Search Results for: Nature

O, Small-bany! Part 2: Winter

Illustration by Senne Trip

Elisa Albert | Longreads | August 2018 | 24 minutes (5,940 words)

 

Her name was Sally. Sally-bo-bally. The Salster. Sometimes we called her Butt-Wiggle, for the way she shook it when she saw us. Or butt-wig, for short. You know how it is with nicknames, the language of love. We found her on a rescue organization’s website. Sally! She was bright-eyed and smiling. Hi! Someone had tied a bandana around her neck. I adored her on sight. She was up for adoption the following Saturday in a parking lot behind a warehouse in Schenectady.

I’d never had a dog. My mother said it was dirty to have animals in the house.

We resolved to keep open minds and meet all the dogs, let the right one find us, not force anything, but it was always going to be Sal. She stood on her hind legs and wagged her whole ass at us. She was practically dancing. Sally-Sal! Jet black, with a short, shiny coat. Pit/lab mix? Pit/lab/hound? Pit/whippet/lab? Who knew. Who cared. The chemistry was perfect. Love at first lick. Not like poor little Buddy, over in the corner with a bad case of worms, or pretty retriever Julius, who wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. It was always going to be Sal. Four months old, spayed and vaccinated. No one else showed the slightest interest in her. She was ours. We filled out the paperwork and took her home.

***

Her eyes! The way she looked at you, and didn’t look away. So present and soulful, a real lover. She was like a person, if we’re talking about the most honest loving open deep good authentic funny sort of person, and how many of those have you ever met? She’d curl herself up next to you, close as she could get. She wanted to crawl under the sheets next to you. She wasn’t satisfied unless she had her body in the sweetest possible proximity to yours. She was like one of those rare massage therapists whose touch feels psychic: exactly where you want it, exactly how you want it. Magic.

I was never into dog memoirs or whatever, never understood that mad devotion to pets. Seemed weird to be that into an animal. It seemed fairly sad to be that into an animal. Like, why don’t you find yourself some more people to love? I didn’t get it. Now I got it. People are way overrated.

How creepy it is when people talk of “completing” their families, as though a family is a construction project or a vocational course, a finite thing, a theoretical ideal. How moronic and hubristic I find that attitude. It’s like the ugliest kind of nationalism, on a microcosmic scale. And yet. And yet. Sally gave us something new to love, and in so doing gave our family a new dimension, this whole new love to share between us. I felt a weird, delicious sense of… completeness. I was past having babies, but Sal was my sweet darling beloved lil’ boo. We were in love with her and in love with each other and in love with the way she loved us back and generally high off our own abundance of love and good fortune. There was this warmth in my chest. We redrew our goofy family crest to include her. We sang ridiculous songs to and with and about her. We spoke to her in a silly dialect. Dare I say it? We were happy.
Read more…

‘I was pain incarnate.’

(AP Photo/The Republic, Andrew Laker)

As the opioid crisis rages unchecked in North America and addicts are dying in record numbers, the voices of law enforcement and politicians braying for action are drowning out those of terminal cancer patients whose remaining quality of life depends on fentanyl — the only drug that keeps their relentless pain at bay.

At the Walrus, Teva Harrison reflects on how fentanyl is helping her make the most of the time she has left.

In 2013, at the age of thirty-seven, I was marketing director at the Nature Conservancy of Canada. My husband and I had just bought our first home. I was training for a half-marathon. And I had pain—excruciating pain that I managed by taking Advil and Tylenol as often as the packaging allowed. It didn’t really help. The ache was deep in my bones, like the worst toothache you’ve ever had, writ large. It throbbed and spasmed and shot like needles throughout my body. The pain grew so intense that I went to emergency, but doctors just gave me more painkillers and sent me on my way. It hurt too much to sit, so I stood and leaned through meetings at work.

The pain finally made sense when I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer (mbc). It wasn’t stress from over-training causing me pain, as I had initially thought; it was cancer in my bones—cancer that had metastasized to remote parts of the body to form new tumours. Even though I have cancer in my bones, my liver, my lungs, and elsewhere, it’s all breast cancer. mbc is terminal. It is incurable. But it can be treated for an indeterminate amount of time.

Fentanyl patches have not only given me relief from pain for three years now; they have given me my life back. I can now usually sleep through the night. I can now sit at a table for a meal or at a desk to write. I still can’t run, but I can walk. And fentanyl doesn’t slow down my bowels to the point of near-failure. I never have to experience the agony of feeling my medication completely wear off—that raw and naked pain, all-consuming like the darkest night. Pain and its management no longer dominate my thoughts every minute of the day. And because I am acclimated to narcotics and using just enough, neither pain nor opioids cloud my mind any longer.

I was barely a person. I was pain incarnate. A drug is neither good nor bad in its own right. Fentanyl is neither evil nor benign. It just is. And for many people, people like me, it is a crucial tool that allows us to live.

Read the story

Boo: A Reading List About Ghosts

red, green, blue, and orange pac-man ghosts painted on a gray wall, with bright green grass on the ground
Photo by Jason Whitaker via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories (and some of her friends’ favorites, too). 

Tonight the subject is…ghosts. (Cue “WoooOOOOOOOOOOOooooo” sound effect.) Ghost stories seem to point to a reality beyond our own — or, at the very least, to an expanded understanding of what exactly this plane of existence encompasses. And from a philosophical perspective, I’m half Mulder and half Scully, which means I can find deep spiritual fulfillment from things that I’m 100% sure are total bullshit.

I was raised in rural western New Jersey, right across the Delaware River from the beautiful farmlands and forests of eastern Pennsylvania. Both sides of the river are dotted with 17th and 18th century homes and outbuildings, and many people speak of ghosts as matter of factly as my old neighbors in New Mexico speak of aliens: Maybe they hadn’t personally seen one, but their cousin sure did, and he wasn’t nuts. I’ve never seen a ghost, but I, too, have met many reasonably rational people who report ghost stories. I had a friend whose mother, a salt-of-the-earth woman with common sense and a practical nature, told me with no tongue in cheek about the ghost that lived in their farmhouse.

