My 2019 reading theme was "Rebellion" which ended up being a lot more complicated and significantly less fun than my 2018 theme of "Crime and Punishment."  I read over 100 books this year and picked out my favorite 10 below.

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Fiction

Bildungsroman - "Hell at the Breech" tells the story of two boys in rural Alabama who quickly get in over their heads during a small-scale revolt against authority. A beautifully written book in the tradition of great southern storytelling, Franklin's novel is a combination of a bildungsroman, a southern-noir detective novel, and an incisive commentary on the socioeconomic dynamics of the rural South. Larry Pine, the audiobook narrator, is a virtuoso. Buy on Amazon

Classics - "Moby Dick: or the Whale" is a book everyone knows about and few are dedicated enough to read. I'm glad I made the time because Melville's masterpiece is actually quite hilarious. The Norman Dietz audiobook brought Melville's humor to life and helped me appreciate the subtler aspects of tone and intent. I won't belabor the point about how great Moby Dick is - just get this audiobook and set sail! You'll also enjoy Yale professor Amy Hungerford's lecture on Moby Dick's influence on Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian". Buy on Amazon

Non-Fiction

Biography - "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War" is a bombastic, tragic, and frequently hilarious biography of a great patriot and a terrible dad. Like seriously, one of the worst dads of all time. In spite of his flaws, Boyd displayed extraordinary range in his career, from unbeatable fighter pilot, to revolutionary aircraft designer, to Pentagon procurement polemicist, to visionary grand strategist. Coram's biography shades into hagiography at times, but it's still an utterly compelling and unconventional look at how the US military operates. Buy on Amazon

Economics - "More from Less" is the rational analysis we need in a year during which the prestigious and otherwise mostly legitimate scientific journal "Nature" named notable non-scientist and climate alarmist Greta Thunberg as one of it's top 10 people in science. MIT economist Andrew McAfee shows how we are past "peak stuff" for all sorts of materials - our modern economy is following Buckminster Fuller's decades-old prediction that we can make "more from less." McAfee lays out surprising data to support his compelling thesis that capitalism, technological advances, public awareness, and responsive government are decreasing our environmental impact while improving our quality of life. Buy on Amazon

Revolution - "The Revolt of the Public" will change the way you see the past decade. Occupy Wall Street, Brexit, the Arab Spring, Donald Trump - Gurri posits a framework for understanding why so many people across the world are losing faith in the authority of their governments. In a nutshell, governments make heroic claims about their ability to improve our lives, but in the age of Facebook and Twitter, we constantly see them fail on their own terms. Where are the legitimate sources of authority in such an age? Buy on Amazon

Literary Journalism - "Shah of Shahs" is Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński's account of the Iranian revolution. Suspected of ties with Polish intelligence, Kapuściński was personally present during 27 revolutions. He writes in a strangely compelling, pseudo-magical-realism style that he himself described as "literary reportage." Shah of Shah's was the best book I read all year on the psychology of revolution. Buy on Amazon

Science - "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" is a magisterial account of the Manhattan Project. Covering a vast intellectual territory from early nuclear physics under Rutherford to the weaponization of the atom under Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, Richard Rhodes guides us through the many scientific, military, and political forces that came together to create the first fission bomb. A master researcher and storyteller, Rhodes introduces us to the vast cast of characters behind the atomic effort and sprinkles the massive text with hundreds of exquisitely chosen anecdotes that illuminate their personalities. Buy on Amazon

History - "How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States" was one of the more surprising books I read this year. Immerwahr reveals that America still has hundreds of overseas military bases in a pointillist empire that spans the globe. By shrinking the globe through better travel/communications technology and eliminating dependence on tropical colonies through advances in chemical synthesis, the US has created a modern empire that looks very different than any other in history. Buy on Amazon

Banned Books - "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" was on the Oprah Book Club, not usually where I source my books from! Yet this memoir hit me pretty hard and was right on theme for this year of Revolution. Covering three generations of Chinese women who spanned Mao's entire career from his fight against the Nationalists to his death in 1976, Chang's book confronts us with the cruel and casual violence that Mao's totalitarian ideology inflicted on her family. Although hers is a fairly one-sided account, Chang unflinchingly exposes the viciousness of Chinese communism. Buy on Amazon

China - "The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State" is a clear-eyed look at Xi Jinping's striking consolidation of political power in China and the many challenges that modern China faces. Published by the Council on Foreign Relations, Elizabeth Economy's book is full of hard numbers and some surprising facts. Did you know that 250 million Chinese lack access to clean drinking water? Buy on Amazon

I've been trying to learn more about the Communist takeover of China as part of my 2019 reading theme on Rebellion.  "Wild Swans" is a memoir about three generations of women in a Chinese family in the mid-20th century.  The story begins with Jung Chang's grandmother who was a concubine for a warlord.  Chang's mother was the wife of a rising Communist official who was then purged during Mao's Cultural Revolution.  Chang herself grew up in the middle of the Red Guard movement and ultimately managed to escape to the West and write this book.

Chang's story traces the evolution of Chinese society from its essentially feudal state in the beginning of the 1900's through the battle between the Nationalists and Communists for the control of China, to the imposition of a totalitarian regime by the victorious communists under Mao.  I had understood the broad outlines of this history before, but Chang's multi-generational memoir  confronted me with the bare, brutal reality of how China's turbulent 20th century affected an individual family.  Of course, similar scenarios played out for millions of other individual families across the country.

With the bitterness that only a disillusioned apostate can summon, Chang singles out Mao for particular condemnation.  She had grown up worshipping the man and obediently practicing "Mao Zedong Thought."  The entire population of China seemd to have been co-opted into Mao's system of control.  Yet Mao's jealous ideology and his vengeful minions tore her family apart and literally drove her father insane during one of his detentions.   As she struggled to come to terms with Mao's arbitrary cruelty, Chang began to question everything she had previously believed.  The Communist party's tight control over information and Mao's personal contempt for education made it difficult for Chang to recalibrate her mind, but in the end she was able to secretly read enough banned books that she was able to intellectually free herself from the chains of Mao's ruthless totalitarianism.

The level of viciousness in Chinese society shocked me.  Neighbors turned on neighbors with barbaric cruelty.  Well-placed Communist Party officials used their power to settle personal scores by humiliating, detaining, torturing, and executing their opponents.  Chang often highlights the mistreatment of Chinese women - her own grandmother had her feet bound.  The misery and material scarcity endured by the average Chinese peasant in Chang's book is hardly believable.

Chang clearly has a very anti-Mao perspective, and very reasonably so.  She does show a semblance of balance by pointing out the charitable or even-handed acts of a number of "good" Communist officials.  There's also a touching moment when a pickpocket returns her wallet to her as she's hanging off a train in rural China.  Yet the evil far outweighs the good in Chang's story.  It's a bit hard to know exactly what is spin and what is real - her family in particular is portrayed as perhaps less powerful and more enlightened than perhaps they really were.  But in any case, this book is a powerful reminder about the personal tragedies suffered by individuals in a totalitarian, Communist system.  It's a lesson many intellectuals today try to ignore.

Did you know the world's paper consumption peaked in 2013 and total global paper use has been declining ever since?  Or that since 1982, America has taken an area the size of Washington State out of cultivation while simultaneously increasing total crop tonnage by 35%?

Welcome to the power of "dematerialization."  I first encountered this idea while reading Buckminster Fuller's 1969 "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth," although he called it "ephemeralization."  MIT economist Andrew McAfee takes Bucky's idea and updates it for the world of 2019, writing a clear synthesis of many of the key ideas of the last 50 years.  "More from Less" presents a strong case against neo-Malthusian alarmism and is required reading for anyone who wants to have an informed conversation about economics and the environment.

McAfee's central thesis revolves around what he calls the "four horsemen of the optimist" - namely technological progress, capitalism, public awareness, and responsive government.  These forces combine to create new solutions for many of the major challenges we face.  In the environmental sphere, this manifests as the reduction of natural resource inputs into economic production, hence the title "More from Less."

But don't humans have unlimited wants?  Don't we always want to consume more? McAfee elegantly deflates this classic argument with one of the best one-liners in the book:

We do want more all the time, but not more resources.

Or, said another way, I really just want to buy a pair of pants - I don't care about the nitrogen and water inputs used to grow the cotton that goes into the pants.

This intellectual approach stands in stark contrast to the alarmist rhetoric of other members of the academy, especially tenured Stanford biology professor and notable neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich.  McAfee devotes an entire chapter to the Paul Ehrlich / Julian Simon bet on the future prices of commodities - a bet Ehrlich famously lost.  In the same tradition, McAfee actually puts up $100K of his own money for a series of commodity bets he lists at the end of the book!  For deeper reading on the topic, check out Yale professor Paul Sabin's "The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future."

McAfee's book is a timely and clear synthesis of history of big ideas in environmental economics.  Here's a (partial, semi-chronological) list of many of the usual suspects along with a few surprising characters:

• Thomas Malthus - the intellectual grandpa of resource scarcity alarmism
• de Tocqueville - a footnote wryly comments that de Tocqueville references are de rigueur for any "serious" book about America
• Adam Smith, Marx, and Engels - it is a book about economics, after all!
• Thorstein Veblen - author of "Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899) and intellectual father of the theory of conspicuous consumption
• Buckminster Fuller - early thinker on "ephemeralization" of production (1960's and 70's)
• Paul Ehrlich - famous neo-Malthusian alarmist and author of "The Population Bomb" (1968)
• John Holdren - Obama's science advisor and frequent collaborator with Paul Ehrlich
• Donella Meadows - part of the "Limits to Growth" (1972) team and the "Club of Rome"
• Julian Simon - economist, Ehrlich antagonist, and author of "The Ultimate Resource" (1981)
• Ronald Coase - won a Nobel for being the intellectual father of cap and trade
• William Nordhaus - Yale prof and climate economist
• Vaclav Smil - one of Bill Gates' favorite authors and a prodigious producer of really dense books on resource flows in the global economy
• Bjørn Lomborg - controversial author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (1998). Sort of a bold move for McAfee to favorably cite him!
• Robert Putnam - author of "Bowling Alone" (2000)
• Tyler Cowen - author of "The Great Stagnation" (2011) and perhaps our generation's greatest reader?  Not mentioned by name, but McAfee takes a shot at his big idea - "I believe that technological progress today is faster than ever before in our history."
• Daron Acemoglu - author of "Why Nations Fail" (2012)
• Matt Ridley, Stephen Pinker, Hans Rosling - authors of popular modern books about how the world is getting better
• Johann Hari - author of "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs" (2015) about the epidemic of alienation in America

These thinkers create ideas that drive policy in the real world.  That's a big responsibility.  Incorrect analysis can lead to immense human suffering, a prominent theme in one of my all-time favorite books, "Seeing Like a State."  McAfee notes that Song Jian, the architect of China's infamous "One Child Policy" was heavily influenced by the book "Limits to Growth."  As modern China struggles with a severe gender imbalance and a rapidly aging population, most contemporary analysts have cast the One Child Policy as an unmitigated disaster for the country (to say nothing of the tragedy and violence endured by Chinese individuals).  Yet when the policy was officially retired in 2015, Ehrlich tweeted, "China to End One-Child Policy, Allowing Families Two Children… GIBBERING INSANITY—THE GROWTH-FOREVER GANG."

McAfee, on the other hand, actually looks at the data.  Fortunately for our civilization, the numbers are actually looking pretty good.  One exception to this is Branko Milanovic's famous "Elephant Chart."

This chart is so famous that somehow I had never even heard of it.  It shows that while the global poor and the super-elite have generally seen a large improvement in their incomes, those in the 80-90th percentiles (the middle class in the US and Western Europe) have been stagnating.  If you see me in real life at any point in the next few years, I'll probably still be ranting about this graph.

Anyways, I loved this book.  It surprised me with data, presented a clear theory of change, and was accessibly written - what more can a non-fiction reader ask for?  (OK, it didn't have the Shakespearean majesty of Caro's "The Power Broker," but honestly, who does these days?)  McAfee is sort of an odd duck ideologically - how many other public intellectuals are pro-GMO, pro-carbon-tax, pro-nuclear, and pro-vaccine?  I pay attention to what he says.  He was very early on this current wave of thinking about automation, publishing "Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy" back in 2011.  "More from Less" cements his status as a must-read popular author on the modern economy.  I'm looking forward to his next book.  

Also, if you know him in real life... could you connect me?

If you're more of a podcast person, McAfee has a great guest appearance on the EconTalk podcast - https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/

My highlights below

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. —Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, 1968

INTRODUCTION - README

In America — a large, rich country that accounts for about 25 percent of the global economy — we’re now generally using less of most resources year after year, even as our economy and population continue to grow.

In large parts of the world we’ve already turned the corner and are now improving both the human condition and the state of nature.

We invented the computer, the Internet, and a suite of other digital technologies that let us dematerialize our consumption: over time they allowed us to consume more and more while taking less and less from the planet. This happened because digital technologies offered the cost savings that come from substituting bits for atoms, and the intense cost pressures of capitalism caused companies to accept this offer over and over. Think, for example, how many devices have been replaced by your smartphone.

I call tech progress, capitalism, public awareness, and responsive government the “four horsemen of the optimist.”

Jesse Ausubel’s amazing essay “The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment,” published in 2015 in the Breakthrough Journal.

CHAPTER 1 - All the Malthusian Millennia

Data sources for all of this book’s graphs are given in the endnotes, and the data themselves are available at morefromlessbook.com/data

The average Briton, for example, was worse off throughout the 1700s than in 1200.

Ten thousand years ago, about 5 million people were on the planet.

If all the world’s people were spread out evenly around the planet’s inhabitable land in 1800, everyone would have had almost sixteen acres — an area about as large as nine World Cup soccer fields — to himself or herself. We would not have been able to hear each other, even by shouting.

Part of the reason population grew so slowly throughout all this time was that we didn’t live long. According to demographer James Riley, “Global life expectancy at birth was about 28.5 years in 1800,” and no region of the world at that time had a life expectancy as high as thirty-five years.  [NOTE FROM MAX - I suspect this is due to infant mortality rather than short lifespans]

CHAPTER 2 - Power over the Earth: The Industrial Era

Steam changed the course of humanity not by helping to plow farms, but instead by helping to fertilize them.

Among economic historians who study the effects of the Industrial Revolution a debate exists about exactly when the average English worker’s real wages started to increase. Some, such as Clark, conclude from their research that this happened right at the start of the nineteenth century. Others believe that it happened decades later, only after workers’ bargaining power over their employers increased. These decades have been called the Engels Pause, after Friedrich Engels, a German philosopher (and son of a Manchester textile-mill owner) who believed that English laborers were suffering greatly under Industrial Era capitalism.

Available evidence suggests that cities in many ways became more healthy, not less, as the Industrial Era advanced. This is because while cities lend themselves to the spread of many diseases, they also lend themselves to epidemiology — the study of disease — and to effective interventions.

After this illness reached London in 1832 from its home in the Ganges River delta two major outbreaks killed more than fifteen thousand people. “King Cholera” caused great fear in part because its roots were unknown.

An evidence-based answer comes from historian Ian Morris, who has constructed a numeric index that quantifies the level of social development in a civilization. Morris’s index is calculated from four traits: per-person energy capture, information technology, war-making capacity, and organization.

These huge gains were achieved in large part by adding three more world-altering technologies to the mix: the internal combustion engine, electrical power, and indoor plumbing.

At first, factories electrified by simply replacing their single big steam engine with a single big electric motor. The new power source, just like the old one, was connected to all the machines in the plant by an elaborate and failure-prone (and often unsafe) system of shafts, pulleys, and belts. The belts were often made of leather, and factories needed so many of them that in 1850 leather manufacturing was America’s fifth-largest industry.

Health researchers David Cutler and Grant Miller estimate that the availability of clean water explains fully half of the total decline in the overall US mortality rate between 1900 and 1936, and 75 percent of the decline in infant mortality. Historian Harvey Green calls the technologies of widespread clean water “likely the most important public health intervention of the twentieth century.”

Electricity and indoor plumbing eliminated this constant toil. In the 1930s a Tennessee farmer summarized the immense value of the technologies of the second century of the Industrial Era: “The greatest thing on earth is to have the love of God in your heart, and the next greatest thing is to have electricity in your house.”

Today, the Haber-Bosch process for producing fertilizer is so fundamental to human enterprise that, according to the energy analyst and author Ramez Naam, it uses about 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy.

Vaclav Smil, a prodigious scholar of humanity’s relationship with our planet, estimates that “the prevailing diets of 45 percent of the world’s population” depend on the Haber-Bosch process.

we and our tamed animals now represent 97 percent of the earth’s mammalian biomass.

The battles over the Corn Laws led the politician James Wilson, who was in favor of free trade, to found The Economist.

CHAPTER 3 - Industrial Errors

As Pinker writes in his book Enlightenment Now, “The Enlightenment is sometimes called the Humanitarian Revolution, because it led to the abolition of barbaric practices [such as slavery] that had been commonplace across civilizations for millennia.”

Hitler and Mussolini tried to justify their plans by pointing out that the natural resources of the earth weren’t fairly distributed. As have-nots they were eager to get their fair share from those nations which had more than they should have had.”

By 2018 the United Nations recognized only sixteen remaining “non-self-governing territories”: a disputed African region called Western Sahara and fifteen island groups.

Economists Brian Beach and W. Walker Hanlon used the amount of industrial activity throughout the country as a proxy for the amount of coal burned and found that a 1 percent increase in the amount of coal used was associated with the death of one additional infant per one hundred births. As they write, “Industrial coal use explains roughly one-third of the urban mortality penalty observed during [the] period [1851–60].”

Recall that since the factories of that time needed so many belts, leather making was the country’s fifth-largest industry by 1850. Bison leather, being so durable, was preferred for all this factory infrastructure.

In 1900, as many as a quarter of a million blue whales may have lived in the Southern Ocean. By 1989, about five hundred remained.

Jevons’s most lasting contribution to the debates around people, technology, and the environment was to argue that more efficient use of natural resources would not lead to lower overall use of them. According to Jevons, this was because we’d use the greater efficiency not to get the same amount of the desired output (steam power) while using less of the resource (coal), but instead to get more and more of the output, thereby using more of the resource in total.

In a famous passage, he wrote, “Human wants and desires are countless in number and very various in kind.… The uncivilized man indeed has not many more than the brute animal; but every step in his progress upwards increases the variety of his needs together with the variety in his methods of satisfying them. He desires not merely larger quantities of the things he has been accustomed to consume, but better qualities of those things; he desires a greater choice of things, and things that will satisfy new wants growing up in him.”

CHAPTER 4 - Earth Day and Its Debates

The biologist Paul Ehrlich became the most popular exponent of this view. In his bestselling 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich laid out a scenario that made Malthus look like a sunny optimist. Early editions of the book began, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

It is hard to convey to people who came of age after Earth Day just how broad and deep the concerns were at the time, and how the tone of the mainstream conversation about our planet was somewhere between alarmist and apocalyptic. Modern discussions around climate change sometimes have the same flavor, but very different timescales. Today, we are concerned about what climate change could do by the end of the twenty-first century. Around Earth Day, it seemed as if we might not survive the twentieth.

In 1971 Ehrlich and the physicist John Holdren proposed in Science the equation I = P x F, where I represented a society’s total negative impact on the environment, P stood for population size, and F was a per-person factor.

Though criticized as “mathematical propaganda,” it endured as a model for estimating environmental impact and a guide to what, if anything, could be done.

Economist Kenneth Boulding boosted the recycling movement in 1966 with the vivid image of “Spaceship Earth,” a vessel of finite resources on a long journey through the cosmos.

As the economist Julian Simon put it in his 1981 book, The Ultimate Resource, “Are we now ‘entering an age of scarcity’? You can see anything you like in a crystal ball. But almost without exception, the best data… suggest precisely the opposite.”

Population and economic growth bring with them challenges, but Simon argued that people are actually quite good at meeting challenges. We learn about the world via science, invent new tools and technologies, create institutions such as democracy and the rule of law, and do many other things that let us solve problems and create a better future.

In his 1968 book, Utopia or Oblivion, the architect and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller wrote, “I made many calculations, and it seemed increasingly clear that it was feasible for us to do so much with so little that we might be able to take care of everybody. In 1927 I called this whole process ‘Ephemeralization,’ ” by which he meant satisfying human desires for consumption while using fewer resources from the physical world — fewer molecules, in short.

Fuller wrote, “Ephemeralization… is the number one economic surprise of world man.” The word was eventually replaced by its synonym dematerialization in discussions of innovation, technological progress, and resource use.

Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich made one of the most famous bets in history.

Other times wouldn’t have been so favorable to Simon. As Kedrosky wrote, “If you started the bet any year during the 1980s Simon won eight of the ten decadal start years. During the 1990s things changed, however, with Simon the decadal winner in four start years and Ehrlich winning six.… And if we extend the bet into the current decade… then Ehrlich won every start-year bet in the 2000s.”

Foxfire is a term for bioluminescence caused by fungi that live in decaying wood.

CHAPTER 5 - The Dematerialization Surprise

The magnitude of the dematerialization is large. In 2015 (the most recent year for which USGS data are available) total American use of steel was down more than 15 percent from its high point in 2000. Aluminum consumption was down more than 32 percent and copper 40 percent from their peaks.

Fertilizer use is down almost 25 percent from its 1999 peak, and by 2014 total water used for irrigation had decreased by more than 22 percent from its maximum in 1984. Total cropland has also fallen, to levels rivaling the lowest points of the previous century.

Total timber use is down by a third, and paper by almost half, since their 1990 high points.

American consumption of plastics, which is not tracked by the USGS, is an exception to the overall trend of dematerialization.

I was surprised to learn that total American energy use in 2017 was down almost 2 percent from its 2008 peak, especially since our economy grew by more than 15 percent between those two years.

The six resources America is still using more of year after year are diatomite (fossilized algae skeletons) and industrial garnet (both of which are used as abrasives and filters), gemstones, salt, silver, and vanadium (a metal alloyed with steel to make everything from cutting tools to nuclear reactors).

CHAPTER 6 - CRIB Notes

Instead, America’s manufacturers have learned to produce more things from less metal.

Recycling is big business: 47 percent, 33 percent, 68 percent, and 49 percent of all the tonnage of aluminum, copper, lead, and iron and steel (respectively) consumed in the United States in 2015 came from scrap metal rather than ore taken from the earth. Similarly, almost 65 percent of paper products came from recycled newspapers, pizza boxes, and so on rather than from felled trees.

We should be thankful for this because homesteading is not great for the environment, for two reasons. First, small-scale farming is less efficient in its use of resources than massive, industrialized, mechanized agriculture. To get the same harvest, homesteaders use more land, water, and fertilizer than do “factory farmers.” Farms of less than one hundred acres, for example, grow 15 percent less corn per acre than farms with more than a thousand acres.

Second, rural life is less environmentally friendly than urban or suburban dwelling. City folk live in high-density, energy-efficient apartments and condos, travel only short distances for work and errands, and frequently use public transportation. None of these things is true of country living. As economist Edward Glaeser summarizes, “If you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. Move to high-rise apartments surrounded by plenty of concrete.… Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.”

It’s almost certainly the case that the English turned to coal for home heating in the middle of the sixteenth century because they’d cut down such a huge percentage of their trees that the price of wood skyrocketed.

In 1979 the government of the People’s Republic of China announced its new family planning policy, which soon became known as the one-child policy. It was enacted despite the steady decline in the country’s birth rate throughout the 1970s. But after reading Limits to Growth, A Blueprint for Survival, and other books limning the looming dangers of unchecked population expansion, the missile scientist Song Jian came to believe that even faster birth rate reductions were required. He became the architect of the new policy, the main effect of which was to limit ethnic Han Chinese families to a single child.

In their 2013 essay “How Will History Judge China’s One-Child Policy?” the demographers Wang Feng, Yong Cai, and Baochang Gu compared the policy unfavorably to two of their country’s great twentieth-century convulsions: the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. They wrote, “While those grave mistakes both cost tens of millions of lives, the harms done were relatively short-lived and were corrected quickly afterward. The one-child policy, in contrast, will surpass them in impact by its role in creating a society with a seriously undermined family and kin structure, and a whole generation of future elderly and their children whose well-being will be seriously jeopardized.”

Third, bans have been imposed on the commercial trade in many animal products. The most sweeping of these is probably the nationwide ban on the sale of hunted meat. You may see venison or bison meat at a butcher’s counter or on a menu in America, but it always comes from a ranch, not a hunt.

Yet this example of large-scale and largely unnecessary state-imposed coercion, entailing countless forced abortions, sterilizations, and other brutalities against women, retains some supporters, at least in the West. When China announced the formal end of the one-child policy in late 2015, Paul Ehrlich responded with a tweet: “China to End One-Child Policy, Allowing Families Two Children… GIBBERING INSANITY—THE GROWTH-FOREVER GANG.”

CHAPTER 7 - What Causes Dematerialization? Markets and Marvels

Capitalism and technological progress are the first pair of forces driving dematerialization.

In 1982, after more than a decade of steady expansion due in part to rising grain prices, total cropland in the country stood at approximately 380 million acres. Over the next ten years, however, almost all of this increase was reversed. So much acreage was abandoned by farmers and given back to nature that cropland in 1992 was almost back to where it had been almost twenty-five years before.

Between 1982 and 2015 over 45 million acres — an amount of cropland equal in size to the state of Washington — was returned to nature. Over the same time potassium, phosphate, and nitrogen (the three main fertilizers) all saw declines in absolute use. Meanwhile, the total tonnage of crops produced in the country increased by more than 35 percent.

Nokia, meanwhile, sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft in 2013 for $7.2 billion to get “more combined muscle to truly break through with consumers,” as the Finnish company’s CEO Stephen Elop said at the time of the deal. It didn’t work. Microsoft sold what remained of Nokia’s mobile phone business and brand to a subsidiary of the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn for $350 million in May of 2016.

Thanks to fracking, US crude oil production almost doubled between 2007 and 2017, when it approached the benchmark of 10 million barrels per day. By September of 2018 America had surpassed Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest producer of oil.

As a result of the fracking boom the United States has experienced peak coal rather than peak oil. And the peak in coal is not in total annual supply, but instead in demand. Fracking made natural gas cheap enough that it became preferred over coal for much electricity generation. By 2017 total US coal consumption was down 36 percent from its 2007 high point.

As a 2017 Bloomberg headline put it, “Remember Peak Oil? Demand May Top Out Before Supply Does.”

At present over 5 million messages about railcar status and location are generated and sent throughout the American railway system every day, and the country’s more than 450 railroads have nearly real-time visibility over all their rolling stock.

China didn’t attain its near monopoly because it possessed anything close to 90 percent of global reserves of REE. In fact, rare earths aren’t rare at all (one, cerium, is about as common in the earth’s crust as copper). However, they’re difficult to extract from ore. Obtaining them requires a great deal of acid and generates tons of salt and crushed rock as by-products. Most other countries didn’t want to bear the environmental burden of this heavy processing and so left the market to China.

Overall, the companies using REE found many inexpensive and convenient alternatives. By the end of 2017 the same bundle of rare earths that had been trading above $42,000 in 2011 was available for about $1,000.

We do want more all the time, but not more resources.

When fracking made natural gas much cheaper, total demand for coal in the United States went down even though its price decreased.

Materials cost money that companies locked in competition would rather not spend.

There are multiple paths to dematerialization.

A kilogram of uranium-235 fuel contains approximately 2–3 million times as much energy as the same mass of coal or oil. According to one estimate, the total amount of energy that humans consume each year could be supplied by just seven thousand tons of uranium fuel.

For example, the world’s commercial airlines have improved their load factors — essentially the percentage of seats occupied on flights — from 56 percent in 1971 to more than 81 percent in 2018.

The iPhone and its descendants are among the world champions of dematerialization.

I call these four paths to dematerialization slim, swap, optimize, and evaporate.

Innovation is hard to foresee.

The year of peak paper consumption in the United States, however, was 1990. As our devices have become more capable and interconnected, always on and always with us, we’ve sharply turned away from paper. Humanity as a whole probably hit peak paper in 2013.

One of my favorite definitions of technology comes from the philosopher Emmanuel Mesthene, who called it “the organization of knowledge for the achievement of practical purposes.”

My other preferred definition of technology comes from the great science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin, who wrote, “Technology is the active human interface with the material world. Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?), what they build with and what they build, their medicine—and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren’t interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I’m fascinated by them.”

I’m going to join this long sad parade by arguing in favor of capitalism.

Some important “market failures” need to be corrected by government action.

How could these predictions about resource availability, which were taken seriously when they were released, have been so wrong? Because the Limits to Growth team pretty clearly underestimated both dematerialization and the endless search for new reserves.

Abraham Lincoln, the only US president to hold a patent, had a deep insight about capitalism. He wrote that the patent system “added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things.” “The fire of genius” is a wonderful label for technological progress. “The fuel of interest” is equally good as a summary of capitalism.

If the Enlightenment led to the Industrial Era, then the Second Machine Age has led to a Second Enlightenment — a more literal one. We are now lightening our total consumption and treading more lightly on our planet.

Lincoln’s patent was for a flotation system that lifted riverboats stuck on sandbars.

CHAPTER 8 - Adam Smith Said That: A Few Words about Capitalism

The profit motive is an extremely powerful incentive for people and companies to create goods and services others will want to buy.

As Smith observed, “Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.”

Yet another of Smith’s most famous observations, taken from a lecture he gave more than twenty years before The Wealth of Nations appeared, is that “little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.”

Hayek realized that fluctuating prices for such things as aluminum and wheat are signals about scarcity and abundance. These signals cause people who buy and sell to take action (to slim, swap, optimize, evaporate, and so on). So free-floating prices in capitalist economies do an important double duty: they provide both information and incentives. Prices fixed by a socialist government do neither of those things.

A former director of the state-run oil company explained, “In Venezuela, there is no war, nor strike. What’s left of the oil industry is crumbling on its own” because of incompetence and corruption. Other industries didn’t fare much better. The IMF estimated that the country’s GDP dropped 35 percent between 2013 and 2017. According to economist Ricardo Hausmann, this is the largest economic collapse ever seen in the history of not only Latin America but also Western Europe and North America.

UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously observed in 1976, “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

CHAPTER 9 - What Else Is Needed? People and Policies

If companies can buy and sell the right to pollute, things will get even better. This is the conclusion of a line of thinking kicked off by the legendary and Nobel Prize–winning economist Ronald Coase in his 1960 paper “The Problem of Social Cost.”

A cap-and-trade system or any other pollution-control effort won’t work if the government is weak, corrupt, or otherwise unable to enforce its laws. It’s not too cynical to say that polluters won’t stop simply because they’re asked to or because a law has been passed. They need to be confident that there will be penalties, and that the cost of these penalties will be greater than the cost of being clean and green. So governments need to have high-quality monitoring and enforcement capabilities.

A study published in 2017 by researchers Christian Schmidt, Tobias Krauth, and Stephan Wagner found that 88–95 percent of all plastic garbage that flowed into the world’s oceans from rivers came from just ten of them, of which eight were in Asia and two in Africa.

The United States, for example, which accounts for approximately 25 percent of the world’s overall economy, contributes less than 1 percent of total global river-sourced plastic ocean trash. China, meanwhile, is responsible for about 15 percent of the world’s economy, yet contributes 28 percent of total oceanic plastic trash from rivers.

But we shouldn’t get complacent about the power of capitalism and tech progress to prevent the complete dematerialization of species, for two reasons. The first is biology. By the time high prices or other factors lead us to stop killing animals, there may simply not be enough left to allow their population to rebound.

The other reason high prices might not rescue animals is that we humans sometimes like high prices. With most products, demand goes down when prices go up, all other things being equal. But with “Veblen goods,” something very different happens: higher prices cause demand to go up.

The scientific consensus about the safety of GMO foods is overwhelming.

Yet thirty-eight countries don’t allow their farmers to grow GMO crops, according to the Genetic Literacy Project website. These include most EU countries (except for Spain and Portugal), Russia, and much of Africa. This collective refusal represents a great triumph of ideology over evidence, and also over the environment.

In my view the best answer to this question comes from the work of the economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James Robinson, summarized in their book Why Nations Fail. They argue that the differences between rich countries and poor ones, between those that maintain growth over long periods and those that can only accomplish it fitfully (if at all), stem from differences in their institutions.

The author and self-described “rational optimist” Matt Ridley makes a stark comparison: “A car today emits less pollution traveling at full speed than a parked car did from leaks in 1970.”

The USSR minister of fisheries during the time of the whale hunts was Aleksandr Ishokov, who was named a Hero of Socialistic Work for his ability to execute plans. As Berzin wrote in his memoir, “On one occasion a scientist was trying to protect the whale resources from destructive whaling and he reminded the Minister about his descendants. Ishokov returned an abominable, criminal, and chilling response that should be carved upon the gravestone of the Soviet economic system: ‘These descendants will not be the ones to fire me from my job.’ ”

CHAPTER 10 - The Global Gallop of the Four Horsemen

In 2016, more people in the world had a phone than a flush toilet or piped water.

I believe that technological progress today is faster than ever before in our history.

The new approach was called “reform and opening up.” It was also referred to as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” but a better label for it might be “Chinese authoritarianism with some capitalist characteristics.”

Soon after, Gorbachev signed a document giving up his presidency and returning self-government, after more than six decades, to the fifteen republics that had made up the USSR. During the ceremony the Russian-made felt pen Gorbachev tried to use didn’t work, so he borrowed a fountain pen from CNN president Tom Johnson.

When introducing these reforms, Singh paraphrased Victor Hugo by stating, “No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”

Between 1978 and 1991, then, more than 2.1 billion people — about 40 percent of the world’s 1990 population — began living within substantially more capitalist economic systems. This is certainly the largest and fastest shift toward economic freedom that the world has ever seen.

Although autocracies still governed more than 23 percent of the global population in 2015, there are fewer and fewer of them over time. And as Roser says, “It is worth pointing out that four out of five people in the world that live in an autocracy live in China.”

As Pinker writes, “Young Muslims in the Middle East, the world’s most conservative culture, have values today that are comparable to those of young people in Western Europe, the world’s most liberal culture, in the early 1960s.”

As recently as 1980, almost 44 percent of all people at least fifteen years old were illiterate. By 2014, the figure had dropped to less than 15 percent.

CHAPTER 11 - Getting So Much Better

Max Roser’s Our World in Data is one of my favorite websites, for two reasons. The first is that it contains a lot of valuable information. The second is that it tells an invaluable story — an optimistic and hopeful one. The evidence presented in Our World in Data and in books like Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource, Bjørn Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist, Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, and Hans Rosling’s Factfulness shows clearly that most of the things we should care about are getting better.

One other important factor, I think, was identified by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill in an 1828 speech: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” In many elite circles and publications negativity seems to be a sign of seriousness and rigor, while optimism and positivity seem naive and under-informed.

However, Brand points out that documented extinctions are relatively rare (with about 530 recorded within the past five hundred years) and appear to have slowed down in recent decades; for example, no marine creatures have been recorded as extinct in the past fifty years.

Second, we’re fighting to preserve some of the most threatened species living on islands (where a disproportionate number of extinctions take place) by removing imported predators. To date, at least eight hundred islands have been protected in this way.

Parks and other protected areas made up only 4 percent of global land area in 1985, but by 2015, this figure had almost quadrupled, to 15.4 percent. At the end of 2017, 5.3 percent of the earth’s oceans were similarly protected.

The most important way that we’re absenting ourselves from the land at present is by no longer farming it. As we saw in chapter 7, for example, the amount of land used for farming in the United States has declined since 1982 by a Washington State–sized amount. After we stop farming the land, it eventually reverts to forest. Throughout the developed world this process is now dominating any and all tree felling that is taking place, and overall reforestation has become the norm.

Even with continued deforestation in developing countries and other challenges, a critical milestone has been reached: across the planet as a whole we have, as an international research team concluded in 2015, experienced a “recent reversal in loss of global terrestrial biomass.” For the first time since the start of the Industrial Era, our planet is getting greener, not browner.

CHAPTER 12 - Powers of Concentration

We’re not on our way to becoming a city-dwelling species — we’re already largely there.

Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won a majority of the vote in fewer than five hundred counties. These counties, however, together generated 64 percent of the country’s economy. The more than twenty-five hundred counties won by Trump were responsible for only a bit more than a third of the American economy.

Van Reenen writes, “Many of the patterns are consistent with a… view where many industries have become ‘winner take most/all’ due to globalization and new technologies rather than a generalized weakening of competition due to relaxed antitrust rules or rising regulation.”

Most Americans, however, don’t own stock in Amazon. Or in any other company. Economist Edward Wolff found that, in 2016, 50.7 percent of US households owned no stocks at all, either directly or in retirement accounts. So all stock market wealth is concentrated in less than half of America’s households.

As Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton put it in 2017, “Inequality is not the same thing as unfairness; and, to my mind, it is the latter that has incited so much political turmoil in the rich world today. Some of the processes that generate inequality are widely seen as fair. But others are deeply and obviously unfair, and have become a legitimate source of anger and disaffection.”

CHAPTER 13 - Stressed Be the Tie That Binds: Disconnection

Instead, he replied: “The lack of a fundamental friendliness. It seems like an awful lot of people in America and around the world feel spiritually and personally alienated.… I think that, when you look at veterans coming out of the wars, they’re more and more just slapped in the face by that isolation, and they’re used to something better. They think it’s PTSD — which it can be — but it’s really about alienation. If you lose any sense of being part of something bigger, then why should you care about your fellow man?” - General Mattis

Just about all the mortality increase was attributable to the least educated white middle-aged Americans, and to three causes of death: suicide, drug overdose, and chronic liver disease such as cirrhosis (which is often caused by alcoholism).

The US suicide rate rose by 14 percent between 2009 and 2016, when it reached a level not previously seen since the end of World War II. Overdose deaths have climbed even more quickly. They almost doubled between 2008 and 2017, when more than 72,000 people lost their lives to an overdose. This is far more than the 58,220 American military deaths recorded throughout the Vietnam War.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2016, 197,000 deaths were related to suicide, alcohol, and drug abuse. This was more than four times the 44,674 people who died from HIV/AIDS at the peak of its epidemic in 1994.

As Johann Hari, a writer and researcher on the global “war on drugs” puts it, “The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, it’s connection.”

As we saw in chapter 10, most countries are becoming significantly more pluralistic — they’re seeing more ethnic diversity and immigration, gender equality, support for gay marriage and other nontraditional lifestyles, and related changes that enhance diversity. A fascinating stream of recent research finds that a large percentage of people in all countries studied have an innate intolerance for this greater diversity. Instead, they want things to be the same everywhere. They value uniformity of beliefs, values, practices, and so on (as long, of course, as this uniformity reflects their own beliefs, values, and practices). The political scientist Karen Stenner labels people with this personality type “authoritarians” because they typically want a strong central authority to enforce obedience and conformity. Recent election results across countries as dissimilar as the United States, Poland, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines, and Brazil indicate a global growing desire for authoritarian leaders.

Economic activity, as it brings people together to produce and exchange, builds bonds and social capital. So as economic activity declines, so does social capital. As factories close and farms go fallow in a county it’s not just output that decreases; the number of relationships does, too.

Sullivan makes a point that might help explain why European countries haven’t seen fatal overdoses rise anywhere near as much as the United States has. As he writes, “Unlike in Europe, where cities and towns existed long before industrialization, much of America’s heartland has no remaining preindustrial history, given the destruction of Native American societies. The gutting of that industrial backbone — especially as globalization intensified in a country where market forces are least restrained — has been not just an economic fact but a cultural, even spiritual devastation.”

The famous Elephant Graph, drawn by economists Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner, helps us understand why this segment of society might be feeling so much alienation and resentment. Milanovic and Lakner had the great idea to essentially line up all the people in the world from poorest to richest, then see how much their incomes changed between 1988 and 2008. The resulting graph looked to many like a drawing of an elephant with its trunk in the air.

In 1867 the German statesman Otto von Bismarck famously observed, “Politics is the art of the possible.” A century and a half later, as the Industrial Era rapidly gives way to the Second Machine Age, disconnection, authoritarianism, and polarization seem to be reducing the possibilities for effective government.

Another reason is that we humans outsource a lot of knowledge to other people, often without even realizing that we’re doing so. As Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach explain in their book, The Knowledge Illusion, many people believe that they have a good idea how a flush toilet works, but few can actually explain the mechanisms by which that device carries away waste and refills with water. This “illusion of explanatory depth” is widespread, covering everything from how a can opener operates to how a cap-and-trade system for reducing pollution is put into practice.

Globally, approximately 90 percent of children are vaccinated against pertussis, a highly infectious coughing disease that’s especially dangerous to infants. In some Los Angeles preschools, however, more than half of students are exempt from this vaccination because of paperwork filed by their parents. These schools’ communities, which are usually affluent and well educated, appear to have immunization rates similar to those of Chad and South Sudan.

The anti-vaccination movement is not confined to America. Europe had more than eighty thousand measles cases in 2018, a fifteenfold increase over 2016. These cases led to seventy-two deaths.

CHAPTER 14 - Looking Ahead: The World Cleanses Itself This Way

Romer’s largest contribution to economics was to show that it’s best not to think of new technologies as something that companies buy and bring in from the outside, but instead as something they create themselves (the title of his most famous paper, published in 1990, is “Endogenous Technological Change”). These technologies are like designs or recipes; as Romer put it, they’re “the instructions that we follow for combining raw materials.”

Romer’s brilliance was to highlight the importance of two key attributes of the technological ideas companies come up with as they pursue profits. The first is that they’re nonrival, meaning that they can be used by more than one person or company at a time, and that they don’t get used up.

The second important aspect of corporate technologies is that they’re partially excludable.

Romer called this capacity “human capital” and said at the end of his 1990 paper, “The most interesting positive implication of the model is that an economy with a larger total stock of human capital will experience faster growth.”

Digital tools are technologies for creating technologies, the most prolific and versatile ones we’ve ever come up with. They’re machines for coming up with ideas.

the Instructables website contains detailed instructions for making equipment ranging from air-particle counters to machine tools,

Because 3-D printing generates virtually no waste and doesn’t require massive molds, it accelerates dematerialization.

Here are the even-money bets I’m offering: Compared to 2019, in 2029 the United States will consume in total:

• Fewer metals
• Fewer “industrial materials” (diamonds, mica, etc.)
• Less timber
• Less paper
• Less fertilizer
• Less water for agriculture
• Less energy

Compared to 2019, in 2029 the US will:

• Use less cropland
• Have lower greenhouse gas emissions

CHAPTER 15 - Interventions: How to Be Good

Economist William Nordhaus uses the image of a “climate casino” to convey the uncertainty about the future trajectory of climate change.

In January of 2019, an all-star collection of American economists (featuring Nobel Prize winners, Fed chairs, treasury secretaries, and others) signed an open letter advocating that the United States adopt a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

Germany has embarked on an ambitious Energiewende — literally, a national “energy transition” — away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. However, the results to date have been unimpressive: electricity prices for consumers have doubled since 2000, and carbon emissions have been flat or increasing in recent years (after decreasing substantially for more than a decade after 1990).

As the environmental policy analyst and self-described “ecomodernist” Michael Shellenberger highlights, however, the evidence is strong that nuclear is actually the safest source of reliable energy. A study published in the Lancet in 2007 found that over the previous fifteen years death rates from pollution were generally hundreds of times lower for nuclear power than for coal, gas, or oil, and that accident rates were also comparatively low for nuclear.

The two horsemen of capitalism and tech progress are taking us into a more concentrated world, not a more evenly distributed one.

The software company Salesforce is buying enough carbon offsets to make up for all the CO2 produced by its data centers around the world.

Other large technology companies, including Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, have similar plans.

Because transportation currently relies so heavily on burning fossil fuels, it’s a major contributor to global warming. But many companies are making efforts to improve the situation. United Airlines has committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050. Shipping giant A.P. Møller-Maersk has gone further, pledging carbon neutrality across its fleet by the middle of the century.

Since greenhouse gases are global pollutants, carbon offsets benefit the whole planet. Nonprofits such as Cool Effects and Carbonfund.org certify that the carbon-reducing projects receiving their money are actually causing reductions that wouldn’t happen otherwise, a property called additionality (even though the trees in my backyard absorb carbon, Cool Effects won’t pay me for them because I’m not bringing about any additional reductions beyond what nature is already accomplishing).

Ducks Unlimited, for example, has since its establishment in 1937 conserved 14 million acres in North America, an area as big as West Virginia.

Trout Unlimited, Salmon Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, and many other groups are similarly dedicated to preserving the species they go after for sport and food.

Another of my favorite examples of new approaches to human capital formation is 42, a technology academy founded by the French entrepreneur Xavier Niel.

Families and people who are aware of the evidence, and who want to do right by their fellow humans and the planet we all live on, will do a few things. One of the most important is that they’ll influence their governments by voting and persuading others to vote, contacting elected officials, speaking in public, coming together at rallies and in peaceful protests, and using all the other tools of engaged citizens.

(Recommendations for what we can do)

• Reducing pollution.
• Reducing greenhouse gases.
• Promoting nuclear energy.
• Preserving species and habitats.
• Promoting genetically modified organisms.
• Funding basic research.
• Promoting markets, competition, and work.

In the future we’ll see more companies launch efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, households will have more ways to determine which of these efforts are most sincere and effective. This will allow them to reward decarbonizers by buying their goods and services.

As Linus Blomqvist of the ecomodernist think tank Breakthrough Institute puts it, “A diet including chicken and pork, but no dairy or beef, has lower greenhouse gas emissions than a vegetarian diet that includes milk and cheese, and almost gets within spitting distance of a vegan diet.”

For the greenhouse-gas-generating activities that households can’t avoid (or choose not to), they can buy carbon offsets against them.

CONCLUSION - Our Next Planet

As our creators and children look at this turning point, they will see that it was good.

Compared to forests, grasslands keep the earth cooler in two ways: they reflect more sunlight back into space, and they insulate the ground less, leading to longer and deeper winter freezes.

Acknowledgments

At the Breakthrough Institute Ted Nordhaus

Buckle up, my friends.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "Infidel" is a staggeringly controversial memoir that forcefully condemns "multicultural" appeasement of Islamic immigrants in Western countries because of their unequal treatment of women and subordination of individual liberty.  A fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and Harvard's Kennedy School, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the Dutch parliament, Ali traces her intellectual journey from a devout Somali Muslim to a Westernized apostate in Holland targeted for assassination by Islamic fundamentalists.  If her name sounds familiar, you may be recollecting the notorious 2004 assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh who was murdered for making a controversial film "Submission" with Ali.  She also recently published a critique in the WSJ of fellow Somali immigrant and controversial political figure Ilhan Omar.

Living in an Islamic society, Ali's freedom was heavily restricted and she spent a lot of time reading.  Even silly kids' books like Nancy Drew gave her a window onto a completely different way of life and made her question the unequal conditions that Islam imposed upon women.  She credits these Western books with providing the foundation for her resistance, "Most of all, I think it was the novels that saved me from submission."  

One of the themes she returns to again and again is the Western notion of romantic love.  She tells of stealing pleasure from scandalous paperbacks that she and other girls would trade with one another.  I'm reminded of the idea from "How the Classics Made Shakespeare" that romantic love is the key driver of plot in many of Shakespeare's works.  No matter how her culture tried to repress her desire, it was too powerful a force to be resisted.

But Ali did more than just read trashy bodice-rippers.  Like Malcolm X, Ali devoured books to try to understand her world.  Especially once she began attending the Leiden University in Holland, she dove deep into the works of Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Mill, Voltaire, Russell, and Popper.  These transformed her consciousness and posed a major challenge to her religious beliefs:

Sometimes it seemed as if almost every page I read challenged me as a Muslim. Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.

Ali's intellectual struggle plays out across the stage of her tragic personal life. Her politically influential father spent much of her childhood in jail and essentially abandoned her mother for another wife.  Ali's grandmother had a local man perform a female genital mutilation procedure on her when she was five years old.  Her mother frequently beat her.  She escaped an arranged marriage by fleeing as a refugee to Holland (where she committed immigration fraud).  Later, her sister suffered a mental breakdown and died.  Ali's personal resilience and refusal to suffer in silence is inspiring.

OK, so now on to the really controversial stuff.  After her move to Holland, Ali began serving as a Somali translator for the government.  In her role, she had a firsthand view of the continued oppression of women by the Somali community even after they got refugee status in Holland.  She saw that many Muslims failed to integrate into Dutch society and instead took advantage of government support to run their own religious schools that perpetuated non-Western views:

At the Muslim schools there were no children from Dutch families. The little girls were veiled and often separated from the boys, either in the classroom or during prayer and sports. The schools taught geography and physics just like any school in Holland, but they avoided subjects that ran contrary to Islamic doctrine. Children weren’t encouraged to ask questions, and their creativity was not stimulated. They were taught to keep their distance from unbelievers and to obey. This compassion for immigrants and their struggles in a new country resulted in attitudes and policies that perpetuated cruelty. Thousands of Muslim women and children in Holland were being systematically abused, and there was no escaping this fact. Little children were excised on kitchen tables — I knew this from Somalis for whom I translated. Girls who chose their own boyfriends and lovers were beaten half to death or even killed; many more were regularly slapped around. The suffering of all these women was unspeakable. And while the Dutch were generously contributing money to international aid organizations, they were also ignoring the silent suffering of Muslim women and children in their own backyard. Holland’s multiculturalism — its respect for Muslims’ way of doing things — wasn’t working. It was depriving many women and children of their rights.

Ali gained notoriety as a fierce critic of Islam and multiculturalism.  She focused on the unequal treatment of women as well as the repression of individual rights.  Her views have contributed to the ongoing debate on Muslim immigration to Europe and caused so much controversy that she was forced out of the Dutch government and nearly even had her citizenship revoked.

As a female Somali apostate who opposes the moral relativist agenda of the multicultural left, Ali has a rare perspective.  Even if you disagree with her positions, it's worth reading about how she arrived at them.  Her story is powerful and tragic and brave.  It forced me to take a different look on immigration issues and I found it hard to argue with her logic.  I'm looking forward to reading some books on the other side to figure out what I really believe here.

For another controversial Muslim apostate, check out Salman Rushdie's "The Satantic Verses."

My highlights below:

Foreword by Christopher Hitchens

Thus the other journey described here, and a no less arduous one, is the gradual emancipation of the self from the “mind-forged manacles” of theocracy.

We then discussed the triad of mentalities that, in my opinion, go to make up Islamist fundamentalism. These are self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. “In the Muslim world there is hardly a self,” was her first comment, “because the only real human moments are stolen ones. This leads to hypocrisy, which is the main cause of self-righteousness.”

(I told her the old joke: when people say they talk to god, we may call that prayer. When people say that god talks to them—that’s schizophrenia.)

Here is the very encapsulation of the sado-masochism of religion: it makes impossible demands on people and then convicts them of original sin when they fail to live up to them.

The cause of backwardness and misery in the Muslim world is not Western oppression but Islam itself: a faith that promulgates contempt for Enlightenment and secular values. It teaches hatred to children, promises a grotesque version of an afterlife, elevates the cult of “martyrdom,” flirts with the mad idea of forced conversion of the non-Islamic world, and deprives societies of the talents and energies of 50 percent of their members: the female half.

The Muslim hadith, which have canonical status along with the Quran, state plainly that the punishment for apostasy is death.

There is another viewpoint that must be stated without equivocation: if Muslims want to immigrate to open and developed societies in order to better themselves, then it is they who must expect to do the adapting. We no longer allow Jews to run separate Orthodox courts in their communities, or permit Mormons to practice polygamy or racial discrimination or child marriage. That is the price of “inclusion,” and a very reasonable one.

Introduction

One November morning in 2004, Theo van Gogh got up to go to work at his film production company in Amsterdam. He took out his old black bicycle and headed down a main road. Waiting in a doorway was a Moroccan man with a handgun and two butcher knives.

With the other knife, he stabbed a five-page letter onto Theo’s chest. The letter was addressed to me.

Theo and I knew it was a dangerous film to make. But Theo was a valiant man — he was a warrior, however unlikely that might seem. He was also very Dutch, and no nation in the world is more deeply attached to freedom of expression than the Dutch. The suggestion that he remove his name from the film’s credits for security reasons made Theo angry. He told me once, “If I can’t put my name on my own film, in Holland, then Holland isn’t Holland any more, and I am not me.”

However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.

This book is dedicated to my family, and also to the millions and millions of Muslim women who have had to submit.

