Pretty Postage Each of the United States has its own "official" bird and flower. The states adopted the flora and fauna of their choice after great deliberation-sometimes after heated debate. Some birds and flowers are so popular that more than one state claimed them as their very own. Earlier this year the United States Postal Service issued a series of 50 stamps based on the theme: "The Birds and Flowers of the 50 States." Famous American wildlife artist Arthur Singer and his son Alan created this pane of
50 stamps-the father drawing the birds and the son the flowers. The bright and cololrful pane is arranged alphabetically, by state, and each stamp depicts both the .official bird and flower' of a state. The Singers worked on their designs for nearly two years. Arthur Singer is the illustrator-author of Birds of the World and the illustrator for The Hamlyn Guide to Birds of Britain and Europe and similar books. Birds and nature have been the subject of his exhibitions, too-The Bird in Art, Nature in Art, The Animal in Art.
SPAN 2 Election USA: Candidates and Issues by John W. Mashek
4 Fashioning a Global Communications Network by Michael R. Gardner
5
Futuristic Architecture by Sarah Booth Conroy
10 The New Guru of American Journalism by Tim Whitaker
14 David Brinkley Views the News An Interview by Katherine Winton Evans
16 The Great Writ by A.G. Noorani
19 On the Lighter Side
20 The Classical Athlete by David M. Abramson
28 Fighting Fire With Red Adair by Peter Gwynne
31 'Fiction Is Meant to Illuminate' by Joshua Gilder
34 The Enormous Radio A Short Story by John Cheever
38 Third World Counterrevolutionaries by Fred Barnes
40 Indian Painters in a Global Village by Chidananda Das Gupta
45 In India's Corner ... Sam Hickman by Aruna Dasgupta
46 Focus On ...
Editor Managing Editor
Mal Oettinger Chidananda Das Gupta
Assistant Managing Editor
Krishan Gabrani
Senior Editor
Aruna Dasgupta
Copy Editor Editorial Assistant
Murari Saha Rocque Fernandes
Photo Editor
Avinash Pasricha
Art Director
Nand Katyal
Associate Art Director
Kanti Roy
Assistant Art Director
Bimanesh Roy Choudhury
Chief of Production
Awtar S. Marwaha
Circulation Manager
P.N. Saigal
Photographic Service
USIS Photographic Services Unit
Photographs: Front cover-Mario Miranda. 4-S. Johnson. 5 top and bottom nght-SITE Inc., bottom left-Š Claes Oldenburg, courtesy Multiples Inc. 6 top-Sarah Putnam; bottom-Elizabeth S. Sasser. 7-courtesy of the Buckminster Fuller Archives. 8 top and center-Best Products Company; bottom row-David Stainback (2), SITE Inc. 21-Avinash Pasricha except left center courtesy Eastman Kodak. 22-Avinash Pasricha except left center by Bob Gomel, bottom left by J.H. Bailey and Larry Kinney, and top right by John Zimmerman. 23 center and bottom right-Avinash Pasricha; bottom left-Bruce Roberts. 24-Charles Muhlstock, Black Star. 25-Art Seitz, Black Star. 27 top-William Campbell; bottom-Avinash Pasricha. 28-Shelly Katz; inset-Matt Herron, both Black Star. 29-Black Star. 30Mukesh Parpiani. 41-43-Ram Rahman. 44-John Wicart, USIA. 45-A vinash Pasricha.46 top-Shanti Shah. Insidt: back cover top and bottom left-courtesy Seymour Chwast; center and bottom rightcourtesy Milton Glaser. Back cover-Enrico Ferrorelli.
Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by H.K. Mehta at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year's subscription (12 issue) 21 rupees, single copy, 2 rupees 75 paise. For change of address send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager , SPAN Magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 110001. See change of address form on page 48b.
Front cover: Appu; the Asian Games, scores of sportsmen, fun and color. .. all pictured by Mario Miranda. And, round the comer the road leads to the Olympics~ Los Angeles, 1984, See pages 20-27 for a special sports section. Back cover: Artifacts of an era: American jazz and ragtime from about 1910 to 1930 in sheet music and on records. Today's record album designs are jazzier (see inside back cover).
November is election time in the United States. Every four years, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the people elect a President. This year on that date they will participate in what are known as midterm elections: Halfway through a President's four-year term, voters get a chance to elect all 435 members of the House of Representatives (who serve two-year terms) and one-third of the membership of the Senate (senators serve for six years). Although midterm elections do not attract as much attention as presidential contests, they are significant. They function as part of the system of checks and balances in American government. Theoretically, midterm elections serve as a referendum on a President's performance. As SPAN's article on page 2 points out, many· other factors complicate the process: candidates' personalities; strictly local issues and the fact that not all members of a President's political party vote his way on all issues. For the past two years, the Republican Party, which President Reagan heads, has controlled the Senate, and the House has been in the hapds of the opposition Democratic Party. Nevertheless, the President has had unusual success in persuading Congress to enact his programs. The voters' choice of particular legislators will determine whether the President can count on congressional support for his proposals for the rest of his term. An unofficial kind of check-and-balance--but a highly efficient one-is the American media. Reporters watch politicians and tell voters what they do and say. This polymorphous mixture of newspapers, television, radio and magazines is the focus of 'continuous controversy that becomes more intense around election time. Does the press inform the public or simply spread confusion? Do newspapers represent any interests beyond those of their publishers? Are television correspondents genuine journalists or merely attractive actors and actresses? SPAN looks at same of these questions in articles on two outstanding American newsmen: Eugene Roberts, Jr., executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and David Brinkley, dean of television newscasters. Each of them~as won the respect of his peers, a notoriously cynical~ lot.
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Perhaps Roberts' outstanding quality as an editor i? his respect for the reader's desire to know as much as possible about what's happening not only in his city but in the world at large. One wayan editor demonstrates· his dedication to this ideal is by spending the substantial amount of his newspaper's money required to open bureaus far fram the paper's circulation area. Roberts opened a bureau in New Delhi this year. Such a step does bring prestige, but it does not pay for itself directly in increased advertising or circulation. It is a service to readers, enabling them to be better informed about events in South Asia, to give them a better understanding of achievements and problems in this part of the world. David Brinkley has spent 38 years in television. His pre-eminence derives from the fact that he writes and speaks lucid, easily understood English in a straightforward manner totally free of condescension. Before he came along, television "announcers" read stilted copy in portentous tones. They were haughty, pompous and dull. Brinkley's penchant for clarity would have made him valuable in any medium, but he was a trailblazer in television. Perhaps the quality that he and Roberts share--which could be recommended to all members of the press--is a sense of duty to the audience: Get it right and make it clear. --M.P.
Fashioning a Global Communications Network A six-week Plenipotentiary Conference of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) opened September 28 in Nairobi, Kenya. A specialized agency of the United Nations, ITU regulates and promotes international cooperation in the use of telephones, telegraph, radio and television signals and other forms of communications. The conference, which is being attended by almost all the ITU's 157 member states, is expected to take some wide-ranging decisions that will determine the shape of global communications for years. The U.S. delegation to the conference is headed by Ambassador Michael R. Gardner, a partner in the Washington law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld. This is the text of Ambassador Gardner's address at the conference.
In a world troubled with poverty and deprivation, it is particularly fitting that 157 nations would come together in Kenya to deal with telecommunications-a topic that offers real hope to the diverse peoples of the world. Telecommunications, properly applied, can help education to triumph over ignorance; health and nutrition to Telecommunication replace disease and starvation; and vi- the International Union, sound, technically-oriented brant economic activity to supplant poverdecisionmaking will be replaced by ty and deprivation. and - misplaced political Telecommunications offer vistas for inappropriate rhetoric. progress that not even the most visionary The U.S. Government, like. many can fully appreciate. For example, who amongst us, just a few short years ago, others here today, places great importance on the principle of universality thought we would see a space shuttle return safely to earth or astronauts and which underpins the integrity of the encosmonauts control their own journeys in tire United Nations system. This is the outer space? Who amongst us could principle that ensures that each memberimagine being able to direct-dial relatives state has a right to make known its views. and friends instantly in nearly any willing If the U.N. and related international organizations are to be able to influence country in the world? And who amongst the resolution of conflicts peacefully, it us would have imagined 10 years ago that telecommunications would already have makes no sense to exclude states party to proven its ability to provide lifesaving such disputes, through whatever means. In the spirit of Harambee let us put medical information on a routine basis via data links to urban hospitals, and via aside divisive rhetoric and avoid the ideological and _political preoccupations satellite radio to rural health posts. It is fitting that we convene this importhat have doomed so many once-worthy tant technical conference in Nairobi, for . international forums. here we have the marvelous example of Today ITU faces possibly its most Kenya's Harambee-that stirring spirit of challenging test. We must restore finanworking together for the common good cial integrity to its operation while still that is essential to our efforts during providing an exciting vehicle _for worldwide growth through telecommunications. the next five weeks of deliberations. We must bridge the gap between deWithout a disciplined focus by all of us on the traditional technical role of veloped and developing nations to ensure
that the requisite sharing takes place so that all peoples have the opportunity to benefit from the limitless advances in telecommunications during this decade of the Eighties-truly 'the decade of telecommunications. We in the United States approach this conference fully aware of its challenges, yet optimistic that the vast majority of our fellow delegates share our deep desire for the preservation of the ITU as a cooperative, technical-coordination body. The strength of the United States in telecommunications resides largely outside the government sector, in private enterprise and nonprofit private organizations. The American private sector has taken the lead in jointly sponsoring with the Federal Government the U.S. Telecommunications Training Institute. This new institute will offer free instruction to more than 300 students from developing countries during 1983. Moreover, through the institute and through an increase in private sector initiatives in some developing nations, the United States is hopeful that the positive (Text continued on page 48)
Futuristic. Architecture .
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They call it the Wandering Wall building-for when one corner of the wall wanders off (it rolls out, actually) the building is open. The pictures above show the unusual entrance to the Best Product Company's catalog showroom building in Sacramento,
California, open (top) and closed (above). Even more revolutionarybut as yet untried-is sculptor Claes Oldenburg's whimsical proposal for an additional wing to the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio, in the shape of a three-way electric plug (left).
Left: Arcosanti, designed by architect Paolo Soleri as an energy -efficient, ecologically sound and aesthetically pleasing community for 3,000 persons, is being built in the Arizona desert near Phoenix, with the help of volunteers.
Below, left: One enters the house of sculpture professor Robert Bruno through the building's legs. Right: An artist's rendering of Buckminster Fuller's sky-floating geodesic spheres. Fuller argues that if a sphere is big enough, the weight of the structure itself-and of the hordes of people who might inhabit it-is negligible compared to the weight of the air trapped inside. When the sun strikes the outside of the sphere, Fl4ller adds, the air inside would be heated, causing the whole structure to float, like a cloud: "The passengers could come and go from cloud to cloud, or cloud to ground, as the clouds float around the earth 01' are anchored to mountain tops."
a thousand years, the beginning of The'immense bubble floats gently in another thousand, will come. What will it the atmosphere, free of the earth's mud- bring? The beginning of Heaven? Or the dy morass. The transparent sphere cra- end in Hell? dles an entire city. Inside, the' calendar The turn of the century always brings stands always at spring, the clock perpeforth new ideas, new spirits. And what of tually at noon. The air is neither too hot the time when all four numbers change? nor too cold, always as clean as on the Already you can see the ideas spinning. day of the first creation. The people of Utopia swims in the dreams of men and this paradise are neither rich nor poor, suf- women. Architects are especially prone fer neither age nor disease, but live like to such visions, particularly those who are heavenly beings to think of beauty all day. artists with slide rules, poets with pencils, Ah, but it won't be like that at all, says philosophers with geometric theories. the pessimist, sticking his needle into the No visionary worthy of his bubble pipe balloon: The last drop of oil was swal- would ever stand still long enough to be lowed up by the last Cadillac's dying classified. A slippery group they' are, gurgle. The few survivors of the last great parading out facts, and hiding in the war fled to caves in the hills. The brave, shadows of supposition. But if you push the wise, and those still sane transport them around enough, you can make them themselves by foot, heat and cook with - land in heaps labeled the technologists, dung, grow amaranth for protein. Life is the naturalists, the artists and the comics. dark, mean, dangerous. Without energy, The technologists do everything with the earth slows, flickers, coughs and stops. geometry and numbers so large they can In 18 years, the millennium, the end of be calculated only by computers. The naturalists divide into subgroups: those who think nature will save us, and those by SARAH BOOTH CONROY
who think we've already lost. The artists are not concerned with making the future work, only with making it look right. And the comics think nothing will work anyway, so we might as well laugh as cry. If it all works out the way it usually does, the numbers won't add up, but the jokes will come true. And who is to say after all, which is which? Not all visions of the future are confined to p~per and cardboard. Some stand in stone. The comics carried the day in "Architectural Fantasies: Creative Alternatives," an exhibit organized by the American Institute of Architects Foundation at the Octagon in Washington, D.C., last year. Twenty architects proposed possibilities, most of them hilarious. Sculptor Claes Oldenburg belongs with the comics rather than the artists in our classification. He sketches a dream cathedral, built like a faucet with an ever-flowing waterfall of grace. "Perfectly feasible," he said, "if I had the money." Once he made a sculpture like a three-way electric plug to stand outside
the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio, and then he drew a proposal to make a giant plug into a museum and a museum into a sculpture. Washington, D.C., artist David Stainback remodels existing buildings into paintings and sculptures. But he's ever a practical man, and he doesn't want to be accused of frivolity. So he makes a Washington Monument condominium sculpture and a-Thomas Jefferson Memorial restaurant painting. Stanley Tigerman, the Chicago architect, has, by some rude souls, been accused of seeing bad architecture as a dirty joke. So he has painted panels as intricate as a Persian miniature that turn architecture into a well-scrubbed, purged, soaked and cleansed joke. He calls his concept a "bathroom in the intention of Dante's Inferno," obviously inspired by his stay at the American Academy of Rome. His classical bathhouse has hot and cold plunges on either side. The structure is a water-filled glass block with silicone joints, a natural pas-
sive solar collector. Water closet, lava: tory, bidet, shower and tub- Tigerman isolates each into what he calls altars. "The metaphor for Hell," says Tigerman, "is the steambath which one descends into from the peripheral purgatorial edges of the little building." The heavenly metaphor is couched in a chaise lounge under a cloud-painted ceiling. Tigerman sees his. ideas as banishing embarrassment from dirtying bodily funcc tions and "celebrating the bathroom as a place of joy." Tigerman's imp helpers were Deborah. Doyle and Patrick Burke. The master at blowing up buildings into objects of fun is David Macaulay, whose inflatable cathedral "to create a distinguished setting at a moment's notice" was pictured on the Octagon show's poster. The cathedral and other buildings are from his book Great Moments in Architecture. Consider whose jokes not only were built, but turned out to work very well indeed. Chief among them is SHE (Structure in the Environment, though
they'd rather you call them by their nickname). SITE's great building puns are turned into brick and glass and concrete by the magic of the money of Best Products Company, a large chain of catalog showrooms. Sydney and Frances Lewis, founders of the company, are great collectors of both modern and art nouveau. The witty structures show ~ direct influence from the German and Spanish turn-of-the-century artists. The first SITE/Best project was a remodeling in Richmond, Virginia; a building made to look as though one whole cQfJ!~rof brick veneer is peeling off. Another SITE/ Best building, also in Richmond, is Best's headquarters. Fifteen-meter-high oak trees, a reminder of the forest once on the site, split the building into two parts, as though nature has started to reclaim ground. The trees, many original to the spot, grow in a sort of atrium between entrance and showroom. In Sacramento, California, the Wandering Wall Building has a corner section that rolls out
r
Imaginations run wild when artists indulge in architectural fantasies: David Stainback sees the Jefferson Memorial in Washington as a restaurant (above) and the Washington Monument as a vertical
bank of condominiums (right). But the Best Products Company goes beyond mere imagination, making revolutionary ideas concrete (or possibly brick). Their witty structures, proposed and existing, include, top to
bottom: Michael Graves' model for a shopping center facade in which theportico extends well beyonq, the building behind it; Robert Stern's proposed building facade reflects the notion that "our household goods
have become our household gods"; the Greek columns and pediment are blended with cut-out designs of ababycarriage, clock, ete; the "Indeterminate Facade" showroom in Houston, Texas.
