most successful, is everywhere and nowhere. Both persons have noticed that when an event is merely somewhere it has failed.

To be successful now, one would want to be a person whose work was dispersed throughout the world but who lived (nevertheless) in a collegial atmosphere. Scientists and entertainers do this. It is the work of scientists and entertainers which has been most thoroughly dispersed throughout the modern world, and yet scientists and entertainers live in a collegial atmosphere, within which the work of an ambitious man is likely to be known to another ambitious man. Thus, history survives within the history of science and the history of entertainment— especially the history of entertainment on film. Silent films, vaudeville turns, and the work of B-picture directors are studied by men who do not intend to do vaudeville or direct B pictures or make pictures without sound. In the same way, scientists know and make use of the work of men whose theories have been overthrown.

A collegial situation in which a sense of history leads men to respect work a layman would ignore is rare now. The collegial atmosphere around the work of lawyers is thinner than it used to be, and around the work of literary men it is very thin; this is a measure of the loss of vitality in these two spheres. Traditions are maintained by collegial bodies that retain vitality and direct part of their vital energy to the protection of parts of themselves which would be ignored by a layman. Americans are not, as is sometimes said, a people without traditions; our traditions are being formed within science and entertainment.

The vast majority of people do not see evidence of a collegial enterprise in what they encounter either on the surface of life (where the history of science is to be seen) or in their dreams (formed by entertainment). The world is not familiar from the point of view of knowledge; nor does its mystery give birth to healthy aspirations. Rather, the lives of most people are characterized by attempts to make the world familiar through the application of affection, and by nonsensical aspirations: attempts to reach images in the air and to take part in events in the sky.

But scientists and entertainers do see evidence of sense and of a collegial spirit in what is around them, and this convinces them that there is more structure in the lives of people than there really is. Consider the example of a filmmaker whose film about gangsters is being shown on television. He knows the film, of course, and he knows other films of the genre, and he knows how television works; that is, he could explain how his film came to be shown on television and what people were involved. He may not know anything about gangsters; that doesn’t matter. He himself may be capable of being fooled by some of his own work (he may be imitating the work of other, greater men, whose work he is incapable of understanding), but a partial delusion does not make the experience of watching the film a crazy one for him: he may even transform what does not make sense into a sensiFor him, the explicable and the mysterious are in contact, as they are for all men who are involved in a ritual and are taking it seriously.

watching this film is completely different. The explicable and the mysterious are not in contact. The mystery that the filmmaker consciously refers to in his film and the mystery of which he is not conscious (his delusion: the result of not understanding his own work)— these mysteries are not important, or even perceptible, to the child, who is under the weight of the questions “What is television?” and “How does something get on television?” One definition of a ritual would be: a circumstance in which images fall into an order that makes an order that makes deep sense. One definition of television would be: an unsuccessful ritual; or a ritual that works only for the priests.

Science, like entertainment, is found in layers, in a hierarchy, throughout the world. From a scientific point of view, there are important connections between the most repellent application of a degraded technology and the most sublime speculation. This being true, the consequences of the degraded technology are, perhaps, slightly less repellent to a scientist than they would be to a sensitive nonscientist. What joins the scientist and the entertainer is this: they create the modern world but do not live in it, while other people live in it without knowing much about how it has been made.

IN the back seat of an automobile travelling south on Route 9W in the small, decayed city of Newburgh, on the west bank of the Hudson, Hamilton Fish, of that distinguished New York family, Harvard Class of 1910, former member of Congress, said to the air in front of him, “I have too much money now. I’m embarrassed.” It is the habit of some people whose final reference is to certainty to speak to the air in front of them. “It’s true,” Mr. Fish said. “I’m embarrassed.” It was not true.

Mr. Fish was refering to his third wife, who is rich and with whom he was at this moment living in a nineteenth-century house overlooking the Hudson near Newburgh. This was a change for Mr. Fish, whose family has had strong connections in Garrison, over on the east bank of the river. The Newburgh house is handsome on the outside. Inside, it is opulent. The house is surrounded by specimen trees. Each tree carries a small tag giving its proper name, or is meant to carry one. “Still,” Mr. Fish said, into the air, “charity can be very dangerous. My first wife’s father gave a great deal of money to Williams College and then had very little left for himself.” Mr. Fish opened his eyes wide, and so opened wide his big face. This he did to add emphasis to the words “had very little left for himself.” Mr. Fish, in his nineties, is extremely handsome—tall, with a famous nose and famous eyes. His late sister Rosalind Fish Cutler had eyes even bigger, the wonder of her friends and family, but Mr. Fish’s career has been public, so his eyes are better known.

Travelling south on 9W, the automobile crossed the principal thoroughfare of the small, decayed city of Newburgh. There was silence in the automobile as it crossed this strong street, which is called Broadway. Broadway is a boulevard, eighty-two feet wide. After crossing Broadway, the automobile followed the dispersal of the small city of New-burgh.

After a time, a man in the front seat said, “Do you think New-burgh will come back, Uncle Ham?”

“No,” Mr. Fish said.

Route 9W proceeds south of New-burgh through the old town of New Windsor and into the Hudson Highlands. When one is travelling south, Storm King Mountain off to the left. To the right is the Harvard Black Rock Forest, a tract of thirty-eight hundred acres which was developed as scientific, or demonstration, forest by Dr. Ernest G. Stillman, a benefactor of Harvard; he endowed the forest and left it to Harvard at his death, in 1949. Farther south, a trav-eller may turn off to the United States Military Academy, at West Point. The Hudson Highlands are merely fifty miles from New York City, but there are large tracts of undeveloped land here: within the West Point Military Reservation; within Storm King State Park, which is a part of the Palisades Interstate Park; and within the Harvard Black Rock Forest.

Of Harvard and its relationship to the Black Rock Forest, to the Stillman family of benefactors, to the science of silviculture (within a demonstration forest), it should be said that, in response to the new, tough reality in American life, Harvard University has been looking closely, ruthlessly at its assets. Where an asset does not per- form, it is suspect. Recently, Harvard University decided that the Black Rock Forest, the tract of thirty-eight hundred acres within the Hudson Highlands given to it by Dr. Ernest Stillman (a benefactor from a family of benefactors), had not performed and should be sold. There were difficulties. It was not possible to say that the forest was a burden, for instance. The expenses of upkeep were light; there were no large buildings in the forest; runaway fuel costs and other such aspects of the new, tough reality were absent. Expenses had not outstripped income. Most emphatically, they had not. Income rose and rose and rose. At moments, it must have been embarrassing how much money Harvard had available to be spent within the forest. This money derived from a fund established by Dr. Ernest Stillman primarily to support the expenses of maintaining the forest and the expenses of conducting scientific work within the forest; the fund amounted to about a million dollars at the time of Dr. Stillman’s death, in 1949. It amounts to more than that now. Harvard has said that although it is not possible for Harvard to keep the forest it is possible for it to keep the money.

Hamilton Fish (Harvard ‘10) and his companions were on their way to a meeting of Harvard men. Their trip took them through the old, decayed city of Newburgh and through the Hudson Highlands— where the Black Rock Forest is. The meeting was a fund-raiser, connected to an effort by the President and Fellows of Harvard College to raise (at first; they asked for a hundred million more later) the sum of two hundred and fifty million dollars. It was held at a hotel on the grounds of the United States Military Academy. There was a view of the Hudson River (very narrow here). There were talks by three men, and there was a film.

THE collegial atmosphere around the men of Harvard is thin now. It is thinner than the atmosphere around lawyers, not so thin as the atmosphere around literary people. It becomes thick, richer in oxygen, more nearly capable of sustaining life, during fund-raising periods. Men are injected into buildings; their money is mortar. Buildings reveal that they were built by men and have always housed people. Everything is named. “The Names of Harvard” is a booklet issued at this fund-raising period to set out the details of the process by which money becomes mortar and mortar is trained to speak the name of some person.

AT the meeting attended by Mr. Fish and his companions, there were three kinds of talk:

(1) Talk in imitation of a backwater patois, from one speaker.

(2) Tough, simple talk, neutral in coloration, from a second speaker.

(3) New talk, based on the new relationship that is evolving between images and words, from a third speaker.

A discussion of the second kind of talk will reveal something about all three:

After the Second World War, there came into power at Harvard University, an old backwater near to the center of national life, a New Man. He was represented as having a point of view, but what he had in fact was a function and a tone of voice. His function was to make a new arrangement between the old backwater and national life. His tone of voice was neutral. This neutral tone of voice was his point of view. He was never asked to explain himself; his voice explained him. His effectiveness depended in some degree, however, on the presence at Harvard of certain old men, with whom he was juxtaposed. In the absence of these men, with whom he was in contrast, he looked very much like other strong, neutral men of his generation; that is, he seemed not particular but general. He had toughness and integrity. Here were two wirelike threads that linked him to his institution and to the old men who were his mentors. One decision he made demonstrated both his toughness and his integrity: he refused to adopt the manners of the old men, which were beguiling.

This man, where he continues to serve his institution, now represents the Old Guard of his institution. He is an important figure in that he does understand the ways of his backwater even though he has not adopted them himself. It must be difficult for him, in some cases, to welcome the newer sort of New Man, who knows the ways of the backwater very superficially and puts them on and casts them off as he pleases.

We may think of continuity within Harvard University as having three strands: toughness; manners; spirit. Wound together, they would have one destiny. They are not wound together; they are separate. After the Second World War, it was decided that toughness would continue into the next generation and manners would not. What of spirit?

It may be that the old men tried to pass on their spiritual inheritance to the new, tough man and failed. It may be that they did not try to pass on their spiritual inheritance. Or it may be, as it seems to me, that their spiritual inheritance had shrunk over time until it was no longer able to compete on equal terms with toughness or man-It seems to me ners. seems to me likely that by the time of the Second World War the spiritual inheritance of Harvard University was able to do very light work only; that the work it took on to do was to enliven manners; that it had become embedded within manners, so that when it was decided that manners would not continue, spirit (now known only as a form of energy within manners) died, too.

Not died—was not passed on. The spirit would not really die until the last self-confident old man died; and many self-confident old men lived on, more cheerful than ever.

WHAT happened was that the work of running the university was separated from the work of maintaining its particular character. This explains the three kinds of talk. We have discussed the neutral tone of the second speaker. Now let us consider the two other kinds of talk.

A person attending Harvard after the, Second World War might have decided to make a study of the inheritance of Harvard. In time, he would understand that his study was narrow; it was not, as he had thought, the study that embraced all the others. From that time, although his syntax would reflect his study of self-confidence, his reference would be to uncertainty. This was the first speaker.

Another person would find in the inheritance a kind of motif to be used to decorate, or to frame, whatever sort of excellence he wanted to promote. This was the third speaker, and also the film.

IT will be the purpose of this essay to consider aspects of an inheritance; I will try to determine what it was that came to Harvard with the Black Rock Forest.

When I described Harvard as “an old backwater near to the center of national life,” I was speaking of a former condition; Harvard is now a part of national life, and life there is not distinguishable from life anywhere else. When I used the phrase “old backwater near to the center of national life,” there was nothing insulting in the use of the word “backwater;” I was thinking of the truck gardens that used to exist quite close to New York City and from which the city constantly drew refreshment.

I WOULD like to begin to introduce particular men into this story. My idea is that even the most difficult story (“Atomic Energy in the Modern World,” “New Frontiers in MicroBiology,” “Our Colleges in Crisis”) can be told as the history of the work of particular men and should be told that way.

The reader will accept this device. He is used to the idea that men, at their daily tasks, are occupying a certain space in the foreground. I want to address the question of the background against which these men appear, and to try to suggest that this background should be understood as the accumulated result of knowable stories.

This is important, because it is important to set right a deformation in modern discourse, a twofold mistake: the first part of the mistake is to think of the background against which the work of modern persons is juxtaposed as unknowable; the second part of the mistake is to accept it—whatever it is.

Now I want to introduce the idea of social embarrassment. One reason most people ignore—actually ignore— the question of the background against which their own lives are juxtaposed is that they imagine that some persons do understand this background (are in charge of it) and that these people-in-charge are their social betters. I would like to make the point in this regard that the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the college composed of living Harvard men and women do not understand the background against which modern lives are juxtaposed. It is only at fund-raising moments that they remember that they did, once, understand it.

A SMALL beginning may be to tell the story of the Black Rock Forest in terms of the histories of particular men who were connected to it. Then places can be indicated at which this story may be said to join larger histories: of Harvard University, of the conservation policies of the government of the United States, of the history of optimistic thought within the conservation policies of the government, and of the history of science as it encloses the remarkable work done in physics and biology in this century.

F IRST, a father.

James Stillman was a banker; he was thought by some people to be a ruthless one. He was associated with William Rockefeller, the brother of John D. Rockefeller, and operated with Rockefeller and a small group of other men as a capitalist, which is to say that he was interested in the power of money within an enterprise, quite apart from any particular thing the enterprise was set up to do. The Stillman-Rockefeller group was described (by Henry Clews, a contemporary on Wall Street) as having resources so vast “that they need only concentrate on any given property in order to do with it what they please.” As soon as this was known, they became unbearably attractive to investors. In the Amalgamated Copper manipulation, it was the reputation (for ruthlessness and vast resources) of the Rockefeller-Stillman manipulators that was attractive, more than the reputation of copper. The formula was, in some ways, the same as for older frenzies, like the South Sea Bubble, but the distant place where there was wealth beyond counting was in the Rockefeller-Stillman circle, as far as most investors were concerned, rather than in Montana.

T HEN a son.

Ernest Stillman, the youngest son of James Stillman, was a medical doctor. His impulse in all his activities seems to have been toward healing. He had an enthusiasm for firefighting, which seeks to remedy a spreading trouble. Also, we should note here that the land that was to constitute the Black Rock Forest was in a deplorable condition at the time Dr. Stillman inherited it from his father: these acres had been cut over for timber to be used (once reduced to charcoal) as fuel for the brickmaking factories along the Hudson. The land was the ruined remainder of the economic processes embraced and mastered by his father. Ernest Stillman wanted to bring this particular tract of land back to health, perhaps. More than that, he wanted to bring it back to health for good. His idea was that this protected forest, at least, should be constantly useful and also constantly flourishing.

NOW I need to consider Gifford Pinchot, whose ideal the constantly useful, constantly flourishing forest was (he said that one of his goals for a forest was “sustained yield,” and that the ideal against which conservation policies ought to be tested was “the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time”), but first I want to mention one other man: Richard Thornton Fisher, of Harvard. Fisher was for many years (in the first half of this century) the head of the Harvard Forest, in Peter-sham, Massachusetts—a demonstration forest acquired in 1907. It was he who suggested to Dr. Ernest Stillman that the land he owned in the Hudson Highlands might be set up as a second demonstration forest. Richard Fisher seems to have acted in a fatherly way toward Dr. Stillman. Dr. Stillman’s son Calvin Stillman has said that the death of Richard Fisher, in 1934, was the greatest blow Ernest Stillman suffered in his life. At Richard Fisher’s death, a committee of Harvard alumni published a small book in his honor. The book was printed at the Cornwall Press, which was owned by Dr. Ernest Stillman. The book included this biographical note:

James Stillman was one of a small number of men who discovered the life that money might have as money, apart from any particular work in the world—apart, even, from “rates of interest” and the ordinary terminology of the banker. He was one of a small number of men who saw that money might be free; that it might have a life of its own.

Ernest Stillman, his youngest son, was drawn to healing work; he took particular interest in a particular tract of ravaged land, which he hoped to bring to health in such a way that it would stay useful and healthy for the longest time he could foresee.

Richard Fisher acted in a fatherly way to Ernest Stillman, and was embraced, perhaps, as a father by him. Richard Fisher had been, in his youth, “one of the enthusiastic and ‘closely knit group of men who helped Mr. [Gifford] Pinchot get the practice of forestry under way.’ “

Gifford Pinchot was born on August 11, 1865, in Simsbury, Connecticut. His father had made a fortune in drygoods in New York City. His maternal grandfather, Amos Eno, was a successful investor in real estate and was the owner of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Pinchot went to Exeter and Yale. Just before he enrolled at Yale, his father suggested to him that he make forestry his career. This was a most interesting intuition, since there was no forestry school at Yale, or anywhere in the country, at that mo-ment. Pinchot wrote in his autobiography:

He left America for Europe. When he returned, in 1890, he had studied the systematized forests of Europe. At that time, in America, the condition of the forests was very striking: vast forests had been thoroughly lumbered over and had been left in pitiable condition. Pinchot felt he had a role to play. His first work was for great magnates, however: he worked for W. Seward Webb in the Adirondacks and for Webb’s connection George Washing-ton Vanderbilt near Asheville, North Carolina.

THE Vanderbilt family in America may be discussed in terms of the history of railroading, the history of social life, the history of architecture. In the history of architecture, they are secure in their place as promoters of gorgeous European styles. The family possessed almost a dozen large houses on Fifth Avenue in New York, the most remarkable of which was the “château” of Cornelius Vanderbilt III, at Fifty-seventh Street. Among their country houses were the house of Frederick Vanderbilt in Hyde Park, New York; the Breakers and Marble House, at Newport; Florham, in New Jersey, the house of Hamilton Twombly and Florence Vanderbilt Twombly; and Biltmore, near Asheville, North Carolina, the house of George Washington Vanderbilt.

This last house has been known since the time of its building as “the largest private house in America.” It was modelled on the château of Blois, but the work is not so finely done as it is at Blois. The interior is furnished with old European pieces and with imitations of such pieces. The house, which if it were in Europe would be beneath anyone’s notice, is heavily visited by the public. The house is viewed by the public, I think, as a symbol of success, and it is that. It is representative of the failure of success to take hold in America. Some moment of success left this thing. People look at it, but they don’t understand it.

Biltmore has shrunk. There was a forest; an arboretum was envisioned. What remains is the artifact-house. Frederick Law Olmsted was particularly interested in developing an arboretum at Biltmore. Gifford Pinchot (working as the “consulting forester” at Biltmore) wrote this enthusiastic prospectus, in 1893:

We may, for purposes of this essay, establish the arboretum as a symbol for one kind of activity undertaken in America with reference to a European model and Biltmore House as another. We see that the arboretum takes notice of the well-established gardens at Kew and means to outdo them—not as a result of an urgent interest in outdoing them but in consequence of certain natural advantages (here meteorological) to be found on this new continent. Biltmore House, on the other hand, has been built in an atmosphere of urgent need, and no natural advantages exist in North Carolina to support it. A third symbol is to be found in Biltmore Forest. The forest was that extensive portion of the Biltmore property given over to scientific forest management. It was described by Gifford Pinchot as follows:

The forest, Pinchot said, “derives an additional interest from the fact that it is the first piece of woodland in the United States to be subjected to a regular system of management, the prime object of which is to pay the owner while improving the forest.”

Of the condition of the forest at the time the “regular system of management” was instituted, Pinchot said,

Pinchot did not stay long at Biltmore. In 1898, he went to work for the United States Department of Agriculture as the head of its Forestry Division. There he was called the Chief Forester; he was the first man to hold this version of the title, and it appealed to him, as he was the first American-born man to be a professional forester.

Pinchot’s idea of what forestry might be can be thought of as having three parts. There was a scientific component, encompassing the study of the various factors that affect the growth and thrift of trees; a practical component, taking into consideration what goal was looked for in the culture and harvest of trees; and a conservative component, which sought to balance questions of usefulness in the short term and usefulness in the longer term. These three parts were not arcs of a circle but cups that fitted one inside another. The conservative part was the large cup into which scientific study and practical use were meant to fit.

There were objections to this point of view. To many men, Pinchot’s arrangement seemed to use one cup too many. A simpler plan was to remove the scientific and the practical from the conservative-ethical context—to free them. We should take note of the opinions of two men who were at work in forestry at this time: Bernhard E. Fernow, who was Pinchot’s predecessor at the Department of Agriculture; and Dr. Carl Alwin Schenck, a German forester, who succeeded Pinchot at Biltmore and was head of the Biltmore Forest School there.

Of methods of forestry which sought to assure a “sustained yield” over a long period, Fernow wrote in 1899:

Of the Biltmore Forest School (which had been established in 1898 by Dr. Schenck and existed in one form or another until 1913), Dr. Schenck wrote, “I thought of it as a practical and technical school, the teachings of which, notably in lumbering and in financing, would be capable of immediate application in American woods.”

We see that for Fernow and Schenck (as for later generations of lumbermen and graduates of forestry schools) the issue of forest management was not symbolic of some larger American issue. For Pinchot, it was. It is also true that his eye, more than the eyes of his contemporaries (Fernow and Schenck, for instance), was on the distant future. In America, the man who is reputed to be forward- looking wants only to see into the moment that is just beyond his grasp. The far distance has no interest for him. It may be the backward-looking man who thinks most clearly about the future. Pinchot wrote, in his book “The Fight for Conservation,” in 1910:

An enthusiastic man himself, he concerned himself with the question of what enthusiasm might do, and denied that it must inevitably apply itself to the stale job of increasing the momentum of whatever forces were already at work. He imagined, I think, that he had found an instant in time in which American enthusiasm might be redirected. His understanding of his country was unusual, and he was justified, perhaps, in thinking that he might shape it. He wrote:

This is an unusual and interesting set of remarks. “We have gained out of the vast destruction of our natural resources a degree of vigor and power and efficiency of which every man of us ought to be proud.” This is an unusual statement. An image comes to life here: a man on a piece of land. The land is damaged; the man has damaged it. But look: the man is powerful, strong, and happy. We recall that Frederick Law Olmsted saw a murderer (a man responsible for the death of many people) perform an act of high courage. This is what American history is like, but it is hard for us to accept: that a vigorous and splendid country could have been built by really guilty people. Nearly all statements in support of American enthusiasm describe only the nourishing power of enthusiasm, its ability to transform experience. Our attention is drawn, again and again, to the vigorous condition of the man with the axe. People who think that American enthusiasm ought to be curbed ignore this strong man and look only at the damage he has caused. Pinchot is one of a small number of powerful American men (Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt are others) who allow themselves to see both the glory of the vigorous man and the damage he has done. Pinchot takes note of the wonderful force that has been used to do the damage and asks that it be allowed to continue—but doing different work.

Men like Pinchot must ordinarily fail. Many Americans feel that it is in the contemplation of the possibility of uncontrolled recklessness that the nourishing power of enthusiasm actually resides; many other people have cultivated an interest in damage, and even in inventories of damaged things. Enthusiastic restraint is a difficult idea to grasp, and it is rarely put forward as a practical policy. But there were certain circumstances working in Pin-chot’s favor at the turn of the century. The forests of the country had been lumbered in such a reckless way that the result was obvious to the public. The near-total destruction of the pre-Colonial forest was as striking to people as the final depletion of American oil reserves will be. Moreover, Pinchot found that he had the ear of Theodore Roosevelt, who was unexpectedly elevated to the Presidency by the assassination of William McKinley in 1901.

IN 1926, Richard Thornton Fisher, the director of the Harvard Forest, in. Petersham, Massachusetts, walked over a tract of land in Cornwall, New York, owned by his friend Dr. Ernest Stillman. Like the land that had been formed into the Biltmore Estate, this was damaged land that had been purchased from many smallholders by a rich man—in this case, Dr. Stillman’s father, the banker James Stillman. Richard Fisher urged Dr. Stillman to establish this tract as a demonstration forest. It was so established, and was called the Black Rock Forest; the name derived from Black Rock Mountain, one of a number of high hills within the tract. A system of publications (Bulletins and Papers) describing the work being done within the forest was established as well.

Richard Fisher contributed an introduction to the first Black Rock Forest Bulletin, in 1930. He wrote:

When Richard Fisher wrote the introduction to the first Bulletin, he was fifty-four. Thirty-seven years had passed since Gifford Pinchot issued his description of the work to be undertaken within Biltmore Forest. Thirty-two years had passed since Fisher encountered Gifford Pinchot on Mount Shasta.

WE might return for a moment to Pinchot’s description of the work he was doing (and planned to do) at Biltmore. This description is contained in a booklet entitled “Biltmore Forest,” which was written in connection with an exhibit taken by the Biltmore Estate to the Columbian Exposition of 1893. The following quotation is from “Planting,” a section in which Pinchot laid out his plans for planting trees in certain patches of wasteland at Biltmore:

This quotation introduces the idea of planting trees, which Pinchot did not in general favor; he preferred to concern himself with natural reproduction within the forest. And it contains the interesting remark “Of the silvicultural character of American trees we are almost equally ignorant.”

This is a true statement to this day, and it is clear why: it is hard to get to know the silvicultural character of trees (there are countless elements that affect the growth of trees in situ over their long life), and, given the way we prefer to live in America, there is no very good reason for trying. The situation might be compared with one in which people neglect to pay attention to the specific things that make one particular town healthy, because these specific things are very complex and hard to pin down, because mastery of these things promises success only in one particular place, and because people have become habituated to towns of standardized manufacture. We know about trees what we think we need to know, and what is exciting to know. That is, we know what men at work in basic science tell us is true for very many trees or all trees; we know from experience which species, growing under what conditions, harvested in which way, fit best into the framework of our economic life as it exists now. Nearly all else is still hidden.

We might return again to the symbols within the Biltmore Estate. Bilt- more House represents an attempt to establish a place within national life. It is everywhere and nowhere. It has little to do with North Carolina. The arboretum has roots in the specific conditions to be found near Asheville, North Carolina, but with reference to other arboretums, elsewhere. Within the forest there is a promise of information that may, over time, be found to be useful in other places, but first of all it is what it is: a forest in North Carolina, tending to good health or poor.

Everywhere and nowhere is the way of national life and is also the place where basic scientific research is to be found. It may be of interest to some few persons that the first work was done in this or that place, but the success of the work is in proportion to the degree to which the work is diffused throughout the world.

Here and there is the manner of the museum, where the location of the collection is only part of the issue.

Mostly here is the way of silviculture, and also of human settlements, which must necessarily be affected by specific local conditions.

In recent times, the first two ways of being in a place have been much more important to the American people than the third—this despite the fact that everyone does live in some particular place. As a result, very little is known about how this or that particular place might be brought into a healthy condition.

IN 1940, Dr. Ernest Stillman wrote a letter to Dr. James B. Conant, the president of Harvard University, and enclosed a memorandum he had written on the subject of the Harvard Forest and the Black Rock Forest. Dr. Stillman urged Harvard to give a greater attention to the Harvard Forest, which he felt was being neglected. He also urged Harvard to agree to accept the Black Rock Forest at his death. I do not know exactly what position Harvard was taking at this time about the Harvard Forest (of which Dr. Stillman was the principal benefactor) and the Black Rock Forest (of which Dr. Stillman was the sole proprietor); the relevant documents are protected by a “fifty-year rule”— under which documents are withheld from public scrutiny for fifty years. The university seems to have been reluctant to commit itself to taking on the Black Rock Forest. “As long as the late Professor Fisher approved . . . the idea of Black Rock Forest becoming a part of the forestry plant of the University, naturally I erroneously assumed that the necessary arrangements had been made,” Dr. Stillman wrote in 1940 in his letter to Conant. Apparently, the necessary arrangements had not been made.

In the memorandum that accompanied his letter to President Conant, Dr. Stillman discussed several plans (to be financed in large part by Dr. Stillman himself) that he felt would bring the Harvard Forest into greater prominence. He referred to the Harvard Forest as “a barely explored academic gold mine.” He advanced the opinion that a set of forest models, financed by him, would interest not only distinguished visitors but also the general public. He wrote that “the members of the biological staffs have not made use of [the forest’s] resources because of lack of proper housing facilities.” To that sentence Professor Hugh Raup, of the Arnold Arboretum, at Harvard, appended this note:

Of the Black Rock Forest property Dr. Stillman wrote:

Harvard accepted the gift. I imagine this conversation:

SOON after the Harvard fund-raising event at the United States Military Academy, I went to see Mr. Esty Stowell. Mr. Stowell is a graduate of Harvard College, Class of 1934. He maintains a house in Cornwall, New York, near the Black Rock Forest. He said, “We have known for some time that Harvard had lost interest in the forest. John Stillman, a son of Dr. Stillman’s, who lives here, wrote to Harvard sometime in the nineteen-fifties, and someone there wrote back saying, Oh, we are doing this and that. But nothing has really gone on in the forest for years and years—although Harvard does keep the roads up. In any case, after the Storm King issue came up—in the early nineteen-sixties, if you remember, Con Edison wanted to build a pumped-storage plant here—Harvard appointed a committee to see what its response should be to Con Edison’s proposal, because some acres of the forest would have been taken. Somewhere in the report of that committee, it says that Harvard should think about getting rid of the forest, because no real work was being done in it. Rather like the railroads, you see. It runs down, and then people say, ‘Impossible to go on, it’s so run down.’ In any case, some few of us went on the alert after that. Over the whole period, Harvard has been very elusive. There was a period in the middle seventies when it pursued a deal with the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, but the Park Commission was not able after all to get the funds it would have needed to buy the forest, so that fell through. And then, you see, we began to worry that Harvard, having begun this process, might consider any buyer, and a few of us began to ask, and ask again, what Harvard’s intentions were. I began a correspondence with Daniel Steiner, Harvard’s general counsel, and what I got back in most instances was a total mouthful of feathers. ‘No decision has been reached; we’re not talking to anyone at this moment.’ It was ‘Harvard will do the right thing’ kind of talk. He won’t say much except that Harvard feels secure in its legal position, because Dr. Stillman did not put any language in his will saying that the forest must revert to his heirs if Harvard didn’t follow a given course of action. That’s what makes John Stillman so angry: he says—quite rightly, I think—that of course his father didn’t use that language, because he trusted Harvard. Besides, you know, I think Harvard doesn’t like accepting gifts with that kind of restriction, and it probably asked him to make the bequest as simple as possible, but that’s a guess.

“There are so many issues here. First of all, the forest is very interesting, you know. It was set up to look into various practical problems: woodlot management and so forth—just the sort of thing people are interested in now. Wouldn’t you think Harvard would think about that? Well, it doesn’t. And, of course, the forest is beautiful. My wife and I walk in it all the time; the roads and trails are mar-vellous. We have been just about everywhere, I would say, except down to Glycerine Hollow. It’s all terribly well done. I mean, it has been laid out with care, and, of course, there are experimental plots all through it, testing whether this sort of tree grows best here or there. I wish I could tell you more about that, but I can’t. You would have liked Henry Tryon, who was the forester here. He was what I call a rough diamond. Always wore red suspenders. His attitude toward the forest was almost the attitude of a poet. There was a sign that Hal Tryon had erected which no longer stands. It was a yard square, I would say. And on it—very neat—was a description of a cycle in silviculture. And it concluded with this: ‘The trees were cut; their work was done.’ There was an amateur poet shining through. He had that spirit—an amateur, in the old sense. He was a big, burly, red-haired Harvard guy. Ex-football player.

“I would say the important issue is: Harvard gave its word.

“You must walk around the forest. It’s laid out so well; you can take short walks or quite long ones. We’ll go on a short one today. On another day, I suggest you make a circuit. I will give you a map. You might go south as far as Spy Rock and Eagle Cliff. That’s a good day’s walk.

“And go and talk to Steiner. We can’t get much out of him. Just that Harvard feels secure in its legal position.”

IF a person were to walk through the Black Rock Forest today, starting from the entrance to the forest, at the Upper Reservoir, he might climb the Hill of Pines to the top, where there is a fine view all around. He might look at pitch pine and scrub oak (Henry Tryon assumed that they constituted one of the few scraps of the pre-Colonial pattern remaining within the Forest), then descend to Carpenter Road (an ample, well-maintained dirt road), head west on Carpenter Road, then southwest on Bog Meadow Road to the white-blazed trail called the Scenic Trail, then walk on the Scenic Trail to Eagle Cliff, elevation 1,443 feet. This is about as far south as a person can go in the forest. From this spot, there is a wonderful view south in the direction of New York City. It is the sort of view that no one thinks can exist close to New York City—the sort of thing that a person heads west for. From here, a route back to the entrance to the forest might be: the Scenic Trail again until the turnoff to the Chatfield Trail; the Chatfield Trail to Chatfield Road; east on Chat-field Road to the White Oak Trail, passing the Tamarack Pond and the Chatfield farmhouse (a splendid stone building of 1834), and passing a tract reforested in red pine by Henry Tryon; west on the White Oak Trail to Sutherland Road; northeast on Sutherland Road to the Schunemunk— Storm King Trail; up Black Rock, elevation 1,410; down to the Aleck Meadow Reservoir and White Oak Road. This would take most of one day.

On another day, a person might go to Glycerine Hollow. This would be a short trip: south from the entrance to the forest to Carpenter Road by the Hill of Pines Trail and then to Go-Down Road. No route could be finer than Go-Down Road. It is broader than a trail but narrower now than a road. It is a road gone gentle. It is grassy most of its length and descends at a good rate. It does not twist and turn. It goes straight to where it is going.

This is what Henry Tryon said in 1939 in his Ten Year Progress Report about Glycerine Hollow and his work there:

Much important information is implicit in these paragraphs. Notice all the room for judgment: not now, later; this much, no more. Notice the room for the adjustment of judgment: we may be wrong, of course. And the acknowledgment of the possibility of grace: we may be in for a pleasant surprise. Notice these recorded facts:

(1) The forest is not a magnificent stand of virgin timber. It is a magnificent place, with a history of abuse. In the whole of the forest, Glycerine Hollow has the best stand of timber, and in 1928 that was merely seventy years old.

(2) The timber is meant to be harvested in the end, as part of the natural rhythm of the work of men. There is a trust in the possibilities of work. A man who had come to distrust the work of men might have said, “See here, this is good. Let’s at least keep our hands off this.” A devilish man who had come to despise the work of men might have said, “This is good. What of it?” Tryon’s opinion is one never heard in our day: “This is good. Let us put our good hands on it.”

IN July, 1898, James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture to President McKinley, appointed Gifford Pinchot to be Chief Forester of the United States in the Department of Agriculture. Here Pinchot had a tiny staff, and no forests to manage, because the forest reserves superintended by the federal government were under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior. In the absence of federal land to look into, Pinchot turned to questions relating to the management of private land. On October 15, 1898, his division issued Circular 21, which announced a management-assistance program for large tracts of timberland and small woodlots. Small owners could apply for free assistance; large holders of land were expected to share the cost. Numbers of landholders, small and large, sought help. The expansion of his work load justified the expansion of his operation, and in 1899 Pinchot reported, “The Division has been thoroughly equipped with instruments for field work, in which it was wholly lacking at the beginning of the year.” It was also drawing to it the services of enthusiastic men, many of them recent college graduates, who worked for little money and came to be known as “Pinchot’s young men.” And the liveliness of this operation, in turn, generated more work, and inquiries from the Department of the Interior.

Then Theodore Roosevelt became President of the United States. While he was governor of New York State, he had consulted with Pinchot. “Like other men who had thought about the national future at all, I had been growing more and more concerned over the destruction of the forests,” Roosevelt wrote in his “Autobiography.” When Roosevelt came to Washington after the assassination of President McKinley, he did not go immediately to the White House but stopped at the house of a sister. Gifford Pinchot and his colleague Frederick H. Newell came to call on him there. “The first work I took up when I became President was the work of reclamation,” Roosevelt wrote.

It might be well to describe here Roosevelt’s attitude toward conservation. It was influenced by Pinchot, but it was in keeping with other beliefs of his. Proper use might describe it. His faith in himself was abundant, and also his faith in the idea of individual persons making judgments. He was apt to endorse Pinchot’s idea of silviculture, since he took the view that the nation itself was like a forest, in which good thrift and healthy reproduction could be encouraged. A striking and, to modern minds, an extreme instance of his belief in distinction-making is to be found in his attitude toward large business combinations. He wrote:

As we discuss the inheritance present within the Black Rock Forest, in Cornwall, New York, this quality of optimism should be remembered, and distinguished from the idea, now coming to prevail in America, that impersonal forces rule the world, and that clever men ally themselves with these forces, while idealistic men struggle to move certain valued things out of their way.

In 1905, the forest lands managed by the Interior Department were transferred to the Department of Agriculture, where Gifford Pinchot was Chief Forester. In 1907, more than forty-three million acres of land were added by Presidential proclamation to the area of the National Forests. “By this time, also,” Roosevelt wrote in his “Autobiography,” “the opposition of the servants of the special interests in Congress to the Forest Service had become strongly developed, and more time appeared to be spent in the yearly attacks upon it during the passage of the appropriation bills than on all other Government Bureaus put together. Every year the Forest Service had to fight for its life.”

He continued:

The ethic of restraint put forward by Pinchot and Roosevelt proved to be too small a vessel to hold the enthusiastic ambition of many independent men, who called it “Pinchotism.” Nonetheless, during Theodore Roosevelt’s Administration the area of the National Forests increased from forty-three million acres to a hundred and ninety-four million.

By the end of Roosevelt’s time in office, Pinchot and Roosevelt had begun to think of conservation as a worldwide movement. A North American Conservation Conference was held at the White House on February 18, 1909. “It is evident that natural resources are not limited by the boundary lines which separate nations,” Roosevelt wrote in his invitation (delivered in person by Gifford Pinchot) to the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico. The North American Conservation Conference met for five days and, in its communique to Roosevelt, suggested that “all nations should be invited to join together in conference on the subject of world resources, and their inventory, conservation, and wise utilization.” Soon afterward, Roosevelt left office. The worldwide conservation conference envisioned by Pinchot and Roosevelt did not take place.

Pinchot was removed from office by Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft—a fact that Roosevelt noted bitterly in his “Autobiography.” “Gifford Pinchot is the man to whom the nation owes most for what has been accomplished as regards the preservation of the natural resources of our country,” he wrote. “I believe it is but just to say that among the many, many public officials who under my administration rendered literally invaluable service to the people of the United States, he, on the whole, stood first.”

In looking again at the phrase “what has been accomplished as re-gards the preservation of the natural resources of our country,” we must admit that while Pinchot had succeeded in bringing a vast amount of land under public stewardship he had not succeeded in bringing his idea of conservation into a synthesis with the national enthusiasm for work. Pinchot has described a moment early in a December, 1908, governors’ meeting when he began to understand what President-elect Taft’s position would be:

Ever faithfully your friend,

Theodore Roosevelt

Other Letters of 1909

Theodore Roosevelt, on the ‘Nzor River, to his daughter Ethel:

Edward. H. Harriman, from Aiken, South Carolina, to James Stillman, in Cannes:

Sincerely yours,

E.H.H.

James Stillman, from Cannes, to his mother, in America:

Your affectionate son,

JAMES STILLMAN

James Stillman, from London, to his mother:

Your affectionate son,

JAMES S.

Robert W. Sayles, assistant in charge of the geological collection at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, in Cambridge, to Jerome D. Greene, Secretary to the Corporation, Harvard University:

Yours very truly,

ROBERT W. SAYLES

WE are now in a position, perhaps, to put down a chronology:

(1) In 1893, Gifford Pinchot, twenty-eight years old, prepared a booklet that described the work he was undertaking and planned to undertake near Asheville, North Carolina, at Biltmore Forest—a tract of land owned by George Washington Vanderbilt, who was engaged also in the building of a large country house, Biltmore, modelled in large part on the chateau of Blois.

(2) In July, 1898, James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture under President McKinley, appointed Pinchot to be Chief Forester in the Department of Agriculture. Pinchot had a tiny staff and no forests to manage.

(3) In the summer -of 1898, Pinchot encountered Richard Thornton Fisher, who had just graduated from Harvard College, on Mount Shasta, in California. Pinchot offered Fisher a job for the next summer, and Fisher became one of the “closely knit group of men who helped Mr. Pinchot get the practice of forestry under way.,

(4) On September 14, 1901, President McKinley died from wounds suffered from an assassin’s bullets, and Theodore Roosevelt assumed the Presidency. When Roosevelt arrived in Washington, he went to the house of a sister. Pinchot and his colleague Frederick Newell called on him there. Pinchot was then thirty-six years old. Theodore Roosevelt later wrote, “The first work I took up when I became President was the work of reclamation.” By “reclamation” he meant in particular forest work and the irrigation of arid lands. In general, he meant a policy that would encourage the proper use of all the nation’s natural resources.