PART I - My Childhood

CHAPTER 1 - Bloodlines

Somali children must memorize their lineage: this is more important than almost anything. Whenever a Somali meets a stranger, they ask each other, “Who are you?” They trace back their separate ancestries until they find a common forefather.

We had no father, because our father was in prison. I had no memory of him at all.

My family were nomads who moved constantly through the northern and northeastern deserts to find pasture for their herds.

“A woman alone is like a piece of sheep fat in the sun,” she told us. “Everything will come and feed on that fat. Before you know it, the ants and insects are crawling all over it, until there is nothing left but a smear of grease.” My grandmother pointed to a gobbet of fat melting in the sun, just beyond the talal tree’s shadow. It was black with ants and gnats. For years, this image inhabited my nightmares.

Then my father decided to attend college in the United States: Columbia University, in New York.

And then, in April 1972, when I was two years old, my father was taken away. He was put in the worst place in Mogadishu: the old Italian prison they called The Hole.

CHAPTER 2 - Under the Talal Tree

In Somalia, the man who read the news on the Somali service of the BBC every evening was called He Who Scares the Old People.

In Somalia, like many countries across Africa and the Middle East, little girls are made “pure” by having their genitals cut out. There is no other way to describe this procedure, which typically occurs around the age of five. After the child’s clitoris and labia are carved out, scraped off, or, in more compassionate areas, merely cut or pricked, the whole area is often sewn up, so that a thick band of tissue forms a chastity belt made of the girl’s own scarred flesh. A small hole is carefully situated to permit a thin flow of pee. Only great force can tear the scar tissue wider, for sex. Female genital mutilation predates Islam. Not all Muslims do this, and a few of the peoples who do are not Islamic. But in Somalia, where virtually every girl is excised, the practice is always justified in the name of Islam. Uncircumcised girls will be possessed by devils, fall into vice and perdition, and become whores. Imams never discourage the practice: it keeps girls pure.

CHAPTER 3 - Playing Tag in Allah’s Palace

After my father arrived back in my life, I opened up the way a cactus blooms after rain. He showered me with attention, swept me up in the air, told me I was clever and pretty. Sometimes in the evenings he gathered all three of us children together and talked to us about the importance of God, and of good behavior. He encouraged us to ask questions; my father hated what he called stupid learning — learning by rote. The question “Why?” drove my mother mad, but my father loved it: it could set off a river of lecturing, even if nine-tenths of it was way above our heads.

Some of the Saudi women in our neighborhood were regularly beaten by their husbands. You could hear them at night. Their screams resounded across the courtyards: “No! Please! By Allah!” This appalled my father. He saw this horrible, casual violence as a prime example of the crudeness of the Saudis, and when he caught sight of the men who did it — all the neighborhood could identify who it was, from the voices — he would mutter, “Stupid bully, like all the Saudis.” He never lifted a hand to my mother in this way; he thought it was unspeakably low.

Weddings meant three evenings of festivities, all attended only by women, who seemed to come to life on these occasions, dressed up in their finery. On the first evening the bride was covered to protect her from the evil eye; you could see only her ankles, decorated with spiral henna designs. The next day she glittered in Arab dress and jewels. On the last evening, which is called the Night of Defloration, she wore a long white dress in lace and satin and looked frightened. On that evening the man she would marry was there, the only man ever allowed in the presence of women not from his family. He would be sweaty, ordinary looking, sometimes much older, wearing the long Saudi robe. The women would all hush as he came in. To Haweya and me, men were not from another planet, but to the Saudi women in the room, the bridegroom’s arrival was hugely significant. Every wedding was like this: all the women falling silent, breathless with anticipation, and the figure who appeared, entirely banal.

My father was Muslim, but he hated Saudi judges and Saudi law; he thought it was all barbaric, all Arab desert culture.

CHAPTER 4 - Weeping Orphans and Widowed Wives

According to these men, all of them Somali exiles, the situation at home in Somalia was boiling over. My father’s opposition movement, the SSDF, was attracting huge waves of volunteers.

CHAPTER 5 - Secret Rendezvous, Sex, and the Scent of Sukumawiki

Once I had learned to read English, I discovered the school library. If we were good, we were allowed to take books home. I remember the Best Loved Tales of the Brothers Grimm and a collection of Hans Christian Andersen. Most seductive of all were the ragged paperbacks the other girls passed each other. Haweya and I devoured these books in corners, shared them with each other, hid them behind schoolbooks, read them in a single night. We began with the Nancy Drew adventures, stories of pluck and independence. There was Enid Blighton, the Secret Seven, the Famous Five: tales of freedom, adventure, of equality between girls and boys, trust, and friendship. These were not like my grandmother’s stark tales of the clan, with their messages of danger and suspicion. These stories were fun, they seemed real, and they spoke to me as the old legends never had.

After barely a year in Nairobi, Mahad managed to win a place at one of the best secondary schools in Kenya. Starehe Boys’ Center was a remarkable establishment that gave a number of full scholarships every year to street children and to children whose parents could not hope to pay the fees. Only two hundred children were accepted every year. Mahad made it in because after only a year of speaking English, his grades were in the top ten of the Kenyan national exams. When he was accepted, my mother for once beamed with unadulterated joy.

At Muslim Girls’, a dainty Luo woman called Mrs. Kataka taught us literature. We read 1984, Huckleberry Finn, The Thirty-Nine Steps. Later, we read English translations of Russian novels, with their strange patronymics and snowy vistas. We imagined the British moors in Wuthering Heights and the fight for racial equality in South Africa in Cry, the Beloved Country. An entire world of Western ideas began to take shape. Haweya and I read all the time. Mahad used to read, too; if we did him favors, he would pass us the Robert Ludlum thrillers he picked up from his friends. Later on there were sexy books: Valley of the Dolls, Barbara Cart-land, Danielle Steele. All these books, even the trashy ones, carried with them ideas — races were equal, women were equal to men — and concepts of freedom, struggle, and adventure that were new to me.

But the allure of romance called to us from the pages of books. In school we read good books, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and Daphne du Maurier; out of school, Halwa’s sisters kept us supplied with cheap Harlequins. These were trashy soap opera – like novels, but they were exciting — sexually exciting. And buried in all of these books was a message: women had a choice. Heroines fell in love, they fought off family obstacles and questions of wealth and status, and they married the man they chose. Most of my Muslim classmates were steeped in these cheap paperbacks, and they made us all unhappy. We, too, wanted to fall in love, with men we imagined in our bed at night.

I asked my mother for money so Sister Aziza’s tailor could make me a huge black cloak, with just three tight bands around my wrists and neck and a long zipper. It fell to my toes. I began wearing this robe to school, on top of the school uniform that hung off my scrawny frame, with a black scarf over my hair and shoulders. It had a thrill to it, a sensuous feeling. It made me feel powerful: underneath this screen lay a previously unsuspected, but potentially lethal, femininity. I was unique: very few people walked about like that in those days in Nairobi. Weirdly, it made me feel like an individual. It sent out a message of superiority: I was the one true Muslim. All those other girls with their little white headscarves were children, hypocrites. I was a star of God. When I spread out my hands I felt like I could fly.

CHAPTER 6 - Doubt and Defiance

Inwardly, I resisted the teachings, and secretly I transgressed them. Like many of the other girls in my class, I continued to read sensual romance novels and trashy thrillers, even though I knew that doing so was resisting Islam in the most basic way. Reading novels that aroused me was indulging in the one thing a Muslim woman must never feel: sexual desire outside of marriage. A Muslim woman must not feel wild, or free, or any of the other emotions and longings I felt when I read those books. A Muslim girl does not make her own decisions or seek control. She is trained to be docile. If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you. In Islam, becoming an individual is not a necessary development; many people, especially women, never develop a clear individual will. You submit: that is the literal meaning of the word islam: submission. The goal is to become quiet inside, so that you never raise your eyes, not even inside your mind.

Most of all, I think it was the novels that saved me from submission.

She had gotten into the habit at home of eating alone, after all of us, while reading a book. It made her miserable to eat without reading, and she lost weight, which Maryan took as a personal insult.

I talked to Sister Aziza, and she confirmed it. Women are emotionally stronger than men, she said. They can endure more, so they are tested more. Husbands may punish their wives — not for small infractions, like being late, but for major infractions, like being provocative to other men. This is just, because of the overwhelming sexual power of women.

Another benefit was a curbing of corruption. In Muslim Brotherhood enterprises there was virtually no corruption. Medical centers and charities managed by the Brotherhood were reliable and trustworthy. If non-Muslim Kenyans converted, they, too, could benefit from these facilities, and in the slums many Kenyans began converting to Islam.

The moral dilemmas I found in books were so interesting they kept me awake. The answers to them were unexpected and difficult, but they had an internal logic you could understand. Reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I understood that the two characters were just one person, that both evil and good live in each of us at one time. This was more exciting than rereading the hadith.

In February 1989, the BBC ran the news that the Ayatollah Khomeini had issued an order to kill a man called Salman Rushdie, who had written a book about the wives of the Prophet Muhammad titled The Satanic Verses.

CHAPTER 7 - Disillusion and Deceit

They sneered at the big official mosques that older people attended, where the imams reported to the government. A Muslim Brotherhood mosque was a place of inquiry and conspiracy, where people muttered against Siad Barré and shouted doctrine at each other in corners.

In hindsight I don’t think of Abshir as a creep at all. He was just as trapped in a mental cage as I was. Abshir and I and all the other young people who joined the Muslim Brotherhood movement wanted to live as much as possible like our beloved Prophet, but the rules of the last Messenger of Allah were too strict, and their very strictness led us to hypocrisy.

In Somalia, to have a stake in government was to have a family member in the place where tax money and money from kickbacks was distributed. No more, no less. I saw what that does to a nation: it destroys public trust. In the face of such widespread corruption, no wonder people were susceptible to the lure of preachers who said all the answers were to be found in the Holy Writings. Organizations set up by Brotherhood sympathizers were not corrupt.

CHAPTER 8 - Refugees

It began happening all the time: Kenyan soldiers came at night to rape Somali women who were alone without protectors. And then all these women would be shunned and left to die.

CHAPTER 9 - Abeh

Most unmarried Somali girls who got pregnant committed suicide. I knew of one girl in Mogadishu who poured a can of gasoline over herself in the living room, with everyone there, and burned herself alive. Of course, if she hadn’t done this, her father and brothers would probably have killed her anyway.

The plan was this: Fadumo would travel to Europe with the children. But instead of going to Switzerland, which almost never gave refugee status to Somalis, she would stop over in Holland. Once she was at the Amsterdam airport, Fadumo would tear up her ticket and ask for asylum in the Netherlands, where it was much easier to qualify as a refugee, and then live there, receiving money from the state.

My father had given me away to a man called Osman Moussa, a fine young Somali man who had grown up in Canada. He had come to Nairobi to find and rescue family members who had been stranded by the civil war, and also to find a bride. He thought the Somali girls in Canada were too Westernized, by which he meant that they dressed indecently, disobeyed their husbands, and mixed freely with men; they were not baarri, which made them unworthy of marriage. And the civil war meant that daughters of the best families in Somalia were available for practically nothing.

PART II - My Freedom

CHAPTER 10 - Running Away

It was Friday, July 24, 1992, when I stepped on the train. Every year I think of it. I see it as my real birthday: the birth of me as a person, making decisions about my life on my own. I was not running away from Islam, or to democracy. I didn’t have any big ideas then. I was just a young girl and wanted some way to be me; so I bolted into the unknown.

Yasmin had never meant to go to Holland. She had been on her way to the United States, with false papers, but she got caught at the Amsterdam airport. She claimed asylum when they caught her, and though she was my age, she told the officials she was a minor so she could stay in the country. She knew how it worked.

CHAPTER 11 - A Trial by the Elders

I was lucky and felt guilty for getting refugee status so quickly, on false pretenses, when so many people were being turned down.

CHAPTER 12 - Haweya

All my life I had watched my mother veer off and pretend problems weren’t there, hoping Allah would just make them disappear on their own. But Johanna faced things. She said what she wanted; she was clear and direct instead of avoiding issues that were difficult. She would tell us, “There’s nothing rude about saying no.”

I told Johanna how selfish I felt about what I had done to my parents. But Johanna didn’t think there was anything wrong with putting myself first. She said it wasn’t selfish to do what you wanted with your life — everyone should pursue her own happiness. She said I had done the right thing, and made me feel that I might still be a good person. Every Islamic value I had been taught instructed me to put myself last. Life on earth is a test, and if you manage to put yourself last in this life, you are serving Allah; your place will be first in the Hereafter. The more deeply you submit your will, the more virtuous that makes you. But Johanna, Ellen, and everyone else in Holland seemed to think that it was natural to seek one’s own personal happiness on earth, in the here and now.

It irritated me now when Somalis who had lived in Holland for a long time complained that they were offered only lowly jobs. They wanted honorable professions: airline pilot, lawyer. When I pointed out that they had no qualifications for such work, their attitude was that everything was Holland’s fault. The Europeans had colonized Somalia, which was why we all had no qualifications and were in this mess to begin with. I thought that was so clearly nonsense. We had torn ourselves apart, all on our own.

“If you tell a Dutch person it’s racist he will give you whatever you want,” Hasna once told me with satisfaction. There is discrimination in Holland—I would never deny that—but the claim of racism can also be strategic.

I felt embarrassed and even let down by the way so many Somalis accepted welfare money and then turned on the society that gave it to them.

Meeting Freud put me in contact with an alternative moral system. In Nairobi I had had plenty of contact with Christianity, and had heard of Buddhists and Hindus. But I didn’t for one instant imagine that a moral framework for humanity could exist that wasn’t religious. There was always a God. Not having one was immoral. If you didn’t accept God, then you couldn’t have a morality. This is why the words infidel and apostate are so hideous to a Muslim: they are synonymous with immorality in the deepest way.

I think now that this obsession with identifying racism, which I saw so often among Somalis too, was really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize the causes of their unhappiness.

I would read psychology books all afternoon and then look up at Haweya on the sofa.

CHAPTER 13 - Leiden

Half of Holland was Protestant, half Catholic. In every other European country, that was a recipe for massacre, but in Holland, people worked it out. After a period of oppression and bloodshed, they learned that you cannot win a civil war: everyone loses. They set up a system so people could be separate and equal. Two big blocs developed in Dutch society, Protestants and Catholics. Later a third bloc developed for social democrats, who were both Protestant and Catholic, and there was also a much smaller group of nonreligious, secular people called the liberals. These blocs were the “pillars,” the foundation of Dutch society.

I came to realize how deeply the Dutch are attached to freedom, and why. Holland was in many ways the capital of the European Enlightenment. Four hundred years ago, when European thinkers severed the hard bands of church dogma that had constrained people’s minds, Holland was the center of free thought.

Sometimes it seemed as if almost every page I read challenged me as a Muslim. Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.

Almost everything was secular here. God was mocked everywhere. The most common expletive used in Dutch is Godverdomme. I heard it all the time — “God damn me,” to me the worst thing possible — and yet nobody was struck by a thunderbolt. Society worked without reference to God, and it seemed to function perfectly. This man-made system of government was so much more stable, peaceful, prosperous, and happy than the supposedly God-devised systems I had been taught to respect.

Sometimes I would remark during a lesson that something was a class issue. People would always say, “We have no class problems in Holland. We are an egalitarian society.” I didn’t believe it for a second.

When I went to the awful places — the police stations, the prisons, the abortion clinics and penal courts, the unemployment offices and the shelters for battered women — I began to notice how many dark faces looked back at me. It was not something you could avoid noticing, coming straight in from creamy-blond Leiden. I began to wonder why so many immigrants — so many Muslims — were there.

At the Muslim schools there were no children from Dutch families. The little girls were veiled and often separated from the boys, either in the classroom or during prayer and sports. The schools taught geography and physics just like any school in Holland, but they avoided subjects that ran contrary to Islamic doctrine. Children weren’t encouraged to ask questions, and their creativity was not stimulated. They were taught to keep their distance from unbelievers and to obey. This compassion for immigrants and their struggles in a new country resulted in attitudes and policies that perpetuated cruelty. Thousands of Muslim women and children in Holland were being systematically abused, and there was no escaping this fact. Little children were excised on kitchen tables — I knew this from Somalis for whom I translated. Girls who chose their own boyfriends and lovers were beaten half to death or even killed; many more were regularly slapped around. The suffering of all these women was unspeakable. And while the Dutch were generously contributing money to international aid organizations, they were also ignoring the silent suffering of Muslim women and children in their own backyard. Holland’s multiculturalism — its respect for Muslims’ way of doing things — wasn’t working. It was depriving many women and children of their rights.

Haweya was not made mentally ill by Islam. Her delusions were religious, but it would be dishonest to say they were Islam’s fault. She went to the Quran seeking peace of mind, but the unrest inside her was chemical. I think perhaps it had something to do with the limitlessness of Holland; she used to say it was like being in a room without walls. One time she told me, “I was so used to fighting with everybody for every little thing, and suddenly there is nothing to fight for — everything is possible.” In Europe, Haweya lost her road map, and the lack of guidance became unbearable.

CHAPTER 14 - Leaving God

In January 2000, the political commentator Paul Scheffer published an article, “The Multicultural Drama,” in the NRC Handelsblad, a well-respected evening newspaper. It instantly became the talk of Holland.

Scheffer said there was no place in Holland for a culture that rejected the separation of church and state and denied rights to women and homosexuals. He foresaw social unrest.

The interview caused a commotion, and I sat down and wrote an article and sent it to the NRC Handelsblad. I wrote that this attitude was much larger than just one imam: it was systemic in Islam, because this was a religion that had never gone through a process of Enlightenment that would lead people to question its rigid approach to individual freedom.

But that night we saw news footage that shocked me further. In Holland itself — in Ede, in the town I had lived in — a camera crew who happened to be filming on the streets just after the towers were hit recorded a group of Muslim kids jubilating.

The Dutch had forgotten that it was possible for people to stand up and wage war, destroy property, imprison, kill, impose laws of virtue because of the call of God. That kind of religion hadn’t been present in Holland for centuries. It was not a lunatic fringe who felt this way about America and the West. I knew that a vast mass of Muslims would see the attacks as justified retaliation against the infidel enemies of Islam. War had been declared in the name of Islam, my religion, and now I had to make a choice. Which side was I on?

Was innovation therefore forbidden to Muslims? Were human rights, progress, women’s rights all foreign to Islam? By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny. The Prophet Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. By adhering to his rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims suppressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mind-set of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves.

Most Muslims never delve into theology, and we rarely read the Quran; we are taught it in Arabic, which most Muslims can’t speak. As a result, most people think that Islam is about peace. It is from these people, honest and kind, that the fallacy has arisen that Islam is peaceful and tolerant.

In fact, I thought, we were lucky: there were now so many books that Muslims could read them and leapfrog the Enlightenment, just as the Japanese have done.

Pim Fortuyn, a complete unknown in Dutch politics, had begun a meteoric rise in popularity on the basis of his accurate observation that ethnic minorities didn’t sufficiently espouse Dutch values. Fortuyn pointed out that Muslims would soon be the majority in most of Holland’s major cities; he said they mostly failed to accept the rights of women and homosexuals, as well as the basic principles that underlie democracy.

I received an invitation to speak at a symposium on Spinoza at the Thomas Mann Institute. I went back to my Enlightenment textbooks and read about Spinoza and figured people were probably connecting us because we were both refugees. (Spinoza’s family emigrated to Holland in the 1600s to flee the Inquisition in Portugal.)

Everything I wrote about Islam turned out to be much more sensitive than any other topic I could have chosen to write about. I changed a couple of terms: I was learning that in these extremely civilized circles, conflict is dealt with in a very ornate and hypocritical manner.

As I went on doing research, it became painfully apparent that of all the non-Western immigrants in Holland, the least integrated are Muslims. Among immigrants, unemployment is highest for Moroccans and Turks, the largest Muslim groups, although their average level of skills is roughly the same as all the other immigrant populations. Taken as a whole, Muslims in Holland make disproportionately heavy claims on social welfare and disability benefits and are disproportionately involved in crime.

The Dutch government urgently needed to stop funding Quran-based schools, I thought. Muslim schools reject the values of universal human rights. All humans are not equal in a Muslim school.

Now I read the works of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment — Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Mill, Voltaire — and the modern ones, Russell and Popper, with my full attention, not just as a class assignment. All life is problem solving, Popper says. There are no absolutes; progress comes through critical thought. Popper admired Kant and Spinoza but criticized them when he felt their arguments were weak. I wanted to be like Popper: free of constraint, recognizing greatness but unafraid to detect its flaws.

Three hundred and fifty years ago, when Europe was still steeped in religious dogma and thinkers were persecuted — just as they are today in the Muslim world — Spinoza was clear-minded and fearless. He was the first modern European to state clearly that the world is not ordained by a separate God. Nature created itself, Spinoza said. Reason, not obedience, should guide our lives. Though it took centuries to crumble, the entire ossified cage of European social hierarchy — from kings to serfs, and between men and women, all of it shored up by the Catholic Church — was destroyed by this thought. Now, surely, it was Islam’s turn to be tested.

CHAPTER 15 - Threats

Fortuyn could certainly be irritating, but I thought there was nothing racist about him. He was a gay man standing up for his right to be gay in his country, where homosexuals have rights. He was a provocateur, which is a very Dutch thing to be. People called him an extreme right-winger, but to me, many of Fortuyn’s policies seemed more like liberal socialism. Though I would never have voted for him, I saw Fortuyn as mostly attached to a secular society’s ideals of justice and freedom.

Two days later, Fortuyn was shot dead in a parking lot outside Holland’s largest TV and radio studios. Everyone was appalled. Such a thing hadn’t happened in Holland since the brothers de Witt were lynched in the streets of The Hague in 1672. In modern times, all Dutch politicians cycled or rode the trains or drove themselves to work just like everyone else. The murder of a political leader for his opinions was simply unthinkable, and the scale of the country’s emotional reaction was almost impossible to exaggerate.

When we heard that a white animal-rights activist was apparently responsible for the shooting, it seemed as if the whole country let out a collective sigh of relief.

But in reality, the Labor Party in Holland appeared blinded by multiculturalism, overwhelmed by the imperative to be sensitive and respectful of immigrant culture, defending the moral relativists.

I was inspired by Mary Woll-stonecraft, the pioneering feminist thinker who told women they had the same ability to reason as men did and deserved the same rights. Even after she published A Vindication of the Rights of Women, it took more than a century before the suffragettes marched for the vote.

When I tried to find out about honor killings, for instance — how many girls were killed every year in Holland by their fathers and brothers because of their precious family honor — civil servants at the Ministry of Justice would tell me, “We don’t register murders based on that category of motivation. It would stigmatize one group in society.”

I decided that if I were to become a member of the Dutch Parliament, it would become my holy mission to have these statistics registered. I wanted someone, somewhere, to take note every time a man in Holland murdered his child simply because she had a boyfriend. I wanted someone to register domestic violence by ethnic background — and sexual abuse, and incest — and to investigate the number of excisions of little girls that took place every year on Dutch kitchen tables. Once these figures were clear, the facts alone would shock the country. With one stroke, they would eliminate the complacent attitude of moral relativists who claimed that all cultures are equal. The excuse that nobody knew would be removed.

CHAPTER 16 - Politics

Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience or their community.

I wanted Parliament to pass a motion that would require the police to register how many honor killings took place in Holland each year. After weeks of wheeling and dealing in corridors, the minister of justice, Piet Donner, did agree to a motion that I had concocted with the Labor Party, but he said he wanted to try it out first, as a “pilot project,” in just two police regions. Months later, when the results were announced, Parliament was shocked, and I felt a huge groundswell of support in the country. Between October 2004 and May 2005, eleven Muslim girls were killed by their families in just those two regions (there are twenty-five such regions in Holland). After that, people stopped telling me I was exaggerating.

EPILOGUE - The Letter of the Law

The kind of thinking I saw in Saudi Arabia, and among the Muslim Brotherhood in Kenya and Somalia, is incompatible with human rights and liberal values. It preserves a feudal mind-set based on tribal concepts of honor and shame. It rests on self-deception, hypocrisy, and double standards. It relies on the technological advances of the West while pretending to ignore their origin in Western thinking. This mind-set makes the transition to modernity very painful for all who practice Islam.

The message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.

Life is better in Europe than it is in the Muslim world because human relations are better, and one reason human relations are better is that in the West, life on earth is valued in the here and now, and individuals enjoy rights and freedoms that are recognized and protected by the state. To accept subordination and abuse because Allah willed it — that, for me, would be self-hatred.

The fact is that hundreds of millions of women around the world live in forced marriages, and six thousand small girls are excised every day.

When people say that the values of Islam are compassion, tolerance, and freedom, I look at reality, at real cultures and governments, and I see that it simply isn’t so. People in the West swallow this sort of thing because they have learned not to examine the religions or cultures of minorities too critically, for fear of being called racist. It fascinates them that I am not afraid to do so.

As anti-Semitic sentiment ran high in 1894, the French military conducted one of the most egregious witch hunts in modern history.  In the dramatized "An Officer and a Spy," Robert Harris (author of "Fatherland") plunges us into the infamous Dreyfus Affair.  Suspecting a German spy in their ranks, the French Army convicted Captain Alfred Dreyfus on secret evidence in a non-public military court martial.  Although Dreyfus protested his innocence, the Jewish officer was imprisoned for years in barbaric conditions on Devil's Island (also featured in Papillon).

Yet counterintelligence chief Georges Picquart felt uneasy about the whole affair. The secrecy and procedural irregularities didn't sit well with him.  He began to investigate and eventually uncovered clear evidence that Dreyfus had been framed and that the real spy was another officer, Ferdinand Esterhazy.  When he brought his findings to his superiors, he was rebuffed and Picquart began to develop a queasy sense that the French general staff was covering up their incorrect conviction of Dreyfus to avoid public embarrassment.  After all, Dreyfus was "only a Jew."  It wasn't worth making a fuss over.  Picquart heroically disagreed and set off a chain of events that led to an acrimonious national scandal, several assassinations, and the absurd circumstance of the French Army protecting the real traitor Esterhazy in order to keep the innocent Dreyfus locked away.  

Harris does a reasonable, although not inspired, dramatization of the Dreyfus Affair and provides enough flavor on each personality for us to keep the extensive cast of characters in our head.  I particularly enjoyed some of the old-school espionage and counter-espionage tactics that Harris includes as Picquart attempts to escape his pursuers.  I'm looking forward to watching the Polanksi film adaptation in 2019.

Reading this book hot on the heels of Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side," I realized that perhaps we're not too far from our own Dreyfus Affair.  The targeting of religious minorities, indefinite detention on tropical islands, and secret trials in the name of "national security"... if it's not an exact copy, it certainly rhymes.

When I first saw that Neal Stephenson was doing a techno-utopian version of Paradise Lost, my first thought was, "Oh crap!  That's the foundation of my great American novel and freaking Neal Stephenson beat me too it!"  Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for old Neal, his "Fall: Or Dodge in Hell" is far more "Bleak House" than "Paradise Lost."  It seems like Stephenson's editors are afraid to stand up to him anymore - allowing him to spew out hundreds of pages of minutiae on legal technicalities and masturbatory world-building.  This one started out ok and then swiftly ran out of steam as it spiraled into tedium.  (Second half of Seveneves, anyone?)

I love Stephenson's earlier stuff, especially Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash.  Sort of feel like he's starting to run out of juice with his more recent stuff...

For my "Year of Rebellion", I've been brushing up on my American Revolutionary War history. "Valiant Ambition" shows just how dicey the revolution was and how frequently both the British and American sides screwed things up. Nathaniel Philbrick (also the author of the charming "Why Read Moby Dick?") doesn't hold back in his criticism of George Washington in particular, who he accuses of a "lack of generalship" and of being "not a good battlefield thinker." The poor early military performance of the Americans led to a near collapse of the Revolutionary effort before it even got off the ground. Philbrick also reminds us that the American theater was in many respects less important to the British than protecting their extremely profitable Carribbean colonies from the French.

But the real star of this book is Benedict Arnold.  Philbrick begins with a Shakespearean epigraph from Julius Caesar that provides the title for the book: "As he was valiant, I honor him. But, as he was ambitious, I slew him."  Arnold inhabits a canonical place in American history, and Philbrick consciously ties him to his treasonous literary ("like Satan he was magnificent in his fearless and pugnacious pride") and classical ("the sheer audacity of the undertaking won Arnold the title of the “American Hannibal") predecessors.

A New Haven(!) resident, Arnold is a fascinating and deeply flawed character in our national history.  Philbrick highlights how his bravery and brilliance helped turn the tide of the war.  Yet Arnold was repeatedly passed over for promotion because of the Continental Congress's political infighting and he was subjected to a "merciless witch hunt conducted by Reed and his Supreme Executive Council."  Arnold's heroic dedication went consistently unrewarded and Philbrick leads us to take a more sympathetic view of this traditionally reviled figure.

A clear and engaging writer, Philbrick guides us through the muddle of the many Revolutionary War debacles while giving us colorful bits of flavor on a wide cast of characters.  He sprinkles some of his own musings on history and politics throughout:

Since republics rely on the inherent virtue of the people, they are exceedingly fragile. All it takes is one well-placed person to destroy everything.

And he ends with some musings on Arnold's influence on the development of subsequent American national character:

The United States had been created through an act of disloyalty. No matter how eloquently the Declaration of Independence had attempted to justify the American rebellion, a residual guilt hovered over the circumstances of the country’s founding. Arnold changed all that. By threatening to destroy the newly created republic through, ironically, his own betrayal, Arnold gave this nation of traitors the greatest of gifts: a myth of creation.

My highlights below:

PREFACE - The Fault Line

The real Revolution was so troubling and strange that once the struggle was over, a generation did its best to remove all traces of the truth. No one wanted to remember how after boldly declaring their independence they had so quickly lost their way; how patriotic zeal had lapsed into cynicism and self-interest; and how, just when all seemed lost, a traitor had saved them from themselves.

after his retirement in July 1789, Thomson set to work on a memoir of his tenure as secretary to the Congress, eventually completing a manuscript of more than a thousand pages. But as time went on and the story of the Revolution became enshrined in myth, Thomson realized that his account, titled “Notes of the Intrigues and Severe Altercations or Quarrels in the Congress,” would “contradict all the histories of the great events of the Revolution.” Around 1816 he finally decided that it was not for him “to tear away the veil that hides our weaknesses,” and he destroyed the manuscript. “Let the world admire the supposed wisdom and valor of our great men,” he wrote. “Perhaps they may adopt the qualities that have been ascribed to them, and thus good may be done. I shall not undeceive future generations.”

Without the discovery of Arnold’s treason in the fall of 1780, the American people might never have been forced to realize that the real threat to their liberties came not from without but from within.

The son of a bankrupt alcoholic who had been ruined by his pretensions, Arnold lacked the ability to rise above petty and unjustified criticism. He also had a habit of living beyond his means.

PART I - The Wilderness OF Untried Things

CHAPTER ONE - Demons of Fear and Disorder

Three months before, Washington had formed his elite Life Guard, consisting of more than a hundred handpicked men between five feet eight and five feet ten inches in height. They were all, in accordance with Washington’s orders, “handsomely and well made . . . , clean and spruce.” As their title suggested, the Life Guards had been entrusted with ensuring the safety of His Excellency, the commander in chief of the Continental army.

This final convoy, it turned out, contained eight thousand soldiers from Hesse-Cassel in west-central Germany. Britain’s determination to put an end to the American rebellion was so great that the ministry had decided to augment its army of native-born troops with these superbly trained and equipped professional soldiers, whose ruler depended on the income derived from hiring out the young men of his impoverished state to finance his government.

By the middle of August, the British flotilla totaled more than four hundred vessels bearing forty-five thousand soldiers and sailors, making it the largest collection of ships and men ever assembled by the British Empire. (Not until World War I would Great Britain amass a larger fleet.)

On his arrival at Staten Island in July, Admiral Howe learned of the signing of the Declaration of Independence — a document that technically rendered all future negotiation impossible because the Howes had only been given the authority to quell a rebellion, and not to recognize the Americans as an autonomous people. This was not enough to deter Admiral Howe, who made several unsuccessful attempts to engage Washington in talks even as he sent communications to Benjamin Franklin and other officials in Philadelphia. But as Franklin subsequently informed the admiral, the “fine and noble china vase” of the British Empire had already been shattered.

What made this submersible unique was the keg of gunpowder attached to its back, making the Turtle the world’s first military submarine. It was the brainchild of David Bushnell, a Yale graduate who during the Siege of Boston began to tinker with the idea of creating a craft equipped with an explosive device that he called a “torpedo” in reference to the torpedo fish, a type of ray capable of stunning its prey with an electric shock.

Rather than Washington and his army, it was the Howe brothers’ misguided obsession with reaching a peace accord that saved America in the summer of 1776.

Mostly, however, the autumn of 1776 amounted to a terrible and embarrassing collapse of the American army in New York and New Jersey. Over the course of four disastrous days in November, both Fort Washington and Fort Lee fell to the British.

CHAPTER TWO - The Mosquito Fleet

Since no roads existed, Lake Champlain provided the only practical route by which the British could invade America from the north.

He was descended from the Rhode Island equivalent of royalty. The first Benedict Arnold had been one of the colony’s founders, and several subsequent generations had helped to establish the Arnolds as solid and respected citizens. Unfortunately, Arnold’s father, who had resettled in Norwich, Connecticut, proved to be a drunkard, and only after his son had moved to New Haven was the boy able to begin to free himself from the ignominy of his childhood.

Abrupt and impatient with anything he deemed superfluous to the matter at hand, Arnold had a fatal tendency to criticize and even ridicule those with whom he disagreed.

He eventually lost five hundred of his twelve hundred men to starvation, exposure, and desertion, but after several weeks of slogging through the boggy, ice-crisped backwoods of Maine, Arnold and the ragged remnants of his command staggered out of the wilderness and proceeded to climb the same riverside cliffs the young William Howe had scaled back in 1759. Even though the British forces in Quebec refused his impertinent demand that they surrender, the sheer audacity of the undertaking won Arnold the title of the “American Hannibal.”

Arnold had a talent for rubbing people the wrong way. And yet, if a soldier had served with him during one of his more heroic adventures, that soldier was likely to regard him as the most inspiring officer he had ever known.

Adding to the impact of the Inflexible’s arrival was the fact that she almost immediately succeeded in sinking the gondola Philadelphia. (More than 150 years later, a group of salvagers discovered the wreck on the bottom of the lake with her mast still standing and a cannonball wedged between the timbers of her bow. Today the Philadelphia is the centerpiece of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.)

With Arnold it was always difficult to draw the line between acceptable risk and self-serving derring-do, and the retreat from Valcour Bay was to be no exception.

But two weeks later, when Carleton ordered his troops back up the lake to St. Johns for the winter, Arnold could take consolation in knowing that no matter what the cost, he had done it — he had prevented the British from taking Fort Ticonderoga and continuing to Albany and, eventually, to New York. And perhaps just as important, while Washington’s army to the south continued to suffer setback after setback, Arnold had shown that it was possible to stand up and fight.

If Arnold remained a controversial and, as a consequence, underappreciated figure in his own army, his British opponents, who did not have to contend with his often imperious and self-dramatizing manner, were more generous with their praise. Lieutenant Digby wrote of his “remarkable coolness and bravery,” while Secretary of State Germain lauded Arnold as “the most enterprising man among the rebels.”

CHAPTER THREE - A Cabinet of Fortitude

fellow army officer claimed that “the fighter did not combine... any intellectual qualities with his physical prowess. Instead of engaging an interesting argument, he shouted and pounded the table.”

During the Siege of Quebec, he had risked venturing behind enemy lines at night, a sentry remembered, “woman hunting.” High-strung and libidinous, he had little patience with anything beyond the here and now.

From General Howe’s perspective, there was no need to engage the Americans, since the war had already been, for all practical purposes, won. In just three months, the British had taken 4,500 prisoners and almost 3,000 muskets along with close to 250 cannons and 17,000 cannonballs. By December, Washington had lost by death, injury, and desertion more than three-quarters of the soldiers under his command in the main army. The offer of a pardon to the citizens of New Jersey in late November had resulted in thousands of former patriots’ declaring their loyalty to the king. “Our affairs are in a very bad situation,” Washington admitted. “The game is pretty near up — owing in a great measure to the insidious arts of the enemy.”

Until the day the Delaware went from being a moat to being a bridge, there was nothing much for Howe to do but wait in his comfortable headquarters in New York, where his mistress, the blond and beautiful Elizabeth Lloyd Loring of Boston, was waiting for him.

As had been demonstrated at Long Island and New York, Washington was not a good battlefield thinker. Howe (with the help of Henry Clinton) consistently outgeneraled him. Washington’s gifts were more physical and improvisational. When dire necessity forced him to ad-lib, when the scale of the fighting was contained enough that he was able to project his own extraordinary charisma upon those around him, there was no better leader of men. Instead of a diminutive Napoleon who scrutinized his battle plans from the sanctity of his headquarters tent, Washington — as commanding a physical presence as ever led an army — exuded the dignified grace of an Indian sachem.

At one point as they approached a creek crossing, the rear legs of Washington’s horse slid out from underneath it on what Bostwick called “the slanting slippery bank.” In the flickering snow-filled light, Bostwick watched as Washington “seized his horse’s mane and the horse recovered” — an astonishing act of strength and control that confirmed the general’s reputation as the greatest horseman of his generation.

The previous day, Colonel Rall had received a warning from British headquarters that according to a well-placed spy, an American assault was imminent. When Stephen’s men opened fire that night, Rall assumed that this was the anticipated attack, and once the Americans had fled into the darkness, the Hessians inevitably began to relax, particularly given the appalling weather. As a consequence, despite having arrived several hours behind schedule, Washington — thanks to Stephen’s premature and largely ineffective strike — was able to catch the Hessians by surprise.

Some later claimed that the Hessians had been hopelessly drunk after the Christmas celebrations of the night before, but as Greenwood and others testified, this was not the case. If any side indulged in alcohol, it was the Americans, who broke into the Hessian liquor supply and became raucously inebriated.

“Trenton reanimated the timid friends of the Revolution and invigorated the confidence of the resolute... The American community began to feel and act like a nation determined to be free.”

The Howes’ entire premise — that America could be won back through a combination of coercion and negotiation — was dependent on the British army’s completely controlling the momentum of the war.

Up until now, William Howe’s hopes for reconciliation had prevented him from destroying Washington’s army when he had the chance. In his conversation with Cornwallis he made it plain that circumstances had changed. He must make the Americans regret that they had ever ventured back across the Delaware by inflicting the devastating defeat that the British had so far refused to deliver.

By the end of this one last attempt to cross the Assunpink, the Americans had suffered a mere 50 casualties while 365 British and Hessian soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured — most occurring in the space of little over an hour.

As the British retreated, Washington called to those around him, “It is a fine fox chase, my boys!” and took off in pursuit.

Soon Princeton had been flushed of its British occupiers, some of whom attempted a halfhearted stand at the college’s Nassau Hall before surrendering.

CHAPTER FOUR - The Year of the Hangman

In early March 1777, when Elizabeth was just sixteen, all this lip puckering and eye fluttering was, at least for the thirty-six-year-old widower Benedict Arnold, irresistible.

The organization of the American army was based, in large part, on the British model, with one notable exception. Because they had to buy their commissions, British army officers tended to be financially independent products of the upper class; in fact, one of the reasons Horatio Gates had quit the British service was that his lack of social standing severely limited his potential rise through the ranks. American officers, on the other hand, although from the upper echelons of their communities, rarely possessed the personal wealth of their British counterparts.

In the American navy, a ship’s crew received half the total worth of a captured merchant vessel and the entire value of a man-of-war, with the lion’s share going to the captain. As a successful naval officer, Arnold could fulfill all his Gates-like ambitions while living like the lordly Schuyler. This is the great what-if of Arnold’s career. Had he been a commodore rather than a general, he might have outshined even John Paul Jones.

Seventeen seventy-seven, it had been predicted, was destined to be the year the rebellion finally came to an end. The date’s three sevens looked like the gallows from which all the traitors would swing. What better way to begin what the loyalists liked to call “the year of the hangman” than with a devastating lightning strike into the New England interior?

The unfinished mansion on the New Haven waterfront that he’d begun building prior to the Revolution — paneled with mahogany from Honduras, with stables for twelve horses and an orchard of a hundred fruit trees — had become a sadly dilapidated monument to his declining fortunes.

His legs ensnared in the stirrups, Arnold struggled to untangle himself as a well-known Connecticut loyalist rushed toward him with a fixed bayonet. “Surrender!” the loyalist cried. “You are a prisoner!” Reaching for the two pistols in the holsters of his saddle, Arnold was reputed to have said, “Not yet,” before shooting the loyalist dead.

Citing the examples of Caesar and Oliver Cromwell, both of whom had used their armies to seize control of the civil government, they viewed Washington’s increase in popularity in the wake of Trenton and Princeton with concern. Instead of a standing army, they favored the use of the states’ militias as a safer, less expensive, and inherently more republican way to fight the war.

The winter in Morristown had also given the American commander in chief the opportunity to inoculate his army for smallpox, the disease that had so far killed many more American soldiers than the muskets and fieldpieces of the British.

Thanks, in part, to Howe’s seeming indolence, the Continental army had been given the time to rebound from a low of barely a thousand men in the winter of 1777 to almost nine thousand soldiers, and on May 29, Washington moved twenty miles south to Middlebrook, where he had a commanding view of the countryside between Perth Amboy and New Brunswick.

Washington had finally hit upon a way to win this seemingly unwinnable war — not through military brilliance but by slowly and relentlessly wearing the enemy down.

Some in his own army dismissed what they called Washington’s “Fabian” strategy (in reference to Fabius Maximus, the Roman leader who defeated Hannibal through a war of attrition) as unnecessarily cautious.

CHAPTER FIVE - The Dark Eagle

In the days and years ahead, the death and scalping of Jane McCrea became a permanent fixture in the folklore of the Revolution.

Even more than their love of liberty, the New Englanders’ multigenerational fear of native peoples was what finally moved them to rise up and extirpate a British army that had dared to reawaken this ancient source of terror, despair, and guilt.

Schuyler wrote to Washington explaining that Arnold “has asked my leave to retire. I have advised him to delay it for some time.” Once again, Arnold laid aside his own hurt and anger and remained with Schuyler, whom he praised in a letter to Washington as having “done everything a man could do in his situation. I am sorry to hear his character has been so unjustly aspersed and calumniated.”

So as to assert Congress’s supremacy over the military, a sacrifice must be made, in Lovell’s view, of Benedict Arnold.

By August 16 Burgoyne had dispatched a total of fourteen hundred mostly German soldiers on a mission to secure provisions and horses in the countryside to the east. That morning, near the town of Bennington, they fell prey to the force of nature known as John Stark. One of the heroes of Bunker Hill and also present at the Battle of Trenton, Stark had done what Arnold only threatened to do. Rather than dillydally with a capricious Congress, he had simply resigned once he learned that several junior officers had been promoted past him. He was then given an independent command by the New Hampshire General Court, and within six days had raised a brigade of fifteen hundred men. Beholden to no one — least of all Congress — Stark considered himself to be a kind of land-based freebooter. When Schuyler ordered him to join the Continental army stationed on the Hudson, he replied, “Stark chooses to command himself,” and announced his determination to remain on Burgoyne’s left. On August 16 he was perfectly positioned to defeat the extensive British foraging party led by Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Baum in what Stark described as the “hottest” action he had ever seen. By the time the fighting had ended, Stark counted 207 enemy dead and 700 prisoners, meaning that Burgoyne had lost, in just one day, approximately 15 percent of his entire force.

According to a tradition not recorded until the 1870s, Natanis prophesied that Arnold, whom he called “the Dark Eagle,” would ultimately fail in accomplishing his overly ambitious objectives.

The six tribes of the Iroquois nation were the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora, whose territories stretched from the Hudson River and Champlain Valley into western Pennsylvania.

Making the catastrophe that had become the Battle of Brandywine all the more galling to Washington was the realization that had he held to his earlier determination to remain on the defensive, his army would have been positioned to deliver the British a potentially crushing blow. Just as had happened at the Battle of Long Island, Washington’s lack of generalship had denied his army the opportunity to meet the British in a fair fight.

CHAPTER SIX - Saratoga

Although Burgoyne claimed victory, since he still remained on the field, his army had been dealt a potentially mortal blow — 700 British killed, wounded, and captured to the Americans’ 150. And as everyone in the American army knew, the blow had been inflicted, almost exclusively, by the soldiers under Arnold’s command.

Arnold might be vain, overly sensitive to a slight, and difficult to work with, but there were few officers in either the American or British army who possessed his talent for almost instantly assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy.

Dearborn asked if he had been badly wounded. “In the same leg,” Arnold replied. “I wish it had passed [through] my heart.”

PART II - Secret Motives AND Designs

CHAPTER SEVEN - The Bite of a Rattlesnake

On October 17 John Burgoyne’s army finally laid down its arms. Horatio Gates — the commander in chief of the northern army — had never ventured onto the field of battle during two days of brutal fighting. He had so thoroughly bungled treaty negotiations prior to the British surrender that Congress was ultimately forced to renege on several of the agreement’s overly generous terms. However, none of this altered the fact that the Battle of Saratoga had changed the course of the war. An entire army of British and German professional soldiers had been overwhelmed by a swarming mass of American patriots. This was big, extraordinary news, and the sheer magnitude of the victory guaranteed that Gates — no matter how imperfect his performance may have been — was about to become a national hero.

Thomas Paine was with a group of American soldiers near Germantown when he was “stunned with a report as loud as a peal from a hundred cannon at once.” In a letter to Benjamin Franklin he described how the explosion of the Augusta created a cloud like none other he had ever seen: “a thick smoke rising like a pillar and spreading from the top like a tree.” It did not become the symbol of a new and terrible age of destruction for another 168 years, but in the fall of 1777 the skyline of Philadelphia was darkened by the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

As Martin and the five hundred defenders of Fort Mifflin had learned firsthand, “great men get great praise, little men nothing.”

After the Battle of Brandywine, a British officer listed the nationality of the rebel prisoners. If this list is any indication, most of the soldiers in Washington’s army had been born not in America but in England, Ireland, and Germany, with only 82 of the 315 prisoners (approximately 25 percent) listed as native born. This meant that while the vast majority of the country’s citizens stayed at home, the War for Independence was being waged, in large part, by newly arrived immigrants. Those native-born Americans who by mid-1777 were serving in the army tended to be either African Americans, Native Americans, or what one historian has called “free white men on the move,” such as Joseph Plumb Martin.

What the Gates faction did not know was that Washington had an extremely well-placed spy. One of the commander in chief’s aides was a twenty-three-year-old South Carolinian named John Laurens, whose father, Henry, happened to be the new president of the Continental Congress.

At the center of the talented group of young men who constituted Washington’s military family were John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton.

Incredibly, this overweight Prussian fraud, who had lied about almost all his qualifications, proved to be exactly what the soldiers of Washington’s army needed.

CHAPTER EIGHT - The Knight of the Burning Mountain

As difficult as it may be to believe today, Britain’s islands in the Caribbean were of considerably more economic importance in the eighteenth century than all thirteen American colonies combined.

There was nowhere in the world where money could be made at such a staggering clip as the Caribbean. In 1776 the British West Indies generated 4.25 million pounds of trade, almost three times what had been made by Great Britain’s East India Company. France was just as dependent on her Caribbean possessions, which accounted for more than a third of all her overseas trade.

On June 4 he granted James Seagrove his pass, a pass that appears to have given Arnold a stake in Seagrove’s schooner the Charming Nancy. It was just one in an ever-growing number of get-rich schemes that Arnold embarked on in the months ahead, all of them assisted by the fact that on June 18, with the British about to leave Philadelphia, Washington named him military governor of Philadelphia.

Like many American mariners and merchants, Arnold’s early revolutionary beliefs had been nurtured in the smuggling trade. For men like John Hancock in Boston and Arnold in New Haven, finding a way around the stifling economic restrictions imposed by the British government had been not only a financial necessity but an expression of patriotism, a finger in the eye of the British regime. Now that the Continental Congress in Philadelphia had proven to be, if anything, even more dysfunctional and unjust than the ministry in London, Arnold saw nothing disloyal in doing what Americans had always done: profit as best they could from whatever commercial circumstances presented themselves.

CHAPTER NINE - Unmerciful Fangs

Brilliant, mercurial, and outspoken, Reed had a habit of antagonizing even his closest friends and associates, and after his falling-out with Washington in the winter of 1776 over his clandestine correspondence with Charles Lee, he had served in a variety of official capacities, always restless, always the smartest, most judgmental person in the room. As William Gordon, a New England minister who had heard many complaints about Reed during his tenure as adjutant general, wrote to Washington, Reed was “more formed for dividing than uniting.” And then, in the fall of 1778, Reed stepped down as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress to assist the state’s attorney general in prosecuting twenty-three suspected loyalists for treason. For a man who believed that he and he alone possessed the capacity and righteousness to ferret out the sinners in what had come down to a war of good against evil, it was the perfect role. Since many of the accused collaborators came from Philadelphia’s upper class, his position as prosecutor allowed him to menace the very group that had proven so unaccommodating to his wife. It also established him as one of the city’s most zealous and unforgiving patriots.

Perhaps contributing to Reed’s ire was the fact that he and his wife had recently moved to the house next to Arnold’s and had not been invited to the party.

For the last year, a disturbing rumor about Reed had been circulating among the officers of the Continental army. According to John Cadwalader, Reed had been in such despair over the state of the war in late December 1776 that he’d decided to spend the night of Washington’s assault on Trenton at a home in Hessian-occupied New Jersey, where he’d been poised to defect to the British in the event of an American defeat.

Arnold eventually became a traitor of the highest order, and ultimately he alone was responsible for what he did. However, one cannot help but wonder whether he would have betrayed his country without the merciless witch hunt conducted by Reed and his Supreme Executive Council.

Indeed, Arnold’s problems in Philadelphia were symptomatic of a national trend as more and more Americans regarded Continental army officers like Arnold as dangerous hirelings on the order of the Hessian mercenaries and British regulars while local militiamen were looked to as the embodiment of the true patriotic ideal. In reality, rather than fighting for freedom against the British, many of these militiamen were employed by community officials as thuggish enforcers to terrorize local citizens whose loyalties were suspect. In Philadelphia, for example, the state’s militiamen had begun to serve as the strong arm of the Constitutionalists — evicting loyalists from their homes and interrupting meetings of the conservative Republican Party — while Continental army officers like Arnold and Cadwalader became, almost by default, the defenders of the wealthy minority.

Arnold is usually credited with coming up with the idea himself, but there are reasons to suspect that the decision to turn traitor originated with Peggy. Certainly the timing is suspect, following as it does so soon after their marriage.

Adams was lucky; his wife and virtually every member of his extended family supported his political positions. Arnold now found himself in an entirely different situation. Instead of appealing to the better angels of his patriotism, Peggy was calling forth the demons that had been whispering in his ear ever since his first troubles during the retreat from Montreal.

During the English Revolution a hundred years before, the defection of one of Cromwell’s favorite officers, George Monck, had made possible the restoration of King Charles II, who in gratitude awarded Monck a host of preferments including the vast tract of territory in North America that eventually became North and South Carolina.

“Money is this man’s god,” Colonel John Brown had insisted two years before, “and to get enough of it, he would sacrifice his country.”

CHAPTER TEN - The Chasm

After suggesting some of the ways Arnold might help them — from stealing dispatches to identifying the location of ammunition depots — André outlined the code that he was to use in future communications. First, Arnold needed to provide André with “a long book” for reference purposes. (Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England was an early choice but was eventually replaced by Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary, which had the advantage of listing the words alphabetically.) Each word in his message was to be keyed to the book with the help of three numbers: “the first is the page, the second the line, the third the word.” Another way to transmit secret messages was through the use of invisible ink, of which there were two options—one that was revealed by the application of a liquid chemical, the other by heat, each to be identified by a letter at the top of the page. “F is fire,” André instructed, “A, acid.”

Arnold, of course, did not see it that way. The same narcissistic arrogance that enabled him to face the gravest danger on the battlefield without a trace of fear had equipped him to be a first-rate traitor. Arnold had never worried about the consequences of his actions. Guilt was simply not a part of his makeup since everything he did was, to his own mind, at least, justifiable. Where others might have shown, if not remorse, at least hesitation or ambivalence, Arnold projected unwavering certitude.