••Architects face the danger of creating new products immensely beautiful, but absolutely useless .•.. Architecture must be made for living, not to ,be criticized by other architects." to make an entrance. Also at the Museum of Modern Art, "Transformations in Modern Architecture" was a show and a book in recent years by Arthur Drexler, director of the museum's architecture and design department. Many of the 400 buildings built from 1950 to 1980 included in the book are as much pure form and fluidity as any visionary could draw. Drexler points out that "modern architecture, like engineering ... wanted all architectural pleasures to derive from the straightforward encounter with necessity. Architectural fictions, the play of unnecessary forms ... were rejected as unworthy. But no one can tell the truth all the time, if only because no one always knows what it is. How architectural truths and fictions transform each other constitutes a large part of recent history." Drexler shows us glimpses of what is and might be in the pure forms of Louis Kahn's hostels in Bangladesh, John Portman's swashbuckling Renaissance Center in Detroit, and the mirrors of life of an office building by Foster Associates in Ipswich, England. But in Lubbock, Texas, Robert Bruno is building a sculpture/house for himself with little money and no help. Bruno was a professor of sculpture, and one day when he had finished a really big one, he thought, "I'd like to live in that." He set to work to build a welded steel sculpture he and his wife could call home. His wife not only didn't scream at the thought, she's helping finance the $50,000 loan, though from time to time (it's been 12 years) she wishes he'd ,finish it. The visitor enters through one of four elephantine legs. You climb a flight of ceremonial stairs. As YQurise higher and higher, you have the feeling you are on your way to a very important' event, a coronation or a beheading. The windows look out from a cantilevered room suspended 45 meters above the river canyon. The sight has the awesome loneliness of a view from the moon. When he finishes, Bruno wants to build a cathedral, as Antonio Gaudi did. Gaudi is the patron saint of the artist visionaries because he actually built his "deified nature" dreams in Barcelona from 1883
to 1926. Undulating forms, mosaic tiles, swooping shapes, towering turrets; they are a glimpse of a place and time outside of earthly experience. Roy Mason once was in the artist camp, now he's into technology. Mason, an architect, is art director and architecture editor of the Futurist magazine of the World Future Society, He designed and ~elped build a series of fantastic urethane foam structures in Washington, D. C. The houses were more art than architecture. Now Mason is working on computerized houses. Today, when computer systems are available to run houses, Mason believes strongly that the coming of the computer will make it possible for most people to work at home in the future. "You wouldn't have to go to an office at all. You'd just turn on your video display terminal, linked to your company computer, and send away. You could use data banks, reach people in other cities, accomplish more at home than you now can at the office." Ray Pioch's plan for Weidlinger Associates suggests a floating airport anchored to the bottom of the sea. Noriaki Kisho Kurokawa's "porous space study plan" envisions a cluster city with marvelous transportation networks. Frank Lloyd Wright lived so long, he might have been expected to see th,e visions he dreamed realized. But no one was ever willing to build his "Broadacre City" where every couple would have an acre of land and families with children more. He saw the individual acres as grouped around farms with transporta~ tion by monorails and a helicopter variant he called an "aeroter." At the opposite end,- Wright thought of a one-and-a-halfkilometer-high skyscraper he called "Illinois. " It was perhaps Wright's visionary city that inspired his student, Paolo Soleri, to design Arcosanti, a city for 3,000 people to rise 15 stories on four hectares in Mayer, Arizona. With the help, often in passing, of 2,500 students, he has begun. But Arcosanti is but a tiny model of his dreams of arcologies (architecture/ecology), a megastructure which would pierce the sky. People and technology would be concentrated into centers so that all the
rest of the land could be returned to nature. Perhaps the most attractive of the technologists is Buckminster Fuller, whose basic concept, the geodesic dome, serves well as garden shed or world's fair exhibition center. But he thinks we've really missed a bet in not thinking bigger. In 1969, he proposed to cover Manhattan with a dome from the East River to the Hudson at Forty-second Street. The three- kilometer-diameter hemisphere would be one and a half kilometers high at the center. "The captive atmosphere in itself is enough to support the structural shell," claimed Fuller. And he figured "the cost of snow removal in the city would pay for the dome in 10 years." Fuller also planned balloonlike spheres to hold cities in perpetual soap bubbles above the earth. And then, thank heavens, there are the naturalists. Steve Baer's Zomeworks just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, was one of the first of what is now a tidal wave to effectively harness the sun to power his houses. William Morgan, in Florida, has shown that digging into the earth to make your own cave can produce houses both warmed and cooled by the earth. Today, a whole underground house and building movement has, if you excuse the pun, surfaced. The greatest of energy sources is human.' Francisco Carbajal de la Cruz, honored by the International Architects' Union, is an architect who lives in a futuristic hexagonal house outside Mexico City. Carbajal has designed concrete houses that people without training can build. According to him: "Architects face the danger of creating new products immensely beautiful, but absolutely ~seless. We must work toward fulfilling the right of every human being to have a good shelter. Architecture must be made for living, not to be criticized by other architects." So where should we look for salvation as we approach the millennium? To the stars? The sun? The earth? Or will we seek and find salvation where the gods hid it-within ourselves? 0 About the Author: Sarah Booth Conroy is design editor of The Washington Post.
The New Guru of On an especially gray and damp Halloween morning about 200 college journalism students gathered under a rainbow of fluorescent lighting at Philadelphia's Center City Holiday Inn for the 1981 Investigative Reporters and Editors Regional Conference. They were there to pick up some skills of the trade, but jobs-and-how-to-get-'em '" as the number-one topic of conversation. These I-students were there for something else, too. They had been lured to the City of Brotherly Love to hear keynote speaker Eugene L. Roberts Ir., executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer for the past nine years. Word of this man has traveled along the journalism school grapevine: the students have heard about the six Pulitzers in nine years and about how Roberts' reporters actually have fun in the newsroom. Not the kind of fun the New York Daily News specializes in when it's busy thinking up ad campaigns, but good old-fashioned fun, the horsin' around style. They've heard the story about the live camel that was delivered to Roberts' office on his last birthday-his 49th-and another about the time a couple of guys on motorcycles came cruising through the newsroom as a send-off for a departing reporter. But the students have also heard about what Roberts is able to do with newspapers, how he can crawl into the pages, into every department, into every editor's and reporter's head, into the collective psyche of his readership-in this case the readers of The Philadelphia Inquirer-and make it look easy. That's why some media critics call Gene Roberts the best newspaper ,editor in America today. Gene Roberts has a vision. In his vision, everybody in America reads a newspapernot just casually, but voraciously, and not just any newspaper, but his newspaper. It's not that his ego is so big; it's that he's got this overwhelming desire to explain things to as many people as possible. His mind has been likened to a searchlight, always roaming, searching, but staying in place for as long as it takes to solve a problem or to explain something thoroughly, whether it be
M
f ouruais an eight-part series on a teenage girl's losing battle with leukemia, or a four-part series on brutality in the Philadelphia police department. Roberts' searchlight is always reaching farther. While the economy has been crunching some newspapers into extinction, he has managed to find the money to open eight new bureaus in nine years: in New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Rome, Bangkok, and most recently in New Delhi. His vision is beginning to turn The Philadelphia Inquirer into the Great American Newspaper. And so there is near silence in the main ballroom of the Holiday Inn as this unlikely new guru of American newspaper journalism steps to the microphone and begins his treatise in a flat, yet curiously vital, voice. The new guru of American newspaper journalism was once described by a magazine writer as looking like a frog. The description stuck. What's more, the guru recognized the validity of the description and took it as his trademark. His office, in fact, is a veritable frog museum. Paper frogs. Plastic frogs. Macrame frogs. No doubt about it: the guru can take a joke. His colleagues say his ability to take a joke comes from his great sense of Southern irony. "I kind of like to read the great Southern and Russian writers over and over again because I like their sense of what it's like to lose," the guru says in his North Carolina drawl. But losing is something this executive editor has learned only from books. Gene Roberts, journalism lore goes, came out of the farm country of North Carolina with only one ambition: to be a newspaperman. "In those days," the guru says of his early years, "you had but two choices: to be a farmer or to work for a newspaper. I knew I wasn't meant to be a farmer." His first real newspaper job was as a reporter for the Norfolk Virginia-Pilot, where he did such a good job they made him an editor. So he quit. He joined the Detroit Free Press as a
reporter, but he did such a good job they made him an editor there, too. So he quit again. Then he went to The New York Times as a reporter. There he covered the three great stories of his generation: the civil rights movement, the urban riots, and the Vietnam war. The same thing happened again. But this time he was made national editor, a top job on the paper. So Roberts hung around a while. It wasn't until he came to The Phila-. delphia Inquirer as executive editor in late 1972 that he actually got to like the idea of being part of management, or so the story goes. As executive editor, he took charge of the complete editorial product, from the front page to the comic page. Except for the president of the paper, who acted as publisher, he would be in total command. Gene Roberts had always liked a challenge. And reviving The Philadelphia Inquirer, a second-class morning newspaper that had dipped from 619,000 to 445,000 morning readers in 15 years (some 250,000 behind the city's afternoon daily, the Philadelphia Bulletin), would clearly be the biggest challenge of his career. Things had gotten out of hand at the Inquirer during the Fifties and Sixties, under the ownership of publishing magnate Walter Annenberg (TV Guide, Seventeen, The Daily Racing Form). An $l1,OOO-a-year investigative reporter had been convicted of extortion and sent to Graterford Prison when he was caught telling sources he would suppress stories in return for money. There was even an enemies list-a group of people whose names could not be mentioned in the paper. When Annenberg turned his attention to Nixonian politics in 1969, accepting a post as ambassador to the Court of St. James, he decided to sell the Inquirer. The Miami-based Knight-Ridder chain bought the paper for $55 million. To shake out the dead wood left by Annenberg, Knight-Ridder, which owns 33 newspapers across the United States, brought in John McMullan, a 51-year-old Knight lieutenant. Heads rolled. More than
He is Eugene L. Roberts Jr., executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. His credo: "We are always careful and cautious as to libel and fairness, but we are never timid .... We don't mince words and every word is checked and rechecked for accuracy, but we don't clutter things with a lot of 'alleges.'"
80 new reporters, editors and specialists were brought in after the first housecleaning. The shakedown created union problems that would turn into wars for years afterward, and it left McMullan a hated man in many circles. Knight needed to act again. The call went out for Roberts. "I spent a long time trying to lure Roberts away from the Times," remembers Derick Daniels, now the president of Playboy Enterprises. "I was then a corporate editor for KnightRidder. My job was to put the right people in the right place, and I knew that the freckle-bellied country boy from North Carolina with the deceptive 'gee, golly' shuffle and a mind like a steel trap was just the man I wanted. The least important part of the negotiations, as far as Roberts was concerned, was the personal remuneration. We spent most of our time talking about autonomy and resources." Roberts quickly made it clear who had the autonomy . "You couldn't believe how that man took control of the Inquirer newsroom," says Wendell Rawls Jr., a former Inquirer reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. "He made sure everything in the paper had a consistency. They're very proud of consistency where I work now," adds Rawls, who covers the South for The New York Times. "But then they've had plenty of time to be good at it. Roberts must have fired off several hundred memos in his early days at the Inquirer, and they all said things like, 'We [the Inquirer] don't put commas there, but we do over here.'" As for resources, Roberts won the war. When the paper crept into the bla~k sometime after Roberts' first year, with a profit margin of near 6 percent, Roberts persuaded the Knight people to pour the profits back into the paper. The Philadelphia Daily News, the Inquirer's sister paper, also began to prosper under the Knight leadership. The profits allowed Roberts to raid The New York Times staff for editors, hiring away what one former Times man called "the best and the most humanistic" -like Jim Naughton and Doug Robinson. "1 knew he'd bring all the talent with
him," Daniels says. "He's a pied piper. He's found him the next day. You talk about a got legions of people who would follow him loose, relaxed guy." off a cliff at the wave of a pencil. Hell, I'm Nowhere has the Roberts touch been one of them. I'd follow him off a cliff if more evident than in the paper's A section, that's what he wanted." home for most of the Inquirer's "takeouts" With his favorite newspaper cronies by [articles of 4,000 words or longer]. Many of the lnquirer's takeouts are conceived with his side, this deceptively diminutive Southern man with slightly stooped shoulders and the unstated goal of a Pulitzer, and from shy, averted eyes went to work creating his 1975 through 1980, the paper won an unprevision of the Great American Newspaper. cedented six Pulitzer prizes. The diversity of The Inquirer was cleaned and sanitized of all topics in the Pulitzer-winning stories deremnants of deadly prose. More money and . monstrates Roberts' range: attention went into art and photography. • In 1980, the Pulitzer Prize for local More news space was given almost every reporting to the entire Inquirer staff for its coverage of the nuclear accident at Three section of the paper: sports, metropolitan news, arts, real estate, people. Doonesbury Mile Island. [the popular comic strip] was whisked away • In 1979, the Pulitzer Prize for interfrom the competing Bulletin amid cries of national reporting for reports from the dirty pool. But it wasn't until reporters were Mideast. dispatched to cover stories in Korea, Vene• In 1978, the Pulitzer Gold Medal for zuela, Israel and elsewhere-including the public service for a series of articles on abuses by the Philadelphia police departwilds of north and west Philadelphia-that people began to sit up and take notice. The ment. first to notice were the reporters. • In 1977, the Pulitzer Prize for local "In the first three years I was at the investigative reporting for a series of articles Inquirer," says Jonathan Neumann, now a that exposed conditions inside the Pennsylreporter for The Washington Post, "it vania State Hospital for the Criminally Inseemed like nobody was in charge. And yet sane. we kept coming out with a better and better • In 1976, the Pulitzer Prize for editorial newspaper. Roberts, I discovered, was the cartooning. , kind of editor with whom you wouldn't feel • In 1975, the Pulitzer Prize for national uncomfortable walking into his office and reporting for a series of articles exposing the suggesting an ambitious, long-range story. If unequal application of federal laws by the you did enough preliminary work, as often Internal Revenue Service. "A lot of people wonder how much as not he'd say, 'Well, I guess I'll see you in Roberts has to do with the success of those six months.'" stories," says Jonathan Neumann. "You As executive editor of the Inquirer, Roberts spends his days going over long- know, he comes off as a shufflin' kind of range projects with his editors, negotiating country boy, but come a crunch or an important deadline, he turns into a lucid, the budget with Sam McKeel (the president of the paper), approving new hirings, dealing deep-thinking leader who can take 50 typed with union skirmishes, surveying the com- pages of copy, spread them all over the petition, planning projects with Pulitzer floor, and then start rearranging the story, potential and meandering through the news- paragraph by paragraph. In three hours he can complete an editing job that most ediroom. It is an intense schedule for anyone, but Roberts does it with astonishing ease. "I tors wouldn't even tackle at all." Wendell Rawls concurs. "Most newskeep my eye on him when I'm not working on a story," says one Inquirer reporter, "and paper editors take a look at a complex story it seems like he's in his office meditating or and wonder when they can get something something. He never gets worked up about into the paper," he says. "They think you anything. He seems to operate in slow can do investigative reporting on deadline. gear." Problem is, the deadline becomes the only "That's just the way he is," says Jack strategy in charting the story. Roberts treats Nelson, the Washington bureau chief for the his reporters like professionals. He never Los Angeles Times. "After a while you get acts like his reporters are foxing him out of to realize it's an actual style. When he his time or his money. And, in fact, they never are." reported for work the first day as a Southern correspondent at the Times, he showed up "I think where many newspapers go at the office in the middle of the night. No astray," the guru says, reading freely from one was there, so he unbuckled his pants his notes, "is in definin' investigative reand loosened his tie and fell asleep right partin' as unearthin' criminals. We at the there in his chair, and" that's the way we Inquirer stay away from terms' like inves-
tigative, in favor of terms like takeouts, project pieces, or major series. Some of my staff keeps me humble by callin' the biggest of these stories megaturds. I do not deny it. One of my own editors keeps tellin' me we should think less about investigative repartin' and a whole lot more about explanatory journalism."