(5) In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt left office. Gifford Pinchot was dismissed by President Taft the following year.

IN any event, the chronology is a short one. If we put the beginning at 1892, when Pinchot began his work at Biltmore, the first native-born American trained to be a forester, it encompasses less than twenty years. It must end at 1909. More than twenty years passed before the government took an active role in conservation again, and then it was an obvious catastrophe that gave rise to action: the “dust bowl,” in the plains region. In this case, soil and agriculture were the focus of action. There was among some people an interest in finding a generative symbol in the government’s attempt to conserve the soil, but soon the ethical aspect of soil conservation was forgotten, while the practical lessons were reduced to simple formulas related to immediate yield. The conservation movement of our own day has little to do with either the soil-conserving activity of the nineteen-thirties or the conservative-forestry ethic of the turn of the century. The modern conservationist must attempt to modify pathological symptoms unimagined by the men we have been discussing; or he will seek to preserve this or that piece of nature by getting it out of the way of the world’s work. He is, typically, either a scientist experienced in toxicology or a lawyer—not a farmer or a forester.

Pinchot’s idea of conservative forestry, we have said, resembled a nest of cups: practicality and science resting one within the other, and both resting within a conservative ethic that he articulated as “the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time”—a dictum he later attributed to William J. McGee, an ethnologist he described as “the scientific brains of the Conservation Movement.” This ethic had no consistent advocate within the federal government after 1909, but it did continue to hold the interest of certain men, whose history we are able to trace. Here is a minor chronology (to append to the important one above), which will lead us to the Black Rock Forest:

(1) In 1898, Richard Thornton Fisher met Gifford Pinchot on Mount Shasta and became one of “the closely knit group of men who helped Mr. Pinchot get the practice of forestry under way.”

(2) In 1926, Richard Thornton Fisher walked over a tract of land in Cornwall, New York, with Dr. Ernest Stillman, a son of James Stillman, and urged him to establish a demonstration forest on it.

(3) In 1928, the Black Rock Forest was established by Dr. Ernest Stillman.

(4) In 1949, the Black Rock Forest came, with a generous endowment, into the possession of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Now we may describe some important aspects of the inheritance that Harvard received when the Black Rock Forest came into its possession:

(1) The ability to do, within the forest, scientific work that had the potential of wide application. For instance, Professor Hugh Raup, of the Arnold Arboretum, wrote (at the time when Dr. Stillman was approaching Harvard on the subject of the forest):

But we would have to take note of Professor Raup’s caveat that dyed-in-the-wool laboratory men were “often afraid to work ‘in the open field.’ “

(2) The ability to do scientific work of narrow application. Here the case is clear that by 1949 the Black Rock Forest was yielding useful information about the condition of the forests of the Hudson Highlands.

(3) A tradition of optimism. The Black Rock Forest had, in 1949, a better claim than any other organized work of man, not excepting the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, or the Harvard Forest, in Petersham, to be continuing in an unbroken tradition, from honorable man to honorable man, the idea of conservation which Gifford Pinchot and others brought into American life in the first years of this century; which Pinchot articulated as an attempt to procure “the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time;” and which did not exclude from the work of conservation either practicality or science or morality or art or a sense of the spirit within a landscape but conceived of these aspects of human work and perception as constituting a part of a whole, which was life, viewed optimistically.

IN 1940, Dr. Ernest Stillman wrote to President Conant, of Harvard, and sent with his letter a small essay entitled “Random Thoughts on the Harvard Forest,” which included his thoughts on the Black Rock Forest and its future. He wrote:

Two things must strike the reader. The first is how modest the goals set by Dr. Stillman were from a national or a global point of view. He proposes “an intensive study of how to grow most rapidly the most valuable local species of trees,” a study that must have compelling relevance for a very few people—that is, if we are thinking in national or global terms. The second is his prediction that more people will be moving to the country and that “the question of the ‘Farmer’s Wood Lot’ will become increasingly important.” Would this prediction have been accepted by many men active in the world of 1940? I don’t think so. Ernest Stillman was looking beyond the active world of 1940. And wasn’t there a war in Europe going on at that time which absorbed most of the attention of many serious men? Was he looking beyond that, too? It is in the nature of the conservative forester to qualify every description of events powerful-in-the-moment, perhaps using the phrase “but even so . . .”

IN 1949, Dr. Stillman died. In that year, the Black Rock Forest passed to Harvard University. An interesting artifact of that year is Black Rock Forest Paper No. 23 (Papers were shorter than Bulletins), which was written by Dr. Stillman’s son Calvin Stillman. It is entitled “Economic Re-lations of the Black Rock Forest.” Calvin Stillman wrote:

I now want to return to a sentence of Henry Tryon’s, used by him in reference to the silvicultural work he was doing in the section of the Black Rock Forest called Glycerine Hollow. He wrote, “We may learn that we are wide of the mark or perhaps we shall be agreeably surprised.” I want to put this sentence in contrast to Calvin Stillman’s statement “We can be sure of almost nothing.” I submit that the very different way in which uncertainty is handled in the two sentences holds the key to understanding the ingrained pessimism of the modern era. In Calvin Stillman’s view, the enormous uncertainties of the modern world lead one to reject all plans the profits of which cannot be realized in a very short time—before the world changes again. Henry Tryon’s work, on the other hand, seeks to understand (and to change for the better, if that may be) a particular situation in the real world—apart from whatever enormously powerful forces are at work (momentarily) in the world of men—and his sentence reflects this. Calvin Stillman seeks certainty, and finds that the idea that there is profit (or safety) in anything other than the certain (“the one factor most surely fixed”) is delusion. Henry Tryon seems at home in uncertainty and finds that in uncertainty one may be “agreeably surprised.” If we look at the mental events behind what Mr. Tryon and Mr. Stillman have said, we find that behind what Calvin Stillman has said is a fight for certainty: for certain safety, for certain profit. Behind what Henry Tryon has said is an admission that the battle has been lost: certain knowledge is not (at this moment) available to us; but work can continue.

Notice how the positions reverse: at first, it would seem optimistic to think that one could know for sure, and pessimistic to deny it; and yet if one finds that in one’s fight for certainty everything in the real world has become unknowable or unfriendly to thinking-beyond-the-moment, where is optimism in that? And if, admitting uncertainty, one continues to do work and to plan for the future (a more healthy future, if that may be), isn’t that optimism in fact?

THERE was no strong interest in silviculture at Harvard at the time Harvard acquired the Black Rock Forest. The amount of money retained from the Black Rock Forest endowment for use within the forest was sufficient to keep the roads in good shape and to pay for the services of a part-time forester, a full-time forest technician, and a part-time crew. The forest was patrolled by a private club, which, in return for its services, was permitted to hunt and fish within the forest.

In 1960, Dr. Ernest Gould, an economist at the Harvard Forest, published an essay (Harvard Forest Bulletin No. 29) entitled “Fifty Years of Management at the Harvard Forest.” In many ways, it follows Calvin Stillman’s argument in “Economic Relations of the Black Rock Forest.” Dr. Gould explores alternatives to a sustained-yield system. One theoretical course of action he describes would have had the managers of the Harvard Forest (headed by Richard Fisher at that time) sell off all the best-quality saw timber within it “during the high prices of World War I.” In this case, he says, the surplus return over current spending could have been added to the endowment. He wrote:

In 1972, when it appeared that a pumped-storage generating plant that Consolidated Edison proposed to build at Storm King Mountain, in the Hudson Highlands, would take land from the Black Rock Forest, Derek Bok, the president of Harvard University, appointed a three-member committee to judge what Harvard’s position should be. The committee said that Harvard should take no position concerning the building of the plant. The committee recommended that another committee be formed to decide what to do with the Black Rock Forest and with its endowment. The committee itself noted possibilities. The committee noted that a private owner of the forest would find that he had a very valuable piece of real estate. The committee said that “selling the Forest in lots (small estates) of a few acres could raise a lot of money.” The committee said that “Harvard should not think of doing this.” The committee noted that if Consolidated Edison were to build its pumped-storage plant one good result might be that it could acquire the forest and give most of it to the Palisades Interstate Park. The committee noted that there was nothing in Dr. Stillman’s will specifying how Harvard should use the Black Rock Forest. The committee said:

The committee reviewed the work that had been done at the forest (the Bulletins and the Papers). The committee said:

NOW we shall look at the two chronologies we have set down, observing closely what success was achieved.

Looking at the major chronology (1892-1909), we find a record of success and failure mixed. Pinchot and Roosevelt succeeded in creating a system of national forests which was of wide extent. They did not succeed in their effort to create within these forests a system of work that would inspire a change in the country’s attitude toward natural resources. Pinchot did not succeed in gathering science, practicality, and a sense of the spirit within a landscape into a conservative ethic capable of attracting or withstanding American enthusiasm. Science and practicality went out into the world alone; his conservative formula, “the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time,” was largely forgotten, and the national forests came to be seen as land that had been set aside. By the time a new conservation movement arose, the country had drifted so far into a pessimistic idea of human work that Pinchot’s idea of using a forest was seen as suspect—a ploy, a compromise. Conservationists of recent times have perceived the flow as going the other way: not healthy modes of work from the managed forest out into the world of work but pollution from the world of work into the forest.

We now look at the minor chronology. Here we see the history of an attempt to keep an optimistic idea of work alive in one place: the Black Rock Forest, in Cornwall, New York. Here we must acknowledge failure. Dr. Ernest Stillman and Henry Try-on, working under the inspiration of Richard Thornton Fisher (one of the “closely knit group of men who helped Mr. Pinchot get the practice of forestry under way”), did not succeed in keeping Pinchot’s idea alive on their tract of land.

We should note two small exceptions to the statement that the effort of Dr. Stillman and Henry Tryon failed. First, we should note that the money given to Harvard by Dr. Stillman with the forest did not fail. We may now look at a chronology of which money will be the subject.

Dr. Stillman established the endowment of the Black Rock Forest Trust Fund in 1940. During the period from 1940 to 1949, the income from this endowment was added to the principal each year. At the end of fiscal 1948-49, the principal of the endowment stood at $135,003.69. To this amount were added the sum realized from the sale of the Cornwall Press, which came to Harvard in 1949, when Dr. Stillman died, and the proceeds of three life-insurance policies that Dr. Stillman had made payable to Harvard. At the end of fiscal 1949-50, the endowment of the Black Rock Forest Trust Fund stood at $1,154,861.57. During the years that followed, the endowment of the Black Rock Forest Trust Fund was part of the “commingled funds” that formed the General Investment Account at Harvard. The General Investment Account was operated according to principles that have been described as “prudent” and which seemed almost to shield old endowment funds from the increase in market value of the overall commingled portfolio. A special intermediate device, a Gain and Loss Account, was employed. A capital gain, when realized, was not credited immediately to the various endowment funds; rather, it was credited to. the Gain and Loss Account, which periodically (not every year by any means) disbursed money to the endowment funds. Thus, the funds did not immediately reflect any market gain in stocks or other investment instruments that continued to be held, nor did they reflect any realized gains that had not yet been disbursed from the Gain and Loss Account. Distribution from the Gain and Loss Account was at the discretion of the Harvard Corporation. From 1950 to 1970, there were four such distributions to the Black Rock Forest Trust Fund: in fiscal 1956-57, $121,329.36; in. fiscal 1959-60, $133,462.30; in fiscal 1962-63, $146,808.53; in fiscal 1964-65, $161,469.38. There were recorded as well two “capital gains” that reached the fund without going through the Gain and Loss Account: in fiscal 1951-52, $12,476.81; in fiscal 195253, $48,733.44. One effect of this system was to keep the stated value of the various funds constant over a number of years. The Black Rock Forest fund, for instance, was constant in the amount of $1,776,163.19 from the end of fiscal 1964-65 through fiscal 196869. During fiscal 1969-70, $45,785 was transferred to the fund from income. This was the only time during the twenty years from fiscal 1950-51 to fiscal 1969-70 that there was a transfer of income to capital. On June 30, 1970, the principal of the Black Rock Forest Trust Fund amounted to $1,821,948.57. Thus, during the twenty years from the end of fiscal 1949-50 to the end of fiscal 1969-70 the fund had shown an increase in principal of $667,087. Or, to show this figure as a percentage of the June, 1950, figure, the fund had grown in twenty years by just under fifty-eight per cent.

On July 1, 1970, Harvard adopted the market-value method of accounting. By this method, Harvard’s endowment was transformed into something resembling a mutual fund, in which each endowment held a number of shares, or units. The crucial point, of course, was how many units would be issued to each existing fund. The Financial Report to the Board of Overseers for fiscal 1979-80 said:

The difficulty was that it was not obvious how the “proportional share of the market value” of the over-all portfolio should be determined for the old endowment funds, since during the years of the Gain and Loss Account system the various endowment funds had not been allowed to reflect market value. For instance, the figure of $1,821,948.57, which was the stated value of the Black Rock Forest fund as of June 30, 1970, could not be used as the sole means of determining the Black Rock Forest fund’s “proportional share of the market value” of the over-all portfolio, since the system that generated the figure produced a book-value figure that reflected capital gains actually realized and distributed only, and was not allowed to reflect the increase in the “market value” of the whole endowment.

On July 1, 1970, the Harvard Black Rock Forest fund was assigned Participating Units in the number of 21,712.1019. This figure, as a result of gifts and other changes, had risen to 23,907.3505 as of June 30, 1983, when the principal of the fund was listed as having a worth of $2,490,964. This amount Harvard proposes to keep when it disposes of the forest.

EACH year, the Corporation arrived at a figure, given as a percentage, that, when it was applied to the stated value of the principal of the various endowment funds, yielded the “investment income” credited to each of the funds. The Black Rock Forest Trust Fund “earned” income at a rate of around five per cent during most years. Over all, about thirty per cent of this income was spent at the Black Rock Forest and seventy per cent at the Harvard Forest, in Petersham. In establishing the Black Rock Forest fund, Dr. Stillman required that the income be “used to defray the cost of operating, first, the Black Rock Forest, and, then, the Harvard Forest.”

I SET out for Cambridge. On the I way, I stayed the night in a dead small city in central Massachusetts, and the next day I went to Cambridge. At the center of the dead small city were large buildings around a square that contained certain official buildings symbolic of the life of the city. The official buildings were intact. Then, around the square: what had been a large hotel had shifted uses; what had been a large store had shut up. What was alive? Embassies: branches of institutions that collected this or that dollar from people all around the state, all around the country, all around the world, and had decided for this or that reason to continue a physical presence in the old heart of the dead small city. Banks. What was dead? The forest.

I WANT to return one last time to the symbols established within Biltmore Estate.

First, to Biltmore House, the imitation of the château of Blois. It seems to me that a great mainstream of American thought and action washes around Biltmore House. Biltmore House is everywhere and nowhere.

Within Biltmore House we may place Calvin Stillman’s statement “We can be sure of almost nothing. . . . We don’t know what cost and price relationships will be in the future. . . . We don’t know what will happen to taxes, labor costs, and costs of forest protection. . . . I submit that . . . the Forest should adjust to these uncertainties as data of its problem, and devote its energies to the one factor most surely fixed—pure science.”

Within Biltmore House we may place James Stillman’s description of his daughter’s Presentation gown, E. H. Harriman’s assessment of the incoming Taft Administration, and President-elect Taft’s remark “There is one difficulty about the conservation of natural resources. It is that the imagination of those who are pressing it may outrun the practical facts.” That is, we may place within Biltmore House, on the one hand, the science and the technology that underlie the economic life of this country and the practical facts that are consequences of that economic life and, on the other hand, the unconvincing and dreamlike visions of national life which the national economic life has encouraged, and which decorate the national economic life and intertwine with it.

We may wish, for a moment, to take apart the everywhere-and-nowhere construction; that is, to separate the one from the other. The everywhere, we now see, is where the money is raised; the nowhere is where it is spent.

And now we are in a position to see the relationship between everywhere and nowhere. If one is living nowhere (in an imitation of the château of Blois?), the only pleasure is to be reminded that one is a part of something (even something as abstract as an economic system) that is going on every- where. Nowhere monuments (like Biltmore House) are a rarity, and hold a fascination, since in our day the connections between everywhere and nowhere have been evanescent images. The idea that people once lived (or tried to live) in houses that were ev- erywhere and nowhere must necessarily be very interesting to us—as interesting as the idea that a person might actually live in television.

Men and women who are content to live in Biltmore House are content not because they have found a way to live there happily but because they know something about how it was constructed; that is, they know something about what rules are in operation ev- erywhere. Nowhere is nowhere for these people, too, but the contemplation of the rules at work is satisfying to them. Within Biltmore House, there is a sense of satisfaction that one is not, at any rate, bucking the tide. And if, by some chance, a person has been held back by circumstances from living in Biltmore House, there is a pleasant sensation of joining when that person enters at last. Some of this sensation is implicit, I think, in Dr. Ernest Gould’s remark that the fifty-year experiment with sustained-yield management at the Harvard Forest “has cost the Forest nearly $500,000 of additional financial gain;” and also, of course, in President-elect Taft’s statement “There is one difficulty about the conservation of natural resources. It is that the imagination of those who are pressing it may outrun the practical facts.”

In recent times, to be somewhere has meant not to be everywhere; it is annoying to ambitious people now to be somewhere. The forest is inevitably somewhere, and we have neglected it.

Finally, a word about the arboretum. I have said that it is here and there. The balance of here is there—a place that is here to somebody else. The artifacts in a museum are, or have been, evocative of other particular places in the world in time. One important aspect of education involves the collision, in the mind of a person who has a sense of the place where he is, between his understanding of his own experience and his understanding of the experiences of other men and women, living and dead. Such a collision sends a person back to his here with a renewed interest in it. Such a collision is, among other things, a cure for loneliness.

The collision between everywhere and nowhere is no such benign thing. Nowhere threatens to obliterate everywhere in the mind of a person. When the sense of connectedness to everywhere is broken, even momentarily, the sense of loss to a person living everywhere and nowhere is overwhelming. Either a person’s small space within Biltmore House is a vantage point from which he can see— everything; or it is nothing at all. Within Biltmore House, an interest in the way the rules work everywhere usually becomes obsessive, since there is no other source of nourishment.

IN Cambridge, Massachusetts, I met with Mr. Daniel Steiner, general counsel to Harvard University, and Dean Richard Leahy, who has as one of his special responsibilities the administration of those research properties appended to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University which are not near Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dean Leahy said, “Various enterprises that don’t admit students are my responsibility.”

Mr. Steiner said, “It is that from our point of view, from the point of view of our scientific community in biology, it does not offer anything unique in comparison to a forest much closer and where we have a large facility. As a consequence, the amount of research at the Black Rock Forest is limited.”

Dean Leahy said, “It is a division of the Harvard Forest, at Petersham. It isn’t called that, but that’s the way it is operated.”

Dean Leahy said, “There is no School of Forestry at Harvard. Our work in forestry is limited. It is fully contained within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. There are four men— two full professors, one assistant professor, and a senior professional, Dr. Ernest Gould, at Petersham. You really must go to Petersham. In addition to the kinds of facilities you’d expect, there is a museum, a dormitory, married-student housing.”

I said, “If it has come to seem that, from the point of view of your scientific community in biology, the Black Rock Forest does not offer anything unique in comparison to the Harvard Forest, in Petersham, there must have been a moment when that became clear. Can you tell me how it was in that moment?”

Dean Leahy said, “It is hard to say.”

I said, “But there must have been a moment of disappointment. That is to say, at one moment you thought the forest would be useful, and you accepted it. At another moment, then, the forest proved to be a disappointment, leaving you with a belief that it would be better to part with the forest.”

Dean Leahy said, “Over time. It would be hard to pick a moment.” I said, “But men at Harvard found that the forest was disappointing to them?”

Dean Leahy said, “Now, I am not an expert in this aspect. My impression is that the soil condition is not very good. I think there was heavy glaciation in the area.”

Mr. Steiner said, “Remember, we are a teaching and research institution. We are obligated to use funds for teaching and research.”

Mr. Steiner said, “We do not consider that Black Rock Forest is essential.”

Mr. Steiner said, “Consequently, we have been considering alternative ownership of the forest.”

Mr. Steiner said, “But we have no intention of disposing of the forest for development.”

Mr. Steiner said, “We have a passive, or neutral, stand, and respond to inquiries.”

Dean Leahy said, “Bits of it that were acquired afterward might be sold separately. Where the forest manager lives . . . What we are talking about perhaps selling separately is thirty, forty acres, not integral to the forest. We are not talking about any kind of development. At the same time, there is a question whether we ought to give the forest away. It represents, perhaps, the endowment of a professorship.”

Mr. Steiner said, “If it can be preserved, and funds can be realized to support teaching and research . . .”

Dean Leahy said, “We would add it to the endowment of the Harvard Forest.”

Mr. Steiner said, “Perhaps a professorship in Dr. Stillman’s name . . .”

Mr. Steiner said, “One of the questions the law deals with is intent. I feel a little awkward here, as though I were being asked to be a seer.”

Mr. Steiner said, “Who knows most about this? I think it might be Calvin Stillman, Dr. Stillman’s son. Our records indicate that Calvin Stillman was very closely involved . . . at the time of the transfer.”

Mr. Steiner said, “Another thing is Calvin Stillman’s professional training.”

Dean Leahy said, “He’s at Rutgers.”

Mr. Steiner said, “In biology.”

Dean Leahy said, “No, it’s economics, I think.”

Mr. Steiner said, “It was Calvin Stillman who dealt with Harvard on the occasion of transfer.”

Mr. Steiner said, “It is clear to us that Harvard is not a conservation organization. Dr. Stillman understood that. The bequest of the forest is absolute. To Harvard, without restriction. There is well-known language to be used in wills if you want to restrict a bequest: alternative dispositions of property if the university does not carry out his wishes. He did not use any language of this kind. It is a simple and outright bequest. No restriction. That says an awful lot to me, as a lawyer. I think it would be wrong to make an assumption that Dr. Stillman had required, or even expected, that Harvard would hold on to it. If I were interested in preserving a forest, I wouldn’t give it to a university. At the same time, we’ve looked at the land, looked at the area, and it seems inappropriate to sell it for development. Although, under the terms of the will, flat out, we legally could. I will send you a copy of the will. My conscience is clear.”

I Acknowledged that Dr. Ernest Stillman and Henry Tryon had failed in their effort to keep the idea of conservative work alive within the Black Rock Forest, in Cornwall, New York, but we proposed to make two exceptions to the verdict of failure; that is, we proposed to note two successful aspects of their effort. We did note that the money given by Dr. Stillman to Harvard to support the forest and the work he was doing in it, commingled, as it was, with other endowment money of the university, quickly worked its way into the life of the university; and although its rate of growth has always been modest, and almost humble, certainly it has not been forgotten, nor has anyone proposed to do away with it.

There is another aspect of work in the Black Rock Forest which was successful. This is found within the Bulletins. They are octavo volumes, bound in green paper. They have on the cover the device of the forest: concentric circles enclosing the words “The Black Rock Forest Cornwall-on-the-Hudson, New York” and then, at the center, a depiction of Black Rock Mountain. They are well made and well printed. Henry Tryon, who wrote many of them, had a clear, unaffected prose style, well matched to the conservative work he was doing.

Bulletin No. 4, “A Portable Charcoal Kiln,” was published in 1933. It was written by Henry Tryon. The work it describes is, from a global point of view, rather pedestrian in na- ture, competent but with little that is novel or imaginative.

Aspects of local history are mentioned:

A local condition is discussed; a tool is designed to fit into the local condition; the operation of the tool is described:

The failure of the Black Rock Forest was on a small scale; it was more to be compared to the withering away of a limb on the body of an endowment than to a bank failure or the failure of an enormous enterprise in which vast amounts of borrowed money have been sunk. One remembers that Harvard is now entangled in an enormous enterprise. Harvard has pledged its full faith and credit in the amount of some three hundred and fifty million dollars (an amount equal to the final goal of Harvard’s recent fund drive) as security for bonds issued to finance an experiment (very novel and imaginative) whose purpose is to supply the power needs of a complex of buildings it runs in Boston. Here we may find the reverse of the coin: money withering on the body of an outlying project.

And success within the Black Rock Forest was small, too. And yet any effort that meets a certain standard of clarity and sense participates in the continuity of clarity and sense which runs like a small channel throughout history.

The writing of Henry Tryon, for instance—what can we say about it? It is competent and pedestrian—let’s begin with that. As we admit that we look in vain for the novel and the imaginative, let us try to remember that the novel and the imaginative may take us in more than one direction.

THERE is now a publication called Harvard Magazine. The issue of May-June, 1981, had on its cover a striking picture of an old Asian man. His face was full of dignity. Half of his face was in shadow, lending a sombre tone to this dignity. There were lines of type in the lower left-hand corner of the cover. The upper lines referred to this picture. They read:

The other lines of type were descriptive of other articles to be found in the magazine. They read:

The first page of this issue of Harvard Magazine was devoted to a commercial evocation of Harvard. There were illustrations of dinner plates decorated with Harvard scenes. It was remarkable that all the scenes were in the past. A scene of Harvard Yard in 1858 was the closest in time to our own day. Others were much earlier. The place of emphasis was given to the plate enclosing the most distant scene of all: a “Westerly view of Harvard College 1767.”

President Bok’s article, “Business and the Academy,” dealt with a very interesting issue. The issue was: Should Harvard University, for the sake of money, participate in business ventures designed to exploit research done at Harvard in recombinant DNA? The article was written shortly after Harvard decided not to participate in such activities. The decision was not entirely a happy one. When Harvard is asked “Engage in business ventures?” Harvard answers “No.” But Harvard looked at the suitor. Harvard noticed that the suitor was rich. Harvard heaved a sigh.

President Bok’s article begins with this account:

It may be important to follow the progress of these two paragraphs.

The pivot is in the crisp autumn morning. In that phrase is all Harvard to people who have been at Harvard.

We have moved, quite efficiently, from the crisp autumn of all Harvards to the crisp autumn of President Bok’s Harvard and to the newspaper that President Bok is reading. Notice that Harvard has been established in a certain way, President Bok at Harvard has been established in a certain way. Whatever happens now in the newspaper will appear in juxtaposition with the scene as it has been established: Harvard, autumn, President Bok serenely going about his business.

What has been established is: Harvard as a backwater; Harvard as a backwater with its own pretty ways; the world interested in Harvard; the world eager (and sometimes overeager) to report on events going on at Harvard ; the world a little apt to intrude where it doesn’t really belong.

Let us go on. For amusement’s sake, let us make up a story (to compare with President Bok’s) in which the great world will intrude on Harvard— with amusing results.

Notice that in this story the world makes a silly mistake about what is going on at Harvard. My story describes a certain Harvard context, well known to its graduates. It introduces into this context a flap. It introduces people who do not understand Harvard and who may, through their clumsiness, cause trouble to Harvard.

Now we will spend some time with President Bok’s paragraphs.

If one reads this sentence marking especially the text and subtext of the phrase “the story went on to declare” and the fact that the article is quoted directly, and not paraphrased, to what conclusion does one find that it moves? I think it is to the conclusion that the university was about to do no such thing. President Bok quotes the Times as though the Times were in error. And yet the newspaper was not in error. The newspaper had accurately reported important events taking place at Harvard.

Please see how the story is being abused. Which story? The story of Harvard in juxtaposition with the outside world, which I have epitomized in a story in which the outside world makes a silly error. How abused? My sort of story, a story of the old Harvard, is being used as a trench from which to fight a battle. The story of old Harvard has been wrenched out of shape to accommodate very serious business. Its essence has been removed, and it has been supplied with a new substance, which must pollute it.

At each turn in the story (for stories, however carefully controlled, reveal truth always, in the same way that posed photographs do, which show the aspirations within the pose), President Bok returns to my story, the story of Harvard in the age of airs and graces, and he does it for shelter. We watch as we would watch a military exercise—for this is what it is, within the context of public relations.

He begins in the sector of airs and graces. It is autumn, he is reading a newspaper. To his surprise, he sees his own picture. Now he is exposed for a moment. He must deal with the fact that a newspaper has printed an accurate story about an important development taking place at Harvard. He must proceed cautiously here. He may not say that the newspaper is in error, but he may put a distance between himself and the story. He does this by quoting the newspaper article so that the issue of Harvard’s experiments with DNA, Harvard’s interest in exploiting its research in DNA for profit, is emplaced within another issue, the issue of Harvard stirred up by the press, which, in turn, may be em-placed within still another, older issue —of Harvard and the outside world. The no man’s land is the quotation of the newspaper article. If a reader is attentive, he will say, “Stop, stop. Was it correct, the article? Were you—are you—considering such a thing?” If, however, the reader is inattentive or if he is lost in the crisp autumn morning of his own Harvard, President Bok will succeed in transporting him over the dangerous patch into the flap. Here President Bok is on safe ground and may pivot back into the safe Harvard sector from which he began. Note that President Bok’s treatment of the flap resembles the treatment of the flap in my story. He says that “articles appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines describing the merits and demerits of entering into commercial ventures of this kind,” and he seems bemused. He says, “Scientists and editorial writers quickly volunteered their own opinions on the issue,” and he makes them sound like ladies in flowered hats.

The real story is the reverse of the Harvard – against – the – outside – world story. The real story is: There is no distance now between Harvard and the outside world; you could not find the boundary. The context of Harvard is the same as the context of the Times, which is the large context of the whole country of two hundred million people. The Times has understood the story perfectly.

President Bok moves from his discussion of the stir caused by the Times to a laying out of the issues:

Follow the movement of this paragraph. First, again, the flap, which has subsided. The agitation has ceased. Still, there is deep concern in many quarters. Here President Bok makes room for what must already be in the minds of many readers. Yes, of course, people would be concerned about Harvard’s going into business. He minimizes this existing impression by placing it “in many quarters”— which is to say, not in any place you and I know or want to name—and then he pivots away from the existing impression to an entirely different concern, which no one has voiced, which is: How should Harvard now approach business? The first “concern” he mentions is:

This, I’m afraid, is propaganda writing. A person who is upset that Harvard might plan to go into business feels in reading it that his concern is being addressed. And yet his concern has been placed in a context he would not have foreseen. Let us say that the uppermost edge of his concern has been placed within President Bok’s sentence, so that President Bok may say, “Yes, here it is,” and yet one cannot help noticing that this concern is at the very bottom of the new context that President Bok is creating. Such is the ambiguity of the sentence that it would be possible for a person to derive from it the sense that people in some quarters were upset that Harvard had failed to be sufficiently aggressive in marketing the results of its scientific research and now the president of the university was being called upon to defend his backwardness. The next sentence does nothing to undo this impression; in fact, in introducing “the financial pressures facing research institutions” it makes a person think, Yes, really, President Bok must be urged to be more forceful in this matter. Finally, we come to what might be a concern of a certain group of people: “Could universities enter the marketplace without subverting their commitment to learning and discovery?” But that group of people is here a group that has decided “Yes, of course, do consider an alliance with the world of commerce, but make sure you don’t subvert your commitment to learning and discovery.” Anyone saying “No, don’t do it” has to find a home in this group.

“No, don’t do it!” people shout from some quarters.

“I know just what you mean,” President Bok says.

“No, don’t ever do it.”

“Quite right. Without the proper safeguards . . .”

“No, I mean you shouldn’t even consider . . .”

“Doing it without the proper safeguards, certainly not,” President Bok says, and he walks to his conclusion, which is that he finds he has an “intriguing opportunity to discuss the state of academic science,” and that he now finds, after this good, healthy, frank exchange, that he wants to “explore the proper role of the university in translating scientific discoveries into useful products and innovations.”

I WANT to mention the Morgan 1 Guaranty Trust Company here. Recently, advertisements for Morgan Guaranty have begun to identify the company as “The Morgan Bank.” This used to be a private name for the company, employed by people who identified it with the financial patriarchy of New York. I think the name is being used magically. That is, I think that as institutions bearing old names go out into the world now they hope that by speaking their old names they will be safer. I don’t think that President Bok of Harvard wants, any more than the officers of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company want, actually to transform the world of impersonal forces and trends into a world of men (whose stories we may know); I think he only wants the forces to halt on command, to stop still at the mention of a certain name. The power of the impersonal world can be seen in President Bok’s prose. When the world of men-whose-stories-we-may-know is not being specifically invoked, it vanishes from around him. His article “Business and the Academy” is peopled with men and women, but sparsely.

I want to discuss now a reference he makes to Pyotr Kapitsa, the eminent Soviet physicist. President Bok knows Kapitsa through an article in Science which gave a brief account, in 1966, of an address that Kapitsa made to the Royal Society. Kapitsa spoke, on that occasion, about his friend Lord Rutherford, the great British physicist, and about his association with him. Science quoted a little of his speech in an article just over two pages long. One of the paragraphs of direct quotation is quoted, in turn, by President Bok, as relevant to his own concern that the morale of scientists may be damaged if “the ideal of the disinterested scientist begins to be replaced by that of the wealthy professor-entrepreneur.” Notice that Kapitsa’s statements are as clear as glass but that to President Bok they are puzzling.

President Bok says:

Notice. Notice. Kapitsa says, “She has become rich but she has become enslaved.”

Bok says, “Perhaps scientists fear that there is no longer enough time for referees to read papers with sufficient care.”

IT is possible to understand events taking place now by getting to know the history of the work of which they are a result. The large impersonal forces that rule the world now were set in motion by persons-at-work. But it is hard. It is as though at a certain point records ceased to be kept. But that is not true. Records were kept, and in most cases we can get at them. The history of recent work has somehow failed to stick in people’s minds. This has to do, I think, with the fact that the results of successful work are now dispersed throughout the world in such a way that they disappear; that is, they are not linked to any place. What will happen, for instance, when the financial life of the nation is no longer associated with Wall Street is very hard to predict. When the financial life of the nation is a matter of events taking place in the air (retrieved for a moment on this or that screen), will it be possible to raise a child to believe in it? It is difficult to tell the story of any particular event now because the old backgrounds against which a particular event would have meaning (Harvard and Wall Street, for example) are unreliable, and yet they are all we have. That is why entertainment stories are set in the past, or are absurd and not meant to be taken seriously, or deal with some person’s personal problems. To construct, through diligent thought, a true background against which events of this moment might be juxtaposed is the work of art now.

Since this short history of the Harvard Black Rock Forest has been difficult to construct (because the foreground and the background were being constructed at the same time), I should, perhaps, include a summary of what I think is important in what I have written.

First in importance is the image I put forward at the beginning. Two men, one a forester, the other a very rich man, stand on a tract of land. They first look at the land, which has been damaged and exploited. Then they look at an incomplete limestone palace.

Second in importance is the history of the men in the image: Gifford Pinchot and George Washington Vanderbilt. I mention George Washington Vanderbilt here especially because his idea—to build a palace in America—will always be a part of American life and should be accepted by Americans. But: he needs Gifford Pinchot at his side. In my image, he has him.

Thirdly, the various symbols within the Biltmore Estate: corresponding to what is everywhere and nowhere; here and there; and mostly here. I particularly want to direct the reader’s attention to the difference between the qualities of the science of silviculture, which is embedded in a context (the forest), and the qualities of what Calvin Stillman called “pure science,” and to suggest that “pure science” must learn from silviculture how to behave as though it were embedded in a context. The job, it seems to me, is to transform “the scientific method,” which is free in a way that human beings never can be free, into “science,” a collegial system that would recognize, as silviculture does, that life goes on in particular places and that “the longest time” is in fact the span of time we want to consider.

At last, the history of the Black Rock Forest, ending in the history of Harvard’s unsatisfactory stewardship. Here, first of all, I would like to pay my respects to Ernest Stillman. In America, it is very often out of the work of men like Dr. Stillman that good developments are allowed to take place. Dr. Stillman held to the ideal of the constantly flourishing forest long after its vogue had ended. A specific proposal of mine would be that Harvard be asked to transfer the forest and its endowment to an independent foundation that would continue to pursue the silvicultural work begun by Ernest Stillman and Henry Tryon. No hasty action will do justice to what Dr. Stillman began—we remember that he rejected the idea of a private foundation because its plan of work would be “too narrow”—but I am convinced that the integrity of his ideal will be better protected now by a dedicated private group than by any large institution.

As to the usefulness of the forest: this is of two kinds—usefulness that was foreseen by Dr. Stillman and usefulness that was not foreseen by him. Dr. Stillman was right: the farmer’s woodlot is important now. He was right: large numbers of people have moved to the country. What he did not foresee was that the scientific data collected within the forest might be useful as a base against which to measure levels of toxicity (in measuring acidity due to acid rain, for instance). And yet he did foresee it; that is, he foresaw that patient work within the forest would produce benefits he could not foresee.

As to Harvard’s unsatisfactory stewardship of the forest: the weight of all evidence I have seen is against Daniel Steiner’s statement that “it would be wrong to make an assumption that Dr. Stillman had required, or even expected, that Harvard would hold on to” the forest. There is a concept in conservative forestry called the Permanent Association. The Permanent Association for a given piece of forest land is that mixture of trees toward which all the various successions of dominance are tending. It is also called the climax forest. Such a forest, when handled with respect, will yield a handsome profit, and will return to health of itself: it is the constantly useful, constantly flourishing forest. In human affairs, it would be: a stable civilization. In America, this would be: a stable American civilization. It is my conviction that Ernest Stillman was one of those American men (Gifford Pinchot was another; Theodore Roosevelt was another) who believed that it was important to work toward that ideal however much the (so-called) “practical facts” spoke of its impracticability, however much promises of vast wealth spoke of its irrelevance, however much cataclysmic world events spoke of its smallness. Dr. Stillman, I know, thought of Harvard University as the strong home in American life of those persons who were working toward a discovery of what a Permanent Association for America might be. And, of course, it has been that (Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy are among its graduates), and it might be again.

FINALLY, I would like to return to some of the questions to which President Bok of Harvard said he had no very good answers. Why is there “unease” in “many scientific circles”? What is the proper relationship between a scientist working at a university and the world of business? We turn to Pyotr Kapitsa’s address to the Royal Society—to which President Bok has himself referred. Let this be symbolic of what I want to say to President Bok: You have good information close to hand, and you may still decide to use it. Kapitsa’s address to the Royal Society, briefly reported in Science, appears in his “Collected Papers,” under the title “Recollections of Lord Rutherford.”

It is an affectionate work—we notice that. We notice that a man is speaking to other men, simply. It has great force. Events are not shapeless. It is a question of men at work. Notice the pencil of Lord Rutherford—how it has stayed in the mind of the great Russian physicist—and notice how the words of a Ukrainian philosopher have stayed in the mind of the great Soviet physicist, and how simplicity is not ignored. Mr. Kapitsa says: ♦

By Jessica Pressler — New York Magazine, 2018

It started with money, as it so often does in New York. A crisp $100 bill slipped across the smooth surface of the mid-century-inspired concierge desk at 11 Howard, the sleek new boutique hotel in Soho. Looking up, Neffatari Davis, the 25-year-old concierge, who goes by “Neff,” was surprised to see the cash had come from a young woman who seemed to be around her age. She had a heart-shaped face and pouty lips surrounded by a wild tangle of red hair, her eyes framed by incongruously chunky black glasses that Neff, an aspiring cinematographer with an eye for detail, identified as Céline. She was looking, she said in an accent that sounded European, for “the best food in Soho.”

“What’s your name?” Neff asked, after the girl waved off her suggestions of Carbone and the Mercer Kitchen and settled on the Butcher’s Daughter.

“Anna Delvey,” said the young woman. She’d be staying at the hotel for a month, she went on, which Neff also found surprising: Usually it was only celebrities who came for such long stretches. But Neff checked the system, and there it was. Delvey was booked into a Howard Deluxe, one of the hotel’s midrange options, about $400 a night, with ceramic sculptures on the walls and oversize windows looking onto the bustling streets of Soho. It was February 18, 2017.