“I think it’s a little boy,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I get that sense. He’ll leave cabinet doors open. I can feel when he’s in the room and when he isn’t. When we first bought the house, I sensed him here. I could hear him rattling around in the basement. After the cabinet doors thing kept happening, I said out loud, ‘Hey, we don’t mean you any harm. We are going to fix some things in the house but we aren’t going to mess anything up or tear anything down.’”

She said she felt things were very nice after that, and that he still did the cabinet thing sometimes and she would say “Hello!” out loud when he did. “Maybe he’s lonely,” she said. “He’s mischievous but not mean.”

Like my friend’s mother, I was raised Roman Catholic. My relationship with the religion today is tenuous at best — I dislike corruption and mass sexual assault in any internationally franchised corporate entity, whether or not they get nonprofit status due to centuries of political influence — but I give credit to my loving Irish-Catholic father for teaching me an important lesson about belief. (My father, it must be stated, is also not a fan of homophobia, financial misappropriation, abuse, or incense.) Along with giant curly hair, he passed on to me a nearly prayerful awe for science. But his approach to spiritual belief — and belief in spirits — is deeply respectful, more so than my own. He said, “I think it would be arrogant to assume we know everything about this world and if other worlds exist. We don’t know what happens after we die. Maybe elements of energy or what we call a soul do stick around. And I do believe people who say they’ve seen things. Whether or not they were real ghosts, I can’t say.”

My religious background and the relatively open-minded attitude of my parents also influenced my curiosity about telekinesis, astral projection, astrology, clairvoyance, and the bestselling Time-Life “Mysteries of the Unknown” books. It certainly vaulted me in the general direction of witchcraft. Though I am a member of no religion and have a healthy skepticism about many things, I retain the desire for spiritual fulfillment and a connection with the divine. I also like ritual; I recently paid someone a couple hundred bucks to do a healing ceremony with me in a beautiful old house in Los Angeles. (It involved tarot, prayer, and creating a spell bag. I got to write down a list of things and then set that list on fire. It was great! Ten out of ten, would recommend.)

There are many genres of paranormal tale, and I believe the greatest of these is the ghost story. Do we see the people who’ve died before us? Is this simply wishful thinking? And if it is wishful thinking, why do some people report terrifying apparitions none of us would ever wish to see? Is this a collective human tendency to hallucination, or mental illness, or are ghosts really real? I don’t know, but I do know I’ve gotten to read some very good stuff on the subject.

1.  “Why Do People Believe in Ghosts?” (Tiffanie Wen, The Atlantic, September 2014)

Wen leads with three anecdotes about women who believe they may have captured images of ghosts via iPhone camera. Wen herself is one of these examples, and she does a medium-deep dive into why folks in our modern world still believe in specters and ghouls.

Recent surveys have shown that a significant portion of the population believes in ghosts, leading some scholars to conclude that we are witnessing a revival of paranormal beliefs in Western society. A Harris poll from last year found that 42 percent of Americans say they believe in ghosts. The percentage is similar in the U.K., where 52 percent of respondents indicated that they believed in ghosts in a recent poll.

Wen cites examples from Asia and mainland Europe, and consults scholars and scientists to figure it all out. By the end of the article, I came to the conclusion that there’s simply something wrong with the iPhone camera and the way it captures images, and that it was probably something notorious asshole Steve Jobs knew about and couldn’t fix.

2. “Ghosts Definitely Don’t Exist Because Otherwise The Large Hadron Collider Would Have Found Them, Claims Brian Cox.” (Andrew Griffin, The Independent, February 2017, suggested by Kara Hansen)

The headline alone is hilarious. Before reading this article I had no idea who Brian Cox was, but his photo told me this dude was wild, because he is giving us “deeply-moisturized Mads Mikkelsen on a casual science journey” realness. I’d also heard of the Large Hadron Collider, probably on an episode of Big Bang Theory or in an article I skimmed, but I didn’t know what the hell it was either. Now I do!

The LHC is the biggest particle accelerator ever built. It is includes a huge ring of superconducting magnets and accelerators that fling particles around, sending them into each other at such speed that they can be used to understand some of the most fundamental properties of the universe. In doing so, scientists can find out how elementary particles interact and behave, and understand how they work to compose the world that we see around us.

Sounds dope. What does all this have to do with ghosts? Well, Brian Cox, who is a TV-friendly professor at the University of Manchester, thinks the LHC would’ve seen a ghost if ghosts were real. It hasn’t, so ghosts are not real. Also important: Cox has a Beatles haircut, very on-brand for Manchester. And he was in a band, much like my friend Brian, who is a physicist but also half of the hilarious band Ninja Sex Party. Maybe they hang out.

Oh, Cox also has a podcast called the Infinite Monkey Cage, with which I plan to become obsessed. So he said some smart-sounding thing about all this on his show, and fellow TV-friendly scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson was all, “Friggin’ excuse me?” Except what he actually said was, “If I understand what you just declared, you just asserted that CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, disproved the existence of ghosts.” And Cox was like, “Yes.” Anyway, I’m going to become a Brian Cox fan, probably.

3. “The 10 Best Ghost Stories” (Lauren Oliver, Publishers Weekly, October 2014)

Lauren Oliver seems like a really neat person. She’s also a talented author. And while my columns here are reading lists and I don’t usually link to other lists, I’ll make an exception here. Oliver collects her favorite ghost stories, and I’m terribly embarrassed to say I’ve read none of them. I’ve certainly seen Kubrick’s screen adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, and I know it has key differences from the book. And I’ve seen any number of film, stage, and TV versions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Anyway, I’ve got to get my shit together and check out all of her recommendations before I myself am dust and ashes, at which point I’ll pass on to my next life, or stick around this plane as a lingering ghost, or simply be dead and gone. Regardless of what happens, I doubt I’ll have much time to read.