The J-students listen, and they take notes. As well they should. Explanatory journalism-the art of explaining things in vivid language-is a current rage in American newspaper journalism, and Gene Roberts is one of the main practitioners. When the executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer says, as he often does, that many major stories do not break, but "trickle, seep and ooze" instead, he is saying that not all stories fit neatly into an inverted pyramid and that there might be anothermore literary-way to look at the story. Gep.e Roberts learned how to explain things as a farm reporter for a small weekly newspaper in his home state of North Carolina. "I wrote a column that I inherited from my father called 'Ramblin' and Rural Wayne.' I drove from one farm to another askin' a lot of questions and then I had to go back and make that interestin'. That's when I learned how to ruminate." The second editor this young farm reporter ever worked for was blind. "He used to tell me that my stories were interestin' but that I had to make him see it better," Roberts says. "Y'know,' you can't get a better teacher of vivid writin' than a blind editor." "We are always careful and cautious as to libel and fairness, but we are never timid. If we have a forceful story to tell, we tell it forcefully. We don't mince words and every word is checked and rechecked for accuracy, but we don't clutter things with a lot of 'alleges.' ... " ... Reporters on the Inquirer have learned that it is not just three or four elite members of the staff who are allowed to do investigatin'. Anyone can do it, if he or she has a compellin' idea and has already' done the spadework. We discourage career inves- tigative reportin' over and over again at the Inquirer. Just as every reporter can have that shot at comprehensive reportin', all reporters are expected to go after spot repartin' as it happens. "
Roberts got his first "shot" at comprehensive reporting as a young, ambitious reporter for the Detroit Free Press. When news that President Kennedy had been shot came over the wire in the Free Press newsroom, Roberts grabbed the first editor he saw and begged to go to Dallas to cover the
story. Permission was granted and the result ~as an eight-page recreation of the shooting of the President. Roberts also managed to get two full pages worth of assassination photos that the Dallas police had already sold exclusively to Time/Life. "I learned a lot from that experience," Roberts says today. "I learned how to move in behind a news mob and get the real story. There were all these people down in Dallas that had become overnight celebrities because of the assassination. But when the television cameras packed up and went home, and the spotlight moved somewhere else, these people were left standin' there feelin' like they had been used. That's when I moved in and found out all kinds of details. It's takin' the time to listen that makes the story work." Roberts' story on the Kennedy assassination worked so well, in fact, that it was noticed by Harrison Salisbury, then an editor' at The New York Times. In 1964 Salisbury offered Roberts the job of Southern correspondent. But by this time Roberts had been made city editor of the Free Press, and the .paper was in the midst of a nasty 134-day strike. "I knew I would have to tell Salisbury no," Roberts remembers, still smarting at the memory. "I just couldn't leave in the middle of a strike. It damn near broke my heart." Telling the Times no was one of the hardest decisions of Roberts' career. As a young boy, he had dreamt of covering the South, particularly the civil rights movement. An oft-told story from Roberts' childhood was about how he saved the life of a drowning black friend in his native Wayne County, North Carolina. But when the ambulance driver arrived and saw that the gasping victim was black, he sped off. "Unless you grow up around separate water fountains and restrooms," Roberts says, "you can't possibly know the difference between being prejudiced against and being persecuted. " A year later, the Times called again. This time there was no strike, and Roberts was off for his beloved South. "I kind of zigzagged all over the South in those years," Roberts says. "I covered the charter meetin' of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and I got to know a lot of courageous people who believed in passive resistance. I met a man named John Lewis. I always thought he was one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights movement. He had a bedrock character and more strength of purpose than any man I ever saw. "Whenever you're on a story, you try to
be detached and clinical. But that was hard coverin' civil rights. There was no way you could cover Martin Luther King and not be impressed. I'd never seen anything quite like him. It was electrifyin'. And then the next day, I'd be out coverin' George Wallace while he was runnin' for governor of Alabama. It got real confusin'. I knew all the cast of characters: the Klan, the Nazis, the Church of Jesus Incorporated. There were all these little stories all over the place, but the bigger story was about an entire region in the throes of change. That was a story." Perhaps it was inevitable that the only place this 34-year-old reporter for The New York Times could feel at home after the excitement of the civil rights movement and the urban riots was to be assigned to a war. He was. New Year's Eve, 1967. Vietnam. Bureau chief. Personal facts about this new guru of American newspaper journalism come easy. Married, four daughters. Likes poker, 1930 movies, Bernard Malamud novels, Lou Grant [a TV series about a courageous newspaper editor], aggressive reporters. When he quit his four-pack-a-day cigarette habit several years back, he increased his iced tea consumption proportionately. Today, if he feels like lighting up, he takes a swallow or two of iced tea instead. He is also a nomad by nature. He recently moved from the plush suburbs of Philadelphia's Main Line to center city. "I thought it was essential that our paper reach out to the suburbs in order to get in the black," he says of his earlier decision to live in the suburbs. "But now I want to make sure our presence is felt in the city. That's why I like to move around a bit. Besides, I think Philadelphia is one of the most underrated, underpublicized, extremely livable cities. I feel in touch living here." Though the facts about him come easy, there remains the enigma. "It's like he gets lost sometimes," says Steve Seplow, the assistant managing editor of the Detroit Free Press and a former Roberts colleague at the Inquirer. "When Vietnam was falling apart, I wanted to send a reporter there right away. Gene was against it; he was afraid a reporter might get killed. So we're talking about it and right in the middle of the conversation, he blanks out. I must have stood there for two or three full minutes before Gene's eyes came back to the front of his head. I thought maybe he went for a walk around Saigon." "You have to know that you're dealing with a genuine crazy man," says Jon Katz, another Inquirer alumnus, who is now the
managing editor of The Dallas TimesHerald. "He's brilliant, but he's crazy. He used to call me at three in the morning from his bathtub and really believe there was nothing unusual about that." It is said that much of the staff of The Philadelphia Inquirer lives in fear of the day Gene Roberts decides to take his act on the road again. His departure, perhaps imminent, is almost certainly inevitable. He has, in nine years, accomplished much of what he set out to do in Philadelphia. The Inquirer is not only a solid newspaper, but in terms of investigative journalism, it is elbow to elbow with the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe, which some critics say are two of the best. The 134-year-old Philadelphia Bulletin, Philadelphia's number-one circulation newspaper before Roberts' arrival, is thoroughly punched out. Roberts could return to the Times someday. Or he could just retire early. "I always thought I'd like to retire in my mid-fifties," Roberts says wistfully. But the most persistent rumors are that Roberts will succeed Ben Bradlee as executive editor of The Washington Post. "I'm not sure how much of the talk is legitimate speculation or just newspaper gossip," says David Shaw, media critic for the Los Angeles Times, "but Roberts has done just about everything he can do at the Inquirer and he's only 49, so where does he go next? Bradlee was originally going to retire at 60 and he's past that now. One doesn't know whether recent setbacks will hasten that departure. Roberts does have a reputation for integrity as well as great journalism skills, so he could be the logical successor. " Tom Wark, the associate managing editor of the Inquirer, is trying to explain Gene Roberts. "He sometimes strikes me as Oriental," Wark says, stroking his gray beard and searching for words. "I mean, I've worked with Gene on three newspapers now aBd I still don't r-retend to u!lderstand him thoroughly. I'm not sure anybody does. But if you want to know why people like to work for him, just try to imagine what would happen if you were a young reporter or a young editor and you decided to playa practical joke on Abe Rosenthal [The New York Times editor] or Ben Bradlee by bringing a camel into his office on a workday. Gene Roberts is the only editor in America who could appreciate such a gesture." Of such stuff are gurus made. D About the Author: Tim Whitaker is a free-lance writer based in Philadelphia.
"Television and I have grown up together," says David Brinkley, who was one of the medium's first celebrities. Brinkley achieved TV stardom as a newscaster on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) evening news program in the mid-1950s. The successful teaming of the witty Brinkley and the more serious Chet Huntley, in fact, brought int9 sharp focus the realization that on TV the bearer of the news was as important as-if not more important than-the news itself. They were called "anchormen," a position similar to host that includes newsreading and introducing reports from correspondents in other cities. Since Huntley and Brinkley (seen left to ril\ht during an election-night
broadcast in 1968) worked for a national network', which provides programs for hundreds of television stations across the United States, they were known everywhere. Brinkley would complain that he was too much a celebrity to cover a story as a reporter; crowds would throng around him instead of the political figure on whom Brinkley was reporting. Brinkley's wit and dry sardonic delivery set a style in broadcasting that is still emulated. In September 1981 he left NBC after 38 successful years to join the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) where he presents This Week With David Brinkley, described by Time as "a true innovation in television journalism. "
David Brinkley Views the News EV ANS: Television news in the United States
has changed enormously in the 38 years you've been in it. What are the most significant changes? BRINKLEY: Two things have happened in the 38 years- television has become a serious news medium, whereas in the beginning it was not. National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in 1956 began the first serious news program. Since then, the changes primarily have been technological, with the arrival of tape as opposed to film, satellites, color, and so on-all sorts of technological improvements which have made it possible for us to do things we could not do before. What made you and fellow newscaster ehet Huntley such a successful team? We were the first to do a news program in any real sense, and we had the great advantage of being first. Whatever we did hadn't been done before, and we did news in a professional way. In the beginning, television news was a copy of the newsreels, which did not cover news. Newsreels only covered sta"ged events, arrivals, departures, ribbon-cuttings, ship-launchings. They weren't equipped to cover news. They covered World War II almost entirely by using handouts from the War Department, as it was called then. They shot little or none of their own film, so they were not a news medium in any real sense. We actually were the first. What makes a good anchorman? The person who gives the appearanceI would hope the fact, but at least the appearance-of knowing what he is talking
about, of not being an automaton who's just put hair spray on his hair and is reading a TelePrompter. In addition, it seems to be necessary for the person to be likeable on the air, to have some sort of personal appeal to a wide spectrum of people. TV Guide once took a poll which indicated that viewers want an avuncular, benign, soothing personality to deliver the evening news, not an intense or aggressive one. Do you think that's true? I think people probably said that was what they wanted because that was what they were then getting. If they are accustomed to eating chocolate, they will say they like chocolate. They were then getting Walter Cronkite (of the Columbia Broadcasting System), who certainly was avuncular. But, nevertheless, I think it probamy is true. It is a kind of enduring, almost family relationship. People who write to me always call me by my first name. People I don't even know.' Which is fine. It's a fairly intimate relationship over a period of years. You are, after all, in people's living rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms. So if you are some kind of high-strung, aggressive, abrasive, smart-alecky type, you will not last. Because you won't wear well. Is a sense of humor a help or a hindrance to a television correspondent? I always thought it was a help. Still think so. There has been an idea that anyone who treated the news with wit was being flippant and not being serious. I think the opposite is true. A good deal of the news is serious; a good deal of the news is even bad, tragic.
But at least as much of it is absurd and ridiculous, and should be so treated. You started out as.a wire service reporter. Have you always written your own copy? Yes. And do you think it's important for an anchorman to be able to write, or can he just read somebody else's copy and still be good? My opinion is that if you're going to be a person and not some kind of dictaphone, the words you say on the air should be your own. And the only way to do that is to write them yourself. You've got a very distinctive style of speaking. Where did that come from? I don't know. It's just the way I've always talked. It may have been influenced somewhat in the beginning by remembering the fact that the ear is the poorest, poorest way to acquire information. So you emphasized words to make it clear? Emphasis is all-important. When I first started, I wrote scripts to be read by announcers. Often I would hear the whole meaning and whole sense of a sentence changed by an announcer who emphasized the wrong words because he didn't know what he was saying. He was just reading words. If he emphasized the wrong words, he changed the sense of it. That happened so often and was so irritating that when I started doing it myself, I may have gone a little to an extreme to emphasize what I thought were the right words. Have television viewers changed over the years? Do you find them more sophisticated
vious answer is that we put it on because there wasn't any news. The truth is that there isn't that much news of general. national public interest. News ranges from back-fence gossip, which may be the most interesting kind, to tremendous events-like the shooting of President Reagan. People have the illusion that all over the world, most of the time, all kinds of sensational things are happening. The fact is, over most of the world, most of the time, nothing is happening.
Do you ever worry that the huge amount of money involved in television news-the millions the networks make on it and the hundreds of thousands of dollars that correspondents and anchormen are paid-will put the whole profession of television journalism into the category of entertainment instead of journalism?
or more cynical? Do they expect more from television news? I think people in general are more cynical. Whether that has much, if anything, to do with television news I don't know. As for the news, they are much more demanding. In the beginning they were happy with anything they got because whatever we did was being done for the first time. No people in the history of the world have seen so much, without ever leaving home. From the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the top of Mount Everest, they've seen it all. And no previous generation had such an experience and so they are more demanding, harder to please, more sophisticated, more critical.
What effect do you think that has on politicians? Do people get tired of politicians after they've seen them on television? If they tuned them in every time they were on the air, they would get tired of them very quickly. But they don't. What we have found is that if you really want to kill the ratings and drive the audience away, you put on political speeches. Do you think network news itself is doing
more lighter features than it used to? If there is not enough news of general, national public interest, then you fill up the half hour with something else. And it will be a feature about something or other. Over the years I have gotten mail from people s'lying, "Last night you had a feature on somebody training dogs," or whatever. "Why do you put that kind of thing on instead of putting the news on?" The ob-
You think money equals entertainment? One thing has nothing to do with the other. Nobody in television makes as much money as Robert Redford, for example, who likes to make movies for several million dollars only on the condition that they contain some sort of social message. I can't take very seriously a social message delivered by an actor who's paid nine million dollars. to deliver it. And who charges you five dollars to see it. That's a whole different world. One which I hold in some disdain, I might say . .one has nothing to do with the other. Running a television news operation requires a tremendous number of people because of the technical demands, which means it costs a lot.
It brings in a lot of money to the network, doesn't it? Isn't news doing very well for the networks? No. The six, six-thirty, seven o'clock news programs make a lot of money. Which is then spent almost entirely on other news programs that don't make any money. So there are very few television news programs that make money. People don't know that. Special events, the royal wedding, the inaugural, the various shootings of public officials, are very, very expensive. And you don't put commercials in them, so you get nothing.
Does the intense competition for ratings poison the atmosphere when you're working in television? Is it something you make a conscious effort to forget? No, you can't forget it because it is important. The whole business of ratings is widely misunderstood. I remember an occasion in which The New York Times ran a full-page house ad in its own paper boasting about its increase in circulation. Which is
fine. In the same paper there was a column by one of their TV critics giving us hell for being concerned with ratings. Now, how much hypocrisy can you get into a square foot? If it is sinful for us to be concerned about ratings, which are our circulation, then why is it not sinful for newspapers? And magazines? And printed media of all kinds? There is the difference, of. course, !hat in television each individual program gets a circulation figure, whereas in newspapers only the total paper gets a circulation figure. But essentially they are the same measurement. I see nothing wrong with our being concerned about it. If you put on a program nobody looks at, why do it? You're supposed to serve the public. If they don't like what we're putting on, we have only one way of finding out about it. And that is that they won't look at. it. So if nobody looks at it, we'll take it off.
Some people worry about the potential political power of television news. The power of television lies in its enormous circulation. Political figures who can get on the air and get a chance to talk will reach people that they could never reach in any other way. It's not so much a power the news has; it's a power the medium itself has. The power lies in its enormous circulation and its immediacy. As one who's been doing news on television for a long time, I've never had the feeling of having any power. If I did, I can tell you a great many things in the United States would be quite different. Do you think President Reagan is being
well covered by the networks? Sometimes it seems as if they were originally kind of easy on him, and now that he's being criticized more everywhere, they are really getting tough. Do you think he is being treated fairly? Well, they're easy on every President in the beginning because they don't want to be accused of trying to damage him .in his first few months in office. It always happens after six or eight months; they begin to get restless and begin to be critical. In president Reagan's case, I think it is particularly so in view of the fact that he is making a great many changes in the government programs, which no recent President has done-except to increase them. I don't think he's getting treated badly, no.
Is television going to take the place of the written word? Oh no, I never have thought
so.
0
About the Interviewer: Katherine Winton Evans is managing editor of the Washington Journalism Review.
"Habeas corpus provides a remedy for jurisdictional and constitutional errors at the trial 'without lImIt of time.' The very truth and substance of the causes of a person's detention can be investigated." habeas he corpus is the single advantage which our government has over that of other countries," Dr. Samuel Johnson told his devoted biographer James Boswell in September 1769. Already by then, the Great Writ was well established in the American colonies. It was first expressly recognized in a 1692 Massachusetts statute which was modeled on the English Habeas Corpus Act, 1679. The Constitution of Georgia, adopted early in 1777, guaranteed the right to habeas corpus. Arresting officers were obliged to bring anyone accused of crime before a court or judge to decide the legality of his detention. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the Constitution of the United States of America adopted in 1787 contained an explicit provision for the writ of habeas corpus. The language of the provision itself shows how the framers of the Constitution took for granted that the courts of the United States would be given jurisdiction by the legislatures to issue this writ that is the greatest of the safeguards for personal liberty. Article I, Section IX, Clause (2) ranks among the restrictions on the national legislative powers. It simply says, "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." This is the solitary provision where the writ is mentioned and it applies
ll
only to the Federal Government, not to the states. Courts m the United States have uniformly interpreted Art. I, S. IX (2) as a positive guarantee of the writ, in the absence of suspension, for that was the clear intent of the Foundmg Fathers. They brought with them from England the legacies of English common law and of the liberties the people there had won as prizes in their battles against the Crown's arbitrary power. A polity without habeas corpus was inconceivable to Englishmen anywhere, whether in their colonies in America or in the territories they had just acquired in India. The first writ of habeas corpus was issued in India as early as 1775 by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Calcutta, Sir Elijah Impey, against the first Governor General, Warren Hastings. In 1828 Sir John Peter Grant, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Bombay, locked up the Court and suspended its work because the Governor, Sir John Malcolm, would not enforce a writ of habeas corpus which the Court had issued. The Constitution of India empowers the high courts to issue the writ but makes the right to move the Supreme Court for habeas corpus itself a fundamental right. India and the United States share a great heritage. It is fascinating and very instructive to study how India's coheir, the United States, developed the legacy in the last two centuries. The first
Congress, which met under the new Constitution in 1789, created a framework of the American judicial system in the Judiciary Act of 1789. Section 14 of the act conferred on the courts the power to issue writs of habeas corpus according to "the principles and usages oLlaw." The confidence reposed by the Founding Fathers was thus amply justified. Later statutes and judicial dicta led to an expansion of the scope and ambit of the writ. The Supreme Court¡ played a crucial role in the growth of habeas corpus not only as a legal remedy but also as an instrument of national control over criminal justice in the states. As the Court pointed out in 1917, "since 'law' is not a static concept but expands and develops as new problems arise, we do not believe that the forms of the habeas corpus writ are only those recognized in this country in 1789," when the original Judiciary Act came into existence. "The writ cannot be used as a cloak for appeal in disguise. It is a swift and summary remedy for securing the liberty of anyone imprisoned without the authority of law." The first major clash between the Supreme Court and the U.S. Government over habeas corpus arose early in the Civil War when President Abraham Lincoln temporarily suspended the writ for the line of transit for troops en route to Washington. He acted without authorization by Congress and on the assumption that the area of suspension was within the field of military operations over which he, as Commander-inChief, had full sway. When John Merryman of Baltimore petitioned the Supreme Court for habeas corpus on May 26, 1861, he little realized that he was making legal history. General George Cadwalader filed a return before the Court but did not produce his prisoner. A writ of attachment was returned at the gate of Fort McHenry to the U.S. marshal who was sent to serve it. "There was no answer to my card," he reported to the Court. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney censured this affront. He tartly remarked: "He [the President] certainly does not faithfully execute the laws, if he takes upon himself legislative power, by suspending the writ of habeas and the judicial power also, by arresting and imprisoning a person without due process of law." He narrated at length the history of habeas corpus in England and said that if Lincoln's claim were upheld, he would have "more regal and absolute power over the liberty of the citizen than the people of England have thought it safe to entrust to the Crown." However, since the Court's "power has been resisted by a force too strong for me to overcome," he would send a copy of the proceedings to the President for him to determine pow "to cause the civil process of the United States to be respected and enforced." Eventually, Congress enacted a law in 1863 empowering the President to suspend habeas corpus "during the present rebellion" whenever he felt that public safety required it. The next test arose in 1866 over Lamdin Milligan. He had been sentenced to death by a military commission on charges of disloyalty. Justice David Davis, a personal friend of Lincoln, pronounced the trial by military commission of a citiz.en to be illegal, accepted Milligan's petition for habeas corpus and ordered his release. A passage in Justice Davis' opinion deserves to rank with the great classics of legal pronouncements:
Time has proven the discernment of our ancestors .... Those great and good men foresaw that troublous times would arise, when rulers and people would become restive under restraint, and seek by sharp and decisive measures to accomplish ends deemed just and proper; and that the principles of constitutional liberty would be in peril. unless established by irrepealable law. The history of the world had taught them that what was done in the past might be attempted in the future. The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people. equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism ....