What made Arnold unique was the godlike inviolability he attached to his actions. He had immense respect for a man like Washington, but Arnold was, in the end, the leading personage in the drama that was his life.

By waiting her husband out, Peggy had allowed the deteriorating conditions in Philadelphia to work to her advantage. Now that Continental soldiers and Pennsylvania militiamen were killing each other in the city’s streets (deaths that Joseph Reed dismissed as the “casual overflowings of liberty”), Arnold had decided that his best bet was with the British.

CHAPTER ELEVEN - The Pangs of a Dying Man

By so harshly condemning an act that paled beside what he had already done and planned to do, Arnold had become the oratorical equivalent of the berserker who had stormed the enemy redoubt at Saratoga. He was mocking not only his military judges but the gods, and like Satan he was magnificent in his fearless and pugnacious pride.

By turning West Point into the largest, most important fortress in the United States, Washington had created, ironically, a vulnerability that the country had not previously possessed: a military stronghold so vital that should it fall into the hands of the enemy it might mean the end of the war.

Five days after the Connecticut mutiny, Washington received news of the most stunning defeat of the war. Charleston had fallen to the British. Rather than abandoning the city when he still had the chance, Benjamin Lincoln had allowed the pleas of local citizens to delay his exit until it was too late, and he and almost his entire army of fifty-five hundred soldiers had been captured. The following day, on May 31, Washington confessed to Joseph Jones, an attorney from Virginia who served in the Continental Congress, that he feared “our cause is lost.”

In the end, it had all come down to money. Unwilling to pay the taxes demanded by Great Britain, the American people had fomented a revolution; unwilling to pay for an army, they were about to default on the promise they had made to themselves in the Declaration of Independence.

For almost half of its 315-mile overall length, from New York Harbor to Troy, the Hudson is tidal, meaning that it flows south at ebb tide and north with the flood.

D’Estaing had been replaced by the Comte de Rochambeau, who was headed for America with an army of four thousand soldiers and a fleet of warships under the command of Charles-Henri-Louis d’Arsac de Ternay.

CHAPTER TWELVE - The Crash

On August 16 in Camden, South Carolina, Gates suffered one of the bloodiest and most humiliating defeats of the war. Nine hundred American soldiers were killed or wounded; a thousand were made prisoners as Gates abandoned the field in apparent panic and rode an estimated 180 miles before finally coming to a stop.

Gates’s debacle at Camden, coupled with Benjamin Lincoln’s equally spectacular defeat at Charleston, gave Arnold the satisfaction of knowing that his two superior officers at Saratoga had so far proven unable to succeed without him.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - No Time for Remorse

Unknown to just about everyone but Washington, Tallmadge, twenty-six, was also the head of the American spy network. Over the last year, he had done much to develop what is now known as the Culper Ring, which had already provided valuable information through agents stationed in New York and Long Island.

It was not Arnold’s fault the scheme had failed; it was André’s.

What really irritated André was the fact that he had been undone by three American peasants. Just as had happened the day before with the Cahoon brothers, the three militiamen had refused to do as they’d been told by their social superiors.

The capture of John André had revealed a glaring gap in the spy network put together by Washington and Tallmadge. Despite the sophistication and reach of the Culper Ring, Arnold had succeeded in outfoxing Washington’s spy chief, who later admitted that he had “no suspicion of [Arnold’s] lack of patriotism or political integrity.”

Treason, along with suicide, is the most self-centered of acts.

Since republics rely on the inherent virtue of the people, they are exceedingly fragile. All it takes is one well-placed person to destroy everything.

Peggy had apparently decided that insanity was her best defense. All that night and well into the following morning, she succeeded in convincing anyone who was brought into her presence that Arnold’s treason had left her bereft of reason. It also meant that she did not have to answer any questions. Even the very bright and normally clearheaded Alexander Hamilton was completely taken in. “Her sufferings were so eloquent,” he wrote his fiancée, “that I wished myself her brother, to have a right to become her defender.”

Through several different channels, Washington informed Clinton that the only way he would release André was in exchange for Arnold. No matter how sorely tempted he may have been on a personal level to do exactly that, Clinton acknowledged to his staff that “a deserter is never given up.” Washington had no choice, in the end, but to execute Major André.

But Washington, who had made sure not to meet André, refused to yield. What Arnold had done had rocked the country to its already shaky foundations. The times required an act of unbending firmness to drive home the point that treason in this new, half-formed country was not to be tolerated. It almost cost him Hamilton, who regarded the decision as an unnecessarily “hard hearted policy,” but in the end Washington realized that he could not grant the prisoner his wish.

EPILOGUE - A Nation of Traitors

As a warrior at Valcour Island and Saratoga, Benedict Arnold had been an inspiration. But it was as a traitor that he succeeded in galvanizing a nation. Just as the American people appeared to be sliding into apathy and despair, Arnold’s treason awakened them to the realization that the War of Independence was theirs to lose.

The United States had been created through an act of disloyalty. No matter how eloquently the Declaration of Independence had attempted to justify the American rebellion, a residual guilt hovered over the circumstances of the country’s founding. Arnold changed all that. By threatening to destroy the newly created republic through, ironically, his own betrayal, Arnold gave this nation of traitors the greatest of gifts: a myth of creation. The American people had come to revere George Washington, but a hero alone was not sufficient to bring them together. Now they had the despised villain Benedict Arnold. They knew both what they were fighting for — and against. The story of America’s genesis could finally move beyond the break with the mother country and start to focus on the process by which thirteen former colonies could become a nation. As Arnold had demonstrated, the real enemy was not Great Britain, but those Americans who sought to undercut their fellow citizens’ commitment to one another.

the greatest danger to America’s future came from self-serving opportunism masquerading as patriotism.

"Why We Sleep" is one of the scarier books I've read lately.  Not regularly getting 8 hours of sleep a night?  Prepare for cancer, Alzheimers, traffic fatalities, and more!  UC Berkeley professor Matthew Walker is basically the Malcom Gladwell of sleep - he does a great job of communicating the current state of the art in sleep science and translating it into practical knowledge you can use in daily life.  Walker walks a fine line between technical detail and popular appeal and manages to pull it off nicely.  He helps lighten the tone with a couple of irreverent observations about several of the scientific studies too.  I found his sections on the role of sleep in memory formation particularly interesting and was scared straight by his commentary on sleep, mental illness, and Alzheimers.  Some of these studies - particularly for shorter-term effects - are beautifully designed and clearly demonstrate the importance of getting good sleep.  I'll be making sure to get a regular 8 hours from here on out!

Also, thinking back to my high school days of homework until 1AM and then the 6:07AM bus ride... after reading this book I can hardly believe I'm still alive!  Walker couldn't be more direct with what he thinks about the early start-times of schools across the US:

More than 80 percent of public high schools in the United States begin before 8:15 a.m. Almost 50 percent of those start before 7:20 a.m. School buses for a 7:20 a.m. start time usually begin picking up kids at around 5:45 a.m. As a result, some children and teenagers must wake up at 5:30 a.m., 5:15 a.m., or even earlier, and do so five days out of every seven, for years on end. This is lunacy.

My highlights below

PART 1 - This Thing Called Sleep

CHAPTER 1 - To Sleep . . .

Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease.

Worse, should you attempt to diet but don’t get enough sleep while doing so, it is futile, since most of the weight you lose will come from lean body mass, not fat.

Tragically, one person dies in a traffic accident every hour in the United States due to a fatigue-related error. It is disquieting to learn that vehicular accidents caused by drowsy driving exceed those caused by alcohol and drugs combined.

As one sleep scientist has said, “If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.”

I am a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

CHAPTER 2 - Caffeine, Jet Lag, and Melatonin

Kleitman and Richardson were to be their own experimental guinea pigs. Loaded with food and water for six weeks and a pair of dismantled, high-standing hospital beds, they took a trip into Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, one of the deepest caverns on the planet—so deep, in fact, that no detectable sunlight penetrates its farthest reaches. It was from this darkness that Kleitman and Richardson were to illuminate a striking scientific finding that would define our biological rhythm as being approximately one day (circadian), and not precisely one day.

Sunlight acts like a manipulating finger and thumb on the side-dial of an imprecise wristwatch. The light of the sun methodically resets our inaccurate internal timepiece each and every day, “winding” us back to precisely, not approximately, twenty-four hours.

Any signal that the brain uses for the purpose of clock resetting is termed a zeitgeber, from the German “time giver” or “synchronizer.”

An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl.

Owls are thus often forced to burn the proverbial candle at both ends. Greater ill health caused by a lack of sleep therefore befalls owls, including higher rates of depression, anxiety, diabetes, cancer, heart attack, and stroke.

For every day you are in a different time zone, your suprachiasmatic nucleus can only readjust by about one hour.

Scientists have studied airplane cabin crews who frequently fly on long-haul routes and have little chance to recover. Two alarming results have emerged. First, parts of their brains — specifically those related to learning and memory — had physically shrunk, suggesting the destruction of brain cells caused by the biological stress of time-zone travel. Second, their short-term memory was significantly impaired.

One consequence of increasing adenosine in the brain is an increasing desire to sleep. This is known as sleep pressure, and it is the second force that will determine when you feel sleepy, and thus should go to bed.

You can, however, artificially mute the sleep signal of adenosine by using a chemical that makes you feel more alert and awake: caffeine.

Caffeine has an average half-life of five to seven hours. Let’s say that you have a cup of coffee after your evening dinner, around 7:30 p.m. This means that by 1:30 a.m., 50 percent of that caffeine may still be active and circulating throughout your brain tissue. In other words, by 1:30 a.m., you’re only halfway to completing the job of cleansing your brain of the caffeine you drank after dinner.

First, after waking up in the morning, could you fall back asleep at ten or eleven a.m.? If the answer is “yes,” you are likely not getting sufficient sleep quantity and/or quality. Second, can you function optimally without caffeine before noon? If the answer is “no,” then you are most likely self-medicating your state of chronic sleep deprivation.

CHAPTER 3 - Defining and Generating Sleep

All these signals still flood into the center of your brain, but it is here, in the sensory convergence zone, where that journey ends while you sleep. The signals are blocked by a perceptual barricade set up in a structure called the thalamus (THAL-uh-muhs). A smooth, oval-shaped object just smaller than a lemon, the thalamus is the sensory gate of the brain.

This dramatic deceleration of neural time may be the reason we believe our dream life lasts far longer than our alarm clocks otherwise assert.

In this way, sleep may elegantly manage and solve our memory storage crisis, with the general excavatory force of NREM sleep dominating early, after which the etching hand of REM sleep blends, interconnects, and adds details.

What you are hearing is a sleep spindle — a punchy burst of brainwave activity that often festoons the tail end of each individual slow wave. Sleep spindles occur during both the deep and the lighter stages of NREM sleep, even before the slow, powerful brainwaves of deep sleep start to rise up and dominate. One of their many functions is to operate like nocturnal soldiers who protect sleep by shielding the brain from external noises. The more powerful and frequent an individual’s sleep spindles, the more resilient they are to external noises that would otherwise awaken the sleeper.

By severing perceptual ties with the outside world, not only do we lose our sense of consciousness (explaining why we do not dream in deep NREM sleep, nor do we keep explicit track of time), this also allows the cortex to “relax” into its default mode of functioning. That default mode is what we call deep slow-wave sleep. It is an active, deliberate, but highly synchronous state of brain activity. It is a near state of nocturnal cerebral meditation, though I should note that it is very different from the brainwave activity of waking meditative states.

The steady, slow, synchronous waves that sweep across the brain during deep sleep open up communication possibilities between distant regions of the brain, allowing them to collaboratively send and receive their different repositories of stored experience.

When it comes to information processing, think of the wake state principally as reception (experiencing and constantly learning the world around you), NREM sleep as reflection (storing and strengthening those raw ingredients of new facts and skills), and REM sleep as integration (interconnecting these raw ingredients with each other, with all past experiences, and, in doing so, building an ever more accurate model of how the world works, including innovative insights and problem-solving abilities).

Mere seconds before the dreaming phase begins, and for as long as that REM-sleep period lasts, you are completely paralyzed. There is no tone in the voluntary muscles of your body.

CHAPTER 4 - Ape Beds, Dinosaurs, and Napping with Half a Brain

Without exception, every animal species studied to date sleeps, or engages in something remarkably like it.

However, insects, amphibians, fish, and most reptiles show no clear signs of REM sleep — the type associated with dreaming in humans. Only birds and mammals, which appeared later in the evolutionary timeline of the animal kingdom, have full-blown REM sleep.

The mystery deepens when we consider pinnipeds (one of my all-time favorite words, from the Latin derivatives: pinna “fin” and pedis “foot”), such as fur seals. Partially aquatic mammals, they split their time between land and sea. When on land, they have both NREM sleep and REM sleep, just like humans and all other terrestrial mammals and birds. But when they enter the ocean, they stop having REM sleep almost entirely.

That humans (and all other species) can never “sleep back” that which we have previously lost is one of the most important take-homes of this book, the saddening consequences of which I will describe in chapters 7 and 8.

This humble passerine bird has evolved an extraordinary biological cloak of resilience to total sleep deprivation: one that it deploys only during a time of great survival necessity. You can now imagine why the US government continues to have a vested interest in discovering exactly what that biological suit of armor is: their hope for developing a twenty-four-hour soldier.

It is perhaps unsurprising that in the small enclaves of Greece where siestas still remain intact, such as the island of Ikaria, men are nearly four times as likely to reach the age of ninety as American males.

This body-balancing act was the challenge and danger of tree sleeping for our primate forebears, and it markedly constrained their sleep.

While there remains some debate, many believe that Homo erectus was the first to use fire, and fire was one of the most important catalysts — if not the most important — that enabled us to come out of the trees and live on terra firma. Fire is also one of the best explanations for how we were able to sleep safely on the ground.

From these clues, I offer a theorem: the tree-to-ground reengineering of sleep was a key trigger that rocketed Homo sapiens to the top of evolution’s lofty pyramid. At least two features define human beings relative to other primates. I posit that both have been beneficially and causally shaped by the hand of sleep, and specifically our intense degree of REM sleep relative to all other mammals: (1) our degree of sociocultural complexity, and (2) our cognitive intelligence. REM sleep, and the act of dreaming itself, lubricates both of these human traits.

From this REM-sleep-enhanced emotional IQ emerged a new and far more sophisticated form of hominid socioecology across vast collectives, one that helped enable the creation of large, emotionally astute, stable, highly bonded, and intensely social communities of humans.

What may at first blush have seemed like a modest asset awarded by REM sleep to a single individual is, I believe, one of the most valuable commodities ensuring the survival and dominance of our species as a collective.

CHAPTER 5 - Changes in Sleep Across the Life Span

Through speech or song, expecting parents will often thrill at their ability to elicit small kicks and movements from their in utero child. Though you should never tell them this, the baby is most likely fast asleep. Prior to birth, a human infant will spend almost all of its time in a sleep-like state, much of which resembles the REM-sleep state.

Autistic individuals show a 30 to 50 percent deficit in the amount of REM sleep they obtain, relative to children without autism.

Alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep that we know of.

Almost half of all lactating women in Western countries consume alcohol in the months during breastfeeding. Alcohol is readily absorbed in a mother’s milk. Concentrations of alcohol in breast milk closely resemble those in a mother’s bloodstream: a 0.08 blood alcohol level in a mother will result in approximately a 0.08 alcohol level in breast milk.

In contrast to the single, monophasic sleep pattern observed in adults of industrialized nations, infants and young kids display polyphasic sleep: many short snippets of sleep through the day and night, punctuated by numerous awakenings, often vocal.

That balance will finally stabilize to an 80/20 NREM/REM sleep split by the late teen years, and remain so throughout early and midadulthood.

The changes in deep NREM sleep always precede the cognitive and developmental milestones within the brain by several weeks or months, implying a direction of influence: deep sleep may be a driving force of brain maturation, not the other way around.

Those individuals who developed schizophrenia had an abnormal pattern of brain maturation that was associated with synaptic pruning, especially in the frontal lobe regions where rational, logical thoughts are controlled — the inability to do so being a major symptom of schizophrenia. In a separate series of studies, we have also observed that in young individuals who are at high risk of developing schizophrenia, and in teenagers and young adults with schizophrenia, there is a two- to threefold reduction in deep NREM sleep.

Adolescents face two other harmful challenges in their struggle to obtain sufficient sleep as their brains continue to develop. The first is a change in their circadian rhythm. The second is early school start times.

The reason is not simply that children need more sleep than their older siblings or parents, but also that the circadian rhythm of a young child runs on an earlier schedule. Children therefore become sleepy earlier and wake up earlier than their adult parents.

That older adults simply need less sleep is a myth. Older adults appear to need just as much sleep as they do in midlife, but are simply less able to generate that (still necessary) sleep.

Poor memory and poor sleep in old age are therefore not coincidental, but rather significantly interrelated.

PART 2 - Why Should You Sleep?

CHAPTER 6 - Your Mother and Shakespeare Knew

Ironically, most all of the “new,” twenty-first-century discoveries regarding sleep were delightfully summarized in 1611 in Macbeth, act two, scene two, where Shakespeare prophetically states that sleep is “the chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

In doing so, sleep had delightfully cleared out the hippocampus, replenishing this short-term information repository with plentiful free space.

Fitting the notion of a long-wave radio signal that carries information across large geographical distances, the slow brainwaves of deep NREM had served as a courier service, transporting memory packets from a temporary storage hold (hippocampus) to a more secure, permanent home (the cortex). In doing so, sleep had helped future-proof those memories.

Counter to earlier assumptions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, sleep does not offer a general, nonspecific (and hence verbose) preservation of all the information you learn during the day. Instead, sleep is able to offer a far more discerning hand in memory improvement: one that preferentially picks and chooses what information is, and is not, ultimately strengthened. Sleep accomplishes this by using meaningful tags that have been hung onto those memories during initial learning, or potentially identified during sleep itself.

Those who remained awake across the day showed no evidence of a significant improvement in performance. However, fitting with the pianist’s original description, those who were tested after the very same time delay of twelve hours, but that spanned a night of sleep, showed a striking 20 percent jump in performance speed and a near 35 percent improvement in accuracy. Importantly, those participants who learned the motor skill in the morning — and who showed no improvement that evening — did go on to show an identical bump up in performance when retested after a further twelve hours, now after they, too, had had a full night’s sleep.

It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection.

CHAPTER 7 - Too Extreme for the Guinness Book of World Records

Every hour, someone dies in a traffic accident in the US due to a fatigue-related error.

Ten days of six hours of sleep a night was all it took to become as impaired in performance as going without sleep for twenty-four hours straight.

When participants were asked about their subjective sense of how impaired they were, they consistently underestimated their degree of performance disability.

After being awake for nineteen hours, people who were sleep-deprived were as cognitively impaired as those who were legally drunk. Said another way, if you wake up at seven a.m. and remain awake throughout the day, then go out socializing with friends until late that evening, yet drink no alcohol whatsoever, by the time you are driving home at two a.m. you are as cognitively impaired in your ability to attend to the road and what is around you as a legally drunk driver.

Operating on less than five hours of sleep, your risk of a car crash increases threefold. Get behind the wheel of a car when having slept just four hours or less the night before and you are 11.5 times more likely to be involved in a car accident.

The heady cocktail of sleep loss and alcohol was not additive, but instead multiplicative.

After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail.

Approximately 80 percent of truck drivers in the US are overweight, and 50 percent are clinically obese. This places truck drivers at a far, far higher risk of a disorder called sleep apnea, commonly associated with heavy snoring, which causes chronic, severe sleep deprivation. As a result, these truck drivers are 200 to 500 percent more likely to be involved in a traffic accident. And when a truck driver loses his or her life in a drowsy-driving crash, they will, on average, take 4.5 other lives with them.

It is during this end phase of flight, known in the aviation industry as “top of descent to landing,” that 68 percent of all hull losses — a euphemism for a catastrophic plane crash — occur.

The researchers set to work answering the following question, posed by the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA): If a pilot can only obtain a short nap opportunity (40–120 minutes) within a thirty-six-hour period, when should it occur so as to minimize cognitive fatigue and attention lapses: at the start of the first evening, in the middle of the night, or late the following morning? It first appeared to be counterintuitive, but Dinges and Rosekind made a clever, biology-based prediction. They believed that by inserting a nap at the front end of an incoming bout of sleep deprivation, you could insert a buffer, albeit temporary and partial, that would protect the brain from suffering catastrophic lapses in concentration. They were right. Pilots suffered fewer microsleeps at the end stages of the flight if the naps were taken early that prior evening, versus if those same nap periods were taken in the middle of the night or later that next morning, when the attack of sleep deprivation was already well under way.

No matter what you may have heard or read in the popular media, there is no scientific evidence we have suggesting that a drug, a device, or any amount of psychological willpower can replace sleep.

Analysis of the brain scans revealed the largest effects I have measured in my research to date. A structure located in the left and right sides of the brain, called the amygdala — a key hot spot for triggering strong emotions such as anger and rage, and linked to the fight-or-flight response — showed well over a 60 percent amplification in emotional reactivity in the participants who were sleep-deprived.

With a full night of plentiful sleep, we have a balanced mix between our emotional gas pedal (amygdala) and brake (prefrontal cortex). Without sleep, however, the strong coupling between these two brain regions is lost. We cannot rein in our atavistic impulses—too much emotional gas pedal (amygdala) and not enough regulatory brake (prefrontal cortex).

A similar relationship between a lack of sleep and violence has been observed in adult prison populations; places that, I should add, are woefully poor at enabling good sleep that could reduce aggression, violence, psychiatric disturbance, and suicide, which, beyond the humanitarian concern, increases costs to the taxpayer.

There is no major psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. This is true of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder (once known as manic depression).

I am not suggesting that all psychiatric conditions are caused by absent sleep. However, I am suggesting that sleep disruption remains a neglected factor contributing to the instigation and/or maintenance of numerous psychiatric illnesses, and has powerful diagnostic and therapeutic potential that we are yet to fully understand or make use of.

I find it to be an ethically difficult experiment to appreciate, but the scientists had importantly demonstrated that a lack of sleep is a causal trigger of a psychiatric episode of mania or depression. The result supports a mechanism in which the sleep disruption — which almost always precedes the shift from a stable to an unstable manic or depressive state in bipolar patients — may well be a (the) trigger in the disorder, and not simply epiphenomenal.

When we compared the effectiveness of learning between the two groups, the result was clear: there was a 40 percent deficit in the ability of the sleep-deprived group to cram new facts into the brain (i.e., to make new memories), relative to the group that obtained a full night of sleep.

While at Harvard University, I was invited to write my first op-ed piece for their newspaper, the Crimson. The topic was sleep loss, learning, and memory. It was also the last piece I was invited to write.

In other words, if you don’t sleep the very first night after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories, even if you get lots of “catch-up” sleep thereafter. In terms of memory, then, sleep is not like the bank. You cannot accumulate a debt and hope to pay it off at a later point in time. Sleep for memory consolidation is an all-or-nothing event.

More than 40 million people suffer from the debilitating disease. That number has accelerated as the human life span has stretched, but also, importantly, as total sleep time has decreased. One in ten adults over the age of sixty-five now suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.

Making matters worse, over 60 percent of patients with Alzheimer’s disease have at least one clinical sleep disorder.

The disruption of deep NREM sleep was therefore a hidden middleman brokering the bad deal between amyloid and memory impairment in Alzheimer’s disease. A missing link.

Although the glymphatic system — the support team — is somewhat active during the day, Nedergaard and her team discovered that it is during sleep that this neural sanitization work kicks into high gear. Associated with the pulsing rhythm of deep NREM sleep comes a ten- to twentyfold increase in effluent expulsion from the brain. In what can be described as a nighttime power cleanse, the purifying work of the glymphatic system is accomplished by cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain. Nedergaard made a second astonishing discovery, which explained why the cerebrospinal fluid is so effective in flushing out metabolic debris at night. The glial cells of the brain were shrinking in size by up to 60 percent during NREM sleep, enlarging the space around the neurons and allowing the cerebrospinal fluid to proficiently clean out the metabolic refuse left by the day’s neural activity.

One piece of toxic debris evacuated by the glymphatic system during sleep is amyloid protein — the poisonous element associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

From this cascade comes a prediction: getting too little sleep across the adult life span will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Precisely this relationship has now been reported in numerous epidemiological studies, including those individuals suffering from sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea. Parenthetically, and unscientifically, I have always found it curious that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—two heads of state that were very vocal, if not proud, about sleeping only four to five hours a night — both went on to develop the ruthless disease. The current US president, Donald Trump — also a vociferous proclaimer of sleeping just a few hours each night — may want to take note.

CHAPTER 8 - Cancer, Heart Attacks, and a Shorter Life

In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity. Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day. Impressively, it works both ways. In the autumn within the Northern Hemisphere, when the clocks move forward and we gain an hour of sleep opportunity time, rates of heart attacks plummet the day after.

The global health cost of diabetes is $375 billion a year. That of obesity is more than $2 trillion.

Independent of one another, the research groups found far higher rates of type 2 diabetes among individuals that reported sleeping less than six hours a night routinely.

When your sleep becomes short, you will gain weight. Multiple forces conspire to expand your waistline. The first concerns two hormones controlling appetite: leptin and ghrelin. Leptin signals a sense of feeling full. When circulating levels of leptin are high, your appetite is blunted and you don’t feel like eating. Ghrelin, in contrast, triggers a strong sensation of hunger.

At fault were the two characters, leptin and ghrelin. Inadequate sleep decreased concentrations of the satiety-signaling hormone leptin and increased levels of the hunger-instigating hormone ghrelin.

Of relevance to this behavior is a recent discovery that sleep loss increases levels of circulating endocannabinoids, which, as you may have guessed from the name, are chemicals produced by the body that are very similar to the drug cannabis. Like marijuana use, these chemicals stimulate appetite and increase your desire to snack, otherwise known as having the munchies.

Take it to the extreme by sleep-depriving an individual for twenty-four hours straight and they will only burn an extra 147 calories, relative to a twenty-four-hour period containing a full eight hours of sleep. Sleep, it turns out, is an intensely metabolically active state for brain and body alike.

Based on evidence gathered over the past three decades, the epidemic of insufficient sleep is very likely a key contributor to the epidemic of obesity. Epidemiological studies have established that people who sleep less are the same individuals who are more likely to be overweight or obese.

Three-year-olds sleeping just ten and a half hours or less have a 45 percent increased risk of being obese by age seven than those who get twelve hours of sleep a night.

Sample the hormone levels circulating in the blood of these tired participants and you will find a marked drop in testosterone relative to their own baseline levels of testosterone when fully rested. The size of the hormonal blunting effect is so large that it effectively “ages” a man by ten to fifteen years in terms of testosterone virility.

There was a clear, linear relationship with infection rate. The less sleep an individual was getting in the week before facing the active common cold virus, the more likely it was that they would be infected and catch a cold.

Cancers are known to use the inflammation response to their advantage. For example, some cancer cells will lure inflammatory factors into the tumor mass to help initiate the growth of blood vessels that feed it with more nutrients and oxygen. Tumors can also use inflammatory factors to help further damage and mutate the DNA of their cancer cells, increasing the tumor’s potency.

The sleep-deprived mice suffered a 200 percent increase in the speed and size of cancer growth, relative to the well-rested group.

Not getting sufficient sleep when fighting a battle against cancer can be likened to pouring gasoline on an already aggressive fire. That may sound alarmist, but the scientific evidence linking sleep disruption and cancer is now so damning that the World Health Organization has officially classified nighttime shift work as a “probable carcinogen.”

Deprive a mouse of sleep for just a day, as researchers have done, and the activity of these genes will drop by well over 200 percent.

The less sleep an individual obtains, or the worse the quality of sleep, the more damaged the capstone telomeres of that individual’s chromosomes.

PART 3 - How and Why We Dream

CHAPTER 9 - Routinely Psychotic

In fact, there are four main clusters of the brain that spike in activity when someone starts dreaming in REM sleep: (1) the visuospatial regions at the back of the brain, which enable complex visual perception; (2) the motor cortex, which instigates movement; (3) the hippocampus and surrounding regions that we have spoken about before, which support your autobiographical memory; and (4) the deep emotional centers of the brain — the amygdala and the cingulate cortex, a ribbon of tissue that sits above the amygdala and lines the inner surface of your brain — both of which help generate and process emotions. Indeed, these emotional regions of the brain are up to 30 percent more active in REM sleep compared to when we are awake!

REM sleep can therefore be considered as a state characterized by strong activation in visual, motor, emotional, and autobiographical memory regions of the brain, yet a relative deactivation in regions that control rational thought.

CHAPTER 10 - Dreaming as Overnight Therapy

At the heart of the theory was an astonishing change in the chemical cocktail of your brain that takes place during REM sleep. Concentrations of a key stress-related chemical called noradrenaline are completely shut off within your brain when you enter this dreaming sleep state. In fact, REM sleep is the only time during the twenty-four-hour period when your brain is completely devoid of this anxiety-triggering molecule.

Most compelling to me, however, were the repetitive nightmares reported in PTSD patients — a symptom so reliable that it forms part of the list of features required for a diagnosis of the condition.

It turns out that the drug prazosin, which Raskind was prescribing simply to lower blood pressure, also has the fortuitous side effect of suppressing noradrenaline in the brain. Raskind had delightfully and inadvertently conducted the experiment I was trying to conceive of myself.

Mutually informed by each other’s work, and based on the strength of Raskind’s studies and now several large-scale independent clinical trials, prazosin has become the officially approved drug by the VA for the treatment of repetitive trauma nightmares, and has since received approval by the US Food and Drug Administration for the same benefit.

With the absence of such emotional acuity, normally gifted by the re-tuning skills of REM sleep at night, the sleep-deprived participants slipped into a default of fear bias, believing even gentle- or somewhat friendly looking faces were menacing.

CHAPTER 11 - Dream Creativity and Dream Control

Scientists had gained objective, brain-based proof that lucid dreamers can control when and what they dream while they are dreaming. Other studies using similar eye movement communication designs have further shown that individuals can deliberately bring themselves to timed orgasm during lucid dreaming, an outcome that, especially in males, can be objectively verified using physiological measures by (brave) scientists.

PART 4 - From Sleeping Pills to Society Transformed

CHAPTER 12 - Things That Go Bump in the Night

Approximately one out of every nine people you pass on the street will meet the strict clinical criteria for insomnia, which translates to more than 40 million Americans struggling to make it through their waking days due to wide-eyed nights.

Without belaboring the point, insomnia is one of the most pressing and prevalent medical issues facing modern society, yet few speak of it this way, recognize the burden, or feel there is a need to act. That the “sleep aid” industry, encompassing prescription sleeping medications and over-the-counter sleep remedies, is worth an astonishing $30 billion a year in the US is perhaps the only statistic one needs in order to realize how truly grave the problem is.

Cataplexy is therefore an abnormal functioning of the REM-sleep circuitry within the brain, wherein one of its features — muscle atonia — is inappropriately deployed while the individual is awake and behaving, rather than asleep and dreaming.

Scientists have examined the brains of narcoleptic patients in painstaking detail after they have passed away. During these postmortem investigations, they discovered a loss of almost 90 percent of all the cells that produce orexin.

Despite wonderful work by many of my colleagues, narcolepsy currently represents a failure of sleep research at the level of effective treatments.

For the first symptom of narcolepsy — daytime sleep attacks — the only treatment used to be high doses of the wake-promoting drug amphetamine.

Soon after turning forty-two years old, Michael Corke died of a rare, genetically inherited disorder called fatal familial insomnia (FFI). There are no treatments for this disorder, and there are no cures. Every patient diagnosed with the disorder has died within ten months, some sooner. It is one of the most mysterious conditions in the annals of medicine, and it has taught us a shocking lesson: a lack of sleep will kill a human being.

CHAPTER 13 - iPads, Factory Whistles, and Nightcaps

five key factors have powerfully changed how much and how well we sleep: (1) constant electric light as well as LED light, (2) regularized temperature, (3) caffeine (discussed in chapter 2), (4) alcohol, and (5) a legacy of punching time cards.

Nightly alcohol will disrupt your sleep, and the annoying advice of abstinence is the best, and most honest, I can offer.

To successfully initiate sleep, as described in chapter 2, your core temperature needs to decrease by 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 1 degree Celsius. For this reason, you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that is too cold than too hot, since a room that is too cold is at least dragging your brain and body in the correct (downward) temperature direction for sleep.

The need to dump heat from our extremities is also the reason that you may occasionally stick your hands and feet out from underneath the bedcovers at night due to your core becoming too hot, usually without your knowing.

A bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3°C) is ideal for the sleep of most people, assuming standard bedding and clothing.

Our biased sensitivity to cool blue light is a vestigial carryover from our marine forebears.

CHAPTER 14 - Hurting and Helping Your Sleep

No past or current sleeping medications on the legal (or illegal) market induce natural sleep. Don’t get me wrong — no one would claim that you are awake after taking prescription sleeping pills. But to suggest that you are experiencing natural sleep would be an equally false assertion.

Those taking sleeping pills were 4.6 times more likely to die over this short two-and-a-half-year period than those who were not using sleeping pills.

One frequent cause of mortality appears to be higher-than-normal rates of infection.

Consider that the original Star Wars movies — some of the highest-grossing films of all time — required more than forty years to amass $3 billion in revenue. It took Ambien just twenty-four months to amass $4 billion in sales profit, discounting the black market.

One of the more paradoxical CBT-I methods used to help insomniacs sleep is to restrict their time spent in bed, perhaps even to just six hours of sleep or less to begin with. By keeping patients awake for longer, we build up a strong sleep pressure — a greater abundance of adenosine. Under this heavier weight of sleep pressure, patients fall asleep faster, and achieve a more stable, solid form of sleep across the night.

Published in the prestigious journal Annals of Internal Medicine, the conclusion from this comprehensive evaluation of all existing data was this: CBT-I must be used as the first-line treatment for all individuals with chronic insomnia, not sleeping pills.

All twelve suggestions are superb advice, but if you can only adhere to one of these each and every day, make it: going to bed and waking up at the same time of day no matter what. It is perhaps the single most effective way of helping improve your sleep, even though it involves the use of an alarm clock.

CHAPTER 15 - Sleep and Society:

A hundred years ago, less than 2 percent of the population in the United States slept six hours or less a night. Now, almost 30 percent of American adults do.

A 2007 report entitled “Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality” offers a disquieting account of such practices in the modern day. The document was compiled by Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group seeking to end human torture. Telegraphed by the report’s title, many modern-day torture methods are deviously designed to leave no evidence of physical assault. Sleep deprivation epitomizes this goal and, at the time of writing this book, is still used for interrogation by countries, including Myanmar, Iran, Iraq, the United States, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey.

Proof comes from a recent scientific study demonstrating that one night of sleep deprivation will double or even quadruple the likelihood that an otherwise upstanding individual will falsely confess to something they have not done.

Several US federal courts hold a similarly damning view of these practices, ruling that sleep deprivation violates both the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution regarding protection from cruel and inhuman punishment. Their rationale was sound and impenetrable: “sleep,” it was stated, must be considered a “basic life necessity,” which it clearly is.

More than 80 percent of public high schools in the United States begin before 8:15 a.m. Almost 50 percent of those start before 7:20 a.m. School buses for a 7:20 a.m. start time usually begin picking up kids at around 5:45 a.m. As a result, some children and teenagers must wake up at 5:30 a.m., 5:15 a.m., or even earlier, and do so five days out of every seven, for years on end. This is lunacy.

Forced by the hand of early school start times, this state of chronic sleep deprivation is especially concerning considering that adolescence is the most susceptible phase of life for developing chronic mental illnesses, such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and suicidality. Unnecessarily bankrupting the sleep of a teenager could make all the difference in the precarious tipping point between psychological wellness and lifelong psychiatric illness.

Only then did scientists realize the rather profound conclusions of the experiment: REM sleep is what stands between rationality and insanity.

Published in his seminal papers and book Genetic Studies of Genius, Terman found that no matter what the age, the longer a child slept, the more intellectually gifted they were.

Terman believed that this swing to an early-morning model of education would damage, and damage deeply, the intellectual growth of our youth. Despite his warnings, nearly a hundred years later, US education systems have shifted to early school start times, while many European countries have done just the opposite.

In a study that was started by Dr. Ronald Wilson at Louisville School of Medicine in the 1980s, which continues to this day, hundreds of twin pairs were assessed at a very young age. The researchers specifically focused on those twins in which one was routinely obtaining less sleep than the other, and tracked their developmental progress over the following decades. By ten years of age, the twin with the longer sleep pattern was superior in their intellectual and educational abilities, with higher scores on standardized tests of reading and comprehension, and a more expansive vocabulary than the twin who was obtaining less sleep.

When the Mahtomedi School District of Minnesota pushed their school start time from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m., there was a 60 percent reduction in traffic accidents in drivers sixteen to eighteen years of age. Teton County in Wyoming enacted an even more dramatic change in school start time, shifting from a 7:35 a.m. bell to a far more biologically reasonable one of 8:55 a.m. The result was astonishing — a 70 percent reduction in traffic accidents in sixteen- to eighteen-year-old drivers.

School bus schedules and bus unions are a major roadblock thwarting appropriately later school start times, as is the established routine of getting the kids out the door early in the morning so that parents can start work early.

Most people know the name of the common ADHD medications: Adderall and Ritalin. But few know what these drugs actually are. Adderall is amphetamine with certain salts mixed in, and Ritalin is a similar stimulant, called methylphenidate. Amphetamine and methylphenidate are two of the most powerful drugs we know of to prevent sleep and keep the brain of an adult (or a child, in this case) wide awake.

Based on recent surveys and clinical evaluations, we estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications.

Why did we ever force doctors to learn their profession in this exhausting, sleepless way? The answer originates with the esteemed physician William Stewart Halsted, MD, who was also a helpless drug addict.

To Halsted, sleep was a dispensable luxury that detracted from the ability to work and learn. Halsted’s mentality was difficult to argue with, since he himself practiced what he preached, being renowned for a seemingly superhuman ability to stay awake for apparently days on end without any fatigue. But Halsted had a dirty secret that only came to light years after his death, and helped explain both the maniacal structure of his residency program and his ability to forgo sleep. Halsted was a cocaine addict. It was a sad and apparently accidental habit, one that started years before his arrival at Johns Hopkins.

Throughout the course of their residency, one in five medical residents will make a sleepless-related medical error that causes significant, liable harm to a patient. One in twenty residents will kill a patient due to a lack of sleep.

CHAPTER 16 - A New Vision for Sleep in the Twenty-First Century

Few people realize that the annual financial cost of the flu in the US is around $100 billion ($10 billion direct and $90 billion in lost work productivity).

Rather than required hours with relatively hard boundaries (i.e., the classic nine to five), businesses need to adapt a far more tapered vision of hours of operation, one that resembles a squished inverted-U shape. Everyone would be present during a core window for key interactions—say, twelve to three p.m. Yet there would be flexible tail ends either side to accommodate all individual chronotypes.

Conclusion - To Sleep or Not to Sleep

This silent sleep loss epidemic is the greatest public health challenge we face in the twenty-first century in developed nations.

About the Author

MATTHEW WALKER, PHD, is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, the director of its Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, and a former professor of psychiatry at Harvard University.

Although most famous for his Narnia series, a Christian allegory for children, C.S. Lewis (that's "Clive Staples Lewis" to you young man!) also wrote plenty of explicitly religious books for adults. I came across "The Screwtape Letters" in a reading list prepared by philosophy professor Dr. Robert Kreeft (a devout Catholic). It was a book that, as C.S. Lewis himself said, "wrote itself" after he came up with the key idea. That key idea was to create an epistolary novel in which a demon ("Screwtape") gives advice to his tempter-in-training nephew ("Wormwood"). It's a marvelous conceit and one which C.S. Lewis executes brilliantly. I would have given this one 5 stars but it does drag a bit in some parts. But on the whole, it's a delightful little book that is over too soon. The audiobook narration by Joss Ackland is pitch-perfect and makes this a perfect road-trip pick. I'm sure I'll be reading the text version at some point.

“Goddamn airplane is made out of balonium.”  Fighter pilot John Boyd had an extremely low tolerance for bullshit.  In a remarkable three decade career of military service, Boyd exhibited near-mythical talent, range, and insight.  As a tragic genius, he has few parallels in American history.

He began as an unbeatable fighter pilot and became a legendary instructor at the Air Force's Fighter Weapons School.  In civilian life, we often scoff and say, "those who can't do, teach."  Quite the opposite at FWS:

In most places of higher learning, an instructor is at the bottom of the academic pecking order. But at Nellis there is no more prestigious title. An FWS instructor may go on to become a general; many have. But ask him what gave him the most pride — becoming an FWS instructor or being promoted to general — and he will not hesitate. A general wears stars. But an FWS instructor wears the patch.

Then Boyd invented a whole new theory of aerodynamics to explain and quantify the performance characteristics of fighter jets.  Putting this into practice, he recruited the "Fighter Mafia" to subvert the gold-plated Pentagon procurement process and became the father of the iconic F-16 fighter jet.  And he did it with flair:

The closest Boyd came to defining a specific technical solution was when he said the aircraft should pull enough Gs at 30,000 feet to “roll down your goddamn socks.”

According to Wikipedia, the F-16 remains the "most numerous fixed-wing aircraft in military service."

But wait, there's more.  Boyd's battles with the Pentagon sparked the "defense reform movement" of the 1980's.  As peeved Pentagon staffers denied him further promotion from his rank of Colonel, Boyd developed a series of theories that reshaped modern warfare.  He literally wrote the book on tactics for fighter aircraft in his "Aerial Attack Study."  Today, he is most famous for his "OODA loop" decision cycle theory.  But it was his legendary "Discourse on Winning & Losing" briefing that really cemented his position as a master of Grand Strategy.  

The academics who know of Boyd agree he was one of the premier military strategists of the twentieth century and the only strategist to put time at the center of his thinking. That is as far as they will go. But Boyd was the greatest military theoretician since Sun Tzu. Academics snort in derision at such a claim. Von Clausewitz remains their favorite even though those who know the work of both Boyd and von Clausewitz agree that Boyd revealed the gaping flaws of von Clausewitzian theory.

Boyd's insight was that the key mechanism behind victory is to get within your enemy's decision cycle.  It sounds really simple, but this is not historically how America fights wars - think of our brutal wars of attrition like the Civil War or WWII.  His insight is captured in the popular idiom of "running circles around someone," where you are able to operate at such a high tempo that your opponent just completely collapses:

A commander can use this temporal discrepancy (a form of fast transient) to select the least-expected action rather than what is predicted to be the most-effective action. The enemy can also figure out what might be the most effective. To take the least-expected action disorients the enemy. It causes him to pause, to wonder, to question. This means that as the commander compresses his own time, he causes time to be stretched out for his opponent. The enemy falls farther and farther behind in making relevant decisions. It hastens the unraveling process.

Now if this is all sounding a bit abstract to you, do you remember how America absolutely curb-stomped Saddam in the first Gulf War?  SecDef Cheney called Boyd out of retirement and up to Washington for the (short) duration of the conflict.  In contrast to the traditional US military strategy of "high diddle up the middle," Boyd's theories were front and center:

He called Boyd and said, “John, they’re using your words to describe how we won the war. Everything about the war was yours. It’s all right out of ‘Patterns.’” He was right. Everything successful about the Gulf War is a direct reflection of Boyd’s “Patterns of Conflict” — multiple thrusts and deception operations that created ambiguity and caused the enemy to surrender by the thousands. America (and the coalition forces) won without resorting to a prolonged ground war. America not only picked when and where it would fight, but also when and where it would not fight. Coalition forces operated at a much higher tempo than the enemy. The resulting crises happened so fast that opposing forces could not keep pace with them. The one-hundred-hour ground war blitz against Iraq is a splendid example of maneuver warfare, a first-rate instance of cheng/ch’i, the conventional and the unconventional, all done so quickly the enemy was disoriented and collapsed from within.

Other US SecDefs have also been influenced by Boyd's theories.  General Mattis (former SecDef) says that his own method of military management originates from Boyd's strategic thinking.  I know this for a fact because I asked him in-person at an event at Stanford's Hoover Institution (see 1:07:40).  Admiral Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy (and founder of RSI), was also a Boyd fan.

How on earth did a single man accomplish so much?  For one thing, he read a TON and loved books - "It was obvious from Boyd’s phone calls that he was not only spending a disproportionately large amount of his retirement pay on books but was reading them all."  Boyd actually created the very first reading list for the US Marine Corps - a tradition that has carried on to this day.

Although Boyd was an autodidact without much formal education, he cultivated a smaller number of like-minded individuals to cover some of his blind spots.  These "Acolytes," as they became to be known, got roped into all sorts of Boyd's schemes and were on the receiving end of many late-night surprise phone calls from him.  Boyd was notoriously difficult to work with, from his grueling work hours to his abrasive personality.  Yet his vision somehow attracted a small circle of men who became absolutely devoted to him professionally.

Boyd's less attractive personal traits also spilled over into his family life, or rather, his complete neglect thereof.  Boyd's near complete disengagement with his wife and children is one of the uglier elements of his story.  Truly a tragic family life.  Worst Dad of the Year award winner for a solid two decades.

Many of the impositions that Boyd forced upon his family were driven by his foundational drive for independence.  As Coram relates, "Boyd knew he had to be independent and he saw only two ways for a man to do this: he can either achieve great wealth or reduce his needs to zero."  Maybe Boyd really was ahead of his time - this sounds suspiciously like the "Mr. Money Mustache" philosophy on financial independence to me.

Yet Boyd's obstinacy and devotion to his principles was also the wellspring of one of his best features - his integrity.  Part of the reason other people in the Air Force thought he was such an ass is that he refused to compromise on what he believed was right.  Normally in society we pay a lot of lip service to "standing up for what you believe in," but then expect people to compromise and "get along" in practice.  Boyd refused to do so and encouraged his subordinates to do the same.  In fact, one of his greatest legacies is a brief talk informally known as his "To Be or To Do" speech:

“Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road,” he said. “And you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” He raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction. “Or you can go that way and you can do something — something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference.” He paused and stared into Leopold’s eyes and heart. “To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?”

Yet, Boyd's legacy remains disputed.  Part of this is due to his own lack of concern for his image.  He shunned the spotlight and most people in the military thought of him as a real pain in the neck.  He never officially published his work (but you can find most of his written work here).  Boyd was focused on getting things done and said himself that, "If you insist on getting credit for the work you do, you’ll never get far in life. Don’t confuse yourself with the idea of getting credit."  (Sounds like Robert Moses to me)

I personally had difficulty assessing whether Boyd was a genius or completely nuts.  His approach to strategy is very abstract and theoretical.  He doesn't give you much to really hang your hat on and he certainly avoids making concrete prescriptions.  Yet I could say the same thing about the professors in my Grand Strategy class at Yale.  Did I learn a ton and did it change the way I think?  Absolutely.  Could I explicitly tell you what I learned and how it changed my mind?  Not really... it's more of a "feel" thing.  Of course, other people tend to get quite frustrated when I tell them this!

The Air Force remains ambivalent on John Boyd.  In 2016, the Air Force Historical Foundation's Air Power History magazine published an article titled, "Boyd Revisited: A Great Mind with a Touch of Madness."  

The author contrasts Boyd with John Warden, another Air Force strategic theorist famous for his "Five Rings" framework.  He claims that it is really Warden's thinking that shaped the strategy in the First Gulf War.  Boyd is abstract while Warden is concrete.  Boyd aims for "implosion" while Warden targets "explosion" -  "Both focus on the disruption of the enemy's leadership, but Boyd attempts to influence the leaders' reasoning processes, thereby forcing mistakes, where Warden emphasizes using force to break the tangible connections between the leaders and the levers of power they wish to employ."

The author essentially dismisses Boyd as a dreamer and it's hard for me to know whether this is legitimate criticism or just a hit-piece run by the higher-ups at the Air Force trying to rewrite history.  One solid criticism of Boyd that I did agree with was the author's comment that, "...Boyd's strong emphasis on speed and tempo; at the tactical level they are all-important and key to success, but at the grand strategic level patience may indeed be a virtue."

In any case, this book is a must-read.  It's got big ideas, camaraderie and enmity, fighter jets, personal triumph and tragedy, and a heavy dose of "how the world works."  It's one of my favorites from 2019 for sure.

A big thanks to Ryan Holiday for originally recommending this book.

My highlights below.

Acknowledgments

It is a measure of the respect Boyd evoked that Vice President Dick Cheney took time to talk about his old friend. The generosity of his comments added much to the book.

Prologue

And while Boyd’s life was marked by a series of enormous accomplishments and lasting achievements, the thing that meant the most to him over the longest period of time was the simple title he had in the beginning. He was first, last, and always a fighter pilot — a loud-talking, cigar-smoking, bigger-than-life fighter pilot. There is no such thing as an ex–fighter pilot. Once a young man straps on a jet aircraft and climbs into the heavens to do battle, it sears his psyche forever.

He remembers the days when he sky-danced through the heavens, when he could press a button and summon the lightning and invoke the thunder, the days when he was a prince of the earth and a lord of the heavens. He remembers his glory days and he is young again.

Suddenly what he had learned in thermodynamics meshed with all that he had learned as a fighter pilot and Boyd had the epiphany that became his Energy-Maneuverability (E-M) Theory. Tom Christie smiled and nodded as he remembered. He was the man who steadied the soapbox for the rambunctious and confrontational Boyd in those tumultuous years of presenting the E-M Theory to the Air Force, the years when Boyd became known as the “Mad Major.” After E-M, nothing was ever the same in aviation. E-M was as clear a line of demarcation between the old and the new as was the shift from the Copernican world to the Newtonian world. Knowledge gained from E-M made the F-15 and F-16 the finest aircraft of their type in the world. Boyd is acknowledged as the father of those two aircraft.

After he retired from the Air Force in 1975, Boyd became the founder, leader, and spiritual center of the Military Reform Movement — a guerrilla movement that affected the monolithic and seemingly omnipotent Pentagon as few things in history have done. For a few years he was one of the most powerful men in Washington.

Then he went into a self-imposed exile and immersed himself in a daunting study of philosophy, the theory of science, military history, psychology, and a dozen other seemingly unrelated disciplines. He had evolved from being a warrior to a warrior-engineer, and now he was about to move into the rarefied atmosphere of the pure intellectual. He synthesized all that he studied into all that he knew about aerial combat, expanded it to include all forms of conflict, and gave birth to a dazzling briefing titled “Patterns of Conflict.”

The results of what he taught were manifested in the crucible of the Gulf War. Everything about the startling speed and decisive victory of that conflict can be attributed not to the media heroes, not to strutting and bombastic generals, but to a lonely old man in south Florida who thought he had been forgotten.

The only things he ever published were a few articles in specialized Air Force magazines and an eleven-page study. His most important work was a six-hour briefing. Thus, there is almost nothing for academics to pore over and expound upon. That is why today both Boyd and his work remain largely unknown outside the military.

His motivation was simple: to get as close as possible to the truth. He would have been the first to admit there is no absolute truth. But he continued chasing something that was always receding from his grasp. And in the pursuit he came far closer to the unattainable than do most men.

Placing the symbol of the U.S. Marine Corps on a grave is the highest honor a Marine can bestow. It is rarely seen, even at the funeral of decorated combat Marines, and it may have been the first time in history an Air Force pilot received the honor.

Part One - FIGHTER PILOT

Chapter One - Haunted Beginnings

Hubert Boyd was a traveling salesman for HammerMill Paper Company, and a job at the “HammerMill” was both prestigious and well-paying.

She taught all her children, but especially John since he was at his most malleable age, that they had principles and integrity often lacking in those with money and social position. She hammered into John that as long as he held on to his sense of what was right, and as long as his integrity was inviolate, he was superior to those who had only rank or money. She also taught him that a man of principle frightened other people and that he would be attacked for his beliefs, but he must always keep the faith. “If you’re right, you’re right,” she said.

This was not the last time Elsie was to demonstrate her willingness to sever a relationship with any person or any institution that offended her. She could do it without a second thought, without looking back, without any willingness to discuss the issue. Once she shut the door it was closed forever. John warned by her example, and it was a lesson he would remember.

John grew up not attending church and without any religious affiliation. On Air Force records he would later list his religion as Presbyterian, but that was only a word to fill in a blank space.