4. “The Truth About The Paranormal” (David Robson, BBC, October 2014, suggested by Kara Hansen)

Robson opens with an anecdote about a naked Winston Churchill encountering the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. I am here for any and all naked Churchill stories, and to put it in the lede is a bold and brave move, so probably this article should get whatever the British Pulitzer is called. (It should be called the Bareass Churchill.)

His supposed contact with the supernatural puts Churchill in illustrious company. Arthur Conan Doyle spoke to ghosts through mediums, while Alan Turing believed in telepathy. Three men who were all known for their razor-sharp thinking, yet couldn’t stop themselves from believing in the impossible. You may well join them. According to recent surveys, as many as three quarters of Americans believe in the paranormal, in some form, while nearly one in five claim to have actually seen a ghost.

Read on for information on damage to visual processing centers in the right hemisphere of the brain, symptoms of epilepsy, and other reasons you might think you’ve seen a ghost when you haven’t. Turns out sometimes your brain tries to fill in missing information when, for example, you catch a glimpse of something unidentifiable in low light. Also turns out there are no more Churchill naked tales in this article, but you should still read it.

5. “The Spookiest Ghost Stories From All 50 States” (Mental Floss, October 2017)

There are so many delightful stories here. I’m highlighting one from Connecticut, our nation’s dullest state, as a reward for being a nice place to stop for a pee at the many Dunkin’ Donuts shops between Boston and New York.

In 1970, famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren were called to combat the spirit of “Annabelle,” a demonic presence attached to a giant Raggedy Ann doll. For weeks the doll had thoroughly freaked out its owner, Donna, moving from room to room, leaving handwritten notes, and even attacking a friend who suggested Donna get rid of the doll, choking him in his sleep. Finally, a priest exorcised the doll and the Warrens locked it away in a special case designed to check its malevolent influence. But even that wasn’t enough to save one brash visitor to the Warrens’ museum, who reportedly taunted the doll and died in a motorcycle crash on his way home.

* * *

In high school, my mom and her sister threw a party when their mom was away. My football-playing, pot-smoking, drag-racing (not in the RuPaul way, sadly), respectful-of-ghost-believers dad (remember him?) showed up with his giant cloud of curly red hair and found her Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dolls, and proceeded to arrange them into a coital tableau to make his dumbass football bro friends laugh. My mom was enraged and embarrassed because she was trying to impress some guy and my dad was stealing focus. The point is, adolescent boys are gross and my mom wouldn’t go out with my dad for another year.

I’d tie it back into spectral ghosts but I keep picturing Raggedy Ann humping Raggedy Andy at a hormonal teen house party in Bound Brook, New Jersey in 1973 and now I’m snort-laughing on a flight to Dallas. Because for me, the most compelling part of ghost stories will always be the tales of who we used to be. Pantomime doll sex is just a bonus.

* * *

Sara Benincasa is a stand-up comedian, actress, college speaker on mental health awareness, and the author of Real Artists Have Day JobsDC TripGreat, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. She also wrote a very silly joke book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad. Recent roles include “Corporate” on Comedy Central, “Bill Nye Saves The World” on Netflix, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TVLand and critically-acclaimed short film “The Focus Group,” which she also wrote.

Editor: Michelle Weber

The Horse Was a Lie (The Horse Is Here With Us Now)

Ernst Haas / Getty

Levi Vonk | Longreads | August 2018 | 7 minutes (1,927 words)

In the prelude to Mario Chard’s “Caballero,” we are presented with a car crash. We are told that the crash happened in the desert, that there was no one around. Two accounts of the crash exist. The first is a succinct description by the Associated Press:

Eight of the 14 people in the Chevy Suburban died
after it rolled several times on U.S. 191 a few hours
before dawn Monday. Salas-López, originally from
Guatemala, told investigators he swerved to miss a
horse. He was arrested after fleeing into the desert…

The second is a quote from the sergeant investigating the crash:

The passengers say no, he wasn’t swerving to miss a
horse, that he was fondling a female passenger in the
front seat of the vehicle.

At first it seems an all-too-familiar migration narrative, the harsh coalescence of movement and death, of sexual exploitation and isolation, which has become a defining aesthetic of the U.S.-Mexico border. Of course the coyote lies. Of course the victim dies. We find ourselves in bitter but accustomed topography.

Instead, “Say it was a horse,” writes Chard in the first canto of “Caballero,” and we move into stranger territory. Read more…

The Scientist at the Center of a Heated Scientific Feud

AP Photo/Wong Maye-E

Many Americans learn in school that a giant asteroid crashed into the earth and destroyed three-quarters of Earth’s species, including the dinosaurs. Scientists even found the supposed site of impact down in Mexico. For The Atlantic, Bianca Bosker writes about Princeton paleontologist Gerta Keller, whose 30-plus years of research contradicts the asteroid scenario. Volcanic eruptions, Keller says, not a celestial body, altered the earth’s climate so severely that it destroyed most life on our planet. Keller’s research has upended a scientific institution, revealed the fundamental difficulties in discerning scientific facts, and caused its own massive eruptions that have spewed noxious gas within scientific history.

Keller’s resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous and longest-running controversies in science. “It’s like the Thirty Years’ War,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and attempts to torpedo careers. “I’ve never come across anything that’s been so acrimonious,” Kerr says. “I’m almost speechless because of it.” Keller keeps a running list of insults that other scientists have hurled at her, either behind her back or to her face. She says she’s been called a “bitch” and “the most dangerous woman in the world,” who “should be stoned and burned at the stake.”

Understanding the cause of the mass extinction is not an esoteric academic endeavor. Dinosaurs are what paleontologists call “charismatic megafauna”: sexy, sympathetic beasts whose obliteration transfixes pretty much anyone with a pulse. The nature of their downfall, after 135 million years of good living, might offer clues for how we can prevent, or at least delay, our own end. “Without meaning to sound pessimistic,” the geophysicist Vincent Courtillot writes in his book Evolutionary Catastrophes, “I believe the ancient catastrophes whose traces geologists are now exhuming are worthy of our attention, not just for the sake of our culture or our understanding of the zigzaggy path that led to the emergence of our own species, but quite practically to understand how to keep from becoming extinct ourselves.”