Habeas corpus has been used most effectively to rip off the mask of legality which is put on to hide miscarriage of justice and violation of legal rights. Domination of a courtroom by a mob determined to press on a single result in a trial is a mockery of justice. In 1923 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., blazed the trail in Moore v. Dempsey when he said: We assume ... that the corrective process supplied by the State may be so adequate that interference by habeas corpus ought not to be allowed. It certainly is true that mere mistakes of law in the course of a trial are not to be corrected in that way. But if the case is that the whole proceeding is a mask-that counsel, jury and judge were swept to the fatal end by an irresistible wave of public passion, and that the State Courts failed to correct the wrong, neither perfection in the machinery for correction nor the possibility that the trial court and counsel saw no other way of avoiding an immediate outbreak of the mob can prevent this Court from securing to the petitioners their constitutional rights ....
Habeas corpus provides a remedy for jurisdictional and constitutional errors at the trial "without limit of time," it has been said. The very truth and substance of the causes of a person's detention can be investigated. As recently as June 28,1979, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a habeas co'rpus application is entitled to relief "if it is found that upon the record of the evidence adduced at the trial, no rational trier of fact could have found proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." Racism in criminal justice has felt the sting of this writ. On July 2, 1979, the Court upheld its relevance saying "discrimination on the basis of race, odious in all aspects, is especially pernicious in the administration of justice. Selection of members of a grand jury because they are of one race and not another destroys the appearance of justice and thereby casts doubt on the integrity of the judicial process." Habeas corpus has traveled very far, indeed, since Dr. Johnson's panegyric in 1769 or the U.S. Judiciary Act 20 years later. The scope of the modern writ, as Justice Hugo Black noted, has "grown to achieve its grand purpose-the protection of individuals against erosion of their right to be free from wrongful restraints upon their liberty." It is, however, only fair to give its ally in the struggle for liberty its due share of credit. For many of the successes of habeas corpus were due to the support which the writ derived from the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It reads: "In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a
speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense." A violation of any of these rights entitles the accused to a writ of habeas corpus for quashing the trial and conviction. "The scope of inquiry in habeas corpus proceedings has been broadened-not narrowed-since the ,adoption of the Sixth Amendment," the Supreme Court tersely pointed out in a habeas corpus case where Sixth Amendment rights had been violated. . The Sixth Amendment was addressed' to the Federal Government; the Fourteenth Amendment to the states. It forbids the states from, among other things, depriving "any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law." It is a standing tribute to the Supreme Court's inventive genius that it has, over the years, used the Fourteenth Amendment to extend the federal Bill of Rights to the states, which are ijercely jealous of their autonomy.
In the last two decades the Supreme Court found itself faced repeatedly with the media's claims to access to courtrooms. The earliest of these cases arose in 1965. It concerned Billie Sol Estes, a financier who was convicted of swindling after a trial of great notoriety that was televised despite his objection. The Supreme Court quashed his conviction holding that "it violates the Sixth Amendment for federal courts and the Fourteenth for state courts to allow criminal trials to be televised to the public at large." Soon thereafter the Court reversed, on similar grounds, the conviction of an osteopath, Dr. Samuel H. Sheppard, for the murder of his pregnant wife. The presence of a large, ill-controlled news media contingent inside the courtroom can deny the accused the "judicial serenity and calm" that is essential to a fair trial. Such cases were fairly simple to decide as compared to the complex problems which arose when the claims of the news media came into conflict with the trial judges' orders against pretrial publicity. In a sensational case involving the murder of six persons, the judge imposed a "gag order" restraining the press, until the jury was impaneled, from publishing statements by the accused or facts implicating him. The Supreme Court struck down the order as being too wide and unnecessary but declined to lay down the law in absolute terms. "The authors of the Bill of Rights did not undertake to assign priorities as between the First Amendment and Sixth Amendment rights, ranking one as superior to the other ... it is not for us to rewrite the Constitution by undertaking what they declined to do." The First Amendment rights are not absolute but the barriers to prior restraint are very high. More recently, the Court had to shift its position in favor of the press after ruling against it by a narrow interpretation of the Sixth Amendment. In July 1979, in the Gannett case, the Court upheld exclusion of the press and the public from a pretrial hearing in a murder case and held that the Sixth Amendment guarantee~ "a public trial" to the accused, not to the public nor the press. A year later, in the Richmond Newspapers case, the Court reverted to thยง aspect it had earlier ignored, the First Amendment. It now ruled that "the right to attend criminal trials is implicit in the guarantees of the First Amendment." One of the justices, Harry Blackmun, was of the view that "the right to a publi~ trial is to be found where the- Constitution explicitly placed it-in the Sixth Amendment." As with other topics, the rules will be evolved through a case-by-case approach. At stake are nothing less than the cherished freedoms of the individual-his right to .personal liberty, to fair trial and to speak as a free citizen. The law on these rights might smack of dialectics of procedure. But procedure is not unimportant. Habeas corpus itself is a procedural remedy. The Sixth Amendment, too, embodies procedural rights. Liberty will have a precarious existence without these rights. All of which proves the truth of Justice Felix Frankfurter's perceptive words: "The history of liberty has largely been the history of observance of procedural safeguards." 0
hiSvery much included the rights embodied in the Sixth Amendment. Violation of these rights in a state court entitles the accused to petition for habeas corpus in a federal district court. The Supreme Court has enjoined the federal judge in such a case to make an independent evaluation of the facts regardless of whether the state appellate court had upheld the verdict or not. But the Supreme Court has followed a process of selective "nationalization" of the rights. In 1932 in the famous case of. Powell v. Alabama, the Scottsboro Boys case, the Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment guarantee of the right to the assistance of counsel in criminal prosecutions was binding on the states in capital cases. It was in 1963, in the famous case of Gideon v. Wainwright that the Court ruled that this right was available in all criminal cases, capital or not, and indigents must be provided with counsel. The case has been celebrated in Anthony Lewis' superb book Gideon's Trumpet. Fifty-one-year-old Clarence Earl Gideon was sentenced to five years' imprisonment on a . conviction for petty larceny. He had asked the trial court to appoint counsel but the request was declined. After conviction he sent a handwritten petition to the Supreme Court, which appointed one of the most eminent lawyers in Washington and a future Supreme Court justice to represent Gideon. He was Abe Fortas. Now, all the guarantees of the Sixth Amendment apply to .\ the states-the rights to a speedy trial, to a public trial in the district where the crime was committed, to an impartial jury, to due notice of charges, to confront and cross-examine one's accusers, to have compulsory process for securing witnesses on one's behalf and to the assistance of counsel. Enforcement of About the Author: A. G. Noorani, a frequent contributor to SPAN, is a these rights is not always an easy task. Bombay-based lawyer and scholar on constitutional law.
1f .
ON
THE
LIGHTER SIDE
"I'll just keep going, thank you! I've already missed 10 minutes of mysoap opera!" Time Out. By Jeff Keate; © 1980 Field Enterprises, Inc. Courtesy of Field Newspaper Syndicate.
The Classical Athlete An ace bicyclist prescribes a training regimen combining a variety of exercises for athletes who aspire to become champions in today's fiercely competitive world of sports. In 1980, John Howard, one of Amer- bole is inspirational indeed, but Howica's premier bicycle racers for more than ard's example is also instructive. Anyone interested in developing a well-rounded 12 years, was at the apex of his training. Still as spare and sleek as a cheetah at 33 aerobic fitness program would do well to but no longer challenged by the bike- adopt a modified version of Howard's racing circuit, Howard sought a new intensive cross-training program. Better avenue for his athletic abilities. He chose than any regimen employing one sport alone, following a schedule based on the most demanding endurance competition modern man has devised: the Hawaii Howard's combination of three superior aerobic sports-running, swimming and Triathlon. a power-building weightJohn Howard had been there before, in cycling-and lifting program is the most effective way 1979, and had finished third in the event, to fully condition the body's muscular a terror featuring a grueling 4-kilometer swim in the choppy Pacific, a 180- and cardiovascular systems. Cross-training is not so much a specific kilometer bicycle race, and a marathon run of 42 kilometers-all to be done on a technique as it is a method of exercise. At single day. On this hot Sunday in 1980, the peak of my own bike-riding season in 1981, I decided to augment my rides with howeller, he was confident of a victory. 3.2- to 6.4-kilometer runs. Instead of His daily training regimen had included running eight kilometers, cycling any- logging up to 80 kilometers a day on my where from 16 to 160 kilometers, swim- "-bike, I cut down to 32. My legs got ming an hour, and working out with stronger, the change of pace was certainly weights. His resting pulse was down five nice, and-best of all-I maintained the beats from his usual 42, and his heart was same level of fitness in less time. working in half notes, filling two beats Ultimately, cross-training is most useper measure to the average male's four. ful for what it doesn't do; it doesn't bring The event began, and Howard finished a on the problems associated with training respectable 89th in the swim. He then in one sport only ("sport specificity"). proceeded to demolish the bicyclists Dr. Ed Burke, a sports physiologist and ahead of him and capped his victory by manager of the 1980 U.S. Olympic bicyfinishing 24 minutes in front of his nearest cling team, points to one such problem, marathon competitor. called activity addiction, which he says can lead to muscle damage. Of the many In training for the Triathlon, Howard had pushed his body to the limit, con- who rely on running alone to keep ditioning his heart, blood system, and themselves fit, he says: "You see runners .muscles to respond efficiently in three come in with sore feet and sore knees. different endurance events. Today's best They're overstraining one part to the marathon runners, like Frank Shorter point of getting tendinitis; they should be and Bill Rogers, could not do what stressing total musculature of the body." Howard did without months-and posIt has been estimated that everyone of sibly years-of diversified training. the 30 million or so runners and joggers Howard wanted more than a single spe- in the United States has sustained an cialty; like the Greek pentathlon athletes injury at some point in his training who sought to conquer the three worlds program. Dr. George Sheehan, a noted of ~trength, agility and endurance, he medical authority on running, says that wanted to prove that man could do the frequency of injury increases in those everything. runners who clock more than 50 kiloSuch an exhibition of athletic hyper- meters a week and that the most common
injury spot is the knee joint. "The only treatment I have found that works for any knee injury," says Dr. Edward Colt, a New York endocrinologist who specializes in running injuries, "is to stop running and do something else. I recommend bicycling and using toe clips to help strengthen the quadriceps and anterior tibial [shin] muscles. As you use the quadriceps, you strengthen and tighten the knee joint, and working on the shin muscles will help prevent shin splints. Cross-training effectively both prevents and treats running injuries." Another failing of sports specificity is a lack of distributed strength, which leads to a muscle imbalance. World-class cyclists are noted for their oversized quadricepses (bulging blocks of muscle above the knees), but most make weak runners because their hamstrings and calf muscles can't match the strength of their quadricepses. I have met several professional bike racers who could trounce me in a 80-kilometer cycling race but admit that I could probably beat them in a 1.6kilometer footrace. They're in better shape than I am cardiovascularly, but their leg muscles are uneven in strength. Dr. William D. McArdle, a noted exercise physiologist, suggests that only by training all the muscle groups and peripheral areas can you reach total aerobic fitness. Otherwise, "it's like having a great amplifier and lousy speakers," McArdle says. "If you train the amplifier-the heart-through running and then try to use that ability in an upperbody task like swimming, you would find that you haven't trained the peripheral area. It would be like using cheap speakers with an expensive stereo set." But one of the greatest drawbacks of sports specificity is the least quantifiable- namely, the discouragement suffered by weekend athletes who begin a running program enthusiastically only to (Text continued on page 26)
SPAN presents athletes in action, demonstrating what Ernest Hemingway described as "grace under pressure."
drop it sev~ral weeks later out of boredom, muscle fatigue, or injury. My friend Stu twice tried to start up a serious running program. "I found more pain than pleasure," he said later. "After a half kilometer I'd feel aches in my side. This lasted two weeks, and then I gave it up." Had he varied his program, Stu might have avoided such disenchantment. Olympic athletes probably worry less about boredom-they have to be obsessed already to do what they do-but many cross-train to maintain their level of fitness in the off-season and to build endurance. Each summer cross-country skier Billy Koch, the Olympic silver medalist, bicycles the length of Vermont at top speed. Another Winter Olympian, Eric Heiden, incorporated cycling into his training regimen and found it so satisfying that after retiring from the speed-skating circuit, he turned to bike racing as his next competitive domain. The point is that the crossover is "not difficult. "If you have the endurance," says John Howard, "it doesn't matter what the medium is-you can evolve into it. I proved that it is possible to improve your performance in one sport by concentrating your training on another." A program that includes running, cross-country skiing, swimming, and cycling-sports unanimously endorsed by exercise physiologists as the best aerobic activities-can strengthen a range of muscles, minimize sport-specific injuries, and begin to control the boredom factor. It's an effective complement of sports; each makes its distinct contribution to your musculature.' Within each muscle group there are agonist muscles, which initiate movement and shorten, and antagonists, which oppose the movement, checking it as they lengthen. Although the agonists are the prime muscle movers, most muscle injuries occur to the antagonists, either because they have not been warmed up properly or because they are not strong enough to match the pull of the agonists. When you cycle, the quadricepses contract while the hamstrings relax; the opposite happens when you run. SimilarIy, running flexes the calf muscle while cycling flexes the flip side, the shin muscle. For both the runner and cyclist to prevent injuries and help smooth out the primary motion within their particular muscle groups, the antagonists need to be strengthened along with the agonists. By combining the two sports, you strengthen
all the muscles in the leg and protect yourself: the chance of injury to a muscle like the hamstring is smaller if the muscle's mirror side, the quadriceps, is equally strong. As for the torso, swimming is almost a total exercise. When you swim, the pectorals and anterior fibers of the deltoid muscles are flexed as the arm hits the water and pulls you along. The opposite occurs when you pull your arm out of the water: the trapezius and posterior fibers of the deltoid contract while the others relax. But although swimming tones the shoulder, chest and back muscles, it doesn't do much for the biceps and forearm. Isometric calisthenics or weight training can strengthen those muscles. Of all the outdoor sports, cross-country skiing is generally recognized as the most beneficial, working both the upper and lower body. The arm-swinging motion exercises the same shoulder girdle muscles that are used when swimming the
Golf, while not the most physically demanding of sports, is unparalleled at inflicting mental anguish-and occasional euphoria-on its followers. The sport welcomes stalwart professionals and bumbling amateurs. Perhaps the greatest of the former is Jack Nicklaus, shown practicing chipping for a tournament in Africa (facing page, top). Below that a golfer tees off at the Delhi Golf Club, Asiad site. At right is thefamous Pinehurst No.2 course in North Carolina, where amateurs and professionals have settled championships. Below is Spyglass Hill in Monterey, California, one of the courses used in the Bing Crosby tournament, which is open to the public the rest of the year.
crawl, and the leg movement works the hamstring, calf, and quadriceps. The problem with cross-country skiing is that it's the least accessible of the four sports, because it is seasonal and requires more specialized equipment than the others do. There is no required schedule to a cross-training program, as long as the variety is kept constant. But you should be careful not to fall into the trap of scurrying from one exercise to the next. According to studies performed by the Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas, Texas, it generally takes at least 20 minutes for anyone exercise to produce results. It takes that long for your body to reach a "steady state" of oxygen consumption, the point at which the largest possible amount of oxygen is extracted from the air you breathe before being delivered to your muscles. A 30-minute workout of one exercise at a time at least four days a week is virtually required, with five minutes of stretching to warm up and five minutes afterward to cool down. Don't try to do too much-run on Monday, cycle Tuesday, take a day off, then swim on Thursday.
On days when it is impossible to exercise outdoors, circuit weight training offers a nice alternative, mixing power building with aerobics. You can set up your weights in such a way that. you have room to run from one station to the next (maybe place them in different rooms in your house or apartment). Spend 30 seconds on each exercise, working at 40 to 60 percent of your maximum power, and jog between sets of weights. One half hour of weight training complements the outdoor sports effectively. In every aspect of a cross-training program, work for time, not distance or speed. If you want to increase your mileage, exercise for another five or ten minutes a day. Progress may seem difficult to measure this way-you can't count on the same steady increase of miles you logged, say, running every day to know that your exercise is paying off-but one solution is to set a "target .training zone," measurable by your pulse rate. Cardiovascular improvement takes place when your heart is pumping at 70 to
85 percent of its maximum capability. Subtract your age from 220-that's your maximum pulse rate. Your target training zone is the range between 70 and 85 percent of this rate (for a 30-year-old man that would mean 133 to 162 beats per minute). Monitor your pulse as you train. At the beginning of your program stay close to the low end of the zone, and as you get more proficient in each sport, increase the effort until your heart is beating at the zone's top end. The ancient Greeks considered fitness, health and versatility among the most admirable of human traits; they would certainly have applauded John Howard's accomplishments. While we might forgo Howard's ordeal, it is difficult to deny his spirit. For us ordinary mortals th;;;re is cross-training, the fitness program for those who take to heart the ideal of the well-rounded man. D About the Author: All ace bicyclist, David Abramson also writes frequently for Rolling Stone, Bicycling and Esquire magazines.