“Thanks,” said Delvey. “See you around.”

That turned out to be a promise. Over the next few weeks, Delvey stopped by often to ask Neff’s advice, slipping her $100 each time. Neff would wax on about how Mr. Purple was totally washed and Vandal was for hipsters, while Delvey’s eyes would flit around behind her glasses. Eventually, Neff realized: Delvey already knew all the cool places to go — not only that, she knew the names of the bartenders and waiters and owners. “This is not a guest that needs my help,” it dawned on her. “This is a guest that wants my time.”

This was not out of the ordinary. Since she’d started working there, Neff, a Washington, D.C., native with a wedge of natural hair, giant Margaret Keane eyes, and a gap-toothed smile, had found herself playing therapist to all manner of hotel guests: husbands cheating on their wives, wives getting away from their husbands. “You just sit there and listen, because that’s your concierge life,” she recalled recently, at a coffee shop near her apartment in Crown Heights.

Usually, these guests went back to their own lives, leaving Neff to hers. But February became March, and Delvey kept showing up. She’d bring food down, or a glass of extra-dry white wine, and settle near Neff’s desk to chat. Some of the other hotel employees found Anna deeply annoying. She could be oddly ill-mannered for a rich person: Please and thank you were not in her vocabulary, and she would sometimes say things that were “Not racist,” Neff said, “but classist.” (“What are you bitches, broke?” Anna asked her and another hotel employee.) But to Neff, it didn’t come across as mean-spirited. More like she was some kind of old-fashioned princess who’d been plucked from an ancient European castle and deposited in the modern world, although according to Anna she came from modern-day Germany and her father ran a business producing solar panels. And despite her unassuming figure — “a sort of Sound of Music Fräulein,” one acquaintance later put it — Anna quickly established herself as one of 11 Howard’s most generous guests. “People would fight to take her packages upstairs,” said Neff. “Fight, because you knew you were getting $100.” Over time, Delvey got more and more comfortable in the hotel, swanning around in sheer Alexander Wang leggings or, occasionally, a hotel robe. “She ran that place,” said Neff. “You know how Rihanna walks out with wineglasses? That was Anna. And they let her. Bye, Ms. Delvey …”

Anna was preparing to launch a business, a Soho House–ish type club, she told Neff, focused on art, with locations in L.A., London, Hong Kong, and Dubai, and Neff became her de facto secretary, organizing business lunches and dinners at restaurants like Seamore’s and the hotel’s own Le Coucou. (“That’s what they do in the rich culture, is meals,” said Neff.) On occasion, when Delvey showed up while the concierge desk was busy, she would stand at the counter, coolly counting out bills until she got Neff’s attention. “I’d be like, ‘Anna, there’s a line of eight people.’ But she’d keep putting money down.” And even though Neff had begun to think of Anna as not just a hotel guest but a friend, a real friend, she didn’t hesitate to take it. “A little selfish of me,” she admitted later. “But … yeah.”

Who can blame her? This was Manhattan in the 21st century, and money is more powerful than ever. Rare is the city dweller who, when presented with an opportunity for a sudden and unexpected influx of cash, doesn’t grasp for it. Of course, this money almost always comes with strings attached. Sometimes you can barely see them, like that vaudeville bit in which the pawn dives for a loose bill only to find it pulled just ahead. Still, everyone makes the reach. Because here, money is the one thing that no one can ever have enough of.

For a stretch of time in New York, no small amount of the cash in circulation was coming from Anna Delvey. “She gave to everyone,” said Neff. “Uber drivers, $100 cash. Meals — listen. You know how you reach for your credit card? She wouldn’t let me.”

The way Anna spent money, it was like she couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. Her room was overflowing with shopping bags from Acne and Supreme, and in between meetings, she’d invite Neff to foot massages, cryotherapy, manicures (Anna favored “a light Wes Anderson pink,” according to Neff). One day, she brought Neff to a session with a personal trainer–slash–life coach she’d found online, a svelte, ageless Oprah-esque figure who works with celebrities like Dakota Johnson.

“Stop sinking into your body,” the trainer commanded Anna. “Shoulders back, navel to spine. You are a bright woman; you want to be a businesswoman. You gotta be staying strong on your own power.”

Afterward, as Neff panted on the sidelines, Anna bought a package of sessions. “It was, I’m not lying, $4,500,” said Neff.

Anna paid cash.

Neff’s boyfriend didn’t understand why she was spending so much time with this weird girl from work. Anna didn’t understand why Neff had a boyfriend. But he was rich, Neff protested. He’d promised to finance her first movie. “Dump him,” Anna advised. “I have more money.” She would finance the movie.

Neff did dump the guy. Not because of what Anna had said, although she had no reason to doubt it. Her new friend, she discovered, belonged to a vast and glittering social circle. “Anna knew everyone,” said Neff. At night, she’d taken to hosting large dinners at Le Coucou, attended by CEOs, artists, athletes, even celebrities. One night, Neff found herself seated next to her childhood idol, Macaulay Culkin. “Which was awkward,” she said. “Because I had so many questions. And he was right there. But they were talking about, like, friend stuff. So I never got the chance to be like, ‘So, you the godfather to Michael Jackson’s kids?’ ”

Despite her seemingly nomadic living situation, Anna had long been a figure on the New York social scene. “She was at all the best parties,” said marketing director Tommy Saleh, who met her in 2013 at Le Baron in Paris during Fashion Week. Delvey had been an intern at European scenester magazine Purple and appeared to be tight with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Olivier Zahm, and its man-about-town, André Saraiva, an owner of Le Baron — two of “the 200 or so people you see everywhere,” as Saleh put it: Chilterns and Loulou’s in London; the Crow’s Nest in Montauk; Paul’s Baby Grand and the Bowery Hotel; Frieze, Coachella, Art Basel. “She introduced herself, and she was a sweet girl, very polite,” said Saleh. “Then we’re just hanging with my friends all of a sudden.”

Soon, Anna was everywhere too. “She managed to be in all the sort of right places,” recalled one acquaintance who met Anna in 2015 at a party thrown by a start-up mogul in Berlin. “She was wearing really fancy clothing” — Balenciaga, or maybe Alaïa — “and someone mentioned that she flew in on a private jet.” It was unclear where exactly Anna came from — she told people she was from Cologne, but her German wasn’t very good — or what the source of her wealth was. But that wasn’t unusual. “There are so many trust-fund kids running around,” said Saleh. “Everyone is your best friend, and you don’t know a thing about anyone.”

After a gallerist at Pace introduced her to Michael Xufu Huang, the extremely young, extremely dapper collector and founder of Beijing’s M Woods museum, Anna proposed they go together to the Venice Biennale. Huang thought it was “a little weird” when Anna asked him to book the plane tickets and hotel on his credit card. “But I was like, Okay, whatever,” he said. It was also strange, he noticed during their time there, that Anna only ever paid with cash, and after they got back, she seemed to forget she’d said she’d pay him back. “It was not a lot of money,” he said. “Like two or three thousand dollars.” After a while, Huang kind of forgot about it too.

When you’re superrich, you can be forgetful in this way. Which is maybe why no one thought much of the instances in which Anna did things that seemed odd for a wealthy person: calling a friend to have her put a taxi from the airport on her credit card, or asking to sleep on someone’s couch, or moving into someone’s apartment with the tacit agreement to pay rent, and then … not doing it. Maybe she had so much money she just lost track of it.

The following January, Anna hired a PR firm to put together a birthday party at one of her favorite restaurants, Sadelle’s in Soho. “It was a lot of very cool, very successful people,” said Huang, who, while aware Anna owed him money for their Venice trip, remained mostly unconcerned about it, at least until the restaurant, having seen Polaroids of Huang and Anna at the party on Instagram, messaged him a few days later. “They were like, ‘Do you have her contact info?’ ” he says now. “ ‘Because she didn’t pay her bill.’ Then I realized, Oh my God, she is not legit.”

As Anna bounced around the globe, there was some speculation as to where her means to do this came from, though no one seemed to care that much so long as the bills got paid.

“I thought she had family money,” said Jayma Cardoso, one of the owners of the Surf Lodge in Montauk. Delvey’s father was a diplomat to Russia, one friend was sure. No, another insisted, he was an oil-industry titan. “As far as I knew, her family was the Delvey family that is big in antiques in Germany,” said another acquaintance, a millionaire tech CEO. (It is unclear what family he was referring to.) The CEO met Anna through the boyfriend she was running around with for a while, a futurist on the TED-Talks circuit who’d been profiled in The New Yorker.For about two years, they’d been kind of like a team, showing up in places frequented by the itinerant wealthy, living out of fancy hotels and hosting sceney dinners where the Futurist talked up his app and Delvey spoke of the private club she wanted to open once she turned 25 and came into her trust fund.

Then it was 2016. The Futurist, whose app never materialized, moved to the Emirates, and Anna came to New York on her own, determined to make her arts club a reality, although she worried to Marc Kremers, the London creative director helping her with branding, that the name she’d come up with — the Anna Delvey Foundation, or ADF — was “too narcissistic.”

Early on, Anna and architect Ron Castellano, a friend of her Purple cohort, had scouted a building on the Lower East Side, but it turned out to be too close to a school to get a liquor license, and soon Anna had shifted her aspirations uptown. Through her connections, she’d befriended Gabriel Calatrava, one of the sons of famed architect Santiago. His family’s real-estate advisory company, Calatrava Grace, had helped her “secure the lease,” she informed people, on the perfect space: 45,000 square feet occupying six floors of the historic Church Missions House, a landmarked building on the corner of Park Avenue and 22nd. The heart of the club would be, she said, a “dynamic visual-arts center,” with a rotating array of pop-up shops curated by artist Daniel Arsham, whom she knew from her Purpledays, and exhibitions and installations from blue-chip artists like Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Tracey Emin. For the inaugural event, Anna told people, the artist Christo had agreed to wrap the building. Some people raised their eyebrows at the grandiosity of this plan, but to others it made sense, in a New York kind of way. The building’s owner, developer Aby Rosen, was no stranger to the private-club genre; a few years earlier, he’d bought a midtown building and opened the Core Club, which housed an art collection. He also happened to own 11 Howard.

With the help of Calatrava executive Michael Jaffe, a former employee of Rosen’s RFR realty firm, Anna soon began meeting with big names in the food-and-beverage world to discuss possibilities in the space. One was André Balazs, who, according to Anna, suggested they add two floors of hotel rooms. Another was Richie Notar, one of the founders of Nobu, who did a walk-through of the building with Anna as she described her vision, which included three restaurants, a juice bar, and a German bakery. “Apparently her family was prominent in Germany,” Notar said, “and funding this big project for her.”

But a project of this size required more capital than even someone of Anna’s apparently considerable resources could manage: approximately $25 million, “in addition to $25m existing,” Anna wrote in an email to a prominent Silicon Valley publicist in 2016. “If you think this is something you could help us with and have anyone in mind who would be a good cultural fit for this project.” But by fall, Anna had turned on the idea of private investors, in part because she didn’t want anyone telling her what to do. “If we were to bring in investors, they would say, ‘Oh, she’s 25; she doesn’t know what she’s doing,’ ” Anna explained later. “I wanted to build the first one myself.”

To help secure a loan, one of Anna’s “finance friends” had told her to get in touch with Joel Cohen, best known as the prosecutor of Jordan Belfort, a.k.a. the Wolf of Wall Street. Cohen now worked at Gibson Dunn, a large firm known for its real-estate practice. He put her in touch with Andy Lance, a partner who happened to have the exact kind of expertise that Anna was looking for. In the past, she’d complained to friends about feeling condescended to by older male lawyers because of her age and gender. But Lance was different. “He knows how to talk to women,” she said. “And he would explain to me the right amount, without being patronizing.” According to Anna, she and Lance spoke every day. “He was there all the time. He would answer in the middle of the night, or when he was in Turks and Caicos for Christmas.”

After filling out Gibson Dunn’s new-client-intake form, which included checking boxes that confirmed the client had the resources to pay and would not embarrass the firm, Lance put Anna in touch with several large financial institutions, including Los Angeles–based City National Bank and Fortress Investment Group. “Our client Anna Delvey is undertaking a very exciting redevelopment of 281 Park Avenue South, backed by a marquee team for this type of venue and space,” Lance wrote in one email, in which he explained that Anna needed the loan because “her personal assets, which are quite substantial, are located outside the US, some of them in trust with UBS outside the US.” The monies she received, he added, would be “fully secured” by a letter of credit from the Swiss bank. (Lance did not respond to requests for comment.)

When the banker at City National asked to see the UBS statements, he received a list of figures from a man named Peter W. Hennecke. “Please use these for your projections for now,” Hennecke wrote in an email. “I’ll send the physical statements on Monday.”

“Question: Are you from UBS?” the banker replied, puzzled by Hennecke’s AOL address.

No, Anna explained. “Peter is head of my family office.”

With Anna in fund-raising mode, the artists and celebrity friends at her dinners were gradually supplanted by men with “Goyard briefcases and Rolexes, and Hublot, like that Jay-Z lyric,” according to Neff, who at one point looked across the table at Le Coucou and recognized the face of infamous “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, who would later be convicted of securities fraud. Anna introduced Shkreli as a “dear friend,” although it was really the only time they’d met, Shkreli told New York in a letter from the penitentiary; Anna was close with one of his executives. “Anna did seem to be a popular ‘woman about town’ who knew everyone,” he wrote. “Even though I was nationally known, I felt like a computer geek next to her.”

As for Neff, she was not as discreet as she had been with Macaulay Culkin, tweeting after the fact that Shkreli had played her and Anna the leaked tracks from Tha Carter V, the delayed Lil Wayne album he’d acquired. Anna was furious, but Neff refused to delete the tweet. “I wanted everybody to know that I heard this album that the world is waiting on! But Anna was pretty mad. She didn’t come down to my desk for maybe three days.”

In the meantime, though, Neff said she had another visitor: Charlie Rosen. Aby Rosen’s sons were generally regarded as pretty-boy trust-fund kids — a few years back, they made headlines for reportedly racing ATVs over piping-plover nests in the Hamptons — but Neff liked them, and when Charlie stopped by one evening, she dropped that she’d recently been to visit the Park Avenue building that one of the guests, a young woman, was leasing from their father for an arts club.

Rosen looked confused. He didn’t appear to have ever heard of Anna or her project. “What room is she staying in?” he asked. When Neff told him, he looked skeptical. “If my dad has someone buying property from him staying here,” he said, “would she be in a Deluxe or would she be in a suite?”

He had a point. A few days later, Neff broached the subject. “Why did you tell me you’re buying property from Aby but you’re not staying in a suite?” she asked.

Anna looked surprised but answered immediately. “She said, ‘You ever have someone do so many favors for you, you kind of just want to pay them back in silence?’ ”

“Genius,” Neff said.

Soon it was April. Spring was poking its head through the gray New York City sidewalks, and the weather was getting warm enough to sip rosé on rooftops, one of Anna’s favorite activities, although the circle she was doing this with, Neff noticed, was smaller than it had been in the past and mainly consisted of herself; Rachel Williams, a photo editor at Vanity Fair; and the trainer, who, although she was notably older, had taken a motherly interest in her client. “I know a lot of trust-fund babies, and I was impressed that Anna had something that she wanted to do, instead of, you know, living like a Kardashian,” said the trainer. Plus, she said, Anna seemed lonely. Neff noticed the same thing. “What happened to your friends?” she asked Anna after one night out. “Oh,” Anna said vaguely. “They’re all mad I left Purple.” She was too busy for parties, anyway, she said, what with building her business.

It was true that Anna was spending a lot of time working, frowning at her in-box and huffing into the phone. “She was always on the phone with lawyers,” said Neff, who would sort of listen in from the concierge desk. “They were always toning her down. Like, ‘Anna, you’re trying to make something that’s worth this much be worth that much, and that’s just not how it works.’ ”

Back in December, City National had turned down her loan request — a management decision is how Anna framed it — and while the ever-loyal Andy Lance was reaching out to hedge funds and banks for alternate financing, executives at RFR were pressuring her to come up with the money fast, Anna said. If she didn’t, they were going to give it to another party, rumored to be the Swedish museum Fotografiska. “How do they even pay for that?” Anna fumed. “It’s like two old guys.”

In the meantime, Anna was having cash-flow issues of her own. One night, Anna asked Neff to dinner at Sant Ambroeus in Soho. They were by themselves, which was unusual. Even more unusually, at the end of the meal, Anna’s card was declined. “Here,” she told the waiter, handing him a list of credit-card numbers. In Neff’s admittedly foggy memory, they were in a small book, though it may have been the Notes app on her phone. But she’s clear on what happened next. “The waiter went back to his station and began entering the numbers. There were like 12, and I know the guy tried them all,” she said. “He was trying it and then shaking his head. And then I started to sweat, because I knew the bill was mine.” While the amount — $286 — was a fraction of what Anna usually spent, it was a lot for Neff, who quietly transferred money from her savings to cover the bill. Doing so made her feel sick, but after all the money Anna had spent on her, she understood it was her turn.

Not long after, Neff’s manager called and asked her to address a delicate issue: It seemed 11 Howard didn’t have a credit card on file for Anna Delvey. Because the hotel had been so new when she arrived, and because she was staying for such an unusually long time, and because she was a client of Aby Rosen’s and a very valued guest, it had agreed to accept a wire transfer. But a month and a half later, no such transfer had arrived, and now Delvey owed the hotel some $30,000, including charges from Le Coucou that she’d been billing to her room.

Neff wasn’t sure what to think. She was sure Anna was good for the money. The day after the Sant Ambroeus debacle, she’d paid her back triple. In cash.

When Anna came by her desk the next day, Neff took her aside and told her that management had said Anna needed to pay her bill. Anna nodded, her eyes inscrutable behind her sunglasses. There was a wire transfer on the way, she said. It should arrive soon. Then, about midway into her shift, Anna came by the desk again and, with a mischievous smile on her face, told Neff to expect a package. When it arrived, Neff opened it to find a case of 1975 Dom Pérignon, with Anna’s instructions to distribute it among the staff. Neff hesitated. Gifts, especially of the liquid variety, needed to be approved by management. “They were like, ‘How do we look approving this if she hasn’t paid us?’ So they went after her. ‘We need the money or we’re locking you out.’ ”

One morning, Anna showed up to her morning session with the trainer looking visibly upset. “Can we do a life-coaching session?” she pleaded. She was trying to build something, to do something, she went on, and no one was taking her seriously. “They think because I am young, they think I have all this money,” she sobbed. “I told them the money would be there soon. I’m having it transferred.”

The trainer told her to breathe. “I feel like you are in a little over your head,” she offered. “Maybe you just need a break.”

Then something miraculous happened. Citibank sent 11 Howard a wire transfer on behalf of Ms. Anna Delvey for $30,000. Neff called Anna on her cell phone. “Where you at?” she asked. Across the street at Rick Owens, Anna replied. Neff checked the clock: It was her lunch break. When she came through the door of the store, Anna was holding up a T-shirt. “Look what I found,” she said, beaming. “It’s perfect for you.” She was right: The shirt was the exact orangey red of the creepy bathroom scene in The Shining, one of Neff’s favorite movies, and the signature color of the brand Neff was trying to launch, FilmColours. It was also $400. “I’d love to buy it for you,” Anna said.

A few weeks later, Anna told Neff she was going to Omaha. “I’m going to see Warren Buffett,” she announced, grandly. One of her bankers had gotten her on the list to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual investment conference, and she’d decided to bring the executive from Martin Shkreli’s hedge fund, who was fun and a friend of his, on the private jet she’d rented to take them there. “I’ll be back,” she promised Neff.

But there was still a problem with her account at 11 Howard. Despite being repeatedly asked by hotel management, she still hadn’t given the hotel a working credit card, and her charges continued to mount. Following through on their warning, hotel employees changed the code on the lock of Anna’s room and put her things in storage. Neff texted Anna in Omaha to deliver the bad news.

“How can they do that?” Anna asked indignantly, although if she was truly shocked, it didn’t last long. The conference had been great, she said. The best part had happened the very last day, when, having exhausted all the opportunities for luxury Omaha had to offer, Anna and her party had taken a cab driver’s suggestion to check out the zoo. They hadn’t expected much, but then, while they were riding around on their golf carts, they’d stumbled on a private dinner hosted by Buffett for a slew of VIPs. “Everyone was there,” she said. “Like, Bill Gates was there.”

For a little while, they’d watched through the glass, then they’d slipped in and mingled among them.

When Anna got back to 11 Howard, she made her fury known. She was going to purchase web domains in all of the managers’ names, she told Neff, a trick she’d learned from Shkreli: “They’re going to pay me one day,” she said. Also, she was moving out — as soon as she got back from Morocco. Inspired by Khloé Kardashian, she’d reserved a $7,000-a-night riad with a private butler at La Mamounia, an opulent resort in Marrakech, and asked Neff if she wanted to join herself, the trainer, Rachel Williams, and a videographer, who she was hoping would make “a behind-the-scenes documentary” about the process of creating her arts foundation on a vacation. They’d wake up to massages, she said, and spend their days exploring the souk, lounging by the pool. Neff wanted to go, badly. But there was no way the hotel would let her take off eight days. “Just quit,” Anna said airily.

For a day or two, Neff considered it. But her mom told her she had a bad feeling about it. “Nothing in life is free,” she said. So Neff stayed behind, morosely following her friend’s journey on Instagram. “I was pretty jealous,” she said.

As she would find out, the pictures didn’t exactly tell the whole story. Two days in, after coming down with a nasty case of food poisoning, the trainer had gone back to New York early.

About a week later, the trainer got a call from Anna, who was alone at the Four Seasons in Casablanca and hysterical. There was, she sobbed, a problem with her bank. Her credit cards weren’t going through, and the hotel was threatening to call the police. After calming Anna down, the trainer asked to speak to management. “They were like, ‘She is going to be arrested,’ ” she said.

The trainer was torn: On the one hand, this was not her problem. On the other, Anna was her client, her friend, and someone’s daughter. Offering a prayer to the universe, the trainer gave the hotel her credit-card number and, when it failed to go through, made the requisite calls to her bank. When it still failed to go through, she went the extra mile: She called a friend and had her give her credit-card information. When that failed to work, the hotel conceded the problem might be on their end.

Later, the trainer would recognize this as a substantial gift from the Universe. At the time, she promised the hotel in Casablanca that Anna would make them whole. “Trust me,” she told them. “I know she’s good for it. I just spent two days with her in Marrakech.” When Anna came back on the phone, the trainer told her she was booking her a ticket back to New York. Anna snuffled her thanks. Then she asked for one last favor: “Can you get me first class?” she asked.

A few days later, a silvery Tesla pulled up in front of 11 Howard. Neff, at the concierge desk, felt her cell phone buzz. “Look out the window,” said a familiar German accent. The car’s futuristic doors slowly raised up to reveal Anna. “I’m here to get my stuff,” she said.

Anna was making good on her promise to leave 11 Howard. She was moving downtown to the Beekman Hotel, she told Neff, who watched her drive away in a car that she only later realized someone must have rented to her. Moving didn’t stem Anna’s mounting troubles. Not only did she owe the hotel, but, over in London, Marc Kremers, the designer she’d hired to do her branding work, was getting antsy: The £16,800 fee Anna had promised would arrive by wire almost a year before had yet to materialize, and now emails to Anna’s financial adviser, Peter W. Hennecke, were bouncing back. “Peter passed away last month,” Anna replied. “Please refrain from contacting or mentioning any communication with him going forward.”

In retrospect, her terseness was understandable. Things were rapidly deteriorating for Anna Delvey in New York. Twenty days into her stay, the Beekman Hotel, having realized it did not have a working credit card on file and having not received the promised wire transfer for her balance of $11,518.59, locked Anna out of her room and confiscated her belongings. A subsequent two-day stay at the W Hoteldowntown ended in a similar fashion, and by July 5, Anna was effectively homeless, wandering the streets in threadbare Alexander Wang sportswear.

Late one night, she made her way to the trainer’s apartment and dialed her from outside. “I’m right near your building,” she said. “Do you think we could talk?”

The trainer hesitated: She was in the middle of a date. But there was a desperate note in Anna’s voice. She made her way to her lobby, where she found Anna with tears streaming down her face. “I’m trying to do this thing,” she sobbed. “And it’s so hard.”

Maybe she should call her family, the trainer suggested. She would, Anna replied, but her parents were in Africa. “Do you mind if I crash at your place tonight?” No, the trainer said, she had a date.

“I really just don’t want be alone,” Anna sniffled. “I might do something.”

The date hid in the bedroom while the trainer made a bed for her unexpected houseguest and offered her a glass of water.

“Do you have any Pellegrino?” Anna asked. There was one large bottle left. Anna ignored the two glasses placed on the counter and began swilling from the bottle. “I’m so tired,” she yawned.

As Anna slept, the trainer’s spidey sense began to tingle. “I mean, I’m born and raised in New York,” she told me later. “I’m not stupid.” She texted Rachel Williams, who told her about what had happened at La Mamounia: Apparently, after the trainer returned to New York, the credit card Anna had used to book the hotel was found to be nonfunctional, and when Anna was unable to produce a new form of payment and a pair of threatening goons appeared in the doorway, the photo editor was forced to put the balance — $62,000, more than she was paid in a year — on the Amex she sometimes used for work expenses. Anna had promised her a wire transfer, but a month later, all Rachel received was $5,000, and her excuses had turned “Kafkaesque.”

The following morning, the trainer resolved to draw a clear boundary. After lending Anna a clean (and flattering) dress, she sent her on her way with a gratis motivational speech. But when Anna walked out the door, she left her laptop behind. The trainer was having none of it. She deposited the computer at the front desk and texted Anna that she could pick it up there.

That evening, the trainer got a call from her doorman. Anna was in the lobby. He’d told her that the trainer was out, at which point she’d asked for access to her suite. When he refused, Anna had resolved to wait for the trainer to return home.

“Let me know when she goes,” the trainer told the doorman.

But hours passed and Anna didn’t budge. “They were like, She’s still here. She’s texting,” the trainer recalls. “I was like, Oh my God, I’m a prisoner of my own house.” It wasn’t until after midnight that Anna finally left the building.

The relief the trainer felt soon turned into worry. “I started calling the hotels to see where she was staying, and each hotel was like, ‘This girl,’ she said.

She found out why later that month, when both the Beekman and the W Hotel filed charges against Anna for theft of services. WANNABE SOCIALITE BUSTED FOR SKIPPING OUT ON PRICEY HOTEL BILLS, blared the headline in the Post, which referenced an incident in which Anna attempted to leave the restaurant at Le Parker without paying. “Why are you making a big deal about this?” she’d protested to police. “Give me five minutes and I can get a friend to pay.”

But no friends arrived. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding, as Anna told Todd Spodek, the criminal attorney she hired to fight the misdemeanor charges. Maybe the poised young woman in the Audrey Hepburn dress who’d cold-called him on his cell phone repeatedly, insisting it was an emergency until he’d agreed to come into his office on a Saturday, really was a wealthy German heiress, he thought, as his 4-year-old pasted Paw Patrol stickers up one of Anna’s bare arms, and her credit cards had gotten jammed up, or someone had taken away her trust fund. Just in case, Spodek, whose everyday clientele includes grifters, dog-murderers, femme fatales, rapists, and cybercriminals, among other miscreants, had her sign a lien on all of her assets, one that would ensure he got paid. On her way out, Anna asked a favor. “I kind of need a place to stay,” she said. Spodek demurred. The last thing his wife wanted was for him to bring his work home with him.

Anna again got in touch with the trainer, who did not invite her to stay but instead organized an intervention at a nearby restaurant, during which she and Rachel Williams attempted to get answers: about why Anna had done what she’d done, who she really was, if she’d ever planned on paying anyone back. Anna hemmed and hawed and dissembled and prevaricated and, as the women got increasingly angry, allowed two fat tears to roll down her cheeks. “I’ll have enough to pay everyone,” she sniffled. “Once I get the lease signed …”

“Anna,” the trainer said, summoning her last shred of patience. “The building has been rented.”

She held up her iPhone and showed her the headline: FOTOGRAFISKA SIGNS A LEASE FOR ENTIRE 45K SF AT ABY ROSEN’S BUILDING.

“That’s fake news,” Anna said.

Is “Fotografiska really get the building?” sighed the tiny, accented voice after the recording identifying the call as coming from Rikers Island, where Anna Delvey, a.k.a. Anna Sorokin, has been remanded without bail since October 2017.

As it turned out, Anna’s hotel bills were merely the first loose threads in a web of fraudulent activity, one that began to unravel in November 2016, after she submitted documents claiming a net worth of €60 million in Swiss accounts to City National Bank in pursuit of a $22 million dollar loan. The following month, she submitted the same documents to Fortress in an attempt to secure a $25 million to $35 million loan. After that bank asked her for $100,000 to perform due diligence, she convinced a representative at City National to extend her a $100,000 line of credit, which she then wired to Fortress. Then, apparently spooked by Fortress’s decision to send representatives to Switzerland to personally check her assets, she withdrew herself from the process halfway through, wiring the remaining $55,000 to a Citibank account that she used for “personal expenses … shopping at Forward by Elyse Walker, Apple, and Net-a-Porter,” according to the New York District Attorney’s office. Then, in April, she deposited $160,000 worth of bad checks into the same account, managing to withdraw $70,000 before they were returned, which is how she managed to pay off 11 Howard and, ostensibly, buy Neff’s T-shirt and the domain names of the managers of the hotel. (“They called me down to the office. They said, ‘Neff, did you know about this?’ And I started dying laughing. I thought it was a boss move.”) In May, Anna convinced the company Blade to charter her a $35,000 jet to Omaha by sending them a forged confirmation for a wire transfer from Deutsche Bank. It might have helped that she had the business card of the CEO, whom she’d met in passing at Soho House but who says he didn’t actually know her at all. Not wanting to leave Anna homeless after their intervention last summer, the trainer and a friend agreed to put Anna up at a hotel for one night, after having the hotel remove the mini-bar and giving strict instructions not to allow her any room service. She subsequently checked in to the Bowery Hotel for two nights, sending the hotel a receipt for a wire transfer from Deutsche Bank that never came. Rachel Williams, City National, and others also received phony wire-transfer receipts, which a representative of the bank identified as forged. Anna’s “family adviser,” the late Peter W. Hennecke, seems to have been a fictional character; his cell-phone number belonged to a now-defunct burner phone from a supermarket, New York found. (A living Peter Hennecke did not return calls for comment.) Later in the summer, with her misdemeanor charges pending, Anna deposited two bad checks into an account at Signature Bank, netting her $8,200, which is how she managed to take what she said was a “planned trip” to California, where she was arrested outside of Passages in Malibu and brought back to New York to face six counts of grand larceny and attempted grand larceny, in addition to theft of services, according to the indictment. “I like L.A.,” she giggled when I visited her at Rikers this past March. “L.A. in the winter, New York in spring and autumn, and Europe in summer.”

People looked over curiously. “She’s like a unicorn in there,” Todd Spodek, Anna’s lawyer, had told me. “Everyone else is in there for like, stabbing their baby daddy.” He had mentioned that his client was taking incarceration unusually in stride, and indeed, this appeared to be the case.

“This place is not that bad at all actually,” Anna told me, eyes sparkling behind her Céline glasses. “People seem to think it’s horrible, but I see it as like, this sociological experiment.”

She’d made friends, of course. The murderers were the most interesting to her. “There are couple of girls who are here for financial crimes as well,” she told me. “This one girl, she’s been stealing other people’s identities. I didn’t realize it was so easy.”

Over the course of three months, I spoke to Anna over the phone and visited her several times, occasionally bringing her copies of Forbes, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal at her request. Clad in a beige jumpsuit, her $800 highlights faded and her $400 eyelash extensions long fallen away, she looked like a normal 27-year-old girl, which is what she is.

Anna Sorokin was born in Russia in 1991, and moved to Germany in 2007, when she was 16, with her younger brother and her parents, who, after being independently tracked down by and speaking with New York, asked to remain anonymous, as news of their daughters arrest has not yet reached the small rural community where they live.

Anna attended high school in Eschweiler, a small working-class town 60 kilometers outside Cologne, near the Belgian and Dutch border. Her classmates remember her as quiet, with an unwieldy command of German. Her father had worked as a truck driver and later as an executive at a transport company until it became insolvent in 2013, whereupon he opened a heating-and-cooling business specializing in energy-efficient devices. Anna’s father was circumspect about the family’s finances, possibly out of a not-unreasonable fear of being held responsible for his daughter’s debts, which it was suggested to New York multiple times are larger and more wide-ranging than officially documented. “She screwed basically everyone,” said the acquaintance in Berlin, who passed on the names of several individuals who were said to have had amounts large and small borrowed or stolen but were too embarrassed to come forward. (Also paranoid: “I heard she commissions these stories,” I was told more than once, after I reached out to alleged victims. “They’re strategic leaks.”)

In any case, according to Anna’s father: “Until now, we have never heard of any trust fund.”

That said, he went on, the family did support her to an extent after Anna graduated from high school in 2011. She moved first to London, where she attended Central Saint Martins College, then she dropped out and returned to Berlin, where she interned in the fashion department of a public-relations firm before relocating to Paris, where she landed a coveted internship at Purple magazine and became Anna Delvey. Her parents, who say they do not recognize the surname, told New York: “We always paid for her accommodations, her rent, and other matters. She assured us these costs were the best investment. If ever she needed something more at one point or another, it didn’t matter. The future was always bright.”

Anna, in jail, told me: “My parents had high expectations. They always trusted me with my decision-making. I guess they regret it now.”

Over the course of our conversations, Anna never admitted any guilt, although she did say she felt bad about what happened with Rachel Williams. “I am very upset that things went that way and I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she said. “But I really can’t do anything about it, being in here.”

She expressed frustration about not being able to bail herself out. “If they were doubting — ‘Oh, she can’t pay for anything’— why not give me bail and see?” she challenged. “If I was such a fraud, it would be such an easy resolution. Will she bail herself out?”

She was frustrated with the New York Post’s characterization of her as a “wannabe socialite” — “I was never trying to be a socialite,” she pointed out. “I had dinners, but they were work dinners. I wanted to be taken seriously” — and the District Attorney’s portrayal of her as, as Anna put it, “a greedy idiot” who had committed a kind of harebrained Ponzi scheme in order to go shopping. “If I really wanted the money, I would have better and faster ways to get some,” she groused. “Resilience is hard to come by, but not capital.”

She seemed most interested in expressing that her plans to create the Anna Delvey Foundation were real. She’d had all of those conversations and meetings and sent all of those emails and commissioned those materials because she thought it was actually going to happen. “I had what I thought was a great team around me, and I was having fun,” she said. Sure, she said, she might have done a few things wrong. “But that doesn’t diminish the hundred things I did right.”

Maybe it could have happened. In this city, where enormous amounts of invisible money trade hands every day, where glass towers are built on paperwork promises, why not? If Aby Rosen, the son of Holocaust survivors, could come to New York and fill skyscrapers full of art, if the Kardashians could build a billion-dollar empire out of literally nothing, if a movie star like Dakota Johnson could sculpt her ass so that it becomes the anchor of a major franchise, why couldn’t Anna Delvey? During the course of my reporting, people kept asking: Why this girl? She wasn’t superhot, they pointed out, or super-charming; she wasn’t even very nice. How did she manage to convince an enormous amount of cool, successful people that she was something she clearly was not? Watching the Rikers guard shove Fast Companyinto a manila envelope, I realized what Anna had in common with the people she’d been studying in the pages of that magazine: She saw something others didn’t. Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else. And the thing was: It was so easy.

“Money, like, there’s an unlimited amount of capital in the world, you know?” Anna said to me at one point. “But there’s limited amounts of people who are talented.”

Additional reporting by Austin Davis and Naima Wolfsperger in Germany.

*This article appears in the May 28, 2018, issue of New York Magazine.

By Kenneth Li — Vibe, 1998

At dusk, they take over the road. Roaring and buzzing like locusts, the swarm of asphalt-scraping Japanese cars — with swooping rear wings and brightly colored logos — merges from the side streets of Uptown Manhattan onto the traffic-congested Henry Hudson Parkway. Zigzagging back and forth like jet-fueled go-carts, they slow to a stop, blocking off three lanes of oncoming cars in preparation for the infamous mile-long run.

A black Nissan 300ZX and a white Mitsubishi Starion pull out of the pack and creep up to the starting line. As the sun dances on the nearby river, the sound of honking horns and screaming drivers is drowned out by the sonic blast of the two engines revving for takeoff. A stocky Latino dude in a blinding yellow shirt stands in the middle of the highway and raises his hands. Both cars lurch and halt like chained pit bulls, their wheels spitting out black smoke. The hands drop.

10 mph: Off the starting line, the Nissan pulls ahead by one car length.

40 mph: Still in first gear, the driver jams the stick into second, and his head snaps back. The tires let out a brief squeal.

100 mph: The Starion pulls closer. There’s a halting moment when it looks like the Nissan might lose. It lasts about one hundredth of a second.

160 mph: Gritting his teeth, the man behind the wheel of the Nissan begins to shake from the speed; his vision is a blur. He doesn’t see the Starion closing in.

“The excitement of going fast is like nothing else. Another group gets excitement from doing drugs or whatever. Speed excites us.”

Crossing the finish line, the Nissan driver, Rafael Estevez, wins by one car length. In less than a minute, the guy in the Mitsubishi has lost $7,500. Glowing with confidence, Estevez immediately challenges him for $2,500 and offers an 18-car lead and beats him again.

Estevez, a 30-year-old Dominican drag racer from Washington Heights, is considered an OG among a growing legion of young speed junkies terrorizing the back alleys, highways, and legal racetracks around New York City. The urban dragracing frenzy was started in the early ‘90s by a tightly-knit crew of Asian-American boys in Southern California and is now hitting hard on the East Coast. The hundreds of kids who line New York hot spots like Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens or the Fountain Avenue strip in Brooklyn every weekend are an urban polyglot of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Chinese, Filipino, Jamaican, Italian and other ethnicities who have one thing in common: They love hurtling metal, meat and rubber through the concrete jungle at dangerous velocities.

Young men have been fascinated with tweaking and tuning big block Chevys and Mustangs since the days of Rebel Without a Cause. But the new guys wouldn’t be caught dead driving the gaudy muscular beasts of yesteryear. Instead, they’re tricking out low-buck Japanese imports like Honda Civics and Acura Integras and tattooing them like skateboards with Neuspeed and Greddy car parts stickers. By stroking the engine, adding a supercharger, and hitting the “juice” (nitrous oxide: a gaseous liquid once used to boost bomber planes in WWII), they can smoke the herb in the Iroc at the stoplight. And to do it with a puny four-cylinder rice burner that your moms would drive is downright arrogant.

“It’s about power. It’s about the control of power,” philosophizes Shawn Rousseau, a chunky West Indian racer in baggy jeans and Timberland boots. He’s hanging out at the packed Eastern Autosports store in Queens, New York, where kids in the scene go to chill and tune their cars.

“The excitement of going fast is like nothing else,” says Javier Ortega, a Columbian-American who screeches his blue Honda Civic to a halt in front of the store. “Another group gets excitement from doing drugs or whatever. Speed excites us.”

Few know that excitement like Estevez. Six feet tall with stooped shoulders and a healthy gut, he writes his own rules. Forget about valor, compassion, honor; in his book, that’s all synonymous with second place.

“People say I cheat all the time,” explains Estevez, a Huck Finn grin spreading across his face. “They say I jump the line, I do this, I do that. Drag racing is war. If you bring a knife, and I bring a machine gun, you’re dead. That’s it.”

Street rule No. 1: Gun it before the hands drop.

“Whenever someone is about to go, they always do something with their body,” says Estevez. “Right before they drop the clutch, they usually pitch forward. I don’t watch the guy [in between the cars] to say go. I just wait for the other guy to move, and then I go before he does.”