Many years later Boyd was interviewed by the Office of Air Force History as part of the Air Force Oral History Program. He said, “… my mother had to spread herself thin among all of us children. As a result, I did not get a lot of attention.” He said this gave him “more freedom” as a child than most. Even then, he remembered his mother’s admonition about family matters, and throughout the lengthy interview never explained that the reason his mother had so little time was that she worked three jobs and that Ann had polio.

He was particularly gifted in math.

Chapter Two - The Big Jock and the Presbytreian

Fed up with this situation, Boyd led a revolt. He and his fellow soldiers tore down two hangars and used the wood to build fires so they could stay warm. Soon after, the Army inventoried base property and discovered the hangars had gone missing. Boyd was identified as the leader of the perpetrators and brought up on charges. A court-martial loomed. Officers believed this would be the quick and uncontested trial of an enlisted man who clearly was guilty. But Private Boyd went on the attack and turned the pending court-martial into a referendum on officer leadership and responsibility. He asked the investigating officer if the Army’s general orders were in effect at the time he used wood from the hangars to build fires. When he was told that of course the general orders were in effect, he said one of the general orders stated that the first responsibility of an officer was to take care of his men. Officers were not doing that, not if enlisted personnel were sleeping on the ground while suitable quarters stood empty. Boyd said that if the court-martial proceeded, he would raise the issue of officer responsibility with higher authorities. The charges were dropped. The U.S. military had lost its first runin with Boyd.

He said in his Air Force Oral History interview that he knew bomber pilots were “a bunch of truck drivers” and “I did not want to be in a crowded bus and have a bunch of people continually telling me what to do.”

After World War II, both the Soviets and Americans had access to Germany’s research on jet fighters, and both countries went into production on jets based in large part on the German research. The Soviet MiG-15 and the American F-86 Sabre were remarkably similar. Both had swept wings and were about the same size, the MiG being slightly smaller.

Boyd was ordered to Albuquerque, New Mexico, until the next flight training class opened,

Chapter - Three Fledgling

If there is any group on Earth with healthier egos than fighter pilots, they have yet to be discovered.

If the book said the aircraft should never exceed 260 mph, Boyd pushed it to 265 or 270 or 280. He knew intuitively by the sound of the aircraft when it was approaching not the book limits but the true limits, which, for those bold enough to search for them, always are slightly greater.

Many civilians and those who have never looked through the gun sight — then called a pipper — at an enemy aircraft have a romantic perception, no doubt influenced by books and movies about World War I, that pilots are knights of the air, chivalrous men who salute their opponents before engaging in a fight that always is fair. They believe that elaborate rules of aerial courtesy prevail and that battle in the clear pure upper regions somehow is different, more glorified and rarefied, than battle in the mud. This is arrant nonsense. If anything, aerial combat is far meaner and grittier than ground combat. It is a primitive form of battle that happens to take place in the air. Fighter pilots — that is, the ones who survive air combat — are not gentlemen; they are back-stabbing assassins. They come out of the sun and attack an enemy when he is blind. They sneak up behind or underneath or “bounce” the enemy from above or flop into position on his tail — his sixo’clock position — and “tap” him before he knows they are there.

Thus, aerial combat favors the bold, those who are not afraid to use the airplane for its true purpose: a gun platform.

A wing consists of three squadrons, each theoretically comprised of twenty-four to thirty-two aircraft. A fighter wing has about ninety-six aircraft. Thus, these six wings had a theoretical maximum of 500–600 aircraft, although the actual number was about half that.

He manifested both the macho nature of a fighter pilot and the thinking of fighter aviation at the time when he replied, “I had to bend the shit out of that airplane” and “hose” the opponent. To “bend” an airplane was to pull more Gs than the enemy, to put one’s aircraft on the inside of the pursuit curve and gain the advantage from which he could fire. When a jet fires its guns, tracers allow the pilot to correct his aim. If the jet is pulling Gs, the stream of tracers bends and looks like the stream of water from a hose that is moved quickly. Thus, to “hose” an enemy is to get him in the pipper, follow him with tracers, and — as pilots say — wax his ass.

Chapter Four - K-13 and Mig Alley

Under no circumstances could an American pilot cross the Yalu River and go into Manchuria, where North Korean aircraft were based. American pilots most often encountered enemy aircraft in “MiG Alley,” the thirty-mile-wide stretch south of the Yalu where MiGs patrolled. If an F-86 pilot had a MiG in his pipper and the MiG fled across the Yalu, the F-86 pilot had to disengage. Manchuria was a sanctuary that America would not violate.

At the end of the war, the MiG was on the losing end of a kill ratio that had been as high as fourteen to one and finally settled at ten to one. The official count for the war was 792 MiGs shot down and 78 F-86s shot down.

The Air Force was only seven years old, but it was fast becoming not only a bureaucracy, but a technocracy that worshiped equipment and gadgets more than any other branch of the military. It was becoming hardware oriented and the goals for its hardware were simple: Bigger-Faster-Higher-Farther.

Chapter Five - High Priest

In 1954 the biggest slice of the Pentagon budget — $12 billion — went to the Air Force. (The Army received $9.9 billion and the Navy $8.1 billion. The Air Force continued to receive the largest amount of the Pentagon budget through 1961.) Within the Air Force, most of the money went to the Strategic Air Command. SAC was led by General Curtis LeMay.

“Peace is Our Profession” was the SAC motto as it prepared for Armageddon.

The Atomic Energy Commission began using Frenchman’s Flat, part of the Nellis bombing range, to detonate nuclear weapons. (The explosions always were announced in advance and one of the most popular pastimes in nearby Las Vegas was watching the mushroom clouds climb high into the clear desert air.)

The motto at Nellis was “Every Man a Tiger” and to be called a tiger by a senior fighter pilot was the ultimate accolade. Confident and intelligent men would damn near pop the rivets out of their aircraft during air-to-air combat training just to have one of the Nellis cadre nod approvingly and call them “Tiger.” To be called a tiger meant you had stainless-steel testicles that dragged the ground and struck sparks when you walked. To be called a tiger meant you were a pure fighter pilot and that you would not hesitate to tell a bird colonel to get fucked.

Rarely did a week go by that a fighter pilot did not crash. And when a fighter crashed at 400 knots, it was for keeps. When a pilot augered in, screwed the pooch, fucked the duck, and bought the farm, then the base siren wailed and the blue car drove slowly and wives stood in the windows and the chaplain consoled and the flag hung at half staff. But it always happened to someone else, never to the best fighter pilot in the world. And if you have to ask who the best is, it sure as hell ain’t you. Fighter pilots fly with their fangs out and their hair on fire and they look death in the face every day and you ain’t shit if you ain’t done it.

He found solace in an unusual place: the music of Wagner. His favorite was “Ride of the Valkyries,” which he played over and over at high volume.

The summer of 1954, when Stephen contracted polio, was the last summer America experienced a polio epidemic. Dr. Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine that year. In 1955 the U.S. government approved polio vaccinations, and for all practical purposes polio disappeared from America. It was good news for America and for the world, but what was even more important news to Boyd was that Dr. Salk said polio was a virus — the disease was not hereditary. Boyd was not responsible. But Stephen would never walk.

German pilots in World War I developed the technique of diving with the sun at their backs and firing at blinded American pilots. This maneuver led to the expression, “Beware of the Hun in the sun.” American pilots copied the maneuver.

Eric Hartman, the famous German pilot of World War II, simply pounced on slow bombers, unsuspecting fighters, or any crippled aircraft from behind. He was a back-shooter who shot down 352 airplanes and became the leading ace of all time.

In most places of higher learning, an instructor is at the bottom of the academic pecking order. But at Nellis there is no more prestigious title. An FWS instructor may go on to become a general; many have. But ask him what gave him the most pride — becoming an FWS instructor or being promoted to general — and he will not hesitate. A general wears stars. But an FWS instructor wears the patch.

Once in a great while there came along a pilot whose knowledge of air-to-air combat was so great and whose skills were so exemplary that he did not go back to his squadron to await the call. Upon graduation he was asked to stay on as an instructor. These men were seen as the most gifted of the gifted, the ultimate fighter pilots, the pure warriors.

Chapter Six - Pope John Goes Severely Supersonic

What he was teaching was how to think—not just of the maneuver, but of the effect each maneuver had on airspeed, what counter-moves were available to an enemy pilot, how to anticipate those counters, and how to keep enough airspeed to counter the counter-move. Airspeed preservation enabled a pilot to maintain or to regain the offensive. It was radical, heady stuff, the first effort ever to make air combat a science rather than an art.

Boyd’s fame as a fighter pilot came on the wings of one of the most quirky and treacherous fighter planes in the history of the Air Force, the F-100—the first operational aircraft to reach the speed of sound in level flight.

The Hun, particularly the A model, was a lieutenant-killer, a widow-maker with a fearsome reputation. One quarter of all the F-100s ever produced were lost in accidents.

Simply put, at low airspeeds and high angle of attack, the down aileron produced more drag than it did lift. As one F-100 pilot said, “If you wanted to go right and the aircraft wanted to go left, the aircraft always won.” Suddenly the pilot was out of altitude, airspeed, and ideas — all at the same time. At low altitude, where FWS pilots worked much of the time, there was no room to recover. It was adverse yaw that killed so many pilots and gave the F-100 its fearsome reputation. Boyd loved the airplane’s evil quirks. “It bites back,” he said. He thought the F-100 was a great aircraft for students; if they could fly the Hun, they could fly anything.

“There I was, going severely supersonic” became the new phrase among Hun drivers. (No Hun pilot was happy simply announcing he had been going supersonic; it had to be “severely supersonic.”) The comment was delivered casually because Hun drivers knew no other pilots in the Air Force could say the same thing and there was no need to remind those lesser mortals of where they fit into the cosmic scheme of things.

Chapter Seven - Rat-Racing

Two hours was the maximum time Boyd allowed for these brunches. His name for the government was “Uncle,” as in “Uncle Sam,” and he believed that he owed Uncle a solid day’s work. It might be Friday afternoon and fighter pilots might be gathering at the Stag Bar, but the pilots who worked for Boyd would return to the office and stay there until 4:30 P.M

Boyd turned to Spradling and his voice was low and urgent and intense. “Sprad, goddammit, he’s going. We’re going down there as a group and if they kick us out they’ll have to kick out the whole base. They’ll have to kick out the fucking U.S. Air Force.” “But, John, I was just—” “Sprad, if they object to Oscar, they have to object to all of us. The Air Force is integrated. We have been for years. We don’t have a problem. It’s their goddamn problem.” A fighter pilot is a fighter pilot is a fighter pilot. If a man can drive a Hun it doesn’t matter what color he is.

the 555th Fighter Squadron — the famed “Triple Nickel”

Boyd enjoyed these late-afternoon sessions with young pilots. Their adulation was the fuel that kept him going.

Chapter Eight - Forty-Second Boyd and the Tactics Manual

BY 1959 Nellis was the largest Air Force base in the world. The airspace over one-tenth of Nevada, more than 3 million acres of gunnery and bombing and air-to-air ranges, was devoted to Air Force use.

The Corvette was the car of choice for fighter pilots in the 1950s. It would not go severely supersonic but it could get close enough, and from the way this one was being driven, it was obvious a fighter pilot was at the wheel.

After all, Boyd had enormous compassion for the underdog, having been one most of his life. When he saw the instructors and students at the FWS arrayed against Catton, he had to defend the young officer. He saw promise in Catton, just as Frank Pettinato had seen promise in him, and he liked the idea of a man fighting against impossible odds. Plus, he had an old-fashioned belief, instilled in him by Art Weibel and Frank Pettinato, that hard work can overcome all obstacles.

In his Oral History interview, Boyd recounts that he told Newman, “You ought to be glad. This way you are ending up with the better book. It is a better reflection on you as the commander. Why are you protecting a bunch of goddamn losers over there who cannot even do their homework? You know they did not do as good of a job as me. They are losers.” “Get out,” the colonel ordered. But the next day the colonel called Boyd to his office. “I want to apologize to you,” Boyd quotes him. “I really never read your manual before last night. Yours really is much better than the one from TR&D.” Boyd said the colonel then called TR&D and “ate their ass out” for doing such shabby work.

Everything a fighter pilot needed to know was in the “Aerial Attack Study.” The most prescient part was called “Basic Limitation of AIM-9 Against Maneuvering Targets.” Even though the Air Force had an unshakeable belief in the omnipotence of missiles, Boyd showed — and he was the first to do so — that missiles could be out-maneuvered by a maneuvering target (i.e., another fighter). His specific reasons for why they could be outmaneuvered was why the “Aerial Attack Study” was classified. The fact missiles could be defeated was of crucial importance; it meant the dogfight was not dead, as SAC generals believed.

For the “Aerial Attack Study” Boyd received the Legion of Merit, an award usually given to senior officers. The commendation said the “Aerial Attack Study” was the “first instance in the history of fighter aviation in which tactics have been reduced to an objective state.”

Part Two - ENGINEER

Chapter Nine - Thermo, Entropy, and the Breakthrough

The 1960s were years of protests and demonstrations on college campuses across America. But not at Georgia Tech. In 1961 the president of Tech called a mandatory all-student meeting and announced that the first black students had been accepted, that all students would welcome them in friendship and cordiality, and any student who behaved otherwise would be dismissed and there would be no appeal. Thus, Tech became the first major state university in the South to desegregate peacefully and without being forced to do so by court order. Tech and its students were too serious about academics to become sidetracked by such issues.

Chapter Ten

Eglin has hundreds of thousands of sandy acres covered in pine trees to the north and west of the base. To the south is the Gulf of Mexico. The remoteness of the base made it the perfect place to test guns, bombs, and rockets. Some of the most secret missions of the American military have been practiced at Eglin and the little ancillary bases squirreled away in the pine forests.

During Boyd’s life he became close friends with six men. They were his Acolytes. In many ways these six men are quite different. What they share is that all are extraordinarily bright, all have an almost messianic desire to make a contribution to the world in which they live, all are men of probity and rectitude, and all — while independent in the extreme — are devoted followers of Boyd. They are important because they were so close to Boyd that oftentimes their work cannot be distinguished from his. The story of Boyd’s life is by necessity the story of their lives.

It is impossible to separate the contributions of the two men to the work they were about to do — work that would, in the end, do just what Boyd predicted: change people’s fundamental understanding of aviation. The idea was Boyd’s. But Christie’s background in advanced math and his skill with computers, along with his skills in handling the bureaucracy, made possible Boyd’s great and lasting contribution to aviation. Boyd simply could not have done what he did had it not been for Christie — not at that time and not at that place.

Reduced to its basics, Boyd’s work hinged on thrust and drag ratios. An airplane at a given altitude, given G, and given speed has a defined drag. The engine has a maximum potential thrust at that altitude and that temperature. If the engine puts out enough energy to match the drag, the aircraft’s total energy is unchanging — the energy rate is zero. All is balanced. But Boyd wanted to know how fast a pilot could gain energy when he fire walled the throttle. At a given altitude, given speed, and pulling a given amount of Gs, how much ooomph did he have in reserve? And the answer he sought had to be normalized so every aircraft could be seen in an equal light, independent of its weight. That is why Boyd chose to look at how fast a fighter gained or lost specific energy, not total energy.

The E-M Theory, at its simplest, is a method to determine the specific energy rate of an aircraft. This is what every fighter pilot wants to know. If I am at 30,000 feet and 450 knots and pull six Gs, how fast am I gaining or losing energy? Can my adversary gain or lose energy faster than I can?

There was talk of submitting his name to the Guinness Book of World Records after he was clocked downing two eggs, a slice of ham, two pieces of toast, and a cup of coffee in twenty-two seconds. And for such a profane man he had a paradoxical streak of the puritan. He once attended a bachelor party, and the sexually suggestive language, the gag gifts, and the gyrations of a nude female dancer so embarrassed him that he left.

Second, he had to find a way to translate pages and pages of complex mathematics into something that was informative, persuasive, and interesting — something that, as he kept saying, “even a goddamn general can understand.”

While the denizens of Wright-Pat have always had a very high opinion of themselves, that opinion is not universally shared. A story is told of how a group of former high-ranking German officers was touring military facilities in America and was taken to Wright-Pat. The officers saw the labs and talked with professorial officers and experienced the lofty mustiness of the base, and then one of the German officers turned to his host and quietly said, “Now I know why we lost the war.” His host from Wright-Pat smiled and waited. “We had two bases like this.”

Chapter Eleven - The Sugarplum Fairy Spreads the Gospel

But the F-111 was a high-tech wonder with two bold innovations, both of which were later to cause enormous problems. The F-111 was the first combat airplane to have an afterburning turbofan engine.

The second innovation was the wing. The F-111 was the first combat aircraft to have a variable-geometry wing, commonly called the “swing wing.” The small narrow wings extended straight out for takeoff and slow-speed flight, then folded back for high-speed runs.

Hillaker was supervising construction of what would turn out to be one of the most scandal-ridden aircraft in U.S. history. Boyd was the first to publicly say what in a few years everyone would know. The Air Force was seduced by swing-wing technology, a technology that ultimately would ruin two generations of airplanes.

Hillaker was a company man who hewed to the company line. But that did not mean he did not have a dream of his own. A few years later he and Boyd would have their chance to build the ideal fighter aircraft. They would join together in the most audacious plot ever conceived against the U.S. Air Force.

Then one day he stopped twirling and tossed the pencil on the desk. He had the answer; he knew how to translate the reams of charts and formulas and engineering data from Wright-Pat into a simple form. He would show graphs of the differences between each American fighter’s energy rate and the energy rate of its Soviet counterpart. Blue areas represented where the differences favored the American fighter, red where the Soviet fighter had the advantage. Blue is good. Red is bad. Even a goddamn general can understand that.

As had happened again and again in Boyd’s career, his immediate supervisor gave him a poor or mediocre rating, one that signaled it was time to get out of the Air Force, and again and again a general officer rescued him.

Fighter pilots called the B-52 the “BUFF” — big ugly fat fucker.

A military briefing is a slow, antiquated, and terribly inefficient way to present information. Nevertheless, it is an art form upon which an officer’s career can rise or fall. Many men have risen to high rank on their ability to, as the military says, “give a good brief.”

It is obvious that most people can read and assimilate information faster than they can learn something by listening to a dog and pony show. But the U.S. military culture is an oral culture and the bedrock of that culture is the briefing.

Christie had great admiration for Boyd’s briefing technique, except for one thing: Boyd roamed the stage and bounced on his toes and waved his arms about with such passion that he reminded Christie of a ballet dancer. “Stand still, John,” he said again and again. But Boyd could not. Christie began calling him the “Sugarplum Fairy,” a nickname soon shortened to the “Plum,” which is how Boyd was thereafter known to his friends at Eglin.

He even briefed Chuck Yeager.

Boyd and Christie used E-M data to run computer simulations and discovered that the reality was far different. Performance of U.S. missiles was nowhere near what it was advertised to be, and Boyd and Christie became the first two men in the defense industry to talk about the limitations of missiles.

And the F-111 chart was one that would cause serious heartburn to any general who saw it — the chart was solid red: Soviet aircraft could defeat the F-111 at any altitude, at any airspeed, in any part of the flight envelope.

Boyd’s second ER at Eglin is dated September 7, 1964, and is nothing short of phenomenal. This is one of the few times in Air Force history, perhaps the only time, when an officer has created a radical new theory and then been told his job was to develop that theory.

Kan was shot down in Vietnam, and when the rescue helicopter came to pick him up, the crew saw his Asian features and thought a North Vietnamese was trying to get aboard. The helicopter quickly departed. Kan released such a stream of creative profanity over the radio that the helicopter crew knew the man on the ground had to be an American and returned to pick him up.

People in the Flight Dynamics Lab at Wright-Pat heard of Boyd’s work and were working day and night to disprove the E-M Theory. It was embarrassing in the extreme to have a fighter pilot from Eglin develop a theory that should have been developed there at WrightPat.

Chapter Twelve - Pull the Wings off and Paint It Yellow

The general thought for a moment. Maybe there was something the charts did not reveal, something he could salvage. “Major, based on your extensive research, do you have any recommendations regarding this aircraft?” Boyd did not miss a beat. “General, I’d pull the wings off, install benches in the bomb bay, paint the goddamn thing yellow, and turn it into a high-speed line taxi.”

When he briefed the Air Force Science and Engineering Symposium, a convocation that lasted almost a week and included dozens of the best briefers in the Air Force, he was given the award for having the best presentation.

But to be right was not enough. He had to have a redress of grievances and he had to publicly embarrass the person who wronged him. He had to be the last man standing. “People did things to me when we were young,” he once told Mary. “They did it because we were poor. But they’re not going to do it now.”

The Air Force is a collection of coalitions, and by late 1965 there were strong anti-Boyd coalitions at Eglin, at Wright-Pat, and in scattered pockets around the Air Force.

It was clear to Boyd’s friends what had happened. Those whom Boyd had belittled and denigrated had sent out the word, and the word had percolated among various coalitions until it reached the promotion board: sure, Boyd has done some good things for the Air Force, but he is unprofessional, lacks basic military courtesies, and is unfit for rapid promotion. These people had lost battles with Boyd, but they won the war. They affected his career and his life in the most hurtful way possible.

Boyd had established a pattern: no matter what his contributions to the Air Force or to national defense might be — and there were significant contributions yet to come — his outspoken nature, his lack of reluctance to criticize his superiors, and his love of conflict with others would hinder his promotion throughout his career.

Chapter Thirteen - “I’ve Never Designed a Fighter Plane Before”

A warrior wants his country to be prepared for war, to win against all enemies, to prevail at all costs. Duty and patriotism and honor are not buzz words to a warrior; they are his creed. A warrior speaks the truth to generals and congressmen. Being promoted is not the top priority of a warrior. Thus, warriors do not fare well in the Pentagon. But then, there are few true warriors in the Air Force.

The host of troubles facing the Air Force allowed Boyd to take over the F-X project. His takeover was de facto rather than de jure, as he was far junior in rank to people who made design and acquisition decisions and to those who, on organization charts, led the F-X program.

In addition, Boyd had support from the top, invaluable in a bureaucracy. Few in the Building knew that Air Force Chief of Staff John McConnell was a Boyd fan. It was General McConnell who cancelled Boyd’s Vietnam tour and brought him to the Pentagon. He knew of Boyd, the legend: fighter pilot and creator of the E-M Theory. But he needed Boyd, the maverick: the obstreperous and independent officer who cared more for his work than for his career. Only such a man could save the F-X from being cancelled and prevent the Air Force from being outmaneuvered by the Navy. Only such a man could save the Air Force from itself.

“You gotta challenge all assumptions. If you don’t, what is doctrine on day one becomes dogma forever after.”

Pierre Sprey stood out. Some Whiz Kids traveled on their reputations. Not Sprey. He entered Yale at fifteen and graduated four years later with a curious double major: French literature and mechanical engineering.

Sprey was not the sort of man who followed other men, but he could follow Boyd. Boyd had met the second of the Acolytes.

Sprey realized, as had Christie before him, that being Boyd’s friend meant dedicating one’s life to Boyd’s causes. Very few men were ever invited by Boyd to join forces with him. None ever refused. Each sensed intuitively that he was being offered a rare gift. Each was to pay a terrible price for his friendship with Boyd. Each would have paid more.

Boyd and Sprey formed the nucleus of what in a few years would be the most famous, most detested, and most reluctantly respected ad hoc group in the Building, a group that history would know as the “Fighter Mafia.”

Chapter Fourteen - Bigger-Higher-Faster-Farther

Incredible as it may seem, the F-X was the first fighter in U.S. history designed with any maneuvering specifications, much less E-M specifications.

The closest Boyd came to defining a specific technical solution was when he said the aircraft should pull enough Gs at 30,000 feet to “roll down your goddamn socks.”

When the war finally ended, one Air Force pilot would be an ace. North Vietnam would have sixteen.

Wolfpack pilots shot down seven MiGs that day, plus two probables (MiGs that disappeared into an overcast with missiles tracking strong and true). January 2, 1967, was the greatest day the Air Force had during the Vietnam War. Bolo went into the history books. But what Razz remembers is that six of the seven kills that day were done by pilots who used John Boyd’s outside roll at some point in the engagement. Razz says Boyd was the father of that great victory as surely as if he had led the mission.

During the summer of 1967, the Soviets introduced two new fighters: the swing-wing MiG-23 and the MiG-25. American fighter pilots laughed at the MiG-23 and said the only good thing about the F-111 was that the Soviets had copied it and thereby lost at least one generation of aircraft to bad technology.

Missiles could be evaded by the simplest of countermeasures. There was no countermeasure for a gun. Signs began showing up on the walls in the Pentagon: “It takes a fighter with a gun to kill a MiG-21.”

Then in the fall of 1967 there came to the Building one Mordecai Hod, head of the Israeli Air Force (IAF). He came to buy F-4 Phantoms. And he came wearing the aura of a man who was an icon in the fighter-pilot community. Under his leadership the IAF had done three things that got the attention of the U.S. Air Force. First, in the Six Day War of June, the Israeli Air Force shot down sixty Arab jets while losing only ten fighters — an exchange ratio of six to one. Second, every Israeli kill was a gun kill. And third, the Israelis — as the name of the war indicates — had moved quickly, decisively, and thoroughly at a time when the Americans had been at war in Vietnam for several years, and the war was escalating with no end in sight.

Chapter Fifteen - Saving the F-15

And all the children say today that their anger toward their father is rooted in his insistence on living in the tiny apartment.

Boyd won battles not only in the open and more or less public arenas, such as briefings, but also in the corridors and offices of the Pentagon, where politics is both byzantine and deadly. Here, one of his greatest weapons was his secret back-channel communication to the Air Force chief of staff. The chief often followed the Franklin Roosevelt theory of management, bypassing sycophantic generals and seeking out from among relatively junior officers a few men who would tell him the truth. The chief knew the culture of the Building and knew that, in many ways, he was the most ignorant man in the Air Force. Dozens of high-ranking officers put their fingers in the wind before they talked to him. Then they told him what they thought he wanted to hear. Boyd, and presumably a very few others, told him what he needed to know. Occasionally a colonel from the chief’s office dropped into Boyd’s office and said, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” And the two men sat in a corner of the cafeteria and the colonel said, “The chief wants to know…” And because Boyd gave him straight answers, the chief came to him again and again.

If a superior gave Boyd an order and Boyd believed that order had implications deleterious to the F-X, he smiled and said, “Sir, I’ll be happy to follow that order. But I want you to put it in writing.” Generals like to issue verbal orders. That way if the results are not what the general expected, he can always deny he issued the order. While Boyd was within his rights to ask for written orders, his doing so infuriated generals. It clearly indicated he thought the general was wrong.

A member of the subcommittee scratched his head and in a noncommittal tone, almost as an aside, asked the general if the Air Force had made a decision about the wing design. The general paused. Boyd knew that the future of the nonnuclear Air Force hung in the balance; all the work he had done on the F-X was crystallized in that one frozen moment. He leaped into the breach. “Yes, Sir, we have. The Air Force does not believe a variable-geometry wing is the answer. In fact, we believe the fixed-wing aircraft is a superior design. The F-X will be a fixed-wing aircraft.” It is difficult to know who was the most surprised — the general or the members of the subcommittee. The general stared at Boyd in disbelief. No decision had been made on the wing design. And now a lieutenant colonel on his own initiative had made a decision that was the prerogative of a four-star general.

Chapter Sixteen - Ride of the Valkyries

Usually there are no cost constraints on an aircraft-design program. Politically there are often many reasons to maximize costs. In all the history of the Air Force, the A-X was the single exception. It had to be cheap. It had to cost less than the Cheyenne.

Sprey was fascinated by Hans Rudel, the legendary tank-killing German pilot of World War II who still is considered the greatest CAS pilot of all time. Sprey insisted that everyone on the A-X project read Stuka Pilot, Rudel’s wartime biography that told how he flew 2,530 missions and destroyed 511 tanks.

The Air Force loathed everything about the A-X, which soon would be known as the A-10. Jokes were made that it was so slow that it suffered bird strikes — from the rear — and that instead of carrying a clock, the cockpit had a calendar. The aircraft was so ugly it was called the “Warthog.” Many in the Air Force said no airplane could perform or survive in combat as this airplane was supposed to perform. It would be almost twenty years before the A-10 had the chance to demonstrate just how wrong its detractors were.

Boyd laughed. “We don’t care what the Russians are doing. We only care about what the Navy is doing.”

Chapter Seventeen - The Fighter Mafia Does the Lord’s Work

On the other hand, the lightweight fighter he secretly was working on was a rapier that embodied all the concepts of his updated E-M Theory. It was simple and small, with less drag, less weight, less visibility, and with much greater performance than the F-15, a day fighter that would not even carry a radar. It was a pure fighter with no bomb racks. It would be a 20,000-pound airplane, half the weight of the F-15; in fact, it was the aircraft the F-15 could have been. The design requirements Boyd set up meant he knew what would come from the contractors even before they set pen to paper. He knew the turning capability, the specific energy rate at every altitude, the rate of climb, and the range. And best of all, the aircraft would be so inexpensive that the Air Force could build several thousand, enough to flood a future battlefield. This was what he called his “Grand Strategy.” Reduced to its basics, the Grand Strategy was to take on the U.S. Air Force, develop the new lightweight fighter in secret, build a prototype, then force the Air Force to adopt the aircraft.

He told Sprey and Riccioni they should never make a reference, on the phone or even in private conversation, to the fighter they were designing. Anything and everything to do with the lightweight fighter should be referred to as the “Lord’s work.”

And every time his boss asked why he was late, Boyd said, “I was doing the Lord’s work last night.” Then he took a big drink of coffee, lit a Dutch Master, looked around, and said, “And goddamned good work it was.”

One day Boyd went to him and said, “If you insist on getting credit for the work you do, you’ll never get far in life. Don’t confuse yourself with the idea of getting credit.”

Boyd shoved the papers across the desk. “Goddamn airplane is made out of balonium.” According to Boyd, the designer called the next day and invited him to lunch and asked him not to tell his superiors about the spurious design. “I have to tell them,” Boyd said. Then the engineer made an offer that, stripped of all the circumlocutions and delicate language, amounted to a bribe for Boyd to keep silent. “That won’t take,” Boyd responded. Then came an open threat that the designer would use his company’s considerable clout with the Department of Defense to have Boyd fired. “Take your best shot, you son of a bitch,” Boyd said. A week later the famous designer and his company withdrew their design from consideration.

In the end he came up with two significant advantages the F-86 had over the MiG. First, the F-86 had a bubble canopy that gave the pilot a 360-degree field of vision, while the MiG pilot’s view to the rear was blocked. Thus, the F-86 pilot had a much easier time observing his enemy than the enemy had observing him. Second, the F-86 had full hydraulic controls, while the MiG did not. This meant that the F-86 pilot could control his aircraft with one finger, while controlling the MiG was so difficult that MiG pilots often lifted weights between flights in order to gain strength. The unboosted controls of the MiG meant that its pilot grew fatigued more quickly than the F-86 pilot but, far more importantly, the F-86 driver could go from one maneuver to another more quickly than the MiG driver. In a practical sense this meant the F-86 pilot could go through a series of either offensive or defensive maneuvers quicker than could his adversary. And with each maneuver he gained a half second or a second on his enemy until he could either break for separation or be in position for a kill.

Chapter Eighteen - A Short-Legged Bird

This was not a new idea. Before World War II most new fighters appeared first as prototypes. It made sense to test a design, decide whether it was good or bad, make modifications, redesign it, and then put it on the production line. But then came jet engines and swept wings and ever more exotic avionics, all of which caused larger Air Force and contractor bureaucracies. The development staff of an airplane went from maybe a hundred people to a thousand or more. Defense contractors said the business had become too complex and too expensive to make prototypes. Air Force bureaucracies agreed. They did not want tests that might cancel their projects. McNamara played into their hands when he brought to the Pentagon something called “Total Package Procurement Concept.” He thought all the analysis and quantification could be done on paper. Design teams grew to two thousand people, then three thousand. And the cost of developing a new fighter rose to around $1 billion.

The fuel fraction is derived by considering the weight of the fuel relative to the combat weight of the aircraft. The crucial thing about understanding fuel fraction is that it is the relative fuel and not the absolute fuel that is important in determining how far an airplane flies. That is, the percentage of fuel relative to the weight of the aircraft is more important than the absolute gallons of fuel carried. Boyd was adamant that the fuel fraction for the lightweight fighter not go below 30 percent.

There is a hummingbird that can fly across the Gulf of Mexico, while birds many times its size can fly only a few miles. The hummingbird has a high fuel fraction.

Keeping secret the range of the lightweight fighter was one of Boyd’s greatest cape jobs.

Boyd looked at Sprey and said, “That was me on the line. I wondered why the phone went dead.” Afterward the incident became known as the “air-to-rug maneuver,” and the Acolytes shook their heads in amazement that even on the telephone Boyd could cause a Blue Suiter to fall out of his chair. The story of the air-to-rug maneuver became a favorite at happy hour, especially after the colonel became a four-star and then the Air Force chief of staff.

This meant that, for the first time since World War II, the U.S. Air Force had three new tactical aircraft in production at the same time — the F-15, the lightweight fighter, and the A-10. All were from Air Force designs and not foisted off by the Navy. Boyd was largely responsible for two of them and Sprey the other.

Chapter Nineteen - Spook Base

Taking up much of the base was an enormous complex surrounded by two security fences topped with razor wire. Earth-filled revetments bordered the complex. Security police stood in towers and walked patrol along the fences. Admittance to the complex was tightly controlled. The main building, when constructed in 1968, was the largest single building in all of Southeast Asia. But most of the facility was underground, protected by thick concrete walls and operating inside a positive pressurized atmosphere to keep out dust and protect an enormous array of computers. Around NKP the complex was known simply as the “Project.” The official name was Task Force Alpha. Various other code names were associated with the complex: Igloo White, Dutch Mill, and Muscle Shoals.

Seeding the trail with sensors had been the idea of Defense Secretary McNamara’s R&D technocrats, and the project became known as the “McNamara Line.” The $2.5 billion operation was a huge windfall for IBM. The technocrats convinced McNamara that if the trail were wired — as one Task Force Alpha worker said, like a “pinball machine” — the supply chain could be broken and America could win the war. This was America’s first electronic battlefield. It was one of the most highly classified operations of the Vietnam War.

What Boyd was obsessing about — and that is not too strong a word — was trying to understand the nature of creativity. This had actually begun several years earlier as he wondered how he came up with the E-M Theory. E-M is at heart such a simple thing; why had no one else discovered it? What was there about his thinking that enabled him to be the first? His search ranged far afield. From the base library he checked out every available book on philosophy and physics and math and economics and science and Taoism and a half dozen other disciplines. He was all over the map, searching but not quite knowing for what.

In his new job, Boyd saw problems that needed immediate attention everywhere he looked. But 7th Air Force sent down paperwork daily that took hours to answer. Boyd thought Air Force bureaucracy was keeping him from the job at hand. His solution was to respond but to add material that caused 7th Air Force more paperwork than 7th Air Force caused him. “Pain goes both ways,” he said. In only a few weeks the time-consuming requests from 7th Air Force shrank to almost nothing.

Thai women are extraordinarily beautiful and many American officers formed close relationships with them. But this particular officer was married and soon was overcome with guilt. He broke off the relationship. The woman in question was the daughter of an influential village official who felt his family lost face when his daughter was spurned. He was about to charge the young officer with rape. Boyd said he called in the young officer and gave him the big picture of how many base activities depended on the good will of Thai officials. He ordered the young officer, guilty or not, to continue the relationship. “I’m giving you a direct order to screw her every night until you are transferred out of here,” Boyd said he told the officer. “Sir, I don’t believe that is a lawful order,” the officer said. “Goddammit, I issued it and you better obey it. We’re at war and bigger things are at stake here than your guilt. Your dick can cause you problems but it is not going to cause problems for America. You do as I say or I will make your life a living hell for as long as you are in the Air Force.”

Boyd also dealt with situations of great consequence. He said the McNamara Line was an expensive failure and shut it down. He claimed that a four-star general later told him he was sent to NKP solely because Pentagon generals knew he was the only man in the Air Force with the guts to close down the boondoggle.

It would be almost five years before this search culminated in one of the few things Boyd ever wrote, an eleven-page paper he called “Destruction and Creation,” an unpublished work that some think is his most significant intellectual achievement.

NKP was a pivot point in Boyd’s career. For him the Vietnam War served almost as a vacation from the Pentagon war.

He had begun a voracious reading program and an obsessive search for the nature of creativity, both of which laid the foundation for what soon would become the major focus of his life.

It is worth noting that in the cauldron of a combat environment, a place where men reveal what they are made of, and a place where — as his predecessor as base commander proved — some men collapse from stress, Boyd performed flawlessly.

Chapter Twenty - Take a Look at the B-I

James Schlesinger was the new secretary of defense — the “SecDef” in Building speak — and, like most secretaries, wanted to leave a legacy. To find out how to do that, he sought counsel with a man whose understanding of the military he deeply respected, Richard Hallock. Colonel Hallock was a paratrooper, a highly-decorated combat hero who also was a close friend of the redoubtable Pierre Sprey. In fact, when Sprey first came to the Building, Hallock was his mentor.

He stalked the office, staring at his underlings, then suddenly walking up to them, sticking a bony finger into their chest, and saying things such as, “If your boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, then give him loyalty.”

There was nothing Boyd loved more than a good skunk fight. It kept the juices flowing. It kept him at a combat edge. Without a skunk fight, life was boring.

Then Boyd delivered what was to be called his “To Be or to Do” speech. Leopold was the first person known to receive the speech, probably because Boyd, based on his experiences over the years, was solidifying certain conclusions about the promotion system within the military.

In the meantime Leopold discovered, as had others, that Boyd had little perception of time. Leopold might work at the Pentagon until midnight and then, as he wearily walked into his house in Dale City some thirty miles south, the phone was ringing. Boyd had calculated to the minute the time it took Leopold to get home. And he would have more questions, more directions for the B-1 study.

Chapter Twenty-One - “This Briefing is for Information Purposes Only”

It had never occurred to Christie’s boss or to Air Force generals that the new civilian from Eglin had access to Schlesinger. The generals did not know that, through Colonel Richard Hallock, Sprey had introduced Boyd to Schlesinger and that he, too, was meeting privately with the SecDef. The generals did not know that Sprey was a special advisor to Schlesinger. And the generals did not know that Schlesinger was committed to making the lightweight fighter part of his legacy.

Christie and Spinney and Leopold soon heard of the testimony. Leopold called Boyd and told him what happened and then grew silent as Boyd began talking. Leopold’s eyes grew wider and wider. He put down the phone and turned to Spinney. “You won’t believe what Boyd just said.” “What’s that?” “He said he was going to have to fire his first general.” The two young captains stared at each other. The idea of a colonel firing a two-star simply could not be assimilated. Such things do not happen in the military. But then the SecDef called the chief of staff and asked him whether or not he was in charge of the Air Force. A few days later the two-star was given twenty-four hours to clean out his desk and leave the Pentagon. Other Pentagon generals saw what happened to the two-star. The Fighter Mafia had struck back and the generals could read the tea leaves. There could be no more obstacles for the lightweight fighter. It was cleared to go into production.

In August, Boyd finished a six-and-one-half-page draft of the Development Planning Report. It is significant in two respects. First, astonishingly, it marks the first time the Air Force ever had guidelines about matching planning needs with available budgets. Second, the report says if combat tasks are to be of any use to planners, the tasks should be related to needed hardware.

“Colonel, for your information, I am talking about a different kind of missile, a missile whose performance is such that it doesn’t matter about the capabilities of the delivery aircraft.” “Oh, and what kind of missile would that be, Professor?” “I’m talking about a lenticular missile.” “Sir, I’m just a dumb fighter pilot. I have to ask you what a “lenticular missile” is.” The professor’s disdain for this slow-witted fighter pilot was obvious when he said, “It’s shaped like a lens, like a saucer.” Boyd nodded and said, “Oh, I get it.” He appeared to be thinking for a moment. Then he said, “You know, Professor, you have a pretty good idea there. Might I offer an idea for a modification?” “Of course.” “Instead of saucer shaped, why don’t you make it boomerang shaped? That way, you can fling the goddamn thing out there and if it misses it will come back and you can fling it again.” Members of the board laughed so hard the chairman had to call a recess. For months afterward Boyd was known as “Boomerang Boyd” in honor of his latest cape job. The lenticular missile was never heard of again, except at happy hour on Wednesday nights.

But the Air Force does not kill its young in public. Someone else has to do it. The official position of the Air Force remained that the B-1 cost $25 million each. In early 1977, when Jimmy Carter assumed the presidency, one of his first acts would be to kill the B-1.

Chapter Twenty-Two - The Buttonhook Turn

They preferred the YF-16 because it could perform what they called a “buttonhook turn.” It could flick from one maneuver to another faster than any aircraft they ever flew. It was born to turn and burn—the most nimble little banking and yanking aircraft the world had ever seen.

On August 31, 1975, John Richard Boyd retired after twenty-four years in the Air Force. He was forty-eight years old.

Part Three - SCHOLAR

Chapter Twenty - Three Destruction and Creation

Boyd knew he had to be independent and he saw only two ways for a man to do this: he can either achieve great wealth or reduce his needs to zero. Boyd said if a man can reduce his needs to zero, he is truly free: there is nothing that can be taken from him and nothing anyone can do to hurt him.

It was obvious from Boyd’s phone calls that he was not only spending a disproportionately large amount of his retirement pay on books but was reading them all.

Boyd was charging into esoteric and arcane areas of knowledge. And the Acolytes were far too proud to simply agree with Boyd on everything he said. If they were going to hold up their end of the conversation they had to buy whatever book Boyd was reading. They read and when Boyd called they were ready. And while the Acolytes did not discuss it with each other, they knew that Boyd was fortune’s child, that he had passed beyond the E-M Theory and was venturing into more rarefied heights. They sensed he was about to give birth to his greatest work. But they wished the birth were not so painful and protracted.

Boyd had less formal education than did any of the Acolytes. But he was their intellectual leader — not only in the number and substance of the books he had them read, but in his passion and his obsession and his iron discipline about getting to the truth.

The Acolytes reeled when Boyd said his work would link Godel’s Proof, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the second law of thermodynamics.

Now Boyd showed how synthesis was the basis of creativity.

The danger — and this is a danger neither seen nor understood by many people who profess a knowledge of Boyd’s work — is that if our mental processes become focused on our internal dogmas and isolated from the unfolding, constantly dynamic outside world, we experience mismatches between our mental images and reality. Then confusion and disorder and uncertainty not only result but continue to increase. Ultimately, as disorder increases, chaos can result.

Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science, and Joseph Schumpeter, an economist, recognized the destructive side of creativity. But Boyd was unique in his explanation of how the process is grounded in fundamentals discovered by Godel and Heisenberg and by entropy.

Chapter Twenty-Four - OODA Loop

The fast transients brief is dated August 4, 1976. It is the application of “Destruction and Creation” to an operational issue — that is, a better and more thorough definition of “maneuverability.” The ability of an aircraft to perform fast transients does two things, one defensive and one offensive: it can force an attacking aircraft out of a favorable firing position, and it can enable a pursuing pilot to gain a favorable firing position. The advantage gained from the fast transient suggests that to win in battle a pilot needs to operate at a faster tempo than his enemy. It suggests that he must stay one or two steps ahead of his adversary; he must operate inside his adversary’s time scale.

Thinking about operating at a quicker tempo — not just moving faster — than the adversary was a new concept in waging war. Generating a rapidly changing environment — that is, engaging in activity that is so quick it is disorienting and appears uncertain or ambiguous to the enemy — inhibits the adversary’s ability to adapt and causes confusion and disorder that, in turn, causes an adversary to overreact or underreact. Boyd closed the briefing by saying the message is that whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives.

A decade later, when Boyd put all his work into a collection titled “A Discourse on Winning and Losing,” he took about fourteen hours — two days — to deliver it.

“Patterns” is one of the most monumental snowmobiles ever constructed, one of the most influential briefings ever to come from a military mind.

As Boyd studied the Blitzkrieg, he found historical references he did not understand, especially in his readings on the tactics of Tank Commander Heinz Guderian and in the book Lost Victories by Erich von Manstein. He had to begin at the beginning, go back to the earliest recorded Greek and Persian battles, and march through history to properly understand the Blitzkrieg. Four areas drew most of his attention: general theories of war, the Blitzkrieg, guerrilla warfare, and the use of deception by great commanders.

The Art of War became Boyd’s Rosetta stone, the work he returned to again and again. It is the only theoretical book on war that Boyd did not find fundamentally flawed. He eventually owned seven translations, each with long passages underlined and with copious marginalia. The translations of Samuel Griffith and, later, Thomas Cleary were his favorites. He insisted the Acolytes read and reread the book.

From Sun Tzu, Boyd moved to the campaigns of Alexander the Great around 300 B.C., Hannibal around 200 B.C., Belisarius around 500 A.D., Genghis Khan around 1200 A.D., Tamerlane around 1400 A.D., then Napoléon and von Clausewitz and on through World War I and World War II. He found that the campaigns of many of these great commanders, particularly the Eastern commanders such as Genghis Khan, demonstrated an understanding of Sun Tzu.

For example, Boyd was fascinated by how a vastly superior Roman Army lost to Hannibal and the Carthaginians at the Battle of Cannae.

Von Clausewitz is often acknowledged as the greatest of military theoreticians. Rarely has his book been studied as Boyd studied it.

Boyd called Spinney late one night and said he had a breakthrough. He began reading passages and explaining two crucial differences between von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. First, von Clausewitz wants to bring the enemy to a big “decisive battle,” while Sun Tzu wants to unravel the enemy before a battle. Put another way, von Clausewitz believes wars are decided by set piece battles more than by strategy, deception, and guerrillalike tactics. This means that even if he wins, there is a bloodbath. Boyd said von Clausewitz’s second major flaw is that he spends a lot of time talking about how a commander must minimize “friction” — that is, the uncertainty or chance that always appear in the “fog of war.” He does not deal with maximizing the enemy’s friction — as does Sun Tzu — but only with minimizing his own. As Boyd said to Spinney, “Sun Tzu tried to drive his adversary bananas while Clausewitz tried to keep himself from being driven bananas.”

Boyd said the strategies and bloodbaths of World War I were the natural consequence of both the von Clausewitzian battle philosophy and the inability of generals to adapt new tactics to nineteenth-century technology: line abreast, mass against mass, and linear defenses against machine guns and quick-firing artillery.

Hitler took Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and France with about two hundred thousand casualties. The Allies had about three point five million losses, almost three million of whom were prisoners.

The briefing begins with what was to become Boyd’s most famous — and least understood — legacy: the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act cycle, or O-O-D-A Loop.

The most amazing aspect of the OODA Loop is that the losing side rarely understands what happened.

Note that Boyd includes the “Implicit Guidance & Control” from “Orientation” with both “Observations” and “Action.” This is his way of pointing out that when one has developed the proper Fingerspitzengefuhl for a changing situation, the tempo picks up and it seems one is then able to bypass the explicit “Orientation” and “Decision” part of the loop, to “Observe” and “Act” almost simultaneously.

A commander can use this temporal discrepancy (a form of fast transient) to select the least-expected action rather than what is predicted to be the most-effective action. The enemy can also figure out what might be the most effective. To take the least-expected action disorients the enemy. It causes him to pause, to wonder, to question. This means that as the commander compresses his own time, he causes time to be stretched out for his opponent. The enemy falls farther and farther behind in making relevant decisions. It hastens the unraveling process.

Here Boyd says that to shape the environment, one must manifest four qualities: variety, rapidity, harmony, and initiative.

The mental and moral aspects of maneuver conflict do not sit well with most military minds, particularly those who use a managerial approach or those who prefer the slugfest of attrition warfare. They don’t like the mental agility, the intellectual innovation, the placing trust in subordinates. They don’t like the rapidly changing, free-form tactics of probing for weak spots rather than concentrating more fire-power on selected targets. Why tiptoe through the tulips, the conventional mind asks, when war is blood and guts?

Boyd showed that maneuver tactics brought victory. To attack the mind of the opponent, to unravel the commander before a battle even begins, is the essence of fighting smart.

disorient the enemy, then follow with the unexpected lightning thrust.

Boyd’s briefing, then, is an updating and affirmation of Sun Tzu and a repudiation of von Clausewitz.

He remembered what Boyd often said: “There are only so many ulcers in the world and it is your job to see that other people get them.”

Chapter Twenty-Five - Reform

BY 1978, both officers and enlisted personnel were leaving the military services in large numbers. They left not because of pay, as military leaders had said for the past few years, but because they were displeased with what they saw as a lack of integrity among their leaders. They thought careerism inhibited professionalism in the officer corps. The military also was having readiness problems; expensive and highly complex weapons systems were fielded before being fully tested. These systems were not only expensive to buy but expensive to maintain, and they rarely performed as advertised. Stories began to appear in the media of America’s “hollow military.”

There is nothing in the past to compare with the Spinney Report. For that reason alone, it is arguably one of the most important documents ever to come out of the Pentagon. Spinney’s basic point was that the unnecessary complexity of major weapons systems was wrecking the military budget.

(Boyd’s belief in using the adversary’s information against him is the practical application of Asian writings, particularly The Japanese Art of War, in which translator Thomas Cleary talks of “swordlessness,” or the ability to defend oneself without a weapon, a concept that by implication means using the enemy’s weapon against him. Cleary says this technique can be used in debate, negotiations, and all other forms of competition. He says swordlessness is the “crowning achievement of the warrior’s way.”)

The Atlantic published “The Muscle-Bound Superpower” in the October 2, 1979, issue. It was the first of three events that launched the reform movement onto a national stage.

Much of Fallows’s fourteen-page story revolved around Boyd and “Patterns of Conflict.”

Now for the first time in history, Pentagon insiders, men who had the keys to the kingdom, men who knew the budgets and the issues as well as anyone in the Air Force, were attacking the Building. And they were building alliances with Congress and the media, the two institutions that can cause heart-burn in generals.

One quiet congressman from Wyoming, Dick Cheney, heard the “Patterns” briefing and then Boyd’s other briefings—an investment of some twelve hours. He asked Boyd to come by his office for numerous private sessions to talk of tactics and strategy and how America might best conduct itself in the next war. “I was intrigued by the concepts he was working on,” Cheney would later say. “He was a creative and innovative thinker with respect to the military.” Cheney added that the Reformers had “great ideas” that were “a part of my education.”

The Acolytes sometimes had little respect for congressmen and senators, but even Pierre Sprey was impressed with Dick Cheney. He accompanied Boyd on some of the visits to Cheney’s office and knew the congressman did his homework. Cheney studied deeply the intricacies of Boyd’s approach to strategy. He was one of the founders of the Reform Caucus on Capitol Hill, a group that soon numbered more than one hundred congressmen and senators.

One day Boyd said to Spinney, “You know, I like the Pentagon more than I liked Nellis.” Spinney waited. That feral grin sliced Boyd’s face and he held a clenched fist in the air, then jerked it sharply downward and said, “More targets.” His booming cackle filled the office; he was ready to do battle.

In early 1981, the Reform Movement received another big boost, both in public awareness and credibility, when Jim Fallows published his first book, National Defense, to an extraordinary reception. The book was an elaboration of the articles he published in the Atlantic Monthly.

Chapter Twenty-Six - The Great Wheel of Conspiracy

In the meantime, Boyd continued to research and amend and add to “Patterns,” briefing it often. Story after story about Boyd appeared in newspapers around the country. No one could counter Boyd’s briefing because no one in the Building was doing similar work; the Pentagon had no military theorists. Boyd was out there all alone and gaining converts by the day. The Pentagon was under siege from reporters. Paranoia was a palpable presence in the Building.

Boyd was busy during those months. Not only was he a primary point of contact for the Time reporters but he was showing Spinney how to work within the bureaucracy to affect change in the Pentagon.

Boyd knew that when Pentagon bureaucrats seek vengeance the best strategy is not — as many believe — to keep a low profile but rather to become so prominent that any retribution will be seen for what it is.

A story about Spinney appeared in the New York Times the week before the hearing. The next Sunday morning, Spinney’s phone rang and a voice identified itself as Bosuns Mate somebody and said, “Admiral Rickover would like to speak with you.” A moment later Admiral Hyman Rickover was congratulating Spinney about what great work he was doing. He wanted to see Spinney’s latest study. “I will send it over, Admiral, but I have to tell you it will take several hours to read.” “I don’t read anything but executive summaries.” “I don’t have an executive summary.” Spinney sent copies of his work and a few days later the admiral called and again congratulated Spinney. Then he mentioned the upcoming hearings and said, “Son, you are not going to win. But it will make a man out of you.”