When Paul Neal Adair was a child in Houston, Texas, he used to fight anyone who called him "Red"-which was a natural enough nickname, given the flaming color of his hair. Later in life, Adair came to appreciate the appellation. He started ~o wear red overalls and red hard hats out on his job, fitted out his office with red telephones and carpets, hired a red-haired secretary and occasionally drove a red Cadillac or Mercedes to work. But it is Adair's technical skill and daring, rather than his color sense, that have made him a living legend. Red Adair is the world's foremost expert in putting out oil-well fires-a man called in by the oil companies whenever they face a fire or blowout (explosion at the well head) that their own highly trained experts. can't control. Now 67 years old, Adair has battled-and beaten-blazes and blowouts for more than 40 years, from East Texas to the North Sea, and from Australia to Algeria-and now, in India. Adair acquired his taste for danger early in life when he served on a U.S. Army bomb disposal squad. Later, he returned to his native Texas to work in the oil fields, and there he came to the attention of Myron Kinley, a pioneer in fighting oil fires. Kinley hired the burly, red-haired youth on the spot after he saw Adair pick himself up and resume working immediately after a blowout had hurled him' 15 meters into the air. The expert taught his protege everything he knew about fire fighting on the grand scale, and when Kinley retired from the business in 1959, Adair formed the Red Adair Oil Well Fires and Blowouts Control Company. In principle, extinguishing an From his home base in Houston, Texas, Red Adair, wearing his famous red attire, flies around the world to fight oil-well fires. At right, the acefirefighter and his son Jimmy, who at one time worked with his father, direct the spray of a hose.
oil fire is a simple task; all the fire fighter has to do is to extinguish the blaze with a powerful explosion and then cap the leak that caused the conflagration. But that is rather like saying that flying to the moon is easy ,because one merely has to aim the rocket in the right direction. In practice, a person fighting an oil fire must cope with one of the world's most fearsome forces. Often soaked with highly flammable oil, he continually risks a painful, fiery death. "With bombs or fires," says Adair, "you get only one mistake." Adair has lacked no opportunity to make that one fatal error. Among his conquests have been some of the most dramatic and dangerous oilwell fires ever known. The most spectacular of all, as Adair recalls, was the blaze that arose from a leaky gas well in southern Algeria in 1962. So bright was the ISO-meter tower of flaming gas that astronaut John Glenn spdtted it during his
earth orbit more than 160 kilometers up. French engineers, who termed the blaze "the Devil's cigarette lighter," predicted it would burn for more than a century before exhausting the rich gas field that was feeding it. Six months after the fire started, the French called in Red Adair. Adair took a preliminary look at the inferno, and then .left to fight other fires while his associates Asgar (Boots) Hansen and Edward (Coots) Matthews set abou't preparing the offensive against the Algerian fire. They aimed to clear the area around the blowout of all debris and other material, and provide as much water there as possible to drench the fire fighters when they were set to extinguish the blaze. The team first drilled a series of water wells some 800 meters deep and then used bulldozers to install sheet-iron shelters close to the flames. Next, they used huge hooks and rakes on the ends of cranes to remove the distorted
derrick from atop the leaking gas well. At that point all was ready for Red to return and put the finishing touches to the fire. Adair packed a steel drum with 250 kilograms of high explosive and lifted it on a 60meter crane hook under a deluge of water from the newly dug wells. Directed by Boots Hansen, he meticulously positioned the drum within less than a meter of the point at which the flame actually started-l0 meters above ground level. Then Adair and Hansen raced 200 meters to a protective trench, threw themselves into it and pushed a plunger that detonated the explosive. Just as they expected, the blast blew out the fire. Adair and his colleagues had little time to savor that triumph. They still had to face the task of capping the leak with a IS-ton device called a control head. Twenty men gripping thick ropes slowly lowered the head over the well, forcing the escaping gas to spray out in all directions over Adair, Hansen and Matthews as they stood by ready to secure it. As the gas made contact with their asbestos suits it condensed into gasoline so volatile that a single spark would have ignited all three men. Ignoring the riskbut using brass tools, which don't cause sparks-the trio spent three desperate hours securing the control head over the well. Finally the last bolt was fastened and the fire that threatened to burn for 100 years was out. The infernos that Red Adair fights are not restricted to land. In December 1968, a drill from the Marlin No.1 rig punctured the sea floor off the southeast coast of Australia, causing a leak that poured poisonous gas over a r~dius of hundreds of meters. "It was a real sight," reported Adair after an inspection flight over the area. "We couldn't go lower than 900 meters, and even at that height the stench of the gas was stomach-turning. The sea for hundreds of meters around was
boiling. We had ourselves one hell of a job." 'No leak' ,is too large for Adair, and after five tedious weeks his team-had sealed it up. They did the joh by pumping tons of mud down a pipeline that they had attached to the leaky drilling platform, using a helicopter. The job marked Adair's emergence as a celebrity outside the oil business: As soon as they heard of Red's arrival at the scene, Universal Pictures executives speeded up the release of Hellfighters, a John Wayne film based loosely on Adair's life. The Red Adair Oil Well Fires and Blowouts Control Company is a very small firm in an industry made up mostly of giant international conglomerates. It employs only 30 persons (including Adair's daughter), most of them technical experts in dousing oil and gas fires. . The company's work load is almost as sparse as its staff. Because they are called in only for fires that other experts can't control, rather like medical specialists to whom general practitioners send patients with puzzling symptoms, Adair and his experts rarely fight more than 50 fires and blowouts in anyone year. That works out to no more than 150 days annually out in the field. But while his payroll may be small, Adair spares no expense on equipment and supplies when he gets to the scene of a fire. While tussling with an oil fire in the state of Wyoming, he brought in scores of railroad cars filled with salt water, because the normal freshwater supply was freezing in the chilly weather. And once Adair had no hesitation in ordering 30 planeloads of mud flown from Houston to Dubai in the Persian Gulf-at a cost of some $ 250,000. Penny-pinching, in fact, is the last consideration of any company that calls in Adair. He inevitably tells company executives to sign a blank check for his services. The oil companies pay willingly because, as Coots Matthews puts it, "When you're dying of a
This time the port of call for Red Adair was Bombay. The legendary fire fighter recently spent a month and a half at Bombay High directing operations to control the blowout in SJ-5, the fifth Bombay High offshore well drilled by the Indian Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGe). The fire broke out on July 30. As it raged and gas gushed out, ONGC sent an SOS to Red Adair. When Adair and his men reached BomDay, he was impressed by the steps ONGC already had taken. At great personal risk, the engineer aboard Sagar Vikas-the drilling rig that was destroyed in the fire-had switched off the generator when the well blew out. The ONGC also had been jetting water on the
heart attack, you don't negoti- . ate with the doctor." Furthermore, a quick and successful kill by Adair and his technicians can save an oil corporation millions of dollars in unburned oil and gas and environmental damage prevented. Adair has good reason for his no-expense-spared philosophy: In an inherently hazardous profession, he wants to reduce the risks as far as is humanly possible. "People say we are daredevils," he explains, "but that's wrong. Evel Knievel [the celebrated American stuntman who jumps motorcycles over apparently insurmountable obstacles] is a daredevil. Everything we do we plan." That planning starts from the first look at a fire or blowout. "No two fires are exactly alike," says Adair. "That's why we take a lot of photographs and notesso as to have a little nugget
platform of SJ-5-making it easy for Adair's team to start operations almost immediately. "It really makes me happy that they've organized themselves so quickly," said Adair (seen at left, with ONGC chairman Col. S.P. Wahi) after his first inspection of the disaster area. The ONGC men had drawn up schemes, models and diagrams to facilitate relief operations. Adair and his men in their famous red attire-the Adair trademark-quickly set to work. First, daredevil helicopter pilots landed a nine-member team on the wrecked and fireravaged deck of Sagar Vikas, with the wind blowing wildly at 30 to 40 knots and the sea swelling as high as five meters. The team consisted of three representatives each of ONGC and Red Adair's company, two insurance assessors and an executive of the international construction firm Brown and Root, owners of the derrick barge Hercules whicn Adair had requisitioned from the Perf>ian Gulf for relief operations. The team also landed on the platform of the SJ-5 oil well and made a thorough inspection to plan out the course of action. Adair shifted his operations from Bombay city to Hercules, which was anchored next to the platform and connected to it by a pipe bridge. Finally, 44 days after it blew out, the well was capped. With the help of a 90-ton mobile crane, Adair's team fitted it with a new well head on September 11. Despite the high pressure of the gas, which tends to throw off the well head, this risky maneuver succeeded in the first attempt. Follow-up operations proceeded smoothly and Adair flew back to Houston in mid-Septembera hero once again. He carried back with him some precious cargo: fan mail from several Indians thanking him for a job well done. Another job well done ....
handy in our. minds to lick the problem next time." But even the best laid plans of mice and men go wrong, and Adair and his staff have at various times suffered burns, scorches, broken bones and other assorted accidents in the line of duty. On one notable occasion, an experimental protective suit that Adair was wearing started to shrink and almost choked him. Adair himself takes a humorous view of such misfortunes. "Injuries aren't serious," he says, "if you don't have to stay in the hospital more than a week." That happened to him once, in 1954, when a crane operating near an oil-well fire in California struck him and broke both his hips and split his pelvis. Doctors told Adair that he would never be able to walk properly againbut within four months he was back fighting fires.
Can Red Adair's unique company survive in the face of improved technology to prevent oil fires and environmentalists' demands that oil fields be made completely safe? Adair has no doubts that it can. He applauds new safety measures designed to reduce the risks of fires, but points out that absolute safety is impossible to guarantee. "Any time you have drilling, you're going to have blowouts," he says. "Sometime, somebody is going to get a little careless. But it shouldn't stop people from drilling. After all, nature causes more catastrophes than man. The good Lord put oil and gas there for us to find and use, and we'd better do it." 0 About the Author: A noted' science writer, Peter Gwynne was science editor of Newsweek for several years. He is the coauthor of Physics and the Physical Perspective.
-Fiction IsMeant
10 Illuminate~ by JOSHUA GILDER
In this interview given a few months before his death in June, John Cheever assesses-with remarkable clarity and candor-his craft and his career. The winter day I arrived in Ossining, New York, to interview John Cheever, the wind whipped off a Hudson River choked with ice. It was the second meeting we had scheduled; our first, almost a month earlier, had been canceled when the extent of Cheever's cancer had been diagnosed. Since then he'd been undergoing radiation treatments that have helped, but left him gaunt and exhausted. Still, he was determined if at all possible to go on with business as usual. Oh What a Paradise It Seems, his new novel, was coming out soon, and he wanted to talk even if he had to give the interview in bed. As it turned out, he wasn't feeling well enough to leave his bed, so we talked in his room on the second floor of his Dutch-style wooden house. He looked physically tired, but alert. Reclining against his pillows, Cheever was, as always, polite and cordial, maintaining decorum even in the sickroom. "I was realizing this morning," he said, looking out a window at the snow-covered, woods that surrounded his yard, "this is the first snowfall I can remember when I haven't been out skiing. There's almost no inch of snow that I don't remember fondly. There's something marvelous about it, swaying
down a well-covered slope. "So," he said, getting right down to it, "you see before you a very sick man." Cheever had originally been unwilling, when we were making plans for the interview, to have the details of his cancer publicized; but he said now that he felt it important to discuss it. "It's not me," he said, resigned to being the reluctant "host" to this invading disease. "Having cancer is a whole new world, of course. Memorial Hospital, where I go for treatment, is a cancer hospital, and suddenly to find yourself with thousands and thousands seeking some cure for this deathly thing is an extraordinary experience. It's not depressing, really, or exhilarating. It's quite plainly a critical part of living, or the aspiration to live." Cheever didn't always share in that aspiration. For several years in the 1970s, he was in the depths of a severe, selfdestructive alcoholism that came close to claiming his life. At its worst, he was washing down several Valiums at a time with a quart of hard liquor, drugging himself into an almost comatose state. His family and friends were convinced he was going to
die, and his only feeling about it was, "So what?" A more basic instinct for survival, however, got him through the worst and into a rehabilitation clinic. From there he emerged, about six years ago, with a determined will to live, and a renewed sense of the importance to him of writing. His daughter, Susan (now a novelist in her own right), has said that when her father came out, he seemed to be on a kind of high: He sat down and wrote Falconer-considered by most cr~tics to be one of the great achievements of his career-in a little under a year. And he didn't, as he usually had in the past when his novels were published, run off to some foreign country to avoid the press. He welcomed interviews, and said he had discovered a new respect for his audience, being genuinely gratified by the intelligent and feeling letters he received from readers. "Literature," he will tell you now, "is the highest form of communication between intelligent adults." And on a more personal level he will speak of literature as the only vehicle for expressing certain modes of feeling and of love. "Though I'm very close to my son, there are still things I can say to him only in fiction." Even before his cancer was diagnosed, Cheever was talking of the setbacks of aging, and that "as one grows old there's always the possibility that one won't be able to write." Cheever compared himself to his friend and younger colleague, John Updike. Updike, he said, is "at the peak of his powers, while I'm an old man reaching the end of his journey." Cheever is now 69, but except for the possible disruptions of illness, there is no evidence that his literary powers have declined with age. The evidence points much the other way. Falconer, published in 1977, was in many ways a creative breakthrough; it was his longest sustained narrative, formally his most successful mwel; the Wapshot books read more like collections of shorfstories and Bullet Park is unconvincing structurally. Still, Cheever is not a literary long-distance runner; he tends toward brevity. Falconer was a' short novel. His new book, Paradise, at about 100 pages, is even shorter; going by length it might be more accurate to call Paradise a novelette or even a long short story. But it reads like a novel. The story's continuity and the skill with which . two narrative lines are woven together are evidence that Falconer wasn't one of a kind, that our best short-story writer has consummately mastered the somewhat differ~nt craft of writing n9vels.
Paradise- "really the first ecological romance," said Cheever-opens with a lyrical passage like the beginning of a fairy tale: This is a story to be read in bed in an old houseon a rainy night. The dogs are asleep and the saddle horses- Dombey and Trey-can be heard in their stalls across the dirt road beyond the orchard. The rain is gentle and needed but not needed with any desperation. The water tables are equitable, the nearby river is plentiful, the gardens and orchards-it is at the turning of the season-are irrigated ideally. Into this peaceful, melodic vision (surely one reads Cheever as much as anything for the harmonious cadences of his prose) comes a disturbing note. The town council of Janice is profiting from the dumping of toxic wastes into Beasley's Pond, a oncebeautiful, deep body of water surrounded by forest at the north end of town. Some weeks before the dumping begins on a winter day in January, Lemuel Sears"an old man but not yet infirm"-is up skating on the pond, an experience of almost divine pleasure. The pollution of Beasley's Pond seems a desecration. Sears has some money and he hires a lawyer to investigate. In the meantime, waiting on line in a bank, he meets Renee Herndon, a divorcee, in whose features he sees "very definitely a declaration of paradise." They begin what becomes an intensely erotte relationship, but all Renee ever seems to say to Sears is, "You don't understand the first thing about women." Renee is mysterious-she regularly attends meetings about which she refuses to tell Sears-and she is in the end perfectly cold to his entreaties before she leaves. "I never thought of Renee as being particularly cold," said Cheever. "She's capricious; and she stands him up-twice. But she's terribly nice to him a good deal of the time." Still, when she stands him up, isn't he devastated? "Oh, yes," replied Cheever, "the 'Balkans of the spirit.' "I don't know how successfully that's conveyed. What I meant was some absolute wilderness-yes just that, a wilderness. But then Sears is left with the memory of what a paradise it seems." The purification of Beasley's Pond becom~ more than a metaphor; it's almost the means of Sears' spiritual purification. "I think that if he wishes to discover any purity in himself," Cheever said, "he's not going to find it in himself; he's going to have to find it in some larger sphere-of which he is, of course, a part. Sears means to succeed in loving usefulness, and actually he is quite useful. He purifies a large body of water.
There really is little one can do> that's comparably useful today." John Cheever occupies a special place in the pantheon of great American writers. Cheever and Updike are often compared for the elegance of their prose and because they both write out of their experience as WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) suburbanites. But while Updike seems to wax poetical at the slightest provocation, Cheever's lyricism is all the more powerful for its restraint. And traditional WASP values survive more intact in Cheever's fiction, though not without conflict. In the introduction to his collection of short stories, Cheever describes his work as determined to "trace some moral chain of being." He writes that although Calvin played no part in his religious education, "his presence seemed to abide in the barns of my childhood and to have left me with some undue bitterness. " Cheever looked a bit bewildered at the suggestion that in some ways one might think of vim as an ethnic writer; he smiled and found amusing the proposition that one could draw a parallel between himself and Philip Roth." "No!.Philip is a good friend, and I admire his work immensely-in fact I don't think of Roth as an ethnic writer, either. I think that's a limitation:" As an attempt to pigeonhole Cheever's writings it no doubt would be, but it's not typecasting either author to acknowledge that each comes out of a definite heritage, and for each it is a source of tremendous ambivalence. A seminal work of Cheever's early career is "The Enormous Radio." In it, a young couple living on Sutton Place buy a large radio that supernaturally picks up the revealing private conversations of their neighbors (see page 34). Cheever wrote it at a time, he said, when he could still be shocked that behind their upright exteriors people carried all sorts of shames and vices; and there is a touch of adolescent righteousness to the story. But though the moral thrust of the piece may be simple, the unraveling of the young couple's lives in remorse and accusation is Cheever at his most devastating. Because Cheever's fictional characters have followed him from his starving-artist beginnings to the New York suburbs, people assume his writing is autobiographical. It's a misconception that Cheever has probably despaired of ever setting right. . Just as Balzac could find a Lear in a Parisian vermicelli manufacturer, Cheever discovered the themes of great literature dwelling among suburbanites. At first, his work found favor with intellecfuals beciause
.
his dark vision, often shading off into the depressive, seemed to confirm the thenfashionable disdain for American values a~ exemplified in the suburban middle class. Even the Soviets adopted Cheever as one of theirs, believing that his writings showed up the moral bankruptcy and decadence of capitalist society. This was a misreading of Cheever. His view of humanity would be the same no matter where he chose to situate himself or his fiction. If his characters lead less-than-perfect lives, if in fact they sometimes appear t9 be teetering on the edge of a spiritual abyss, this, to Cheever, is the universal human condition. Cheever is not one of those writers who explain the world to us. He is not a psychological writer, and there is no sense in his writing that life has a meaning to be discovered. There is ugliness to cause despair, and there is beauty to celebrate- but there is nothing to explain. This is partly seen in Cheever's attitude toward psychoanalysis. He has tried therapy at several difficult times in his life, but has never found it helpful. In his stories, analysts are always underemployed. "Yes," said Cheever, "I am inclined to deal with them lightly in my fiction." They don't, he feels, have much to offer: "Psychoanalysis runs counter to fiction with the idea that everything is symptomatic. Fiction is not about what's symptomatic, it's about what's astonishing in life. Fiction is meant to illuminate." Illuminate, not enlighten; it is a religious illumination, not a humanistic enlightenment. He is in many ways our most religious writer today: The light in his fiction is the light cast by a halo; there is no source but in faith. And the dark side of his vision? "My sense of darkness is the sense of evil. I think there is evil in the world. I've always associated evil with darkness, and I've always associated goodness quite openly with light." When asked what part religion plays in his life, he described himself as "a churchgoer." When pressed further he said he goes to church "because prayer seemS to contain certain levels of gratitude and aspiration that I know no other way of expressing." He stops and considers before he makes this statement, and when he talks it's as if he is reciting the phrases. It is almost word for word what he has said about religion in other interviews, and beyond this he will not go. It's obviously import,mt for him to get it just right: like his prose, perfectly poised between allusion and affirmation. A short way into our interview, Cheever apologized for his failing strength and said he could talk only a little while longer. I mentioned that "The Death of Justina" is
JOHN UPDIKE ON CHEEVER Introducing his collected stories, John Cheever wrote: My favorite stories are those that were written in less than a week and that were often composed aloud. I remember exclaiming: "My name is Johnny Rake!" This was in the hallway of a house in Nantucket that we had been able to rent cheaply because of the delayed probating of a will. Coming out of the maid's room in another rented house I shouted to my wife: "This is a night when kings in golden mail ride their elephants over the mountains!"