This dispute illuminates the messy way that science progresses, and how this idealized process, ostensibly guided by objective reason and the search for truth, is shaped by ego, power, and politics. Keller has had to endure decades of ridicule to make scientists reconsider an idea they had confidently rejected. “Gerta had to fight very much to get into the position that she is in right now,” says Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, a collaborator of Keller’s from Heidelberg University. “It’s thanks to her that the case is not closed.”

Read the story

An Inquiry Into Abuse

Corbis Historical / Getty

Elon Green | Longreads | August 2018 | 16 minutes (4,019 words)

Roger Morris was standing on the South Lawn of the White House. It was early 1969, and Richard Nixon had only been in office for three or four weeks. Morris was a holdover on the National Security Council from Lyndon Johnson’s administration, staying on at the behest of Henry Kissinger. Morris and his colleagues had been invited to fill empty spots on the lawn during a ceremony involving a visiting head of state. “I was suddenly aware of this figure, very close to me on my right,” Morris said. “I looked over and it was Pat Nixon.” Morris decided that, though he’d never met the first lady, as a courtesy he ought to say hello.

When the event concluded, Morris turned to Nixon. “I just want you to know how much I am enjoying my work. It’s a pleasure to work for a president who is so well-informed in foreign affairs,” he said. Morris wasn’t just blowing smoke. He found Nixon quite knowledgeable about his own portfolio — Africa, South Asia, and the United Nations. As Morris told me, “[Nixon] knew a lot of heads of state in Black Africa, personally and well, for years.” And it wasn’t uncommon, he said, for Nixon to point out mistakes made by Richard Helms, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, during briefings.

Nixon looked at Morris rather quizzically. “Oh dear,” she said. “You haven’t seen through him yet.” Morris, stunned, could only nod.

Pat Nixon was formidable. That year, during a visit to Vietnam, she became the first first lady to enter an active combat zone since World War II. But her relationship with the president could be a challenge. “No question it was a tough marriage,” Bob Woodward would tell Nixon biographer Fawn Brodie in 1980. “Even the people we talked to, who were very defensive about him, just felt that he didn’t treat her very well.”

Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who revealed the president’s secret taping apparatus, told Woodward not long ago that the first lady was “borderline abused.” Nixon would ignore her when they were together. “I wanted to shake him. ‘Answer her, goddamn it; she’s your wife!’”

There have also been darker reports, many of which were rounded up in Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan’s 2000 Nixon biography, The Arrogance of Power. For instance: Allegations that Nixon “kicked the hell” out of Pat in 1962. That, after telling America that the country would not have him to “kick around anymore,” the former vice president “beat the hell” out of her. That, in fact, she had been so injured “she could not go out the next day.” That, on an unspecified occasion, one aide or perhaps more “had to run in and pull [Nixon] off Pat,” who sustained bruises on her face.

That Nixon struck his wife while he was president.

‘Oh dear,’ Pat said. ‘You haven’t seen through him yet.’

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. (The Nixons’ daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox, unequivocally denied the allegations made in The Arrogance of Power in 2000.) But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity. The scrutiny is not commensurate with the accusations.

For years, journalists and historians have mostly danced around the reports, gently poking and prodding. Nixon chroniclers tend either to acknowledge that the reports exist without assessing their reliability, or they ignore them altogether. A conspicuous absence of specifics in the public record — dates, locations, and documentation — may be to blame for this, and, especially when writing about allegations of abuse, one must write with care and caution.

What can be said with confidence is the truth of the matter has not been been satisfactorily resolved. With the benefit of distance and perspective, it’s worth giving the alleged incidents a second look and considering their sources more closely, because allegations of abuse are taken more seriously today than they were a half-century ago — or even more recently, when this history was being written.

***

In 1962, Nixon was running for governor of California against Edmund “Pat” Brown. He’d spent the previous eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president. Nixon was suited to the position. “Eisenhower radically altered the role of his running mate by presenting him with critical assignments in both foreign and domestic affairs once he assumed his office,” wrote Irwin Gellman, one of the great Nixon chroniclers. “Because of the collaboration between these two leaders, Nixon deserves the title, ‘the first modern vice president.’”

The gubernatorial campaign was contentious. “Nixon had charged that Brown was soft on communism and crime, while the governor claimed that the former vice president was interested in the governorship only as a stepping stone to the White House,” the Los Angeles Times recalled years later.

Brown told Fawn Brodie, in her Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, that during the campaign he heard that Nixon “kicked the hell out of her, hit her.” The book was published in 1981, which makes this, I suspect, the earliest on-record accusation of its kind.

In a recording of the interview from July 1980, which is held with Brodie’s files at the University of Utah, Brodie and the loose-talking former governor wonder if the alleged abuse — they had both heard the rumors — was physical or purely emotional; they’re uncertain. This is what follows:

BRODIE: Were you aware of Pat as a campaigner, in the campaign, at all? Was she —

BROWN: I don’t think she campaigned. She may have gone to a few women’s parties. But we got word, at one stage of the campaign, that he kicked the hell out of her. He hit her or some damn thing. Did you ever hear that?

BRODIE: That story keeps surfacing.

BROWN: Some of the guys that were on the plane with the campaign came to me confidentially and said, “Nixon really slugged his wife. He treated her terribly. He hauled her out in the presence of people.”

BRODIE: He slugged his wife in front of people?

BROWN: Well, in front of one of the press that was supposed to be friendly to him. He got so angry.

BRODIE: He hit her.

BROWN: But I can’t prove that. I never used it.