Juan J. Sanchez, Estevez’s road dawg of 16 years, describes him as an unbeatable foe. “Half of the race is psychology, and mentally he’s set,” says Sanchez. “One way or another, he’ll find a way to beat you even if he’s driving the slower car.”

As a kid growing up in Washington heights, Estevez remembers being transfixed every week by TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard. “The Dukes pulled a lot of stunts, soared through the air, and were always getting chased by cops,” he recalls.

“The best part was they would always get away.”

Estevez’s own fantasies of jetting from the potbellied law came together when he first discovered “the Strip” along 190th and Amsterdam Avenue, in Upper Manhattan. Over many humid summer nights amid the caramel-colored bodega lights and din of merengue and hip-hop, a younger Estevez came to study the form of the best oldtimers. “The guy Carlito, forget it,” says Estevez, both arms going up in mock defeat. “We always used to want to race him.”

Estevez stood there for hours every weekend evening, taking mental notes: how Carlito’s body shifted moments before take off, his deadlocked gaze, the catlike smirk. It became a to-do checklist for later. Carlito quit racing before Estevez ever got to challenge him. Instead, Estevez raced his boys on a strip behind Shea Stadium. His first car was a 1972 orange Datsun 510 grocery getter that he pulled apart and reassembled hundreds of times to eke out extra juice.

“Half of the race is psychology, and mentally he’s set. One way or another, he’ll find a way to beat you even if he’s driving the slower car.”

By the time he was 16, Estevez dropped out of school to devote all his time to cars. He worked at several garages, honing his skills on other people’s autos. All the money went right back into his own machine. He constantly remade his car, forging his reputation every time he smoked another friend.

That was the heyday of street racing, when wagers soared and reputations rose and fell in the blink of an eye. But then the cops started cracking down. “It’s a real problem,” says NYPD Chief Michael Ansbro, who’s witnessed racers cutting up traffic along the mile-long strip on the Henry Hudson freeway.

“I couldn’t believe how many people were weaving in and out of traffic. I’d be doing sixty, and the next thing you know, they’re flying right by.”

Last summer, a joint operation between Highway One police and the local 24th Precinct targeted illegal racing on 190th and Amsterdam. Between July and December 1997, the police issued 310 speeding tickets and 150 summonses for various violations. Now, a marked squad car works in tandem with an unmarked car during prime weekend hours to apprehend speed demons on the Henry Hudson.

Estevez and crew are forever playing cat and mouse with the police. “I do anything I have to do to get away from the cops,” says Estevez, who’s been chased on more than one occasion. “I’m not trying to go to jail.”

In the past year or so, the street racers have found a few “new drag spots,” but they’ve also begin to turn to the legal racetracks in new Jersey and Long Island to test their mettle. To gun it against the towering digital time boards, among the heavy metal-heads in domestic Mustangs and Camaros, no special license is needed at the entry gate, run through tech inspection, and you’re ready to race.

Tacked onto Estevez’s yellowing fridge door, the flier reads in bold: DRAG WARS: THE TRISTATES FIRST IMPORT STREET DRAG. The stakes are high. Big money sponsors like Penzoil and HKS U.S.A., car magazines Turbo and Super Street, and thousands of spectators from the streets will be keeping score at the Atco Raceway in New Jersey.

Two months before the big race, the boys at Speed and Sound, a tuner shop in Yonkers, relentlessly hammer away at Estevez’s civilianissue ’92 Civic. The transformation is sick. The stock engine has been replaced with a graniteblack motor borrowed from the Acura Integra GSR. Enlarged tubes of matte silver metal called headers loop around the top of the engine bay. They are intended, along with the softball-size turbochargers affixed to the front of the GSR, to dramatically boost output.

Just three days before the event, everything starts to go wrong. Estevez is rushed to the hospital and has to be operated on for an infected appendix. That same evening, he’s back at the shop massaging his bandages as he slowly limps around the car to check everything out.

On the big day, the flatbed tow truck they ordered never shows. The car is also acting up. The turbo computer mounted on the dashboard jumps out of its saddle every time the Civic lunges forward.

“I just hope I don’t break anything,” Estevez says with fingers crossed, not sure if he means himself or the car. He drives it to the track in New Jersey.

It’s an overcast morning, with temperatures hovering near the 70s — a perfect day for racing. On the first run of the day, Estevez scores 12.02 seconds on the quarter mile. Respectable for an amateur, but no big shakes. On Estevez’s second run, it happens.

The Christmas tree lights drop down: Yellow, yellow, yellow….His wheels are squealing in their disc-brake bear traps. Green! He stuffs the accelerator. The car lurches out of the gate and disappears across the horizon.

Eleven-point-three-six seconds later, Estevez makes history, becoming the East Coast’s fastest Honda car racer. The five thousand sitting on the bleachers jump to their feet, roaring in the day’s first standing ovation. Estevez didn’t break the California Honda record of 10.61 seconds; but unlike the stripped-down trailer-towed compacts in the West, his car was driven to the track in heavy stock trim, with full glass and interior.

Back at Estevez’s tent, auto industry reps and reporters line up to shakes his hand. Lucrative endorsement deals will pay for the pricey car parts he needs to follow the race circuits up and down the eastern seaboard; and maybe, if Estevez is lucky, he’ll head to Cali, where the big boys will be waiting to take a crack at him. It’s the first glimmer of a legal career in the growing, adrenaline-charged sport of import drag racing. And it’s making him misty-eyed today. “I said I would do it, and then I did it,” Estevez says proudly.

A few days later, Estevez is streaking down Henry Hudson Parkway in the Civic, past the sparkling tiara of the New Jersey nightscape. As he floors the now record-setting ride, the cockpit rumbles with Gatling gun intensity. Over the roar, whistle, and hiss of the engine, he screams, “Do you hear that fluttering?” He checks off a list of problems. “That’s just one thing. The headers are leaking. We need to weld a differential to put more power to the ground; remap the computer.

“Every time I find another problem with the car, it makes me even happier,” he adds. “When I fix it, it means I’ll go even faster.” His eyes are lowered half-mast, nodding occasionally like he’s studying what the car has to tell him. For Estevez, it’s not the contest between racers that really matters but the abstract dialogue between the soul of a racer and his machine.

Oddly, the makeshift dash cluttered with gauges — telling him everything from water pressure to fuel mixture — is missing one key thing: a speedometer. There’s a good reason. “When you know how fast you’re going,” says Estevez, punching the throttle again, “you’ll slow down.” — By Kenneth Li (May 1998)

By Richard Behar — Time, 1991

Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power.

Even as the cult of Scientology tries to destroy the truth, the truth shall be loosed over the planet forever.

Time Magazine May 6, 1991 page 50.

Special Report (cover story)

Copyright © 1991 Time Magazine

This young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were still clutching $171 in cash, virtually the only money he hadn’t turned over to the Church of Scientology, the self-help “philosophy” group he had discovered just seven months earlier.

His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to start his own investigation of the church. “We thought Scientology was something like Dale Carnegie,” Lottick says. “I now believe it’s a school for psychopaths.” Their so-called therapies are manipulations. They take the best and the brightest people and destroy them.” The Lotticks want to sue the church for contributing to their son’s death, but the prospect has them frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of Scientology has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment as well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady private detectives.

The Church of Scientology, started by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard to “clear” people of unhappiness, portrays itself as a religion. In reality the church is a hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner. At times during the past decade, prosecutions against Scientology seemed to be curbing its menace. Eleven top Scientologists, including Hubbard’s wife, were sent to prison in the early 1980s for infiltrating, burglarizing and wiretapping more than 100 private and government agencies in attempts to block their investigations. In recent years hundreds of longtime Scientology adherents — many charging that they were mentally of physically abused — have quit the church and criticized it at their own risk. Some have sued the church and won; others have settled for amounts in excess of $500,000. In various cases judges have labeled the church “schizophrenic and paranoid” and “corrupt, sinister and dangerous.”

Yet the outrage and litigation have failed to squelch Scientology. The group, which boasts 700 centers in 65 countries, threatens to become more insidious and pervasive than ever. Scientology is trying to go mainstream, a strategy that has sparked a renewed law- enforcement campaign against the church. Many of the group’s followers have been accused of committing financial scams, while the church is busy attracting the unwary through a wide array of front groups in such businesses as publishing, consulting, health care and even remedial education.

In Hollywood, Scientology has assembled a star-studded roster of followers by aggressively recruiting and regally pampering them at the church’s “Celebrity Centers,” a chain of clubhouses that offer expensive counseling and career guidance. Adherents include screen idols Tom Cruise and John Travolta, actresses Kirstie Alley, Mimi Rogers, and Anne Archer, Palm Springs mayor and performer Sonny Bono, jazzman Chick Corea and even Nancy Cartwright, the voice of cartoon star Bart Simpson. Rank-and-file members, however, are dealt a less glamorous Scientology.

According to the Cult Awareness Network, whose 23 chapters monitor more than 200 “mind control” cults, no group prompts more telephone pleas for help than does Scientology. Says Cynthia Kisser, the network’s Chicago-based executive director: “Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen. No cult extracts more money from its members.” [Note: since publication of this article, the Cult Awareness Network has been taken over by Scientology. Do not contact them!] Agrees Vicki Aznaran, who was one of Scientology’s six key leaders until she bolted from the church in 1987: “This is a criminal organization, day in and day out. It makes Jim and Tammy [Bakker] look like kindergarten.” To explore Scientology’s reach, TIME conducted more than 150 interviews and reviewed hundreds of court records and internal Scientology documents. Church officials refused to be interviewed. The investigation paints a picture of a depraved yet thriving enterprise. Most cults fail to outlast their founder, but Scientology has prospered since Hubbard’s death in 1986. In a court filing, one of the cult’s many entities — the Church of Spiritual Technology — listed $503 million in income just for 1987. High-level defectors say the parent organization has squirreled away an estimated $400 million in bank accounts in Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Cyprus. Scientology probably has about 50,000 active members, far fewer than the 8 million the group claims. But in one sense, that inflated figure rings true: millions of people have been affected in one way or another by Hubbard’s bizarre creation.

Scientology is now run by David Miscavige, 31, a high school dropout and second-generation church member. Defectors describe him as cunning, ruthless and so paranoid about perceived enemies that he kept plastic wrap over his glass of water. His obsession is to obtain credibility for Scientology in the 1990s. Among other tactics, the group:

– Retains public relation powerhouse Hill and Knowlton to help

shed the church’s fringe-group image.

– Joined such household names as Sony and Pepsi as a main sponsor

of Ted Turner’s Goodwill Games.

– Buys massive quantities of its own books from retail stores to

propel the titles onto best-seller lists.

– Runs full-page ads in such publications as Newsweek and

Business Week that call Scientology a “philosophy,” along with a

plethora of TV ads touting the group’s books.

– Recruits wealthy and respectable professionals through a web of consulting groups that typically hide their ties to Scientology.

The founder of this enterprise was part storyteller, part flimflam man. Born In Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard served in the Navy during World War II and soon afterward complained to the Veterans Administration about his “suicidal inclinations” and his “seriously affected” mind. Nevertheless, Hubbard was a moderately successful writer of pulp science fiction. Years later, church brochures described him falsely as an “extensively decorated” World War II hero who was crippled and blinded in action, twice pronounced dead and miraculously cured through Scientology. Hubbard’s “doctorate” from “Sequoia University” was a fake mall-order degree. In a I984 case in which the church sued a Hubbard biographical researcher, a California judge concluded that its founder was “a pathological liar.”

Hubbard wrote one of Scientology’s sacred texts, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, in 1950. In it he introduced a crude psychotherapeutic technique he called “auditing.” He also created a simplified lie detector (called an “E-meter”) that was designed to measure electrical changes In the skin while subjects discussed intimate details of their past. Hubbard argued that unhappiness sprang from mental aberrations (or “engrams”) caused by early traumas. Counseling sessions with the E-meter, he claimed, could knock out the engrams, cure blindness and even improve a person’s intelligence and appearance.

Hubbard kept adding steps, each more costly, for his followers to climb. In the 1960s the guru decreed that humans are made of clusters of spirits (or “thetans”) who were banished to earth some 75 million years ago by a cruel galactic ruler named Xenu. Naturally, those thetans had to be audited.

An Internal Revenue Service ruling in 1967 stripped Scientology’s mother church of its tax-exempt status. A federal court ruled in 1971 that Hubbard’s medical claims were bogus and that E-meter auditing could no longer be called a scientific treatment. Hubbard responded by going fully religious, seeking First Amendment protection for Scien- tology’s strange rites. His counselors started sporting clerical collars. Chapels were built, franchises became “missions,” fees became “fixed donations,” and Hubbard’s comic-book cosmology became “sacred scriptures.’

During the early 1970s, the IRS conducted its own auditing sessions and proved that Hubbard was skimming millions of dollars from the church, laundering the money through dummy corporations in Panama and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts. Moreover, church members stole IRS documents, filed false tax returns and harassed the agency’s employees. By late 1985, with high-level defectors accusing Hubbard of having stolen as much as S200 million from the church, the IRS was seeking an indictment of Hubbard for tax fraud. Scientology members “worked day and night” shredding documents the IRS sought, according to defector Aznaran, who took part in the scheme. Hubbard, who had been in hiding for five years, died before the criminal case could be prosecuted.

Today the church invents costly new services with all the zeal of its founder. Scientology doctrine warns that even adherents who are “cleared” of engrams face grave spiritual dangers unless they are pushed to higher and more expensive levels. According to the church’s latest price list, recruits — “raw meat,” as Hubbard called them — take auditing sessions that cost as much as $1,000 an hour, or $12,500 for a 12 1/2-hour “intensive.”

Psychiatrists say these sessions can produce a drugged-like, mind-controlled euphoria that keeps customers coming back for more. To pay their fees, newcomers can earn commissions by recruiting new mem- bers, become auditors themselves (Miscavige did so at age 12), or join the church staff and receive free counseling in exchange for what their written contracts describe as a “billion years” of labor. “Make sure that lots of bodies move through the shop,” implored Hubbard in one of his bulletins to officials. “Make money. Make more money. Make others produce so as to make money . . . However you get them in or why, just do it.”

Harriet Baker learned the hard way about Scientology’s business of

selling religion. When Baker, 73, lost her husband to cancer, a

Scientologist turned up at her Los Angeles home peddling a $1,300

auditing package to cure her grief. Some $15,000 later, the

Scientologists discovered that her house was debt free. They arranged

a $45,000 mortgage, which they pressured her to tap for more auditing

until Baker’s children helped their mother snap out of her daze. Last

June, Baker demanded a $27,000 refund for unused services, prompting

two cult members to show up at her door unannounced with an E-meter to

interrogate her. Baker never got the money and, financially strapped,

was forced to sell her house in September.

Before Noah Lottick killed himself, he had paid more than $5,000 for church counseling. His behavior had also become strange. He once remarked to his parents that his Scientology mentors could actually read minds. When his father suffered a major heart attack, Noah insisted that it was purely psychosomatic. Five days before he jumped, Noah burst into his parents’ home and demanded to know why they were spreading “false rumors” about him — a delusion that finally prompted his father to call a psychiatrist.

It was too late. “From Noah’s friends at Dianetics” read the card

that accompanied a bouquet of flowers at Lottick’s funeral. Yet no

Scientology staff members bothered to show up. A week earlier, local

church officials had given Lottick’s parents a red-carpet tour of

their center. A cult leader told Noah’s parents that their son had

been at the church just hours before he disappeared — but the church

denied this story as soon as the body was identified. True to form,

the cult even haggled with the Lotticks over $3,000 their son had paid

for services he never used, insisting that Noah had intended it as a

“donation.”

The church has invented hundreds of goods and services for which members are urged to give “donations.” Are you having trouble “moving swiftly up the Bridge” — that is, advancing up the stepladder of en- lightenment? Then you can have your case reviewed for a mere $1,250 “donation.” Want to know “why a thetan hangs on to the physical universe?” Try 52 of Hubbard’s tape-recorded speeches from 1952, titled “Ron’s Philadelphia Doctorate Course Lectures,” for $2,525. Next: nine other series of the same sort. For the collector, gold-and-leather-bound editions of 22 of Hubbard’s books (and bookends) on subjects ranging from Scientology ethics to radiation can be had for just $1,900.

To gain influence and lure richer, more sophisticated followers, Scientology has lately resorted to a wide array of front groups and financial scams. Among them:

CONSULTING. Sterling Management Systems, formed in 1983, has been

ranked in recent years by Inc. magazine as one of America’s

fastest-growing private companies (estimated 1988 revenues: $20 mil-

lion). Sterling regularly mails a free newsletter to more than 300,000

health-care professionals, mostly dentists, promising to increase

their incomes dramatically. The firm offers seminars and courses that

typically cost $10,OOO. But Sterling’s true aim is to hook customers

for Scientology. “The church has a rotten product, so they package it

as something else,” says Peter Georgiades, a Pittsburgh attorney who

represents Sterling victims. “It’s a kind of bait and switch.”

Sterling’s founder, dentist Gregory Hughes is now under investigation

by California’s Board of Dental Examiners for incompetence. Nine

lawsuits are pending against him for malpractice (seven others have

been settled), mostly for orthodontic work on children.Many dentists who have unwittingly been drawn into the cult are filing or threatening lawsuits as well. Dentist Robert Geary of Medina, Ohio, who entered a Sterling seminar in 1988, endured “the most extreme high-pressure sales tactics I have ever faced.” Sterling officials told Geary, 45, that their firm was not linked to Scientology, he says. but Geary claims they eventually convinced him that he and his wife Dorothy had personal problems that required auditing. Over five months, the Gearys say, they spent $130,000 for services, plus $50,000 for “gold-embossed, investment-grade” books signed by Hubbard. Geary contends that Scientologists not only called his bank to increase his credit card limit but also forged his signature on a $20,000 loan application. “It was insane,” he recalls. “I couldn’t even get an accounting from them of what I was paying for.” At one point, the Gearys claim, Scientologists held Dorothy hostage for two weeks in a mountain cabin, after which she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. Last October, Sterling broke some bad news to another dentist, Glover Rowe of Gadsden, Ala., and his wife Dee. Tests showed that unless they signed up for auditing Glover’s practice would fail, and Dee would someday abuse their child. The next month the Rowes flew to Glendale, Calif., where they shuttled daily from a local hotel to a Dianetics center. “We thought they were brilliant people because they seemed to know so much about us,” recalls Dee. “Then we realized our hotel room must have been bugged.” After bolting from the center, $23,000 poorer, the Rowes say, they were chased repeatedly by Scientologists on foot and in cars. Dentists aren’t the only once at risk. Scientology also makes pitches to chiropractors, podiatrists and veterinarians.

PUBLIC INFLUENCE. One front, the Way to Happiness Foundation, has

distributed to children in thousands of the nation’s public schools

more than 3.5 million copies of a booklet Hubbard wrote on morality.

The church calls the scheme “the largest dissemination project in

Scientology history.” Applied Scholastics is the name of still another

front, which is attempting to install a Hubbard tutorial program in

public schools, primarily those populated by minorities. The group

also plans a 1,000 acre campus, where it will train educators to teach

various Hubbard methods. The disingenuously named Citizens Commission

on Human Rights is a Scientology group at war with psychiatry, its

primary competitor. The commission typically issues reports aimed at

discrediting particular psychiatrists and the field in general. The

CCHR is also behind an all-out war against Eli Lilly, the maker of

Prozac, the nation’s top-selling antidepression drug. Despite scant

evidence, the group’s members — who call themselves “psychbusters” —

claim that Prozac drives people to murder or suicide. Through mass

mailings, appearances on talk shows and heavy lobbying, CCHR has hurt

drug sales and helped spark dozens of lawsuits against Lilly.Another Scientology linked group, the Concerned Businessmen’s Association of America, holds antidrug contests and awards $5,000 grants to schools as a way to recruit students and curry favor with education officials. West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV unwittingly commended the CBAA in 1987 on the Senate floor. Last August author Alex Haley was the keynote speaker at its annual awards banquet in Los Angeles. Says Haley: “I didn’t know much about that group going in. I’m a Methodist.” Ignorance about Scientology can be embarrassing: two months ago, Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, noting that Scientology’s founder “has solved the aberrations of the human mind,” proclaimed March 13 “L. Ron Hubbard Day.” He rescinded the proclamation in late March, once he Iearned who Hubbard really was.

HEALTH CARE. HealthMed, a chain of clinics run by Scientologists,

promotes a grueling and excessive system of saunas, exercise and

vitamins designed by Hubbard to purify the body. Experts denounce the

regime as quackery and potentially harmful, yet HealthMed solicits

unions and public agencies for contracts. The chain is plugged heavily

in a new book, Diet for a Poisoned Planet, by journalist David

Steinman, who concludes that scores of common foods (among them:

peanuts, bluefish, peaches and cottage cheese) are dangerous.Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop labeled the book “trash,” and the Food and Drug Administration issued a paper in October that claims Steinman distorts his facts. “HealthMed is a gateway to Scientology, and Steinman’s book is a sorting mechanism,” says physician William Jarvis, who is head of the National Council Against Health Fraud. Steinman, who describes Hubbard favorably as a “researcher,” denies any ties to the church and contends, “HealthMed has no affiliation that I know of with Scientology.”

DRUG TREATMENT. Hubbard’s purification treatments are the mainstay

of Narconon, a Scientology-run chain of 33 alcohol and drug

rehabilitation centers — some in prisons under the name “Criminon” —

in 12 countries. Narconon, a classic vehicle for drawing addicts into

the cult, now plans to open what it calls the world’s largest

treatment center, a 1,400-bed facility on an Indian reservation near

Newkirk, Okla. (pop. 2,400. At a 1989 ceremony in Newkirk, the As-

sociation for Better Living and Education presented Narconon a check

for $200,000 and a study praising its work. The association turned out

to be part of Scientology itself. Today the town is battling to keep

out the cult, which has fought back through such tactics as sending

private detectives to snoop on the mayor and the local newspaper

publisher.

FINANCIAL SCAMS. Three Florida Scientologists, including Ronald

Bernstein, a big contributor to the church’s international “war

chest,” pleaded guilty in March to using their rare-coin dealership as

a money laundry. Other notorious activities by Scientologists include

making the shady Vancouver stock exchange even shadier (see box) and

plotting to plant operatives in the World Bank, International Monetary

Fund and Export-Import Bank of the U.S. The alleged purpose of this

scheme: to gain inside information on which countries are going to be

denied credit so that Scientology-linked traders can make illicit

profits by taking “short” positions in those countries’ currencies.In the stock market the practice of “shorting” involves borrowing shares of publicly traded companies in the hope that the price will go down before the stocks must be bought on the market and returned to the lender. The Feshbach brothers of Palo Alto, Calif. — Kurt, Joseph and Matthew – have become the leading short sellers in the U.S., with more than $500 million under management. The Feshbachs command a staff of about 60 employees and claim to have earned better returns than the Dow Jones industrial average for most of the 1980s. And, they say, they owe it all to the teachings of Scientology, whose “war chest” has received more than $1 million from the family. The Feshbachs also embrace the church’s tactics; the brothers are the terrors of the stock exchanges. In congressional hearings in 1989, the heads of several companies claimed that Feshbach operatives have spread false information to government agencies and posed in various guises — such as a Securities and Exchange Commission official — in an effort to discredit their companies and drive the stocks down. Michael Russell, who ran a chain of business journals, testified that a Feshbach employee called his bankers and interfered with his loans. Sometimes the Feshbachs send private detectives to dig up dirt on firms, which is then shared with business reporters, brokers and fund managers. The Feshbachs, who wear jackets bearing the slogan “stock busters,” insist they run a clean shop. But as part of a current probe into possible insider stock trading, federal officials are reportedly investigating whether the Feshbachs received confidential information from FDA employees. The brothers seem aligned with Scientology’s war on psychiatry and medicine: many of their targets are health and bio- technology firms. “”Legitimate short selling performs a public service by deflating hyped stocks,” says Robert Flaherty, the editor of Equities magazine and a harsh critic of the brothers. “But the Feshbachs have damaged scores of good start-ups.” Occasionally a Scientologist’s business antics land him in jail. Last August a former devotee named Steven Fishman began serving a five-year prison term in Florida. His crime: stealing blank stock-confirmation slips from his employer, a major brokerage house, to use as proof that he owned stock entitling him to join dozens of successful class-action lawsuits. Fishman made roughly $1 million this way from 1983 to 1988 and spent as much as 30% of the loot on Scientology books and tapes. Scientology denies any tie to the Fishman scam, a claim strongly disputed by both Fishman and his longtime psychiatrist, Uwe Geertz, a prominent Florida hypnotist. Both men claim that when arrested, Fishman was ordered by the church to kill Geertz and then do an “EOC,” or end of cycle, which is church jargon for suicide.

BOOK PUBLISHING. Scientology mischiefmaking has even moved to the

book industry. Since 1985 at least a dozen Hubbard books, printed by a

church company, have made best-seller lists. They range from a

5,000-page sci-fi decology (Black Genesis, The Enemy Within, An Alien

Affair) to the 40-year-old Dianetics. In 1988 the trade publication

Publishers Weekly awarded the dead author a plaque commemorating the

appearance of Dianetics on its best-seller list for 100 consecutive

weeks.Critics pan most of Hubbard’s books as unreadable, while defectors claim that church insiders are sometimes the real authors. Even so, Scientology has sent out armies of its followers to buy the group’s books at such major chains as B. Dalton’s and Waldenbooks to sustain the illusion of a best-selling author. A former Dalton’s manager says that some books arrived in his store with the chain’s price stickers already on them, suggesting that copies are being recycled. Scientology claims that sales of Hubbard books now top 90 million worldwide. The scheme, set up to gain converts and credibility, is coupled with a radio and TV advertising campaign virtually un- paralleled in the book industry.

Scientology devotes vast resources to squelching its critics. Since 1986 Hubbard and his church have been the subject of four unfriendly books, all released by small yet courageous publishers. In each case, the writers have been badgered and heavily sued. One of Hubbard’s policies was that all perceived enemies are “fair game” and subject to being “tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” Those who criticize the church journalists, doctors, lawyers and even judges often find themselves engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes, framed for fictional crimes, beaten up or threatened with death. Psychologist Margaret Singer, 69, an outspoken Scientology critic and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now travels regularly under an assumed name to avoid harassment.

After the Los Angeles Times published a negative series on the church last summer, Scientologists spent an estimated $1 million to plaster the reporters’ names on hundreds of billboards and bus placards across the city. Above their names were quotations taken out of context to portray the church in a positive light.

The church’s most fearsome advocates are its lawyers. Hubbard warned his followers in writing to “beware of attorneys who tell you not to sue . . . the purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage rather than to win.” Result: Scientology has brought hundreds of suits against its perceived enemies and today pays an estimated $20 million annually to more than 100 lawyers.

One legal goal of Scientology is to bankrupt the opposition or bury it under paper. The church has 71 active lawsuits against the IRS alone. One of them, Miscavige vs. IRS, has required the U.S. to pro- duce an index of 52,000 pages of documents. Boston attorney Michael Flynn, who helped Scientology victims from 1979 to 1987, personally endured 14 frivolous lawsuits, all of them dismissed. Another lawyer, Joseph Yanny, believes the church “has so subverted justice and the judicial system that it should be barred from seeking equity in any court.” He should know: Yanny represented the cult until 1987, when, he says, he was asked to help church officials steal medical records to blackmail an opposing attorney (who was allegedly beaten up instead). Since Yanny quit representing the church, he has been the target of death threats, burglaries, lawsuits and other harassment.

Scientology’s critics contend that the U.S. needs to crack down on the church in a major, organized way. “I want to know, Where is our government?” demands Toby Plevin, a Los Angeles attorney who handles victims. “It shouldn’t be left to private litigators, because God knows most of us are afraid to get involved.” But law-enforcement agents are also wary. “Every investigator is very cautious, walking on eggshells when it comes to the church,” says a Florida police detective who has tracked the cult since 1988. “It will take a federal effort with lots of money and manpower.”

So far the agency giving Scientology the most grief is the IRS, whose officials have implied that Hubbard’s successors may be looting the church’s coffers. Since 1988, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the revocation of the cult’s tax-exempt status, a massive IRS probe of church centers across the country has been under way. An IRS agent, Marcus Owens, has estimated that thousands of IRS employees have been involved. Another agent, in an internal IRS memorandum, spoke hopefully of the “ultimate disintegration” of the church. A small but helpful beacon shone last June when a federal appeals court ruled that two cassette tapes featuring conversations between church officials and their lawyers are evidence of a plan to commit “future frauds” against the IRS.

The IRS and FBI have been debriefing Scientology defectors for the past three years, in part to gain evidence for a major racketeering case that appears to have stalled last summer. Federal agents complain that the Justice Department is unwilling to spend the money needed to endure a drawn-out war with Scientology or to fend off the cult’s notorious jihads against individual agents. “In my opinion the church has one of the most effective intelligence operations in the U.S., rivaling even that of the FBI,” says Ted Gunderson, a former head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.

Foreign governments have been moving even more vigorously against the organization. In Canada the church and nine of its members will be tried in June on charges of stealing government documents (many of them retrieved in an enormous police raid of the church’s Toronto headquarters). Scientology proposed to give $1 million to the needy if the case was dropped, but Canada spurned the offer. Since 1986 authorities in France, Spain and Italy have raided more than 50 Scien- tology centers. Pending charges against more than 100 of its overseas church members include fraud, extortion, capital flight, coercion, illegally practicing medicine and taking advantage of mentally incapacitated people. In Germany last month, leading politicians accused the cult of trying to infiltrate a major party as well as launching an immense recruitment drive in the east.

Sometimes even the church’s biggest zealots can use a little protection. Screen star Travolta, 37, has long served as an unofficial Scientology spokesman, even though he told a magazine in 1983 that he was opposed to the church’s management. High-level defectors claim that Travolta has long feared that if he defected, details of his sexual life would be made public. “He felt pretty intimidated about this getting out and told me so,” recalls William Franks, the church’s former chairman of the board. “There were no outright threats made, but it was implicit. If you leave, they immediately start digging up everything.” Franks was driven out in 1981 after attempting to reform the church.

The church’s former head of security, Richard Aznaran, recalls Scientology ringleader Miscavige repeatedly joking to staffers about Travolta’s allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior. At this point any threat to expose Travolta seems superfluous: last May a male porn star collected $100,000 from a tabloid for an account of his alleged two-year liaison with the celebrity. Travolta refuses to comment, and in December his lawyer dismissed questions about the subject as “bizarre.” Two weeks later, Travolta announced that he was getting married to actress Kelly Preston, a fellow Scientologist.

Shortly after Hubbard’s death the church retained Trout & Ries, a respected, Connecticut-based firm of marketing consultants, to help boost its public image. “We were brutally honest,” says Jack Trout. “We advised them to clean up their act, stop with the controversy and even to stop being a church. They didn’t want to hear that.” Instead, Scientology hired one of the country’s largest p.r. outfits, Hill and Knowlton, whose executives refuse to discuss the lucrative relationship. “Hill and Knowlton must feel that these guys are not totally off the wall,” says Trout. “Unless it’s just for the money.” One of Scientology’s main strategies is to keep advancing the tired argument that the church is being “persecuted” by antireligionists. It is supported in that position by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Council of Churches. But in the end, money is what Scientology is all about. As long as the organization’s opponents and victims are successfully squelched, Scientology’s managers and lawyers will keep pocketing millions of dollars by helping it achieve its ends.

One source of funds for the Los Angeles-based church is the notorious, self-regulated stock exchange in Vancouver, British Columbia, often called the scam capital of the world. The exchange’s 2,300 penny-stock listings account for $4 billion in annual trading. Local journalists and insiders claim the vast majority range from total washouts to outright frauds.

Two Scientologists who operate there are Kenneth Gerbino and Michael Baybak, 20-year church veterans from Beverly Hills who are major donors to the cult. Gerbino, 45, is a money manager, marketmaker and publisher of a national financial newsletter. He has boasted in Scientology journals that he owes all his stock-picking success to L. Ron Hubbard. That’s not saying much: Gerbino’s newsletter picks since 1985 have cumulatively returned 24%, while the Dow Jones industrial average has more than doubled. Nevertheless Gerbino’s short-term gains can be stupendous. A survey last October found Gerbino to be the only manager who made money in the third quarter of 1990, thanks to gold and other resource stocks. For the first quarter of 1991, Gerbino was dead last. Baybak, 49, who runs a public relations company staffed with Scientologists, apparently has no ethics problem with engineering a hostile takeover of a firm he is hired to promote.

Neither man agreed to be interviewed for this story, yet both threatened legal action through attorneys. “What these guys do is take over companies, hype the stock, sell their shares, and then there’s nothing left,” says John Campbell, a former securities lawyer who was a director of mining company Athena Gold until Baybak and Gerbino took it over.

The pattern has become familiar. The pair promoted a mining venture called Skylark Resources, whose stock traded at nearly $4 a share in 1987. The outfit soon crashed, and the stock is around 2 cents. NETI Technologies, a software company, was trumpeted in the press as “the next Xerox” and in 1984 rose to a market value of $120 million with Baybak’s help. The company, which later collapsed, was delisted two months ago by the Vancouver exchange.

Baybak appeared in 1989 at the helm of Wall Street Ventures, a start-up that announced it owned 35 tons of rare Middle Eastern postage stamps — worth $100 million — and was buying the world’s largest collection of southern Arabian stamps (worth $350 million). Steven C. Rockefeller Jr. of the oil family and former hockey star Denis Potvin joined the company in top posts, but both say they quit when they realized the stamps were virtually worthless. “The stamps were created by sand-dune nations to exploit collectors,” says Michael Laurence, editor of Linn’s Stamp News, America’s largest stamp journal. After the stock topped $6, it began a steady descent, with Baybak unloading his shares along the way. Today it trades at 18 cents.

Athena Gold, the current object of Baybak’s and Gerbino’s attentions, was founded by entrepreneur William Jordan. He turned to an established Vancouver broker in 1987 to help finance the company, a 4,500-acre mining property near Reno. The broker promised to raise more than $3 million and soon brought Baybak and Gerbino into the deal. Jordan never got most of the money, but the cult members ended up with a good deal of cheap stock and options. Next they elected directors who were friendly to them and set in motion a series of complex maneuvers to block Jordan from voting stock he controlled and to run him out of the company. “I’ve been an honest policeman all my life and I’ve seen the worst kinds of crimes, and this ranks high,” says former Athena shareholder Thomas Clark, a 20-year veteran of Reno’s police force who has teamed up with Jordan to try to get the gold mine back. “They stole this man’s property.”

With Baybak as chairman, the two Scientologists and their staffs are promoting Athena, not always accurately. A letter to shareholders with the 1990 annual report claims Placer Dome, one of America’s largest gold-mining firms, has committed at least $25.5 million to develop the mine. That’s news to Placer Dome. “There is no pre-commitment,” says Placer executive Cole McFarland. “We’re not going to spend that money unless survey results justify the expenditure.”

Baybak’s firm represented Western Resource Technologies, a Houston oil-and-gas company, but got the boot in October. Laughs Steven McGuire, president of Western Resource: “His is a p.r. firm in need of a p.r. firm.” But McGuire cannot laugh too freely. Baybak and other Scientologists, including the estate of L. Ron Hubbard, still control huge blocks of his company’s stock.

[ Caption: ATHENA GOLD’S WILLIAM JORDAN. Cult members got cheap stock, then ran him out of the company ]

[The following part was only in the international version of TIME]

Today Hubbard’s minions continue to wreak global havoc, costing governments considerable effort and money to try to stop them. In Italy a two-year trial of 76 Scientologists, among them the former leader of the church’s Italian operations, is nearing completion in Milan. Two weeks ago, prosecutor Pietro Forno requested jail terms for all the defendants who are accused of extortion, cheating “mentally incapacitated” people and evading as much as $50 million in taxes. “All of the trial’s victims went to Scientology in search of a cure or a better life,” said Forno, “But the Scientologists were amateur psychiatrists who practiced psychological terrorism”. For some victims, he added, “the intervention of the Scientologists was devastating.”

The Milan case was triggered by parents complaining to officials that Scientology had a financial stranglehold on their children, who had joined the church or entered Narconon, its drug rehabilitation unit. In 1986 Treasury and paramilitary police conducted raids in 20 cities across Italy shutting down 27 Scientology centers and seizing 100,000 documents. To defend itself in the trial, the cult has retained some of Italy’s most famous lawyers.

In Canada, Scientology is using a legal team that includes Clayton Ruby, one of the country’s foremost civil rights lawyers, to defend itself and nine of its members who are to stand trial in June in Toronto. The charges: stealing documents concerning Scientology from the Ministry of the Attorney General, the Canadian Mental Health Association, two police forces and other institutions. The case stems from a 1983 surprise raid of the church’s Toronto headquarters by more than 100 policemen, who had arrived in three chartered buses; some 2 million pages of documents were seized over a two-day period. Ruby, whose legal maneuvers delayed the case for years, is trying to get it dismissed because of “unreasonable delay.”

Spain’s Justice Ministry has twice denied Scientology status as a religion, but that has not slowed the church’ s expansion. In 1989 the Ministry of Health issued a report calling the sect “totalitarian” and “pure and simple charlatanism.” The year before, the authorities had raided 26 church centers, with the result that 11 Scientologists stand accused of falsification of records, coercion and capital flight. “The real god of this organization is money,” said Madrid examining magistrate Jose Maria Vasquez Honrnbia, before referring the case to a higher court because it was too complex for his jurisdiction. Eugene Ingram, a private investigator working for Scientology claims he helped get Honrubia removed from the case for leaking nonpublic documents to the press.

In France it took a death to spur the government into action: 16 Scientologists were indicted last year for fraud and “complicity in the practice of illegal medicine” following the suicide of an industrial designer in Lyon. In the victim’s house investigators found medication allegeally provided to him by the church without doctor’s prescription. Among those charged in the case is the president of Scientology’s French operations and the head of the Paris-based Celebrity Centre, which caters to famous members.

Outside the U.S., Scientology appears to be most active in Germany where the attorney general of the state of Bavaria has branded the cult “distinctly totalitarian” and aimed at “the economic exploitation of customers who are in bondage to it.” In 1984 nearly 100 police raided the church in Munich. At the time, city officials were reportedly collaborating with U.S. tax inspectors and trying to prove that the cult was actually a profitmaking business. More recently, Hamburg state authorities moved to rescind Scientology’s tax reduced status, while members of parliament are seeking criminal proceedings. In another domain, church linked management consulting firms have infiltrated small and middle sized companies throughout Germany, according to an expose published this month in the newsmagazine DER SPIEGEL; the consultants, who typically hide their ties to Scientology, indoctrinate employees by using Hubbard’s methods. A German anticult organization estimates that Scientology has at least 60 fronts or splinter groups operating in the country. German politics appears as well to attract Hubbard’s zealots. In March the Free Democrats, partners in Chancellor Helmut Kohl’ s ruling coalition in Bonn, accused Scientology of trying to infiltrate their Hamburg branch. Meanwhile the main opposition party, the Social Democrats, has been warning its members in the formerly com- munist eastern part of the country against exploitation by the church. Even federal officials are being used by the church: one Scientology front group sent copies of a Hubbard written pamphlet on moral values to members of the Bundestag. The Office of Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher unwittingly endorsed the Scientologists’ message: “Indeed, the world would be a more beautiful place if the principles formulated in the pamphlet, a life characterized by reason and responsibility, would find wider attention.”

[end of Internationl Edition-only section]

For the TIME story, at least 10 attorneys and six private detectives were unleashed by Scientology and its followers in an effort to threaten, harass and discredit me. Last Oct. 12, not long after I began this assignment, I planned to lunch with Eugene Ingram, the church’s leading private eye and a former cop. Ingram, who was tossed off the Los Angeles police force In 1981 for alleged ties to prostitutes and drug dealers, had told me that he might be able to arrange a meeting with church boss David Miscavige. Just hours before the lunch, the church’s “national trial counsel,” Earle Cooley, called to inform me that I would be eating alone.