Years later, after John Boyd died, the Army would deny he had ever been involved in that service’s effort at reform. The Marine Corps would claim Boyd as one of its own.

Chapter Twenty-Seven - Boyd Joins the Marines

THE Air Force has never made a serious study of warfare because every historically based effort to do so has come to the inescapable conclusion that the use of air power should be consistent with or — better yet — subordinate to the ground commander’s battle plans, a conclusion that argues against the existence of an independent Air Force.

After the Air Force, Navy, and Army came the Marine Corps. What happened to the Marine Corps as a result of John Boyd is one of the great untold stories of modern military history. To understand the enormity of the changes Boyd wrought, one must know something about the Marines.

The Marines are more than a military organization; they are a national institution. No two branches of the American military are farther apart than the Air Force and the Marines.

Belleau Wood became a hallowed name in Marine Corps history because that is where more Marines died than on any other day in Marine Corps history and because that is where Marines stopped the German advance. That is also where they acquired one of their most treasured nicknames: teufelhunden—“devil dogs.”

Wyly went to jump school, to psychological-warfare school, and to special-warfare school, and he trained often with the Army. He read Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, the classic book on the French in Vietnam, and stood on a platform and told Marines passing through Pendleton, “If we go to Vietnam, we are not going to make the mistakes the French made.”

Amphibious warfare is unique to the Marine Corps; it is all that keeps the Marines from being swallowed by the Army or Navy.

Mike Wyly had become the sixth Acolyte. He and John Boyd were about to take on the U.S. Marine Corps.

Chapter Twenty-Eight - Semper Fi

Boyd and Wyly decided the AWS was fundamentally an educational institution, and educational institutions are places where students consider all ideas. One of the best ways to do that is to have students read. So Wyly and Boyd put together a reading list. This was a radical step for the Marine Corps, the least-intellectual branch of the U.S. military. But General Trainor, by now widely recognized as Wyly’s protector, blessed the concept and soon the young captains were reading Victory at High Tide and Guerrilla and White Death and Strategy and even books by World War II German officers such as Attacks by Rommel and Panzer Battles by von Mellenthin. Boyd and Wyly were both combat veterans, so when they claimed there was a connection between books and the ability to lead men into battle, students listened. In fact, students began coming to class early so they could debate the ideas they had been reading. Soon students were recommending additional books for the reading list.

Wyly was leading a guerrilla movement within the Corps, and sometimes he recalled a line from his lectures: “Guerrillas win wars but they don’t march home to victory parades.”

General Gray told Wyly he wanted to put together a list of books for Marines to read. Wyly took the reading list he compiled years earlier at the AWS, added books that Boyd recommended, solicited recommendations from others, and presto, the Marine Corps had its first Commandant’s Reading List, a compilation that, while not mandatory, is read by most officers and enlisted personnel.

It was also a matter of considerable pride to Wyly that during the 1980s the Marine Corps evolved from being knuckle draggers who take the hill to the most intellectual branch of the U.S. military; even enlisted men were reading Sun Tzu.

Chapter Twenty-Nine - Water-Walker

The real business of the Pentagon is buying weapons. And the military has a pathological aversion to rigorous testing procedures because in almost every instance the performance of the weapon or weapons system is far below what it is advertised to be and, thus, far below the performance used to sell Congress on the idea in the first place.

Several years earlier the Congressional Reform Caucus had created what was to be the single lasting legacy of the reform movement, a new job in the Pentagon that supervised the testing of all military weapons. The Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, or “DOT&E,” was unusual in that he reported directly to the secretary of defense and to Congress. The purpose of the job was to act as a counterweight to the weapons advocacy system in the Pentagon.

Pierre Sprey testified at the hearings against the Army. Sprey’s specialty is statistics and the report he presented to Congress was one of the most devastating indictments of a military service — its chicanery, its outright lying, its lack of concern for its troops — that the Congress has ever heard.

Chapter Thirty-One - The Ghetto Colonel and the SecDef

Until Dick Cheney later spoke of that period, all the evidence was anecdotal and pieced together after the fact. The anecdotes pointed inexorably toward the idea that Boyd played a crucial role in the top-secret planning of what would become America’s strategy for prosecuting the Gulf War. Several weeks after Desert Shield began, Boyd suddenly was flying back and forth to Washington.

In The Generals’ War, a book written by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard Trainor after the war, Cheney is quoted as saying to Powell, “I can’t let Norm do this high diddle up the middle plan.” Not only did Cheney reject Schwarzkopf’s plan but he used Boyd’s language to do so.

But in Dick Cheney the Pentagon had a rare SecDef. Cheney had enough one-on-one sessions with Boyd to give him the knowledge and self-confidence to second-guess even a headstrong four-star general such as Norman Schwarzkopf. Simply put, Cheney knew more about strategy than did his generals.

Nevertheless, it has become an article of faith that Cheney developed his own plan for fighting the Gulf War. The Marines would feint an amphibious assault while the Army made a wide sweep through the western desert and then swung north to cut off the Iraqi Army.

Nowhere can be found a better example of Boyd’s ideas on “folding the enemy in on himself” than in the fact that some fifteen Iraqi divisions surrendered to two divisions of Marines.

He called Boyd and said, “John, they’re using your words to describe how we won the war. Everything about the war was yours. It’s all right out of ‘Patterns.’” He was right. Everything successful about the Gulf War is a direct reflection of Boyd’s “Patterns of Conflict” — multiple thrusts and deception operations that created ambiguity and caused the enemy to surrender by the thousands. America (and the coalition forces) won without resorting to a prolonged ground war. America not only picked when and where it would fight, but also when and where it would not fight. Coalition forces operated at a much higher tempo than the enemy. The resulting crises happened so fast that opposing forces could not keep pace with them. The one-hundred-hour ground war blitz against Iraq is a splendid example of maneuver warfare, a first-rate instance of cheng/ch’i, the conventional and the unconventional, all done so quickly the enemy was disoriented and collapsed from within.

(Belisarius, the Byzantine commander, was one of Boyd’s favorite generals and was an early practitioner of maneuver conflict; he always fought outnumbered, never lost a battle, and understood the moral dimension of war.)

Hammond’s book The Mind of War was published in the spring of 2001. It is a study of Boyd’s ideas and is written for an academic audience or for an audience interested in military affairs.

One of the few times Mary, Jeff, or Kathy saw Boyd display any emotion was when he saw Legends of the Fall, a movie about the relationship of a father to his three sons. Boyd wept with such grief that his shoulders shook and he cried aloud.

Epilogue - El Cid Rides On

Sprey’s son, John, is growing up hearing stories of the man for whom he is named.

But the A-10 had a bigger effect on the campaign than any other aircraft. It was the aircraft most feared by Iraqi troops. They called it “Black Death.” Iraqi POWs said other aircraft came in, made a quick strike, and were gone. But the A-10 lingered over the battlefield, and when the pilot sighted a target, the deadly thirty-millimeter cannon released destruction such as ground troops had never seen. General Horner said, “I take back all the bad things I have ever said about the A-10. I love them. They’re saving our asses.”

Boyd’s Energy-Maneuverability Theory did four things for aviation: it provided a quantitative basis for teaching aerial tactics, it forever changed the way aircraft are flown in combat, it provided a scientific means by which the maneuverability of an aircraft could be evaluated and tactics designed both to overcome the design flaws of one’s own aircraft and to minimize or negate the superiority of the opponent’s aircraft, and, finally, it became a fundamental tool in designing fighter aircraft.

The academics who know of Boyd agree he was one of the premier military strategists of the twentieth century and the only strategist to put time at the center of his thinking. That is as far as they will go. But Boyd was the greatest military theoretician since Sun Tzu. Academics snort in derision at such a claim. Von Clausewitz remains their favorite even though those who know the work of both Boyd and von Clausewitz agree that Boyd revealed the gaping flaws of von Clausewitzian theory.

Vice President Cheney has his own ideas about Boyd’s place in military history. “We could use him again now. I wish he was around now. I’d love to turn him loose on our current defense establishment and see what he could come up with. We are still oriented toward the past. We need to think about the next one hundred years rather than the last one hundred years.”

At the Air Force Academy, seniors take an advanced course in aeronautical engineering. The textbook is primarily an explication of the E-M Theory. Boyd’s name is not in the book and those who teach the course do not give Boyd credit. When a group of graduating seniors was polled, not one cadet knew the name of Colonel John Boyd.

"The Revolt of the Public" is what Tyler Cowen refers to as a "quake book" - I can't see the world the same after reading it. This book is criminally underappreciated, as I write this review it only has 11 ratings on Amazon. Writing in 2014, former CIA analyst Martin Gurri looks out at the world and sees Occupy Wall Street, Brexit, and the Arab Spring and wonders if these populist uprisings are isolated incidents or part of a larger trend (the 2019 edition has an afterword on Trump). The one-liner version is "The internet and social media make the failures of government policies overwhelming apparent and are eroding the legitimacy of our ruling institutions and elites, opening our society up to a nihilist death spiral." There's a lot to unpack there, but Gurri backs it up with incisive and eminently quotable analysis. I'm typically reluctant to get onboard with sweeping theories that explain everything, but his work lies firmly in the tradition of James Scott's "Seeing Like a State" (also heavily influenced by Ormerod's "Why Most Things Fail") and it is my generation that is leading the charge into our nihilist future. Gurri's book encapsulates the elite anxieties and nihilism of my time as a Yale undergraduate (2008-2012) in a way that I haven't seen anywhere else. "They disdained specifics — ideology, policy — but excelled at lengthy menus of accusations" - Gurri gets it. Here's his thesis in his own words:

The failure of government isn’t a failure of democracy, but a consequence of the heroic claims of modern government, and of the constantly frustrated expectations these claims have aroused. Industrial organization, with its cult of the expert and top-down interventionism, stands far removed from the democratic spirit, and has proven disastrous to the actual practice of representative democracy. It has failed in its own terms, and has been seen to fail, and it has infected democratic governments with a paralyzing fear of the public and with the despair of decadence.

You can see why I love this guy!  But he really reeled me in with an unexpected detour into the realm of my 2017 reading theme on the "Integrity of Western Science."  Here's Gurri on the state of modern science:

Much has been claimed for the scientific method, but the only method to which all scientists subscribe is the peer review process. It too has been under strain. Peer review presupposes the existence of independent-minded experts who evaluate manageable data sets. Often, in the age of the Fifth Wave, neither condition applies. Scientists today work in teams, and the subject matter can be so specialized that only a handful of individuals will be able to understand and review the literature. Authors and reviewers can trade places in a chummy circle of mutual admiration and protection. In extreme cases, this constriction of knowledge leads to what one analyst has called “research cartels,” which actively stifle minority or unorthodox views... The peer review process, relic of a simpler time, has thus become progressively less able to guarantee the integrity and legitimacy of research in many fields of science.

Am I dreaming?  Pinch me!  Martin Gurri, you get me.  For those paying attention, there are even whispers of Moldbug in here.  Does this sound like "The Cathedral" to you?

Vast amounts of money have been poured into science and technology research and development: around $400 billion in the US alone for 2009. The price of affluence has been the centralization and institutionalization of research. An iron triangle of government, the universities, and the corporate world controls the careers of individual scientists... Government favor is the single most important factor in science research today. It’s disingenuous to imagine that such favor would be granted without considerations of power and political advantage.

This book is a masterclass on the sources of legitimacy in our social institutions and Gurri's analysis is devastating.  He's got these incredible lines like "Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority," and:

The word “progress” itself has become impolite, an embarrassment. Nobody has a clue which way that lies.

Gurri leads us pretty far into the desert.  Does he give us any hope of escape or survival?  Well, this is the best he's got:

The quality that sets the true elites apart — that bestows authority on their actions and expressions — isn’t power, or wealth, or education, or even persuasiveness. It’s integrity in life and work. A healthy society is one in which such exemplary types draw the public toward them purely by the force of their example.

Sounds a bit like motherhood and apple pie to me, but I suppose he's not wrong.  In any case, this book is required reading if you're trying to understand our moment in time.

My highlights below.

Martin Gurri is a geopolitical analyst and student of new media and information effects. He spent many years working in the corner of CIA dedicated to the analysis of open media.

FOREWORD BY ARNOLD KLING

With his eyes on this altered media space, Martin Gurri saw what was coming. He saw that the elites would be increasingly despised, as more of their mistakes and imperfections became exposed. He saw that the elites would respond to the public with defensiveness and contempt, but that this would only make the public more hostile and defiant toward authority. He saw that the public’s new-found power does not come with any worked-out program or plan, and as a result it poses the threat of nihilism. If the existing order is only torn down, not replaced, the outcome could be chaos and strife.

And let me repeat the other factor that makes this book’s analysis of the Trump phenomenon particularly credible: Martin Gurri saw it coming.

To avoid these extreme outcomes, both elites and the public have to change. Elites will have to cede authority and permit more local variation and experimentation. The public will have to be more tolerant. Imperfections and bad outcomes should not be taken as proof of conspiracy or evil intent.

1: Prelude to a turbulent age

Should anyone care about this tangle of bizarre connections? Only if you care how you are governed: the story I am about to tell concerns above all a crisis of that monstrous messianic machine, the modern government. And only if you care about democracy: because a crisis of government in liberal democracies like the United States can’t help but implicate the system.

A curious thing happens to sources of information under conditions of scarcity. They become authoritative.

And the first significant effect I perceived related to the sources: as the amount of information available to the public increased, the authoritativeness of any one source decreased.

Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust. Every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor. When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over every authoritative judgment.

The docile mass audience, so easily persuaded by advertisers and politicians, had been a monopolist’s fantasy which disintegrated at first contact with alternatives.

I’d been enthralled by the astronomical growth in the volume of information, but the truly epochal change, it turned out, was the revolution in the relationship between the public and authority in almost every domain of human activity.

Thoughtful interpretations of the genesis and nature of the change have been written by Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, and Glenn Reynolds, among many others.

Using terms for analytic style coined by Isaiah Berlin and borrowed by Joseph Tetlock in his famous study of expert political judgment, I’m afraid that I am a “fox” rather than a “hedgehog.”

There will be a scarcity of saints but an abundance of martyrs. That is the way of our moment in time.

There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.”

By the time he came to publish The Phantom Public in 1927, Lippmann’s subject appeared to him to be a fractured, single-issue-driven thing. The public, as I see it [he wrote], is not a fixed body of individuals. It is merely the persons who are interested in an affair and can affect it only by supporting or opposing the actors.

At the individual level, this standing is achieved by professionalization. The person in authority is a trained professional. He’s an expert with access to hidden knowledge. He perches near the top of some specialized hierarchy, managing a bureaucracy, say, or conducting research. And, almost invariably, he got there by a torturous process of accreditation, usually entailing many years of higher education.

Lasting authority, however, resides in institutions rather than in the persons who act and speak on their behalf.

2: Hoder and Wael Ghonim

He represents a type we’ll encounter often in this story of the struggle between grand hierarchies and the public: the gifted amateur, propelled to unexpected places by the new information technology.

In theory, the Iranian regime is a Platonic republic, with wise guardians protecting the moral and material welfare of all. In practice, it resembles a sterile hybrid begot on the mafia by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In consequence, the ruling class confronted what has come to be called “the dictator’s dilemma” — a frequent affliction of authority in the new environment. The dilemma works this way. For security reasons, dictators must control and restrict communications to a minimum. To make their rule legitimate, however, they need prosperity, which can only be attained by the open exchange of information. Choose.

The most famous blogger in the country is ex-president Ahmadinejad. Of course, the regime also blocked many websites, and currently holds the world record for bloggers thrown in jail. At least one of them died from the admonishments of his wise Platonic guardians.

The industrial age depended on chunky blocks of text to influence government and opinion. The new digital world has preferred the power of the visual. What is usually referred to as new media really means the triumph of the image over the printed word.

His own telling of those events, the autobiographical Revolution 2.0, I recommend to anyone who wants to understand, from a very human perspective, the destructive effects of new information on a fossilized political system.

The political system in Egypt rested on pure gangsterism, lacking any ideological justification other than the authority of the men in charge: they alone, it was claimed, possessed the expertise to maintain security, grow the economy, and manage the complexities of a modern government.

Not long ago, a revolutionary was a dedicated professional. To achieve his goal, he needed an organization to conduct command and control, a published program to explain the need for radical change, resting on an ideology which persuaded and attracted large numbers of the public—who would then be formed into a mass movement by means of command and control. Organization, program, printing presses, ideology, mass command and control: this costly, slow-moving machinery, with its need for hierarchy and obedience, could be transcended by a single click of the mouse if Wael Ghonim won his bet.

It was a testament to the power of TV to capture and communicate sincerity: his sorrow when confronted with photos of dead demonstrators was both compelling and painful to watch. Before a mass audience, Wael Ghonim, that extraordinary ordinary person, gave the revolutionaries a face that ordinary Egyptians could identify with. He embodied information which changed the direction of political life in his country. His interview went viral on YouTube, new media compounding the effect of the old. The crowds in Tahrir swelled in size. Four days later, Hosni Mubarak resigned from office.

3: My thesis

The result is paralysis by distrust. The Border, it is already clear, can neutralize but not replace the Center. Networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern. Bureaucratic inertia confronts digital nihilism. The sum is zero.

His arrival confronts the regime with a new threat: the public with a longer reach may gain access to information which subverts its story of legitimacy. In the regime’s worst nightmare, the public actually conceives of an alternative form of government and acts to attain it.

The simplicity and perfect fit between the public’s perception of the world and the regime’s story of legitimacy are gone forever. Under these conditions, the best outcome for the regime is acceptance by the public that the world is too complex to be understood yet too dangerous to be left alone, and must be placed in the care of those whose job it is to manage the nation’s affairs. Examples of mediated acceptance of the status quo are the Soviet Union under Stalin and North Korea today.

Most importantly, it shatters the illusion that his way of life is inevitable and preordained, a first, necessary step toward revolution.

The fall of the mediators, all things being equal, means the end of the regime’s ability to rule by persuasion.

But the rise of Homo informaticus places governments on a razor’s edge, where any mistake, any untoward event, can draw a networked public into the streets, calling for blood. This is the situation today for authoritarian governments and liberal democracies alike. The crisis in the world that I seek to depict concerns loss of trust in government, writ large. The mass extinction of stories of legitimacy leaves no margin for error, no residual store of public good will. Any spark can blow up any political system at any time, anywhere.

Information influences politics because it is indigestible by a government’s justifying story. The greater the diffusion of information to the public, the more illegitimate any political status quo will appear. Homo informaticus, networked builder and wielder of the information sphere, poses an existential challenge to the legitimacy of every government he encounters.

4: What the public is not

The most promising way forward, it seems to me, is to follow N. N. Taleb’s “subtractive knowledge” method of analyzing complex questions. Rather than assert what the public is, I explain what the public is not.

The public is not, and never can be, identical to the people: this is true in all circumstances, everywhere. Since, on any given question, the public is composed of those self-selected persons interested in the affair, it possesses no legitimate authority whatever, and lacks the structure to enforce any authority that might fall its way. The public has no executive, no law, no jails. It can only express an opinion, in words and in actions—in its own flesh and blood. That was what transpired in Egypt. The roar of public opinion precipitated political change, but it was the Egyptian military, not the public, who compelled Mubarak and Morsi to step down. The public can never be the people because the people are an abstraction of political philosophy. The people, strictly speaking, don’t exist.

What broke Lippmann’s heart was the assumption that the people of political philosophy must exist in political reality. He knew that the public was the only candidate available for the job, and, as an astute observer of events, he felt keenly the disproportion between his hopes and the truth. The ideal of the “sovereign and omnicompetent citizen” was unattainable.

Henry Ford and Lenin were Taylorists, each in his way. Both believed in an infallible vanguard commanding a mass of undifferentiated humanity.

Intoxicated by the successes of industrial organization, the founders of mass movements, and their admirers and imitators, sought to reduce political action to pure mechanics. This was true right and left, and regardless of the actual content of the movement’s ideology. The latter was usually a hash of pseudo-science, in any case: racial Darwinism for the Nazis, for example, or “scientific materialism” for Marxist-Leninists. What mattered was control of the masses.

Propaganda was the totalitarian’s admission that his power wasn’t total. Unlike democratic politicians, leaders of mass movements lacked feedback mechanisms: they had no idea what the masses were thinking, and could only hope to inject the desired opinions directly into the brains of their followers. Call it Taylorism for the soul.

This last development can help explain why Lippmann and Dewey got the future wrong: like every other person on planet Earth, they failed to foresee the advent of a personalized information technology.

5: Phase change 2011

Failure typically gets blamed on insufficient support: the CIA, for example, demanded and received a bigger budget after 9/11.

I also believe 2011 first exposed the gulf of distrust between the public and elected governments in many democratic countries. Liberal democracy itself came under attack. Since no alternatives were proposed, the events of 2011 may be said to have launched a fundamental predicament of life under the Fifth Wave: the question of nihilism.

Some form of this riddle confronted the public during every collision with authority in the turbulent year 2011. What next? What structures will replace the old, despised institutions? How should society be reorganized? In every case no satisfactory answer was given.

Pure negation is nothing and leads nowhere. Neither-nor resembles a curse in a fairy-tale because it’s open-ended. Under its spell, a revolutionary can never declare victory, or even glimpse the promised land from a high place. He can only batter away at the established order, until every trace of history has been erased from social life. Then he too, as a child of history, will disappear. So I pose here, for the first time, in the context of the Spanish street revolts, the question of nihilism. By this word I mean the will to destruction, including self-destruction, for its own sake. I mean, specifically, the negation of democracy and capitalism, with a frivolous disregard for the consequences.

It’s worth noting that anarchism is by far the most sectarian movement on the left, with an ideological predilection for individualism and self-expression. The difference between a young anarchist and a young disillusioned liberal was not likely to be noticed by either.

The romance of condemnation, in my judgment, has become the most conspicuous feature of President Obama’s mode of governance. The demonization of millionaires was a rhetorical pillar of the president’s successful 2012 campaign.

OWS’s numbers may have been small, but the message was consequential. It helped tip American politics at the highest level toward pure negation and distrust, eroding the legitimacy of democratic institutions. For this reason alone the Occupy protests belong with the bigger revolts in my investigation of phase change.

Revolution, in 2011, meant denunciation. Actual change was left for someone else.

OWS didn’t influence the president. The arrow of causation moved the other way. President Obama anticipated many of the movement’s rhetorical features during his 2008 electoral campaign, which was one reason so many of the 2011 Occupiers participated in it.

But like rebels in other democratic countries, they effected a strange mental separation between the life they wished for and the structures which made that life possible.

The rioters existed in a world of effects without causes. However dimly, they envisioned a desirable mode of living — one weighed down with mobile phones, video games, plasma TVs — but they vandalized the processes which made that life possible. They behaved as if desirable things were part of the natural order, like the grass under their feet. Detestable systems of authority only stood in the way.

I don’t want to make too much of this. Like dueling naming conventions, the infatuation with V for Vendetta was a symptom, not a cause, of the larger conflict. It revealed an emotional orientation among the protesters: they were self-dramatizers to an extreme degree. The disconnection between their words and their actions, between their understanding of effects and their indifference to causes, can be explained by this trait.

They disdained specifics — ideology, policy — but excelled at lengthy menus of accusations.

The phase change concerned, at the most obvious level, a new capacity to mobilize large numbers of the public and so to command the attention of all political players, from government leaders to the media to ordinary voters. This was a new thing under the sun, and it became possible only in the altered landscape of the Fifth Wave. Digital platforms allowed even rioters who wished to loot London stores to organize and act more intelligently, for their purposes, than the authorities. The consequence wasn’t revolution but the threat of perpetual turbulence. The authorities felt, and still feel, their incapacity keenly.

That was the most profound consequence of 2011: sowing the seeds of distrust in the democratic process. You can condemn politicians only for so long before you must reject the legitimacy of the system that produced them.

6: A crisis of authority

To some indeterminate degree, the public must trust and heed authority, or it is no authority at all. An important social function of authority is to deliver certainty in an uncertain world. It explains reality in the context of the shared story of the group. For this it must rely on persuasion rather than compulsion, since naked force is a destroyer of trust and faith. The need to persuade in turn explains the institutional propensity for visible symbols of authority — the patrician’s toga, the doctor’s white frock, the financier’s Armani suit. Authority being an intangible quality, those who wield it wish to be recognized for what they are.

Even in purely practical terms, persuasion has always trumped compulsion or bribery. The authorizing magic of legitimacy can channel social behavior more deeply and permanently than the policeman’s club or the millionaire’s check. These propositions should be considered truisms, but they are not. Not by the public, which, as we have seen, assumes that every failure of authority must be explained by a collusion of money with power.

Between every decision and its consequences rises an impenetrable veil of uncertainty. The present can only guess at the future — and the track record, as we’ll soon see, isn’t good. Even among experts, the track record is terrible. The reason isn’t false consciousness but the stupendous complexity of human events, which renders prediction impossible.

The crisis of authority hollowing out existing institutions didn’t arise because these institutions prostituted themselves to power or money. That was an explanation after the fact — one that happened to be believed by much of the public and many experts. The fact that needed to be explained, however, was failure: the painfully visible gap between the institutions’ claims of competence and their actual performance. The gap, I maintain, was a function of the limits of human knowledge. It had always been there. What changed was the public’s awareness of it.

Power and money can never be wholly dispensed with: a source of satisfaction to conspiracy theorists. The truly interesting question, on the other hand, is how to explain the crisis of authority and the erratic behavior of the institutions, if there were no conspiracies to account for them.

But certain conditions particular to the event helped amplify the resonance of Einstein’s achievement. It was the first major scientific breakthrough in the age of mass media — and it occurred in a field that was impenetrable to all but a handful of brilliant specialists. When told that people believed only three scientists in the world could understand general relativity, Eddington grew quiet. “I’m just wondering who the third might be,” he explained.

In the century or so since Einstein’s triumph, the practice of science has been transformed. Vast amounts of money have been poured into science and technology research and development: around $400 billion in the US alone for 2009. The price of affluence has been the centralization and institutionalization of research. An iron triangle of government, the universities, and the corporate world controls the careers of individual scientists. Consequently, the ideal of the lonely and disinterested seeker after truth has been superseded by that of the scientist-bureaucrat. Though the various fields of science differ greatly, scientific success, in general, has been defined less by the quality of the findings than by the ability to bring in “research support” — funding for the institution.

Much has been claimed for the scientific method, but the only method to which all scientists subscribe is the peer review process. It too has been under strain. Peer review presupposes the existence of independent-minded experts who evaluate manageable data sets. Often, in the age of the Fifth Wave, neither condition applies. Scientists today work in teams, and the subject matter can be so specialized that only a handful of individuals will be able to understand and review the literature. Authors and reviewers can trade places in a chummy circle of mutual admiration and protection. In extreme cases, this constriction of knowledge leads to what one analyst has called “research cartels,” which actively stifle minority or unorthodox views.

Complicated computer programs have become necessary to array and model the data, and high-level statistical skills are routinely required to assess the validity of any finding. Many scientists, including reviewers, have not been up to the job. The peer review process, relic of a simpler time, has thus become progressively less able to guarantee the integrity and legitimacy of research in many fields of science.

The alpha bureaucrats, ensconced at the top of the pyramid, were Michael Mann of Penn State University for the US, and Phil Jones, head of the CRU, for Britain. The two men nominated each other to awards and pressured colleagues to sign petitions supporting the IPCC orthodoxy. Questions of loyalty and disloyalty, of sustaining the information monopoly of the group, absorbed their emails.

Mann, Jones, and the circle of scientists around them wrapped themselves in the mantle of the peer review process, which the “skeptics” had avoided. They were accredited science professionals, published in legitimate journals. This was their creed, the source of their authority. But since the group largely controlled peer review for their field, and a consuming subject of the emails was how to keep dissenting voices out of the journals and the media, the claim rested on a circular logic.

The emails showed the world’s leading climatologists busily working to organize a research cartel. Peer review was a legitimate source of authority when the process supported their positions. It was compromised, if not malicious, when it offered critics of the orthodoxy a platform. The wish to crush dissenting views, in their minds, had become indistinguishable from the pursuit of truth. In this attempt they ultimately failed, but not, the emails revealed, for lack of trying.

Given that it was the Center investigating the Center, this judgment was predictable.

People on the left believe that science is a tool of Big Business, that scientists are willing to poison us with genetically modified food and torture laboratory animals to earn a bigger profit for their paymasters. This may be an exaggeration, but, as a general proposition, it’s accurate enough. Corporations undeniably pay for and control a substantial percentage of all scientific research. For people on the right, science has become the handmaiden of Big Government, raising climate and environmental scares to justify the imposition of ever more restrictive political controls over every aspect of life. And this, too, while overstating the case, is generally correct. Government favor is the single most important factor in science research today. It’s disingenuous to imagine that such favor would be granted without considerations of power and political advantage.

The revelations in the CRU emails likely drove the public one more step down a path in which its perception of science and the scientist have been radically transformed. The beneficent guardian of truth has become, at best, a self-serving ally of remote elites, and at worst the amoral lackey of money and power.

A fitting place to start is with the life and times of Alan Greenspan, the man who transformed the economic expert into a glamorous, almost mythical figure.

Greenspan’s most significant achievement had been to persuade the elites and the public that the pursuit of material happiness required supervision by a brilliant specialist.

Every institution in the system failed catastrophically, beginning with Greenspan’s Fed, which encouraged a casino atmosphere by flooding the markets with easy money. Investment firms like Lehman Brothers took that money and “leveraged” it, betting $30 for each dollar they actually held in their hands. The rating agencies like Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s, designated by the government to assess investment risk, gave the complex, untested subprime securities a AAA rating: when all was said and done, Moody’s had missed the mark by 20,000 percent. The White House and Congress pumped the housing bubble by pressuring regulators to accept ever riskier mortgages. It was a total bankruptcy of the elites — only the public paid the bill.

But it was an extraordinary defense of the performance of the expert class to say that none of them, at any level, had known what was coming.

Yet I suspect that it was equally impossible for a personage high in a structure of authority — a sitting president, a White House economist — to acknowledge, in public, the impossibility of prophecy. Within this contradiction, much about the crisis of authority of the institutions can be explained.

If you pursue this line of questioning, you will soon arrive at a fundamental dilemma. The disasters of 2008 were at bottom a failure of capitalism. The people in authority who were discredited and swept away in the aftermath could be described as the capitalist elite. They had claimed authority over the sources of prosperity, but were shown to be clueless and unsteady. The closest thing to a papal figure in capitalism, Alan Greenspan, now acknowledged that the system failed to grasp how the world really worked.

So my dilemma is how to square the revolt of the public and the crisis of the institutions with the apparent survival of capitalism.

Anti-capitalism was never an alternative to capitalism. It was another path to negation — when pushed hard enough, to nihilism.

The public has imposed a single all-important demand on business, the same as it has done on government, politicians, educators, media, and service providers: that every transaction treat the customer as a person, with active tastes and interests, rather than as a passive and undifferentiated member of a mass. Remember that ugly word, “disaggregation.” Meaning: to unbundle, to unpack — to tear apart. As it was in politics, the disaggregation of the masses has been a revolutionary economic event. It marked the passing of John Kenneth Galbraith’s “new industrial state,” in which Big Business and Big Labor divided the spoils of the modern economy at the consumer’s expense. Today, Big Business faces a radically shortened life expectancy, Big Labor is in full retreat, and the consumer — the mutinous public — is in command.

In Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee conjectured that this frenzy of innovation has been a major reason for the stagnant economic growth since 2008. “The root of our problems is not that we’re in a Great Recession or a Great Stagnation, but rather that we are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring,” they argued. “Our technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind.”

Many of the structures battered by the global struggle between the public and the elites have been captives of single-trial processes, and sought to define success hierarchically, from authority. New initiatives typically have failed — and failure has been typically explained away and doubled down on. The CIA, we saw, demanded and received more money after 9/11. Advocates of the $787 billion stimulus blamed its failure on the insufficient amounts spent. Such arguments persuaded only while the institutions held a monopoly of the means of information and communication: in other words, only so long as they went unquestioned. Today, of course, the public always questions, and will usually find the answer in the information sphere.

I made specific claims using specific types of evidence. I intended to describe what a crisis of institutional authority looked like, and to illustrate a handful of instances, rather than to demonstrate the proposition beyond a shadow of a doubt. So: my analysis could be falsified.

This state of affairs invites counter-revolution by the established order. Again and again, in subject after subject, accredited experts have attempted to regain control over the levers of epistemic closure. At every opportunity, institutional actors attacked the public on the grounds of its uncertainty: for example, the public stands accused of cocooning into a daily me, of conducting a “war on science,” of indulging in unprecedented partisanship, and more. Such nagging gives the game away. The counter-revolution of the authoritative elites has floundered, because the elites are themselves tormented by that terrible splinter of doubt.

You would expect the loss of a stable existence on earth to drive a search for fixity on a higher sphere. If this is the case, a rise in the appeal of fundamentalism will testify to the experience of impermanence. That takes me deep into the realm of subjectivity, but there are empirical hints and signs. In Egypt, we saw, the old regime was initially replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, which won the country’s only fair elections to date. The hard reality in the Middle East is that Islamist groups have prospered wherever secular Arab authoritarians have wobbled. In the US, the more demanding faiths — evangelists, Mormons, Hasidics — have grown at the expense of older institutions which too much resemble the earth-bound hierarchies of the Center. The spread of Christianity in China is among today’s best-kept secrets. For the governing classes and articulate elites of the world, this turn to religion is both appalling and incomprehensible — but this is a denial of human nature. If the City of Man becomes a passing shadow, people will turn to the City of God.

Western intellectuals often dismiss Al Qaeda as a primitivist organization run by blinkered fanatics, but it is nothing of the kind. The group operates at the merciless front lines of the revolt of the public against authority, and its disregard not just for human life but for nearly every structure which binds people together poses again, with some urgency, the question of nihilism.

Liberal democracy has been the chief mechanism for mediating such internal flaws. The question of nihilism, now inextricably tangled with the crisis of authority, will be answered in terms which either affirm or negate the legitimacy of the democratic process. As I move to consider the effect of the crisis on government, this remains, for me, the most consequential and least noticed imponderable of our moment in time.

7: The failure of government

The fiction of extraordinary ambition and mastery has persisted, without irony, in our political language.

I have treated the limitation of government as a function of the limits of human knowledge, not of ideological preference, and in this approach I have stuck close to Paul Ormerod’s brilliantly researched and happily titled book, Why Most Things Fail.

The emergence of the Tea Party movement in 2009 anticipated many of the patterns followed by the insurgent groups of 2011.

If the Republican Party or the Koch brothers could really play Pied Piper to the libertarian masses, why on earth had they waited to do so until after the presidential elections?

Between libertarian and anarchist, it may be, the distance can be reduced to a quarrel about private property.

Unlike the Occupiers, Tea Party adherents swarmed head-on into electoral politics. Here was a difference that made a difference. And unlike the Five Star movement in Italy, the Tea Partiers did not strike out on their own. Instead, they focused their energies into transforming the Republican Party and making it the vehicle for their ideals. Success was partial, but still remarkable: in the 113th Congress, 48 Republican congressmen and five Senators belonged to the “Tea Party Caucus.” Many governors and state officials were also associated with the movement.

What James C. Scott has called the twentieth century’s “high modernist” approach to government routinely gambled on colossal projects designed to bring perfection to the social order.

High modernist ideology was a utopian faith: it assumed that rational planning and scientific knowhow, if imposed on a gigantic enough scale, could eradicate the miseries of the human condition, from tyranny and inequality to hunger and disease. The enemy was history, mother of superstition and disorder. The hero was the expert-bureaucrat, who could wipe the slate clean.

It is too late in the day now for such romance: government has lost the will for heroic effort.

Late modernist government is more like a kindly uncle, passing out chocolate chip cookies to his favorite nieces and nephews. He doesn’t wish to transform them. He just wants them to be happy — most particularly, with him. If high modernism in power was an engine of perfection, late modernism has become a happiness machine. It feels bound to intervene anywhere it has identified groups that were somehow victimized, disabled, troubled, below average, offended, uncomfortable—actually or potentially unhappy. Its actions are the political equivalent of handing out a chocolate chip cookie: government today desperately wishes to be seen doing something, anything, to help, and be recognized for its good intentions. There are no boundaries to intervention, but no epic outcomes either.

Interventionism has substituted a thousand tactics for a single bold strategy. Programs seem scarcely intelligible in terms of their stated purposes, and, like the stimulus, need to be legislated at exhausting length. President Obama’s signature program, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, sprawled over 900 pages of contradictory minutiae: the word “waiver” appeared 214 times. The Dodd-Frank bill that tightened regulation of the US financial system in 2009 covered 848 pages. For comparison, it took 31 pages in 1913 to establish the Federal Reserve, 37 to wrap up the Social Security Act of 1935.

The itch for microcosmic social adjustments is not an American invention. The democracies of Europe surrendered to it first, and with far more conviction. The European Union’s proposed constitution of 2004, for example, contained 400 articles (the US constitution has seven) and 855 pages, in which every conceivable strand of right-thinking opinion was awarded a chocolate chip cookie.

Modern governments have many achievements to their credit. They have built superhighways and helped to eradicate smallpox and polio. But they have promised many more things — nothing less than the good life — and they have asked for increasing control over wealth and power to get there. Failure has been a function of extravagant promises and great expectations.

“Instead of seeking to achieve political objectives, people seek certain physical and moral qualities,” writes Henri Rosanvallon. “Transparency, rather than truth or the general interest, has become the paramount virtue in an uncertain world.”

In May 2013, the IRS admitted that it had targeted President Obama’s political opponents for audits in the run-up to the 2012 elections, and had consistently denied tax-exempt status to groups associated with the Tea Party.

Other traditional government activities, like border control and the postal service, seemed to have embraced failure as their mission.

If the answer is no, however, we face an even more disturbing possibility: that democratic politics are fought over issues that democratic governments have no power to resolve.

Most things fail, because our species tends to think in terms of narrowly defined problems, and usually pays little attention to the most important feature of these problems: the wider context in which they are embedded. When we think we are solving the problem, we are in fact disrupting the context. Most consequences will then be unintended.

The difference is that failing companies go out of business and are replaced by new companies, while government accumulates failure, making it, systemically, much more fragile.

In Britain, where excellent statistics have been kept from the Victorian era onward, the size of the public sector as a proportion of the economy has doubled since 1946, compared to the period 1870–1938. Yet the difference in the average unemployment rate before and after the expansion of government was statistically negligible.

A preference for negation as a political style has begun to spread among the very people who are responsible for the preservation of the political status quo. For this paradoxical development, much of the responsibility, I believe, falls to President Obama, whose sectarianism from the heights brings him back to my story.

Few observers, then or now, have grasped how deeply against the grain of history this approach was. American presidents are supposed to be doers and achievers — masters of legislation, policy, and politics. President Obama seemed uninterested in fitting into that mold. He had risen on a tidal wave of hostility against authority, and he had been smashed down when he, in turn, was perceived to be the authority. The public was angry and disgusted with government. Henceforth he would be the voice of that anger and disgust. The veteran community organizer would embrace and reinforce the public’s distrust of the established order. The president became chief accuser to the nation.

The president was now a denouncer rather than a fixer of problems. He had described a destructive trend, but refused to make any claims of competence over it. The purpose of the exercise seemed to be to align him with the public’s anger on this issue, as he perceived it.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post chided “Obama, the uninterested president,” complaining that “he wants no control over the actions of his administration.” A satire in the liberal New Yorker hammered at the same point: “President Obama used his radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has ‘played no role whatsoever’ in the US government over the past four years,” it deadpanned.

Barack Obama, I believe, represented a new and disconcerting development in democratic politics: the conquest of the Center by the Border, and the rise of the sectarian temper to the highest positions of power.

8: Nihilism and democracy

Here was the overarching feeling of our age: that we were the decadent children of a great generation, and that no way back could be found, no exit from the quicksand into which we were sinking, because that quicksand was us. The natural urge to find responsible parties and assign blame was baffled by the immense number of targets.

That faith has died. I won’t dwell on the cause of death, but will only state an incontrovertible fact: there are no serious political actors today who believe in the reality, much less the desirability, of revolution. In consequence, radical and democratic politics, which shared the same utopian end-point, have lost their directional coherence. The word “progress” itself has become impolite, an embarrassment. Nobody has a clue which way that lies.

Newly risen to education and prosperity, he imagines himself liberated from the past, and has grown hostile to it as to any limiting factor. The good things in life have always been there. They seem detached from human effort, including his own, so he takes them as given, part of the natural order, like the air he breathes. Gratitude would be nonsensical. Mass man accepts the gifts of the system as his due, but will tear up that system root and branch, present and past, if the least of his desires is left unfulfilled.

More accurately than alienation, a radical ingratitude describes the feeling that makes the nihilist tick. His political and economic expectations are commensurate with his personal fantasies and desires, and the latter are boundless. He expects perfection. He insists on utopia.

If the past is acknowledged, that relationship must be one of indebtedness. The Romans littered their homes with carved images of illustrious ancestors. But when, as is the case today, the public rejects history and longs to start again from zero, its relationship to the institutions that sustain it will be one of radical ingratitude. Once privilege is felt to be natural, a matter of birth rather than previous effort, the phantom that is the nihilist becomes flesh in the rebellious public—and any failure, any fall from perfection, will ignite a firestorm of discontent.

Every great institution is justified by a story. That story connects the institution to higher political ideals and ultimately to the moral order of the world. It persuades ordinary people—you and me—that, if we wish to do the right thing, we should act as the institution requires of us. The story bestows the authorizing magic I have called legitimacy.

Otherwise, I may as well shrug my shoulders and say, like John Searle’s determinist at the restaurant: “I think I’ll just sit here and wait to see what I order.”

If modern government, for all its wealth and power, can’t ordain the future of complex systems, what difference can it possibly make whether we, in our smallness, embrace one side or the other, choose this rather than that? All the wounded vanity of our decadent age will be rolled up in that one question.

9: Choices and systems

In the reality interpreted by Ormerod, most things must fail, including ambitious government projects, because the world is too unpredictable and nonlinear. But if that is the case, what difference can a personal choice make? The intelligent reader will at once understand this to be another question entirely: in what social and political environment could personal choices make a difference? The search for an answer is a major thread in this chapter.

The habits of high modernism have led to certain default assumptions: that only the top of the pyramid can impose meaningful social, political, and economic change, for example. Only the highest reaches of government, therefore, have the capacity to choose the path ahead. The rest of us belong to the inert masses. These assumptions were always undemocratic in spirit, but, more importantly, they have been falsified by the experience of the last 50 years. Heroic top-down initiatives have failed, habitually and in their own terms. The masses have awakened to political life in the unruly public, and the tremendous energies released by the Fifth Wave have surged entirely from below. Ideologies justifying hierarchical control over society have faltered, fallen, and begun to go extinct.

Drill down into the networks that have enabled the public to confound authority, and you soon arrive at what I would call the personal sphere. This is the circle of everyday life, experienced directly, in all its local specificity. Here the choices meaningful to an individual get generated: spouse, children, friends, career, faith. Government and high politics fill in the background. To imagine they can ordain or legislate happiness at this level is a modern illusion.

My question concerns the intrinsic necessity of industrial modes of organization to democratic government, and the intrinsic destructiveness of a public organized in digital networks, riding the tsunami of information.

The failure of government isn’t a failure of democracy, but a consequence of the heroic claims of modern government, and of the constantly frustrated expectations these claims have aroused. Industrial organization, with its cult of the expert and top-down interventionism, stands far removed from the democratic spirit, and has proven disastrous to the actual practice of representative democracy. It has failed in its own terms, and has been seen to fail, and it has infected democratic governments with a paralyzing fear of the public and with the despair of decadence.

The nihilist is dangerous in part because he’s right.

The most effective alternative to the steep pyramid of industrialized democracy isn’t direct democracy on the Athenian model or cyber-democracy in the style of Wael Ghonim’s Facebook page. It’s the personal sphere: the place where information and decisions move along the shortest causal links. To the extent that choices are returned to the personal from the political, they can be disposed directly, in the light of local knowledge, as part of an observable series of trial and error. Personal success can be emulated and replicated. Personal failure will not implicate the entire system.

Here’s a contradiction: for all its disdain of politicians, the public has often behaved as if happiness were indeed a gift bestowed by presidents.

The alternative I wish to consider comes in two parts. The first has to do with honesty in our expectations. Presidents can’t handle the economy. They have no clue how to do it. The experts who advise them rarely have what N. N. Taleb has called “skin in the game”: they pay no penalty when they are wrong, as they were, catastrophically, in 2008, and immediately again, with the stimulus, in 2009.

There is a second part to this choice. The standards used to evaluate government projects are also inventions of the industrial age. We, the public, are invited to take sides, to applaud or condemn presidents, based on some statistical abstraction, some number — the gross domestic product, for example, or the unemployment and poverty rates. We saw the unemployment rate used like a baseball score in the controversy surrounding the stimulus. The number shows the public who’s winning the political game. Numbers like the GDP fulfill a rhetorical function. They partake of the prestige of science, appearing superior to the confused jumble of reality as actually experienced. They sustain the high modernist claim that we can know at a glance the truth about vast systems. But we know that we don’t know. The number is an illusion.

playing politics by the number is a frivolous game of make-believe. Politics is nothing like baseball. In the end, the most persuasive story wins, not the highest score.

Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the most horrific slaughter of US troops in history, is today considered our greatest president.

The best character in the best novel by Dickens, to my taste, is Mrs. Jellyby of Bleak House, who spent long days working to improve “the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger,” while, in her London home, her small children ran wild and neglected. Dickens termed this “telescopic philanthropy” — the trampling of the personal sphere for the sake of a heroic illusion.

Instead, unknowingly, they crossed into N. N. Taleb’s wild “Extremistan,” where “we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted.” In that unstable country, “you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data.”

Control, however tenuous, and satisfaction, however fleeting, can only be found in the personal sphere, not in telescopic numbers reported by government.

From within the short causal links of that intimate space, I can engage the tangled web of politics and government, form opinions, and act, if I wish, on those opinions. I can join vital communities of interest, and participate in philanthropic activity, including protests on behalf of radical change. I can exult when my ideals triumph on the great stage of the world, and feel despondent when they are defeated. That is allowed. What I cannot do is demand certainty of complexity, or expect that statistical formulas and numbers, accessible only to a chosen few, will have the power to ordain the future. What I should not do is pour a corrosive stream of rejection and negation on a democratic system that has struggled, and mostly failed, to meet my impossible demands and expectations.

The decisive choices, I believe, concern the handling of that perturbing agent, information.

For government to communicate with the public online to any extent, official language must be radically altered in style and length. That is also a choice, and by no means a trivial or superficial one.

That is only one speculative illustration of what might happen if government chose to work its drafts out in the open, online. The legal and pseudo-technical jargon clogging most official communications would also be reduced to a minimum. The current incentives for opaqueness would be replaced by a need for persuasiveness. Bureaucracy would behold itself through the cold eyes of the public. That alone might be transformative.

The point isn’t to pull the public up to the top of the pyramid in some sort of king-for-a-day “e-government” exercise, but to push the output of the elites to the personal sphere, where the public lives and makes decisions.

The failure of government has proceeded in parallel with the devaluation of practical knowledge. Intoxicated with the possibility of perfection, high modernist rulers endeavored to reduce local reality to the administrative grid of their observations.

To any who care to look, it will be apparent, in real time, that the veil of uncertainty clouds the vision of presidents and Fed chairs, no less than that of ordinary men and women. Once that fact is admitted, the loss of magical powers might well be compensated by a gain in legitimacy. I don’t consider this a paradox, only the difference between observing actions based on illusion or reality.

10: Finale for skeptics

If my thesis is true, we have entered a historical period of revolutionary change that cannot achieve consummation. Institutions are drained of trust and legitimacy, but survive in a zombie-like state. Governments get toppled or voted out, but are replaced by their mirror images. Hierarchies are brought low, but refuse to yield the illusion of top-down control. Hence the worship of the heroic past, the psychology of decadence — the sense, so remarkable in a time of radical impermanence, that there’s nothing new under the sun.

I have aimed at the strategic, at the big picture, folding Napster and blogging and “Climategate” into the same insurgency that swept Barack Obama to office and knocked Hosni Mubarak off his pharaoh’s throne. I have portrayed a public in revolt against authority in every domain. So maybe that has been my contribution.

I would look for entities external to government, such as corporations and NGOs, to absorb many of the functions traditionally assigned to the brain-dead institutions. Government could begin to unbundle.

Finally: in the political environment described by my thesis, government must make it a priority to defend itself against the public. I would expect the Chinese regime, for example, to be far more concerned with surveillance and control of the Chinese public than with foreign adventures — and to court risk overseas primarily to manipulate domestic opinion. The same would apply to our own Federal government. It will treat the American public like the enemy and deal with foreign enemies mostly to impress the public.

Years later, Philip Tetlock was to put scholarly integrity around this insight, in Expert Political Judgment. On reading Tetlock’s data, I found myself fascinated but not in the least surprised.

The new prime minister, a leading voice at Maidan, submitted to EU-mandated economic reforms with a despair bordering on nihilism. “We are a team of people with a suicide wish — welcome to hell,” he said. His words were remarkable for their honesty.

Following the horrors of 9/11, Fukuyama and his ideas were derided as triumphalist nonsense. But he was only half wrong. Fukuyama, a Hegelian, argued that Western democracy had run out of “contradictions”: that is, of ideological alternatives. That was true in 1989 and remains true today. Fukuyama’s mistake was to infer that the absence of contradictions meant the end of history. There was another possibility he failed to consider. History could well be driven by negation rather than contradiction. It could ride on the nihilistic rejection of the established order, regardless of alternatives or consequences. That would not be without precedent. The Roman Empire wasn’t overthrown by something called “feudalism” — it collapsed of its own dead weight, to the astonishment of friend and foe alike.

It is always useful to remember history, however: not so long ago, Europe was the world’s leading exporter of anti-democratic ideologies and movements.

I wrote this book, in part, to invite the discussion. I did so in the manner of a man who notices a fire blazing in a corner of a locked room: I don’t want to start a panic, only some sane talk among the occupants about how best to put the thing out.

Afterword: Trump, Brexit, and farewell to all that Reconsiderations:

The Revolt of the Public was first published in June 2014.

But Trump’s predecessor in the White House, Barack Obama, turns out to be a nihilist too — and at least one bewildered commentator has proclaimed (again in the Washington Post), “We’re all political nihilists now.”

The fate of democracy, I believe, is inextricably bound to the fate of the elites in democratic nations. The current elite class, having lost its monopoly over information, has been stripped, probably forever, of the authorizing magic of legitimacy. The industrial model of democracy is dysfunctional and discredited. That is the current predicament. Every step forward must start there.

A more precise phrasing would be: How are legitimate elites selected in a democratic society?

I said that Trump is free of any taint of government or political experience. He’s also ideologically formless — a member of his campaign staff described him, generously, as “post-ideological.” He has been for and against abortion in his time, for example. His supposed nationalism, on close inspection, dissolves into certain rhetorical preferences and the vague demand that the US get better economic deals from the world. The why of Trump’s election is simple enough. A candidate that innocent of qualifications and political direction can be elected only as a gesture of supreme repudiation, by the electorate, of the governing class. From start to finish, the 2016 presidential race can best be understood as the political assertion of an unhappy and highly mobilized public.

The right level of analysis on Trump isn’t Trump at all, but the public that endowed him with a radical direction and temper, and the decadent institutions that proved too weak to stand in his way.

In somewhat slower motion than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is unbundling into dozens of political war-bands, each driven by the hunger for meaning and identity, all focused with monomaniacal intensity on a particular cause: feminism, the environment, anti-capitalism, pro-immigration, or racial or sexual grievance. The schism has been veiled by the generalized loathing of all things Trump: but I find it hard to envision a national party thriving on tribalism and wars of identity.

The news business seemed strangely obsessed with this strange man, and lavished on him what may have been unprecedented levels of attention. The question is why. The answer will be apparent to anyone with eyes to see. Donald Trump is a peacock among the dull buzzards of American politics. The one discernible theme of his life has been the will to stand out: to attract all eyes in the room by being the loudest, most colorful, most aggressively intrusive person there. He has clearly succeeded to an astonishing degree.