The gusto, the abrupt poetry, the clear consciousness of which room is the maid's room are all Cheeveresque. From somewhere-perhaps a strain of sea-yarning in his Yankee blood-he had got the authentic archaic storytelling temper, and one could not be with John Cheever for more than five minutes without se~ing stories take shape: past embarrassments worked up with wonderful rapidity into hilarious fables, present surroundings made to pulse with sympathetic magic as he glanced around him and drawled a few startlingly concentrated words in that mannerly, rapid voice of his. He thought fast, saw everything in bright, true colors, and was the arena of a constant tussle between the bubbling joie de vivre of the healthy sensitive man and the deep melancholy peculiar to American Protestant males. He wrote, in Bullet Park, of a hero pursued by a cafard- "the blues" would be a translation-and he kept a little ahead of his own by means of beautiful sprints of art. His face always
one of my favorite stories. "I'm so glad you like it," he said. "I love it. I used to love givingreadings of it. It's short, it would only take about 12 minutes, and if I were going to read a long story, something like 'The Swimmer,' I'd read 'The Death of Justina' to find out what the audience was like, what the depth of their response was. And it used to appeal to almost everyone on one level or another." In "Justina," Cheever writes, "How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love ... ?" "Yes," Cheever said, quoting from the same passage, "love is a violet-flavored kiss," a line referring to our culture's denial of death, represented in the story by the undertaker and his helpers hiding behind their limousines at Justina's funeral. The
looked reddened and polished, as if by a brisk wind, though his hair was perfectly combed and his necktie tightly knotted. His characters cry out for the oldfashioned virtues-"Valor! Love! Virtue! . Compassion! Splendor! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!"-while living lives exemplary in their modern muddle of emotional greed and misplaced aspiration. "Truly nostalgic for love and happiness" is how he described his generation. Though he was as alertly appreciative of contemporary details as any writer-his last novel breaks into a paean to supermarkets- he was born and bred on Boston's South Shore, a pleasant, longsettled stretch that, like much of Massachusetts, has kept a visible residue of earlier centuries. From its steepled, shingled, sandy landscape Cheever distilled the lovely town of St. Botolphs in the two Wapshot novels, and it was there, in the First Parish Cemetery of Norwell, with its grassy hillocks and overarching trees, that he was laid to rest, alongside the traditional slate tombstones of his parents .. He was often labeled a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia, and only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it, a terrain we can recognize within ourselves, wherever we are or have been. Only he saw in its cocktail parties and swimming pools the shimmer of dissolving dreams; no one else satirized. with such tenderness its manifold distinctions of class and style, or felt with such
end of the passage- "who will sound the alarm?" -had always intrigued me, but if I hoped for an explanation, it wasn't forthcoming. Cheever looked as if, yes, that's exactly what he meant to say, and to say more would only muddy up the idea with inadequate words. "Justina" ends with a personal and strongly'felt rendition of the 23rd Psalm; it is at least a partial aQswer to his thoughts at the opening of the story on life, death, and the purpose of fiction: Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing. We admire decency
poignance the weary commuter's nightly tumble back into the arms of his family. He made of the suburbs another episode in the continuing New World epic of Man's encounter with Nature. Natural grandeur and human ignominy and dissatisfaction mingle in the haze from the cookout grill: We have a nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking meat, and on summer nights, sitting there with the kids and looking into the front of Christina's dress as she bends over to salt the steaks, or just gazing at the lights in heaven, I am as thrilled as I am thrilled by more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is what is meant by the pain and sweetness of life.
Thus spoke Johnny Hake, in "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," before telling the reader how his quest for the good life led him to crime and repentance. It took an effortlessly moral nature to imagine fall and redemption in that realm of soft lawns and comfortable homes; Cheever's sense of the human adventure lay squarely in the oldest American vein. Like Hawthorne's, his characters are moral embodiments, rimmed in a flickering firelight of fantasy. Like Whitman, he sang the common man, the citizen average in his sensuality, restlessness, lovingness and desperation. A suburban man infatuated with his babysitter should make a sad and squalid story, but in "The Country Husband" the story ends with a glad shout of kings in golden mail riding their elephants over the mountains. 0
and we despise death but even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night, and perhaps the exhibitionist at the corner of Chestnut and Elm streets is more significant than the lovely woman with a bar of sunlight in her hair, putting a fresh piece of cuttlebone in the nightingale's cage. Just let me give you one example of chaos and if you disbelieve me look honest1y into your own past and see if you can't find a comparable experience ....
Throughout his life, Cheever has tried in his fiction to bring order to chaos and to exalt the decent and beautiful, though he often doubted that good would prevail over evil. The despair in his fiction is palpable. But so . too is the abiding faith that answers it. 0 About the Author: Joshua Gilder was associate editor of Saturday Review, which recently suspended publication.
The Enormous Radio A Short Story by John Cheever Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theater on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester. Irene Westcott was a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written, and in the cold weather she wore a coat of fitch skins dyed to resemble mink. You could not say that Jim Westcott looked younger than he was, but you could at least say of him that he seemed to feel younger. He wore his graying hair cut very short, he dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover, and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally naive. The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts-although they seldom mentioned this to anyone-and they spent a good deal of time listening to music on the radio. Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. Neither of them understood the mechanics of radio-or of any of the other appliances that surrounded them-and when the instrument faltered, Jim would strike the side of the cabinet with his hand. This sometimes helped. One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether. Jim struck the cabinet repeatedly,
but there was no response; the Schubert was lost to them forever. He promised to buy Irene a new radio, and on Monday when he came home from work he told her that he had got one. He refused to describe it, and said it would be a surprise for her when it came. The ractio was delivered at the kitchen door the following afternoon, and with the assistance of her maid and the handyman Irene uncrated it and brought it into the living room. She was struck at once with the physical ugliness of the large gumwood cabinet. Irenf\ was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder. She was confounded by the number of dials and switches on the instrument panel, and she studied them thoroughly before she put the plug into a wall socket and turned the radio on. The dials flooded with a malevolent green light, and in the distance she heard the music of a piano quintet. The quintet was in the distance for only an instant; it bore down upon her with a speed greater than light and filled the apartment with the noise of music amplified so mightily that it knocked a china ornament from a table to the floor. She rushed to the instrument and reduced the volume. The violent forces that were snared in the ugly gumwood cabinet made her uneasy. Her children came home from school then, and she took them to the Park. It was not until later in the afternoon that she was able to return to the radio. The maid had given the children their suppers and was
supervising their baths when Irene turned on the radio, reduced the volume, and sat down to listen to a Mozart quintet that she knew and enjoyed. The music carne through clearly. The new instrument had a much purer tone, she thought, than the old one. She decided that tone was most important and that she could conceal the cabinet behind a sofa. But as soon as she had made her peace with the radio, the interference began. A crackling sound like the noise of a burning powder fuse began to accompany the singing of the strings. Beyond the music, there was a rustling that reminded Irene unpleasantly of the sea, and as the quintet progressed, these noises were joined by many others. She tried all the dials and switches but nothing dimmed the interference, and she sat down, disappointed and bewildered, and tried to trace the flight of the melody. The elevator shaft in her building ran beside the living-room wall, and it was the noise of the elevator that gave her a clue to the character of the static. The rattling of the elevator cables and the opening and closing of the elevator doors were reproduced in her loudspeaker, and, realizing that the radio was sensitive to electrical currents of all sorts, she began to discern through the Mozart the ringing of telephone bells, the dialing of phones, and the lamentation of a vacuum cleaner. By listening more carefully, she was able to distinguish doorbells, elevator bells, electric razors, and Waring mixers, whose sounds had been picked up from the apartments that surrounded hers and transmitted through her loudspeaker. The powerful and ugly instrument, with its mistaken sensitivity to discord, was more than she could hope to master, so she turned the thing off and went into the nursery to see her children. When Jim Westcott carne horne that night, he went to the radio confidently and worked the controls. He had the same sort of experience Irene had had. A man was speaking on the station Jim had chosen, and his voice swung instantly from the distance into a force so powerful that it shook the apartment. Jim turned the volume control and reduced the voice. Then, a minute or two later, the interference began. The ringing of telephones and doorbells set in, joined by the rasp of the elevator doors and the whir of cooking appliances. The character of the noise had changed since Irene had tried the radio earlier; the last of the electric razors was being unplugged, the vacuum cleaners had all been returned to their closets, and the static reflected that change in pace that overtakes the city after the sun goes down. He fiddled with the knobs but couldn't get rid of the noises, so he turned the radio off and told Irene that in the morning he'd call the people who had sold it to him and give them hell. The following afternoon, when Irene returned to the apartment from a luncheon date, the maid told her that a man had come and fixed the radio. Irene went into the living room before she took off her hat or her furs and tried the instrument. From the loudspeaker carne a recording of the "Missouri Waltz." It reminded her of the thin, scratchy music from an old-fashioned phonograph that she sometimes heard across the lake where she spent her summers. She waited until the waltz had finished, expecting an explanation of the recording, but there was none. The music was followed by silence, and then the plaintive and scratchy record was repeated. She turned the dial and got a satisfactory burst of Caucasian music-the thump of bare feet in the dust and the rattle of coin jewelry-but in the background she could hear the ringing of bells and a confusion of voices. Her children carne horne from school then, and she turned off the radio and went to the nursery.
When Jim carne horne that night, he was tired, and he took a bath and change<;lhis clothes. Then he joined Irene in the living room. He had just turned on the radio when the maid announced dinner, so he left it on, and he and Irene went to the table. Jim was too tired to make even a pretense of sociability, and there was nothing about the dinner to hold Irene's interest, so her attention wandered from the food to the deposits of silver polish on the candlesticks and from there to the music in the other room. She listened for a few minutes to a Chopin prelude and then was surprised to hear a man's voice break in. "For Christ's sake, Kathy," he said, "do you always have to play the piano when I get horne?" The music stopped abruptly. "It's the only chance I have," a woman said. "I'm at the office all day." "So am I," the man said. He added something obscene about an upright piano, and slammed a door. The passionate and melancholy music began again. "Did you hear that?" Irene asked. "What?" Jim was eating his dessert. "The radio. A man said something while the music was still going on-something dirty." "It's probably a play." "I don't think it is a play," Irene said. They left the table and took their coffee into the living room. Irene asked Jim to try another station. He turned the knob. "Have you seen my garters?" a man asked. "Button me up," a woman said. "Have you seen my garters?" the man said again. "Just button me up and I'll find your garters," the woman said. Jim shifted to another station. "I wish you wouldn't leave apple cores in the ashtrays," a man said. "I hate the smell." "This is strange," Jim said. "Isn't it?" Irene said. Jim turned the knob again. "'On the coast of Coromandel where the early pumpkins blow,'" a woman with a pronounced English accent said, "'in the middle of the woods lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo. Two old chairs, and half a candle, one old jug without a handle ... '" "My God!" Irene cried. "That's the Sweeneys' nurse." "'These were all his worldly goods,'" the British voice continued. . "Turn that thing off," Irene said. "Maybe they can hear us." Jim switched the radio ott. "That was Miss Armstrong, the Sweeneys' nurse," Irene said. "She must be reading to the little girl. They live in 17-B. I've talked with Miss Armstrong in the Park. I know her voice very well. We must be getting either people's apartments." / "That's impossible," Jim said. "Well, that was the Sweeneys' nurse," Irene said hotly. "I know her voice. I know it very well. I'm wondering if they can hear us." Jim turned the switch. First from a distance and then nearer, nearer, as if borne on the wind, carne the pure accents of the Sweeneys' nurse again: " 'Lady Jingly! Lady Jingly!' " she said, "'sitting where the pumpkins blow, will you come and be my wife? said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo ... ' " Jim went over to the radio and said "Hello" loudly into the speaker. " '1 am tired of living singly,' " the nurse went on, "'on this coast so wild and shingly, I'm a-weary of my life; if you'll come and be my wife, quite serene would be my life... '" "I guess she can't hear us," Irene said. "Try something else."
Jim turned to another station, and the living room was filled with the uproar of a cocktail party that had overshot its mark. Someone was playing the piano and singing the "Whiffenpoof Song," and the voices that surrounded the piano were vehement and happy. "Eat some more sandwiches," a woman shrieked. There were screams of laughter and a dish of some sort crashed to the floor. "Those must be the Fullers, in ll-E," Irene said. "I knew they were giving a party this afternoon. I saw her in the liquor store. Isn't this too divine? Try something else. See if you can get those people in 18-C." .The Westcotts overheard that evening a monologue on salmon fishing in Canada, a bridge game, running comments on home movies of what had apparently been a fortnight at Sea Island, and a bitter family quarrel about an overdraft at the bank. They turned off their radio at midnight and went to bed, weak with laughter. Sometime in the night, their son began to call for a glass of water and Irene got one and took it to his room. It was very early. All the lights in the neighborhood were extinguished, and from the boy's window she could see the empty street. She went into the living room and tried the radio. There was some faint coughing, a moan, and then a man spoke. "Are you all right, darling?" he asked. "Yes," a woman said wearily. "Yes, I'm all right, I guess," and then she added with great feeling, "But, you know, Charlie, I don't feellike'myself any more. Sometimes there are about fifteen or twenty minutes in the week when I feel like myself. I don't like to go to another doctor, because the doctor's bills are so awful already, but I just don't feel like myself, Charlie. I just never feel like myself.'" They were not young, Irene thought. She guesseJ from the timbre of their voices that they were middle-aged. The restrained melancholy of the dialogue and the draft from the bedroom window made her shiver, and she went back, to bed.
he following morning, Irene cooked breakfast for the family-the maid didn't come up from her room in the basement until ten-braided her daughter's hair, and waited at the door until her children and her husband had been carried away in th~ elevator. Then she went into the living room and tried the radio. "I don't want to go to school," a child screamed. "I hate school. I won't go to school. I hate school." "You will go to school," an enraged woman said. "We paid eight hundred dollars to get you into that school and you'll go if it kills you." The next number on the dial produced the worn record of the "Missouri Waltz." Irene shifted the control and inyaded the privacy of several breakfast tables. She overheard demonstrations of indigestion, carnal love, abysmal vanity, faith, and despair. Irene's life was nearly as simple and sheltered as it appeared to be, and the forthright and sometimes briltallanguage that came from the loudspeaker that morning astonished and troubled her. She continued to listen until her maid came in. Then she turned off the radio quickly, since this insight, she realized, was a furtive one. Irene had a luncheon date with a friend that day, and she left her apartment at a little after twelve. There were a number of women in the elevator when it stopped at her floor. She stared at their handsome and impassive faces, their furs, and the cloth flowers on their hats. Which one of them had been to Sea Island? she wondered. Which one had overdrawn her bank account? The elevator stopped at the tenth floor and a woman with a pair of Skye terriers joined them. Her hair was rigged high on her head and she wore a mink cape. She was humming
T
the "Miss~)llri Waltz." Irene had two Martinis at lunch, and she looked searchingly at her friend and wondered what her secrets were. They had intended to go shopping after lunch, but Irene excused herself and went home. She told the maid that she was not to be disturbed; then she went into the living room, closed the doors, and switched on the radio. She heard, in the course of the afternoon, the halting conversation of a woman entertaining her aunt, the hysterical conclusion of a luncheon party, and a hostess briefing her maid abom some cocktail guests. "Don't give the best Scotch to anyone who hasn't whitehair," the hostess said. "See if you can get rid of that liver paste before you pass those hot things, and could you lend me five dollars? I want to tip the elevator man." As the afternoon waned, the conversations increased in intensity. From where Irene sat, she could see the open sky above the East River. There were hundreds of clouds in the sky, as though the south winds had broken the winter into pieces and were blowing it north, and on her radio she could hear the arrival of cocktail guests and the return of children and businessmen from their schools and offices. "I found a good-sized diamond on the bathroom floor this morning," a woman said. "It must have fallen out of that bracelet Mrs. Dunston was wearing last night." "We'll sell it," a man said. "Take it down to the jeweler on Madison Avenue and sell it. Mrs. Dunston won't know the difference, and we could use a couple of hundred bucks ... " "'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's,' " the Sweeneys' nurse sang. "'Halfpence and farthings, say the bells of S1, Martin's. When will you pay me? say the bells at old Bailey ... '" "It's not a hat," a woman cried, ~ild at her back roared a cocktail party. "It's not a hat, it's a love affair. That's what Walter Florell said. He said it's not a hat, it's a love affair," and then, in a lower voice, the same woman added, "Talk to somebody, for Christ's sake, honey, talk to somebody. If she catches you standing here not talking to anybody , she'll take us off her invitation list, and I love these parties." The Westcotts were going out for dinner that night, and when, Jim ,came home, Irene was dressing. She seemed sad and vague, and he brought her a drink. They were dining with friends in the neighborhood, and they walked to where they were going. The sky was broad and filled with light. It was one of those splendid spring evenings that excite memory and desire, and the air that touched their hands and faces felt very soft. A Salvation Army band was on the corner playing "Jesus Is Sweeter." Irene drew on her husband's arm and held him there for a minute, to hear the music. "They're really such nice people, aren't they?" she said. "They have such nice faces. Actually, they're so much nicer than a lot of the people we know." She took a bill from her purse and walked over and dropped it into the tambourine. There was in het face, when she returned to her husband, a look of radiant melancholy that he was not familiar with. And her conduct at the dinner party that night seemed strange to him, too. She interrupted her hostess rudely and stared at the people across the table from her with an intensity for which she would have punished her children. It was still mild when they walked home from the party, andIrene looked up at the spring stars. "'How far that little candle throws its beams,'" she exclaimed. "'So shines a good deed in a naughty world.'" She waited that night until Jim had fallen asleep, and then went into the living room and turned on the radio.