Alone, perhaps, but not forgotten. By day’s end, I later learned, a copy of my personal credit report — with detailed information about my bank accounts, home mortgage, credit-card payments, home address and Social Security number — had been illegally retrieved from a national credit bureau called Trans Union. The sham company that received it, “Educational Funding Services” of Los Angeles, gave as its address a mail drop a few blocks from Scientology’s headquarters. The owner of the mail drop is a private eye named Fred Wolfson, who admits that an Ingram associate retained him to retrieve credit reports on several individuals. Wolfson says he was told that Scientology’s attorneys “had judgments against these people and were trying to collect on them.” He says now, “These are vicious people. These are vipers.” Ingram, through a lawyer, denies any involvement in the scam.

During the past five months, private investigators have been contacting acquaintances of mine, ranging from neighbors to a former colleague, to inquire about subjects such as my health (like my credit rating, it’s excellent) and whether I’ve ever had trouble with the IRS (unlike Scientology, I haven’t). One neighbor was greeted at dawn outside my Manhattan apartment building by two men who wanted to know whether I lived there. I finally called Cooley to demand that Scientology stop the nonsense. He promised to look into it.

After that, however, an attorney subpoenaed me, while another falsely suggested that I might own shares in a company I was reporting about that had been taken over by Scientologists (he also threatened to contact the Securities and Exchange Commission). A close friend in Los Angeles received a disturbing telephone call from a Scientology staff member seeking data about me — an indication that the cult may have illegally obtained my personal phone records. Two detectives contacted me, posing as a friend and a relative of a so-called cult victim, to elicit negative statements from me about Scientology. Some of my conversations with them were taped, transcribed and presented by the church in affidavits to TIME’s lawyers as “proof” of my bias against Scientology.

Among the comments I made to one of the detectives, who represented himself as “Harry Baxter,” a friend of the victim’s family, was that “the church trains people to lie.” Baxter and his colleagues are hardly in a position to dispute that observation. His real name is Barry Silvers, and he is a former investigator for the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force. (RB)

[Photograph, page 51]

The Lotticks lost their son

[photograph of the couple standing beside the grave of their son.]

[Photograph, page 53]

Harriet Baker, 73, lost her house

[photograph of Harriet Baker on front of her old home.]

[Chart, page 52-53]

The Bridge to enlightenment

[shows costs of various “courses” ranging from a

free Personality Test to more than $1,000 an hour for

“finding and releasing” “body thetans” (BTs).]

By Vernor Vinge — VISION-21 Symposium, 1993

Department of Mathematical Sciences

San Diego State University

(c) 1993 by Vernor Vinge

(This article may be reproduced for noncommercial

purposes if it is copied in its entirety,

including this notice.)

The original version of this article was presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993. A slightly changed version appeared in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur):

– There may be developed computers that are “awake” and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is “yes, we can”, then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.)

– Large computer networks (and their associated users) may “wake up” as a superhumanly intelligent entity.

– Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.

– Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.

The first three possibilities depend in large part on improvements in computer hardware. Progress in computer hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades [17]. Based largely on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles Platt [20] has pointed out that AI enthusiasts have been making claims like this for the last thirty years. Just so I’m not guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me more specific: I’ll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities — on a still-shorter time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work — the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct “what if’s” in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.

From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in “a million years” (if ever) will likely happen in the next century. (In [5], Greg Bear paints a picture of the major changes happening in a matter of hours.)

I think it’s fair to call this event a singularity (“the Singularity” for the purposes of this paper). It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown. In the 1950s there were very few who saw it: Stan Ulam [28] paraphrased John von Neumann as saying:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it appears he is thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman intellect. (For me, the superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed (see [25]).)

In the 1960s there was recognition of some of the implications of superhuman intelligence. I. J. Good wrote [11]:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. … It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make.

Good has captured the essence of the runaway, but does not pursue its most disturbing consequences. Any intelligent machine of the sort he describes would not be humankind’s “tool” — any more than humans are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.

Through the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, recognition of the cataclysm spread [29] [1] [31] [5]. Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the “hard” science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future [24]. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable … soon. Once, galactic empires might have seemed a Post-Human domain. Now, sadly, even interplanetary ones are.

What about the ’90s and the ’00s and the ’10s, as we slide toward the edge? How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view? For a while yet, the general critics of machine sapience will have good press. After all, till we have hardware as powerful as a human brain it is probably foolish to think we’ll be able to create human equivalent (or greater) intelligence. (There is the far-fetched possibility that we could make a human equivalent out of less powerful hardware, if we were willing to give up speed, if we were willing to settle for an artificial being who was literally slow [30]. But it’s much more likely that devising the software will be a tricky process, involving lots of false starts and experimentation. If so, then the arrival of self-aware machines will not happen till after the development of hardware that is substantially more powerful than humans’ natural equipment.)

But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. (I have heard thoughtful comic book writers worry about how to have spectacular effects when everything visible can be produced by the technologically commonplace.) We will see automation replacing higher and higher level jobs. We have tools right now (symbolic math programs, cad/cam) that release us from most low-level drudgery. Or put another way: The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming of the Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of _true_ technological unemployment finally come true.

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace. When I began writing science fiction in the middle ’60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months. (Of course, this could just be me losing my imagination as I get old, but I see the effect in others too.) Like the shock in a compressible flow, the Singularity moves closer as we accelerate through the critical speed.

And what of the arrival of the Singularity itself? What can be said of its actual appearance? Since it involves an intellectual runaway, it will probably occur faster than any technical revolution seen so far. The precipitating event will likely be unexpected — perhaps even to the researchers involved. (“But all our previous models were catatonic! We were just tweaking some parameters….”) If networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous embedded systems), it may seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly wakened.

And what happens a month or two (or a day or two) after that? I have only analogies to point to: The rise of humankind. We will be in the Post-Human era. And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I’d be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove … instead of twenty.

Well, maybe it won’t happen at all: Sometimes I try to imagine the symptoms that we should expect to see if the Singularity is not to develop. There are the widely respected arguments of Penrose [19] and Searle [22] against the practicality of machine sapience. In August of 1992, Thinking Machines Corporation held a workshop to investigate the question “How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks” [27]. As you might guess from the workshop’s title, the participants were not especially supportive of the arguments against machine intelligence. In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds. However, there was much debate about the raw hardware power that is present in organic brains. A minority felt that the largest 1992 computers were within three orders of magnitude of the power of the human brain. The majority of the participants agreed with Moravec’s estimate [17] that we are ten to forty years away from hardware parity. And yet there was another minority who pointed to [7] [21], and conjectured that the computational competence of single neurons may be far higher than generally believed. If so, our present computer hardware might be as much as _ten_ orders of magnitude short of the equipment we carry around in our heads. If this is true (or for that matter, if the Penrose or Searle critique is valid), we might never see a Singularity. Instead, in the early ’00s we would find our hardware performance curves beginning to level off — this because of our inability to automate the design work needed to support further hardware improvements. We’d end up with some _very_ powerful hardware, but without the ability to push it further. Commercial digital signal processing might be awesome, giving an analog appearance even to digital operations, but nothing would ever “wake up” and there would never be the intellectual runaway which is the essence of the Singularity. It would likely be seen as a golden age … and it would also be an end of progress. This is very like the future predicted by Gunther Stent. In fact, on page 137 of [25], Stent explicitly cites the development of transhuman intelligence as a sufficient condition to break his projections.

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. Even if all the governments of the world were to understand the “threat” and be in deadly fear of it, progress toward the goal would continue. In fiction, there have been stories of laws passed forbidding the construction of “a machine in the likeness of the human mind” [13]. In fact, the competitive advantage — economic, military, even artistic — of every advance in automation is so compelling that passing laws, or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that someone else will get them first.

Eric Drexler [8] has provided spectacular insights about how far technical improvement may go. He agrees that superhuman intelligences will be available in the near future — and that such entities pose a threat to the human status quo. But Drexler argues that we can confine such transhuman devices so that their results can be examined and used safely. This is I. J. Good’s ultraintelligent machine, with a dose of caution. I argue that confinement is intrinsically impractical. For the case of physical confinement: Imagine yourself locked in your home with only limited data access to the outside, to your masters. If those masters thought at a rate — say — one million times slower than you, there is little doubt that over a period of years (your time) you could come up with “helpful advice” that would incidentally set you free. (I call this “fast thinking” form of superintelligence “weak superhumanity”. Such a “weakly superhuman” entity would probably burn out in a few weeks of outside time. “Strong superhumanity” would be more than cranking up the clock speed on a human-equivalent mind. It’s hard to say precisely what “strong superhumanity” would be like, but the difference appears to be profound. Imagine running a dog mind at very high speed. Would a thousand years of doggy living add up to any human insight? (Now if the dog mind were cleverly rewired and _then_ run at high speed, we might see something different….) Many speculations about superintelligence seem to be based on the weakly superhuman model. I believe that our best guesses about the post-Singularity world can be obtained by thinking on the nature of strong superhumanity. I will return to this point later in the paper.)

Another approach to confinement is to build _rules_ into the mind of the created superhuman entity (for example, Asimov’s Laws [3]). I think that any rules strict enough to be effective would also produce a device whose ability was clearly inferior to the unfettered versions (and so human competition would favor the development of the those more dangerous models). Still, the Asimov dream is a wonderful one: Imagine a willing slave, who has 1000 times your capabilities in every way. Imagine a creature who could satisfy your every safe wish (whatever that means) and still have 99.9% of its time free for other activities. There would be a new universe we never really understood, but filled with benevolent gods (though one of _my_ wishes might be to become one of them).

If the Singularity can not be prevented or confined, just how bad could the Post-Human era be? Well … pretty bad. The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility. (Or as Eric Drexler put it of nanotechnology: Given all that such technology can do, perhaps governments would simply decide that they no longer need citizens!). Yet physical extinction may not be the scariest possibility. Again, analogies: Think of the different ways we relate to animals. Some of the crude physical abuses are implausible, yet…. In a Post-Human world there would still be plenty of niches where human equivalent automation would be desirable: embedded systems in autonomous devices, self-aware daemons in the lower functioning of larger sentients. (A strongly superhuman intelligence would likely be a Society of Mind [16] with some very competent components.) Some of these human equivalents might be used for nothing more than digital signal processing. They would be more like whales than humans. Others might be very human-like, yet with a one-sidedness, a _dedication_ that would put them in a mental hospital in our era. Though none of these creatures might be flesh-and-blood humans, they might be the closest things in the new enviroment to what we call human now. (I. J. Good had something to say about this, though at this late date the advice may be moot: Good [12] proposed a “Meta-Golden Rule”, which might be paraphrased as “Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors.” It’s a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and most of my friends don’t believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff is so hard to articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some sense that might say something about the plausibility of such kindness in this universe.)

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans’ natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet … we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is:

And it’s very likely that IA is a much easier road to the achievement of superhumanity than pure AI. In humans, the hardest development problems have already been solved. Building up from within ourselves ought to be easier than figuring out first what we really are and then building machines that are all of that. And there is at least conjectural precedent for this approach. Cairns-Smith [6] has speculated that biological life may have begun as an adjunct to still more primitive life based on crystalline growth. Lynn Margulis (in [15] and elsewhere) has made strong arguments that mutualism is a great driving force in evolution.

Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded. What goes on with AI will often have applications in IA, and vice versa. I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence. With that insight, we may see projects that are not as directly applicable as conventional interface and network design work, but which serve to advance us toward the Singularity along the IA path.

Here are some possible projects that take on special significance, given the IA point of view:

– Human/computer team automation: Take problems that are normally considered for purely machine solution (like hill-climbing problems), and design programs and interfaces that take a advantage of humans’ intuition and available computer hardware. Considering all the bizarreness of higher dimensional hill-climbing problems (and the neat algorithms that have been devised for their solution), there could be some very interesting displays and control tools provided to the human team member.

– Develop human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic generation capability of modern machines and the esthetic sensibility of humans. Of course, there has been an enormous amount of research in designing computer aids for artists, as labor saving tools. I’m suggesting that we explicitly aim for a greater merging of competence, that we explicitly recognize the cooperative approach that is possible. Karl Sims [23] has done wonderful work in this direction.

– Allow human/computer teams at chess tournaments. We already have programs that can play better than almost all humans. But how much work has been done on how this power could be used by a human, to get something even better? If such teams were allowed in at least some chess tournaments, it could have the positive effect on IA research that allowing computers in tournaments had for the corresponding niche in AI.

– Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a computer. (This is an aspect of IA that fits so well with known economic advantages that lots of effort is already being spent on it.)

– Develop more symmetrical decision support systems. A popular research/product area in recent years has been decision support systems. This is a form of IA, but may be too focussed on systems that are oracular. As much as the program giving the user information, there must be the idea of the user giving the program guidance.

– Use local area nets to make human teams that really work (ie, are more effective than their component members). This is generally the area of “groupware”, already a very popular commercial pursuit. The change in viewpoint here would be to regard the group activity as a combination organism. In one sense, this suggestion might be regarded as the goal of inventing a “Rules of Order” for such combination operations. For instance, group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical meetings. Expertise of individual human members could be isolated from ego issues such that the contribution of different members is focussed on the team project. And of course shared data bases could be used much more conveniently than in conventional committee operations. (Note that this suggestion is aimed at team operations rather than political meetings. In a political setting, the automation described above would simply enforce the power of the persons making the rules!)

– Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything else. The power and influence of even the present-day Internet is vastly underestimated. For instance, I think our contemporary computer systems would break under the weight of their own complexity if it weren’t for the edge that the USENET “group mind” gives the system administration and support people! The very anarchy of the worldwide net development is evidence of its potential. As connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn Margulis’ [15] vision of the biosphere as data processor recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).

– Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability. Nerve to silicon transducers can be made [14]. This is an exciting, near-term step toward direct communication.

– Direct links into brains seem feasible, if the bit rate is low: given human learning flexibility, the actual brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely selected. Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces.

– Plugging in to the optic trunk has the potential for bandwidths of 1 Mbit/second or so. But for this, we need to know the fine-scale architecture of vision, and we need to place an enormous web of electrodes with exquisite precision. If we want our high bandwidth connection to be _in addition_ to what paths are already present in the brain, the problem becomes vastly more intractable. Just sticking a grid of high-bandwidth receivers into a brain certainly won’t do it. But suppose that the high-bandwidth grid were present while the brain structure was actually setting up, as the embryo develops. That suggests:

– Animal embryo experiments. I wouldn’t expect any IA success in the first years of such research, but giving developing brains access to complex simulated neural structures might be very interesting to the people who study how the embryonic brain develops. In the long run, such experiments might produce animals with additional sense paths and interesting intellectual abilities.

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being. I think a closer look at the notion of strong superhumanity can show why that is.

But in this brightest and kindest world, the philosophical problems themselves become intimidating. A mind that stays at the same capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating tape loop than a person. (The most chilling picture I have seen of this is in [18].) To live indefinitely long, the mind itself must grow … and when it becomes great enough, and looks back … what fellow-feeling can it have with the soul that it was originally? Certainly the later being would be everything the original was, but so much vastly more. And so even for the individual, the Cairns-Smith or Lynn Margulis notion of new life growing incrementally out of the old must still be valid.

This “problem” about immortality comes up in much more direct ways. The notion of ego and self-awareness has been the bedrock of the hardheaded rationalism of the last few centuries. Yet now the notion of self-awareness is under attack from the Artificial Intelligence people (“self-awareness and other delusions”). Intelligence Amplification undercuts our concept of ego from another direction. The post-Singularity world will involve extremely high-bandwidth networking. A central feature of strongly superhuman entities will likely be their ability to communicate at variable bandwidths, including ones far higher than speech or written messages. What happens when pieces of ego can be copied and merged, when the size of a selfawareness can grow or shrink to fit the nature of the problems under consideration? These are essential features of strong superhumanity and the Singularity. Thinking about them, one begins to feel how essentially strange and different the Post-Human era will be — _no matter how cleverly and benignly it is brought to be_.

From one angle, the vision fits many of our happiest dreams: a time unending, where we can truly know one another and understand the deepest mysteries. From another angle, it’s a lot like the worst- case scenario I imagined earlier in this paper.

Which is the valid viewpoint? In fact, I think the new era is simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and evil. That frame is based on the idea of isolated, immutable minds connected by tenuous, low-bandwith links. But the post-Singularity world _does_ fit with the larger tradition of change and cooperation that started long ago (perhaps even before the rise of biological life). I think there _are_ notions of ethics that would apply in such an era. Research into IA and high-bandwidth communications should improve this understanding. I see just the glimmerings of this now [32]. There is Good’s Meta-Golden Rule; perhaps there are rules for distinguishing self from others on the basis of bandwidth of connection. And while mind and self will be vastly more labile than in the past, much of what we value (knowledge, memory, thought) need never be lost. I think Freeman Dyson has it right when he says [9]: “God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.”

[I wish to thank John Carroll of San Diego State University and Howard Davidson of Sun Microsystems for discussing the draft version of this paper with me.]

[2] Anderson, Poul, “Kings Who Die”, _If_, March 1962, p8-36. Reprinted in _Seven Conquests_, Poul Anderson, MacMillan Co., 1969.

[3] Asimov, Isaac, “Runaround”, _Astounding Science Fiction_, March 1942, p94. Reprinted in _Robot Visions_, Isaac Asimov, ROC, 1990. Asimov describes the development of his robotics stories in this book.

[4] Barrow, John D. and Frank J. Tipler, _The Anthropic Cosmological Principle_, Oxford University Press, 1986.

[5] Bear, Greg, “Blood Music”, _Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact_, June, 1983. Expanded into the novel _Blood Music_, Morrow, 1985.

[6] Cairns-Smith, A. G., _Seven Clues to the Origin of Life_, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

[7] Conrad, Michael _et al._, “Towards an Artificial Brain”, _BioSystems_, vol 23, pp175-218, 1989.

[8] Drexler, K. Eric, _Engines of Creation_, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986.

[9] Dyson, Freeman, _Infinite in All Directions_, Harper && Row, 1988.

[10] Dyson, Freeman, “Physics and Biology in an Open Universe”, _Review of Modern Physics_, vol 51, pp447-460, 1979.

[11] Good, I. J., “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”, in _Advances in Computers_, vol 6, Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff, eds, pp31-88, 1965, Academic Press.

[12] Good, I. J., [Help! I can’t find the source of Good’s Meta-Golden Rule, though I have the clear recollection of hearing about it sometime in the 1960s. Through the help of the net, I have found pointers to a number of related items. G. Harry Stine and Andrew Haley have written about metalaw as it might relate to extraterrestrials: G. Harry Stine, “How to Get along with Extraterrestrials … or Your Neighbor”, _Analog Science Fact- Science Fiction_, February, 1980, p39-47.] [13] Herbert, Frank, _Dune_, Berkley Books, 1985. However, this novel was serialized in _Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact_ in the 1960s.

[14] Kovacs, G. T. A. _et al._, “Regeneration Microelectrode Array for Peripheral Nerve Recording and Stimulation”, _IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering_, v 39, n 9, pp 893-902.

[15] Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, _Microcosmos, Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors_, Summit Books, 1986.

[16] Minsky, Marvin, _Society of Mind_, Simon and Schuster, 1985.

[17] Moravec, Hans, _Mind Children_, Harvard University Press, 1988.

[18] Niven, Larry, “The Ethics of Madness”, _If_, April 1967, pp82-108. Reprinted in _Neutron Star_, Larry Niven, Ballantine Books, 1968.

[19] Penrose, Roger, _The Emperor’s New Mind_, Oxford University Press, 1989.

[20] Platt, Charles, Private Communication.

[21] Rasmussen, S. _et al._, “Computational Connectionism within Neurons: a Model of Cytoskeletal Automata Subserving Neural Networks”, in _Emergent Computation_, Stephanie Forrest, ed., pp428-449, MIT Press, 1991.

[22] Searle, John R., “Minds, Brains, and Programs”, in _The Behavioral and Brain Sciences_, vol 3, Cambridge University Press, 1980. The essay is reprinted in _The Mind’s I_, edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, Basic Books, 1981 (my source for this reference). This reprinting contains an excellent critique of the Searle essay.

[23] Sims, Karl, “Interactive Evolution of Dynamical Systems”, Thinking Machines Corporation, Technical Report Series (published in _Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life_, Paris, MIT Press, December 1991.

[24] Stapledon, Olaf, _The Starmaker_, Berkley Books, 1961 (but from the date on forward, probably written before 1937).

[25] Stent, Gunther S., _The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress_, The Natural History Press, 1969.

[26] Swanwick Michael, _Vacuum Flowers_, serialized in _Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine_, December(?) 1986 – February 1987. Republished by Ace Books, 1988.

[27] Thearling, Kurt, “How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks”, a workshop at Thinking Machines Corporation, August 24-26, 1992. Personal Communication.

[28] Ulam, S., Tribute to John von Neumann, _Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society_, vol 64, nr 3, part 2, May 1958, pp1-49.

[29] Vinge, Vernor, “Bookworm, Run!”, _Analog_, March 1966, pp8-40. Reprinted in _True Names and Other Dangers_, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.

[30] Vinge, Vernor, “True Names”, _Binary Star Number 5_, Dell, 1981. Reprinted in _True Names and Other Dangers_, Vernor Vinge, Baen Books, 1987.

[31] Vinge, Vernor, First Word, _Omni_, January 1983, p10.

[32] Vinge, Vernor, To Appear [ 🙂 ].

Local Vinge page. My argument against the incomprehensibility of the Singularity. Me.

By Julian Dibbell — The Village Voice, 1993

A Rape in Cyberspace

(Or TINYSOCIETY, and How to Make One)

Chapter One of Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life, 1998. (First published in somewhat different form in The Village Voice, December 1993.)

They say he raped them that night. They say he did it with a cunning little doll, fashioned in their image and imbued with the power to make them do whatever he desired. They say that by manipulating the doll he forced them to have sex with him, and with each other, and to do horrible, brutal things to their own bodies. And though I wasn’t there that night, I think I can assure you that what they say is true, because it all happened right in the living room — right there amid the well-stocked bookcases and the sofas and the fireplace — of a house I came later to think of as my second home.

Call me Dr. Bombay. A good many months ago — let’s say about halfway between the first time you heard the words information superhighway and the first time you wished you never had — I found myself tripping now and then down the well-traveled information lane that leads to LambdaMOO, a very large and very busy rustic mansion built entirely of words. On the occasional free evening I’d sit down in my New York City apartment and type the commands that called those words onto my computer screen, dropping me with what seemed a warm electric thud inside the house’s darkened coat closet, where I checked my quotidian identity, stepped into the persona and appearance of a minor character from a long- gone television sitcom, and stepped out into the glaring chatter of the crowded living room. Sometimes, when the mood struck me, I emerged as a dolphin instead.

I won’t say why I chose to masquerade as Samantha Stephens’s outlandish cousin, or as the dolphin, or what first led me into the semifictional digital otherworlds known around the Internet as multi-user dimensions, or MUDs. This isn’t quite my story yet. It’s the story, for now, of an elusive congeries of flesh and bytes named Mr. Bungle, and of the ghostly sexual violence he committed in the halls of LambdaMOO, and most importantly of the ways his violence and his victims challenged the thousand and more residents of that surreal, magic-infested mansion to become, finally, the community so many of them already believed they were.

That I was myself already known to wander the mansion grounds from time to time has little direct bearing on the story’s events. I mention it only as a warning that my own perspective may be, at this late date, too steeped in the surreality and magic of the place to serve as an altogether appropriate guide. For the Bungle Affair raises questions that — here on the brink of a future in which human existence may find itself as tightly enveloped in digital environments as it is today in the architectural kind — demand a clear-eyed, sober, and unmystified consideration. It asks us to shut our ears for the time being to techno- utopian ecstasies and look without illusion upon the present possibilities for building, in the on-line spaces of this world, societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital. It asks us to behold the new bodies awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers, and to get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical ones. And perhaps most challengingly it asks us to wrap our late-modern ontologies, epistemologies, sexual ethics, and common sense around the curious notion of rape by voodoo doll — and to try not to warp them beyond recognition in the process.

In short, the Bungle Affair dares me to explain it to you without resort to dime-store mysticisms, and I fear I may have shape-shifted by the digital moonlight one too many times to be quite up to the task. But I will do what I can, and can do no better than to lead with the facts. For if nothing else about Mr. Bungle’s case is unambiguous, the facts at least are crystal clear.

The facts begin (as they often do) with a time and a place. The time was a Monday night in March, and the place, as I’ve said, was the living room — which, due largely to the centrality of its location and to a certain warmth of decor, is so invariably packed with chitchatters as to be roughly synonymous among LambdaMOOers with a party. So strong, indeed, is the sense of convivial common ground invested in the living room that a cruel mind could hardly imagine a better place in which to stage a violation of LambdaMOO’s communal spirit. And there was cruelty enough lurking in the appearance Mr. Bungle presented to the virtual world — he was at the time a fat, oleaginous, Bisquick-faced clown dressed in cum-stained harlequin garb and girdled with a mistletoe-and-hemlock belt whose buckle bore the quaint inscription KISS ME UNDER THIS, BITCH! But whether cruelty motivated his choice of crime scene is not among the established facts of the case. It is a fact only that he did choose the living room.

The remaining facts tell us a bit more about the inner world of Mr. Bungle, though only perhaps that it wasn’t a very cozy place. They tell us that he commenced his assault entirely unprovoked, at or about 10 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. That he began by using his voodoo doll to force one of the room’s occupants to sexually service him in a variety of more or less conventional ways. That this victim was exu, a Haitian trickster spirit of indeterminate gender, brown-skinned and wearing an expensive pearl gray suit, top hat, and dark glasses. That exu heaped vicious imprecations on him all the while and that he was soon ejected bodily from the room. That he hid himself away then in his private chambers somewhere on the mansion grounds and continued the attacks without interruption, since the voodoo doll worked just as well at a distance as in proximity. That he turned his attentions now to Moondreamer, a rather pointedly nondescript female character, tall, stout, and brown-haired, forcing her into unwanted liaisons with other individuals present in the room, among them exu, Kropotkin (the well-known radical), and Snugberry (the squirrel). That his actions grew progressively violent. That he made exu eat his/her own pubic hair. That he caused Moondreamer to violate herself with a piece of kitchen cutlery. That his distant laughter echoed evilly in the living room with every successive outrage. That he could not be stopped until at last someone summoned Iggy, a wise and trusted old-timer who brought with him a gun of near wizardly powers, a gun that didn’t kill but enveloped its targets in a cage impermeable even to a voodoo doll’s powers. That Iggy fired this gun at Mr. Bungle, thwarting the doll at last and silencing the evil, distant laughter.

These particulars, as I said, are unambiguous. But they are far from simple, for the simple reason that every set of facts in virtual reality (or VR, as the locals abbreviate it) is shadowed by a second, complicating set: the “real-life” facts. And while a certain tension invariably buzzes in the gap between the hard, prosaic RL facts and their more fluid, dreamy VR counterparts, the dissonance in the Bungle case is striking. No hideous clowns or trickster spirits appear in the RL version of the incident, no voodoo dolls or wizard guns, indeed no rape at all as any RL court of law has yet defined it. The actors in the drama were university students for the most part, and they sat rather undramatically before computer screens the entire time, their only actions a spidery flitting of fingers across standard QWERTY keyboards. No bodies touched. Whatever physical interaction occurred consisted of a mingling of electronic signals sent from sites spread out between New York City and Melbourne, Australia. Those signals met in LambdaMOO, certainly, just as the hideous clown and the living room party did, but what was LambdaMOO after all? Not an enchanted mansion or anything of the sort — just a middlingly complex database, maintained for experimental purposes inside a Xerox Corporation research computer in Palo Alto and open to public access via the Internet.

To be more precise about it, LambdaMOO was a MUD. Or to be yet more precise, it was a subspecies of MUD known as a MOO, which is short for “MUD, Object-Oriented.” All of which means that it was a kind of database especially designed to give users the vivid impression of moving through a physical space that in reality exists only as words filed away on a hard drive. When users dial into LambdaMOO, for instance, the program immediately presents them with a brief textual description of one of the rooms of the database’s fictional mansion (the coat closet, say). If the user wants to leave this room, she can enter a command to move in a particular direction and the database will replace the original description with a new one corresponding to the room located in the direction she chose. When the new description scrolls across the user’s screen it lists not only the fixed features of the room but all its contents at that moment — including things (tools, toys, weapons) and other users (each represented as a “character” over which the user has sole control).

As far as the database program is concerned, all of these entities — rooms, things, characters — are just different subprograms that the program allows to interact according to rules very roughly mimicking the laws of the physical world. Characters may not leave a room in a given direction, for instance, unless the room subprogram contains an “exit” at that compass point. And if a character “says” or “does” something (as directed by its user-owner via the say or the emote command), then only the users whose characters are also located in that room will see the output describing the statement or action. Aside from such basic constraints, however, LambdaMOOers are allowed a broad freedom to create — they can describe their characters any way they like, they can make rooms of their own and decorate them to taste, and they can build new objects almost at will. The combination of all this busy user activity with the hard physics of the database can certainly induce a lucid illusion of presence — but when all is said and done the only thing you really see when you visit LambdaMOO is a kind of slow-crawling script, lines of dialogue and stage direction creeping steadily up your computer screen.

Which is all just to say that, to the extent that Mr. Bungle’s assault happened in real life at all, it happened as a sort of Punch-and-Judy show, in which the puppets and the scenery were made of nothing more substantial than digital code and snippets of creative writing. The puppeteer behind Bungle that night, as it happened, was a young man logging in to the MOO from a New York University computer. He could have been Al Gore’s mother-in-law for all any of the others knew, however, and he could have written Bungle’s script that night any way he chose. He could have sent a command to print the message Mr._Bungle, smiling a saintly smile, floats angelic near the ceiling of the living room, showering joy and candy kisses down upon the heads of all below — and everyone then receiving output from the database’s subprogram #17 (a/k/a the “living room”) would have seen that sentence on their screens.

Instead, he entered sadistic fantasies into the “voodoo doll,” a subprogram that served the not-exactly kosher purpose of attributing actions to other characters that their users did not actually write. And thus a woman in Haverford, Pennsylvania, whose account on the MOO attached her to a character she called Moondreamer, was given the unasked-for opportunity to read the words As if against her will, Moondreamer jabs a steak knife up her ass, causing immense joy. You hear Mr._Bungle laughing evilly in the distance. And thus the woman in Seattle who had written herself the character called exu, with a view perhaps to tasting in imagination a deity’s freedom from the burdens of the gendered flesh, got to read similarly constructed sentences in which exu, messenger of the gods, lord of crossroads and communications, suffered a brand of degradation all-too-customarily reserved for the embodied female.

“Mostly voodoo dolls are amusing,” wrote exu on the evening after Bungle’s rampage, posting a public statement to the widely read in-MOO mailing list called *social-issues, a forum for debate on matters of import to the entire populace. “And mostly I tend to think that restrictive measures around here cause more trouble than they prevent. But I also think that Mr. Bungle was being a vicious, vile fuckhead, and I…want his sorry ass scattered from #17 to the Cinder Pile. I’m not calling for policies, trials, or better jails. I’m not sure what I’m calling for. Virtual castration, if I could manage it. Mostly, [this type of thing] doesn’t happen here. Mostly, perhaps I thought it wouldn’t happen to me. Mostly, I trust people to conduct themselves with some veneer of civility. Mostly, I want his ass.”

Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face — a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words’ emotional content was no mere fiction. The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL nor the VR facts alone can quite account for. Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that exu and Moondreamer were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim exu scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of “civility.” Where real life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any player’s life, limb, or material well-being, here now was the player exu issuing aggrieved and heartfelt calls for Mr. Bungle’s dismemberment. Ludicrously excessive by RL’s lights, woefully understated by VR’s, the tone of exu’s response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap between them.

Which is to say it made the only kind of sense that can be made of MUDly phenomena. For while the facts attached to any event born of a MUD’s strange, ethereal universe may march in straight, tandem lines separated neatly into the virtual and the real, its meaning lies always in that gap. You learn this axiom early in your life as a player, and it’s of no small relevance to the Bungle case that you often learn it between the sheets, so to speak. Netsex, tinysex, virtual sex — however you name it, in real-life reality it’s nothing more than a 900-line encounter stripped of even the vestigial physicality of the voice. And yet, as many a wide-eyed newbie can tell you, it’s possibly the headiest experience the very heady world of MUDs has to offer. Amid flurries of even the most cursorily described caresses, sighs, or penetrations, the glands do engage, and often as throbbingly as they would in a real-life assignation — sometimes even more so, given the combined power of anonymity and textual suggestiveness to unshackle deep-seated fantasies. And if the virtual setting and the interplayer vibe are right, who knows? The heart may engage as well, stirring up passions as strong as many that bind lovers who observe the formality of trysting in the flesh.

To participate, therefore, in this disembodied enactment of life’s most body-centered activity is to risk the realization that when it comes to sex, perhaps the body in question is not the physical one at all, but its psychic double, the bodylike self-representation we carry around in our heads — and that whether we present that body to another as a meat puppet or a word puppet is not nearly as significant a distinction as one might have thought. I know, I know, you’ve read Foucault and your mind is not quite blown by the notion that sex is never so much an exchange of fluids as as it is an exchange of signs. But trust your friend Dr. Bombay, it’s one thing to grasp the notion intellectually and quite another to feel it coursing through your veins amid the virtual steam of hot netnookie. And it’s a whole other mind-blowing trip altogether to encounter it thus as a college frosh, new to the net and still in the grip of hormonal hurricanes and high-school sexual mythologies. The shock can easily reverberate throughout an entire young worldview. Small wonder, then, that a newbie’s first taste of MUD sex is often also the first time she or he surrenders wholly to the quirky terms of MUDish ontology, recognizing in a full-bodied way that what happens inside a MUD-made world is neither exactly real nor exactly make-believe, but nonetheless profoundly, compellingly, and emotionally true.

And small wonder indeed that the sexual nature of Mr. Bungle’s crime provoked such powerful feelings, and not just in exu (who, be it noted, was in real life a theory-savvy doctoral candidate and a longtime MOOer, but just as baffled and overwhelmed by the force of her own reaction, she later would attest, as any panting undergrad might have been). Even players who had never experienced MUD rape (the vast majority of male-presenting characters, but not as large a majority of the female-presenting as might be hoped) immediately appreciated its gravity and were moved to condemnation of the perp. exu’s missive to *social-issues followed a strongly worded one from Iggy (“Well, well,” it began, “no matter what else happens on Lambda, I can always be sure that some jerk is going to reinforce my low opinion of humanity”) and was itself followed by others from Zakariah, Wereweasel, Crawdaddy, and emmeline. Moondreamer also let her feelings (“pissed”) be known. And even Xander, the Clueless Samaritan who had responded to Bungle’s cries for help and uncaged him shortly after the incident, expressed his regret once apprised of Bungle’s deeds, which he allowed to be “despicable.”

A sense was brewing that something needed to be done — done soon and in something like an organized fashion — about Mr. Bungle, in particular, and about MUD rape, in general. Regarding the general problem, emmeline, who identified herself as a survivor of both virtual rape (“many times over”) and real- life sexual assault, floated a cautious proposal for a MOO-wide powwow on the subject of virtual sex offenses and what mechanisms if any might be put in place to deal with their future occurrence. As for the specific problem, the answer no doubt seemed obvious to many. But it wasn’t until the evening of the second day after the incident that exu, finally and rather solemnly, gave it voice:

“I am requesting that Mr. Bungle be toaded for raping Moondreamer and I. I have never done this before, and have thought about it for days. He hurt us both.”

That was all. Three simple sentences posted to *social. Reading them, an outsider might never guess that they were an application for a death warrant. Even an outsider familiar with other MUDs might not guess it, since in many of them “toading” still refers to a command that, true to the gameworlds’ sword-and-sorcery origins, simply turns a player into a toad, wiping the player’s description and attributes and replacing them with those of the slimy amphibian. Bad luck for sure, but not quite as bad as what happens when the same command is invoked in the MOOish strains of MUD: not only are the description and attributes of the toaded player erased, but the account itself goes too. The annihilation of the character, thus, is total.

And nothing less than total annihilation, it seemed, would do to settle LambdaMOO’s accounts with Mr. Bungle. Within minutes of the posting of exu’s appeal, HortonWho, the Australian Deleuzean, who had witnessed much of the attack from the back room of his suburban Melbourne home, seconded the motion with a brief message crisply entitled “Toad the fukr.” HortonWho’s posting was seconded almost as quickly by that of Kropotkin, covictim of Mr. Bungle and well-known radical, who in real life happened also to be married to the real-life exu. And over the course of the next 24 hours as many as 50 players made it known, on *social and in a variety of other forms and forums, that they would be pleased to see Mr. Bungle erased from the face of the MOO. And with dissent so far confined to a dozen or so antitoading hardliners, the numbers suggested that the citizenry was indeed moving towards a resolve to have Bungle’s virtual head.

There was one small but stubborn obstacle in the way of this resolve, however, and that was a curious state of social affairs known in some quarters of the MOO as the New Direction. It was all very fine, you see, for the LambdaMOO rabble to get it in their heads to liquidate one of their peers, but when the time came to actually do the deed it would require the services of a nobler class of character. It would require a wizard. Master-programmers of the MOO, spelunkers of the database’s deepest code-structures and custodians of its day-to-day administrative trivia, wizards are also the only players empowered to issue the toad command, a feature maintained on nearly all MUDs as a quick-and-dirty means of social control. But the wizards of LambdaMOO, after years of adjudicating all manner of interplayer disputes with little to show for it but their own weariness and the smoldering resentment of the general populace, had decided they’d had enough of the social sphere. And so, four months before the Bungle incident, the archwizard Haakon (known in RL as Pavel Curtis, Xerox researcher and LambdaMOO’s principal architect) formalized this decision in a document called “LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction,” which he placed in the living room for all to see. In it, Haakon announced that the wizards from that day forth were pure technicians. From then on, they would make no decisions affecting the social life of the MOO, but only implement whatever decisions the community as a whole directed them to. From then on, it was decreed, LambdaMOO would just have to grow up and solve its problems on its own.

Faced with the task of inventing its own self-governance from scratch, the LambdaMOO population had so far done what any other loose, amorphous agglomeration of individuals would have done: they’d let it slide. But now the task took on new urgency. Since getting the wizards to toad Mr. Bungle (or to toad the likes of him in the future) required a convincing case that the cry for his head came from the community at large, then the community itself would have to be defined; and if the community was to be convincingly defined, then some form of social organization, no matter how rudimentary, would have to be settled on. And thus, as if against its will, the question of what to do about Mr. Bungle began to shape itself into a sort of referendum on the political future of the MOO. Arguments broke out on *social and elsewhere that had only superficially to do with Bungle (since everyone seemed to agree he was a cad) and everything to do with where the participants stood on LambdaMOO’s crazy-quilty political map. Parliamentarian legalist types argued that unfortunately Bungle could not legitimately be toaded at all, since there were no explicit MOO rules against rape, or against just about anything else — and the sooner such rules were established, they added, and maybe even a full-blown judiciary system complete with elected officials and prisons to enforce those rules, the better. Others, with a royalist streak in them, seemed to feel that Bungle’s as-yet-unpunished outrage only proved this New Direction silliness had gone on long enough, and that it was high time the wizardocracy returned to the position of swift and decisive leadership their player class was born to.

And then there were what I’ll call the technolibertarians. For them, MUD rapists were of course assholes, but the presence of assholes on the system was a technical inevitability, like noise on a phone line, and best dealt with not through repressive social disciplinary mechanisms but through the timely deployment of defensive software tools. Some asshole blasting violent, graphic language at you? Don’t whine to the authorities about it — hit the @gag command and said asshole’s statements will be blocked from your screen (and only yours). It’s simple, it’s effective, and it censors no one.