Until the turn of the new millennium, the news media had controlled the information agenda. They could decide, on the basis of some elite standard, how much attention you deserved. In a fractured information environment, swept by massive waves of signal and noise, amid newspaper bankruptcies and many more TV news channels, every news provider approaches a story from the perspective of existential desperation. Trump understood the hunger, and knew how to feed the beast.

Like the old Holy Roman Empire, it lacks a true center and a shared reason for being. Nationalists and separatists, anarchists and populists, all tear at bonds held together mostly by inertia. The question, “On what principle must we stay?” receives at best a muddled answer.

The Russian economy is roughly equivalent to Spain’s. GDP per capita has declined in parallel with the oil market, and in 2016 was ranked right below the Caribbean island of Grenada. The Russian population peaked around 1990 and has lost five million since, the result of low birth rates, high abortion rates, and zero immigration. Life expectancy for males compares unfavorably with Rwanda.

Putin portrays himself in a very different light. He belongs to a class that I would call dictatorships of repudiation: al-Sisi in Egypt, Erdogan in Turkey, and the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela are members of the club. The common thread is a rhetoric of defiance and renewal. The dictator is transformed from a murderous predator into a solitary hero struggling against overwhelming odds. The villain confronting him is some hodgepodge of globalized malevolence, with the US typically pulling the strings.

Their struggle is the public’s, at least in this sense: the repudiation of the status quo and the desire to abolish it by fair means or foul.

China and Russia don’t pretend to be rival models to democracy: they are, in fact, old-fashioned industrial-age hierarchies intent on looting their own people.

As I look over the world’s democratic nations, I find little support for the thesis that their governments are becoming more violent or authoritarian. Among the old democracies at least, the opposite is closer to the truth. Democratic governments are terrified of the public’s unhappiness. They understand the crushing existential burden placed by the public on mere politics, and the likelihood of failure, and the certainty that failure will be digitally magnified. Their behavior is the opposite of authoritarian. It’s a drift to dysfunction: to paralysis.

A year in, it’s fairly clear that the actions and policies of the Trump administration are little different from, say, what a Ted Cruz or even a Jeb Bush administration would have implemented.

Trump has mastered the nihilist style of the web. That, to me, is the most significant factor separating him from the pack. His opponents speak in jargon and clichés. He speaks in rant.

The election of Donald Trump can be said to have demolished the intellectual foundations of the news business. The pretense of objectivity had been abandoned for a higher cause. The claim to furnish “all the news that’s fit to print” was now refuted by the failure to grasp the shape and outcome of the contest. No one who followed the news understood the forces at play. None guessed what was coming. Continued consumption of news seemed to lack any justification, other than amusement or habit.

The question was never asked why people would believe fake news over the real stuff. Trust in news as an institution had imploded.

“This is, at bottom, a battle over the truth,” Kurtz concludes. But it’s really a battle for dominance, fought on a darkling plain where truth, when encountered, is used strictly as a weapon.

That is the strong version of a thesis I believe to be generally valid. If fake news had become a salient part of the 2016 campaign, for example, it would have been exposed and exploded. If it wasn’t exposed, it was because it never crossed the public’s awareness threshold. Politically, it did not matter. Post-truth in relation to the web describes a vast and elaborate body of lies, but very little deception and practically no impact.

Consider Matthew d’Ancona’s condemnation of the tactics used by Brexit advocates: “This was Post-Truth politics at its purest — the triumph of the visceral over the rational, the deceptively simple over the honestly complex.” But that has always been the way. All the cunning dictators, like Hitler and Mussolini, persuaded by appealing to raw emotions — but so did the great democrats from Pericles to Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s how human persuasion works.

“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate asked — but that way lies madness.

But what does data look like, devoid of structure? Nietzsche thought the whole thing was a rationalist prejudice. Marxists maintain that truth is a class construct — postmodernists, that it is a justification for power. And the father of Platonic truth was himself a proponent of the “noble lie.”

I want to make my terms very clear. I don’t believe reality is malleable, variable, or constructed. Reality is as unyielding as a policeman’s club. Unlike that club, however, the shared reality of 320 million persons can’t be experienced directly: it’s mediated.

Truth, for the elites, has come to mean that democracy will die in darkness unless the elected president is somehow overthrown.

Truth at the university, Jonathan Haidt notes, is increasingly subservient to social justice.

As we fly ever farther apart, we can only hear each other when we scream. The result (I repeat) has been paralysis for democratic government. In nearly every instance of provocation and violence, officials at every level, elected and appointed, have chosen to play the part of silent observers. No arrests were made in the Berkeley riots. Few persons were arrested in Charlottesville after a day of street fighting—and most were “drunk people.” This, I am persuaded, is where the fuzzy notion of post-truth acquires a club-like reality. The bearers of democratic legitimacy and agents of democratic law have become uncertain of their actual power. The keepers of the grand narratives, of our cosmic truths, appear unable to find a path to right action. The elites in their institutions are petrified by self-doubt.

Among the political left, there has been a robust debate whether to applaud or condemn antifa violence. The authorities that make life-and-death decisions are more concerned with not ending up on the wrong side of history. In the era of post-truth, with reality up for grabs, nobody wants to be perceived as anti-anti-fascist.

As the last righteous person, the nihilist aims to bring this about in the blood of random strangers. He acts out the violence that so many others perpetrate verbally and virtually on the web: he is, in that sense, the avenging angel of post-truth, and the rant made flesh.

The ISIS message resonated with thousands from Western countries who flocked to join the Caliphate. Many knew just a few words of Arabic. A significant minority was of non-Muslim origin. They chose barbarism over boredom, becoming actors in the apocalyptic drama instead of software programmers back home.

The defeat of ISIS demonstrates that when elites act with confidence in a cause that is shared across partisan and social lines, they can easily scatter the barbarian war-bands.

The democratic principle of access to the people in power is at war with the industrial age ideal of rule by remote, disinterested experts: and our representative system is too broken to mediate a settlement.

Yet democracy in a complex society can’t dispense with elites. That is the hard reality of the situation. Much more is involved than a need for specialized or esoteric knowledge. Today’s tastes may run to egalitarianism, but across history and cultures the only way to organize humanity, and get things done, has been through some level of command and control within a formal hierarchy.

If my analysis is anywhere close to the mark, the re-formation of liberal democracy, and the recovery of truth, must wait on the emergence of a legitimate elite class.

The quality that sets the true elites apart — that bestows authority on their actions and expressions — isn’t power, or wealth, or education, or even persuasiveness. It’s integrity in life and work. A healthy society is one in which such exemplary types draw the public toward them purely by the force of their example.

Innovation’s lightning may strike new domains: religion, so far, has remained singularly untouched.

Modern government’s original sin is pride. It was erected on a boast—that it can solve any “problem,” even to fixing the human condition—and it endures on a sickly diet of utopian expectations. We now know better.

The qualities I would look for among elites to get politics off this treadmill are honesty and humility: old-school virtues, long accepted to be the living spirit behind the machinery of the democratic republic, though now almost lost from sight. The reformers of democracy must learn to say, out loud for all to hear, “This is a process of trial and error,” and, “We are uncertain of the consequences,” and even, “I was wrong.”

Truth, Justice, Faith.  That was my original plan.  When I started choosing annual reading themes two years ago, I congratulated myself on my pursuit of this lofty and glorious philosophical trifecta of enlightenment.  How noble!  How wise!

And then Year 1 happened.  For the general theme of "Truth," I narrowed my focus to the "Integrity of Western Science" with a particular interest in the reproducibility crisis and "bad science."  In my professional life, I spend a lot of time thinking about measuring and monitoring the natural environment, so I was excited to learn more about modern climate science/policy controversies too.  And thus began my descent into the dank dungeon of epistemology and the philosophy of science.  It got real heavy, real fast.  And alarmingly, there didn't appear to be a solid bottom.

So Year 1 was intellectually challenging and gave me some new tools for seeing the world, especially the framing of climate policy as a continuation of the classic Malthusian vs. Cornucopian debate.  But was it fun?  Well... a very Type-2 kind of fun.  Good learning, but not so big on the thrills.

For Year 2: Justice, I contemplated with horror the prospect of a year of dusty law books and more piles of dense philosophical tomes.  Thank you, next.  It looked a lot more fun on the dark side.  And thus was born the idea of flipping Justice on its head and doing a year of "Financially-Motivated Crime" instead.  And let me tell you, it was a hell of a ride.  If you want to see where the real heists of the 21st century are taking place, I suggest that you Google "monetizing the state."  And yes, Goldman has an entire group dedicated to this entirely benevolent and above-board provision of liquidity to honest and selfless public officials across the world.

Next up, Faith.  The Year of Crime had re-energized me and I was ready to really buckle down and tackle a survey of world religions and really dig into Biblical hermeneutics.  Just kidding.  Hot off a Year of Crime, I was thirsty for a topic that would accelerate hard enough to, as fighter pilot John Boyd said, "roll my goddam socks down."  

What ideas are you willing to die for?  This question grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let go.  It shook me around like a rag doll as I scrambled to find any halfway compelling personal answer.  I terrorized friends, family, and random people sitting next to me on airplanes with pointed questions about the existence of principles they'd lay down their lives for.  "Family" was basically the only thing that people could come up with. And it struck me.  The Western world sucks at this question right now.

I fumbled around trying to find a more focused topic than "ideas people are willing to die for."  I wanted a variety of perspectives from different cultures around the world.  I wanted to analyze success and failures.  I wanted clear examples of people who put it all on the line and didn't back down.  I wanted well-documented, clear statements of their motives.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wanted a Year of Rebellion.

Because political (and sometimes religious) rebellions are aimed at the state and the state theoretically claims a monopoly on violence, death is almost always involved.  The scale of political rebellions forces individuals to move beyond familial or tribal loyalties and find more general principles to devote themselves to.  And there were plenty of rebellions to choose from.  America has both the Revolutionary and the Civil Wars and a number of quashed rebellions (Wikipedia has a whole page full).  Across the world, nearly every country has had a significant (although not necessarily successful) rebellion in the last 400 years:  Russia, China, Britain, France, Cuba, Iran, Egypt, Haiti, Czechoslovakia, Spain, South Africa, Italy, Ireland - and those are just off the top of my head.  

Not all of these have been the glorious successes that the people were promised.  The American Revolution seems to have turned out pretty well so far.  The Russian.... well maybe not so much.  The Chinese?  Seems like the jury is still out.  What accounts for these differences?  How do the stated goals of the revolutionaries match up with their real-world performance?  How do existing governments prevent rebellions?  How does a revolution that seizes power with a sword make the transition to a government of laws?  What inspires a man to take up arms in the first place?

Buckle up.  We're going to find out.

My 2018 reading theme was "Crime and Punishment", which ended up being a lot more fun than my 2017 theme of "The Integrity of Western Science!" I read over 100 books this year and have picked out my favorite 10 below.

If you enjoy my reviews, please help spread the word by sending one of my "Annual Best" posts to a book lover in your life!

Fiction

Historical Fiction - A Gentleman in Moscow is probably my favorite book I read this year. Told from the perspective of a Russian aristocrat placed under lifetime house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel, the novel manages to fit an entire universe inside the walls of the stately hotel as the Russian Revolution transforms the world outside. Count Alexander Rostov charms us throughout this homage to Montaigne's philosophy - a delightful novel that is even better on audiobook. Buy on Amazon

Bildungsroman - The Lords of Discipline is a close contender for my favorite book this year. Southern writer Pat Conroy pens a haunting account of young men enrolled at The Citadel - the famed South Carolina military academy. Inspired by Conroy's own experiences as a cadet at The Citadel, the novel pulses with the youthful exuberance and hilarity of young, terrified men as they confront the darker forces that await them in adulthood. A nearly perfect novel. Buy on Amazon

Classics - Many critics think that The Brothers Karamzov is the greatest book ever written. It's certainly up there for me. Although I had to exercise some patience with the slow-paced Russian style (and 40 hours of audiobook!), Dostoyevsky's penetrating meditations on good and evil, faith and reason, and love and crime made it clear why this book has earned a place at the pinnacle of world literature. The parable of the Grand Inquisitor was particularly chilling. I'd highly recommend listening to this on audiobook (I did the Naxos edition), as the narrator's delivery helped guide my interpretation of Dostoyevsky's literary intent. Buy on Amazon

Banned Books - When I describe Tropic of Cancer, I tend to compare it to "Catcher in the Rye" - that book that we all had to read in high school. If J.D. Salinger is serving us bitter lemonade, Henry Miller is prying open our jaws and pouring battery acid down our gullet. Originally published in Paris in 1934, Miller's masterpiece was banned in the US because of its incredible profanity and vulgarity. This book will ruin your week for sure. Buy on Amazon

Mythology - Circe is a feminist retelling of the Odyssey. Miller expertly walks a fine line, adding substantive feminist themes while still respecting the underlying mythology. Circe mixes a disorienting blend of classical morals and customs with modern feminist perspectives, resulting in a potent brew unlike anything else I've experienced. The audiobook is great too. Buy on Amazon

Non-Fiction

Finance - Treasure Islands was my favorite read from my year of "Crime and Punishment." An eye-opening account of the world of tax evasion and offshore finance, Treasure Islands reveals the mechanisms that are systematically shifting economic burdens from the wealthy to the poor at a mind-boggling scale. Shaxson exploring how this economic cheating destroys accountability between governing elites and the population at large, especially in developing nations. He includes a fair amount of technical detail about transfer pricing, loan-backs, revocable trusts, etc., but the most interesting part of this book was about the role that the City of London plays in the global web of dark money. Buy on Amazon

Corruption - The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth traces the illicit flows of tens of billions of dollars of African natural resource wealth to local dictators, Western corporations and financial elites, and - more recently - massive Chinese enterprises. Because the chronically cash-strapped rulers of resource-rich African states can rely on resource royalties from Western and Chinese companies, they're able to fund their regimes without taxing their local populations. This makes rulers unaccountable to their citizens - they don't need their consent to keep the army paid and the government running. They're able to get away with all sorts of blatantly self-serving corruption, like appropriating billions in government revenue and stashing it in personal bank accounts in London. Burgis names names and takes no prisoners. The Looting Machine was a great guide for understanding the mechanics of how corruption works in Africa. Buy on Amazon

History - The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government is a hefty biography of Allen Dulles that documents his rise from an intelligence agent in Europe during WWII to the head of the CIA. While his brother, John Foster Dulles, served as the Secretary of State, Allen ominously liked to refer to himself as “the secretary of state for unfriendly countries.” Dulles was an extremely ambitious and complicated man and Talbot (founder of Slate magazine) manages to condense Dulles's life into a comprehensible story while still giving us enough detail and context to begin to understand the man. The last third of the book turns into a JFK conspiracy theory which I enjoyed but remain quite skeptical of. Although if the CIA really did assassinate Kennedy... it would be inexcusable that Allen Dulles was allowed to serve on the Warren Commission! Buy on Amazon

Biography - Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror brings to life one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. Sebestyen shows us how Lenin ruthlessly seized the reins of power and forged the Soviet Union in his image. Packed with details of intrigue and violence, this Lenin biography filled a serious gap in my historical knowledge and helped me understand why Cold Warriors like Allen Dulles (see "The Devil's Chessboard" above) were willing to take such extreme measures to fight the global expansion of Communism. Buy on Amazon

Business - The Score Takes Care of Itself sits at the intersection of the two worst book genres: business and sports. Yet somehow, Bill Walsh's memoir managed to rise above the typical drivel and self-glorification of these sorts of books and actually delivered some ideas that changed my mind about management. I particularly liked his "Standard of Performance" concept and the importance of continual teaching. For Bay-area people, there are a bunch of fun connections to Stanford and San Francisco history in here too. Buy on Amazon

When Eisenhower became president, two brothers ascended to the commanding heights of the US foreign policy establishment. One brother, John Foster Dulles, was appointed Secretary of State. The other, Allen Dulles, became the head of the CIA. Or as he himself sinisterly called it, "the secretary of state for unfriendly countries." In "The Devil's Chessboard", David Talbot, founder of Slate Magazine, writes a biography of Allen Dulles and his covert actions at the height of secret power in America. The first two-thirds of the book is a relatively straightforward account of Dulles's life and the highlights of his intelligence career. Talbot documents Dulles's early days as a spy in Europe who collaborated with Nazis to combat the Soviet menace - a controversial and possibly treasonous maneuver. "Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who as a young lawyer served with Allen in the OSS, later declared that both Dulleses were guilty of treason." But Dulles knew how power worked - he used his connections and influence to reach ever higher in America's security establishment until he was able to begin to remake the world according to his vision. He (unsurprisingly) took a Machiavellian view of the world and insisted that it was better to be feared than loved - a perspective that directly clashed with JFK's and was the source of serious conflict between them. This perspective is on chilling display in a CIA handbook produced during Dulles's reign titled A Study of Assassination. His greatest "successes" were regime change in Iran and Guatemala, but he was humiliated by the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba. And it's at this point that the book shifts from a standard biography to something a bit more... conspiracy theory.

The last third of the book is devoted to Talbot's theory that Allen Dulles was behind the Kennedy assassination. And to be sure - Kennedy and Dulles hated each other. Kennedy even fired Dulles as head of the CIA. It's also strange that Dulles ran the Warren Commission that "investigated" the Kennedy assassination. Talbot documents all sorts of suspicious coincidences and connections between the CIA Bay of Pigs operation and the Kennedy assassination, but it's hard to know what evidence is cherry-picked and what's real. This part of the book isn't nearly as strong as the first two thirds, but it is plenty of fun. Of course, the CIA doesn't think so, according to their review of Talbot's book...

A spidery network of intrigue connected the Dulles story to much of the other reading I've done. The Guatemalan escapades with the United Fruit Company were extensively documented in The Fish that Ate the Whale. Henry Luce and his Time publishing empire were staunch allies of Dulles, but don't receive particularly favorable treatment in The China Mirage about American foreign policy blunders in China. The OAS de Gaulle assassination attempt (discussed in Legionnaire and represented fictionally in Forsyth's delightful Day of the Jackal) bears more than a passing resemblance to the Kennedy assassination... and Dulles was at least adjacent to both. There's a passing reference to Meyer Lansky and the Mafia in regards to the Cuban imbroglio, and even "King Leopold's Ghost" makes an appearance when Dulles may or may not have ordered the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Also, Carl Jung seems to keep popping up in these power-player biographies - Dulles's wife Clover spent a ton of time with him, as did one of Rockefeller's daughters (as documented in Chernow's excellent biography "Titan"). There are plenty of Yale connections in here too - the book is packed to the gills with Bonesmen - including a Kentuckian John Sherman Cooper who served on the Warren Commission!

My highlights below.

Epigraph

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. —THE INSCRIPTION CHOSEN BY ALLEN DULLES FOR THE LOBBY OF CIA HEADQUARTERS, FROM JOHN 8:31–32

They are the professionals, the entrepreneurs, the links between the businessmen, the politicians who desire the end but are afraid of the means, and the fanatics, the idealists who are prepared to die for their convictions. The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.” —A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS, ERIC AMBLER

Prologue

Given free rein by President Eisenhower to police the world against any insurgent threat to U.S. dominion, Dulles’s CIA overthrew nationalist governments in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, and even targeted troublesome leaders in allied European countries. Dulles called himself “the secretary of state for unfriendly countries”—which had an ominous ring when one took note of what happened to unfriendly countries in the American Century.

John Foster Dulles needed Communism the way that Puritans needed sin, the infamous British double agent Kim Philby once remarked.

Allen Dulles was one of the wiliest masters of secret power ever produced by America. And his most ambitious clandestine efforts were directed not against hostile governments but against his own. While serving in multiple presidential administrations, he learned to manipulate them and sometimes subvert them. In the view of the Dulles brothers, democracy was an enterprise that had to be carefully managed by the right men, not simply left to elected officials as a public trust. From their earliest days on Wall Street — where they ran Sullivan and Cromwell, the most powerful corporate law firm in the nation — their overriding commitment was always to the circle of accomplished, privileged men whom they saw as the true seat of power in America.

As younger men, the Dulles brothers were obsessive chess players.

John Foster Dulles would rise to become the chief counsel for American power, a man destined to quietly confer with kings, prime ministers, and despots. He liked to think of himself as chess master of the free world. His younger brother would become something more powerful still — the knight-errant who enforced America’s imperial will. As director of the CIA, Allen Dulles liked to think he was the hand of the king, but if so, he was the left hand—the sinister hand. He was master of the dark deeds that empires require.

Later, when Allen Dulles served as the United States’ top spy in continental Europe during World War II, he blatantly ignored Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional surrender and pursued his own strategy of secret negotiations with Nazi leaders. The staggering sacrifice made by the Russian people in the war against Hitler meant little to Dulles. He was more interested in salvaging the Third Reich’s security apparatus and turning it against the Soviet Union — which he had always regarded as America’s true enemy. After the war, Dulles helped a number of notorious war criminals escape via the “Nazi ratlines” that ran from Germany, down through Italy, to sanctuary in Latin America, the Middle East, and even the United States.

Eisenhower gave Dulles immense license to fight the administration’s shadow war against Communism, but at the end of his presidency, Ike concluded that Dulles had robbed him of his place in history as a peacemaker and left him nothing but “a legacy of ashes.” Dulles undermined or betrayed every president he served in high office.

Dulles would turn his Georgetown home into the center of an anti-Kennedy government in exile.

Dulles declared that the Kennedy presidency suffered from a “yearning to be loved by the rest of the world.” This “weakness” was not the mark of a global power, insisted Dulles. “I should much prefer to have people respect us than to try to make them love us.”

Many of the practices that still provoke bouts of American soul-searching originated during Dulles’s formative rule at the CIA. Mind control experimentation, torture, political assassination, extraordinary rendition, massive surveillance of U.S. citizens and foreign allies — these were all widely used tools of the Dulles reign.

Allen was less troubled by guilt or self-doubt than any of his siblings. He liked to tell people — and it was almost a boast — that he was one of the few men in Washington who could send people to their deaths.

This is a history of secret power in America.

Part I

1 - The Double Agent

Dulles not only enjoyed a professional and social familiarity with many members of the Third Reich’s elite that predated the war; he shared many of these men’s postwar goals.

Dulles also positioned himself in Bern because the Swiss capital was the center of wartime financial and political intrigue. Bern was an espionage bazaar, teeming with spies, double agents, informers, and peddlers of secrets. And, as Dulles knew, Switzerland was a financial haven for the Nazi war machine.

Dulles knew many of the central players in the secretive Swiss financial milieu because he and his brother had worked with them as clients or business partners before the war. Sullivan and Cromwell, the Dulles brothers’ Wall Street law firm, was at the center of an intricate international network of banks, investment firms, and industrial conglomerates that rebuilt Germany after World War I. Foster, the law firm’s top executive, grew skilled at structuring the complex merry-go-round of transactions that funneled massive U.S. investments into German industrial giants like the IG Farben chemical conglomerate and Krupp Steel.

Foster continued to represent German cartels like IG Farben as they were integrated into the Nazis’ growing war machine, helping the industrial giants secure access to key war materials. He donated money to America First, the campaign to keep the United States out of the gathering tempest in Europe, and helped sponsor a rally honoring Charles Lindbergh, the fair-haired aviation hero who had become enchanted by Hitler’s miraculous revival of Germany.

Like his brother, Allen Dulles was slow to grasp the malevolence of Hitler’s regime. Dulles met face-to-face with Hitler in the Führer’s Berlin office in March 1933. He was ostensibly on a fact-finding mission to Europe for President Roosevelt, but Dulles was particularly interested in determining what Hitler’s rise meant for his law firm’s corporate clients in Germany and the United States. As Dulles subsequently informed Foster, he did not find Hitler particularly alarming. And he was “rather impressed” with Joseph Goebbels, remarking on the Nazi propaganda chief’s “sincerity and frankness.”

And Allen and his wife, Clover, continued to socialize with the Lindberghs, who were their neighbors on Long Island’s Gold Coast shore.

Fleming was a great admirer of Stephenson, whom he called “a magnetic personality” and “one of the great secret agents” of World War II. The novelist, who worked with Stephenson’s operation as a British naval intelligence agent in Washington, also praised the spymaster’s martinis — which he served in quart glasses — as “the most powerful in America.”

By siccing men like William O. Douglas on men like John Foster Dulles, President Roosevelt drove the plutocracy mad. J. P. Morgan Jr. was so incensed by the “class traitor” FDR that his servants had to cut out the president’s picture from the Wall Street titan’s morning newspaper for fear that it would spike his blood pressure.

One of Dulles’s most important contacts in Europe was Thomas McKittrick, an old Wall Street friend who was president of the Bank for International Settlements.

BIS laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in Nazi gold looted from the treasuries of occupied countries.

McKittrick demonstrated equal disdain for the project, and his lack of cooperation proved particularly damaging to the operation, since BIS was the main conduit for the passage of Nazi gold.

By playing an intricate corporate shell game, Foster was able to hide the U.S. assets of major German cartels like IG Farben and Merck KGaA, the chemical and pharmaceutical giant, and protect these subsidiaries from being confiscated by the federal government as alien property.

If their powerful enemy in the White House had survived the war, the Dulles brothers would likely have faced serious criminal charges for their wartime activities. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who as a young lawyer served with Allen in the OSS, later declared that both Dulleses were guilty of treason.

But Roosevelt’s unconditional surrender declaration, which took Churchill by surprise, was FDR’s way of reassuring Stalin that the Americans and British would not sell out the Soviet Union by cutting a separate peace deal with Nazi leaders.

The Casablanca Declaration had clearly unnerved Himmler’s circle by making it clear that there would be no escape for the Reich’s “barbaric leaders.” But Dulles took pains to put his guest’s mind at rest. The Allies’ declaration, Dulles assured him, was “merely a piece of paper to be scrapped without further ado if Germany would sue for peace.” Thus began Allen Dulles’s reign of treason as America’s top spy in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Before the war, Dulles had been an occasional guest of Lord and Lady Astor at Cliveden, the posh couple’s country home along the Thames that became notorious as a weekend retreat for the pro-Nazi aristocracy. (There is no getting around this unwelcome fact: Hitler was much more fashionable in the social settings that men like Dulles frequented—in England as well as the United States—than it was later comfortable to admit.)

At one point, Himmler even recruited fashion designer Coco Chanel, bringing her to Berlin to discuss strategy.

2 - Human Smoke

Neither Allen, Foster, nor their three sisters were ever as devout as their father, the Reverend Allen Macy Dulles, who presided over a small Presbyterian flock in Watertown, New York, a sleepy retreat favored by New York millionaires near Lake Ontario.

His illustrious father-in-law, the luxuriantly bewhiskered John Watson Foster, who had served briefly as secretary of state under President Benjamin Harrison and then established himself as one of Washington’s first power attorneys, was a beneficent presence in the family’s life.

Clover Dulles called her cold and driven husband “The Shark.”

It was her mother, Eleanor would recall, who ran the family.

Morgenthau was so integral a member of Roosevelt’s inner circle that he was known as “the assistant president.” He was of German Jewish ancestry and Democratic Party royalty. His father, New York real estate mogul Henry Morgenthau Sr., had been one of President Woodrow Wilson’s major financial backers and served as Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Henry Jr., who ran a Hudson Valley farm near the Roosevelt family’s Hyde Park estate, would develop a long personal and political relationship with FDR. When Franklin’s privileged life was suddenly turned upside down by the ravages of polio, Morgenthau was one of the few political advisers who remained close to him, keeping his spirits up with games of Parcheesi.

It is not widely recognized that the Nazi reign of terror was, in a fundamental way, a lucrative racket — an extensive criminal enterprise set up to loot the wealth of Jewish victims and exploit their labor. The chemical giant Farben was at the forefront of integrating concentration camp labor into its industrial production process, with other major German corporations like Volkswagen, Siemens, and Krupp following closely behind. Himmler’s SS empire moved aggressively to cut itself in on the spoils, extracting sizable payments from these companies for providing them with a steady flow of forced labor.

Instead, Dulles sent off a routine cable on the Vrba-Wetzler report to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, a man Dulles knew would not lift a finger to help the Jews, even though he was married to a Jewish woman.

3 - Ghosts of Nuremberg

But by 1945, Nuremberg had been reduced to rubble. On January 2, Royal Air Force and U.S. Army Air Force bombers swarmed over the city and destroyed the glories of its medieval center in just one hour.

The Nuremberg trial was a moral milestone, the first time that top government officials were held accountable for crimes against humanity that in earlier days would have likely been dismissed as the natural acts of war.

President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill were so intent on meting out a fitting punishment that they originally favored taking the law into their own hands and summarily shooting Hitler’s top military, ministerial, and party ranks—Churchill estimated the number would be somewhere between fifty and a hundred men. The prime minister thought that once the proper identifications were made, the killing could be completed within six hours. In one of history’s deeper ironies, it was Joseph Stalin who insisted that the Nazi leaders be put on trial, lecturing his Western allies on the merits of due process. “U[ncle]. J[oe]. took an unexpectedly ultra-respectable line,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt after meeting with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944. The Soviet premier told Churchill that “there must be no executions without trial; otherwise the world would say we were afraid to try them.”

He also antagonized his powerful enemies, he explained, by going after “German industrialists whose plight arouses the class loyalties of their opposition numbers in Great Britain and the United States. We cannot forget [for example] that one of the big war factories in Germany was the Opel Company which was owned and financed by the General Motors Corporation, a company in which Secretary Stettinius had a great interest. The biggest electric company in Germany was owned and financed by the General Electric Company of New York. We have here very potent reasons why a large and important group in this country is trying to pipe down on the serious investigations of [corporate Germany’s collaboration with the Nazis].”

And Schacht, for his part, had remained a well-respected figure in New York, London, and Swiss banking circles even after selling his soul to Hitler. (Schacht later fell out with the Führer and spent the final days of the war in the VIP section of Dachau, where prisoners received relatively lenient treatment.) The banker knew where much of Nazi Germany’s assets were hidden, which continued to make him a valued man in global financial circles.

But, due to sloppiness or ill will, the Nuremberg hangings were not professionally carried out. The drop was not long enough, so some of the condemned dangled in agony at the end of their ropes for long stretches of time before they died.

4 - Sunrise

The SS general was the key to Dulles’s greatest wartime ambition: securing a separate peace with Nazi forces in Italy before the Soviet army could push into Austria and southward toward Trieste.

The Gaevernitzes had broken from the Nazis early on, and Dulles helped funnel their money to safe havens outside of Germany, as he did for many wealthy Germans, including those who remained loyal to the Nazi regime, before and during the war.

Time magazine — which, under the ownership of his close friend Henry Luce, could always be counted on to give Dulles good press — trumpeted Operation Sunrise as “one of the most stunning triumphs in the history of secret wartime diplomacy.”

His business background gave Wolff cachet in the SS, where such skills were in short supply. It was Wolff who was put in charge of Himmler’s important “circle of friends,” a select group of some three dozen German industrialists and bankers who supplied the SS with a stream of slush money. “Himmler was no businessman and I took care of banking matters for him,” Wolff later recalled. In return for their generosity, the corporate donors were given special access to pools of slave labor. They were also invited to attend high-level government meetings and special Nazi Party ceremonies.

Under the terms of Operation Sunrise, Wolff specifically agreed not to blow up the region’s many hydroelectric plants, which generated power from the water roaring down from the Alps. Most of these installations were owned by a multinational holding company called Italian Superpower Corporation. Incorporated in Delaware in 1928, Italian Superpower’s board was evenly divided between American and Italian utility executives, and by the following year the power company was swallowed by a bigger, J. P. Morgan–financed cartel. The ties between Italian Superpower and Dulles’s financial circle were reinforced when, toward the end of the war, the spymaster’s good friend — New York banker James Russell Forgan — took over as his OSS boss in London. Forgan was one of Italian Superpower’s directors.

Dulles succeeded in keeping Wolff off the Nuremberg defendants list. The general would appear at the trial only as a witness, testifying on behalf of his fellow war criminal Hermann Goering.

5 - Ratlines

Counterintelligence was the spy craft’s deepest mind game—it was not just figuring out the enemy’s next moves in advance and blocking them, but learning to think like him. Not yet thirty, Angleton was already being talked about in American and British intelligence circles as one of the masters of the field. He had been educated in British prep schools and at Yale, where he had edited the avant-garde poetry magazine Furioso and courted the likes of Ezra Pound and e.e. cummings as contributors, and he seemed to bring an artist’s intuition to his profession.

Angleton looked up to Dulles as a mentor — a powerful figure in the mold of his adored father, James Hugh Angleton, an international businessman who had paved his son’s path into the spy trade and continued to play an influential role in the young spook’s life. Dulles would remain a strong, paternal figure for Angleton junior throughout their deeply entwined intelligence careers.

In Naples, he was invited to the midnight entertainments at Duchess Rosalba’s decaying mansion, festivities so lavishly debauched that they could have inspired a young Fellini.

It was the most peculiar of ironies, and one that Dollmann and his intimates no doubt privately relished. The man who kept the Axis partners smoothly aligned, with his impressive language and social skills, was a highly educated, arts-loving homosexual who enjoyed trading in the most salacious gossip about the personalities who ruled Germany and Italy. Dollmann was, in short, precisely the type of person the Nazis sent to the gas chambers. But instead, Hitler’s interpreter was free to attend gay and lesbian orgies in Venice, a city whose shadows offered some protection from the authorities’ prying eyes. And he had the pleasure of going on shopping safaris with Eva Braun, Hitler’s companion, during her Italian holidays.

Dollmann was fond of Braun, a sweet and simple young woman who confided her sad life to him. She was known throughout the world as the German strongman’s mistress, but, as she confessed to Dollmann, there was no sexual intimacy between her and the Führer. “He is a saint,” Braun told Dollmann wistfully. “The idea of physical contact would be for him to defile his mission. Many times we sit and watch the sun come up after spending the whole night talking. He says to me that his only love is Germany and to forget it, even for a moment, would shatter the mystical forces of his mission.”

The general’s small audience listened in rapt silence, transfixed by the portrait of a Hitler who was more interested in boyish men than in national politics.

“He was a daemonic personality, a Lucifer with cold blue eyes.” One night, Heydrich demanded that Dollmann take him to Naples’s finest brothel. Two dozen half-naked women representing the full spectrum of the female form—from “slim gazelles to buxom Rubenesque beauties”—were arranged for Heydrich’s inspection in the brothel’s ornate lobby, with its gilt-edged mirrors and frescoes of rosy nymphs. Heydrich gazed at the women on display with his blank, shark eyes. Considering the SS butcher’s reputation, Dollmann did not know what to expect next. Suddenly Heydrich flung a fistful of shiny gold coins across the marble floor. “Then he jumped up, Lucifer personified, and clapped his hands. With a sweeping gesture, he invited the girls to pick up the gold. A Walpurgisnacht orgy ensued. Fat and thin, ponderous and agile, the [women] scrambled madly across the salotto floor on all fours.” Afterward, Heydrich looked pale and spent, as if he himself had joined in the frenzy. He coolly thanked Dollmann and disappeared into the night. The interpreter was glad to see Heydrich go. He was, said Dollmann, “the only man I instinctively feared.”

Angleton seemed to work more closely with the British spies than with his U.S. Army colleagues, and the British treated him like one of their own. Before transferring to Rome in 1944, Angleton had been stationed in London, where his X-2 unit was overseen by British intelligence.

Rauff would cap his bloody career in Chile, where he became a top adviser to DINA, military dictator Augusto Pinochet’s own Gestapo.

Angleton was also raised in wealth. But his father, Hugh, was not the Main Line type. He was a swashbuckling, self-made man who had swept up his future wife, Carmen, when she was a teenager in Mexico, after he joined General John “Black Jack” Pershing’s 1916 expedition to capture Pancho Villa.

Nonetheless, by 1947, many in the American military hierarchy shared the Dulles-Angleton view that fighting Communism was a bigger priority than prosecuting fascist war criminals.

Few station chiefs come close to having the literary touch of onetime spies like Graham Greene, David Cornwell (John le Carré), or Ian Fleming.

Dulles had recently published The Secret Surrender, his Operation Sunrise memoir, and Dollmann was upset to read the spymaster’s description of him as a “slippery customer.”

Part II

6 - Useful People

Allen Dulles’s wife, Clover, and his wartime mistress, Mary Bancroft, were both patients of Carl Jung.

Despite their striking personality differences—and their awkward romantic triangle—Clover and Mary developed a unique friendship that would last the rest of their lives.

Mary sought enlightenment from the great Jung. She made her way down the long, tree-lined path to his home on Lake Zurich, above whose elaborate stone portal was etched in Latin: Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit (“Called or uncalled, God will be present”). Jung was alive to the potential of the supernatural. He believed in demons and angels. The inscription reminded Jung, who said he always felt “unsafe,” that he was “in the presence of superior possibilities.”

During World War I, she volunteered as a canteen girl in a Paris officers’ club. She sometimes wandered the streets of the war-tattered city dressed as a beggar, just to feel what it was like to be someone else, someone who had to plead for bread.

Clover and Allen’s oldest daughter, Martha (“Toddie”), also grappled with psychic demons throughout her life — bouts of manic depression that became so severe that she submitted to multiple rounds of electroshock therapy.

It was Clover’s curse to spend her life with such a man, and it was Allen’s to live with a woman who was finally able to understand him.

Clover told Mary that she had once heard the Dulles brothers referred to as sharks. “And I do think they are,” said the wife to the mistress. “I guess there’s no solution but for you and me to be killer whales!” From then on, the two women referred to Allen as “The Shark” and to themselves as the “Killer Whales.”

Mary also proved that she was more tuned in to certain nuances of the spy craft than Dulles. She realized, for instance, that intelligence could be gathered from the enemy as well as Allied camps by tapping into the underground homosexual network that ran through Europe’s diplomatic and espionage circles.

Although Dulles and Jung met face-to-face in early 1943, Mary also continued to serve as the main link between the two commanding men in her life. Both men were excited by the idea of forging a pioneering marriage between espionage and psychology.

One evening, while warming themselves by the fireplace at Herrengasse, Mary fell into conversation with Dulles about Napoleon’s love life. She told him that she had read that the great conqueror had enjoyed nine women during his life. “Nine!” exclaimed Dulles. “I beat him by one!”

The following year, after being named Austria’s ambassador to Iran, Buresch took Joan off to Tehran, another highly sensitive diplomatic posting. Joan suddenly found herself amid the imperial splendor of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s court, the emperor reinstalled on the Peacock Throne by her father, after the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953.

One day, while sitting in his study — a room stuffed with books, busts of Voltaire and Nietzsche, and primitive artifacts — Jung made an observation that stuck with Mary for many years. The opposite of love is not hate, he said. It’s power. Relationships fueled by a drive for power, where one person seeks dominance over the other, are incapable of producing love.

7 - Little Mice

At the end of 1945, Dulles was elected president of the Council on Foreign Relations

In April 1947, he was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee to present his ideas for a strong, centralized intelligence agency. His memo would help frame the legislation that gave birth to the CIA later that year.

Allen Dulles believed that the shadow war between the West and the Soviet bloc would have few if any rules, and he was contemptuous of any attempts in Washington to put limits on the conflict. He assumed that the United States faced an utterly ruthless enemy in Moscow, and he was prepared to match or go beyond whatever measures were employed by Russia’s KGB and the Eastern bloc’s other security services. Dulles’s aggressive Cold War stance found a key ally in President Truman’s defense secretary, James V. Forrestal, a former Wall Street investment banker at Dillon, Read who moved in Dulles’s circles and who shared Dulles’s suspicions about the Soviet Union.

Angry and despondent about his ouster, he began spiraling quickly downward, ranting about how the Soviets had infiltrated Washington and how they had marked him for liquidation. Early in the morning of May 22, 1949, after Forrestal was checked into the Bethesda Naval Hospital for psychiatric evaluation, he squeezed through the small bathroom window of his sixteenth-floor hospital suite and fell to his death. The tragic collapse of the defense secretary, a man who had controlled America’s fearsome arsenal, was one of the stranger episodes of the Cold War.

In June 1949, Dulles organized the National Committee for a Free Europe in conjunction with an illustrious board that included General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille, and Time-Life publishing magnate (and close friend) Henry Luce. Ostensibly a private philanthropic group, the committee was actually a CIA front that channeled funds to anti-Communist European émigrés and financed major propaganda efforts like Radio Free Europe. At least $2 million of the money poured into the committee’s clandestine projects came from the Nazi gold that Dulles had helped track down at the end of the war.

Dulles and Wisner were essentially operating their own private spy agency. The OPC was run with little government oversight and few moral restrictions. Many of the agency’s recruits were ex-Nazis.

By turning the unsuspecting Field family into members of a far-reaching U.S. spy ring, Dulles would panic Stalin — already rattled by the 1948 defection of Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito — into launching witch hunts that would fracture the Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe. As with all the bold counterintelligence gambits he undertook during his career, Dulles threw himself into the Field affair with great relish, even personally giving it a code name: Operation Splinter Factor.

Both sides saw the dreamy Field as a useful victim. Earl Browder, leader of the U.S. Communist Party, would anoint him “a stupid child in the woods.”

In Czechoslovakia, where nearly 170,000 Communist Party members were seized as suspects in the make-believe Field plot, the political crisis grew so severe that the economy nearly collapsed.

“Dulles had a certain arrogance in which he believed that he could work with the Devil — anybody’s Devil — and still be Allen Dulles,” she told her visitor. “He could work with Noel Field and betray him. He could work with the Nazis or with the Communists. He thought himself untouchable by these experiences and, of course, you cannot help be touched, be affected, no matter how noble your cause is.”

8 - Scoundrel Time

(Dulles had another motive for backing the Marshall Plan: he and Frank Wisner would later use funds skimmed from the program to finance their anti-Soviet operations in Europe.)

When Nixon was finishing law school at Duke University in 1937, he spent a frigid Christmas week in New York searching for a starting position with a prestigious Wall Street firm. He managed to get on the appointments calendar at Sullivan and Cromwell, the firm of his dreams.

The political relationship forged between the rising politician from California and Dulles’s East Coast circle would become one of the most significant partnerships of the postwar era.

While sifting through the military paperwork, Nixon came across eye-opening Nazi documents that had been shipped to an old torpedo factory on the Virginia side of the Potomac. Some of these documents revealed how the Dulles brothers had helped launder Nazi funds during the war. Loftus, citing confidential intelligence sources, alleged that Dulles and Nixon proceeded to cut a deal. “Allen Dulles,” reported Loftus, “told him to keep quiet about what he had seen and, in return, [Dulles] arranged to finance the young man’s first congressional campaign against Jerry Voorhis.”

Voorhis also posed a direct legal threat to the Dulles brothers through his efforts to shine a light on the wartime collusion between Sullivan and Cromwell clients like Standard Oil and DuPont chemical company and Nazi cartels such as IG Farben. Voorhis further unnerved the Dulles circle by demanding a congressional investigation of the controversial Bank for International Settlements, charging that bank president Thomas McKittrick, a close associate of the Dulles brothers, was a Nazi collaborator.

The Cold War furies that Nixon and the Dulles brothers helped to unleash scoured all nuance and charity from American politics.

When Roosevelt was elected in 1932, and Hiss received a telegram from Felix Frankfurter, his former Harvard law professor and an adviser to FDR, urging him to come work for the new administration “on the basis of national emergency,” Hiss knew that he had to sign up.

The political complexity of the Hiss case was further entangled by its interpersonal complications. Although a married man with children, Chambers confessed to the FBI that he had led a secret homosexual life.

“The true story of the Hiss case,” Nixon revealed to a congressional confidante on board his presidential yacht a quarter century later, was that Hiss and Chambers had been “queers.”

Harry Dexter White was a slight, bespectacled, fifty-five-year-old former government economist whose name meant little to the general public. But as the big thinker in Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury Department, White had played a major role in shaping New Deal policy. Among his many accomplishments was the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two linchpins of the postwar global financial order that White was widely credited with spearheading. White joined forces with the esteemed British economist John Maynard Keynes to hammer out the plans for the world’s new financial system, but while Keynes provided substantial intellectual input, it was the politically savvy White who was key to bringing the plans to fruition. White would later be hailed as “arguably the most important U.S. government economist of the 20th century.”

Morgenthau and White led a movement at the conference to abolish the Bank for International Settlements, an institution they saw as an instrument of financial collaboration among New York, London, and Nazi Germany.

By seizing the investigative momentum, Republicans like Dick Nixon, whom Loftus called “Allen Dulles’s mouthpiece in Congress,” made sure that the Dulles circle would never have to answer for their wartime actions.

As White’s biographer, R. Bruce Craig, would conclude, he probably was guilty of “a species of espionage,” but a fairly benign one. There is no evidence that White handed over classified documents or subverted U.S. policy to correspond with the Soviet line. But he was guilty of frequent indiscretion when discussing policy issues with Soviet officials or with his left-wing friends and colleagues.

Harry Dexter White’s death signified the final collapse of Washington’s New Deal order and the unique brand of utopian internationalism that he had championed. It was men like Nixon and Dulles who now moved into the vacuum.

Despite Wisner’s feelings about Malaxa, he realized that Allen Dulles was deeply implicated in the Romanian’s “unsavory” story. Dulles had not only been Malaxa’s lawyer, he had introduced him to Nixon. The Malaxa money trail, in fact, led in many compromising directions, including Nixon’s bank account, Dulles’s law firm, CIA front organizations like the National Committee for a Free Europe, and even some of Wisner’s own secret combat groups. The Romanian industrialist, who reportedly stashed away as much as $500 million (worth over $6.5 billion today) in overseas accounts before he fled to the United States, had made himself extremely useful as a shadow financier for the underground Cold War.

9 - The Power Elite

The 1952 presidential election represented the triumph of “the power elite,” in the phrase coined by sociologist C. Wright Mills, academia’s most trenchant observer of Cold War America. Mills was a ruggedly independent, Texas-born scholar. He lived in a farmhouse forty miles outside of New York City and rode a motorcycle that he had built with his own hands to the classes he taught at Columbia University. He favored flannel shirts and work boots, and confided to friends that “way down deep and systematically I’m a goddamned anarchist.”

Instead, Mills wrote in his 1956 masterpiece The Power Elite, America was ruled by those who control the “strategic command posts” of society — the big corporations, the machinery of the state, and the military establishment.

The crucial task of unifying the power elite, according to Mills, fell to a special subset of the corporate hierarchy — top Wall Street lawyers and investment bankers. These men were the “in-between types” who shuttled smoothly between Manhattan corporate suites and Washington command posts.

But The Power Elite touched a deep chord with a rising new generation of revolutionaries and radicals that was soon to make its impact on history. Young Fidel Castro and Che Guevara pored over the book in the Sierra Maestra mountains. And, at home, Tom Hayden drew heavily on Mills’s writing for the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of the emerging New Left.

“The real truth,” FDR wrote to Colonel Edward M. House, President Wilson’s close adviser, “as you and I know, is that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”

C. Wright Mills was among the first to take note of how “national security” could be invoked by the power elite to more deeply disguise its operations. The Dulles brothers would prove masters at exploiting the anxious state of permanent vigilance that accompanied the Cold War. “For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency’ without foreseeable end,” Mills wrote. “Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.”

Foster later brought out the wicked wit in Churchill, who proclaimed him “Dull, Duller, Dulles.”

the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign by channeling funds to the Republican ticket through CIA front groups and by leaking embarrassing intelligence reports to the media about the Truman administration’s handling of the Korean War — flagrant violations of the CIA charter that forbids agency involvement in domestic politics.

“Smith lacked confidence in Dulles’s self-restraint.” The general felt that Dulles was too enamored of the dark arts of the spy trade. Smith would tell friends that running the CIA sometimes made it necessary to leave his moral values outside the door. But, he quickly added, clinging to his soldierly code of conduct, “You’d damned well better remember exactly where you left them.”

The Dewey-Dulles group was Ike’s brain trust and bank. When these men spoke, the general listened.

Eisenhower saw the CIA (along with the Pentagon’s nuclear firepower) as the most cost-effective way to enforce American interests overseas.

The carnival of shame and humiliation that McCarthy brought to Washington held the capital in its grip from February 1950 — when he delivered the infamous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that kicked off his inquisition (“I have in my hand a list of names . . .”) — to December 1954, when the Senate finally voted to censure him, triggering his rapid political and physical collapse.

McCarthy was a monster of the Republican leadership’s own creation. By the time he claimed the national spotlight in 1950, the GOP had long been using the dark incantations of “treason” and “un-Americanism” for political advantage against the Democrats.

But the truth is that Foster did exert his influence on his brother’s behalf, and Eisenhower never felt close to the younger Dulles, regarding him as a necessary evil in his shadow war with world Communism.

By and large, though, the Dulles fraternal partnership was a machine of humming efficiency.

“It came to mean very quickly that when a situation would not yield to normal diplomatic pressure, Allen’s boys were expected to step in and take care of the matter.”

A number of these purge victims, such as John Carter Vincent and John Paton Davies Jr., were veterans of the China desk, where their only crime was infuriating the right-wing Taiwan lobby by honestly evaluating why Communist revolutionary Mao Tse-tung had been able to defeat corrupt warlord Chiang Kai-shek.

Foster even forced out one of the brightest, most respected intellectual stars in the foreign service firmament, Soviet expert George F. Kennan, simply because he took exception to the secretary of state’s “liberation” strategy aimed at Eastern Europe — a policy so dangerously unviable that even Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers themselves would soon make clear that they had no intention of following through on this campaign promise to “roll back” the Iron Curtain.

Ironically, it was McCarthy’s aggressive chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who took the lead in questioning suspected homosexuals. Cohn, whose heavy-lidded eyes and leathery, perpetually tanned skin gave him a serpentine look, was not only gay but had installed his twenty-six-year-old playmate, a rich golden boy with no particular credentials named David Schine, on his staff.

McCarthy’s prime suspect was a bespectacled, Ivy League–educated CIA analyst named William Bundy, whose profile made him the perfect embodiment of the Dulles agency man. A member of Yale’s secretive Skull and Bones society — breeding ground for future spooks — Bundy joined Army intelligence during the war, working at Bletchley Park in England as part of the Ultra operation that cracked Nazi codes. Dulles was close to Bundy’s father, Harvey, a top diplomat who had helped oversee the Marshall Plan, as well as his younger brother, McGeorge, another product of Skull and Bones and Army intelligence who had worked with Dulles at the Council on Foreign Relations and on the Dewey presidential campaign.

Dulles knew that, despite J. Edgar Hoover’s growing doubts about McCarthy, the FBI still fed him a stream of damaging information about his Washington enemies. Hoover, a sworn rival ever since Dulles outmaneuvered him to create the CIA in 1947, had amassed a thick file on Dulles and his busy adulterous life.

Jim Angleton liked to say that any intelligence service that didn’t keep a close eye on its own government wasn’t worth its salt. “Penetration begins at home,” he quipped.

Dulles compiled even more scandalous files on Joe McCarthy’s sex life. The senator who relentlessly hunted down homosexuals in government was widely rumored to haunt the “bird circuit” near Grand Central Station as well as gay hideaways in Milwaukee.

This gave Dulles leverage in his battle with McCarthy that none of the senator’s other political opponents enjoyed. There was an explosive sexual subtext to the CIA’s power struggle with McCarthy, one that was largely hidden from the public but would eventually erupt in the Senate hearings that brought him down.

After enduring years of relentless harassment from Red hunters, many Washington liberals cheered Dulles as a savior. His CIA became known as a haven for the intelligentsia and for others looked on with suspicion by McCarthyites.

By the time the Army’s distinguished Boston attorney, Joseph Nye Welch, uttered his devastating and instantly memorable line — “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” — the American people knew the answer.

10 - The Dulles Imperium

Licio Gelli — leader of Propaganda Due, the conspiratorial Masonic order whose intrigues undermined Italian democracy for many years — kept three adjoining rooms at the hotel.

After Mossadegh’s bold move, the British spy agency MI6 began working strenuously to undermine his government. When the prime minister responded to the British plotting by shutting down the British embassy in Tehran and ejecting the ambassador, London turned to Washington for assistance.

Eisenhower’s innate midwestern sense of decency initially made him recoil from backing Britain’s colonial siege of Iran. He rebuffed the Dulles brothers’ advice, suggesting that it might be a better idea to stabilize Mossadegh’s government with a $100 million loan than to topple it. If Eisenhower had followed through on his original instincts, the bedeviled history of U.S.-Iran relations would undoubtedly have taken a far different course.