J
im came home at about six the next night. Emma, the maid, let him in, and he had taken off his hat and was taking off his coat when Irene ran into the hall. Her face was shining with tears and her hair was disordered. "Go up to 16-C, Jim!" she screamed. "Don't take off your coat. Go up to 16-C. Mr. Osborn's beating his wife. They've been quarreling since four o'clock, and now he's hitting her. Go up there and stop him." From the radio in the living room, Jim heard screams, obscenities, and thuds. "You know you don't have to listen to this sort of thing," he said. He strode into the living room and urned the switch. "It's indecent," he said. "It's like looking in windows. You know you don't have to listen to this sort of thing. You can turn it off." "Oh, it's so horrible, it's so dreadful," Irene was sobbing. "I've been listening all day, and it's so depressing." "Well, if it's so depressing, why do you listen to it? I bought this damned radio to give you some pleasure," he said. "I paid a great deal of money for it. I thought it might make you happy. I wanted to make you happy." "Don't, don't, don't, don't quarrel with me," she moaned, and laid her head on his shoulder. "All the others have been quarreling all day. Everybody's been quarreling. They're all worried about money. Mrs. Hutchinson's mother is dying of cancer in Florida and they don't have enough money to send her to the Mayo Clinic. At least, Mr. Hutchinson says they don't have enough money. And some woman in this building is having an . affair with the handyman-with that hideous handyman. It's too disgusting. And Mrs. Melville has heart troubie and Mr. Hendricks is goi~g to lose his job in April and Mrs. Hendricks is horrid about the whole thing and that girl who plays the 'Missouri Waltz' is a whore, a common whore, and the elevator man has tuberculosis and Mr. Osborn has been beating Mrs. Osborn." She wailed, she trembled with grief and checked the stream of tears down her face with the heel of her palm. "Well, why do you have to listen?" Jim asked again. "Why do you have to listen to this stuff if it makes you so miserable?" "Oh, don't, don't, don't," she cried. "Life is too terrible, too sordid and awful. But we've never been like that, have we, darling? Have we? I mean, we've always been good and decent and loving to one another, haven't we? And we have¡ two children, two beautiful children. Our lives aren't sordid, are they, darling? Are they?" She flung her arms around his neck and drew his face down to hers. "We're happy, aren't we, darling? We are happy, aren't we?" "Of course we're happy," he said tiredly. He began to surrender his resentment. "Of course we're happy. I'll have that damned radio fixed or taken away tomorrow." He stroked her soft hair. "My poor girl," he said. "You love me, don't you?" she asked. "And we're not hypercritical or worried about money or dishonest, are we?" "No, darling," he said.
man came in the morning and fixed the radio. Irene turned it on cautiously and was happy to hear a California-wine commercial and a recording of Beethoven's Ninth SymphonY, including Schiller's "Ode to Joy." She kept the radio on all day and nothing untoward came from the speaker. A Spanish suite was being played when Jim came home. "Is everything all right?" he asked. His face was pale, she thought.
A
They had some cocktail~ and went in to dinner to the "Anvil Chorus" from Ii Trovatore. This was followed by Debussy's "La Mer." "I paid the bill for the radio today," Jim said. "It cost four hundred dollars. I hope you'll get some enjoyment out of it." "Oh, I'm sure I will," Irene said. "Four hundred dollars is a good deal more than I can afford," he went on. "I wanted to get something that you'd enjoy. It's the last extravagance we'll be able to indulge in this year. I see that you haven't paid your clothing bills yet. I saw them on your dressing table." He looked directly at her. "Why did you tell me you'd paid them? Why did you lie to me?" "I just didn't want you to worry, Jim," she said. She drank some water. "I'll be able to pay my bills out of this month's allowance; There were the slipcovers last month, and that party." "You've got to learn to handle the money I give you a little more intelligently, Irene," he said. "You've got to understand that we won't have as much money this year as we had last. I had a very sobering talk with Mitchell today. No one'is buying anything. We're spending all our time promoting new issues, and you know how long that takes. I'm not getting any younger, you know. I'm thirty-seven. My hair will be gray next year. I haven't done as well as I'd hoped to do. And I don't suppose things will get any better." "Yes, dear," she said. "We've got to start cutting down," Jim said. "We've got to think of the children. To be perfectly frank with you, I worry about money a great deal. I'm not at all sure of the future. No one is. If anything should happen to me, there's the insurance, but that wouldn't go very far today. I've worked awfully hard to give you and the children a comfortable life," he said bitterly. "I don't like to see all of my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and. radios and slipcovers and-" "Please, Jim," she said. "Please; They'll hear us." "Who'll hear us? Emma can't hear us." "The radio." "Oh, I'm sick!" he shouted. "I'm sick to death of your apprehensiveness" The radio can't hear us. Nobody can hear us. And what if they can hear us? Who cares?" . Irene got up from the table and went into the living room. Jim went to the door and shouted at her from there. "Why are you so Christly all of a sudden? What's turned you overnight into a convent girl? You stole your mother's jewelry before they probated her will. You never gave your sister a cefit of that money that was intended for her-not even when she needed it. You made Grace Howland's life miserable, and where was all your piety and your virtue when you. went to that abortionist? I'll never forget how cool you were. You packed your bag and went off to have that child murdered as if you were going to Nassau. If you'd had any reasons, if you'd had any good reasons-" Irene stood for a minute before the hideous cabinet, disgraced and sickened, but she held her hand on the switch before she extinguished the music and the voices, hoping that the instrument might speak to her kindly, that she might hear the Sweeneys' nurse. Jim continued to shout at her from the door. The voice on the radio was suave and noncommittal. "An early-morning railroad disaster in Tokyo," the loudspeaker said, "killed twenty-nine people. A fire in a Catholic hospital near Buffalo for the care of blind children was extinguished early this morning by nuns. The temperature is forty-seven. The humidity is eighty-nine." D
~TflirdWorld
CounterrevolutiDnaries Contrary to classic socialist dogma, it is not central planning but private enterprise that has achieved greater wealth and better distribution of it in the Third World. On a summer morning in 1948, General Lucius D. Clay huffily summoned Professor Ludwig Erhard to his office. As command~r of the American occupation zone in Germany, the general wanted to know why Erhard, acting on his own initiative as economic chief of the embryonic German Government, had peremptorily abolished food rationing and wage and price controls. "Herr Erhard, my advisers tell me that what you have done is a terrible mistake," said Clay. "What do you have to say to that?" Erhard, unbowed, responded without pause: "Herr General, pay no attention to them! My own advisers tell me the same thing." From this fateful encounter was born the free market economy in Germany. As Erhard unfolded his vision of German prosperity through the untethered play of market forces, Clay's skepticism dissolved. He became a convert, against the advice of an international brigade of officials, academics, and experts who declared that hopes for material progress and financial security in poor countries rest with a statecontrolled economy. The result: the Wirtschaftswunder, the German economic miracle. Now, the German experience is being repeated in the Third World in what amounts to a capitalist counterrevolution of global dimensions. The gurus of economic development still offer the old advice. Their recipe for the advancement of poor nations remains a state-run economy that puts first emphasis on redistributing wealth, not creating it. Central planning, said Swedish socialist Gunnar Myrdal, is "the first condition of progress." A breathtaking transfer of money to poor folks is "necessary" for economic success, claimed the ballyhooed report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues in 1979. But, like Erhard and Clay, an increasing number of leaders in the Third World are brushing aside this From The American Spectator. Copyright Š 1981. The At1lerican Spectator, P.O. Box 877, Blooming¡ ton, Indiana. Reprinted with permission.
advice and embracing free market economics. The result: booming economies in the unlikeliest places. Indeed, one of the most extraordinary aspects of the turn to capitalism is that it is flourishing in every type of political soil. Low taxes, free trade, and minimal intervention have given Hong Kong, a British colony with appointed leaders, the most vibrant economy in the world. The same policies have produced an economic renaissance in Chile and Uruguay, which are run by military cliques. Pursued a shade less vigorously, they have revived Sri Lanka, a democracy whose economy had stagnated for decades. In authoritarian countries like South Korea and Taiwan, capitalism has ignited phenomenal economic growth, even in the teeth of oil shocks and a worldwide recession. In the Ivory Coast and Singapore, nations with mildly autocratic rule, it has generated two decades of stable growth and broadly shared prosperity. Those are the clear-cut success stories. In three other countriesone authoritarian, one democratic, one communist-the steps toward free market economics have been tentative and thus the results, though striking, are less conclusive. After signing the Ca.llp David accords with Israel in 1979, the late President Anwar Sadat of Egypt pushed through deep cuts in personal income tax rates. The economy rebounded, but was left burdened by lavish food subsidies. In Israel last year, the government of Menachem Begin, struggling for boldly slashed a re-election, melange of sales, inheritance and income taxes, producing some supply-side effects in increased revenues. But some of the cuts were temporary and other free market policies were not pursued. More dramatic is Communist China's use of market forces and incentives to spur productivity, expand private farming and encourage foreign entrepreneurs. If this turns out to be more than a flirtation, it could be the most significant free market breakthrough since the collapse of mercantilism two centuries ago. Even if China backslides, the
case for capitalism in the Third World-a truly awkward term for economically backward countries- has been made. And a collection of noxious myths about economic progress has been destroyed. For starters, the overarching notion that the path to national wealth is paved by government manipulation of the economy has been discredited. Which country has the freest economy in black Africa? The Ivory Coast. Which has the highest per capita income? The Ivory Coast. Equally tarnished is the idea that wealth is widely shared only when redistribution is aggressively pressed. Where is it least pressed in black Africa? The Ivory Coast. Where is wealth more broadly distributed, the Ivory Coast or socialist Tanzania and Zambia? Guess. Another favorite myth of planners at the United Nations, professors at prestigious universities, and various foreign ministries in the West is that countries without natural resources are doomed to economic anemia. This has been disproved by the spectacular material advance in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong_ Kong and Singapore, which have scant resources. So, too, overpopulation is supposed to foreclose substantial economic improvement. But Hong Kong's population doubled from 2.2 million to 4.5 million from 1954 to 1977, as its economy blossomed and wages soared. Finally, the theory that infant industries should be nourished by high tariffs and subsidies has been undercut. When Chile and Uruguay followed this theory, their economies slumped. When they turned to free trade and nonintervention, their economies surged. For all its successes, the capitalist counterrevolution was hardly inevitable. It was spawned by a few men-a dozen, maybe-and if two or three of them had balked, the movement to free market economics in the Third World might have been stillborn. Obviously, Erhard was crucial. General Douglas MacArthur, as military governor of postwar Japan, was pivotal as well. MacArthur recognized the
need for tax cuts in spite of the government's- hunger for more revenues. "Taxes were incredibly heavy, and for some of the poor people amounted to confiscation of everything they had," he explained. "There had been a tax rebellion in the later stages of the war. Some tax collectors werr too frightened to even try to collect any longer." With thriving capitalist systems, Japan and (to a lesser extent) Germany became models for Third World emulation. A confirmed advocate of free enterprise like John Cowperthwaite, the financial secretary of Hong Kong in the 1960s, didn't need a successful new model to convince him that the tiny colony would benefit from unchained capitalism. Neither did Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the President of the Ivory Coast since its independence in 1960. He never wavered in his devotion to free market economics. But Lee Yuan Kew, the Prime Minister of Singapore and a lapsed socialist, was looking for a model. "You have to learn how to succeed, to see who performs better, and then copy them," he said. Singapore copied Japan. J.R. Jayewardene of Sri Lanka also sought a model of economic success. Since his election as President in 1977, Sri Lanka has copied Singapore. Often, a negative model has been influential, one where policies palpably failed. Park Chung-Hee, the Korean President from 1961 to 1979, acknowledged that his protectionist, high tax policies had led to economic troubles. He shifted to free trade and lower taxes in 1964. Sergio de Castro, one of several Chilean economists trained in free market principles at the University of Chicago, was acutely aware of the shortcomings of both Salvador Allende's Marxist policies and Augusto Pinochet's initial austerity policies. Now finance minister, he has kept Chile on a course of low taxes, reduced tariffs, and sound money. In China, Zhao Ziyang promoted profit incentives to boost lagging productivity in Sichuan province. Output rose 80 percent from 1976 to 1979, and Zhao rose from
provincial governor to deputy prime minister to prime minister. The rebirth of capitalism in the Third World has come in three phases. The first was in the 1960s and involved the Pacific gang of four-South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. It followed the resurgence of Japan, whose economic success had lifted it far above Third World status. South Korea and Taiwan advanced on parallel tracks, fostering industrialization but not at the expense of agriculture. They eschewed collectivization, price controls on food, and heavy taxation of farmers to aid industry-all policies pursued elsewhere at a cost of stupendous inefficiency. With thousands of small landholders farming for profit, productivity spurted, far outpacing that or Communist China and North Korea. In South Korea and Taiwan, textiles and electronics flourished, and even government industries were required to be competitive. South Korea, almost alone in the world, maintained an economic growth rate of 10 percent right through the oil price increase and recession of 1974and 1975. And growth in both countries bestowed new wealth on all. It "was particularly impressive because it brought with it early and almost as a by-product a more egalitarian distribution of income and wealth than is found in most other countries," noted Herman Kahn. "Some socialist states have achieved a more egalitarian distribution of income and wealth, but only at great economic and human costs." Just as impressive was Hong Kong's performance-10 percent growth from 1960 to 1980. Taxes have been kept remarkably low, with a top rate of 15 percent on personal income. The flow of capital, foreign or domestic, is unregulated. Trade is free. Government intervention is nonexistent. Unions are absent because of progressiveantiunionism in the form of relatively high wages. And colonial officials like Cowperthwaite know exactlywhy this unfettered capitalism works. "I still believe that, in the long run, the aggregate of the decisions of individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is likely to do less harm than the centralized decisions of a government, and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster," he said. "It has to be recognized, and it is recognized over a large part of our daily life, that the community'sscarce economic resources
can be efficiently allocated only by the price mechanism." Singapore, with a population half the size of Hong Kong's five million, is not quite so free. Income taxes reach a top marginal rate of 55 percent and forced savings amount to one-third of a company's wage bill. But trade is free and market forces reign. Growth averages nearly 9 percent, and inflation was held to minus 2 percent as recently as 1976. "We proved that certain principles worked," Prime Minister Lee told writer Anthony Sampson. "Wheth~r they're acceptable is a different matter, and other countries disagree. It's a question of priorities .... It's not that we're superior. It's that our approach is right." Along with the Pacific' four, the ivory Coast has been booming under capitalism since the 1960s, mainly because President Houphouet-Boigny has rejected the convention a! wisdom on black African development. He declined to expel Europeans when his country received independence from France in 1960. Thousands remain as officials and advisers. "Not that we have no gray matter here, 'but Europe is ahead of us in technology," Houphouet-Boigny said. Small-scale farming and industry have fared well, as the president looks scornfully on the grandiose agricultural or industrial schemes cherished by other African leaders. In Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere nationalized farmlands and forcibly moved 14 million people into ujamaa settlements. If other poor countries "do not choose socialism, they will continue in a state of weakness, they will be maltreated. oppressed, exploited and will never realize true independence," said Nyerere. But Tanzania, once a maize exporter, now imports large amounts of maize. The Ivory Coast exports rice, cocoa, and coffee at great profit and has attracted one million African immigrants. "There is no miracle," said Houphouet-Boigny. "Just the work of men, freely furnished." The second phase of the revival of capitalism occurred in the mid1970s in Chile, Uruguay and Sri Lanka. Chile is usually remembered as the country with the astounding inflation rate of 350 percent under communist President Allende in 1973. But what is overlooked is that inflation reached 500 percent in 1974 and 374 percent in 1975 after General pinochet had supplanted Allende in a bloody coup. With copper prices about to
buckle, Pinochet was advised that only "shock treatment" would keep the economy from ruin. The treatment: supply-side tax cuts. These were devised by a team of young economists, a number of whom studied under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger at the University of Chicago. Income and profits taxes were trimmed substantially, and, in best supply-side fashion, revenues increased. The economy, which shrank 13 percent in 1975, grew by nearly 9 percent in 1977. Inflation sagged to less than 35 percent in 1980 and to 5.4 percent in the first five months of 1981. De Castro, who dines with supplyside economist Arthur Laffer when he visits Los Angeles, draws a mighty lesson from Chile's economic turmoil. It "is a good example of how the statist socialism does not lead to progress, stability, respect for personal rights and a genuine democratic existence," he said. "Progress is represented by personal initiative, economic liberty ~nd private enterprise." The experience in Uruguay was almost identical, except that the finance ministry went so far as to eliminate the personal income tax in 1974, a year after the military interceded. Uruguay's economy was suffering from bloated government spending, price controls, and lofty tariffs. No more. For two years, the government has run a surplus. In August 1981, Finance Minister Valentin Arismendi went on TV, in the words of a State Department cable, to "puncture any expectations of more state intervention in the economy." Aid to farmers would only come "at the expense of some other sector of the Uruguayan public." So forget it, he said. Perhaps the sharpest turnabout has come in what is still called the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. After 20 years of welfare extravagance, price controls, and food,rations, the economy had slowed to a near-halt. And five years ago Sri Lankans, well educated but impoverished, voted the socialists out and neo-capitalists in. Taxes were cut, import and price controls scrapped, and subsidies reduced. An "investment promotion zone" for foreign companies was established outside Colombo, the capital. It offers, the gov~rnment boasts, "a rare opportunity to earn more profits, 100 percent tax-free." Or, as President Jayewardene puts it, "We are open to serve as a capitalist organization and I often use the words, 'Let the robber
barons come' to that area." And they have, helping the Sri Lankan economy to soar. In Communist China, along with Egypt, Israel and several Latin American countries, the critical locale of the third phase of the capitalist reawakening, leaders are not itching to proclaim "the postsocialist era," but they are willing to come awfully close to that. The government is determined, Deputy Prime Minister Yao Yilin said last year, "to regulate the economy according to the pressures of supply and demand in the market, within the state plan." Incentives abound. Thousands of industrial companies, though state owned, are allowed to keep a healthy portion of their profits and use the money virtually any way factory managers desire, notably for fringe benefits and bonuses for workers. Farmers have been given permission to double the size of their private plots, and the marketing of homemade handicrafts has official sanction. Moreover, foreign capitalists are heing urged to establish factories in China's new "enterprise zones." J.T. A British entrepreneur, Wakefield, found Chinese bureaucrats downright helpful when he asked to set up a factory near Hong Kong fer producing fishing flies. "I found the planning authority personnel in Shenzhen most cooperative," he said. "They would discuss any matter with me without inhibition .... When I was traveling to and fro, I found the facilities for foreigners at the Chinese border to be much better organized than on the British side." Clearly, something is going on here, though it may not be exactly what Adam Smith had in mind. But Smith would doubtless be pleased with the nuggets of free market wisdom that stud the Chinese Beijing Review each week. "An excessive issuance of currency inevitably gives rise to inflation," an article on the evils of "leftist thinking" declared. Another said "the purpose of socialist production" is to meet people's demand for "material goods." And what could be more indicative of the birth pangs of capitalism than the report of a poll of communist youth on their favorite proverb. Some 2.5 percent chose, "Everyone for himself and the devil can take the 0 hindmost." About the Author: Fred Barnes is Washington
correspondent
Baltimore Sun.