But the Bungle case was rather hard on such arguments. For one thing, the extremely public nature of the living room meant that gagging would spare the victims only from witnessing their own violation, but not from having others witness it. You might want to argue that what those victims didn’t directly experience couldn’t hurt them, but consider how that wisdom would sound to a woman who’d been, say, fondled by strangers while passed out drunk in the middle of a party and you have a rough idea how it might go over with a crowd of hard-core MOOers. Consider, for another thing, that many of the biologically female participants in the Bungle debate had been around long enough to grow lethally weary of the gag-and-get- over-it school of virtual-rape counseling, with its fine line between empowering victims and holding them responsible for their own suffering, and its shrugging indifference to the window of pain between the moment the rape-text starts flowing and the moment a gag shuts it off. From the outset it was clear that the technolibertarians were going to have to tiptoe through this issue with care, and for the most part they did.

Yet no position was trickier to maintain than that of the MOO’s resident anarchists. Like the technolibbers, the anarchists didn’t care much for punishments or policies or power elites. Like them, they hoped the MOO could be a place where people interacted fulfillingly without the need for such things. But their high hopes were complicated, in general, by a somewhat less thoroughgoing faith in technology (Even if you can’t tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools — read a slogan written into one anarchist player’s self-description — it is a damned good place to start). And at present they were additionally complicated by the fact that the most vocal anarchists in the discussion were none other than exu, Kropotkin, and HortonWho, who wanted to see Mr. Bungle toaded as badly as anyone did.

Needless to say, a pro-death penalty platform is not an especially comfortable one for an anarchist to sit on, so these particular anarchists were now at great pains to sever the conceptual ties between toading and capital punishment. Toading, they insisted (almost convincingly), was much more closely analogous to banishment; it was a kind of turning of the communal back on the offending party, a collective action which, if carried out properly, was entirely consistent with anarchist models of community. And carrying it out properly meant first and foremost building a consensus around it — a messy process for which there were no easy technocratic substitutes. It was going to take plenty of good old-fashioned, jawbone-intensive grassroots organizing.

So that when the time came, at 7 p.m. PST on the evening of the third day after the occurrence in the living room, to gather in emmeline’s room for her proposed real-time open conclave, Kropotkin and exu were among the first to arrive. But this was hardly to be an anarchist-dominated affair, for the room was crowding rapidly with representatives of all the MOO’s political stripes, and even a few wizards. Hagbard showed up, and Aurea and Quanto, Spaff, TomTraceback, Lithium and Bloof, ShermieRocko, Silver Surfer, MaoTseHedgehog, Toothpick — the names piled up and the discussion gathered momentum under their weight. Arguments multiplied and mingled, players talked past and through each other, the textual clutter of utterances and gestures filled up the screen like thick cigar smoke. Peaking in number at around 30, this was one of the largest crowds that ever gathered in a single LambdaMOO chamber, and while emmeline had given her place a description that made it infinite in expanse and fluid in form, it now seemed anything but roomy. You could almost feel the claustrophobic air of the place, dank and overheated by virtual bodies, pressing against your skin.

I know you could because I too was there, in one of those pivotal accidents of personal history one always wants later to believe were approached with a properly solemn awareness of the moment’s portent. Almost as invariably, of course, the truth is that one wanders into such occasions utterly without a clue, and so it was with me that night. Completely ignorant of any of the goings-on that had led to the meeting, I showed up mainly to see what the crowd was about, and though I observed the proceedings for a good while, I confess I found it hard to grasp what was going on. I was still the rankest of newbies then, my MOO legs still too unsteady to make the leaps of faith, logic, and empathy required to meet the spectacle on its own terms. I was fascinated by the concept of virtual rape, but I was even more so by the notion that anyone could take it altogether seriously.

In this, though, I found myself in a small and mostly silent minority, for the discussion that raged around me was of an almost unrelieved earnestness, bent it seemed on examining every last aspect and implication of Mr. Bungle’s crime. There were the central questions, of course: thumbs up or down on Bungle’s virtual existence? And if down, how then to insure that his toading was not just some isolated lynching but a first step toward shaping LambdaMOO into a legitimate community? Surrounding these, however, a tangle of weighty side issues proliferated. What, some wondered, was the real-life legal status of the offense? Could Bungle’s university administrators punish him for sexual harassment? Could he be prosecuted under California state laws against obscene phone calls? Little enthusiasm was shown for pursuing either of these lines of action, which testifies both to the uniqueness of the crime and to the nimbleness with which the discussants were negotiating its idiosyncracies. Many were the casual references to Bungle’s deed as simply “rape,” but these in no way implied that the players had lost sight of all distinctions between the virtual and physical versions, or that they believed Bungle should be dealt with in the same way a real-life criminal would. He had committed a MOO crime, and his punishment, if any, would be meted out via the MOO.

On the other hand, little patience was shown toward any attempts to downplay the seriousness of what Mr. Bungle had done. When the affable HerkieCosmo proposed, more in the way of an hypothesis than an assertion, that “perhaps it’s better to release…violent tendencies in a virtual environment rather than in real life,” he was tut-tutted so swiftly and relentlessly that he withdrew the hypothesis altogether, apologizing humbly as he did so. Not that the assembly was averse to putting matters into a more philosophical perspective. “Where does the body end and the mind begin?” young Quastro asked, amid recurring attempts to fine-tune the differences between real and virtual violence. “Is not the mind a part of the body?” “In MOO, the body IS the mind,” offered HerkieCosmo gamely, and not at all implausibly, demonstrating the ease with which very knotty metaphysical conundrums come undone in VR. The not- so-aptly named Obvious seemed to agree, arriving after sufficient consideration of the nature of Bungle’s crime at the hardly novel yet now somehow newly resonant conjecture that “all reality might consist of ideas, who knows.”

On these and other matters the anarchists, the libertarians, the legalists, the wizardists — and the wizards – – all had their thoughtful say. But as the evening wore on and the talk grew more heated and more heady, it seemed increasingly clear that the vigorous intelligence being brought to bear on this swarm of issues wasn’t going to result in anything remotely like resolution. The perspectives were just too varied, the meme-scape just too slippery. Again and again, arguments that looked at first to be heading in a decisive direction ended up chasing their own tails; and slowly, depressingly, a dusty haze of irrelevance gathered over the proceedings.

It was almost a relief, therefore, when midway through the evening Mr. Bungle himself, the living, breathing cause of all this talk, teleported into the room. Not that it was much of a surprise. Oddly enough, in the three days since his release from Iggy’s cage, Bungle had returned more than once to wander the public spaces of LambdaMOO, walking willingly into one of the fiercest storms of ill will and invective ever to rain down on a player. He’d been taking it all with a curious and mostly silent passivity, and when challenged face to virtual face by both exu and the genderless elder statescharacter PatSoftly to defend himself on *social, he’d demurred, mumbling something about Christ and expiation. He was equally quiet now, and his reception was still uniformly cool. exu fixed an arctic stare on him — no hate, no anger, no interest at all. Just…watching. Others were more actively unfriendly. “Asshole,” spat Karl Porcupine, “creep.” But the harshest of the MOO’s hostility toward him had already been vented, and the attention he drew now was motivated more, it seemed, by the opportunity to probe the rapist’s mind, to find out what made it tick and if possible how to get it to tick differently. In short, they wanted to know why he’d done it. So they asked him.

And Mr. Bungle thought about it. And as eddies of discussion and debate continued to swirl around him, he thought about it some more. And then he said this:

“I engaged in a bit of a psychological device that is called thought-polarization, the fact that this is not RL simply added to heighten the affect of the device. It was purely a sequence of events with no consequence on my RL existence.”

They might have known. Stilted though its diction was, the gist of the answer was simple, and something many in the room had probably already surmised: Mr. Bungle was a psycho. Not, perhaps, in real life — but then in real life it’s possible for reasonable people to assume, as Bungle clearly did, that what transpires between word-costumed characters within the boundaries of a make-believe world is, if not mere play, then at most some kind of emotional laboratory experiment. Inside the MOO, however, such thinking marked a person as one of two basically subcompetent types. The first was the newbie, in which case the confusion was understandable, since there were few MOOers who had not, upon their first visits as anonymous “guest” characters, mistaken the place for a vast playpen in which they might act out their wildest fantasies without fear of censure. Only with time and the acquisition of a fixed character do players tend to make the critical passage from anonymity to pseudonymity, developing the concern for their character’s reputation that marks the attainment of virtual adulthood. But while Mr. Bungle hadn’t been around as long as most MOOers, he’d been around long enough to leave his newbie status behind, and his delusional statement therefore placed him among the second type: the sociopath.

And as there is but small percentage in arguing with a head case, the room’s attention gradually abandoned Mr. Bungle and returned to the discussions that had previously occupied it. But if the debate had been edging toward ineffectuality before, Bungle’s anticlimactic appearance had evidently robbed it of any forward motion whatsoever. What’s more, from his lonely corner of the room Mr. Bungle kept issuing periodic expressions of a prickly sort of remorse, interlaced with sarcasm and belligerence, and though it was hard to tell if he wasn’t still just conducting his experiments, some people thought his regret genuine enough that maybe he didn’t deserve to be toaded after all. Logically, of course, discussion of the principal issues at hand didn’t require unanimous belief that Bungle was an irredeemable bastard, but now that cracks were showing in that unanimity, the last of the meeting’s fervor seemed to be draining out through them.

People started drifting away. Mr. Bungle left first, then others followed — one by one, in twos and threes, hugging friends and waving goodnight. By 9:45 only a handful remained, and the great debate had wound down into casual conversation, the melancholy remains of another fruitless good idea. The arguments had been well-honed, certainly, and perhaps might prove useful in some as-yet-unclear long run. But at this point what seemed clear was that emmeline’s meeting had died, at last, and without any practical results to mark its passing.

It was also at this point, most likely, that TomTraceback reached his decision. TomTraceback was a wizard, a taciturn sort of fellow who’d sat brooding on the sidelines all evening. He hadn’t said a lot, but what he had said, there and elsewhere, indicated that he took the crime committed against exu and Moondreamer very seriously, and that he felt no particular compassion towards the character who had committed it. But on the other hand he had made it equally plain that he took the elimination of a fellow player just as seriously, and moreover that he had no desire to return to the days of wizardly intervention. It must have been difficult, therefore, to reconcile the conflicting impulses churning within him at that moment. In fact, it was probably impossible, for though he did tend to believe that the consensus on *social was sufficient proof of the MOO’s desire to see capital justice done in the Bungle case, he was also well aware that under the present order of things nothing but his own conscience could tell him, ultimately, whether to ratify that consensus or not. As much as he would have liked to make himself an instrument of the MOO’s collective will, therefore, there was no escaping the fact that he must in the final analysis either act alone or not act at all.

So TomTraceback acted alone.

He told the lingering few players in the room that he had to go, and then he went. It was a minute or two before ten. He did it quietly and he did it privately, but all anyone had to do to know he’d done it was to type the @who command, which was normally what you typed if you wanted to know a player’s present location and the time he last logged in. But if you had run a @who on Mr. Bungle not too long after TomTraceback left emmeline’s room, the database would have told you something different.

Mr. Bungle, it would have said, is not the name of any player.

The date, as it happened, was April Fool’s Day, but this was no joke: Mr. Bungle was truly dead and truly gone.

They say that LambdaMOO wasn’t really the same after Mr. Bungle’s toading. They say as well that nothing really changed. And though it skirts the fuzziest of dream-logics to say that both these statements are true, the MOO is just the sort of fuzzy, dreamlike place in which such contradictions thrive.

Certainly the Bungle Affair marked the end of LambdaMOO’s brief epoch of rudderless social drift. The rash of public-spiritedness engendered by the events might alone have led in time to some more formal system of communal self-definition, but in the end it was the archwizard Haakon who made sure of it. Away on business for the duration of the episode, Haakon returned to find its wreckage strewn across the tiny universe he’d set in motion. The death of a player, the trauma of several others, and the nerve- wracked complaints of his colleague TomTraceback presented themselves to his concerned and astonished attention, and he resolved to see if he couldn’t learn some lesson from it all. For the better part of a day he puzzled over the record of events and arguments left in *social, then he sat pondering the chaotically evolving shape of his creation, and at the day’s end he descended once again into the social arena of the MOO with another history-altering proclamation.

It was to be his last, for what he now decreed was the final, missing piece of the New Direction. In a few days, Haakon announced, he would build into the database a system of petitions and ballots whereby anyone could put to popular vote any social scheme requiring wizardly powers for its implementation, with the results of the vote to be binding on the wizards. At last and for good, the awkward gap between the will of the players and the efficacy of the technicians would be closed. And though some anarchists grumbled about the irony of Haakon’s dictatorially imposing universal suffrage on an unconsulted populace, in general the citizens of LambdaMOO seemed to find it hard to fault a system more purely democratic than any that could ever exist in real life. A few months and a dozen ballot measures later, widespread participation in the new regime had already produced a small arsenal of mechanisms for dealing with the types of violence that called the system into being. MOO residents now had access to a @boot command, for instance, with which to summarily eject berserker “guest” characters. And players could bring suit against one another through an ad hoc mediation system in which mutually agreed-upon judges had at their disposition the full range of wizardly punishments — up to and including the capital.

Yet the continued dependence on extermination as the ultimate keeper of the peace suggested that this new MOO order was perhaps not built on the most solid of foundations. For if life on LambdaMOO began to acquire more coherence in the wake of the toading, death retained all the fuzziness of pre-Bungle days. This truth was rather dramatically borne out, not too many days after Bungle departed, by the arrival of a strange new character named Dr. Jest. There was a forceful eccentricity to the newcomer’s manner, but the oddest thing about his style was its striking yet unnameable familiarity. And when he developed the annoying habit of stuffing fellow players into a jar containing a tiny simulacrum of a certain deceased rapist, the source of this familiarity became obvious:

Mr. Bungle had risen from the grave.

In itself, Bungle’s reincarnation as Dr. Jest was a remarkable turn of events, but perhaps even more remarkable was the utter lack of amazement with which the LambdaMOO public took note of it. To be sure, many residents were appalled by the brazenness of Bungle’s return. In fact, one of the first petitions circulated under the new voting system was a request for Dr. Jest’s toading that almost immediately gathered several dozen signatures (but failed in the end to reach ballot status). Yet few were unaware of the ease with which the toad proscription could be circumvented — all the toadee had to do (all the ur- Bungle at NYU presumably had done) was to go to the minor hassle of acquiring a new Internet account, and LambdaMOO’s character registration program would then simply treat the known felon as an entirely new and innocent person. Nor was this ease necessarily understood to represent a failure of toading’s social disciplinary function. On the contrary, it only underlined the truism (repeated many times throughout the debate over Mr. Bungle’s fate) that his punishment, ultimately, had been no more or less symbolic than his crime.

What was surprising, however, was that Mr. Bungle/Dr. Jest appeared to have taken the symbolism to heart. Dark themes still obsessed him — the objects he created gave off wafts of Nazi imagery and medical torture — but he no longer radiated the aggressively antisocial vibes he had before. He was a lot less unpleasant to look at (the outrageously seedy clown description had been replaced by that of a mildly creepy but actually rather natty young man, with blue eyes…suggestive of conspiracy, untamed eroticism and perhaps a sense of understanding of the future), and aside from the occasional jar-stuffing incident, he was also a lot less dangerous to be around. It seemed obvious, at least to me, that he’d undergone some sort of personal transformation in the days since I’d first glimpsed him back in emmeline’s crowded room — nothing radical maybe, but powerful nonetheless, and resonant enough with my own experience, I felt, that it might be more than professionally interesting to talk with him, and perhaps compare notes.

For I too was undergoing a transformation in the aftermath of that night in emmeline’s — and was increasingly uncertain what to make of it. As I pursued my runaway fascination with the discussion I had heard there, as I pored over the *social debate and got to know exu and some of the other victims and witnesses, I could feel my newbie consciousness falling away from me. Where before I’d found it hard to take virtual rape seriously, I now was finding it difficult to remember how I could ever not have taken it seriously. I was proud to have arrived at this perspective — it felt like an exotic sort of achievement, and it definitely made my ongoing experience of the MOO a richer one.

But it was also having some unsettling effects on the way I looked at the rest of the world. Sometimes, for instance, it grew difficult for me to understand why RL society classifies RL rape alongside crimes against person or property. Since rape can occur without any physical pain or damage, I found myself reasoning, then it must be classed as a crime against the mind — more intimately and deeply hurtful, to be sure, than cross burnings, wolf whistles, and virtual rape, but undeniably located on the same conceptual continuum. I did not, however, conclude as a result that rapists were protected in any fashion by the First Amendment. Quite the opposite, in fact: the more seriously I took the notion of virtual rape, the less seriously I was able to take the tidy division of the world into the symbolic and the real that underlies the very notion of freedom of speech.

Let me assure you, though, that I did not at the time adopt these thoughts as full-fledged arguments, nor am I now presenting them as such. I offer them, rather, as a picture of the sort of mind-set that my initial encounters with a virtual world inspired in me. I offer them also, therefore, as a kind of prophecy. For whatever else these thoughts were telling me, I have come to hear in them an announcement of the final stages of our decades-long passage into the Information Age, a paradigm shift that the classic liberal firewall between word and deed (itself a product of an earlier paradigm shift commonly known as the Enlightenment) is not likely to survive intact. After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era’s definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment — from the growing dependence of economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized words and numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA — knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.

And it was precisely this logic, I was beginning to understand, that provided whatever real magic LambdaMOO had to offer — not the fictive trappings of voodoo and shapeshifting and wizardry, but the conflation of speech and act that’s inevitable in any computer-mediated world, be it Lambda or the increasingly wired world at large. This was dangerous magic, to be sure, a potential threat — if misconstrued or misapplied — to our always precarious freedoms of expression, and as someone who lives by his words I dared not take the threat lightly. And yet, on the other hand, I could no longer convince myself that our wishful insulation of language from the realm of action had ever been anything but a valuable kludge, a philosophically imperfect stopgap against oppression that would just have to do till something truer and more elegant came along.

Was I wrong to think this truer, more elegant thing might be found on LambdaMOO? I did not know. I continued, in my now and then visits, to seek it there, sensing its presence just below the surface of every interaction, yet increasingly I sensed as well that if I really wanted to see what lay beneath those surfaces — to glimpse unveiled whatever there was of genuine historical novelty in VR’s slippery social and philosophical dynamics — I was going to have to radically deepen my acquaintance with the MOO somehow.

For a time I considered the possibility, as I said, that discussing with Dr. Jest our shared experience of the workings of the place might be a step towards just such a breakthrough. But when that notion first occurred to me, I still felt somewhat intimidated by his lingering criminal aura, and I hemmed and hawed a good long time before finally resolving to drop him MOO-mail suggesting we get together. By then it appeared to be too late. For reasons known only to himself, Dr. Jest had stopped logging in. Maybe he’d grown bored with the MOO. Maybe the loneliness of ostracism had gotten to him. Maybe a psycho whim had carried him far away or maybe he’d quietly acquired a third character and started life over with a cleaner slate.

Wherever he’d gone, though, he left behind the room he’d created for himself — a treehouse tastefully decorated with rare-book shelves, an operating table, and a life-size William S. Burroughs doll — and he left it unlocked. So I took to checking in there occasionally, heading out of my own cozy nook (inside a TV set inside the little red hotel inside the Monopoly board inside the dining room of LambdaMOO) and teleporting on over to the treehouse, where the room description always told me Dr. Jest was present but asleep, in the conventional depiction for disconnected characters. The not-quite-emptiness of the abandoned room invariably instilled in me an uncomfortable mix of melancholy and the creeps, and I would stick around only on the off chance that Dr. Jest might wake up, say hello, and share his understanding of the future with me.

It happens, in fact, that Dr. Jest did eventually rise again from his epic sleep. But what wisdom he had to offer on that occasion I couldn’t tell you, for I had given up the habit of my skittish stakeouts by then. Some final transformation had come over me between visits to that lonely place: the complex magic of the MOO grew gradually to interest me less and less as a way of understanding the future and more and more as a way of living the present, until one day I teleported home from Dr. Jest’s treehouse for the last time, determined to wait no longer for a consultation with my fellow doctor to give me what I wanted from the MOO, but to wrest it instead from the very heart of the place. I was resolved now, in other words, to make a life there — to loosen for a while the RL ties that kept me still a sort of tourist on the MOO and to give in, body and soul, to the same powerful gravity that kept so many other MOOers logged on day after day and for hours at a time.

And in the end that’s just what I did, so that for a brief, unforgettable season the buzzing haze of VR came at last to envelop my existence: my small daily dramas were absorbed into the MOO’s teeming reservoir of small daily dramas, my labors were directed as much toward the ongoing construction of that virtual world as toward the quotidian maintenance of my stake in the material one, and my days were swept by the same broad currents of MOO history that gave rise to the Bungle Affair and the momentous social changes that followed on it.

That is all quite another story, of course. Yet as I said before, it begins where Mr. Bungle’s ends, and there remains now only a very little of his to tell. Dr. Jest did finally reawaken, it’s true, one late-December day — but he didn’t even make it to January before he decided, for no apparent reason but old times’ sake, to go on a late-night Bungle-grade rampage through the living room, thus all but formally requesting to be hauled before an official mediator and toaded with a vengeance. The new MOO polity promptly obliged, and I, still busily contriving to loosen those RL ties in preparation for my full-time residency, missed by days my last chance to hear the doctor’s story from his own virtual mouth.

But this was no great loss, I suppose, for after all what more could I have learned? Dr. Jest’s relapse into mindless digital violence, mocking as it did my wishful projection of hard-earned wisdom onto him, was lesson enough, driving home what Bungle’s story in its fullest implications should have already taught me by then: that nothing in the MOO was ever quite what one imagined it to be.

I would still have to learn this lesson many times over, of course. I’d learn it again when on the eve of my immersion in VR two separate and credible sources revealed to me that the virtual psychosis of Mr. Bungle had been even starker than anyone guessed: that the Bungle account had been the more or less communal property of an entire NYU dorm floor, that the young man at the keyboard on the evening of the rape had acted not alone but surrounded by fellow students calling out suggestions and encouragement, that conceivably none of those people were speaking for Bungle when he showed up in emmeline’s room to answer for the crime, that Dr. Jest himself, thought commonly to have reincarnated the whole Bungle and nothing but the Bungle, in fact embodied just one member of the original mob — just one scattered piece of a self more irreparably fragmented than any RL multiple personality could ever fear to be.

I don’t know exactly how often it occurred to me, in the VR-saturated months to follow, that other such shards of Mr. Bungle’s shattered identity might lurk among the ethereal population I moved through on a daily basis. But if they were there they never made themselves known, and I certainly never tried to sniff them out. It was far too late for that: the time had come for me to live in LambdaMOO, and I no longer sought the company of ghosts.

By Hunter S. Thompson — Cycle World, 1995

SONG OF THE SAUSAGE CREATURE

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Dr. Thompson puts the Ducati 900SP to the ultimate test&3×2014;the Test of Naked Truth—on the strange and dangerous blacktop of the Real World

THERE ARE SOME THINGS NOBODY NEEDS IN THIS world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp speed 900cc cafe-racer is one of them-but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.

Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktopVoads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and-too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have^, to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack-and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you…There is, after all, not a pig’s eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.

When Cycle World called me to ask if I would roadtest the new Harley Road King. I got uppity and said I’d rather have a Ducati superhike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited.

“Hot damn,” they said. “We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away.” “Balls,” I said. “Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers.”

The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess-turn is quite another.

But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest deereasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.

Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures…I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days-and many nights for that matter-and it is one of my finest addictions….

1 am not without sears on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. 1 still feel a shudder in my spine every time 1 see a picture of a Vincent Black Shadow, or w hen I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple…I have visions of compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called “Bess” sews the flaps of my scalp together w ith a stitching drill.

Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and others hear the song of the Sausage Creature.

When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do w ith it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said 1 should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the polo crowd.

The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew 1 would go for it.

Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe-racer. And include some license plates, so he’ll think it’s a streetbike. He’s queer for anything fast.

Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. 1 bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as “the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine.” 1 have ridden a 500-pound Vincent

BEING SHOT OUT OF A GANNON Wl LL ALWAYS BE BETTER THAN BEING SQUEEZED OUT OF A TUBE. THAT IS WHY GOD MADE FAST MOTORGYGLES, BUBBA… I’VE ALWAYS BELIEVED THIS, IN SPITE OF TH E TROUBLE IT’S GAUSED ME.

through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 Triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid…1 have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.

Some people will tell you that slow is good-and it may be, on some days-but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba….

So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style bike in my garage, I realized I was back in the roadtesting business.

The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport doublebarreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me w ith feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same w^ay. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about who would be first to help me evaluate my new toy…And 1 did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long w;ay from Daytona or even top-fuel challengesprints on the Pacific Coast Highway, where teams of big-bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on against each other in death-defying games of “chicken” at 100 miles an hour….

No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street in L.A. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we feel like it…For that we need fine Machinery.

Which we had-no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for reasons of their ow n, to send me the 900SP for testing-rather than their 916 crazy-fast, stateof-the-art superbike track-racer. It was far too fast, they said-and prohibitively expensive-to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they’re world-class Cafe Racers.

The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.

Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. 1 had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. 1 was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn’t find…I am too tall for these new-age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be.

Mid-size Italian pimps who like to race from one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a Hat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.

I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed on the concrete bottom, Hesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, f__ked-up for the rest of its life.

We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time—and there is always Pain in that…But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM!

Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on your tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.

No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.

On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4000 rpm….

And that’s when it got its second wind. From 4000 to 6000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds-and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth and sixth. Ho, ho.

I never got to sixth gear, and I didn’t get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you’re ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.

When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This 1 unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.

It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as 1 passed them, but my mouth was too dry… I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature….

But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a schoolbus on the right and then got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until 1 was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. 1 was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.

THE VINCENT WAS LIKE A BULLET THAT WENT STRAIGHT; THE DUCATI IS LIKE THE MAGIC BULLET IN DALLAS THAT WENT SIDEWAYS AND HIT JFK AND THE GOVERNOR OF TEXAS AT THE SAME TIME.

T ▼ Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho…We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever’s funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird….

But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it’s right. The final measure ol any rider’s skill is the inverse ratio Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: II you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. It you go slow and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.

The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90 mph in fifth at 5500 rpm-and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.

Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you can do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast-it is extremely quick and responsive, and it w ill do amazing things…It is a little like riding the original Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the take-off runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. W11AMÖ! The Sausage Creature strikes again.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.

It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across railroad tracks on the 900SP. The bike did it easily with the grace of a feeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddammit, if 1 had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot farther.

Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?

That is the attitude of the new-age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn’t ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, “IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME.”

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By Michael Lewis — Vanity Fair, 2009

Just after October 6, 2008, when Iceland effectively went bust, I spoke to a man at the International Monetary Fund who had been flown in to Reykjavík to determine if money might responsibly be lent to such a spectacularly bankrupt nation. He’d never been to Iceland, knew nothing about the place, and said he needed a map to find it. He has spent his life dealing with famously distressed countries, usually in Africa, perpetually in one kind of financial trouble or another. Iceland was entirely new to his experience: a nation of extremely well-to-do (No. 1 in the United Nations’ 2008 Human Development Index), well-educated, historically rational human beings who had organized themselves to commit one of the single greatest acts of madness in financial history. “You have to understand,” he told me, “Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.”

An entire nation without immediate experience or even distant memory of high finance had gazed upon the example of Wall Street and said, “We can do that.” For a brief moment it appeared that they could. In 2003, Iceland’s three biggest banks had assets of only a few billion dollars, about 100 percent of its gross domestic product. Over the next three and a half years they grew to over $140 billion and were so much greater than Iceland’s G.D.P. that it made no sense to calculate the percentage of it they accounted for. It was, as one economist put it to me, “the most rapid expansion of a banking system in the history of mankind.”

At the same time, in part because the banks were also lending Icelanders money to buy stocks and real estate, the value of Icelandic stocks and real estate went through the roof. From 2003 to 2007, while the U.S. stock market was doubling, the Icelandic stock market multiplied by nine times. Reykjavík real-estate prices tripled. By 2006 the average Icelandic family was three times as wealthy as it had been in 2003, and virtually all of this new wealth was one way or another tied to the new investment-banking industry. “Everyone was learning Black-Scholes” (the option-pricing model), says Ragnar Arnason, a professor of fishing economics at the University of Iceland, who watched students flee the economics of fishing for the economics of money. “The schools of engineering and math were offering courses on financial engineering. We had hundreds and hundreds of people studying finance.” This in a country the size of Kentucky, but with fewer citizens than greater Peoria, Illinois. Peoria, Illinois, doesn’t have global financial institutions, or a university devoting itself to training many hundreds of financiers, or its own currency. And yet the world was taking Iceland seriously. (March 2006 Bloomberg News headline: iceland’s billionaire tycoon “thor” braves u.s. with hedge fund.)

Global financial ambition turned out to have a downside. When their three brand-new global-size banks collapsed, last October, Iceland’s 300,000 citizens found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion of banking losses—which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child. On top of that they had tens of billions of dollars in personal losses from their own bizarre private foreign-currency speculations, and even more from the 85 percent collapse in the Icelandic stock market. The exact dollar amount of Iceland’s financial hole was essentially unknowable, as it depended on the value of the generally stable Icelandic krona, which had also crashed and was removed from the market by the Icelandic government. But it was a lot.

Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, “Well, at least we didn’t do that.” In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their G.D.P. (The debt-drowned United States has reached just 350 percent.) As absurdly big and important as Wall Street became in the U.S. economy, it never grew so large that the rest of the population could not, in a pinch, bail it out. Any one of the three Icelandic banks suffered losses too large for the nation to bear; taken together they were so ridiculously out of proportion that, within weeks of the collapse, a third of the population told pollsters that they were considering emigration.

In just three or four years an entirely new way of economic life had been grafted onto the side of this stable, collectivist society, and the graft had overwhelmed the host. “It was just a group of young kids,” said the man from the I.M.F. “In this egalitarian society, they came in, dressed in black, and started doing business.”

Five hundred miles northwest of Scotland the Icelandair flight lands and taxis to a terminal still painted with Landsbanki logos—Landsbanki being one of Iceland’s three bankrupt banks, along with Kaupthing and Glitnir. I try to think up a metaphor for the world’s expanding reservoir of defunct financial corporate sponsorships—water left in the garden hose after you’ve switched off the pressure?—but before I can finish, the man in the seat behind me reaches for his bag in the overhead bin and knocks the crap out of me. I will soon learn that Icelandic males, like moose, rams, and other horned mammals, see these collisions as necessary in their struggle for survival. I will also learn that this particular Icelandic male is a senior official at the Icelandic stock exchange. At this moment, however, all I know is that a middle-aged man in an expensive suit has gone out of his way to bash bodies without apology or explanation. I stew on this apparently wanton act of hostility all the way to passport control.

You can tell a lot about a country by how much better they treat themselves than foreigners at the point of entry. Let it be known that Icelanders make no distinction at all. Over the control booth they’ve hung a charming sign that reads simply, all citizens, and what they mean by that is not “All Icelandic Citizens” but “All Citizens of Anywhere.” Everyone is from somewhere, and so we all wind up in the same line, leading to the guy behind the glass. Before you can say, “Land of contradictions,” he has pretended to examine your passport and waved you on through.

Next, through a dark landscape of snow-spackled black volcanic rock that may or may not be lunar, but that looks so much as you would expect the moon to look that nasa scientists used it to acclimate the astronauts before the first moon mission. An hour later we arrive at the 101 Hotel, owned by the wife of one of Iceland’s most famous failed bankers. It’s cryptically named (101 is the city’s richest postal code), but instantly recognizable: hip Manhattan hotel. Staff dressed in black, incomprehensible art on the walls, unread books about fashion on unused coffee tables—everything to heighten the social anxiety of a rube from the sticks but the latest edition of The New York Observer. It’s the sort of place bankers stay because they think it’s where the artists stay. Bear Stearns convened a meeting of British and American hedge-fund managers here, in January 2008, to figure out how much money there was to be made betting on Iceland’s collapse. (A lot.) The hotel, once jammed, is now empty, with only 6 of its 38 rooms occupied. The restaurant is empty, too, and so are the small tables and little nooks that once led the people who weren’t in them to marvel at those who were. A bankrupt Holiday Inn is just depressing; a bankrupt Ian Schrager hotel is tragic.

With the financiers who once paid a lot to stay here gone for good, I’m given a big room on the top floor with a view of the old city for half-price. I curl up in silky white sheets and reach for a book about the Icelandic economy—written in 1995, before the banking craze, when the country had little to sell to the outside world but fresh fish—and read this remarkable sentence: “Icelanders are rather suspicious of the market system as a cornerstone of economic organization, especially its distributive implications.”

That’s when the strange noises commence.

First comes a screeching from the far side of the room. I leave the bed to examine the situation. It’s the heat, sounding like a teakettle left on the stove for too long, straining to control itself. Iceland’s heat isn’t heat as we know it, but heat drawn directly from the earth. The default temperature of the water is scalding. Every year workers engaged in street repairs shut down the cold-water intake used to temper the hot water and some poor Icelander is essentially boiled alive in his shower. So powerful is the heat being released from the earth into my room that some great grinding, wheezing engine must be employed to prevent it from cooking me.

Then, from outside, comes an explosion.

Boom!

Then another.

Boom!

As it is mid-December, the sun rises, barely, at 10:50 a.m. and sets with enthusiasm at 3:44 p.m. This is obviously better than no sun at all, but subtly worse, as it tempts you to believe you can simulate a normal life. And whatever else this place is, it isn’t normal. The point is reinforced by a 26-year-old Icelander I’ll call Magnus Olafsson, who, just a few weeks earlier, had been earning close to a million dollars a year trading currencies for one of the banks. Tall, white-blond, and handsome, Olafsson looks exactly as you’d expect an Icelander to look—which is to say that he looks not at all like most Icelanders, who are mousy-haired and lumpy. “My mother has enough food hoarded to open a grocery store,” he says, then adds that ever since the crash Reykjavík has felt tense and uneasy.

Two months earlier, in early October, as the market for Icelandic kronur dried up, he’d sneaked away from his trading desk and gone down to the teller, where he’d extracted as much foreign cash as they’d give him and stuffed it into a sack. “All over downtown that day you saw people walking around with bags,” he says. “No one ever carries bags around downtown.” After work he’d gone home with his sack of cash and hidden roughly 30 grand in yen, dollars, euros, and pounds sterling inside a board game.

Before October the big-name bankers were heroes; now they are abroad, or laying low. Before October Magnus thought of Iceland as essentially free of danger; now he imagines hordes of muggers en route from foreign nations to pillage his board-game safe—and thus refuses to allow me to use his real name. “You’d figure New York would hear about this and send over planeloads of muggers,” he theorizes. “Most everyone has their savings at home.” As he is already unsettled, I tell him about the unsettling explosions outside my hotel room. “Yes,” he says with a smile, “there’s been a lot of Range Rovers catching fire lately.” Then he explains.

For the past few years, some large number of Icelanders engaged in the same disastrous speculation. With local interest rates at 15.5 percent and the krona rising, they decided the smart thing to do, when they wanted to buy something they couldn’t afford, was to borrow not kronur but yen and Swiss francs. They paid 3 percent interest on the yen and in the bargain made a bundle on the currency trade, as the krona kept rising. “The fishing guys pretty much discovered the trade and made it huge,” says Magnus. “But they made so much money on it that the financial stuff eventually overwhelmed the fish.” They made so much money on it that the trade spread from the fishing guys to their friends.

It must have seemed like a no-brainer: buy these ever more valuable houses and cars with money you are, in effect, paid to borrow. But, in October, after the krona collapsed, the yen and Swiss francs they must repay are many times more expensive. Now many Icelanders—especially young Icelanders—own $500,000 houses with $1.5 million mortgages, and $35,000 Range Rovers with $100,000 in loans against them. To the Range Rover problem there are two immediate solutions. One is to put it on a boat, ship it to Europe, and try to sell it for a currency that still has value. The other is set it on fire and collect the insurance: Boom!

The rocks beneath Reykjavík may be igneous, but the city feels sedimentary: on top of several thick strata of architecture that should be called Nordic Pragmatic lies a thin layer that will almost certainly one day be known as Asshole Capitalist. The hobbit-size buildings that house the Icelandic government are charming and scaled to the city. The half-built oceanfront glass towers meant to house newly rich financiers and, in the bargain, block everyone else’s view of the white bluffs across the harbor are not.

The best way to see any city is to walk it, but everywhere I walk Icelandic men plow into me without so much as a by-your-leave. Just for fun I march up and down the main shopping drag, playing chicken, to see if any Icelandic male would rather divert his stride than bang shoulders. Nope. On party nights—Thursday, Friday, and Saturday—when half the country appears to take it as a professional obligation to drink themselves into oblivion and wander the streets until what should be sunrise, the problem is especially acute. The bars stay open until five a.m., and the frantic energy with which the people hit them seems more like work than work. Within minutes of entering a nightclub called Boston I get walloped, first by a bearded troll who, I’m told, ran an Icelandic hedge fund. Just as I’m recovering I get plowed over by a drunken senior staffer at the Central Bank. Perhaps because he is drunk, or perhaps because we had actually met a few hours earlier, he stops to tell me, “Vee try to tell them dat our problem was not a solfency problem but a likvitity problem, but they did not agree,” then stumbles off. It’s exactly what Lehman Brothers and Citigroup said: If only you’d give us the money to tide us over, we’ll survive this little hiccup.

A nation so tiny and homogeneous that everyone in it knows pretty much everyone else is so fundamentally different from what one thinks of when one hears the word “nation” that it almost requires a new classification. Really, it’s less a nation than one big extended family. For instance, most Icelanders are by default members of the Lutheran Church. If they want to stop being Lutherans they must write to the government and quit; on the other hand, if they fill out a form, they can start their own cult and receive a subsidy. Another example: the Reykjavík phone book lists everyone by his first name, as there are only about nine surnames in Iceland, and they are derived by prefixing the father’s name to “son” or “dottir.” It’s hard to see how this clarifies matters, as there seem to be only about nine first names in Iceland, too. But if you wish to reveal how little you know about Iceland, you need merely refer to someone named Siggor Sigfusson as “Mr. Sigfusson,” or Kristin Petursdottir as “Ms. Petursdottir.” At any rate, everyone in a conversation is just meant to know whomever you’re talking about, so you never hear anyone ask, “Which Siggor do you mean?”

Because Iceland is really just one big family, it’s simply annoying to go around asking Icelanders if they’ve met Björk. Of course they’ve met Björk; who hasn’t met Björk? Who, for that matter, didn’t know Björk when she was two? “Yes, I know Björk,” a professor of finance at the University of Iceland says in reply to my question, in a weary tone. “She can’t sing, and I know her mother from childhood, and they were both crazy. That she is so well known outside of Iceland tells me more about the world than it does about Björk.”

One benefit of life inside a nation masking an extended family is that nothing needs to be explained; everyone already knows everything that needs to be known. I quickly find that it is an even greater than usual waste of time to ask directions, for instance. Just as you are meant to know which Bjornjolfer is being spoken of at any particular moment, you are meant to know where you are on the map. Two grown-ups—one a banker whose office is three blocks away—cannot tell me where to find the prime minister’s office. Three more grown-ups, all within three blocks of the National Gallery of Iceland, have no idea where to find the place. When I tell the sweet middle-aged lady behind the counter at the National Museum that no Icelander seems to know how to find it, she says, “No one actually knows anything about our country. Last week we had Icelandic high-school students here and their teacher asked them to name an Icelandic 19th-century painter. None of them could. Not a single one! One said, ‘Halldor Laxness?’!” (Laxness won the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature, the greatest global honor for an Icelander until the 1980s, when two Icelandic women captured Miss World titles in rapid succession.)