In June 1953, Allen presented the CIA plan to overthrow Mossadegh’s government to his brother at a special meeting of national security policy makers held in Foster’s office. The coup plan had been drawn up by Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr., Allen’s handpicked man to run the operation on the ground in Iran. The well-bred grandson of Theodore Roosevelt did not seem like the sort of cutthroat character to carry out such a disreputable task. Roosevelt was well regarded even by ideological enemies like Kim Philby. “Oddly enough, I dubbed [Roosevelt] ‘the quiet American’ five years before Graham Greene wrote his book,” Philby once noted. “He was a courteous, soft-spoken Easterner with impeccable social connections, well-educated rather than intellectual, pleasant and unassuming as host and guest. An equally nice wife. In fact, the last person you would expect to be up to the neck in dirty tricks.”

While Dulles was dallying with Luce’s wife, the magazine mogul was enjoying himself with Dulles’s wartime mistress, Mary Bancroft. But the strongest link between Dulles and the Luces was their shared conviction that they were driving forces behind what Henry had christened “the American Century.”

Dulles would look back on the coup in Iran as one of the two greatest triumphs of his CIA career, along with the regime change he engineered in Guatemala the following year.

Under a new agreement with the major oil companies orchestrated by the shah a few months after the coup, Iran’s oil industry was denationalized. Once again, the country’s natural treasure was handed over to foreign corporations, with 40 percent of the spoils now going to American oil producers, including Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Standard Oil of California. Kim Roosevelt was among those who cashed in on the coup, leaving the CIA in 1958 to join the management of Gulf Oil, where he took charge of the company’s relations with foreign governments, including the Iran regime.

During Eisenhower’s periods of incapacitation, it was Foster Dulles and Vice President Nixon, the Dulles brothers’ acolyte, who moved into the presidential power vacuum.

Or, in the mordant observation of Randolph Bourne as the United States plunged into the epic madness of World War I, “War is the health of the state.” Foster, who always acted in the interests of the American establishment, understood this. It was this permanent war fever that empowered the country’s political and military hierarchies and enriched the increasingly militarized corporate sector. It was the very lifeblood of this ruling group’s existence—even if, in the atomic age, it threatened the existence of humanity.

Dulles’s CIA operated with virtually no congressional oversight. In the Senate, Dulles relied on Wall Street friends like Prescott Bush of Connecticut—the father and grandfather of two future presidents—to protect the CIA’s interests. According to CIA veteran Robert Crowley, who rose to become second-in-command of the CIA’s action arm, Bush “was the day-to-day contact man for the CIA. It was very bipartisan and friendly. Dulles felt that he had the Senate just where he wanted them.”

A young Argentinian doctor named Che Guevara — who had come to Guatemala to help the bold Arbenz experiment in progressive democracy — was among those who implored the besieged president to arm the people, when Arbenz’s army officers began to melt around him under pressure from the CIA.

In June 1952, Arbenz pushed a sweeping land reform bill through his nation’s legislature aimed at redistributing the heavily rural country’s farm acreage, 70 percent of which was in the hands of 2 percent of the landowners. Among the properties expropriated under the new law and handed over to poor farmers were some of the vast estates of United Fruit.

One would have to go far back in time, to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — when the Dutch East India Company ruled a far-flung empire, with the power to make war, negotiate treaties, hang convicts, and mint its own money — to find another corporation that wielded such clout. United Fruit was especially well connected to the Eisenhower administration. As the agribusiness giant began lobbying the White House to overthrow Arbenz, Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, the president’s trusted friend and undersecretary of state, was seeking an executive position with the company. After the coup, he was named to United Fruit’s board of directors. Henry Cabot Lodge, who argued the United Fruit case against Arbenz as Eisenhower’s UN ambassador, belonged to one of the blue-blooded Boston families whose fortunes were long entwined with the banana company. John Moors Cabot, who was in charge of Latin American affairs at the State Department, was the brother of United Fruit’s former chief executive. Even the president’s personal secretary, Ann Whitman, was connected to United Fruit: her husband was the company’s public relations director. But United Fruit had no more powerful friends in the administration than the Dulles brothers. The Dulleses had served as United Fruit’s lawyers from their earliest days at Sullivan and Cromwell.

Upon returning from his corporate spy mission, Foster made a confidential report to his uncle, Robert Lansing, who was not only a former counsel for United Fruit but President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state.

By the time that the bloodletting had run its course, four decades later, over 250,000 people had been killed in a nation whose total population was less than four million when the reign of terror began.

Another document — a chillingly detailed, nineteen-page CIA killing manual titled “A Study of Assassination” — offered the most efficient ways to butcher Guatemala’s leadership. “The simplest tools are often the most efficient means of assassination,” the manual helpfully suggested. “A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.”

“Murder is not morally justified,” the manual briefly acknowledged. “Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.”

11 - Strange Love

Gehlen’s exalted reputation as an intelligence wizard, which won him the Führer’s admiration and his major general’s rank, derived from his organization’s widespread use of torture.

With the generous support of the American government, the Gehlen Organization — as it came to be known — thrived in Pullach, becoming West Germany’s principal intelligence agency.

In fact, the Dulles policy of massive nuclear retaliation bore a disturbing resemblance to the Nazis’ exterminationist philosophy — a link that would be darkly satirized in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, with its Führer-saluting doomsday scientist. No other cultural artifact of the period captures so perfectly the absurd morbidity of the Cold War, and its Wagnerian lust for oblivion. We live “in an age in which war is a paramount activity of man,” Gehlen announced in his memoir, “with the total annihilation of the enemy as its primary aim.” There could be no more succinct a statement of the fascist ethos.

These authoritarian plans were part of a sweeping covert strategy developed in the earliest days of the Cold War by U.S. intelligence officials, including Dulles, to counter a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe by creating a “stay-behind network” of armed resisters to fight the Red Army. Code-named Operation Gladio, these secret CIA-funded networks attracted fascist and criminal elements, some of which later played subversive roles in West Germany, France, and Italy, disrupting democratic rule in those countries by staging terrorist acts and plotting coups and assassinations.

12 - Brain Warfare

What Dulles did not tell his audience in Hot Springs was that several days earlier, he had authorized a CIA mind control program code-named MKULTRA that would dwarf any similar efforts behind the Iron Curtain.

At Camp King, CIA scientists and their German colleagues subjected victims to dangerous combinations of drugs — including Benzedrine, Pentothal-Natrium, LSD, and mescaline — under a research protocol that stipulated, “Disposal of the body is not a problem.” More than sixteen hundred of the Nazi scientists recruited for U.S. research projects like this would be comfortably resettled with their families in America under a CIA program known as Operation Paperclip.

The CIA chemist preyed on “people who could not fight back,” as one agency official put it, such as seven patients in a federal drug hospital in Kentucky who were dosed with acid for seventy-seven straight days by a Gottlieb-funded doctor who ran the hospital’s addiction treatment program.

In 1975, the case resurfaced during the Rockefeller Commission investigation of CIA abuses ordered by President Gerald Ford. Olson’s widow and grown children were invited to the White House by President Ford, who apologized to them on behalf of the government. The Olson case would become enshrined in history as one of the more outrageous examples of CIA hubris and mad science. But as the years went by, the Olson family became convinced that Frank Olson’s death was more than simply a tragic suicide; it was murder.

When Wolff was asked by a colleague why he had never bothered to be board-certified in neurology, he looked puzzled for a moment, and then replied, “But who would test me?”

In 1955, Wolff agreed to become president of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, the primary CIA front for channeling research funds to a wide array of mind control researchers in medicine, psychology, and sociology.

Allen Jr. wasn’t the only family member Clover worried about. Her oldest daughter, Toddie, started to suffer from manic depression in early adulthood, a condition she thought Toddie inherited from her, and began undergoing shock treatments.

13 - Dangerous Ideas

Trujillo further ensured his control of the presidential palace by assiduously courting the powerful giant to the north, pledging his nation’s allegiance to the United States during World War II and the Cold War, and showering money on Washington politicians and lobbying firms. Trujillo’s courtship of Washington paid off. By 1955, John Foster Dulles’s State Department was celebrating the strongman as “one of the hemisphere’s foremost spokesmen against the Communist movement.”

The dictator, like the rest of the Dominican male populace, reveled in the tales of Rubi’s romantic exploits. The dapper playboy had passionate affairs with blond movie goddesses like Kim Novak and courted some of the world’s richest women, including American heiresses Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, both of whom he married.

Maheu later claimed that the Mission: Impossible TV series was based on his firm’s exploits — a secret team whose actions would be “disavowed” by the government should any of their agents be “caught or killed.”

Maheu would become the top-paid security contractor in the country, taking on confidential missions for Vice President Nixon and eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, who later hired him to run his Las Vegas empire.

On December 4, the young American’s Ford was found on a cliff near a slaughterhouse, where the offal that was dumped into the sea attracted swarms of sharks. Known as the “swimming pool,” the lagoon was a favorite disposal site for Trujillo’s enemies.

Joseph Stalin, too, understood the power of words, calling writers “the engineers of the human soul.”

The main front organization used by the CIA to spread its largesse and influence was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, “a kind of cultural NATO,” in one critic’s words, founded in 1950 to counter the propaganda efforts of the Soviet bloc.

Many leading artists and intellectuals fell into the ranks of the CIA’s generously funded culture war, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Daniel Bell, Isaiah Berlin, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and Mark Rothko.

Like many of the CIA-sponsored literary projects, Encounter reflected the aesthetics of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s unofficial cultural commissar. As a Yale undergraduate, Angleton had founded the avant-garde literary magazine Furioso and befriended Ezra Pound and e.e. cummings. The spy wizard was a devotee of the modernist school of poetry — particularly its high priest, T. S. Eliot — and the pages of Encounter were dominated by an Eliotic sensibility, though Eliot himself shunned the London-based publication as so “obviously published under American auspices.”

As Dulles was well aware, Angleton had even tucked away explosive secrets about the CIA director himself. That is why Dulles had rewarded him with the most sensitive job in the agency,

Angleton’s selection as the top hunter of Soviet moles struck many in the agency as peculiar. During and after the war, Angleton had been badly fooled by his close chum in British intelligence, the legendary double agent Kim Philby.

His compulsive mole hunting ruined the careers of dozens of CIA agents, doing more to damage agency security than to fortify it. “I couldn’t find that we ever caught a spy under Jim,” said William Colby, the CIA director who finally terminated Angleton’s long tenure in 1975.

“My father once said, ‘I’m not a genius, but in intelligence I am a genius,’” recalled Siri Hari Angleton, who changed her name from Lucy as a young woman, after following her mother and older sister into the Sikh religion.

Later, in the post-Watergate ’70s, when the Church Committee opened its probe of CIA lawbreaking, Angleton was called to account for himself. As he completed his testimony, the Gray Ghost rose from his chair, and, thinking he was now off the record, muttered, “It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.”

Dulles entrusted Angleton with the agency’s most vital and sensitive missions. He was the principal CIA liaison with the key foreign intelligence services, including those in frontline Cold War nations like France, West Germany, Turkey, Taiwan, and Yugoslavia, as well as with Mossad, the Israeli spy agency.

At the same time he was working with the federal bureau in charge of fighting organized crime, Angleton was also pursuing a CIA partnership with the Mafia.

One day, shortly after Fidel Castro took power in Havana, Angleton had a brainstorm. He summoned two Jewish CIA officers, including Sam Halpern, who had recently been assigned to the agency’s covert Cuba team. Angleton asked them to fly to Miami and meet with Meyer Lanksy, organized crime’s chief financial officer, who had been forced to flee Havana ahead of Castro’s revolutionaries, leaving behind the Mafia’s highly lucrative casino empire. Lansky was part of the Jewish mob but had close business ties to the Italian Mafia. Angleton told Halpern and the other Jewish CIA agent to see if they could convince Lansky to arrange for the assassination of Castro. Angleton’s emissaries met with Lansky, but the crime mogul drove too hard a bargain for his services and the deal fell through.

C. Wright Mills, whose own impassioned defense of the Cuban revolution, Listen, Yankee, had sold four hundred thousand copies within months.

Shortly after the Cuban leader arrived home in Havana, as he addressed a teeming crowd from the balcony of the Presidential Palace, a bomb went off in the park behind the palace, followed by a second explosion within the hour. Later in the day, a third bomb — more powerful than the other two — rocked Havana. The CIA-sponsored terror campaign aimed at killing Castro and destroying his government was quickly escalating.

14 - The Torch Is Passed

“Democracy works only if the so-called intelligent people make it work,” Allen told the press on the eve of his campaign. “You can’t sit back and let democracy run itself.”

Though it was largely hidden from the public, the duel between Kennedy and Dulles would define Washington’s “deep politics” in the early 1960s.

He said that Ho Chi Minh — who had once worked as a baker at JFK’s favorite Boston hotel, the Parker House, and who was inspired by the blazing ideals of the American Revolution — was seen as a national hero.

Eisenhower began referring to Kennedy as “that little bastard.” Meanwhile, Secretary Dulles icily told the press that if the senator from Massachusetts wanted to crusade against imperialism, maybe he should target the Soviet variety.

“I could understand if he played golf all the time with old Army friends,” Kennedy once told Arthur Schlesinger, “but no man is less loyal to his old friends than Eisenhower. He is a terribly cold man. All his golfing pals are rich men he has met since 1945.”

At one National Security Council meeting, Vice President Nixon observed, “Some of the peoples of Africa have been out of trees for only about 50 years,” to which Budget Director Maurice Stans (who would later serve as President Nixon’s commerce secretary) replied that he “had the impression that many Africans still belonged in trees.”

On other occasions, Eisenhower expressed resentment when he had to invite “those niggers” — by which he meant African dignitaries — to diplomatic receptions.

It was Jackie Kennedy who tipped off Dulles to the pleasures of James Bond, giving him a copy of From Russia with Love, which became one of his favorite spy novels. After he got hooked on Ian Fleming, the CIA director would send copies of new Bond novels to the senator and his wife as soon as he got his hands on them.

Kennedy already knew the man he wanted to replace Dulles — tall, brainy Richard M. Bissell Jr., the Groton- and Yale-educated chief of clandestine operations

Among them was McGeorge Bundy, the owlish Harvard dean whom Kennedy appointed national security adviser. The long ties between Dulles and the Boston Brahmin Bundy family had been fortified when the CIA director rescued Mac Bundy’s brother, CIA officer Bill Bundy, from Joe McCarthy’s pyre.

When Bundy became dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1953 — at age thirty-four, the youngest in the school’s history — he used his post to identify future prospects for the CIA among the student body’s best and brightest.

The United States, he declared, was rubbing its hands over the Congo’s uranium deposits — the same deposits that supplied the uranium for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking to dinner guests at a political event in October 1960, Lumumba said that he could have made millions of dollars if he had been willing to “mortgage the national sovereignty.”

Dulles, Doug Dillon (then serving as a State Department undersecretary), and William Burden, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, led the charge within the Eisenhower administration to first demonize and then dispose of Lumumba. All three men had financial interests in the Congo. The Dillon family’s investment bank handled the Congo’s bond issues. Dulles’s old law firm represented the American Metal Company (later AMAX), a mining giant with holdings in the Congo, and Dulles was friendly with the company’s chairman, Harold Hochschild, and his brother and successor, Walter, who served in the OSS during the war. Ambassador Burden was a company director, and Frank Taylor Ostrander Jr., a former U.S. intelligence official, served the Hochschild brothers as a political adviser.

The younger Hochschild cofounded Mother Jones magazine and later authored King Leopold’s Ghost, a powerful indictment of the Belgian reign of terror in the Congo.

At an NSC meeting in August 1960, Eisenhower gave Dulles direct approval to “eliminate” Lumumba.

The man at the center of this intrigue was Lawrence R. Devlin, the CIA station chief in the Congo, a Harvard man who had been handpicked for the spy service by his dean, Mac Bundy. Larry Devlin’s aggressive campaign against Lumumba had won him the admiration of the agency’s top command, including Dulles himself.

In its explosive 1975 report on CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, the Church Committee absolved the agency of responsibility for Lumumba’s murder. “It does not appear from the evidence that the United States was in any way involved in the killing,” concluded the Senate panel.

But as former congressional aide and scholar Stephen Weissman has observed, “The CIA was not the innocent bystander, and its Congo operatives not the paragons of morally sensitive professionalism they claimed to be. In particular, Devlin was a key participant in the Congo government’s decision to approve Lumumba’s fatal rendition.”

Devlin suffered no agency reprimands for his actions in the Congo, and, in fact, his intelligence career continued to thrive after Lumumba’s demise. Before retiring from the CIA in 1974, to pursue a new career in the Congo’s lucrative diamond industry, Devlin rose to become chief of the CIA’s Africa Division.

Propped up by the United States, Mobutu began a thirty-two-year dictatorship that looted the country of its wealth and left the nation in ruins. In his rampant thievery, Mobutu modeled himself on King Leopold. So smug was the dictator in his ironfisted rule that he declared Lumumba a national hero, a sick joke that only he could afford to enjoy.

Part III

15 - Contempt

Some of the sharpest criticisms of the Bay of Pigs operation, in fact, came from within the CIA itself. Dick Drain was among those who later aimed fire at Dulles, when he spoke with Jack Pfeiffer, the CIA historian who prepared the voluminous report on the Bay of Pigs. Drain was a gung ho officer who fit the agency profile, right down to membership in Yale’s secretive Skull and Bones society (Class of ’43).

Kirkpatrick, who prepared his devastating report with the help of three investigators, flatly rejected the main CIA alibi for the failed mission — that Kennedy was to blame by blocking the agency’s last-minute requests for air strikes. The invasion was “doomed” from the start by the CIA’s poor planning, the inspector general concluded.

Perhaps the most devastating revelation about the CIA operation emerged years later, in 2005, when the agency was compelled to release the minutes of a meeting held by its Cuba task force on November 15, 1960, one week after Kennedy’s election. The group, which was deliberating on how to brief the president-elect on the pending invasion, came to an eye-opening conclusion. In the face of strong security measures that Castro had implemented, the CIA task force admitted, their invasion plan was “now seen to be unachievable, except as a joint [CIA/Department of Defense] action.” In other words, the CIA realized that its Bay of Pigs expedition was doomed to fail unless its exile brigade was reinforced by the power of the U.S. military. But the CIA never shared this sobering assessment with the president.

But, as usual, there was method to Dulles’s seeming carelessness. It is now clear that the CIA’s Bay of Pigs expedition was not simply doomed to fail, it was meant to fail. And its failure was designed to trigger the real action — an all-out, U.S. military invasion of the island. Dulles plunged ahead with his hopeless, paramilitary mission — an expedition that he had staffed with “C-minus” officers and expendable Cuban “puppets” — because he was serenely confident that, in the heat of battle, Kennedy would be forced to send the Marines crashing ashore. Dulles was banking on the young, untested commander in chief to cave in to pressure from the Washington war machine, just as other presidents had bent to the spymaster’s will.

Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was disturbed by JFK’s growing estrangement from the military and the CIA. “Of course, Johnson was a great admirer of the military,” recalled Jack Bell, a White House reporter for the Associated Press. “He didn’t believe that Kennedy was paying enough attention to the military leaders.”

But The New York Times’s Scotty Reston was more aligned with the sentiments of the Kennedy White House. Echoing the charges circulating in the French press, Reston reported that the CIA was indeed “involved in an embarrassing liaison with the anti-Gaullist officers.”

After de Gaulle was elected president in 1958, he sought to purge the French government of its CIA-connected elements. Dulles had made heavy inroads into France’s political, cultural, and intelligence circles in the postwar years.

JFK took pains to assure Paris that he strongly supported de Gaulle’s presidency, phoning Hervé Alphand, the French ambassador in Washington, to directly communicate these assurances. But, according to Alphand, Kennedy’s disavowal of official U.S. involvement in the coup came with a disturbing addendum — the American president could not vouch for his own intelligence agency. Kennedy told Alphand that “the CIA is such a vast and poorly controlled machine that the most unlikely maneuvers might be true.” This admission of presidential impotence, which Alphand reported to Paris, was a startling moment in U.S. foreign relations, though it remains largely unknown today.

The most dramatic attempt on his life was staged the next month by the OAS — an ambush made famous in the Frederick Forsyth novel and movie The Day of the Jackal.

On November 28, 1961, Dulles was given his formal send-off at the CIA, in a ceremony held at the agency’s brand-new headquarters, a vast, modernist complex carved out of the woods in Langley, Virginia. It was a day of clashing emotions for Dulles. The gleaming new puzzle palace, which Dulles had commissioned, was seen by many as a monument to his long reign — but he would never occupy the director’s suite.

It was the Kennedy brothers, not the Dulles brothers, who now ran Washington.

In truth, the Kennedy purge had left the ranks of Dulles loyalists at the CIA largely untouched. Top Dulles men like Angleton and Helms remained on the job.

16 - Rome on the Potomac

But just four days after the Kennedy-engineered steel pact was signed, U.S. Steel chairman Roger Blough scheduled a meeting at the White House and stunned the president by informing him that he was going to announce a 3.5 percent price increase, effective at midnight — a move that would trigger price jumps at other steel companies and send inflationary ripples throughout the economy. Kennedy was furious at Blough’s double cross, which he correctly saw as a direct challenge to his ability to manage the economy.

Determined to protect his presidency, over the next three days JFK unleashed the full powers of the federal government in an all-out effort to crush the steel industry rebellion. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy announced a grand jury probe of steel price-fixing, which he followed by issuing subpoenas for the personal and corporate records of steel executives and by sending FBI agents to raid their offices. “We were going to go for broke: their expense accounts and where they’d been and what they were doing,” JFK’s brother and political enforcer later recalled. “I picked up all their records and I told the FBI to interview them all — march into their offices the next day. We weren’t going to go slowly. . . . All of [the steel executives] were hit with meetings the next morning by agents.”

Senator Barry Goldwater, the voice of the rising Republican right, escalated the rhetoric, calling Kennedy’s bare-knuckled tactics against the steel barons “a display of naked political power never seen before in this nation. . . . We have passed within the shadow of police-state methods.”

In October 1963, just weeks before his assassination, JFK’s Justice Department filed price-fixing charges against U.S. Steel and other steel companies, based on Bobby’s earlier grand jury probe of the industry. To the end of his life, Kennedy made it clear that there would be no “ass-kissing” for those corporate powers that tried to undermine his presidency.

Amassing wealth and luxuries had never been important to Dulles, but he did expect to be served and pampered, and the CIA continued to oblige him.

In October 1963, Dulles went public with his most direct criticism of the Kennedy administration in a militant address that he titled “The Art of Persuasion: America’s Role in the Ideological Struggle.” In it, Dulles ridiculed the administration’s “yearning to be ‘loved’ by the rest of the world. . . . No country that wishes to be really popular should aspire to or accept the role of leadership.” The United States was “too rich and too powerful” to be loved, Dulles declared — and that’s the way it must remain. “I should much prefer to have people respect us than to try to make them love us,” he continued. “They should realize that we propose to remain strong economically and militarily, that we have firm principles and a steady foreign policy and will not compromise with communism or appease it.” Here it was, at last, Dulles’s critique of the Kennedy presidency, in stark relief. JFK was an appeaser, a weak leader who wanted to be loved by our friends and enemies, when the man in the White House should be feared and respected.

On that summer evening in 1963, the Russian émigré priest spoke with the calm assurance of a man who knew something the other dinner guests did not. The Old Man will take care of it. That was enough to calm the heated discussion around the table. The Old Man will take care of the Kennedy problem.

On November 2, local Secret Service officials foiled a well-organized assassination plot against President Kennedy. After landing at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport that day, Kennedy was scheduled to ride in a motorcade to Soldier Field for the annual Army-Navy football game. But the motorcade was canceled after the Secret Service exposed a plot to ambush the president from a tall warehouse building as his limousine slowed for a hairpin turn. The plot, which involved a sniper team composed of a disgruntled ex-marine who worked in the building and at least two Cuban marksmen, bore a disturbing resemblance to the series of events that would claim Kennedy’s life twenty days later in Dallas.

It remains one of the many enduring mysteries of the Kennedy case. Why did Dulles meet with Paulino Sierra Martinez in April 1963? What brought together the former CIA director and an obscure, Mafia-connected, anti-Castro conspirator with a penchant for violent action? As Dulles was keenly aware, organizing a paramilitary operation against the Cuban government was, by the spring of 1963, a violation of Kennedy administration policy and of federal law. By meeting with a character like Sierra, Dulles made it abundantly clear how little regard he had for the president’s authority — and perhaps for his life.

17 - The Parting Glass

Shortly after JFK flew home from Italy, Dino John Pionzio, the CIA’s leading operator in Italy at the time, huddled with Sereno Freato, the administrative secretary of Aldo Moro — a rising star in the Christian Democratic Party who would soon become Italy’s prime minister. Pionzio, a Skull and Bones member at Yale (Class of 1950) and zealous Cold Warrior, was adamantly opposed to the opening to the left. The CIA man wanted to know what Moro had discussed with Kennedy a few days earlier during an afternoon stroll that JFK and the Italian politician had taken through the Quirinale garden. To his great dismay, Pionzio was told that Moro and Kennedy had agreed the apertura should go forward.

It was the Indiana “cop” who saw through Philby, not Angleton, who remained forever beguiled by his British friend. Angleton and Harvey were the odd couple of CIA counterintelligence — “the poet and the cop,” as one observer called them. They would alternately clash and connive together throughout their careers. Harvey’s star rose at the agency after he exposed Philby, and he was dispatched to the Cold War front lines in Germany, where he ran the CIA’s Berlin station during the 1950s.

“I loved Rosselli,” CG Harvey said during an interview at her Indianapolis retirement home in 1999, the year before she died. “My husband always used to say that if I had to ride shotgun, that’s the guy I would take with me. Much better than any of the law enforcement people. Rosselli was the kind of guy that if he gave you his desires and friendship, well he was going to stick by you. And he definitely was Mafia, and he definitely was a crook, and he definitely had pulled off all kinds of stunts with the Mafia. But he was a patriot, he believed in the United States. And he knew my husband was a patriot, and that’s what drew him to Bill.”

“As he was walking me out to my car, Wyatt suddenly said, ‘You know, I always wondered what Bill Harvey was doing in Dallas in November 1963,’” Calvi recently recalled. “Excuse me?” said the stunned French journalist, who realized that Harvey’s presence in Dallas that month was extremely noteworthy. Wyatt explained that he had bumped into Harvey on a plane to Dallas sometime before the assassination, and when he asked his boss why he was going there, Harvey answered vaguely, saying something like, “I’m here to see what’s happening.”

18 - The Big Event

The Soviet spy “has been fully indoctrinated” in the Communist principle “that the ends alone count and any means which achieve them are justified,” wrote Dulles. Meanwhile, he observed — taking another swing at the Kennedy philosophy of peaceful coexistence — U.S. leaders shy from Soviet-style ruthlessness, “because of our desire to be ‘loved.’”

According to Dulles, the KGB (the Soviet spy agency) had built an “executive action” section to murder enemies of the state. But this is precisely what Dulles himself had done within the CIA. Dulles also denounced another flagrant example of Soviet “cold-blooded pragmatism”: the “massive recruitment” of Nazi war criminals “for intelligence work.” Coming from the man who salvaged Reinhard Gehlen and untold numbers of other Hitler henchmen — and, in fact, helped build the West German intelligence system out of the poisoned remains of the Third Reich — the utter gall of this statement surely provoked howls of derision inside the Kremlin.

Dulles also drew on his extensive academic contacts for help, including W. Glenn Campbell at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, who provided ready access to his extensive files on the Communist threat.

Dulles was also invited to appear in Texas, where, between October 25 and 29, he met with old friends in Houston and Dallas and spoke before the Dallas Council on World Affairs. Dulles often used speaking engagements and vacations as covers for serious business, and his detour through Texas bears the markings of such a stratagem. His stopover in Texas stood out as an anomaly in a book tour otherwise dominated by appearances on the two coasts. The spymaster’s date book during his Texas trip typically left out as much as it revealed, with big gaps in his schedule throughout his stay there. But Dulles was wired into the Texas oil industry — for which his law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, had provided legal counsel for many years — as well as into the local political hierarchy, including Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, the younger brother of his former CIA deputy, Charles, a fellow victim of JFK’s post–Bay of Pigs housecleaning. With Kennedy’s trip to Texas just weeks away, the president was a hot topic in these local circles.

The Texas oil crowd was also furious at Kennedy for moving to close their tax loopholes, particularly the oil depletion allowance, which threatened to cost the oilmen millions — perhaps billions — of dollars a year.

On November 13, 1963, when Kennedy convened his first important strategy meeting for the ’64 race at the White House, neither Johnson nor any of his staff were invited.

“Come clean, Lyndon,” she smiled wickedly. What did it feel like for the swaggering Texan to be in the rear position? The big man leaned close and whispered, “Clare, I looked it up. One out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only one chance I got.” It was another example of LBJ’s coarse humor. But it also revealed something darker in the man. He undoubtedly was keenly aware of the presidential mortality rate.

On November 14, the day after the White House strategy session on the 1964 campaign, the president privately confirmed that Johnson would not be on the ticket, while conversing with his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln.

Nixon’s prediction, which was prominently displayed in The Dallas Morning News on November 22, was another blow to LBJ’s ego. But he had even bigger concerns. Later that morning, a Life investigative team was scheduled to convene in the magazine’s New York offices, to begin work on a deeper probe of Johnson’s involvement in the Bobby Baker corruption scandal. William Lambert, the investigative unit’s leader, was certain they were sitting on an explosive story that could bring down the vice president. “This guy looks like a bandit to me,” he told his boss, Life managing editor George Hunt. LBJ, he told Hunt, had used public office to amass a fortune, shaking down political favor-seekers for cash and consumer goods, even putting the squeeze on an insurance executive for an expensive Magnavox stereo console that Lady Bird coveted. As Bobby Baker later commented, Johnson was “always on the lookout for the odd nickel or dime.”

At the very beginning of Kennedy’s presidency, Johnson made a strange power grab, trying to get JFK to grant him extraordinary supervisory powers over the country’s entire national security apparatus, including the Defense Department, CIA, State Department, and the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. Kennedy did not even bother responding to Johnson’s maneuver, simply ignoring the executive order and accompanying letter that LBJ sent over to the Oval Office for his signature.

And, in the summer of 1963, Johnson hosted Dulles at his ranch in the Texas Hill Country, sixty miles west of Austin. Dulles’s visit to the LBJ Ranch did not appear in his calendar, but it was briefly noted in a syndicated news photo, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune on August 15, that showed the vice president astride a horse, while a beaming Lady Bird and Dulles looked on. Considering how estranged both men were from Kennedy — and how notoriously conniving they were — the picture could only have produced a sense of puzzlement in the White House.

19 - The Fingerprints of Intelligence

There was a magical element to Oswald’s journey. Despite the fact that he was a broke ex-serviceman who had only $203 in his bank account when he left America, Oswald enjoyed the best accommodations. In Helsinki, he stayed in two of the city’s finest hotels, the Torni and the Klaus Kurki. After checking out, he still had enough money to buy a ticket on the overnight train to Moscow.

When Oswald went on expeditions with his factory hunting club in Minsk, he never could hit anything. A co-worker took pity on him once and shot a rabbit for him.

Oswald’s reentry into the United States was absurdly easy, considering his treasonous track record. He had tried to renounce his citizenship; he had declared his intention to betray his country by handing over some of its most zealously guarded military secrets; he had lived as if he were a Soviet citizen for well over two years. And to top it off, he was bringing back with him a Russian wife, Marina, who had been raised by an uncle who was a KGB officer.

While in Texas, Oswald and his family came under the watchful care of people who in turn were being closely watched. He met quietly with a prominent CIA officer in Dallas. He staged public scenes in New Orleans and Mexico City that called attention to himself as a hotheaded militant, as he had done at the embassy in Moscow. There were invisible wires attached to Oswald — and some of the more intriguing ones led to Allen Dulles.

But there were less sentimental reasons why the baron befriended the wayward young American. De Mohrenschildt was minding the Oswalds for the CIA.

Finally, George de Mohrenschildt settled on the oil business, figuring that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. He eventually wound up in Texas, where he got a petroleum geology degree from the University of Texas, after cheating his way through the final exams. In typical de Mohrenschildt style, he charmed his way out of trouble when he got caught, explaining with an aristocratic wink that everyone in life cheats.

None of de Mohrenschildt’s oil ventures paid off particularly well, and he would soon drift away to try one more roll of the dice with the help of another rich relative or friend. His true skill was cultivating the wealthy and well connected. One of his first jobs in the oil business was working for Pantepec Oil — the petroleum company founded by the father of William F. Buckley Jr., the CIA-connected conservative publisher and pundit.

So it was not surprising when de Mohrenschildt showed up at the Oswalds’ front door that summer afternoon in the company of a man named Colonel Lawrence Orlov, a CIA informant who was a friend and frequent handball partner of J. Walton Moore, the agency’s man in Dallas.

In the end, no Warren Commission witness betrayed Oswald more deeply than George de Mohrenschildt. His testimony before the commission — the lengthiest of the hearings — did more to convict Oswald in the eyes of the press and the public than anyone else. He tied Oswald to the alleged murder weapon, telling the commission about the day when an agitated Marina showed him and his wife the rifle that Lee had stashed in a closet. And most important, de Mohrenschildt gave the Warren Commission the motive for killing Kennedy that the panel had sorely lacked. Oswald, the baron speculated with devastating effect, “was insanely jealous of an extraordinarily successful man, who was young, attractive, had a beautiful wife, had all the money in the world, and was a world figure.

Along with the Titovets chronicle, I Am a Patsy! stands out as the most convincing portrait we have of the true Oswald. De Mohrenschildt’s manuscript, which his wife gave to the House Select Committee on Assassinations after his death, remains unpublished but is available online.

In September 1976, he mailed a distraught, handwritten letter to his old family friend, George Bush, who was then serving as CIA director in the Gerald Ford administration. De Mohrenschildt knew Bush from his prep school days at Phillips Academy, when Bush was the roommate of Dimitri von Mohrenschildt’s stepson.

On the morning of March 29, 1977, committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi rolled up outside the dark-shingled beach house, and when told that de Mohrenschildt was not at home, the congressional staffer left his card with the baron’s daughter, Alexandra. Early that evening, after returning to his Miami motel room, Fonzi got a call from Bill O’Reilly, who was working in those days as a Dallas TV reporter. O’Reilly had some stunning news. George de Mohrenschildt had been found dead at home, his head blown apart by the blast from a 20-gauge shotgun. Fonzi’s card was found in the dead man’s pocket.

Government documents suggest that Ruth’s sister, Sylvia, later went to work for the CIA, and Sylvia’s husband, John Hoke, was employed by AID. In short, the young Dallas housewife who took the Oswald family into her care was not simply a Quaker do-gooder but a woman with a politically complex family history. She grew up in that strongly anti-Communist wing of the American left that overlapped with the espionage world. Ruth Paine was not an operative herself, but there was a constellation of dark stars hovering all around her, even if she chose not to pay attention. But it was the family background of Ruth’s husband, Michael, that most directly overlapped with Allen Dulles’s world. Mary Bancroft, Dulles’s mistress, was one of the oldest friends of Michael Paine’s mother—also named Ruth.

Ruth Forbes Paine hailed from a Boston blue-blood family that had made its fortune from the China tea and opium trade, and counted Ralph Waldo Emerson among its progenitors.

But Ruth Paine was more than that. She was also the woman who — the month before JFK’s arrival in Dallas — informed Lee about the job opening in the Texas School Book Depository, the warehouse building that loomed over the final stretch of President Kennedy’s motorcade route.

Byrd’s name was woven through the turbulent politics of the Kennedy era. He was a crony of Lyndon Johnson and a cousin of Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, a white supremacist and a leader of the rising conservative movement. He also belonged to the Suite 8F Group, an association of right-wing Texas tycoons that took its name from the Lamar Hotel room in Houston where they held their meetings. The group included George Brown and Herman Brown of Brown & Root — a construction giant built on government contracts — and other military industrialists and oil moguls who had financed the rise of LBJ.

In early September, Oswald popped up again in Dallas, where he and his family would move back later that month. This Oswald sighting is an extremely suggestive one, since he was spotted in the company of none other than David Atlee Phillips — one of the more glaring indications that the ex-marine was the focus of an intelligence operation.

But, as President Kennedy prepared to visit Dallas, something curious occurred within this surveillance labyrinth. On October 9, Oswald was suddenly removed from the FBI “FLASHLIST” — the bureau’s index of suspicious individuals to be kept under close watch. FBI officials took this surprising step despite Oswald’s suspicious behavior in Mexico City. The day after the FBI took Oswald off its watch list, the CIA also downgraded him as a security risk.

After receiving the news from Dallas, around 1:30 that afternoon, Dulles took a car back to Washington with John Warner, a CIA attorney. But, according to Dulles’s date book, he did not spend the evening at home in Washington. He headed back to the northern Virginia countryside, where he would spend the entire weekend at a top secret CIA facility known officially as Camp Peary, but within the agency as “the Farm.” At the time of the Kennedy assassination, Dulles had no formal role in government.

This is the CIA command post where the “retired” Dulles situated himself from Friday, November 22, through Sunday, November 24 — a highly eventful weekend during which Oswald was arrested and questioned by Dallas police, Kennedy’s body was flown back to Washington and subjected to an autopsy riddled with irregularities, and Oswald was gunned down in the basement of the Dallas police station by a shady nightclub owner.

20 - For the Good of the Country

But the proximity of the meeting to the Kennedy assassination raises compelling questions, particularly since Dillon, as Treasury chief, was in charge of President Kennedy’s Secret Service protection. And the banking industry was locked in a long-running battle with the president over his economic policies.

If CFR was the power elite’s brain, the CIA was its black-gloved fist.

In retirement, Dulles was still asked to take prestigious positions with the Princeton Board of Trustees, the Council on Foreign Relations, and various defense advisory and blue-ribbon committees.

Nobody occupied a more central position in the Dulles brothers’ power circle than the Rockefeller brothers. Nelson and David were the most public of the five grandsons of John D. Rockefeller — the founder of the Standard Oil behemoth, an unprecedented empire of wealth that would grow to include global banks, mining companies, sprawling ranches, and even supermarkets.

Less well known, both brothers were militant advocates of U.S. imperial interests, particularly in Latin America, where the Rockefeller family had extensive holdings. And they both had backgrounds in U.S. intelligence.

Over the years, the two sets of brothers became close partners in the country’s game of thrones, helping advance one another’s ambitions. The Dulleses ushered David Rockefeller into the Council on Foreign Relations, where he soon became a major force, and Foster would become chairman of the family-controlled Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefellers contributed campaign funds to Dulles-favored Republican candidates, including Foster himself when he ran unsuccessfully for the Senate from New York in 1950. In January 1953, while Allen nervously waited to see whether newly inaugurated president Eisenhower would appoint him CIA director, David took him to lunch in Manhattan and assured him that if things didn’t work out in Washington, he could return to New York and take over the Ford Foundation, which — like the Rockefeller Foundation — Dulles had already used to secretly finance CIA activities. After Allen did win control of the spy agency, he again turned to the Rockefellers to help finance CIA projects like MKULTRA mind control research. The Rockefeller brothers served as private bankers for Dulles’s intelligence empire. David, who oversaw the donations committee of the Chase Manhattan Bank Foundation, was a particularly important source of off-the-books cash for the CIA.

Kennedy’s tax reform policies, which sought to place a heavier burden on the superrich, were a primary source of friction. When the president — who was concerned about the flight of capital in the emerging era of the global market — tried to crack down on overseas tax shelters, international bankers like David Rockefeller cried foul. Wall Street financiers saw the Kennedy move as an assault on their ability to transfer wealth to any corner of the globe as they saw fit.

Jack and David had been contemporaries at Harvard, but as David was quick to point out, “we moved in very different circles.”

When Castro gave a bearded face to these fears, expropriating the Standard Oil refinery and other Rockefeller properties in Cuba, Nelson was outraged. He grew increasingly frustrated with Kennedy as he sidestepped opportunities to invade Cuba, becoming convinced that the president had cut a deal with the Russians to leave Castro alone.

The Kennedy administration’s dynamic image was a public relations myth, Rockefeller insisted. In truth, he charged, JFK’s unassertive leadership had encouraged our enemies and demoralized our allies, and had made the world more dangerous.

Angleton seemed obsessed with Kennedy’s sex life. He reportedly bugged JFK’s White House trysts with Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of his deputy, Cord Meyer — an artistic blond beauty with whom Angleton himself was enamored.

The surgeons who labored futilely over the mortally wounded president at Parkland Hospital also saw clear evidence that Kennedy had been struck by gunfire from the front as well as the rear. But the doctors came under severe pressure to remain silent and it would take nearly three decades before two of them mustered the courage to speak out.

On December 22, 1963, while the country was still reeling from the gunfire in Dallas, Truman published a highly provocative op-ed article in The Washington Post, charging that the CIA had grown alarmingly out of control since he established it.

After the Bay of Pigs, Truman had confided in writer Merle Miller that he regretted ever establishing the CIA. “I think it was a mistake,” he said. “And if I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have done it. . . . [Eisenhower] never paid any attention to it, and it got out of hand. . . . It’s become a government all of its own and all secret. . . . That’s a very dangerous thing in a democratic society.”

How did Allen Dulles — a man fired by President Kennedy under bitter circumstances — come to oversee the investigation into his murder? This crucial historical question has been the subject of misguided speculation for many years. The story apparently began with Lyndon Johnson, a man not known for his devotion to the truth. It has been repeated over time by various historians, including Johnson biographer Robert Caro, who one would think would be more skeptical, considering the exhaustive detail with which he documented LBJ’s habitual deceit in his multivolume work.

But Dulles was the only member of the panel without a day job. He was free to devote himself to commission work, and he promptly began assembling his own informal staff, drawing on the services of his former CIA colleagues and his wide network of political and media contacts. The other two principal players in the inquest were Dulles’s longtime friend and fellow Cold War heavyweight, McCloy, and future president Gerald Ford, who was then an ambitious Republican congressman from Michigan with close ties to the FBI.

The Warren Commission was, in fact, so thoroughly infiltrated and guided by the security services that there was no possibility of the panel pursuing an independent course. Dulles was at the center of this subversion. During the commission’s ten-month-long investigation, he acted as a double agent, huddling regularly with his former CIA associates to discuss the panel’s internal operations.

The story had broken in the press the previous month, when Marguerite Oswald declared that her son was a secret agent for the CIA who was “set up to take the blame” for the Kennedy assassination.

But when Helms was sworn in, he simply lied. There was no evidence of agency contact with Oswald, he testified. Had the agency provided the commission with all the information it had on Oswald, Rankin asked him. “We have — all,” Helms replied, though he knew the files that he had handed over were thoroughly purged.

There were no agents riding on the flanks of his limousine. And when sniper fire erupted, only one agent — Clint Hill — performed his duty by sprinting toward the president’s vehicle and leaping onto the rear. It was an outrageous display of professional incompetence, one that made Robert Kennedy immediately suspect that the presidential guard was involved in the plot against his brother.

But the bulk of the Warren Report was filler. Only about 10 percent of the report dealt with the facts of the case. On Dulles’s insistence, most of it was taken up with a biography of Oswald that, despite its exhaustive detail, managed to avoid any mention of his contacts with U.S. intelligence.

21 - “I Can’t Look and Won’t Look”

Thompson’s book would even land the Haverford philosophy professor-turned-private-eye an editorial consultancy with Luce’s Life magazine, which had earlier played a key role in the assassination cover-up by buying the Zapruder film and locking it away in the company vault.

By 1967, polls showed that two-thirds of the American public did not accept the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.

The Garrison investigation set off alarm bells in CIA headquarters. It soon became clear, however, that the authority of a crusading district attorney was no match for the U.S. intelligence establishment. Days after Garrison sent off the Dulles subpoena to the nation’s capital, he received a letter from the United States attorney in Washington, D.C., who tersely informed the DA that he “declined” to serve the subpoena on Dulles. Meanwhile, the CIA — which, by then, was led by Helms — mounted an aggressive counterattack on the district attorney. Subpoenas like the one sent to Dulles were simply ignored, government records were destroyed, Garrison’s office was infiltrated by spies, and agency assets in the media worked to turn the DA into a crackpot in the public eye. Even the private investigator Garrison hired to sweep his office for electronic bugs turned out to be a CIA operative. After Dulles was subpoenaed by Garrison, the security specialist — Gordon Novel — phoned the spymaster to slip him inside information about the DA’s strategy.

“LBJ differs from JFK in a number of ways—most notably, perhaps, in his absence of intellectual curiosity,” Schlesinger observed.

Even CIA director McCone thought “there were two people involved in the shooting,” Kennedy confided to Schlesinger.

McHugh had found LBJ huddled in the bathroom of his private quarters on Air Force One before the plane took off from Dallas. The panic-stricken Johnson was “convinced that there was a conspiracy and that he would be the next to go.”

22 - End Game

And so, for the most part, Bobby Kennedy maintained a pained silence on the subject of his brother’s assassination. In private, he dismissed the Warren Report as a public relations exercise. But he knew that if he attacked the report in public, it would set off a political uproar that he was in no position to exploit.

But numerous eyewitnesses — including one of the men who subdued Sirhan — insisted that the alleged assassin could not have fired the shot that killed Kennedy. Sirhan was several feet in front of Kennedy when he began firing with his revolver. But the fatal shot — which struck RFK at point-blank range behind the right ear, penetrating his brain — was fired from behind. Furthermore, evidence indicated that thirteen shots were fired in the pantry that night — five more than the number of bullets that Sirhan’s gun could hold. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner who conducted the autopsy on Kennedy, thought that all of the evidence pointed to a second gunman.

While Maheu was being paid over $500,000 a year by Hughes as his Las Vegas overseer, he still treated the CIA like his top client.

Epilogue

He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day—Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were “the grand masters,” he said. “If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.” Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. “I guess I will see them there soon.”

Few men had a larger impact on the 20th century than Lenin, yet in all of my formal education he received no more than a passing mention. The accessible and balanced "Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror" started to fill in this egregious blank space in my mental map. Lenin's philosophy can be summed up as "the ends justify the means" and Sebestyen's excellent biography forces us to confront the terrible consequences of this idea. As architect of the Russian Revolution, Lenin is responsible for human suffering on a scale unmatched by almost anyone else in history. Yet for him, it was largely theoretical - he only saw three dead bodies in his whole life. Sebestyen's heavily researched book lends depth to this complex and tragic man who "desired the good... but created evil."

Lenin's personal life surprised me. I would never have guessed that his favorite book growing up was "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or that he loved reenacting the American Civil War (always taking the side of the Union!) with toy soldiers. He was an avid reader and chess player. His domestic life was irregular, to say the least. He was part of a ménage à trois, and his lover (Inessa Armand) exercised a major influence on him.

As he grew up, he became a complete workaholic (17+ hours a day) and prolific writer (over 10 million words in his lifetime). His capacity for intellectual effort and organizational management was astounding - in line with that of Alexander Hamilton, Robert Moses, and John D. Rockefeller. Given the chaos of the time, it's remarkable that he ran as tight of a ship as he did. It probably didn't hurt that his HR strategy was to threaten to "line up and shoot" underperformers.

Sebastyen expertly guided me through the bewilderingly complicated cast of characters in the chaos of the Russian Revolution. I was surprised by how much of a shitshow it was. Half the reason the revolution succeeded was because "most of the people didn’t care which side won." The murder of the Russian royal family was particularly brutal and sloppy. Yet the intrigue and violence surrounding the revolution snared the whole world in its web. The whole German "sealed train" scheme continues to give rise to conspiracy theories and the British gave over 100 million pounds (in 1917 dollars!) of aid to the anti-Bolshevik Whites. And in a wild twist, the leader of the Whites, Alexander Kerensky, ended his life as a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution!

What will stick with me most from this book are Lenin's failures. Tactically, he made the classic dictatorial blunder of muddled succession planning. But more importantly, his strategy of "the ends justify the means" imposed terrible suffering upon the Russian people. In many ways, this core guiding principle is the opposite of Western law in which we consider a man innocent until proven guilty. In Lenin's world, it was "better that 100 innocent people are killed than that one person who is a danger to the Revolution remains free and a potential threat." Sebestyen's biography won't let us look away from the results of this philosophy.

I want to end this review with a Lenin quote that sounds eerily modern - I wouldn't be surprised at all to read this in a Facebook post today. Let us not forget the past.

Our morality is new, our humanity is absolute, for it rests on the ideal of destroying all oppression and coercion. To us, all is permitted, for we are the first in the world to raise the sword not in the name of enslaving or oppressing anyone, but in the name of freeing all from bondage... Blood? Let there be blood, if it alone can turn the grey-white-and-black banner of the old piratical world to a scarlet hue, for only the complete and final death of that old world will save us from the return of the old jackals.

Introduction

Putin’s grandfather, Spiridon, was Lenin’s cook after the Russian Revolution,

Lenin would very probably have regarded the world of 2017 as being on the cusp of a revolutionary moment. He matters now not because of his flawed, bloody and murderously misguided answers, but because he was asking the same questions as we are today about similar problems.

In his quest for power, he promised people anything and everything. He offered simple solutions to complex problems. He lied unashamedly. He identified a scapegoat he could later label ‘enemies of the people’. He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything: the ends justified the means. Anyone who has lived through recent elections in the supposedly sophisticated political cultures of the West might recognise him. Lenin was the godfather of what commentators a century after his time call ‘post-truth politics’.

He built a system based on the idea that political terror against opponents was justified for a greater end. It was perfected by Stalin, but the ideas were Lenin’s. He had not always been a bad man, but he did terrible things. Angelica Balabanova, one of his old comrades who admired him for many years but grew to fear and loathe him, said perceptively that Lenin’s ‘tragedy was that, in Goethe’s phrase, he desired the good…but created evil’. The worst of his evils was to have left a man like Stalin in a position to lead Russia after him. That was a historic crime.

He spouted Marxist theory constantly – ‘without theory there can be no revolutionary party’, he famously said. But a point he made far more often to his followers is frequently ignored – ‘theory is a guide, not Holy Writ’.

One of the surprises while researching this book was to find that nearly all the important relationships in Lenin’s life were with women.

Prologue - The Coup d’État

‘There are decades when nothing happens – and there are weeks where decades happen.’ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The Chief Tasks of Our Day, March 1918

They let them through thinking they were merely two harmless old drunks. Marxists are not supposed to believe in luck, accident or happenstance, but rather explain life through broad historical forces. Yet the second most influential Bolshevik leader in 1917, Leon Trotsky, said simply that if Lenin had been arrested, or shot, or had not been in Petrograd, ‘there would have been no October Revolution’.

At the top of the stairs he found Trotsky, head of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the man in charge of planning the coup.

The Bolsheviks might easily have failed if at certain key moments they had met some slight resistance. In reality the ‘plot’ was the worst-kept secret in history.

They won because the other side, the Provisional Government and its backers – a coalition of the centre-right, liberals and moderate socialists – were even more incompetent and divided, and because they didn’t take the Bolsheviks seriously until it was too late. But mainly it was because most of the people didn’t care which side won. In fact, few people realised anything significant had happened until it was all over.

The timing of the insurrection was crucial to Lenin’s political strategy. Since the Tsar had fallen seven months earlier power had been shared uneasily between a series of coalition governments, which had grown successively weaker, and the Soviets. In Russian the word ‘soviet’ means simply ‘council’, and they were hastily elected delegates of workers and soldiers who claimed that they had instigated and led the Revolution in February that brought down the Romanov autocracy.

Lenin’s plan was to overthrow the government and claim that he was acting on behalf of the Soviets. Real power would lie with him and the Bolsheviks, but keeping the Soviet on board gave him political cover and a semblance of popular support.

Along with the Cossacks, there were 220 officer cadets from the Oranienbaum Military School, forty members of the Petrograd Garrison’s bicycle squad and 200 women from the Shock Battalion of Death. From an armed force of nine million Russians, this was all the Provisional Government could muster to protect the capital – and themselves.

The ‘storming of the Winter Palace’ – centrepiece of the Russian Revolution – was so sloppy that the American journalists John Reed and his wife Louise Bryant were able to stroll into the building during the afternoon without being stopped.

At 3 p.m. Lenin could delay no longer. He appeared before the Congress of Soviets at the Smolny and brazenly declared a victory, though the government had not yet fallen, the ministers were not arrested, nor was the Winter Palace in Bolshevik hands. This was the first big lie of the Soviet regime.