Brodie disliked Nixon. As Newell Bringhurst recounted in Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life, Brodie called her subject a “shabby, pathetic felon,” “a rattlesnake,” and a “plain damn liar.” When, in November 1977, Brodie’s husband, Bernard, was diagnosed with cancer, she paused her research, quoting her husband saying: “That son of a bitch can wait.” (Brodie herself would die of lung cancer in January 1981, never entirely finishing the manuscript.)

In a recent conversation, Bringhurst called Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character Brodie’s weakest book. “It’s not a balanced biography at all,” he said. “She went into that — into the research and the writing — with a biased perspective.” It’s true, and understandably so: After Nixon was elected president in 1968, after promising to end the war in Vietnam, Brodie’s son was nearly drafted. When Nixon, several years later, attempted to smear the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation colleague of Bernard Brodie’s, it was salt in the wounds.

Brodie had for many years taught college classes on how to write a biography. And yet, said Bringhurst, “she violated, in many ways, the very canons that she tried to teach her students: You have to have some empathy and perspective for the person you’re writing the biography on.

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity.

Brown wasn’t the only source for accusations leveled against Nixon during that period. There’s a quote from Frank Cullen in The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, who, to their great credit, explore the allegations in greater detail than any biographers before or since. Cullen, a Brown senior aide, said he had heard that Nixon “beat the hell [out of]” Pat in the wake of the gubernatorial loss.

By the 1962 campaign, Cullen was an old hand at politics. He’d volunteered on John F. Kennedy’s congressional campaigns in 1948, and stayed on for the Senate run in 1952. In 1960, during Kennedy’s campaign for president, Robert Kennedy introduced Cullen to Brown, who would appoint Cullen assistant legislative secretary. (In 1972, Cullen helped coordinate the visit to the United States by China’s table tennis team that was later famously called “ping-pong diplomacy.”)

***

Other people have made accusations about Nixon. In March 1998, in a talk he believed to be off-the-record, Seymour Hersh told an audience of Harvard’s Nieman fellows about “a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.” Hersh would reprise the charge three months later during appearances on CNBC and NBC.

More recently, Hersh wrote about it in his memoir, Reporter. A couple hundred pages in, he writes that a few weeks after the resignation:

I was called by someone connected to a nearby hospital … and told that Nixon’s wife, Pat, had been treated in the emergency room there a few days after she and Nixon had returned from Washington. She told her doctors that her husband had hit her. I can say that the person who talked to me had very precise information on the extent of her injuries and the anger of the emergency room physician who treated her.

After receiving the tip, Hersh called John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s White House counsel. Ehrlichman not only declined to wave Hersh away from the story, but said he knew of two other instances of abuse: one from 1962 — presumably the instance referenced by Cullen — but also one that occurred during Nixon’s presidency. (Hersh, in an interview with me for the Columbia Journalism Reviewsaid his hospital source was a doctor.)

The biographers Summers and Swan, who interviewed Hersh, also talked to John Sears, who worked for Nixon in 1968. With Sears, who was suspected of being Deep Throat, it’s essentially a high-level game of telephone: Sears heard from Waller Taylor, a senior partner at Nixon’s law firm, that in 1962 Pat Nixon was hit so hard “he blackened her eye” and “she threatened to leave him over it.”

Sears, now 78, told me he was surprised by Taylor’s story because he himself had neither seen nor, until that point, heard of such abuse. Still, he said, “I saw no reason [Taylor] would make up such a thing. He was a friend of theirs.” This seems to be true. Summers and Swan note that Taylor’s father had been an early supporter of Nixon’s, and Taylor himself introduced Nixon to trickster Donald Segretti. Segretti, however, disputes the latter point. “I’ve had a lot of things over the years made up about me that are just complete fantasy. This sounds like one of those stories,” Segretti said. “I do not know who this Waller Taylor was, [and] I never met President Nixon.” (For good measure, without prompting, Segretti also denied authorship of the “Canuck letter.”)

Sears recalled telling the story to Patrick Hillings, who succeeded Nixon in Congress: “He said it was quite possible; the whole business of the loss in California had made them both upset, and that Nixon had finally agreed to move to New York and get out of politics. But there was a lot of problems in and around that.” Hillings, said Sears, didn’t attest to the truth of the allegations, “but he thought it believable.” (I asked John Dean, who succeeded Ehrlichman as White House Counsel, if he knew about the abuse allegations. Dean’s name doesn’t come up in any of these stories, but historically he’s been quite critical of his old boss — he cooperated with the Senate Watergate investigators — so I assumed he would be candid. “I have zero knowledge of RN striking his wife,” he emailed.)

Seymour Hersh told an audience about ‘a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.’

The game of telephone continues with a quote from William Van Petten, a reporter who covered the ’62 campaign. Van Petten told a writer named Jon Ewing that he found Nixon to be “a terrible, belligerent drunk” who “beat Pat badly … so badly that she could not go out the next day.” Van Petten, Summers and Swan write, was informed this had happened before, and that Nixon aides, including Ehrlichman, “would on occasion have to go in and intervene.”

What to make of it all? For his part, John Farrell, author of last year’s Pulitzer finalist, Richard Nixon: The Life, dismisses much of this, asserting that the sources are not to be trusted. “Richard Nixon fired John Ehrlichman. Nixon fired John Sears, too,” he said. (Sears said he left under a “mutual understanding.”) However, he allows, “Pat Hillings would have known. Pat Hillings was incredibly close to the Nixons. But he’s not with us anymore.”

Summers, who conducted the interviews with Ehrlichman for The Arrogance of Power, doesn’t believe that Nixon having fired Ehrlichman tainted the source. “In the sense that one assesses the credibility and character of someone who’s talking to you, I found Ehrlichman a credible interviewee, and not a vindictive interviewee.”

***

On August 8, 1974, 61-year-old Nixon resigned the office of the presidency. He was in poor health, exhibiting persistent phlebitis and shortness of breath. In September, he would be admitted to Long Beach Memorial Hospital, where he was given a blood thinner. Scans revealed evidence of a blood clot that had moved from his left thigh to his right lung.