The world is now pocked with cities that feel as if they are perched on top of bombs. The bombs have yet to explode, but the fuses have been lit, and there’s nothing anyone can do to extinguish them. Walk around Manhattan and you see empty stores, empty streets, and, even when it’s raining, empty taxis: people have fled before the bomb explodes. When I was there Reykjavík had the same feel of incipient doom, but the fuse burned strangely. The government mandates three months’ severance pay, and so the many laid-off bankers were paid until early February, when the government promptly fell. Against a basket of foreign currencies the krona is worth less than a third of its boom-time value. As Iceland imports everything but heat and fish, the price of just about everything is, in mid-December, about to skyrocket. A new friend who works for the government tells me that she went into a store to buy a lamp. The clerk told her he had sold the last of the lamps she was after, but offered to order it for her, from Sweden—at nearly three times the old price.

Still, a society that has been ruined overnight doesn’t look much different from how it did the day before, when it believed itself to be richer than ever. The Central Bank of Iceland is a case in point. Almost certainly Iceland will adopt the euro as its currency, and the krona will cease to exist. Without it there is no need for a central bank to maintain the stability of the local currency and control interest rates. Inside the place stews David Oddsson, the architect of Iceland’s rise and fall. Back in the 1980s, Oddsson had fallen under the spell of Milton Friedman, the brilliant economist who was able to persuade even those who spent their lives working for the government that government was a waste of life. So Oddsson went on a quest to give Icelandic people their freedom—by which he meant freedom from government controls of any sort. As prime minister he lowered taxes, privatized industry, freed up trade, and, finally, in 2002, privatized the banks. At length, weary of prime-ministering, he got himself appointed governor of the Central Bank—even though he was a poet without banking experience.

After the collapse he holed up in his office inside the bank, declining all requests for interviews. Senior government officials tell me, seriously, that they assume he spends most of his time writing poetry. (In February he would be asked by a new government to leave.) On the outside, however, the Central Bank of Iceland is still an elegant black temple set against the snowy bluffs across the harbor. Sober-looking men still enter and exit. Small boys on sleds rocket down the slope beside it, giving not a rat’s ass that they are playing at ground zero of the global calamity. It all looks the same as it did before the crash, even though it couldn’t be more different. The fuse is burning its way toward the bomb.

When Neil Armstrong took his small step from Apollo 11 and looked around, he probably thought, Wow, sort of like Iceland—even though the moon was nothing like Iceland. But then, he was a tourist, and a tourist can’t help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there. When Iceland became a tourist in global high finance it had the same problem as Neil Armstrong. Icelanders are among the most inbred human beings on earth—geneticists often use them for research. They inhabited their remote island for 1,100 years without so much as dabbling in leveraged buyouts, hostile takeovers, derivatives trading, or even small-scale financial fraud. When, in 2003, they sat down at the same table with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, they had only the roughest idea of what an investment banker did and how he behaved—most of it gleaned from young Icelanders’ experiences at various American business schools. And so what they did with money probably says as much about the American soul, circa 2003, as it does about Icelanders. They understood instantly, for instance, that finance had less to do with productive enterprise than trading bits of paper among themselves. And when they lent money they didn’t simply facilitate enterprise but bankrolled friends and family, so that they might buy and own things, like real investment bankers: Beverly Hills condos, British soccer teams and department stores, Danish airlines and media companies, Norwegian banks, Indian power plants.

That was the biggest American financial lesson the Icelanders took to heart: the importance of buying as many assets as possible with borrowed money, as asset prices only rose. By 2007, Icelanders owned roughly 50 times more foreign assets than they had in 2002. They bought private jets and third homes in London and Copenhagen. They paid vast sums of money for services no one in Iceland had theretofore ever imagined wanting. “A guy had a birthday party, and he flew in Elton John for a million dollars to sing two songs,” the head of the Left-Green Movement, Steingrimur Sigfusson, tells me with fresh incredulity. “And apparently not very well.” They bought stakes in businesses they knew nothing about and told the people running them what to do—just like real American investment bankers! For instance, an investment company called FL Group—a major shareholder in Glitnir bank—bought an 8.25 percent stake in American Airlines’ parent corporation. No one inside FL Group had ever actually run an airline; no one in FL Group even had meaningful work experience at an airline. That didn’t stop FL Group from telling American Airlines how to run an airline. “After taking a close look at the company over an extended period of time,” FL Group C.E.O. Hannes Smarason, graduate of M.I.T.’s Sloan School, got himself quoted saying, in his press release, not long after he bought his shares, “our suggestions include monetizing assets … that can be used to reduce debt or return capital to shareholders.”

Nor were the Icelanders particularly choosy about what they bought. I spoke with a hedge fund in New York that, in late 2006, spotted what it took to be an easy mark: a weak Scandinavian bank getting weaker. It established a short position, and then, out of nowhere, came Kaupthing to take a 10 percent stake in this soon-to-be defunct enterprise—driving up the share price to absurd levels. I spoke to another hedge fund in London so perplexed by the many bad LBOs Icelandic banks were financing that it hired private investigators to figure out what was going on in the Icelandic financial system. The investigators produced a chart detailing a byzantine web of interlinked entities that boiled down to this: A handful of guys in Iceland, who had no experience of finance, were taking out tens of billions of dollars in short-term loans from abroad. They were then re-lending this money to themselves and their friends to buy assets—the banks, soccer teams, etc. Since the entire world’s assets were rising—thanks in part to people like these Icelandic lunatics paying crazy prices for them—they appeared to be making money. Yet another hedge-fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets. “They created fake capital by trading assets amongst themselves at inflated values,” says a London hedge-fund manager. “This was how the banks and investment companies grew and grew. But they were lightweights in the international markets.”

On February 3, Tony Shearer, the former C.E.O. of a British merchant bank called Singer and Friedlander, offered a glimpse of the inside, when he appeared before a House of Commons committee to describe his bizarre experience of being acquired by an Icelandic bank.

Singer and Friedlander had been around since 1907 and was famous for, among other things, giving George Soros his start. In November 2003, Shearer learned that Kaupthing, of whose existence he was totally unaware, had just taken a 9.5 percent stake in his bank. Normally, when a bank tries to buy another bank, it seeks to learn something about it. Shearer offered to meet with Kaupthing’s chairman, Sigurdur Einarsson; Einarsson had no interest. (Einarsson declined to be interviewed by Vanity Fair.) When Kaupthing raised its stake to 19.5 percent, Shearer finally flew to Reykjavík to see who on earth these Icelanders were. “They were very different,” he told the House of Commons committee. “They ran their business in a very strange way. Everyone there was incredibly young. They were all from the same community in Reykjavík. And they had no idea what they were doing.”

He examined Kaupthing’s annual reports and discovered some amazing facts: This giant international bank had only one board member who was not Icelandic, for instance. Its directors all had four-year contracts, and the bank had lent them £19 million to buy shares in Kaupthing, along with options to sell those shares back to the bank at a guaranteed profit. Virtually the entire bank’s stated profits were caused by its marking up assets it had bought at inflated prices. “The actual amount of profits that were coming from what I’d call banking was less than 10 percent,” said Shearer.

In a sane world the British regulators would have stopped the new Icelandic financiers from devouring the ancient British merchant bank. Instead, the regulators ignored a letter Shearer wrote to them. A year later, in January 2005, he received a phone call from the British takeover panel. “They wanted to know,” says Shearer, “why our share price had risen so rapidly over the past couple of days. So I laughed and said, ‘I think you’ll find the reason is that Mr. Einarsson, the chairman of Kaupthing, said two days ago, like an idiot, that he was going to make a bid for Singer and Friedlander.’” In August 2005, Singer and Friedlander became Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander, and Shearer quit, he said, out of fear of what might happen to his reputation if he stayed. In October 2008, Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander went bust.

In spite of all this, when Tony Shearer was pressed by the House of Commons to characterize the Icelanders as mere street hustlers, he refused. “They were all highly educated people,” he said in a tone of amazement.

Here is yet another way in which Iceland echoed the American model: all sorts of people, none of them Icelandic, tried to tell them they had a problem. In early 2006, for instance, an analyst named Lars Christensen and three of his colleagues at Denmark’s biggest bank, Danske Bank, wrote a report that said Iceland’s financial system was growing at a mad pace, and was on a collision course with disaster. “We actually wrote the report because we were worried our clients were getting too interested in Iceland,” he tells me. “Iceland was the most extreme of everything.” Christensen then flew to Iceland and gave a speech to reinforce his point, only to be greeted with anger. “The Icelandic banks took it personally,” he says. “We were being threatened with lawsuits. I was told, ‘You’re Danish, and you are angry with Iceland because Iceland is doing so well.’ Basically it all had to do with what happened in 1944,” when Iceland declared its independence from Denmark. “The reaction wasn’t ‘These guys might be right.’ It was ‘No! It’s a conspiracy. They have bad motives.’” The Danish were just jealous!

The Danske Bank report alerted hedge funds in London to an opportunity: shorting Iceland. They investigated and found this incredible web of cronyism: bankers buying stuff from one another at inflated prices, borrowing tens of billions of dollars and re-lending it to the members of their little Icelandic tribe, who then used it to buy up a messy pile of foreign assets. “Like any new kid on the block,” says Theo Phanos of Trafalgar Funds in London, “they were picked off by various people who sold them the lowest-quality assets—second-tier airlines, sub-scale retailers. They were in all the worst LBOs.”

But from the prime minister on down, Iceland’s leaders attacked the messenger. “The attacks … give off an unpleasant odor of unscrupulous dealers who have decided to make a last stab at breaking down the Icelandic financial system,” said Central Bank chairman Oddsson in March of last year. The chairman of Kaupthing publicly fingered four hedge funds that he said were deliberately seeking to undermine Iceland’s financial miracle. “I don’t know where the Icelanders get this notion,” says Paul Ruddock, of Lansdowne Partners, one of those fingered. “We only once traded in an Icelandic stock and it was a very short-term trade. We started to take legal action against the chairman of Kaupthing after he made public accusations against us that had no truth, and then he withdrew them.”

One of the hidden causes of the current global financial crisis is that the people who saw it coming had more to gain from it by taking short positions than they did by trying to publicize the problem. Plus, most of the people who could credibly charge Iceland—or, for that matter, Lehman Brothers—with financial crimes could be dismissed as crass profiteers, talking their own book. Back in April 2006, however, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Chicago named Bob Aliber took an interest in Iceland. Aliber found himself at the London Business School, listening to a talk on Iceland, about which he knew nothing. He recognized instantly the signs. Digging into the data, he found in Iceland the outlines of what was so clearly a historic act of financial madness that it belonged in a textbook. “The Perfect Bubble,” Aliber calls Iceland’s financial rise, and he has the textbook in the works: an updated version of Charles Kindleberger’s 1978 classic, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, a new edition of which he’s currently editing. In it, Iceland, he decided back in 2006, would now have its own little box, along with the South Sea Bubble and the Tulip Craze—even though Iceland had yet to crash. For him the actual crash was a mere formality.

Word spread in Icelandic economic circles that this distinguished professor at Chicago had taken a special interest in Iceland. In May 2008, Aliber was invited by the University of Iceland’s economics department to give a speech. To an audience of students, bankers, and journalists, he explained that Iceland, far from having an innate talent for high finance, had all the markings of a giant bubble, but he spoke the technical language of academic economists. (“Monetary Turbulence and the Icelandic Economy,” he called his speech.) In the following Q&A session someone asked him to predict the future, and he lapsed into plain English. As an audience member recalls, Aliber said, “I give you nine months. Your banks are dead. Your bankers are either stupid or greedy. And I’ll bet they are on planes trying to sell their assets right now.”

The Icelandic bankers in the audience sought to prevent newspapers from reporting the speech. Several academics suggested that Aliber deliver his alarming analysis to Iceland’s Central Bank. Somehow that never happened. “The Central Bank said they were too busy to see him,” says one of the professors who tried to arrange the meeting, “because they were preparing the Report on Financial Stability.” For his part Aliber left Iceland thinking that he’d caused such a stir he might not be allowed back into the country. “I got the feeling,” he told me, “that the only reason they brought me in was that they needed an outsider to say these things—that an insider wouldn’t say these things, because he’d be afraid of getting into trouble.” And yet he remains extremely fond of his hosts. “They are a very curious people,” he says, laughing. “I guess that’s the point, isn’t it?”

Icelanders—or at any rate Icelandic men—had their own explanations for why, when they leapt into global finance, they broke world records: the natural superiority of Icelanders. Because they were small and isolated it had taken 1,100 years for them—and the world—to understand and exploit their natural gifts, but now that the world was flat and money flowed freely, unfair disadvantages had vanished. Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, gave speeches abroad in which he explained why Icelanders were banking prodigies. “Our heritage and training, our culture and home market, have provided a valuable advantage,” he said, then went on to list nine of these advantages, ending with how unthreatening to others Icelanders are. (“Some people even see us as fascinating eccentrics who can do no harm.”) There were many, many expressions of this same sentiment, most of them in Icelandic. “There were research projects at the university to explain why the Icelandic business model was superior,” says Gylfi Zoega, chairman of the economics department. “It was all about our informal channels of communication and ability to make quick decisions and so forth.”

“We were always told that the Icelandic businessmen were so clever,” says university finance professor and former banker Vilhjalmur Bjarnason. “They were very quick. And when they bought something they did it very quickly. Why was that? That is usually because the seller is very satisfied with the price.”

You didn’t need to be Icelandic to join the cult of the Icelandic banker. German banks put $21 billion into Icelandic banks. The Netherlands gave them $305 million, and Sweden kicked in $400 million. U.K. investors, lured by the eye-popping 14 percent annual returns, forked over $30 billion—$28 billion from companies and individuals and the rest from pension funds, hospitals, universities, and other public institutions. Oxford University alone lost $50 million.

Maybe because there are so few Icelanders in the world, we know next to nothing about them. We assume they are more or less Scandinavian—a gentle people who just want everyone to have the same amount of everything. They are not. They have a feral streak in them, like a horse that’s just pretending to be broken.

After three days in Reykjavík, I receive, more or less out of the blue, two phone calls. The first is from a producer of a leading current-events TV show. All of Iceland watches her show, she says, then asks if I’d come on and be interviewed. “About what?” I ask. “We’d like you to explain our financial crisis,” she says. “I’ve only been here three days!” I say. It doesn’t matter, she says, as no one in Iceland understands what’s happened. They’d enjoy hearing someone try to explain it, even if that person didn’t have any idea what he was talking about—which goes to show, I suppose, that not everything in Iceland is different from other places. As I demur, another call comes, from the prime minister’s office.

Iceland’s then prime minister, Geir Haarde, is also the head of the Independence Party, which has governed the country since 1991. It ruled in loose coalition with the Social Democrats and the Progressive Party. (Iceland’s fourth major party is the Left-Green Movement.) That a nation of 300,000 people, all of whom are related by blood, needs four major political parties suggests either a talent for disagreement or an unwillingness to listen to one another. In any case, of the four parties, the Independents express the greatest faith in free markets. The Independence Party is the party of the fishermen. It is also, as an old schoolmate of the prime minister’s puts it to me, “all men, men, men. Not a woman in it.”

Walking into the P.M.’s minute headquarters, I expect to be stopped and searched, or at least asked for photo identification. Instead I find a single policeman sitting behind a reception desk, feet up on the table, reading a newspaper. He glances up, bored. “I’m here to see the prime minister,” I say for the first time in my life. He’s unimpressed. Anyone here can see the prime minister. Half a dozen people will tell me that one of the reasons Icelanders thought they would be taken seriously as global financiers is that all Icelanders feel important. One reason they all feel important is that they all can go see the prime minister anytime they like.

What he might say to them about their collapse is an open question. There’s a charming lack of financial experience in Icelandic financial-policymaking circles. The minister for business affairs is a philosopher. The finance minister is a veterinarian. The Central Bank governor is a poet. Haarde, though, is a trained economist—just not a very good one. The economics department at the University of Iceland has him pegged as a B-minus student. As a group, the Independence Party’s leaders have a reputation for not knowing much about finance and for refusing to avail themselves of experts who do. An Icelandic professor at the London School of Economics named Jon Danielsson, who specializes in financial panics, has had his offer to help spurned; so have several well-known financial economists at the University of Iceland. Even the advice of really smart central bankers from seriously big countries went ignored. It’s not hard to see why the Independence Party and its prime minister fail to appeal to Icelandic women: they are the guy driving his family around in search of some familiar landmark and refusing, over his wife’s complaints, to stop and ask directions.

“Why is Vanity Fair interested in Iceland?” he asks as he strides into the room, with the force and authority of the leader of a much larger nation. And it’s a good question.

As it turns out, he’s not actually stupid, but political leaders seldom are, no matter how much the people who elected them insist that it must be so. He does indeed say things that could not possibly be true, but they are only the sorts of fibs that prime ministers are hired to tell. He claims that the krona is once again an essentially stable currency, for instance, when the truth is it doesn’t currently trade in international markets—it is assigned an arbitrary value by the government for select purposes. Icelanders abroad have already figured out not to use their Visa cards, for fear of being charged the real exchange rate, whatever that might be.

The prime minister would like me to believe that he saw Iceland’s financial crisis taking shape but could do little about it. (“We could not say publicly our fears about the banks, because you create the very thing you are seeking to avoid: a panic.”) By implication it was not politicians like him but financiers who were to blame. On some level the people agree: the guy who ran the Baugur investment group had snowballs chucked at him as he dashed from the 101 Hotel, which his wife owns, to his limo; the guy who ran Kaupthing Bank turned up at the National Theater and, as he took his seat, was booed. But, for the most part, the big shots have fled Iceland for London, or are lying low, leaving the poor prime minister to shoulder the blame and face the angry demonstrators, led by folksinging activist Hordur Torfason, who assemble every weekend outside Parliament. Haarde has his story, and he’s sticking to it: foreigners entrusted their capital to Iceland, and Iceland put it to good use, but then, last September 15, Lehman Brothers failed and foreigners panicked and demanded their capital back. Iceland was ruined not by its own recklessness but by a global tsunami. The problem with this story is that it fails to explain why the tsunami struck Iceland, as opposed to, say, Tonga.

But I didn’t come to Iceland to argue. I came to understand. “There’s something I really want to ask you,” I say.

“Yes?”

“Is it true that you’ve been telling people that it’s time to stop banking and go fishing?”

A great line, I thought. Succinct, true, and to the point. But I’d heard about it thirdhand, from a New York hedge-fund manager. The prime minister fixes me with a self-consciously stern gaze. “That’s a gross exaggeration,” he says.

“I thought it made sense,” I say uneasily.

“I never said that!”

Obviously, I’ve hit some kind of nerve, but which kind I cannot tell. Is he worried that to have said such a thing would make him seem a fool? Or does he still think that fishing, as a profession, is somehow less dignified than banking?

At length, I return to the hotel to find, for the first time in four nights, no empty champagne bottles outside my neighbors’ door. The Icelandic couple whom I had envisioned as being on one last blowout have packed and gone home. For four nights I have endured their Orc shrieks from the other side of the hotel wall; now all is silent. It’s now possible to curl up in bed with “The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery.” One way or another, the wealth in Iceland comes from the fish, and if you want to understand what Icelanders did with their money you had better understand how they came into it in the first place.

The brilliant paper was written back in 1954 by H. Scott Gordon, a University of Indiana economist. It describes the plight of the fisherman—and seeks to explain “why fishermen are not wealthy, despite the fact that fishery resources of the sea are the richest and most indestructible available to man.” The problem is that, because the fish are everybody’s property, they are nobody’s property. Anyone can catch as many fish as they like, so they fish right up to the point where fishing becomes unprofitable—for everybody. “There is in the spirit of every fisherman the hope of the ‘lucky catch,’” wrote Gordon. “As those who know fishermen well have often testified, they are gamblers and incurably optimistic.”

Fishermen, in other words, are a lot like American investment bankers. Their overconfidence leads them to impoverish not just themselves but also their fishing grounds. Simply limiting the number of fish caught won’t solve the problem; it will just heighten the competition for the fish and drive down profits. The goal isn’t to get fishermen to overspend on more nets or bigger boats. The goal is to catch the maximum number of fish with minimum effort. To attain it, you need government intervention.

This insight is what led Iceland to go from being one of the poorest countries in Europe circa 1900 to being one of the richest circa 2000. Iceland’s big change began in the early 1970s, after a couple of years when the fish catch was terrible. The best fishermen returned for a second year in a row without their usual haul of cod and haddock, so the Icelandic government took radical action: they privatized the fish. Each fisherman was assigned a quota, based roughly on his historical catches. If you were a big-time Icelandic fisherman you got this piece of paper that entitled you to, say, 1 percent of the total catch allowed to be pulled from Iceland’s waters that season. Before each season the scientists at the Marine Research Institute would determine the total number of cod or haddock that could be caught without damaging the long-term health of the fish population; from year to year, the numbers of fish you could catch changed. But your percentage of the annual haul was fixed, and this piece of paper entitled you to it in perpetuity.

Even better, if you didn’t want to fish you could sell your quota to someone who did. The quotas thus drifted into the hands of the people to whom they were of the greatest value, the best fishermen, who could extract the fish from the sea with maximum efficiency. You could also take your quota to the bank and borrow against it, and the bank had no trouble assigning a dollar value to your share of the cod pulled, without competition, from the richest cod-fishing grounds on earth. The fish had not only been privatized, they had been securitized.

It was horribly unfair: a public resource—all the fish in the Icelandic sea—was simply turned over to a handful of lucky Icelanders. Overnight, Iceland had its first billionaires, and they were all fishermen. But as social policy it was ingenious: in a single stroke the fish became a source of real, sustainable wealth rather than shaky sustenance. Fewer people were spending less effort catching more or less precisely the right number of fish to maximize the long-term value of Iceland’s fishing grounds. The new wealth transformed Iceland—and turned it from the backwater it had been for 1,100 years to the place that spawned Björk. If Iceland has become famous for its musicians it’s because Icelanders now have time to play music, and much else. Iceland’s youth are paid to study abroad, for instance, and encouraged to cultivate themselves in all sorts of interesting ways. Since its fishing policy transformed Iceland, the place has become, in effect, a machine for turning cod into Ph.D.’s.

But this, of course, creates a new problem: people with Ph.D.’s don’t want to fish for a living. They need something else to do.

And that something is probably not working in the industry that exploits Iceland’s other main natural resource: energy. The waterfalls and boiling lava generate vast amounts of cheap power, but, unlike oil, it cannot be profitably exported. Iceland’s power is trapped in Iceland, and if there is something poetic about the idea of trapped power, there is also something prosaic in how the Icelanders have come to terms with the problem. They asked themselves: What can we do that other people will pay money for that requires huge amounts of power? The answer was: smelt aluminum.

Notice that no one asked, What might Icelanders want to do? Or even: What might Icelanders be especially suited to do? No one thought that Icelanders might have some natural gift for smelting aluminum, and, if anything, the opposite proved true. Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.” The other, more serious problem was the Icelandic male: he took more safety risks than aluminum workers in other nations did. “In manufacturing,” says the spokesman, “you want people who follow the rules and fall in line. You don’t want them to be heroes. You don’t want them to try to fix something it’s not their job to fix, because they might blow up the place.” The Icelandic male had a propensity to try to fix something it wasn’t his job to fix.

Back away from the Icelandic economy and you can’t help but notice something really strange about it: the people have cultivated themselves to the point where they are unsuited for the work available to them. All these exquisitely schooled, sophisticated people, each and every one of whom feels special, are presented with two mainly horrible ways to earn a living: trawler fishing and aluminum smelting. There are, of course, a few jobs in Iceland that any refined, educated person might like to do. Certifying the nonexistence of elves, for instance. (“This will take at least six months—it can be very tricky.”) But not nearly so many as the place needs, given its talent for turning cod into Ph.D.’s. At the dawn of the 21st century, Icelanders were still waiting for some task more suited to their filigreed minds to turn up inside their economy so they might do it.

Enter investment banking.

For the fifth time in as many days I note a slight tension at any table where Icelandic men and Icelandic women are both present. The male exhibits the global male tendency not to talk to the females—or, rather, not to include them in the conversation—unless there is some obvious sexual motive. But that’s not the problem, exactly. Watching Icelandic men and women together is like watching toddlers. They don’t play together but in parallel; they overlap even less organically than men and women in other developed countries, which is really saying something. It isn’t that the women are oppressed, exactly. On paper, by historical global standards, they have it about as good as women anywhere: good public health care, high participation in the workforce, equal rights. What Icelandic women appear to lack—at least to a tourist who has watched them for all of 10 days—is a genuine connection to Icelandic men. The Independence Party is mostly male; the Social Democrats, mostly female. (On February 1, when the reviled Geir Haarde finally stepped aside, he was replaced by Johanna Sigurdardottir, a Social Democrat, and Iceland got not just a lady prime minister but the modern world’s first openly gay head of state—she lives with another woman.) Everyone knows everyone else, but when I ask Icelanders for leads, the men always refer me to other men, and the women to other women. It was a man, for instance, who suggested I speak to Stefan Alfsson.

Lean and hungry-looking, wearing genuine rather than designer stubble, Alfsson still looks more like a trawler captain than a financier. He went to sea at 16, and, in the off-season, to school to study fishing. He was made captain of an Icelandic fishing trawler at the shockingly young age of 23 and was regarded, I learned from other men, as something of a fishing prodigy—which is to say he had a gift for catching his quota of cod and haddock in the least amount of time. And yet, in January 2005, at 30, he up and quit fishing to join the currency-trading department of Landsbanki. He speculated in the financial markets for nearly two years, until the great bloodbath of October 2008, when he was sacked, along with every other Icelander who called himself a “trader.” His job, he says, was to sell people, mainly his fellow fishermen, on what he took to be a can’t-miss speculation: borrow yen at 3 percent, use them to buy Icelandic kronur, and then invest those kronur at 16 percent. “I think it is easier to take someone in the fishing industry and teach him about currency trading,” he says, “than to take someone from the banking industry and teach them how to fish.”

He then explained why fishing wasn’t as simple as I thought. It’s risky, for a start, especially as practiced by the Icelandic male. “You don’t want to have some sissy boys on your crew,” he says, especially as Icelandic captains are famously manic in their fishing styles. “I had a crew of Russians once,” he says, “and it wasn’t that they were lazy, but the Russians are always at the same pace.” When a storm struck, the Russians would stop fishing, because it was too dangerous. “The Icelanders would fish in all conditions,” says Stefan, “fish until it is impossible to fish. They like to take the risks. If you go overboard, the probabilities are not in your favor. I’m 33, and I already have two friends who have died at sea.”

It took years of training for him to become a captain, and even then it happened only by a stroke of luck. When he was 23 and a first mate, the captain of his fishing boat up and quit. The boat owner went looking for a replacement and found an older fellow, retired, who was something of an Icelandic fishing legend, the wonderfully named Snorri Snorrasson. “I took two trips with this guy,” Stefan says. “I have never in my life slept so little, because I was so eager to learn. I slept two or three hours a night because I was sitting beside him, talking to him. I gave him all the respect in the world—it’s difficult to describe all he taught me. The reach of the trawler. The most efficient angle of the net. How do you act on the sea. If you have a bad day, what do you do? If you’re fishing at this depth, what do you do? If it’s not working, do you move in depth or space? In the end it’s just so much feel. In this time I learned infinitely more than I learned in school. Because how do you learn to fish in school?”

This marvelous training was as fresh in his mind as if he’d received it yesterday, and the thought of it makes his eyes mist.

“You spent seven years learning every little nuance of the fishing trade before you were granted the gift of learning from this great captain?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“And even then you had to sit at the feet of this great master for many months before you felt as if you knew what you were doing?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you think you could become a banker and speculate in financial markets, without a day of training?”

“That’s a very good question,” he says. He thinks for a minute. “For the first time this evening I lack a word.” As I often think I know exactly what I am doing even when I don’t, I find myself oddly sympathetic.

“What, exactly, was your job?” I ask, to let him off the hook, catch and release being the current humane policy in Iceland.

“I started as a … “—now he begins to laugh—“an adviser to companies on currency risk hedging. But given my aggressive nature I went more and more into plain speculative trading.” Many of his clients were other fishermen, and fishing companies, and they, like him, had learned that if you don’t take risks you don’t catch the fish. “The clients were only interested in ‘hedging’ if it meant making money,” he says.

In retrospect, there are some obvious questions an Icelander living through the past five years might have asked himself. For example: Why should Iceland suddenly be so seemingly essential to global finance? Or: Why do giant countries that invented modern banking suddenly need Icelandic banks to stand between their depositors and their borrowers—to decide who gets capital and who does not? And: If Icelanders have this incredible natural gift for finance, how did they keep it so well hidden for 1,100 years? At the very least, in a place where everyone knows everyone else, or his sister, you might have thought that the moment Stefan Alfsson walked into Landsbanki 10 people would have said, “Stefan, you’re a fisherman!” But they didn’t. To a shocking degree, they still don’t. “If I went back to banking,” he says, with an entirely straight face, “I would be a private-banking guy.”

Back in 2001, as the Internet boom turned into a bust, M.I.T.’s Quarterly Journal of Economics published an intriguing paper called “Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment.” The authors, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, gained access to the trading activity in over 35,000 households, and used it to compare the habits of men and women. What they found, in a nutshell, is that men not only trade more often than women but do so from a false faith in their own financial judgment. Single men traded less sensibly than married men, and married men traded less sensibly than single women: the less the female presence, the less rational the approach to trading in the markets.

One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risktaking jobs. As far as I can tell, during Iceland’s boom, there was just one woman in a senior position inside an Icelandic bank. Her name is Kristin Petursdottir, and by 2005 she had risen to become deputy C.E.O. for Kaupthing in London. “The financial culture is very male-dominated,” she says. “The culture is quite extreme. It is a pool of sharks. Women just despise the culture.” Petursdottir still enjoyed finance. She just didn’t like the way Icelandic men did it, and so, in 2006, she quit her job. “People said I was crazy,” she says, but she wanted to create a financial-services business run entirely by women. To bring, as she puts it, “more feminine values to the world of finance.”

Today her firm is, among other things, one of the very few profitable financial businesses left in Iceland. After the stock exchange collapsed, the money flooded in. A few days before we met, for instance, she heard banging on the front door early one morning and opened it to discover a little old man. “I’m so fed up with this whole system,” he said. “I just want some women to take care of my money.”

It was with that in mind that I walked, on my last afternoon in Iceland, into the Saga Museum. Its goal is to glorify the Sagas, the great 12th- and 13th-century Icelandic prose epics, but the effect of its life-size dioramas is more like modern reality TV. Not statues carved from silicon but actual ancient Icelanders, or actors posing as ancient Icelanders, as shrieks and bloodcurdling screams issue from the P.A. system: a Catholic bishop named Jon Arason having his head chopped off; a heretic named Sister Katrin being burned at the stake; a battle scene in which a blood-drenched Viking plunges his sword toward the heart of a prone enemy. The goal was verisimilitude, and to achieve it no expense was spared. Passing one tableau of blood and guts and moving on to the next, I caught myself glancing over my shoulder to make sure some Viking wasn’t following me with a battle-ax. The effect was so disorienting that when I reached the end and found a Japanese woman immobile and reading on a bench, I had to poke her on the shoulder to make sure she was real. This is the past Icelanders supposedly cherish: a history of conflict and heroism. Of seeing who is willing to bump into whom with the most force. There are plenty of women, but this is a men’s history.

When you borrow a lot of money to create a false prosperity, you import the future into the present. It isn’t the actual future so much as some grotesque silicon version of it. Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven’t really earned. The striking thing about the future the Icelandic male briefly imported was how much it resembled the past that he celebrates. I’m betting now they’ve seen their false future the Icelandic female will have a great deal more to say about the actual one.

By Christopher Hitchens — The Atlantic, 2002

Contents | April 2002

In This Issue (Contributors)

More on books from The Atlantic Monthly.

From the archives:

“Was the Great War Necessary?” (May 1999)

A young historian argues iconoclastically that Britain’s entry into the First World War, in 1914, was “the greatest error of modern history,” born of neurotic fears projected onto Germany. By Benjamin Schwarz

From Atlantic Unbound:

Flashbacks: “Looking for Mr. Churchill” (March 27, 2002)

Isaiah Berlin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and others on Churchill as politician, author, world leader, and friend.

Elsewhere on the Web

Links to related material on other Web sites.

“The Life and Times of Winston Churchill

The Web site of the Churchill Center, an organization devoted to the life and career of Winston Churchill. Offers general information about him, a collection of writing by and about him, and audio recordings of his speeches

Churchill Archives Centre

The Web site of the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College of Cambridge University. Offers information about the college’s collection of Churchill’s writings, and an online biography.

Churchill: The Evidence

An online exhibit about the life of Winston Churchill, with photographs of Churchill and scans of original documents. Jointly created by the National Library of Scotland and the Churchill Archives Centre.

Books & Critics

Books

The Medals of His Defeats

Our author takes the Great Man down a peg or two—and still finds that Churchill was a great man

by Christopher Hitchens

…..

n the fateful spring and early summer of 1940 the people of Britain clustered around their wireless sets to hear defiant and uplifting oratory from their new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. On May 13, having just assumed the burden of office from a weak and cowardly Neville Chamberlain, Churchill promised a regime of “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” On June 4, after the evacuation of the defeated British army from Dunkirk, he pledged, “We shall fight on the beaches.” On June 18 he proclaimed that even if the British Empire were to last for a thousand years, this would be remembered as its “finest hour.” Over the course of the ensuing months Britain alone defied the vast conquering appetites of Hitlerism and, though greatly outclassed in the air, repelled the Luftwaffe’s assault with a handful of gallant fighter pilots. This chivalric engagement—”The Battle of Britain”—thwarted Nazi schemes for an invasion of the island fortress and was thus a hinge event in the great global conflict we now call World War II.The Medals of His Defeats

Our author takes the Great Man down a peg or two—and still finds that Churchill was a great man

by Christopher Hitchens

…..

The foregoing paragraph could appear without much challenge in almost any English or American newspaper or magazine, and versions of it have recently seen print in the reviews of Churchill: A Biography, by the British Liberal statesman Lord Jenkins of Hillhead. One might, however, call attention to some later adjustments to this familiar picture.

A close reading of the increasingly voluminous revisionist literature discloses many further examples of events that one thinks cannot really be true, or cannot be true if the quasi-official or consecrated narrative is to remain regnant. Against which nation was the first British naval attack directed? (Against a non-mobilized French fleet, moored in the ports of North Africa, with the loss of hundreds of French lives.) Which air force was the first to bomb civilians, and in whose capital city? (The RAF, striking the suburbs of Berlin.) Which belligerent nation was the first to violate the neutrality of Europe’s noncombatant nations? (The British, by a military occupation of Norway.) But these details, not unlike the navels and genitalia in devotional painting, are figleafed in denial. They cannot exactly be omitted from the broader picture, nor can they be permitted any profane influence on its sanctity. Meanwhile, who made the following broadcast speech to the British people in 1940?

“We are a solid and united nation which would rather go down to ruin than admit the domination of the Nazis … If the enemy does try to invade this country we will fight him in the air and on the sea; we will fight him on the beaches with every weapon we have. He may manage here and there to make a breakthrough: if he does we will fight him on every road, in every village, and in every house, until he or we are utterly destroyed.”

That was Neville Chamberlain, who (albeit in his rather reedy tones) delivered the speech himself. And how many casualties did the RAF suffer during the entire Battle of Britain? A total of 443 pilots, according to official sources cited in Richard Overy’s cool and meticulous revisiting of the story.

was brought up on the cult of Winston Churchill. My father, a Royal Navy commander, was on board H.M.S. Jamaica when it helped to deal the coup de grâce to the Nazi warship Scharnhorst on December 26, 1943—a more solid day’s work than any I have ever done. In the declining post-imperial Britain of the 1950s and 1960s the Homeric story of 1940, and of its bulldog-visaged protagonist, was at once a consolation for many disappointments and an assurance of Britain’s continued value to the world. Even then it was sometimes difficult to swallow Churchill whole, as it were. A sort of alternate bookkeeping was undertaken, whereby the huge deficits of his grand story (Gallipoli, the calamitous return to the gold standard, his ruling-class thuggery against the labor movement, his diehard imperialism over India, and his pre-war sympathy for fascism) were kept in a separate column that was sharply ruled off from “The Valiant Years.” But even the many defeats and fiascoes and dishonors added in some numinous way to his stature. Here was a man who had taken part in a Victorian cavalry charge at Omdurman, in the Sudan, to avenge the slaying of General Gordon by a messianic mullah, and who had lived to help evolve the design and first use of thermonuclear weaponry. He was not a figure in history so much as a figure of history. (Invited by Adlai Stevenson to contribute something to the English-Speaking Union, he gruffly replied, “I am an English-speaking union.” In anyone else this would have been solipsism, rather than charm commingled with truth.) And because in 1946 he had effectively founded the Anglo-American “special relationship” in its Cold War form, at Fulton, Missouri, his enormous specter seemed to guarantee Britain a continued role as a junior superpower, or at least as a superpower’s preferred junior.

n the early 1970s I was working at The New Statesman, in London, very near the Public Record Office, when a fresh tranche of Churchill’s wartime papers was released. These covered the discussions between Churchill (“Premier,” as the official papers called him) and Stalin about the future of postwar Eastern Europe. It was already known that Churchill had proposed, on the back of an envelope, a deal with Stalin for 90 percent British control of Greece in exchange for an equivalent communization of the Balkans. But it was not quite clear whether he had also deliberately traded Poland into Stalin’s “sphere of influence.” The matter had moral as well as historical importance, since it was in defense of Poland that Britain had finally declared war on Hitler, in September of 1939. A.J.P. Taylor prompted me to examine the documents, but the authorities informed me that the entries for Anglo-Soviet discussion of wartime Polish policy had been unaccountably mislaid. That sort of thing happens a lot in a state with an Official Secrets Act, but this was flagrant; and Poland had recently begun to stir and shift again as an actor for itself in European politics. “They always say that when it’s important,” Taylor told me about the “loss” of the critical records. I briefly considered titling my New Statesman article “The Churchill-Stalin Pact” but swiftly appreciated that this would make me look like a crank. There was no Churchill-Stalin Pact. There could not have been a Churchill-Stalin Pact. The necessary three words could not be brought into apposition. Heroic and improvised pragmatism—yes. Degraded and cynical statecraft? Not yet thinkable.

The Churchill cult in England, however, is mild and reflective in comparison with the Churchill cult in the United States. (I don’t think any British school would be so artless as to emulate the Winston Churchill High School in the upscale D.C. suburb of Potomac, Maryland, which has a yearbook titled Finest Hours.) The aftermath of September 11 only reinforced a series of tropes that were already familiar to students of ready-made political rhetoric. “We will not waver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail,” President Bush proclaimed as the bombing of Afghanistan began. “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire,” Churchill said—somewhat more euphoniously—sixty years before. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has outdone even his Churchill-obsessed predecessor Caspar Weinberger, announcing to the staff of the Pentagon on September 12, “At the height of peril to his own nation, Winston Churchill spoke of their finest hour. Yesterday, America and the cause of human freedom came under attack.” Only a week earlier, this time speaking in favor of a missile-defense system, Rumsfeld had informed a Senate committee, “Winston Churchill once said, ‘I hope I shall never see the day when the forces of right are deprived of the right of force.’” On September 25, asked whether the Defense Department would be authorized to deceive the press in prosecuting the war, he unhesitatingly responded, “This conjures up Winston Churchill’s famous phrase when he said … sometimes the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies.” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, later to be described as an American Churchill, laid the groundwork for his own plaudits by announcing, just after the aggression of September 11 against his city, that he was reading a book about Churchill’s wartime premiership “and nothing is more inspirational than the speeches and reflections of Winston Churchill about how to deal with that.” Ronald Reagan hung a portrait of Churchill in the Situation Room of the White House soon after taking power; the first President Bush allowed Jack Kemp to compare him to Churchill during the Gulf War; the second President Bush asked the British embassy in Washington to help furnish him with a bronze bust of Churchill, which now holds pride of place in the Oval Office. The legacy-obsessed Bill Clinton can only whimper at the lack of Churchillian analogy to his own tenure, but the rest of us might wish that if the United States is going to stand for something, it (or its overpaid speechwriting class) would try to come up with some mobilizing rhetoric of its own.