Most people in Petrograd did not know a revolution was happening. The banks and shops had been open all day, the trams were running. All the factories were operating as usual – the workers had no clue Lenin was about to liberate them from capitalist exploitation.

In Soviet mythology for decades to come, the Revolution was portrayed as a popular rising of the masses. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Others headed straight for the Tsar’s wine cellar, one of the finest in the world. It contained cases of Tokays from the age of Catherine the Great and Château d’Yquem 1847, Nicholas II’s favourite. ‘The matter of the wine…became critical,’ recalled Antonov. ‘We sent guards from picked units. They got drunk. We posted guards from Regimental Committees. They succumbed as well. A violent bacchanalia followed.’ He called the Petrograd fire brigade to flood the cellar with water, ‘but the firemen… got drunk instead’.

Walking out of the chamber was a fatal mistake, as many admitted soon afterwards. ‘We made the Bolsheviks masters of the situation,’ said Sukhanov, an opponent of Lenin. ‘By leaving the Congress we gave them a monopoly on the Soviets. Our own irrational decisions ensured Lenin’s victory.’

At around 5 a.m., with the opposition about to stage their walkout into oblivion, the Bolsheviks’ most spellbinding orator, the brilliant, vain and ruthless Trotsky, made one of the most famous speeches of the twentieth century. The uprising ‘needs no justification’, he said. ‘What has happened is an insurrection, not a conspiracy… The masses of the people followed our banner. But what do they [pointing to the other socialists] offer us? We are told: renounce your victory, make concessions, compromise. With whom?, I ask. To those who have left us we must say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out. Go where you ought to go – into the dustbin of history.’

To those who encountered him for the first time he did not seem like a revolutionary who would create a new kind of society and transform history, said John Reed. ‘He was a short, stocky figure, with a big head set down on his shoulders, bald and bulging little eyes, a snubbish nose, wide generous mouth, and heavy chin. Dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers were much too long for him. Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob… A strange popular leader – a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colourless, humourless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies – but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms. And combined with shrewdness, the greatest intellectual audacity.’

Chapter 1 - A Nest of Gentlefolk

In the five years before 1917 he wrote many more letters to Inessa Armand – on personal and political matters – than to anyone else. Their correspondence and her diaries were censored for nearly seventy years until the Communist state that Lenin founded collapsed.

Lenin was petulant, ill-tempered and irascible, especially as he grew older, but his mother was the one person he never complained about to anybody, the only one to whom he always showed unqualified love.

Maria Alexandrovna Blank was born in 1835 in St Petersburg. Her father was an eccentric, a martinet and – a fact kept strictly secret by the Soviet authorities after Lenin’s death – a Jew. He had been born Sril (the Yiddish form of Israel) Moiseyevich (Moses) Blank in Odessa, but while studying medicine he converted to Orthodoxy and changed his first name and patronymic to Alexander Dmitriyevich. He travelled widely in Europe after qualifying as a doctor and married the daughter of a wealthy German merchant, Anna Groschopf. She was a Protestant. Under the restrictive religious laws of Tsarist Russia, his wife was required to convert to the Orthodox faith, but she refused and brought up her six children as Lutherans.

Lenin’s mother, although nominally Lutheran, seldom went to church. His father was religious and ensured that the children were brought up Orthodox in a traditional Russian manner.

Ilya revered Alexander II, the ‘Tsar Liberator’ who emancipated the serfs in 1861 and launched a series of other modest measures to modernise the Romanov autocracy. After he was assassinated in 1881 by terrorists from the People’s Will revolutionary group Ilya Ulyanov wept for days.

Lenin was almost certainly unaware of his partially Jewish ancestry.

If Lenin had known, he would probably have been relaxed about the revelation. As he once told the writer Maxim Gorky, ‘We do not have many intelligent people. [Russians] are a talented people. But we are lazy. A bright Russian is nearly always a Jew or a person with an admixture of Jewish blood.’

Chapter 2 - A Childhood Idyll

He was the loudest and worst-behaved child in a well-ordered family.

All the children were encouraged by both parents to read widely, in a permissive way that would have shocked Ilya Ulyanov’s more conservative civil service colleagues. For most of his early teens Vladimir’s favourite book was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an early influence on him pre-dating Marx or any of the Russian radicals. He kept the novel by his bedside for many years.

Indoors, the children, even the older ones, loved to play with toy soldiers. Vladimir always chose the American side and took the part of Abraham Lincoln, or the Union generals Grant and Sherman.

The game Lenin loved throughout his life, though, was chess.

He became a serious player who could give the top names in Russian chess a decent game.

Under the Russian autocracy, where no politics were permitted, the rulers were scared of allowing Russian children to read some of the masterpieces of Russian literature. Very little poetry was taught. Pupils were discouraged from reading most of the great modern Russian writers – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol – because at one time or another they had all faced problems with the Tsarist censors.

Strict silence was enforced during homework hours and time was set aside each day for serious reading.

By a curious twist of fate – it was such a backwater town – Alexander Kerensky was also from Simbirsk. He attended the same school, though they did not know each other, as he was eleven years younger than Lenin.

Chapter 3 - The Hanged Man

The Ulyanovs were shunned by bourgeois Simbirsk. The dignitaries of the town who a year or so earlier had attended the funeral of Vladimir’s father no longer visited. Long-standing family friends who came to play chess with Ilya, and since his death with Vladimir, no longer called. This triggered the vitriolic, sometimes uncontrollable, loathing for liberals and ‘middle class do-gooders’ that he would henceforth show until his dying day. ‘The bourgeois… they will always be traitors and cowards,’ he declared with monotonous frequency from now onwards. Politics is personal – and this was personal. A young boy who rarely thought about politics became radicalised almost overnight.

Chapter 4 - The Police State

Around 85 per cent of the Russian population were peasants, the muzhiks, who were still essentially without civil rights at all, though some advances in their legal status had been made since the abolition of serfdom in 1861.

Nearly 20,000 ministers, provincial governors, senior civil servants and top army officers were assassinated by revolutionary groups in the last twenty-five years of Tsarist rule.

It was surprising how many of the terrorists were women – at a time when even the idea of Votes for Women in Western Europe or the US had barely yet become an issue of debate.

The structure of the police state had been established under Nicholas I in the 1820s. He built an entire organ of government – the Third Section of the Administrative Department – to combat subversion. Essentially it was a secret service of the monarch, whose interests were seen as different from those of his subjects. Laws protecting property or the lives of other Russians were handled by a separate policing system. The Third Section, which in the 1880s became the Okhrana, had draconian powers to detain people without trial and send them to ‘administrative exile’ in Siberia and the Arctic wastes at any hint of ‘political crimes’. Its power and scope were unlike anything elsewhere in Europe. It became the model for the Cheka, the NKVD and the KGB in the Russia of the future – or indeed the FSB of the post-Soviet era.

The biggest and most dangerous of these groups was Narodnaya Volya, whose principal theorist and leader was the charismatic Sergei Nechayev, on whom Dostoyevsky based Verkhovensky, the nihilistic central character in The Possessed.

Many historians have argued that the reason Soviet-style Communism developed as it did is that Lenin tried to import a Western creed and philosophy to a backward country, as Russia was. Rather, the opposite is true. Lenin transformed a set of European ideas into a very Russian creation. His version of Marxism – its intolerance, rigidity, violence and cruelty – were forged from Lenin’s experience as a nineteenth-century Russian. Lenin’s Bolshevism had deep Russian roots.

Chapter 5 - A Revolutionary Education

So he educated himself, quietly in the countryside. ‘Never later in my life, not in prison in Petersburg or in Siberia, did I read so much as in the year after my exile to the countryside from Kazan,’ he said later. ‘This was serious reading, from early morning to late at night.’

But the work that influenced him most profoundly was a novel, What Is to Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a man whom he idolised.

As farming wasn’t working his mother suggested another career. She persuaded him to read for the law and qualify as an advocate. He was barred from attending a university but was permitted to take the exams as an external student at St Petersburg University, and was allowed to go to the capital to do so. He crammed a four-year course into twelve months and passed top of his year, obtaining the highest marks in all fourteen papers. It was a phenomenal achievement intellectually – and in one of the Russian ironies he would delight in, he got the country’s most brilliant law degree while the organs of the police were keeping him under surveillance as a potential lawbreaking subversive.

Chapter 6 - Vladimir Ilyich – Attorney at Law

He was never slovenly or careless about appearances, as the archetype of the Russian revolutionary from the pages of, say, Conrad was supposed to be. He was extremely well ordered and tidy, nearly to the point of obsession – the adjective ‘anal’ as commonly used today might have been coined for him.

He wrote and published more than ten million words in his lifetime, not counting thousands of letters to family, friends and comrades.

If he was slow to succeed as a journalist, he quickly built a reputation as a clever and sharp debater who could demolish an opponent’s argument with forensic skill. This was one of his great talents. He was a hard man to argue against, as his friends and critics acknowledged.

Chapter 8 - Language, Truth and Logic

The Ulyanov style of argument and debate was formed early and did not change significantly over the next two decades. He became better at winning his point, more confident and masterful. But he was nearly always domineering, abusive, combative and often downright vicious. He battered opponents into submission with the deliberate use of violent language which he acknowledged was ‘calculated to evoke hatred, aversion, contempt…not to convince, not to correct the mistakes of the opponent but to destroy him, to wipe him and his organisation off the face of the earth’.

Chapter 9 - Foreign Parts

Vladimir spent nearly half of his adult life outside Russia, though he didn’t leave his homeland until he was twenty-five.

One of the reasons he would spend so many of his exile years in Switzerland was to be close to his beloved Alps.

Vladimir was a highly secretive man and he grew to delight in the ‘conspiratorial’ hide and seek of the clandestine revolutionary life, the disguises and the moving to safe houses through alleyways and tunnels. It added a frisson of excitement to writing articles and researching in libraries.

Chapter 10 - Prison and Siberia

‘No one knows the kind of government he is living under who has never been in jail.’ Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910)

Vladimir’s exile ended on 29 January 1900. But one condition of his release was that he could not live in any major city or a university town in which he might corrupt students with revolutionary ideas.

In 1897 there were around 300,000 exiles scattered across Siberia, roughly 5 per cent of its total population.

Yudin sold his collection to the US Library of Congress in 1906 for US$150,000 – a fortune at the time. It remains the core of the Library’s Russian Collection.

Chapter 11 - Lenin Is Born

During his life he adopted more than a hundred pseudonyms, some of them just once or twice. It is unclear why Lenin was the name that stuck, but he soon began to favour it, though he used a few others off and on for a short while afterwards.

Lenin’s claim to leadership was based as much on his organisational acumen as a plotter as on his ability to inspire as speaker or with his pen.

He replied that he didn’t want liberals in the Party giving the Revolution tacit support: ‘The Party isn’t a ladies’ finishing school. Revolution is a messy business.’ These were some of the first words he wrote under the pen name Lenin.

Chapter 12 - Underground Lives

In order to appoint agents, to look after them, to guide them, it is necessary to be everywhere, to rush about and see them on the job. That requires a team of practical organisers and leaders but we haven’t got any, at least very few to speak of. That’s the whole trouble. Looking at our practical mismanagement is often so infuriating that it robs one of the capacity for work. The consolation is that the cause is vital and despite the chaos is growing.’

Chapter 13 - England, Their England

‘My first impression of London: hideous,’ he wrote the next day

Lenin loathed the very idea of a commune

I simply can’t… everyone has a corner in his life which should never be penetrated by anyone, and everyone should have a special room completely to himself.’

Lenin spent afternoons at the Iskra ‘office’. But every morning, when it opened, he would be at what he agreed was ‘the richest library in the world’ – the central domed Reading Room of the British Museum – where Marx had spent so much of his life.

It was a sixpenny bus ride from Clerkenwell to Highgate Cemetery, where he often went to Marx’s grave and took a short walk up the hill to enjoy the panoramic vista of the whole of London below.

Lenin’s command of English became reasonably good, though, as many recalled, he had a hint of an Irish brogue through his Russian accent. He said that he always found the English spoken by the Irish easier to understand.

Chapter 14 - What Is to Be Done?

His greatest skill in his early years was his ability to inspire optimism and hope.

The essence of Leninism is contained in his best-known work, What Is to Be Done?

Lenin had no great respect for the working classes for whom he was proposing to make the revolution. ‘The working class exclusively by its own efforts is able to develop only trade union consciousness,’ he said.

There had to be a ‘revolutionary vanguard’ of people who could protect themselves from the police, studied Marxist ideology and mastered the arts of revolutionary conspiracy.

For many Russian intellectuals like Lenin, the idea that Marxism would bring Russia closer to the West was its main attraction.

Neither side in this doctrinal dispute would have cared to know what Marx really thought about Russians. As he wrote in a letter to Engels, ‘I do not trust any Russian. As soon as a Russian worms his way in, all hell breaks loose.’

Chapter 15 - The Great Schism – Bolsheviks and Mensheviks

He missed his regular desk, L13, at the Reading Room of the British Museum, where he had spent so many mornings of satisfying hard work.

The Lenins were ‘at home’ and offered open house to Russian visitors on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, a rule designed to stop comrades dropping by at other times of the day or night.

This time Lenin won the vote and, with his characteristic mastery of tactics and presentation – spin in present-day language – he branded his followers ‘bolchintsvo’, the majority, and his opponents ‘menchintsvo’, the minority.

Trotsky responded in kind. He told a Menshevik friend nearly a decade after the split, ‘the rotten squabble, systematically inflamed by that master of such affairs, Lenin, that exploiter of any backwardness in the Russian labour movement… The entire Leninist edifice is built on lies and falsification and carries within it the poisonous source of its own disintegration.’ Lenin, he said, ‘is simply unscrupulous through and through’. His most cutting comment, as it proved to be so prophetic, was ‘when Lenin talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat… he means the dictatorship over the proletariat’.

Chapter 16 - Peaks and Troughs

Splitting the Party and splitting again, going into a political wilderness, would seem a hopeless route to take for a tiny group with little popular support. But in the long term – and Lenin was always looking at the bigger picture and the longer term – the tactic paid off. In his calculation, it did not matter so much how many supporters he had. The important thing was to have a group of people, a Party, loyal to him, of disciplined and dedicated supporters who would spread the true word.

He clearly suffered from hypertension, as his father had done: he was a stroke waiting to happen, as the arteriosclerosis in his brain established later.

Chapter 17 - An Autocracy Without an Autocrat

It is no exaggeration to say that every major decision Nicholas II took was wrong – from his choice of wife, Alexandra, who compounded his own misjudgements, to his disastrous decisions on war and peace.

Historians have on the whole been rather kind to Nicholas II, mainly because of the grisly manner of his death and the murder of his family. But he was largely responsible for his own destruction.

"An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to obtain arms, deserves to be treated as slaves."

He said the important thing was that revolutionaries had fought in the streets and their defeat would teach them to hate their enemies: ‘the one who has been whipped is worth two who have not’.

Chapter 19 - ‘Expropriate the Expropriators’

The Party couldn’t rely entirely on donations from millionaire magnates – Russian oligarchs of a bygone age – to finance the Revolution. Money had to be found in other ways and Lenin built what was in effect a criminal gang to steal on the Party’s behalf, perhaps an original model of the Russian mafia.

Krasin chose as his chief ‘fixer’ and right-hand man Stalin, who planned and took part in a number of ‘expros’, all within the Russian empire. The various gangs they employed robbed banks, stole a large sum in cash and gold from the safe aboard the steamship Nicholas I moored in Baku harbour and attacked post offices and state railway ticket offices. Krasin planned a major operation to print counterfeit money on a clandestine press but he couldn’t find a skilful enough forger.

Chapter 20 - Geneva – ‘An Awful Hole’

In several Swiss cities signs appeared in lodging houses reading ‘No Cats. No Dogs. No Russians.’

Chapter 21 - Inessa – Lenin in Love

Inessa had an incisive mind, she was beautiful, she was exciting, she was an experienced woman of the world who had few bourgeois hang-ups about female sexuality – and Lenin was smitten.

Inessa at this stage was a great admirer of Tolstoy. One of the other members of her group had the idea of writing to the esteemed writer and asking what he thought could be done about the social problem of prostitution, which was destroying the lives of so many Russian women. He had expertise in this area: as a young man he had been a famously enthusiastic customer of courtesans – and, just as famously afterwards, he had ‘reformed’ and become a moral arbiter of the nation’s conscience. He replied: ‘Nothing will come of your work. It was thus before Moses, it was thus after Moses. Thus it was, thus it will be.’ Inessa was disgusted and gave up on Tolstoy.

If she seemed to be living in harmony with her husband, she had started a love affair with another man – Alexander’s younger brother Vladimir. He was just seventeen, newly enrolled as a student at Moscow University; she was twenty-eight, the mother of four young children. In 1903 she left her husband for her brother-in-law, taking the children with her.

Lenin said that ‘most of the émigrés went to seed as soon as they arrived in Paris. Only the strongest survived. The rest were destroyed by petty feuds, domestic quarrels, poverty – and alcohol.’

Chapter 22 - Betrayals

Malinovsky was earning his money. He knew all the senior Bolsheviks in Russia and betrayed many of them, including Yakov Sverdlov, who became one of the most important Bolshevik leaders after the Revolution.

Lenin had the format of the paper worked out. He had chosen a title – Pravda (Truth); he selected a team of journalists to staff it and contribute to it. All he lacked was enough money to produce the publication. The vital funds came from a gift by Viktor Tikhomirov, who had just inherited a fortune following the death of his father, a Kazan merchant.

In its first thirty-eight issues, Pravda had a succession of thirty-six editors, all of whom were arrested. Between them they spent forty-seven months in jail.

Around the same time that Malinovsky began his double life, Yevno Azef, the leader of the Socialist Revolutionaries, the biggest terrorist organisation in Russia, behind hundreds of assassinations of government officials, had been an Okhrana agent. About to be unmasked by his comrades, he escaped to Germany in the nick of time. He died in Berlin in 1918, of natural causes.

Chapter 23 - A Love Triangle – Two into Three Will Go

Whether it was an unnamed gynaecological condition that arose after her Siberian exile, which required two months’ treatment, or her thyroid problems which had probably existed undiagnosed for years, Nadya had no children with Lenin. She rarely mentioned any disappointment, but every now and then a hint of regret would appear.

Chapter 24 - Catastrophe – The World at War

‘They cannot support an imperialist and dynastic war…they are not such rascals,’ he told Zinoviev a few days before the German socialists, carried on a wave of nationalism, voted to grant the government as much money as it needed to pursue the conflict. The equivalent parties in France, Austria and Britain did the same and Lenin was furious. ‘They have betrayed socialism…From this moment I cannot call myself a Social Democrat. I am a Communist.’

The Tsar was wildly cheered from the Winter Palace balcony when the declaration of war was made in St Petersburg, whose name had been changed to Petrograd to make it sound less German.

They lost an entire army corps at the Masurian Lakes, more than 120,000 men killed and wounded. The Battle of Tannenberg, just four weeks after the start of the war, was one of the worst ever defeats in Russian history: the entire 2nd Army was wiped out, with casualties of over 160,000. The winning general, Paul von Hindenburg, said later that ‘we had to remove the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches in order to get a clear field of fire against fresh assaulting Russian waves. Imagination may try to reconstruct the figure of their losses, but an accurate calculation will remain for ever a vain thing.’

By the end of October 1914 Russia had lost 1.2 million men, killed, wounded or missing, a high proportion of whom were trained junior officers and professional NCOs.

The reserves in the rear were the men who ‘were the breeding ground for mass desertion, discontent and finally mutiny which created the Revolution’. These were the men who would become Lenin’s willing accomplices.

The primitive state of communications was at the root of the military disaster. Along Russia’s long Western Front there were just twenty-five telephones and a few Morse coding machines, and telegraph communications constantly broke down. Commanders and their aides had to move around on horseback to find out what was happening at the Front – rather as in the days described in War and Peace.

Vast numbers of Russian soldiers preferred being taken prisoner to fighting. In the first year of the war four and a half times as many Russians were captured than were killed in action – 1.2 million to 270,000.

Chapter 25 - In the Wilderness

To grant equality to little pigs and fools – never.

Lenin was unapologetic. In the short term he accepted that the Bolsheviks would pay a price. But strategically Lenin was right. In the long run his consistent line against the war was a crucial factor in helping him seize power – and keep hold of it. When the mood changed in Russia and war-weariness started growing, support for the Bolsheviks increased. Lenin could plausibly argue that as he had always been against the conflict, he and the Bolsheviks could bring peace. It was the main promise to the people in 1917.

Chapter 26 - The Last Exile

In six months Lenin completed one of his longest and most interesting books, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Much is dated, but some of his ideas have resonance now: ‘Capitalism…is no longer the progressive force described by Marx’; the free market era ‘has been followed by a new one in which production is concentrated in vast syndicates and trusts which aim at monopoly control’. Giant multinational technology companies ‘freeze out other competition to forestall independent technological innovation’. Financial control ‘has passed from the industrialists themselves to a handful of banking conglomerates – the creation of a banking oligarchy’.

Occasionally he met the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, an anti-war pacifist, at the Café Odéon, where Bolsheviks frequently congregated – the Mensheviks favoured the Adler. Zweig was not impressed, wondering in later years ‘how could this obstinate little man…Lenin ever have become so important?’.

Chapter 27 - Revolution – Part One

In a famous poem, Anna Akhmatova captured the spirit: We are all winners, we are all whores How sad we are together.

His wife Zinaida Gippius, a fine poet, wrote in her diary, ‘Russia is a very large lunatic asylum. If you visit an asylum on an open day you may not realise you are in one. It looks normal enough but the inmates are all mad.’

In January 1917 an average working woman in St Petersburg would put in a ten-hour shift – and spend forty hours a week queuing for food.

The suicide rate in Russia tripled during the war years – an epidemic that affected mainly young people under twenty-eight. There was sexual licence on a previously unprecedented scale, and among the rich, divorce – rare until around 1910 – became common.

The Revolution was sparked by bread riots but it succeeded because every regiment in the Petrograd guard – the smart regiments that for centuries had been fiercely loyal to the Romanovs – mutinied. It was the famous Guards of the Preobrazhensky, Volinsky, Pavlovsky and Litovsky, known as the Tsar’s praetorians, who decided the fate of the Emperor.

Historians have often said that it had been a generally peaceful uprising. This is a popular myth that has gained authority largely because the February Revolution was genuinely supported by the vast majority of people. But it was violent. Far more people were killed in February than would die in the Bolshevik coup in October – 1,433 in Petrograd and around 3,000 in Moscow, where armed gangs roamed the streets for several days. The October coup was almost bloodless by comparison.

The sale of vodka was a state monopoly and the scale so large that the tax brought in nearly 20 per cent of the state’s income. To make up for the loss the government had to borrow yet more, adding to the already enormous debts caused by the war, and also to print money which fuelled inflation. Though rarely mentioned, the vodka ban was a big factor in the fall of the Tsarist regime; and seventy years later, when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to prohibit alcohol, the result was similar. It helped to bankrupt the USSR and played a major part in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Chapter 28 - The Sealed Train

‘The Germans turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed train like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.’ Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, Volume Two, 1929

The sealed train story and the wanderings of the ‘exotic’ Russian radicals became big news in Sweden. For the first time anywhere there was a picture of Lenin in a newspaper and Sweden’s quality daily Politiken carried a profile of the man who promised a revolution in Russia and, once in power, an end to the war. He was fêted wherever he went in Stockholm. He was met at the train by Carl Lindhagen, mayor of the city, who gave him breakfast, and there was a lunchtime reception for him laid on at the Hotel Regina by Swedish socialists.

Chapter 30 - The Interregnum

Prince Lvov, the Prime Minister, told Vladimir Nabokov (father of the novelist), his closest aide and Chief Secretary to the Cabinet, ‘Don’t worry about Lenin. The man is not dangerous – and, besides, we can arrest him whenever we want.’

Lurid, semi-pornographic, anti-monarchist pamphlets with titles like The Secrets of the Romanovs, The Night Orgies of Rasputin and The German Woman’s Evil Lies were instant sell-outs.

Lenin was determined to stoke up this desire for revenge and destruction, convinced it would help sweep him to power.

From the start, there was a fatal weakness in the political arrangement immediately after the February Revolution. Two rival seats of power were established – a recipe for chaos. The Duma set up the Provisional Government of Prince Lvov, which, supposedly, was a seamless transition from the Tsarist regime. But on day one the government recognised the Soviet of Soldiers’, Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies as a partner and accepted that all government measures had to be approved by the Soviet before they were put into effect.

As one of his supporters remarked, ‘for sheer political incompetence and well-meaning ineptitude, history has few more striking examples’ than the interregnum between the fall of the Tsar and the Bolshevik coup.

Chapter 31 - ‘Peace, Land and Bread’

But even some of his admirers were shocked by the crude, mob-rousing populism he displayed in the spring and summer of 1917, such as the slogan he used in most speeches, ‘Loot the looters’.

The Provisional Government’s writ never ran throughout much of provincial Russia, where law and order had entirely broken down. Hundreds of large estates throughout Russia were seized by peasants who evicted, brutalised and in many cases murdered their landowners.

Chapter 32 - The Spoils of War

Altogether, by the beginning of July they were producing forty-one publications with a circulation of nearly 350,000. ‘It was an extraordinary feat of organisation’ to get the papers up and running so quickly, said Trotsky, and it made a huge propaganda impact for the Bolsheviks. People who had barely heard of them before now knew where they stood – certainly on the issue of the war. The operation was masterminded by Lenin, but could not have happened without large amounts of money from the Germans, as part of the deal which included the ‘sealed train’ journey.

Chapter 33 - A Desperate Gamble

‘Those who make revolutions by halves are simply digging their own graves.’ François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848)

Chapter 34 - The July Days

Sailors and troops backing the Bolsheviks couldn’t understand why the Party bosses hadn’t seized power when it looked as though it was theirs: ‘Take the power, you son of a bitch, when it is offered,’ a soldier shouted in Trotsky’s direction late that afternoon.

Chapter 35 - On the Run

One night he was billeted at the home of the veteran Finnish socialist Karl Wiik, during which, he later told Nadya, he reread Jules Michelet’s vivid, beautifully written account of the Terror during the French Revolution. He often saw the Jacobins as an inspiration for the Bolsheviks.

The next few weeks showed Lenin’s great skills as a leader. If anything disproves the Marxist idea that it is not individuals who make history but broad social and economic forces it is Lenin’s revolution. He dragged his reluctant and frightened comrades with him towards an uprising most of them did not want. He used a mixture of guile, logic, bluster, threats and calm persuasion to impose his will on them.

Chapter 36 - Revolution – Part Two

Almost at dawn a vote was taken. It went Lenin’s way ten to two, with only Zinoviev and Kamenev voting against. Lenin reached across the table and picked up a pencil. There was no paper so – famously – he scrawled on a child’s exercise book the biggest decision the Bolsheviks took: ‘Recognising that an armed uprising is inevitable and the time perfectly ripe, the Central Committee proposes to all the organisations of the Party to act accordingly and to discuss and decide from this point of view all the practical questions.’

Angelica Balabanova, who hated Trotsky, once asked Lenin what had kept them apart from 1903 to 1917. ‘Now don’t you know? Ambition, ambition, ambition.’ He meant Trotsky’s ambition, not of course his own.

Later, Sukhanov saw the joke that one of the most important meetings in Russian history took place at his apartment while he was elsewhere, sleeping. It was very likely one of the biggest stories ever missed by a journalist so close to the event. ‘Oh, the novel jokes of the merry muse of history,’ he said when he realised.

37 - Power – At Last

‘Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit. It has its own organic life; it develops finally into a disease… blood and power intoxicate.’ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead, 1862

The regime he created was largely shaped by his personality: secretive, suspicious, intolerant, ascetic, intemperate.

Throughout his life as a revolutionary Lenin was absorbed in the study of one subject above all others: the nature of power, how it is grasped and used, how it changes those who possess it and those who don’t. He wanted power for its own sake, as egotists do. But he genuinely believed that he was going to use it to improve the lives of the majority of people. It is how he justified the lies, the deceit and terror that followed: everything was acceptable in pursuit of the socialist dream. As Angelica Balabanova, who respected him and admired him but grew to fear and loathe him, put it, Lenin’s ‘tragedy was that, in Goethe’s phrase, he desired the good…but created evil’.

He wasn’t interested in the trappings of power and didn’t enjoy them. His aim was to impose his ideas and personality on others; to bend people to his will.

He knew the Bolsheviks would use terror and accepted it, always justifying it as necessary. But he never witnessed an execution and had no interest in hearing about one. He saw only three dead bodies in his life: his father, his sister Olga and his mother-in-law. To Lenin, the blood he would spill was largely theoretical.

On day two he began to censor the press and threatened to close down opposition newspapers.

He promised ‘incomparably more press freedom’ if the Bolsheviks had their way. On 27 October Lenin wrote a Decree on the Press which established a system of censorship run by his Party apparatchiks.

Around the same time he shocked Emma Goldman by telling her that ‘free speech is a bourgeois prejudice, a soothing plaster for social ills. In the workers’ republic, economic well-being talks louder than speech.’

Red Guards surrounded the bank while the two Bolsheviks entered the building and ordered junior clerks, at gunpoint, to open the vaults. Five million rubles were hastily stuffed into sacks – as in a heist movie. Gorbunov and Osinsky carried the bags over their shoulders, got into a waiting armoured car and took them directly to Lenin’s office. He was not there; the pair transferred the money into red velvet bags and kept guard over the swag. Osinsky was holding a cocked revolver throughout the procedure. When he returned, Lenin was beaming. The bags were put in an old wardrobe in an adjoining office and a sentry stood permanent guard. This was the first Soviet Treasury.

Kerensky remained in hiding inside Russia or in Finland throughout the Civil War that followed, hoping for a triumphal return to Petrograd. Eventually he accepted it would be unlikely to happen and left for Berlin in 1922, and subsequently Paris – the route taken by hundreds of thousands of Russian émigrés. When France fell to the Germans in 1940 he left for the US. He lived in New York, making a good income on the speaking circuit. Then he went to California and joined the Hoover Institution.

38 - The Man in Charge

Quickly the Soviet became the rubber-stamp body it would remain for the next seven decades – ‘a sorry parody of a revolutionary parliament’.

39 - The Sword and Shield

In Lenin’s words, the Cheka’s job was to ‘investigate and liquidate all attempts or actions connected with counter-revolution or sabotage, no matter from whom they come, throughout Russia’. But its functions and powers were not made public until the mid-1920s, and from the first it operated outside the law under top-secret protocols with virtually no political accountability. The Soviet had no control and neither, over the years, did Sovnarkom. It answered only to Lenin.

The Russian secret police will for ever be identified with the building the Cheka moved into the following March in Moscow – the former headquarters of the All-Russia Insurance Company at 22 Lubyanka, an address that would very soon become one of the most feared prisons in the world. It was – and is – a vast building occupying practically an entire city block. Dzerzhinsky told colleagues that one of the main reasons he chose it was the vast size of the cellar space, where noise could easily be muffled. And so it proved.

40 - War and Peace

Separate peace talks were bad enough. But the Allies were appalled and embarrassed when Trotsky published the ‘secret’ treaties the Tsar had signed with Britain and France before the war began. They showed deals were made to divide the post-war spoils when Germany was defeated: the Middle East would be carved up, Russia would get Constantinople – the dream of the Romanovs for three centuries – and France would get Alsace-Lorraine back. For Lenin these proved that the war was ‘an imperialist adventure all about colonies and plunder’.

At one point Karl Radek rose from his seat and shouted at Lenin, ‘If we had five hundred courageous men in Petrograd we would put you in prison.’ Lenin smiled and answered wearily: ‘Some people may indeed go to prison after this but if you will calculate the probabilities you will see that it is much more likely that I will send you rather than you send me.’

(see Giles Milton’s excellent Russian Roulette and Robert Service’s Spies and Commissars).

41 - The One-Party State

Russia’s first freely elected parliament – the Constituent Assembly – survived for about twelve hours. There would not be another for nearly seventy-five years.

But Lenin in power had no intention of allowing a free parliament. He may on occasions in the past have written in praise of elections. But he didn’t believe in ‘bourgeois democracy’ on principle and certainly not in practice for a revolutionary state. The dictatorship of the proletariat and the authority of the Soviet were ‘not only a higher form of democracy…[but] the only form of democracy’.

Lenin could put off the day no longer. On 5 January 1918 the Assembly gathered at the Tauride Palace. Petrograd was ‘in a state of siege’ from early in the morning. The government had declared martial law and flooded the city with troops and Red Guards. Demonstrations had been banned, but at noon around 40,000 workers, students and civil servants defied the order and began to march the two kilometres from Mars Field to the Tauride Palace on a bitterly cold and snowy day. When they reached Liteiny Prospekt, Red Guards, hidden from rooftops, opened fire. The protestors scattered and two huge banners they had been carrying – ‘All Power to the Assembly’ – lay trampled in the slush. At least ten people were killed and seventy seriously wounded.

Lenin was right about his strategy, though. There was little significant support outside the intelligentsia for the Assembly, no big demonstrations, no strikes, no mutinies in the army. ‘There was apathy among the soldiers and workers… Lenin judged correctly,’ said one of his Sovnarkom comrades.

‘But of course they will only regard the affair as an act of political terror.’ That, according to the Justice Commissar, was when he realised that under the Bolsheviks the phrase ‘political terror’ would justify a wide range of crimes.

The rich were branded ‘former people’, awarded far lower rations, and were placed at the back of the queues for bread. Some scions of great aristocratic families starved to death.

One of Lenin’s decrees codified Bolshevik ideas of ‘revolutionary justice’. At a stroke he abolished the existing legal system, though he kept the Tsarist principle that there was one system of justice for normal crimes against property and separate laws for crimes against the State. He established ‘People’s Courts’ for common criminals – essentially ad hoc mob trials in which twelve ‘elected’ judges, most of them barely literate, would rule less on the facts of a case than with the use, in Lenin’s words, of ‘revolutionary conscience’. Lenin’s hatred of the law and lawyers shone through in this decree.

Lenin had a very simple, straightforward and at least honest argument in favour of this system of so-called justice: his system was far superior, practically and morally, because it operated in the interests of the exploited classes – which justified everything. ‘For us there does not, and cannot, exist the old system of morality and “humanity” invented by the bourgeoisie for the purpose of oppressing and exploiting the “lower classes”. Our morality is new, our humanity is absolute, for it rests on the ideal of destroying all oppression and coercion. To us, all is permitted, for we are the first in the world to raise the sword not in the name of enslaving or oppressing anyone, but in the name of freeing all from bondage…Blood? Let there be blood, if it alone can turn the grey-white-and-black banner of the old piratical world to a scarlet hue, for only the complete and final death of that old world will save us from the return of the old jackals.’

When he read it the Justice Commissar, Steinberg, went to see Lenin and protested that such harsh measures would ‘destroy the Revolution’. Lenin replied: ‘On the contrary…do you really believe that we can be victorious without the very cruellest revolutionary terror?’ ‘Then why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice at all? Let’s call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination and be done with it.’ Lenin’s face lit up, according to Steinberg, and he said: ‘Well put. That’s exactly what it should be; but we can’t say that.’

Most of the old Bolsheviks saw Petrograd as a Western city in the European tradition and regarded Moscow with its onion-domed churches as the capital of Orthodoxy and Old Russia – semi-Asiatic.

Lenin dismissed their arguments. When the government moved, power and authority would move with it. ‘If the Germans in one big swoop overrun Petersburg [he nearly always referred to it by that name, or Peter] – and all of us – then the Revolution perishes. If the government is in Moscow, then the fall of Petersburg will be a grievous blow, but only a blow. If we stay… we are increasing the military danger. If we leave for Moscow, the temptation for the Germans to take Petersburg is much smaller. What is the advantage for them in taking a hungry and revolutionary city?… Why do you prattle about the symbolic importance of Smolny? The Smolny is what it is because we are in it. When we are all in the Kremlin, all your symbolism will be in the Kremlin.’

42  -The Battle for Grain

Lenin needed an enemy. So he invented a new class of Russian – kulaks, or rich peasants – whom he claimed were hoarding grain and deliberately starving the rest of the country, particularly the cities.

Before the Revolution Lenin had promised that peasants would be given land seized from the major landowners – the nobles, big industrialists and the Church. There was little talk of that after the coup.

Millions of people were leaving the cities in the hope that there would be more food in the country, which for a while there was. Petrograd lost two-thirds of its population within eighteen months.

On 23 August he wrote to the Bolshevik chiefs in Penza Province: ‘Comrades, the kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity. The interests of the whole Revolution demand it, for the final and decisive battle with the kulaks everywhere is now engaged. An example must be made. 1) Hang (and I mean hang, so the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Identify hostages… Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry: they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks. Cable that you have received this and carried out [instructions]. Lenin. PS Find tougher people.’

Even by the government’s official figures the food brigades collected only about 570,000 tons – from a total harvest yield of forty-nine million tons.

The word kulak means, literally, ‘fist’ and refers to ‘tight-fisted’ people. So it was an easy transfer to suggest ‘profiteers’ and exploiters.

43 - Regicide

‘In England and France they executed their kings some centuries ago, but we were late with ours.’ Lenin, 1919

There was no public execution to give it a semblance of judicial and State authority. The monarch was allowed no opportunity to perform his final act with regal dignity. Tsar Nicholas II and his immediate family were butchered in secret by a group of thugs, some of them drunk, in a squalid basement, their remains were burned and thrown down a mineshaft – and then the men who ordered the murder lied about it.

At first the Provisional Government believed the former Tsar and Empress would seek refuge in Britain. But, having originally said the Romanovs were welcome, his cousin King George V shabbily changed his mind. He thought it would be a highly unpopular move and reflect badly on him, so he reneged on his commitment with weasel words and let Lloyd George – who was happy to allow the Romanovs to go to Britain – take the blame.

44 - The Assassins’ Bullets

There was an exchange of gunfire between Uritsky’s bodyguards and a young man wearing a military cadet uniform, but he got away on a bicycle.

‘We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life,’ Trotsky said, justifying the terror.

The murder attempt was the beginning of the ‘Lenin cult’, the exaggerated praise and semi-religious worship that characterised leadership in the Communist world for the following decades – perfected later by Stalin, Mao Zedong and Kim Il-Sung but originating in the days after the threat to Lenin’s life.

45 - The Simple Life

Lenin put in a punishing seventeen hours almost every day, but he did try to return to the apartment for lunch – as he had done in Geneva or Zurich.

At Gorki, there were four bodyguards on permanent duty and a staff of three others, including a cook, Spiridon Putin, whose grandson Vladimir would decades later also become the leader of Russia.

He coined a new word for the careerist breed of new Communists, which Trotsky would steal and later use often: ‘radishes – Red on the outside, White inside’.

Lenin’s private office was as unshowy, spartan almost, as his living quarters a little way along the corridor in the Kremlin’s main government building. It was a smallish room of no more than eighteen square metres with a worn brown carpet and a potted plant in one corner. It was simply furnished. Every item – left by the Tsar – was functional, except an old clock which fell behind between three and fifteen minutes a day. Constant repairs did not help, yet Lenin insisted it stay: ‘another clock would be no different’, he said, mysteriously.

Pride of place on the desk was a strange statue of an ape sitting on a pile of books staring at an oversized human skull, representing Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Lenin’s preferred method for dealing with many administrative problems was to threaten to ‘line up and shoot’ someone.

On the whole Lenin’s taste in literature, and all art, was highly conservative and utilitarian. He had read for pleasure in adolescence and early adulthood, but rarely after that. For a well-educated, intellectually sophisticated and intelligent man of that era he was surprisingly poorly read – certainly compared to, say, the omnivorous readers Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin and Lunacharsky among his Bolshevik clique. He knew little about painting or any of the visual arts. He enjoyed music – particularly Beethoven’s piano sonatas and, surprisingly, Wagner – but he seldom listened in case, as he had told Gorky, it would make him go ‘soft’.

Lenin acknowledged that Tolstoy was a ‘giant’ but he loathed the Tolstoyan world view, with its mysticism and pacifism.

Works by ninety-four authors including Kant, Descartes, William James, Schopenhauer, Pyotr Kropotkin and Ernst Mach were removed. ‘This tree of unknowledge was planted by Nadezhda Krupskaya under Lenin, with his direction and advice,’ acknowledged the chairman of the Central Libraries Commission later.

Lenin loathed the portrait of Novodorov in Tolstoy’s last novel Resurrection (1899), half idealistic dreamer and half ruthless opportunist revolutionary who has a lot of Lenin about him. ‘The whole of Novodorov’s revolutionary activity, though he could explain it very eloquently and very convincingly, appeared to be founded on nothing but ambition and the desire for supremacy. But, devoid of these moral and aesthetic qualities which call forth doubts and hesitations, he very soon acquired a position in the revolutionary world which satisfied him – that of leader of a Party. Having once chosen a direction, he never doubted or hesitated, and therefore was certain that he never made a mistake… His self-assurance was so great that it either repelled people or made them submit to him. And as he carried out his activity among very young people who mistook his boundless self-assurance for depth and wisdom, the majority did submit to him, and he had great success in revolutionary circles.’ How perceptive and prescient.

46 - Reds and Whites

He was not a military man, he had no experience of warfare; he had never worn a uniform. But it turned out that he had a good understanding of strategy, he was shrewd at picking efficient generals, he was a ruthless commander-in-chief, and, importantly, he possessed the gift of luck.

In the revolutionary storm that struck Russia in 1917 even out-and-out restorationists had to turn revolutionaries in the psychological sense, because in a revolution only revolutionaries can find their way.’

Altogether more than 50,000 Tsarist officers joined the Reds in the Civil War, including doctors, vets and engineers – most of them because their families were held hostage if they didn’t. They were told they would be watched by a commissar and if they did anything suspicious they would be shot and/or their families would be arrested. Only those who had relatives in Russia were recruited. Trotsky’s ‘Special Order Number 30’ of September 1918 stated: ‘Let the turncoats realise that they are at the same time betraying their own… fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives and children.’

Like Lenin, Trotsky had no military experience and had been a journalist, a pamphleteer, before the Revolution brought him power. But he was decisive, got things done by cutting through red tape and had a clear, logical mind. He was loathed by many Party members for his arrogance and hauteur, his perfectly pressed uniforms and his swagger. But nobody could deny his energy or his showmanship. He criss-crossed Russia in his special train equipped with a printing press, telegraph machines, an orchestra and a film crew and gave electrifying performances to rally often jaded and unwilling troops. He was the Red Army’s persuader-in-chief.

According to his chief aide-de-camp Kolchak’s favourite reading, which he kept by his side, was the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

There was desertion from both armies on a massive scale – more than a million in 1918 alone from the Red Army, and four million overall during the war. But about 80 per cent of Kolchak’s conscripted peasant army deserted, by far the highest proportion of any unit in the conflict from either side.

The Western Allies bankrolled the Whites with large amounts of money and arms, and lied about it. They supported the Whites’ side, but so half-heartedly that their intervention made no difference.

The British were by far the biggest financial backers of the Whites. Altogether they gave them more than £100 million, a vast sum at the time, and sent several spies to help mount plots to undermine the Bolshevik government.

The Americans lied too, principally to hide the truth from their own people, rather than to deceive the Russians. The US Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, was a passionate anti-Communist, a Cold Warrior before the term was invented. ‘Bolshevism is the most hideous and monstrous thing that the human mind has ever conceived,’ he said. ‘It finds its adherents among the criminal, the depraved and the mentally unfit.’ He wanted to help the Whites, but secretly and semi-legally. American law forbade the government granting loans to independent armies or mercenaries. Lansing wrote to Walter Page, American Ambassador to Britain, on 13 December 1917 with a scheme to get around the US Congress: ‘The only practicable course seems to be for the British and French governments to finance the…enterprise, in so far as it is necessary, and for this Government to loan them the money to do so. In that way we could comply with the statute and at the same time strengthen armed opposition to the Bolsheviks.’

Bolshevism was blamed on Jews so it was entirely legitimate to slaughter them, the White propaganda seemed to argue.

As they were being defeated by the Bolsheviks, the Whites slaughtered about 150,000 civilians.

It was a devastating blow for the Whites, whose defeat was accompanied by a mass migration from Russia. Between 1.5 and two million people left the country within two years of the Revolution, most of them educated, professional people, the intelligentsia.

When Trotsky said that while racially, yes, he was a Jew, he hated Judaism and was an internationalist, the Chief Rabbi of Moscow, Yakov Mazeh, observed: ‘It was the Trotskys who made the Revolution, but the Bronsteins who paid the bills.’

48  - The ‘Internationale’

The Comintern was run from Moscow and soon became a branch of Soviet foreign policy. Its founding rules stated that if members wanted to be considered Communist Parties, if they wanted any help or support from Russia, all had to be Leninist-type organisations run like the Bolsheviks. They must expel from their ranks ‘moderates and centrists’; they had to try to take over trade unions; and they had to toe the Moscow line on almost everything. In the long term this did immense harm to the idea of world revolution and set back Lenin and his successors’ dreams of spreading socialism. Portraying the far-Left parties elsewhere as stooges of the Russians played into the hands of the Right.

Lenin installed Angelica Balabanova as the first Secretary of the Comintern in 1919 and sent her to Stockholm to establish links with leftist groups in the West.

He supported a subsidy of US$1 million for John Reed, the American journalist, to spend on propaganda in the US.

49 - Rebels at Sea and on Land

‘Believe me. There can only be two kinds of government in Russia. Tsarism or the Soviets.’ Lenin, 3 March 1921

Senior Party critics weren’t purged, tried and executed – yet. That began later under Stalin.

The troops were repulsed for a few days but in the end it was a massacre. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Even Tukhachevsky was appalled by the carnage and surprised by the sailors’ determination to fight against hopeless odds. ‘It wasn’t a battle, but an inferno,’ he said later. ‘They fought like wild beasts. I cannot understand where they found the strength for such furious rage. Every house had to be taken by storm.’ Nearly all the sailors who survived the final assault on 16 March were summarily executed.

The terror became so routine that some people were slaughtered by ghastly mistake. At a Sovnarkom meeting in October 1919 commissars were discussing investment in railways. Halfway through, Lenin wrote a note to Dzerzhinsky asking: ‘How many dangerous counter-revolutionaries do we have in prison?’ The Cheka boss scribbled a reply, ‘around 1,500’, and returned the note to Lenin who read it, placed an X by the answer and returned it to Dzerzhinsky. That night hundreds of prisoners in Moscow were executed. Lenin had not ordered them to be shot, as his secretary, Fotieva, explained later. Sometimes he placed a cross by documents he had seen merely to show that he had read the information and taken note of it. So casual had the imposition of revolutionary justice become that this appalling error barely caused a stir of any kind.

His principle was simple: it is better that 100 innocent people are killed than that one person who is a danger to the Revolution remains free and a potential threat.

Cannibalism was common. People were storing corpses as food. One woman was caught with her child eating pieces of her dead husband. When police interviewed her she said, ‘We won’t give him up… he is our own family and no one has the right to take him away from us.’ There were several cases of mothers killing one of their children in order to feed the others.

Until July 1921 the Soviet government refused to admit there was a disaster happening, as the Tsar had done in the 1890s: the words ‘famine’ and ‘starvation’ were banned in the press on Lenin’s orders.

Hoover’s aid workers fed twenty-five million people in the Volga region alone and saved hundreds of thousands of lives before the ARA closed down its Russian efforts – prematurely. When it was revealed that the Soviets were taking foreign aid but at the same time selling its cereals for hard currency, it caused a scandal that forced the ARA teams to leave Russia, amid bitterness.

temporal as well as spiritual power. The Orthodox faith alone had the right to proselytise; it received generous state subsidies which paid most of the salaries of 45,000 parish priests and financed 100,000 monasteries. It was one of the biggest landowners in Russia.

We must seize the valuables now speedily; we will be unable to do so later because no other moment except that of desperate hunger will give us support among the masses. The confiscations must be conducted with merciless determination…the greater the number of clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason…[i.e., resisting church looting] the better. We must teach these people a lesson so they will not dare even to think of resistance for decades.’

On the other hand, the Bolsheviks raised a huge amount of booty from robbing the churches. In November 1921 alone, according to a report to Lenin, they seized 500 kilos of gold, 400,000 of silver, 35,670 of diamonds, 265 of assorted gemstones ‘and 964 other antique objects that will be weighed’.

50 - Intimations of Mortality

In October 1920 Kamenev persuaded him to sit for the sculptor Clare Consuelo Sheridan, a cousin of Winston Churchill. She was a great beauty and several leading Communist officials fell under her charms, Trotsky included. The rumour was that after he sat for her, they began an affair.

The idea of leadership cult, so alien to Marx’s or Lenin’s theories, defined the living practice of Communism.

51 - Revolution – Again

His new definition of Communism would be ‘Soviet power, plus electrification’.

Lenin saw the problem: ‘We should all be hanged for creating all this unnecessary red tape,’ he told Alexander Tsyurupa on 21 February 1922. ‘Everything around us is drowned in a filthy swamp of bureaucracy. Over-administration – madness. All these decrees: lunacy. Search for the right people, ensure that the work is properly done – that’s all that’s necessary.’

‘All the evils and hardships we are suffering from… are due to the fact that the Communist Party consists of ten per cent of convinced idealists, ready to die for the cause, but incapable of living for it, and ninety per cent of unscrupulous time-servers who have simply joined the Party to get jobs.’

He wrote a resolution On Party Unity, kept secret for many years. It banned all independent factions and groupings in the Communist Party which the Kremlin magnates did not recognise, on pain of immediate expulsion from the Party, with no appeal. ‘No faction of any sort will be tolerated,’ it said. This was to have the gravest consequences for millions of loyal Communists over the coming decades. It was the principal weapon that Stalin would use against ‘deviationists’ or anyone he perceived to be an opponent.

The Allied nations said they would end the trade blockade if Russia agreed to pay her pre-1914 debts – an important issue for Britain, especially, which was owed nearly £600 million.

52 - The Last Battle

It was his idea to make it a crime ‘not to recognise the right of the Communist system of ownership to replace capitalism and attempt its overthrow’. This became the basis for the notorious Article 58 of the Soviet Penal Code under which millions of people were killed, jailed or sent into the great maw of the Gulag over the following decades.

On 22 December Lenin dictated a frantic letter to Stalin begging him to keep his word and give him poison ‘as a humanitarian gesture’. Stalin said no and told his senior comrades of his refusal. ‘I do not have the strength to fulfil the request of Vladimir Ilyich,’ he said.

One of Lenin’s biggest mistakes was that he made no provisions for his succession.

Little in Soviet history remains so obscure as the truth behind Lenin’s so-called Last Testament – a few fragments of wishes for the post-Lenin era which he dictated, as secretly as he could, in the last months of his life.

Then, on 4 January, he summoned Fotieva to add an explosive postscript to the Testament: ‘Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among we Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. That is why I suggest that comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from the post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to other comrades, less capricious.’

53 - ‘An Explosion of Noise’

Trotsky always maintained that he had been deliberately misinformed – by Stalin – about the date of the funeral. But he had time to get back if he had genuinely wanted to. He wrote a powerful eulogy in a newspaper, though. His absence was carefully noted, and was a major miscalculation on his part. Without a doubt it counted against his succession claims.

54 - Lenin Lives

On 26 February 1924, four weeks after Lenin’s funeral, the Marxist atheists in charge of Soviet Russia established, with no irony intended, the grandiloquently named Commission of Immortalisation.

In fact all the leadership contenders had something to lose if the Testament became public, though Stalin obviously had the most. It showed that Lenin had no real faith in any of the comrades around him.

They experimented on several cadavers of fifty-ish-year-old men brought to them from morgues and scientific institutes in Moscow. After four months they found the correct formula of glycerin, alcohol, potassium acetate, quinine chlorate and another ingredient still strictly secret at the time of writing.

She disapproved strongly when, five days after her husband died, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. She continued to call the city ‘Peter’ as she always had.

After she failed to get Lenin’s Testament circulated she continued to work at the Enlightenment Commissariat for four years, ridding Russia’s libraries of dangerous books, such as those of Kant and Spengler.

An estimated twenty million people visited the mausoleum and saw the embalmed, eerily wax-like Lenin in the eighty-five years after the crypt was opened for tourists.

Over the last ninety years many hundreds of scientists have worked on Lenin’s body, which needs constant maintenance. In 2016 there were a dozen employed part-time, and three or four full-time, responsible for maintaining Lenin’s body as part shrine, part tourist trap.