Then, in October, after what one of his doctors later described as “groin pain and the persistent enlargement of the left leg,” Nixon went back to the hospital. He would remain there for three weeks and lose 15 pounds.

Sometime during this period, again according to Hersh, Pat Nixon was taken to a local emergency room. Evidently, her husband had attacked her at their home in San Clemente, California.

I called Hersh to see if he could shed more light on this. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “I’m not interested. Bye bye.” Mentioning that he had a guest in his office, he hung up.

So I asked Anthony Summers for more information, anything really, about that hospital visit. Did he and Swan attempt to verify Hersh’s source? “I have a very vague memory that we looked for a doctor at the San Clemente hospital.” Did he find the doctor? “I don’t recall.” He suspects the answer is buried in his notes, which aren’t retrievable.

***

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others. According to Farrell’s biography, during Nixon’s 1960 campaign for president, on a swing through Iowa, the strained candidate

vented by violently kicking the car seat in front of him. Its enraged inhabitant, the loyal [Don] Hughes, left the broken seat, and the car, and stalked off down the road. At an otherwise successful telethon in Detroit on election eve, Nixon once again lost his temper, and struck aide Everett Hart. Furious, Hart quit the campaign. “I was really mad,” Hart recalled. “I had had a rib removed where I had had open heart surgery, and that is where he hit me.”

Hart, said Farrell, spoke to Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, over the phone about the incident, and said he could not forgive the man. Woods summarized the phone conversation in a memo currently in Nixon’s archives.

More than a decade later, in the summer of 1973, Nixon, mired in the Watergate scandal, visited New Orleans to give a speech to a veterans group. It was expected to be a friendly audience. As Nixon walked toward the convention hall, reported the Washington Post’s magazine, “he wanted nothing in his way, in front or in back, before he got at the crowd inside.” However, “breathing on him from behind was [Ronald] Ziegler and the clump of TV cameras, mics, and newsmen that inevitably followed.”

An angered Nixon, as Michael Rosenwald wrote last year, “stuck his finger in Ziegler’s chest, turned him around, and then shoved him in the back hard with both hands, saying ‘I don’t want any press with me and you take care of it.’” It was even caught on tape, which was fortuitous because a Nixon aide later denied the incident had occurred at all.

***

The earliest chronological firsthand accusation is also the most shocking. In 1946, Nixon ran against Jerry Voorhis, a five-termer in California’s old 12th congressional district. Despite his incumbency, or perhaps because of it, Voorhis ran a terrible campaign. To boot, there were reportedly phone calls to prospective voters from an anonymous caller inquiring, “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a communist?”

Nixon destroyed him. In his account of the defeat, Farrell includes a quote from Zita Remley, a Democratic campaign worker of whom a Long Beach paper enthused in 1960 that, were she to ever faint, “it’s certain that she could be immediately revived by fanning her with a political brochure.” Remley found Voorhis “very white and sort of quiet. … He just sort of put his head in his hands.”

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others.

Farrell mentions Remley once more in the book, in the endnotes, where he accurately describes her as a “Democratic partisan” who claimed to have “firsthand knowledge of the anonymous phone calls.” However, he writes:

Remley, at least, is a troublesome source: a Nixon hater who fed at least one demonstrably false story about Nixon’s taxes to the press and claimed (more than 20 years later) that Nixon slapped her outside a public function — an assault that, if verified, would have ended his career but that she didn’t report to the police at the time.

Remley talked about the slap in question with Fawn Brodie, who wrote about the knotty tax business:

[Remley] had become a deputy assessor of Los Angeles County with the job of checking veterans’ exemptions. In 1952, just after the election, Nixon sent a notarized letter to her Los Angeles office requesting a veteran’s tax exemption, which was granted only to veterans who, if single, had less than $5,000 worth of property in California or elsewhere, and if married, $10,000.

As Brodie (who misspelled Remley’s first name as Vita) tells it, Remley knew that Nixon bought a pricey home in Washington, D.C., and denied the request. The powerful political columnist Drew Pearson found out and published a damning story.

Nixon was upset about it. In RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, he wrote that Pearson’s column was “teeming with innuendo and loose facts” and claimed that Pearson retracted the column three weeks after the 1952 election.

That sets the scene for what followed later that year. Brodie writes:

When Nixon was speaking in the Long Beach auditorium, Mrs. Remley went to hear him. Arriving late, she listened from near the open door. As he emerged he recognized her. In a sudden fit of rage, he walked over and slapped her. His friends, horrified, hustled him away in the dark. There were no cameras or newsmen to catch the happening, and Mrs. Remley, fearful of losing her job, told only a few friends.

Farrell doesn’t buy it. “She really detests Nixon,” he said. “She could have ended his political career right there by filing a complaint. And yet she never did. There’s no hospital report. There’s no police report from that incident. It’s just her talking, years later, to Fawn Brodie.”

Those doubts are among the reasons Farrell chose to exclude the Remley incident from the book’s text, “to signal to the reader that I didn’t believe it.”

Of the allegations more generally, Farrell continued: “In the period after Watergate, Nixon was accused of everything — some of it quite fanciful — and it’s significant, I think, that you had three of the greatest investigative reporters, Woodward and Bernstein and Hersh, and not one of them put it in print in their long investigations on Nixon.” Neither Woodward nor Bernstein responded to repeated interview requests.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


***

Farrell is right that, given the opportunity to thwack Nixon about this, the otherwise fearless trio declined. Maybe that means something. After all, if “Woodstein” and Hersh couldn’t nail him, who could? But maybe it just says something about the nature of investigative journalism; chasing dozens of consequential stories at any given time, and they don’t all pan out. Which doesn’t, of course, make them false. It just means the threshold for publication — a hospital report or a doctor’s testimony, perhaps — wasn’t met by deadline.

Decades later, we’re left having to deal with a handful of hazy stories, and wondering about the motives of the men and women telling them.