This prevailing line, which teeters between grandeur and kitsch, is followed with reasonable fidelity by American historians and commentators. A few weeks before September 11 a fairly banal development earned a front-page story and an editorial in The New York Times. It became known that William Manchester, debilitated by two strokes, would not be completing his trilogy on the life of Churchill. This trilogy, generically titled The Last Lion, had run to two volumes, Visions of Glory and Alone. If these titles are insufficient to convey the flavor, one might cite, as did The New York Times in its editorial, the closing staves of the second and now final book: “And now, in the desperate spring of 1940, with the reins of power at last firm in his grasp, he resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been and meant, to arm the nation, not only with weapons but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death.”

Never in the field of human biography can metaphor have been more epically mixed. Yet The New York Times regarded the lack of a sequel as a cultural event worthy of reverent coverage and a deferential editorial. The latter, unsigned, described the incomplete work as leaving “Churchill somehow suspended, poised in the midst of a great arc whose outcome we know but whose details we would like to savor over again in Mr. Manchester’s words.” Or, to put it another way, there can never be too much reinforcement of a familiar and useful morality tale. In the quite recent past at least two books have been published to general acclaim—Churchill: A Study in Greatness, by Geoffrey Best, and Five Days in London, May 1940, by John Lukacs, which assist in this ramming home of an already near unassailable myth. And these, together with Lord Jenkins’s tome, only continue a process begun by Churchill himself when he annexed the papers of his time in office to write his own version of events. He could emerge as a historic figure—as he put it in one of his many and likeable moments of self-deprecation—by making sure of writing the history himself. The names of his early research assistants and drafters—Alan Bullock, F. W. Deakin—are testimony in themselves to what might fairly be called a conscription of the historians’ professional mainstream. Yet upon reflection one might perhaps decide that the term “conscription” is unfair. “Churchill the historian,” said the late Sir J. H. Plumb, “lies at the very heart of all historiography of the Second World War and will always remain there.” Donald Cameron Watt commented dryly seven years later, in 1976, “For the bulk of the historical profession in America, Sir Winston Churchill’s view of British policy before 1939 has hardly required a moment’s critical examination.” It would be no insult, then, to describe certain authors not as conscripts but as volunteers.

Manchester’s series proposed itself modestly as only the condensed (or large-print) version of the ur-text of approved Churchilliana: the eight-volume official biography, by Sir Martin Gilbert, the doyen of Churchill historians. Unlike the grave and measured work of which it is the flickering Platonic shadow, Manchester’s unfinished labor is overwrought in the sentimental, para-historical Camelot style that its author helped to originate. Once again, action is judged by reputation rather than reputation by action. In an extraordinary gesture Manchester rendered Churchill’s wartime speeches as blank verse, with carefully incised line breaks and verse settings. This was to make explicit what had been latent heretofore, and it was also to pay Churchill the compliment he would probably have most valued and desired. (Remember that he received his 1953 Nobel Prize for literature.) In the English-speaking world, at any rate, his lapidary phrases and rolling flourishes have achieved the familiarity and renown enjoyed by some passages of the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the “kingship” plays of William Shakespeare. These excerpts or verses have the peculiar and potent faculty of recurring to our minds in time of trouble or when they seem relevant or poignant (or simply useful). And they are associated above all with fortitude, staunchness, and stoicism, salted with a little gallows humor. Imperishability of that sort descends on human beings very rarely indeed. And the audience does not mind a little exaggeration if the aim is flattering to the groundlings. “After he had spoken to them in the summer of 1940 as no one has ever before or since,” Isaiah Berlin wrote in this magazine, in one of his many courageous stands for the conventional wisdom, “they conceived a new idea of themselves which their own prowess and the admiration of the world has since established as a heroic image in the history of mankind.” How true. In bidding a gracious farewell to Neville Chamberlain, Churchill nobly called him “the packhorse in our great affairs.” Accepting the compliment, Chamberlain pointed out that the line comes from Richard III and not, as Churchill had alleged, from Henry VI. But no matter. The thing is not to be right about Shakespeare. The thing is to be Shakespearean. Blood, toil, tears, sweat—and some immodest populism.

n the flush of the “finest hour” in 1944 Laurence Olivier produced and starred in his patriotic movie version of Henry V. This film constituted (and still constitutes) subliminal propaganda of a high order. Shakespeare, Saint George, and the Almighty are yoked together against minatory Continental power. Some deference to contemporaneous Gallic sensibilities resulted in a downplaying of the original quarrel over the Salic law and the French throne, and the scene at Agincourt involving the ruthless massacre of all Prince Hal’s civilian and military prisoners was thoughtfully excised. Indeed, who today cares about the true foundation of Henry’s opportunistic claim, or about the heaps of dead on both sides, or the eventual ruin of his plan for the mainland? What is this when set beside the marvelous evocation of the Feast of Crispin, or the five-to-one numerical odds against the English at Agincourt (“we few, we happy few”), or the splendid words in which the terms of surrender are twice refused by Harry, or the glorious and seductive notion that sacrifice and wounds are to be envied and that “gentlemen in England, now a-bed / Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here”?

These very words were muttered by living (and dying) men on the shores of Dunkirk and Dieppe and Normandy, along with the whispered accompaniment that those absent would “hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks / That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.” And for at least a generation after World War II they had a stilling effect on all politicians who had apparently temporized about the last—or, indeed, the next—European conflict. In a secondhand form they exist in our vernacular as taunts about “Munich” or “appeasement,” the Munich analogy having extended itself through the “Iron Curtain” address in Fulton as a reproach to all those who were soft on communism. Manhood was the least of it; the taint of treason lay behind the suggestion of a want of virility.

In his time Churchill was very “soft,” as well as very hard, on both fascism and communism. His protean, volatile character has allowed him to escape most of the moral and political consequences. So it must count as a minor irony of history that his reputation and rhetoric, both of them highly serviceable to conservatives, have come under sustained attack from a determined school of British right-wing historians—for the intelligible reason that the salient grievance of these historians is the loss of the British Empire. Nevertheless, some American circles retain anti-Churchill suspicions, because of Churchill’s lifetime role in embroiling the United States in European wars. And beneath all this is a more utilitarian critique that simply inquires whether World War II could or should—because of its appalling cost—have been averted.

I earlier employed the term “profane,” knowing that I should be in need of it again. The argument about World War II and its worthwhileness is the most apparently settled and decided of all major questions in our culture. There may be an occasional flinch (about the obliteration of Dresden, say, or the incineration of Nagasaki, or the wisdom of demanding unconditional surrender). But the evidence adduced at Nuremberg has the effect of retrospectively annulling all such doubts. Even the standby argument of some anti-Churchill Tories (and others, including George Orwell), about the callous collusion between Churchill and Stalin, seems almost anachronistic in view of the eventual implosion of the Soviet system. Finally, nostalgia for the British Empire is not so strong either in Britain or in its former colonial possessions as to evoke much rancor or regret at the loss of dominion.

Churchill and his right-wing critics, from John Charmley to David Irving, have something in common. They unite around the two propositions that communism was to be opposed and British imperialism was to be upheld. For the first few decades of his political career Churchill was happy to be counted an extremist—if not, indeed, a fanatic—on both these counts. He helped to organize the brutal, abortive invasion of Lenin’s Russia in 1918, and published at least one subsequent article blaming the Jews for Bolshevism. He also wrote and spoke until quite late in the day (though more as an anti-Communist than an anti-Semite) in favor of Mussolini, Franco, and even Hitler. His fundamentalism about India, and the racist language in which he opposed the smallest concession to the Indian independence movement, were among the many reasons for the wide distrust that hampered him in the 1930s, and for his exclusion from the Tory Cabinets of that decade. Thus we face an intriguing question when we ask ourselves how it was that he came to embrace a cause that not only transcended those two elemental commitments but eventually negated them.

The hagiographer and the hatchet man are in unspoken agreement here. William Manchester and David Irving lay considerable stress on the near eclipse that overtook Churchill in the mid-1930s. The consensus politics of the so-called National Government had no appeal for him, and no need for him either. He was popularly (and correctly) regarded as one of those whose calamitous earlier policies had made coalition and compromise so necessary. And he was further distrusted as one who was predisposed toward grand-opera or militaristic solutions. Already in his sixth decade, Churchill was also (as some have a tendency to forget) on the verge of bankruptcy. Locust years indeed, in which Churchill (“so surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane …”) was more Falstaff than Hal. The blunt conclusion, encouraged by a reading of Manchester no less than of Irving, is that the Last Lion needed a last hurrah—a campaign issue that allowed him scope for all his talents and energies.

Confronted by the enemy’s herald, who warns him that he faces annihilation if he brings his sick and shabby force onto the field of battle, King Henry V retorts with pugnacity but without overmuch bravado: “We would not seek a battle as we are / Nor, as we are, we say; we will not shun it.” This was not unlike the wager that Churchill made in his campaign against the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments in the late 1930s. He accused them of being militarily unready while simultaneously urging them to risk battle. The contradiction is forgiven in light of eventual triumph, as it was in the case of Agincourt. But the political underlay was epigrammatically understood by Churchill as early as 1934. Writing about the reactionary press baron Lord Rothermere, who was enthusiastically pro-Nazi and pro-empire, he said, “He wants us to be very strongly armed & frightfully obsequious at the same time.” The left, he added with equal acuity, wanted Britain to remain “disarmed & exceedingly abusive.” The central paradox of the epoch has never been better phrased. We are almost conditioned to forget that many of the anti-Churchill Tories were busily committed to rearmament, but regarded Churchill’s constant drumming on the subject as vulgar and alarmist (as, indeed, it sometimes was).

The historian David Dutton seeks to rehabilitate Chamberlain and to write about Churchill as if he were, at last, approachable as a mere mortal. But in doing so he understates the way in which the Tory establishment of the time was subjectively, as well as objectively, pro-Nazi.

On closer examination the image of Churchill as the resolute and unwavering opponent of the 1930s’ dictators—a reasonable basis from which to launch an assault upon Neville Chamberlain—begins to dissolve. His contemporary criticism of the aggression of totalitarian regimes other than Hitler’s Germany was at best muted. When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 Churchill declared that there would be a general unwillingness to fight or to “make any special exertions in defence of the present government of China.” Similarly, his record over Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War failed in reality to place him in a distinctly different camp from Chamberlain and the National Government. Nor did Churchill rush to denounce the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935. As late as 1937 he even seemed willing to give Hitler the possible benefit of the doubt. Accepting that history was full of examples of men who had risen to power by “wicked and even frightful methods” but who had gone on to become great figures, enriching the “story of mankind”, he held out the possibility that “so it may be with Hitler” … Before 1938 his most significantly outspoken criticism of government policy related to its failure to uphold Baldwin’s pledge to maintain air parity with Germany. The government, however, had come to admit its failure in this respect and to begin to increase the pace of rearmament. [Italics added]This is true enough in the formal sense. But one might as readily have summarized Lincoln’s hesitations and evasions on the matter of slavery and abolition, and his long and tortuous attempts to avoid war, and his preference for the survival of the Union over other questions of principle. Yet when the arrogant exorbitance of “The Slave Power” compelled a confrontation, there was no length to which Lincoln would not go; no abolitionist group, however fanatical, that he would not befriend; and no extremity of pitiless violence to which he would not resort. His gift—better to say his instinct—for unifying and spirited phrasing promoted him well above the sordid battlefields for which those phrases were carpentered. Churchill (who in his writings actually betrayed a sympathy for the Confederacy) strikes me as a politician of that kind—a statesman who could use terms like “destiny” and “the Almighty” without seeming self-conscious; a Hegelian figure capable of entirely fusing himself with what he conceived as a fateful hour. In his contradictions he contained multitudes.

The word “appeasement” obscures some elements of this realization now, as it did then. It was the vague term chosen by the Tories themselves to mask a collaboration with fascism and also their candid hope that the ambitions of Hitler could be directed eastward against Stalin. It is as easy to imagine the RAF helping the Wehrmacht in the Caucasus—had things occurred in a slightly different order—as it was difficult for my gruff, reactionary Royal Navy father to find himself, under Churchill’s orders, running guns to Stalin via Murmansk. In their neglected book In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion (to which I should confess I wrote the introduction), Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel deploy an arsenal of documents to argue that sympathy for the Nazi Party prevailed in the highest British circles even after the declaration of war in September of 1939. It wasn’t at all that the British rightists were vacillating and pacifistic—an absurd notion to begin with. It was that they thought they could save their empire by a tactical alliance with Berlin. One simple proof of this can be adduced: British colonial and naval officials were historically very jealous of their country’s predominance in the Mediterranean, which extended from the Strait of Gibraltar to the shores of Palestine. Mussolini’s maritime challenge to this hegemony was vastly strengthened by Franco’s advance in Spain, and British ships visiting Republican ports were actually sunk by Italian planes and submarines during the Spanish Civil War. Yet the cheers for Franco on the Tory benches never died away. Quite obviously, these people thought they saw in fascism a future ally and not a future rival.

Thus Professor Dutton is ungenerous to Churchill. He partly acknowledges as much, in the small concession above on the threat from Germany, which was qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from that posed by Italy or Spain or even—Churchill’s greatest failure of prescience—Japan. But he omits to credit the way in which Churchill broke from his previous sympathy for fascism and the “appeasement” of it, and also the stern, memorable words he employed to make the breach. It was actually the realization about Britain’s position in the Mediterranean, and not any sympathy for Republican Spain, that impelled him to recant his long-standing support for the Franco side. But when he made the switch, he made it wholeheartedly. The British ambassador in Paris did not especially object to Churchill’s inviting Léon Blum to dinner during his unofficial stopovers (the leader of the Front Populaire was also an honored guest at Churchill’s own country house at Chartwell). But he did put his foot down when Churchill asked him to produce some French Communist guests. Writing to a colleague about “The Focus,” that loose-knit group of politicians and journalists and socialites that informally coordinated anti-appeasement information and activity in the late 1930s, Churchill once described it as a coalition seeking support especially from “those of the ‘left.’” As a back-bencher with no official position, he repeatedly invited Stalin’s ambassador, Ivan Maisky, to his home to discuss political strategy.

It is difficult to exaggerate the difference between this and all his previous stances. And so it is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill’s sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed. Churchill knew he had but one chance to put himself at the head of affairs. He was more than willing to amend or abandon all his previous allegiances in order to do so. To take only one example, Churchill had rashly enlisted on the side of King Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson against Stanley Baldwin. He made such a fool of himself in the process (even Lord Jenkins concedes urbanely that he must have been hopelessly drunk at the crucial moment) as to jeopardize his newfound anti-Nazi connections. Yet only a short while later he jettisoned all his romantic and high-flown nonsense about being “a King’s man” and rejected the absurd former monarch as if he, Churchill, were Hal and the King the cast-off jester. Rereading this record, and surveying the ever multiplying fund of fresh sources, we find ourselves reviewing the career of a vaulting prince of opportunists.

ere one must negotiate the toxic figure of David Irving. If Sir Martin Gilbert’s work is the quarry from which the wagons of orthodoxy continue to trundle away, laden with the building blocks for lesser edifices of loyalism, then Irving’s projected trilogy Churchill’s War is the dynamite that lies still unexploded around the quarry. Two volumes have so far been published, bringing the story up to 1943, with the Battle of Kursk balanced by the impending invasion of Sicily. Since his first volume was published, to some acclaim, in 1987, Irving has been reduced to publishing and marketing his books himself. The reason for this is now well understood. Both in his public life as a fringe speechmaker and in his career as a freelance archivist and historian, Irving has tainted himself with the one thing of which no serious person can even be suspected: a sympathy for the Nazi cause. Much of this taint is the consequence of an unsuccessful libel lawsuit against the Holocaust specialist Deborah Lipstadt.

Anyone who reads his first two Churchill volumes with open eyes will see at once that Irving invites, if not enjoys, his reputation as an untouchable. Whenever he mentions Nazi defectors or mutineers or anti-Hitler plotters (and the frigid reception given to such men by Chamberlain and Lord Halifax was yet another clue to their real sympathy for the Führer), he refers to them as “traitors.” He repeatedly describes Churchill as a front man for “the Socialists” and for (variously) “the Zionists” and “the Jews.” He has an unconcealed contempt for mongrel America, and for the wiles of Roosevelt as he schemed to poach the wonderful British Empire. Yet in the text Irving often refers to Churchill as “Winston.” (Irving, as those who study him will know, has a tendency to mix the oleaginous with the aggressive.) About halfway through Volume One, describing the tit-for-tat raids by which, he maintains, Hitler was first induced by Churchill to bomb London in September of 1940, he summarizes his essential position.

This first attack had killed 306 Londoners. It was the first lurch towards the holocaust. Now Churchill and Portal needed no further justification for what they proposed—to unleash a new kind of war, in which ultimately one million civilians in Germany as well as hundreds of thousands of French, Poles, Czechs and others would die under the trample of the Allied strategic bomber forces.(“Holocaust” literally means a devouring by fire, so the term may be technically allowed, but you see what I mean.) Irving has a great facility for innuendo; its most successful application is the repeated suggestion that Churchill used his foreknowledge of German air raids sheerly for grandstanding purposes. On the nights when he knew that Göring’s bombers would overfly London on their way to, say, Coventry, he would make a point of standing on the Air Ministry roof, or of taking a stroll in the Downing Street garden, thus impressing his staff and subordinates with his pluck and daring and sangfroid. On the nights when Enigma gave him private information about a raid on London itself, he would decamp to the country house of a wealthy friend. This accumulation of detail is so subversive of the legend as to make a greater difference in the mind of the reader than many more-serious shortcomings of generalship. The allegation has now been in print for fifteen years, and I have never seen it addressed by the Great Man’s defenders, let alone rebutted.

So visceral is his contempt for Churchill that even the later revisionist historians handle Irving with tongs. Clive Ponting’s study 1940: Myth and Reality, published in 1991, does not acknowledge Irving’s existence except in the bibliography. John Charmley’s first book on Churchill, Churchill: The End of Glory, was published in 1993 (while Charmley held the chair at, of all places, Fulton, Missouri), and his second book, Churchill’s Grand Alliance, appeared in 1995. The name David Irving is only briefly cited in either text or index. (This method is employed in turn by Lord Jenkins, who awards Charmley a single reference en passant, doesn’t even credit Irving in his bibliography, and in general writes as if all “second thoughts” about Churchill are beneath his, and our, notice.) Yet internal evidence strongly suggests that Ponting, Charmley, and Jenkins have read Irving with keen attention, and have used him to enlarge their narratives without appearing to bow to his influence.

I would not consider as qualified in the argument about Churchill anybody who had not read Irving’s work. In those pages one may read, without the veil of discretion or constraint that descended like a thick velvet curtain after 1945, what Churchill’s colleagues and subordinates really thought about him at the time. What they often thought—ambassadors, private secretaries, generals, air marshals—was that he was a demagogue, a bluffer, an incompetent, and an inebriate. Some of those cited are jealous subordinates, and others are military men with a pre-war sympathy for fascism. But here, for instance, is Lord Hankey, one of the leading professional civil servants during both world wars, writing in May of 1941, when he had the job of coordinating Britain’s secret services:

Churchill has great gifts of leadership, and can put his stuff over the people, Parliament, his Cabinet colleagues and even himself. But he is not what he thinks himself, a great master of the art of war. Up to now he has never brought off any great military enterprise. However defensible they may have been, Antwerp, Gallipoli and the expedition to help the White Russians at the end of the last war were all failures. He made some frightful errors of judgment between the two wars in military matters, e.g. obstructing the construction of new ships in 1925 … his false estimates of the value of French generals & French military methods … It was he who forced us into the Norwegian affair which failed; the Greek affair which failed; and the Cretan affair which is failing.All of this, and more, is true. Yet even as the disaster in Crete was becoming evident, and Churchill was wondering how to break the news of another calamity, the Nazi flagship Bismarck was found in the North Sea (with the help of an “unofficial” American spotter plane), disabled by a hastily dropped torpedo, and sunk. Triumph. If Churchill was a Hegelian figure, and if Hegel described Bonaparte as “history on horseback,” then Churchill is the most exemplary illustration of one of Bonaparte’s maxims about generalship: he was lucky. The Norwegian fiasco—a fiasco of his own making—led to the vote of confidence in Parliament that deposed Neville Chamberlain. The defeat of France, which negated Churchill’s dogmatic and dangerous belief in the efficacy of the Maginot Line and the Maginot mentality, allowed him to launch an enormous domestic “unity” campaign that stilled his critics and neutralized his rivals. The sudden frightening indebtedness and impoverishment of Britain gave him room to be sole mediator with Roosevelt, who agreed for a price to be his banker and armorer. At almost every point Churchill was allowed by events to flaunt the medals of his defeats.

There were times when this was not so, but they have been airbrushed from the received record. Not only did Churchill entirely lack foresight (or even ordinary prudence) about the ambitions of Japan, but in the early days of his prime ministership he gave orders for the closure of the Burma Road, the supply route by which Nationalist China had received the means of resistance. This was an overt capitulation to Hirohito’s demands—an abject act of “appeasement” and one that was, interestingly enough, opposed as such by none other than the now despised Lord Halifax. Yet when, not long afterward, Singapore was encircled by the Japanese, Churchill raged incoherently about the failure of his generals to warn him of the threat, spoke terrifyingly of the need to uphold “our country and our race,” and gave the direct order “There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population … Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops.” Read out of context, this hysterical directive could have been a telegram to either commander in the Battle for Stalingrad. It was discreetly countermanded by Archibald Wavell, who permitted the odious General Percival to capitulate. (The story of this outburst is rendered no prettier by the fact that Churchill was hoping, in his own words, to impress the Americans by a great human sacrifice.) Lord Jenkins, I must confess, surprised me, in only one way: he freely admits Churchill’s continual worry that the British soldiers were not as good, or as worthy of his militancy, as the soldiers of the other side. This insecurity about the unworthiness of the rank and file for great deeds or great sacrifices was of course shared by at least two of the other three wartime overlords.

Scouring the increasingly meticulous and assertive and well-sourced revisionist literature, I felt a sensation I had experienced only once before, while reading Josephine Tey’s minor masterpiece, The Daughter of Time. As fellow addicts of this book will know, it begins with an acceptance of the standard view of Richard III—”Crookback Dick,” the usurper, and the murderer of the Little Princes. Then, by slow forensic degrees, it demonstrates that every aspect of this story is an accumulation of lies and later courtier propaganda. The chronicle of Holinshed, the memoir of Sir Thomas More, the drama of Shakespeare himself—all are pitilessly uncovered as the merest conjury and fraud. Even for a reader who has no stake in Tudor spin-doctoring, the effect is a vertiginous one, with all the cargo in the hold slowly turning over. Is one to be left with no illusions? Is the whole pageant a cruel put-up job?

There is an increasing scholarly understanding that only when Hitler made the mistake of fighting the Soviet Union and the United States simultaneously did he condemn himself to certain defeat. The overall British contribution to that defeat has been diminished by the years and with the unsealing of more and more international archives. Yet the legend of 1940 has persisted, and has survived the opening of even the British archives on the period. A sort of cognitive dissonance is in operation. The records show, for example, that in secret Cabinet discussions that spring and summer Churchill more than once favored limited negotiations with Hitler, while Chamberlain at least once voted against them. Nobody in the government was in favor of surrender; nobody, including Churchill, was in favor of rejecting all negotiation with Hitler on principle. But some, including Churchill, were too much committed to a war to turn back without risking ridicule or obloquy.

For an instance of the tenacity of the traditional view, by which one historian underwrites and reinforces the conventional efforts of another, I cite this excerpt from John Lukacs’s November 2001 review of Geoffrey Best’s Churchill: A Study in Greatness.

One of the stunning phrases in Churchill’s history of World War I is his description of the First Fleet leaving Portsmouth for Scapa Flow on July 28, 1914, through the English Channel: “Scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought.” Best ends his book with Churchill’s funeral, on January 30, 1965, “the great cranes along the south side of the stretch of the river between Tower Bridge and London Bridge, dipping their masts in tribute as [Churchill’s funeral launch] went by, ‘like giants bowed in anxious thought.’” This is the mark of a great historian.It is by no means the mark of a great historian. It is the mark of a recycler of familiar rhetorical themes, and of stale rhetorical expressions (“wending their way”) at that. But Lukacs is committed to this style in precisely the way he is committed to its corresponding substance, which admits of no demurral. Just as it’s easy to shock someone whose knowledge of World War II comes from the movie Casablanca by mentioning the obstinate fact that the Roosevelt Administration recognized Vichy even while it was at war with Germany, or the equally obstinate fact that it never declared war on Hitler but waited for Hitler to declare war on the United States, so it is easy to upset the Lukacsian world view with a couple of incontrovertible observations: In 1940 the Churchill government did not even surrender the Channel Islands. It evacuated them, beaches and all, and permitted an unopposed Nazi occupation. Churchill himself was quite ready to discuss Hitler’s demand for some German colonies in Africa if that would help to buy time, and even contemplated the cession of some British colonies, such as Malta and Gibraltar.

ndeed, it is fascinating to notice how often the colonial “periphery” was deemed the essential theater for avoiding an all-out war between Europeans. Chamberlain had cared far more about India (a much more faraway country) than about Czechoslovakia, whereas Churchill was willing to use imperial outposts as bargaining chips with both Roosevelt and Hitler; and in dealings with Washington the British were forced to mortgage what they actually held—in the Caribbean especially—as a down payment on Lend-Lease. It seems almost unbelievable now that the British should have panicked at the “prospect” of a Nazi invasion of Ireland, but it remains the case that Churchill (who had helped to fix the Partition of Ireland in 1921) offered to hand over Protestant Ulster to Eamon De Valera in exchange for the use of Irish ports. Hoping to preserve good relations with food-producing Argentina, the British considered relinquishing their dubious historical claim to the Falkland Islands.

Nor is this colonial dimension a sidebar to the main event. If anyone were to write a serious book about the moment when Britain and Churchill crossed the Rubicon and convinced those at home and abroad that there was no alternative to a war to the finish, the relevant time would not be the days of equivocation in May of 1940. It would be July 3 of the same year, when the order was given to destroy the French fleet in the port of Mers el-Kébir, or Oran, in Algeria. Having vastly and repeatedly overstated the will and the ability of the French to resist Hitler, and having nearly lost an entire British army on this delusion at Dunkirk, Churchill became his own polar opposite and decided that the surviving French naval force was in imminent danger of being grafted onto the German fleet. As it happened, Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull were expressing precisely the same anxiety, at exactly the same time, about the British fleet. In none too delicate a fashion they suggested that Churchill dispatch the Royal Navy across the Atlantic for safekeeping. As late as June 27 Hull had proposed this very course, before being checked by an indignant reply from Churchill.

It can confidently be asserted, based on numerous records and recollections, that the British bombardment of the French navy put an end to this period of vacillation. In Parliament, Churchill’s earlier and more famous speeches (which he did at least give in the chamber, leaving Norman Shelley to handle the airwaves) had been greeted by the Tory members with sullenness or sarcasm—with what one Minister described at the time as a “sinister” lack of enthusiasm. But the news from Mers el-Kébir precipitated the first real ovation of his stewardship as Prime Minister. It was also employed by him to rub in a very salient point: “I leave the judgment of our action, with confidence, to Parliament. I leave it also to the nation, and I leave it to the United States. I leave it to the world and to history.” There was to be no more talk of compromise: “We shall on the contrary prosecute the war with the utmost vigor by all the means that are open to us until the righteous purposes for which we entered upon it have been fulfilled. This is no time for doubts or weakness. It is the supreme hour to which we have been called.”

“Supreme hour” is just as effective as “finest hour,” but this is one speech that has not come down to us by way of the Churchill school of historians. Why not? After all, it rallied opinion, spat defiance, dissolved factional differences, and mightily impressed both Washington and Moscow. It was also an unarguable act of war rather than an act of verbiage. It was a burning of the boats. Ah, but the boats were French. And so were the many hundreds of those who died in them. Moreover, no evidence has ever been produced to suggest that the French would have given over their fleet to the Nazis, and there is much evidence the other way: the ships had been moved to North Africa in the first place to avoid their impressment by Germany, and no surviving Vichy vessel was ever transferred to German control. The British commander who was ordered to open fire on a fleet that lay at anchor—Admiral James Somerville—confessed himself nauseated by the task. The French never forgave the incident. Chroniclers prefer to skate over it or, where possible, elide it altogether.

Yet here, if you will, is the Shakespearean or biblical element at work again. If Churchill would so cheerfully slay and humiliate his recent ally, as an earnest of his ruthlessness and resolution, then what might he not do? This was a much more literally and vividly “Churchillian” moment than most. It’s just not—if I may put it like this—the sort of thing they teach you in school.

t the end of his almost parodically orthodox book Geoffrey Best asks himself why Lyndon Johnson did not attend Churchill’s funeral, in 1965, and decides to leave this wounding question as an open one, almost incapable of rational explanation. Well, Churchill very pointedly did not attend Franklin Roosevelt’s obsequies in 1945, and even Lord Jenkins allows one to speculate—in view of Churchill’s addiction to Atlantic crossings and White House hospitality—that this was determined by pique, including pique at Roosevelt’s repeated refusal to visit Britain during the war. Several years ago I read through the entire Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence and was astonished to find how much the two men had disliked and distrusted each other. Astonished, too, by the clarity and candor of this mutual disaffection, and by the way that official history, most notably Churchill’s own volumes, downplayed the fact. The resentment on Roosevelt’s side was rather petty: he did not forget being snubbed by Churchill at their first meeting, in 1918; did not care for his endless importunacy; and was often appalled by his alcoholism. For Churchill’s part there was the detestation that is often felt by the mendicant; he hated having to be polite to the man he was asking for a loan. And to this was added the humiliation of the terms: Roosevelt always exacted payment, in gold or in bases, in advance, and was once described by his victim as “a sheriff collecting the last assets of a helpless debtor.”

One might feel more sympathy for this complaint if Churchill had not employed precisely the same lofty and arrogant method with his own mendicants. The French and the Poles, much more injured in their pride and in their territory than the British (and this often as a result of listening to British promises), were bluntly and sometimes thuggishly told to know their place and to keep their mouths shut. One does not have to reopen the tattered conspiracy theory about the death of General Sikorski. But it is morally impossible to read Churchill’s brutal injunction to Sikorski—that he drop the subject of the Soviet massacre of the Polish officer corps at Katyn—without reflecting that many more deaths were much more cynically covered up. (No serious British official doubted the truth or the justice of Sikorski’s complaint, though Churchill continued to smokescreen the issue even in his memoirs.)

Roosevelt’s case was slightly different. He was determined not to repeat the Wilsonian mistake of involving America in secret diplomacy; he was fighting the last war. But then, so was Churchill in his way. The issue foremost in Churchill’s mind was the entanglement of the United States in the combat. He and his admirals regularly joked about the happy possibility that the German navy would provoke a confrontation with an American vessel in the North Atlantic. During the hunt for the Bismarck and its consort, Prinz Eugen, Churchill announced that “it would be better for instance that she should be located by a US ship as this might tempt her to fire on that ship, then providing the incident for which the US government would be so grateful.” He may have been too jaunty about the second part of the hypothesis. But the evident reference was to the notorious sinking of the Lusitania, in 1915, which occurred during his first tenure at the British Admiralty. The official historian of British Naval Intelligence, Patrick Beesly, has already written about this as follows:

For my part, unless and until fresh information comes to light, I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without Winston Churchill’s express permission and approval.Those who like to refer to Churchill as an adventurer or a swashbuckler or a buccaneer do not like to hear their words come back to them in this fashion; the Beesly history is invariably omitted from the authorized version. But I venture the prediction that the next wave of Churchill revisionism will focus more and more acutely on this and similar incidents. If he has a titanic place in history, it is largely because he was instrumental in engaging the United States in two world wars, and thus acted as (inadvertent) midwife to the successor role of America as an imperial power. The disagreeable and surreptitious element of this story cannot indefinitely remain unexamined. (There is more than a hint in some recent work that the paranoid American right may be mistaken in its ancient belief that “FDR knew” about the imminence of Pearl Harbor. FDR probably did not know. But Churchill quite possibly did.) At any rate, Churchill got his wish, for a wholehearted American commitment to the war. But in exchange he had to sign a virtual British “Declaration of Dependence,” on everything from currency to colonies.

Churchill’s role in advancing the career and power of Joseph Stalin is the second guarantee of his enduring historical importance. In many of his communications and confidences one gets the distinct sense that he admired the great despot not in spite of his cruelty and absolutism but because of it. (He told Ivan Maisky of his admiration for Stalin’s annihilation of the Trotskyists. And that was before the outbreak of war.) Thus, when he mounted the podium at Fulton and spoke of an “Iron Curtain” extending from the Baltic to the Adriatic, Churchill at least possessed the authority of someone who had done much to bring that curtain down. In his other character, as Anglo-American imperialist, he had also helped to determine Washington’s role as guarantor of the other side of the curtain. Finally, he had helped to share the atomic secret as partial payment for a permanent seat for Britain at all superpower negotiations. A colossus by any measurement, if not the part avuncular and part growling figure depicted by those who trade in reassurance.

It is truth, in the old saying, that is “the daughter of time,” and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that “history” had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election. His declining years in retirement were a protracted, distended humiliation of celebrity-seeking and gross overindulgence.

ome recent work on Hitler, notably by Ian Kershaw, has disclosed a banal but nonetheless awful thought: The Führer always “knew” that he did not have long to live. He embarked on rash or hectic or suicidal enterprises not because he believed that his Reich would last a thousand years but because he sensed that it would not. (Those of his intimates who came to realize this were in possession of one of the most ghastly insights in human history.) Even without this awareness no actuary would have insured Hitler’s life for an extra decade, or even five years. In retrospect this terrible knowledge might seem to vindicate the appeasers and those who, like pre-1941 Roosevelt, were ready to wait and see. A holding operation, or a compromise, could have perhaps resulted in Hitlerism’s giving way to a successor regime or possibly being overthrown in favor of one. The Final Solution, which did not begin until the night and fog of war obscured it, might have been averted or at least attenuated. Millions of other Europeans and Americans might not have been burned or starved or tortured to death. We might not be living under the minute-by-minute menace of nuclear extinction.

I can think such thoughts, and even adduce evidence for them, and feel all the cargo in my hold slowly turning over until there is no weight or balance left in the once sturdy old vessel. Stephen Jay Gould, reviewing the evidence of the fossil record in the Burgess Shale, offered the dizzying conclusion that if the “tape” of evolution could be rewound and run again, it would not “come out” the same way. I am quite sure that he is correct in this. But history really begins where evolution ends, and where we gain at least a modicum of control over our own narrative. I find that I cannot rerun the tape of 1940, for example, and make it come out, or wish it to come out, any other way. This is for one purely subjective reason: I don’t care about the loss of the British Empire, and feel that the United States did Britain—but not itself—a large favor by helping to dispossess the British of their colonies. But alone among his contemporaries, Churchill did not denounce the Nazi empire merely as a threat, actual or potential, to the British one. Nor did he speak of it as a depraved but possibly useful ally. He excoriated it as a wicked and nihilistic thing. That appears facile now, but was exceedingly uncommon then. In what was perhaps his best ever speech, delivered to the Commons five days after the Munich agreement, on October 5, 1938, Churchill gave voice to the idea that even a “peace-loving” coexistence with Hitler had something rotten about it. “What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany, and of our existence becoming dependent upon their good will or pleasure.” Those who write mournfully today about the loss of the British Empire must perforce admit that the Tory majority of 1938 proposed to preserve that empire on just those terms. Some saving intuition prompted Churchill to recognize, and to name out loud, the pornographic and catastrophically destructive nature of the foe. Only this redeeming x factor justifies all the rest—the paradoxes and inconsistencies, to be sure, and even the hypocrisy. But then his last political initiative, and his final excuse for declining to make way for a successor, was in 1953-1954, when he reversed course and proposed a major summit with Stalin’s heirs to try to avert a Cold War. That was, in light of his past, paradoxical and inconsistent and hypocritical also. Yet it hurts to read of the contempt and condescension with which Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles treated this greathearted effort. Even Best and Jenkins are ruefully at one on this episode. For those then in power the Churchill legend was quite satisfactory as it was, with the instrumental metaphors of Munich and Dunkirk and Fulton always at hand.

Earlier I mentioned the stand of the Greeks in 1940. On October 28 of that year, having received an ultimatum from Mussolini to capitulate or face immediate occupation, they responded with the single word “Ochi”—”No!”—and mounted an extraordinary resistance that at first drove the forces of Italian fascism well back into Albania. The day is a national holiday in Greece, and “Ochi” can be seen cut into the side of more than one Greek mountain. When the Nazis joined Italy to punish this intransigence, and exerted overwhelming force, a Greek editor wrote an imperishable front-page article saying that Greece, which had once taught men how to live, would now show them how to die. There was much brave mention of Thermopylae and Marathon. It’s a good and an inspiring story. However, and in fact, Greece at the time was ruled by a particularly crude homegrown Fascist dictator named Ioannis Metaxas. He almost certainly never uttered the pungent word “Ochi,”—replying, rather, to a demarche from the Italian ambassador by saying “Enfin—c’est la guerre.” The relatively brief Greek holdout led eventually to appalling reprisals and a cruel famine, and made very little difference to the outcome of the war. (Though it is an article of belief among many Greeks that the savagely protracted defense of the island of Crete, invaded from the air where once Daedalus and Icarus had soared, delayed the start of Operation Barbarossa and thus contributed to Hitler’s fatal collision with the Russian winter.) The story’s ending is distinctly inglorious, with Winston Churchill arriving in liberated Athens in 1944 and ordering the British General Scobie to treat the Red-dominated population as if he were in a conquered city (and meanwhile trading Greece itself with Stalin).

From Atlantic Unbound:

Interviews: “Darker than We Want to Know” (January 8, 1998)

Seymour Hersh discusses his controversial best seller The Dark Side of Camelot—why he wrote it, why it’s right, and why historians of John F. Kennedy’s presidency have been wrong. Yet would one want to be without that story of Greek defiance, even if it proved illusory, or the defiance futile? People fight, as Kant and Hegel and Nietzsche have emphasized, for dignity and for “recognition” just as much as for their “real” interests. Cold and detached revision has removed the aura of heroism from many luminous and legendary events, including the storming of the Bastille, the fall of the Winter Palace, and the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet new tales arise continually to replace the exploded ones. We seem to have a need, as a species, for something noble and lofty. The task of criticism could be defined as the civilizing of this need—the appreciation of true decency and heroism as against coercive race legends and blood myths. The application of this winnowing and discriminating process to the Churchill cult is more urgent and more relevant—and more feasible—than any reconsideration of Agincourt or Thermopylae. In common with these epics, though, it will be found to have survived in its Platonic essence, quite independent of any evidence or testimony. On the wall of the folkish cave it retains a refracted light and life of its own. Satirizing the too much hymned Greek war against the Emperor Darius, Robert Graves once wrote a poem called “The Persian Version,” which reduced Marathon to its proper proportion as a fleeting skirmish on an imperial periphery (and, by doing so, slyly and implicitly reinstated it in its impossible glory). Graves’s work helped us to see that the antique gods and emperors were mere mammals like ourselves. And it is another of his titles, this time a modern one, that furnishes the necessary condition for future Churchill scholarship. In order to begin at all, we need at last to say good-bye to all that.

Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.

The Atlantic Monthly; April 2002; The Medals of His Defeats; Volume 289, No. 4; 118-137.