Of all the allegations, it’s Zita Remley’s that really gnaws at me. I am willing to concede, as Farrell contends, that Remley lied about Nixon’s taxes, even if there’s evidence she just made a dumb mistake. What I keep returning to is this: What did this obscure campaign worker stand to gain from accusing the still-living Nixon of slapping her? It certainly wasn’t fame. From what I can tell, Remley’s death in 1985 didn’t even merit an obituary in the local papers.

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls. Their lives do not seem measurably improved by sticking their necks out. (Quite the contrary. Stormy Daniels, for instance, was recently arrested for touching undercover detectives in a strip club — charges that were later dismissed.)

Now, imagine doing this 40 years ago — which is to say, 20 years before Monica Lewinsky was dragged through the mud and Bill Clinton left office with an approval rating of 66 percent.

What’s the upside?

***

“This is an agonizing subject for me, because I heard some of the same stories, from a much earlier period,” said Roger Morris. A source suggested I talk to Morris, who resigned from the National Security Council in 1970 when Nixon ordered the bloody Cambodian “incursion.”

Morris wrote 1991’s Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, which charts Nixon’s life and career through the election of 1952. He heard stories in Whittier, California, where Nixon moved at the age of 9, and Washington. The tales, always off-the-record, were passed along by friends and acquaintances, often elderly Quakers. (I asked if there was anyone I could talk to; Morris said they were all dead.)

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls.

“I had heard stories about the physical abuse of Pat Nixon as early as the Congressional years, which would have been ’47, ’48, ’49, and much of 1950,” Morris continued. “They had these terrible, raging fights, at high decibel.” Per the descriptions he heard of altercations at the Spring Valley home, Nixon had “manhandled” his wife, “not necessarily beaten. It was a violent relationship, in that respect.”

Morris didn’t hear the stories when he was in government, but only much later, starting in around 1983, when he began work on the book. He could never nail down the details, so, while his book includes accounts of the marriage becoming increasingly strained, there’s no reference to physical abuse. “I didn’t have any real, solid verification. I did not have any eyewitnesses.” Which is not to say his sources were bad, or distant; among them, Morris said, were in-laws of the Nixons. “They were plausible people, serious people.” He believed the stories, but lacked what he felt would be necessary for inclusion — eyewitnesses, testimony from doctors, or hospital records. (That’s to be expected, and it’s one of the inherent difficulties in writing about abuse.)

“If you ask me if this is probable — could it have happened? Absolutely. It is consistent with too much testimony of what we know about their relationship. It was stormy. It was given to outbursts of anger, profanity. It was not based on abiding, mutual respect,” Morris said. There had once been a great deal of love between them, “but as in many marriages, it was depleted and exhausted.”

Just before we hung up, Morris added: “We’re living in a very different era now, and I do think historical figures ought to be judged whole, as it were, against the setting of their times, but also against the setting of posterity.”

Elon Green is a writer in Port Washington, New York.

***

Editor: Kelly Stout
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Read more…

Ancestor Work In Street Basketball

Tim Mossholder / Unsplash, Columbia University Press

Onaje X. O. Woodbine | Excerpt adapted from Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball | Columbia University Press | August 2018 | 25 minutes (6,825 words)

The spirit of the dead must live its life one more time in an accelerated fashion before departing to the realm of the ancestors. . . . It is believed that doing what was once done frees the living from the dead and vice versa.

— Malidoma Patrice Some, Ritual

I had just attended the 2013 Community Awareness Tournament in Roxbury. It was dark. I walked aimlessly along St. Mary’s Street near Boston University. Painful images of the young boys and men of Roxbury flooded my head. That afternoon Russell had asked me to read Marvin’s “Let It Be Magic” poem at halftime to the crowd. I couldn’t do it. Grief racked my body. I left the game. Tears rolled down my eyes as the full impact of the interviews and stories of Boston’s black young men hit me. This wasn’t a few suffering individuals — it was a collective injury. Take Marlon, whom I mention in the introduction. He was a long and skinny six-foot-two-inch player from Roxbury, versatile as a Swiss army knife. He shot threes from deep, made defenders fall with his hesitation dribble, and dunked on players off of one leg. A rhythmic beat reverberated through his head and the sound would grip his body during games:

It seemed like I always had a song going in my head, but I never knew what the song was. That’s just how my game was. It felt like I was dancing on the court. It’s not trying to show off, it’s just how my mind was going and obviously achieved. My mind had a song and I’m bumping to it in my head so now on the court it got me — I’m about to go dunk on somebody or I’m about to go shoot somebody’s lights out. I’m about to cross somebody. It was funny, it’s like I don’t know how many dudes that I made fall just from a simple move. Not even a crossover. A quick step and like “see you later.” Go down, roll it, dunk it.

Marlon, however, was almost raped by his abusive stepfather in a pissy Boston housing project building as a child. Fortunately, he fought him off, dressed his little sister, and hustled down several miles of snow-filled sidewalks to his grandmother’s apartment. His biological father was in prison and his mother was a drug addict, like so many parents of other ballplayers that I interviewed. “I’d run into somebody that was always like, ‘Your mom just copped [bought] some morphine,’ ” explained Marlon. “I tell them, don’t sell nothing to my mom. I’ll kill you. That’s what I tell a person. It’s like, ‘little n***er get the fuck out of here. You ain’t got no gun.’ ‘Oh, I don’t. Okay, be right back.’ [I’d] walk right into the projects. Saw one of the older dudes that know my mother and know my father like, ‘yo’ such and such this and such and such is my mom’s.’ ‘Here take that . . .’ ” and the older gangster would hand him a gun.

Read more…

Convenience Store Woman

Photo by Aaron Gilbreath

Sayaka Murata | Convenience Store Woman | Grove Press | June 2018 | 21 minutes (5,652 words)

A convenience store is a world of sound. From the tinkle of the door chime to the voices of TV celebrities advertising new products over the in-store cable network, to the calls of the store workers, the beeps of the barcode scanner, the rustle of customers picking up items and placing them in baskets, and the clacking of heels walking around the store. It all blends into the convenience store sound that ceaselessly caresses my eardrums.

I hear the faint rattle of a new plastic bottle rolling into place as a customer takes one out of the refrigerator, and look up instantly. A cold drink is often the last item customers take before coming to the checkout till, and my body responds automatically to the sound. I see a woman holding a bottle of mineral water while perusing the desserts and look back down.

As I arrange the display of newly delivered rice balls, my body picks up information from the multitude of sounds around the store. At this time of day, rice balls, sandwiches, and salads are what sell best. Another part-timer, Sugawara, is over at the other side of the store checking off items with a handheld scanner. I continue laying out the pristine, machine-made food neatly on the shelves of the cold display: in the middle I place two rows of the new flavor, spicy cod roe with cream cheese, alongside two rows of the store’s best-selling flavor, tuna mayonnaise, and then I line the less popular dry bonito shavings in soy sauce flavor next to those. Speed is of the essence, and I barely use my head as the rules ingrained in me issue instructions directly to my body.

Alerted by a faint clink of coins I turn and look over at the cash register. It’s a sound I’m sensitive to, since customers who come just to buy cigarettes or a newspaper often jingle coins in their hand or pocket. And yes: as I’d thought, a man with a can of coffee in one hand, the other hand in his pocket, is approaching the till. I quickly move through the store, slide behind the counter, and stand at the ready so as not to keep him waiting.

“Irasshaimasé! Good morning, sir.”

I bow and take the can of coffee he holds out to me.

“Oh, and a pack of Marlboro Menthol Lights.”

“Right away, sir.” I take out a pack of the cigarettes and scan the barcode. “Please confirm your age on the touch screen.”

As he does so, I notice him glance at the hot-food cabinet. I could ask him whether he’d like anything else, but when a customer appears to be dithering over whether or not to buy something, I make a point of taking a step back and waiting.

“And a corn dog.”

“Right away, sir. Thank you.”

I disinfect my hands with alcohol, open the hot cabinet, and take out a corn dog.

“Shall I put the hot food and cold drink in separate bags?”

“Oh no, don’t bother. Together’s fine.”

I put the can of coffee, cigarettes, and corn dog into a small-size bag. Until then the man had been jingling the coins in his pocket, but now he suddenly moves his hand to his breast pocket as though something has just occurred to him. Instantly I deduce that he will use electronic money.

“I’ll pay by Suica.”

“Certainly, sir. Please touch your card here.”

I automatically read the customer’s minutest movements and gaze, and my body acts reflexively in response. My ears and eyes are important sensors to catch their every move and desire. Taking the utmost care not to cause the customer any discomfort by observing him or her too closely, I swiftly move my hands according to whatever signals I pick up.

“Your receipt, sir. Thank you for your custom!”

“Thanks,” he says, taking his receipt and leaving.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” I say with a bow to the woman next in the queue. “Irasshaimasé. Good morning!” Read more…

On Not Being Able to Read

Kaimantha / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Tajja Isen | Longreads | August 2018 | 14 minutes (3,869 words)

They told me I wouldn’t be able to read anymore. That the pleasure of the text, like a lover in a non-law degree, would slowly grow opaque to me — if pleasure were something I even had time to consider. In exchange, I’d learn how to do other things with words: plow through pages of bad legal prose and extract the principle like an animal’s delicate skeleton. Hold up the skull to the dim courtroom light and proclaim its equivalence to the fossils of a different era, a strange phrenology. Memorize the divots in the bones of critters past. Legal education calls this “learning to think like a lawyer.”

After a few weeks of living that story, my body and I revolted at cross-purposes. The stresses of the program congealed into physical illness, which offended me; more often, panic meant productivity. Rather than resting, I hauled myself to a campus book sale I can only recall in feverish splashes — an indiscriminate hunger to grab and possess; the close press of bodies in airless rooms; violent shivers that kept sending my stack of books askew — and somehow came home with a shelf’s width of volumes: Stendhal and Dickens and DeLillo and Mann; Maugham and Poe and Davies and Irving; Gallant and Munro and Atwood and Moore. Mostly men, all of them white, and completely in violation of my network of rules for used book condition. More striking still was that nothing in the stack seemed to call to me, which was likely strategic. Even fever-drunk — a state in which, apparently, I backslid into canonical reverence — I sensed that it would lessen my feelings of loss if the books I kept around me were not ones I burned to read. Loading up my shelves was more gestural than practical; a finger to the mythos of the law school and a memorial to a version of myself that I refused to let disappear entirely. Read more…

Michelle Tea and the Betrayal of Queer Memoir

Feminist Press

Alana Mohamed | Longreads | August 2018 | 12 minutes (3,094 words)

Michelle Tea has made a career of memoir, and in doing so she has chronicled a generation of queer and punk subcultures. Growing up a lonely and shy teenager, for me Tea’s autobiographical novel Valencia represented freedom. She wrote about sex and friends and death in a way that made me feel alive, kind of like the way watching Party Monster makes some want to do a face full of cocaine. I wanted to be her, or the women she portrayed, who were all so brash and powerful and sexy. With her latest release, Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms, Tea continues to write explosively about her life. But she’s also slowed down and become reflective — while still delightfully contradictory — dissecting the history of the ruptures within the communities which she has documented so well.

Recently, I’ve gotten in the habit of saying people have been “so generous” when sharing their stories. Post-#MeToo, radical disclosure has become typical, if not necessary, to speak frankly about sexual boundaries and trauma. “Thank you for being so generous with your story,” I say to the woman who just described her first fisting experience to contextualize her rape. It feels right, like it acknowledges the spiritually taxing effort that goes into disclosure when someone offers a highly personal narrative. But who talks about their first fisting for the good of the general public? Often, they’re talking about it because no one else will, and someone needs to. It’s not so much a matter of generosity as one of necessity. Read more…