for the
39
hulian Painters in a Global Vmage'bYCfITDANANDADASGUITA A number of Indian painters have settled in New York. How do they feel, working outside their old ambience? Have they lost their Indianness or are they aliens in both countries? SPAN's managing editor met a few of them and discussed their work, their ties with India and their new habitat.
New York's SoHo, unlike London's, is not an entertainment area but is full of warehouses with high ceilings and enormous freight elevators. There is nothing in the place to suggest a connection with art. But it is full of artists, exhibition halls, print shops, and is beginning to sprout cafes. The name SoHo comes from the unromantic "South of Houston Street." But the border is delicately defined; it has a touch of the country of the mind, for Houston marks the lower end of Greenwich Village, long known as the home of artists and writers, bohemians of every description, and excellent eating houses. Some of the color of "the Village" has rubbed off on its neighbor, making it an extension, as it were, of that arty habitat. What really attracted painters to this area were the high ceilings and the low rents. Large paintings need high ceilings and painters need lots of light. New York, with its 50,000 or so painters, is not the easiest place in which to find a studio of that description at a rent most painters can afford. So someone discovered SoHo and a lot of them followed. With the painters came artists of other varieties and some film people of the less giamorous kind-critics, avant-garde filmmakers and so on. As a result, today SoHo has become a fashionable area; the artists are having a bad time of it fighting off landlords demanding more rent. Among the painters who live in SoHo are many Indians who came to New York over the last two decades. Why New York? "In a Europe devastated by war," explains Krishna Reddy, "Paris was the only functioning art center- Brancusi, Giacometti, Leger were still there; so were Braque, Max Ernst, Picasso. But French real estate agents destroyed 52,000 ateliers des artistes. Andre Malraux (Minister for Culture in de Gaulle's cabinet) promised to build new studios, but nothing happened." The great figures of European art in Paris faded away,
leaving little more than a crass commercialism among the nonentities who lived in the debris of the ateliers. In the meantime, American contemporary art ceased to look to Europe and came out with an authentic voice of its own. The upshot was, as Mohan Samant points out, that the art capital of the world moved from Paris, and New York became the mecca of contemporary painting. Natwar Bhavsar, Mehli Gobhai, Mohan Samant, Zarina Hashmi and others came from India, Krishna Reddy from Paris, all drawn to the magnet that New York has become for artists. "Nothing is foreign here," says Zarina Hashmi. "In a city of some 50,000 artists, you can always find at least 20 people who think like you. There is no need to apologize for being what you are. People leave you alone to do your own thing. You survive on your own terms. The only question is: How good is your work?" Talking about high ceilings, Natwar Bhavsar really needs one; his paintings are measured not in centimeters but in meters. The only small ones on the wall of his enormous apartment aglow with daylight are his exquisite drawings. His monumental abstractions with their gently varying cloudlike forms have sometimes been compared to Olitski's, but this first impression is superficial. Writil)g in The Christian Science Monitor, Christopher Andreae concluded that his paintings "are not only about silence, they seem to have the mysterious ability to demand it, and once a certain measure of it has been achieved, to impose more." This seems to be the major reaction to his work. His paintings have been described by American critics as "enclosed and quiet." "His paintings are analogous to musical compositions," says Elwyn Lynn in Art International. "He does not present us with an enigmatic score, as do some esoteric calligraphers of the moment, but with a process of giving shape to color without recourse to colored shapes .... Bhavsar's involve recollections of perceptions." The artist himself speaks of the rich reds in the textiles of Kathiawar, and it is possible to see them in the colors rippling across his paintings- "colors that relate to heat and earth," as one critic says while another speaks of their "close connection to primary materiality." Does he feel like an exile living so far
away from his country?-No, New York is not an American city at all; it's international. "By being here I am not being less Indian, in some ways I am preserving my Indianness better here than at home. Of course, I miss the physical experience of India-the rains, the moonlight, the warm evenings .... When you are away for a long time you question your own heritage. You become more curious about it, and through your questioning, you understand it better. The experiences of childhood stay with you, the,memory of rituals-rangoli, for instance. I once did a 24-m¢ter rangoli. People ask, 'Why do you paint so big?' I tell them about the rangoli, which was much bigger. I did that rangoli for 15 days, sleeping only an hour and a half a day. When I finished, my legs gave way under me, and I had to be carried. Your psychic connection with India never goes away. It's there, it works :inside you; it is an ongoing process. I have become more aware today of what India has brought to the total human experience. You have that sense here, being so free, having so many possibilities open all the time." As the cavernous freight elevator trundles down, Bhavsar himself operating the ancient controls, the vivid colors of his paintings contrast oddly in one's mind with the drab exterior and the dilapidated buildings lining the street in the harsh July sun of this now fashionable district. When Krishna Reddy moved to New York from Paris in 1976, he was already a Jamous printmaker, and had visited the United States many times to hold seminars and workshops at universities. He was then codirector with S.W. Hayterwhom he considers the father of modern printmaking-of Atelier 17, Paris. The ambience was great. Hayter himself was a master, with many disciples. Among important artists working with him was Max Ernst. Brancusi had just returned from India and Reddy met him almost every Sunday, discussing his travels with him. Inthe early Fifties, when he first went to Paris, the Surrealists were still there, grown old, yet active in their Montparnasse habitat. After numerous visits to U.S. universities, Reddy decided to move and is now Director of Graphics and Printmaking at New York University. White-haired, elegant, 57-year-old Reddy gets deeper and deeper, as time
Left, Zarina Hashmi stands beside one of her works; below, Francis Souza in his New York apartment; bottom, one of Souza's more recent paintings.
goes on, into his feeling for the materials and the tools u'sed in printmaking. Besides the plate, there are the acids to etch it with, hand tools, mechanicfll tools to work with, the inks for printing, the different rollers for superimposing the inks on the plate. An artist preoccupied withmere survival or success, Reddy says inhis gentle voice, "approaches the materialsgreedily and conventionally, without any regard for them, Thus a distance is created .... It is of the utmost importance for us to have a deeper understanding of the materials- their basic structure including their physical and chemical natures-and the interactions among them. The more sensitive and closer we are to the materials, the more pliable they become to our state of mind, adding to the spontaneity and creative intensity of our work." It was with sculpture that Reddy had grownup. How did he come to printmaking? He had been familiar with the traditional method of making black-and-white etchings, having learnt it at Nandalal Bose's art school in Tagore's university at Santiniketan. When he went to the Slade School in London, and later to Paris working with Zadkine, he was very much a sculptor. It was when he came across Atelier 17 that his interest in print-making was revived. Its artists had seen the necessity of working all the colors together on a single plate and printing in one operation, which they called simultaneous intaglio and surface color printing. "I approached printmak-
ing as a sculptor ... slowly, the plates themselv.es were built up, as I worked, using bunns and scrapers, to become like sculptures. " Like Bhavsar, Reddy retains the Indian village inside him. In his person as in his work, there is the calm of contemplation. The rustle of leaves as he went in the moonlight with his mother to open-air theaters lives in his ears. "My mother was very religious, and she would take me to Brahmins discussing philosophy." Asked
if the life was like that in medieval Europe, full of festivals, he says, "Yes, but I find in India it is different. We worship nature ... if the moon was shining, people were happy. And if the nights were dark we were a little depressed. And then you have the sunrise. Even the animals were affected. Schools of monkeys would sit in the trees at full attention and gaze in silence toward the east ... with this closeness to nature, I did not have to think about myself at all. This has
Nothing could be farther removed from this contemplative calm than the tormented soul of Francis Newton Souza. His mother added the name Francis in accordance with a vow she had made praying for his recovery from smallpox. But Souza grew up to have a ferocious love-hate relationship with Christianity which he never resolved. The "devil" in him went on taunting God and the struggle expressed itself in powerful paintings, for two decades. The Christ image, with shades of Rouault visible behind, became a hopeless symbol of what Souza calls the unredeemability of man, and lived side by side in his febrile imagination with woman seen both as mother and whore, The outcome of this bizarre vision was so strongly imprinted in his paintings that they brought him almost instant recognition in England when he migrated there in 1949. Few Indian artists earned such praise and such prices as Souza did in London in the Fifties. But when he migrated to the United¡ States, he moved to a more contemporary scene which took little notice of him. Perhaps he had exorcised some incarnations of the devil in him, and his paintings had by then lost much of their vigor. He had long ago proved to be a brilliant writer, and this aspect of his talent now came to the fore. The "altered energy" cited by Sandford Redmond (whom he admires intensely) now turned into venomous outpourings of continued torment-in print. In the course of an hourlong interview, he would hardly ever talk
Above, Krishna Reddy in his workshop; right, one of his works; below, left, Natwar Bhavsar in his loft, with wife and child; below, right, one of Bhavsar's paintings.
about painting; "Eat the sun," he said, "Make rainbows through the prisms of your lives, and the universe shall be yours." His latest pursuit is the "White Flag Revolution," which calls upon people to unite against the production of nuclear weapons. So one of India's foremost painters lives in New York as a nonpainter in residence, preaching sermons few people are willing to hear. What he enjoys is the freedom to do so. "Money is an island in which we live," says Mohan Samant. His is half-a-million dollars in size. Thus protected, he does not have to defer to instant judgments of his work. "I don't care too much if a painting is not sold; I can paint as I like."
A few clever moves in the real estate market have placed Samant in this situation that many painters seeking fresh pastures would envy. The skylight in the middle of the roof bathes his vast loft with a diffused glow. A parrot keeps making quips right through the interview. Potted plants flourish in the sunlight. "I dream mythologically," Samant continues, making a quantum leap from real estate. "Sometimes I think of myself as
living in the 11th century in India, or in the Gupta Empire." His paintings are in fact peopled with medieval archetypes held under a microscope, gamboling with erotic vitality. In Bombay Samant used to paint miniatures. He was in the United States in the early Sixties, went back to Bombay for a few years, but returned to New York in 1968 to become a permanent resident. The city seems to suit him as it does Zarina Hashmi. Like Reddy, Zarina has been for years involved in printmaking; in fact she spent some years at S.W. Hayter's Atelier 17 in Paris just about the time that Reddy migrated to New York. She also went back to Indiato visit centers of traditional papermaking and to learn to make paper herself. Not content with her newly acquired knowledge, she went to Japan to perfect her art; she later held lecture workshops on papermaking in numerous U.S. universities. Wanderlust must lie deep in
Zarina's soul, because her shows and lectures have taken her to Greece, Norway, Poland, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Italy, Thailand and England, and from one end to the other of India and the United States. A comment by the American cntIc Madeleine Burnside on Mehli Gobhai's work is perhaps true, in a generic sense, of all the Indian artists mentioned here. "[Gobhai] has come to have two equal cultural affiliations, and has been able to use these as an advantage within the bounds of contemporary art .... It is the duality of his philosophical understandining-Eastern and Western-that forms Gobhai's work and gives it its subtle but resilient strength ... his presentation of meditative calm is disturbed by the suggestion of ecstasy." They are all contemporary-one can leave out Souza since he hardly paints
any more-and they are Indian, some because they want to be, others because they can't help it. It is a quality that American critics seem to see more clearly when an artist's work is available to them over a long period than when they survey it in a small exhibition. Recently there was a showing of 50 contemporary works from India at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. (see next page). Although it featured paintings as diverst: and as far apart in time as those of Rabindranath Tagore and Krishen Khanna, the main reaction it evoked was of Indians' deriving from the West. Significantly, one critic spoke well of Mohan Samant, one of whose paintings was included in the show. Another found Tagore reminiscent of Edward Munch and the German Expressionists, a third spoke of Gauguin's influence on Sher-Gil's work. One admired the "protest art" of Ramkinkar Vaij, Bikash
Mohan Samant with two of his paintings. Left, Mehli Gobhai in his studio; left, above, one of Gobhai's paintings.
Dr. Lakshmi Sihare (left), director of the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi,. with an official of the Hirshhorn Museum, which recently organized an exhibition of contemporary Indian painting. The two fully visible works are Orchard (left) by Avinash Chandra and Metascape 3 by Akbar Padamsee.
The Washington Post summed up the problem best: "Americans will have difficulty knowing in what context to judge these unfamiliar works." Indian painters living in America have made themselves part of the contemporary scene and thus are more readily understood. Painters
from India may need longer exposure before Americans can begin to see them in a context. Yet it is interesting that while many of them speak of art as having no borders and needing originality more than Indianness, American observers should find them both Indian and derivative. D
In India's Corner ... Sam Hickman by ARUNA
DASGUPTA
Muhammad Ali is "Mo" to him; he's known Sugar Ray Leonard since the world welterweight champion "was just a kid of 15"; Joe Frazier is a longtime friend and associate. But the most important boxers in Sam Hickman's life are the ones he's coaching at any given tim~. And that means Indian boxers right now-he's coaching the Indian boxing squad for the Asian Games. Sam Hickman himself stopped fighting long ago-his last fight in a ring was in 1951. Before that there were many rings, many fights. And in between the fights a different kind of fight-the Korean war. Sam was a teenager when he was taken prisoner of war. He was in a POW camp for six months "and I grew old overnight. I lost all interest in fighting to win, in competing." But when you love boxing the way Sam Hickman does-"it's like an obsession with me"-you never really lose interest in it. Hickman still loves a good fight in any ring anywhere in the world. Although he hasn't entered a ring as a fighter for three decades, he's been putting other people there-winners, very often; good fighters, always. A lot of people looking for a good boxing coach choose Sam Hickman. Former world champion Joe Frazier did when he bought a gymnasium in Philadelphia ("that's the home of Rocky," Sam says with a smile) in 1970 and wanted someone to run it and train amateurs. And the Indian Amateur Boxing Federation did earlier this year when it wanted to bring its boxers for the Asian Games up to Olympic standards, a job Hickman specializes in as a coach registered with the Olympic Solidarity Boxing Course Committee. Hickman has been on coaching assignments to "Oh, so many places," he spreads his hands out wide, "in Asia, Scandinavia, Canada, Africa .... " It was on one such trip to the Netaji Subhash National Institute of Sports, Patiala, to conduct an Olympic Solidarity boxingcoaching program that he met senior officials of the Indian Amateur Boxing Federation. Impressed by Hickman's techniques, they asked if he'd consider coming to train the boys for the Asiad. "I said I'd love to, if I got permission from the Olympic SolidarityCommittee, and if it was around my vacation time since I have my own boys to train in Philadelphia. Well. .. here I am. "I really think they're world class," says Hickman of the Indian boxing team. "I know it, but they've got to know it. They've got to believe that they're world class. fighters. Seriously, that's their only drawback. They don't go into the ring thinking they're as good as the best. They should just go ahead and fight to win." There were a lot of techniques and strategies too that Hickman had to teach them. "There are a lot of good boxers, but unless they know the rules and regulations of international boxing,unless they know some techniques, it's no good. That's where a person like me comes in."
importance of hitting One valuable tip he gave them-"the at the right place. A lot of them would just go on hitting out blindly. I made them realize that when you miss, you're really tiring yourself out more than when you hit-there's also the mental disappointment at having missed. So they must see that there are no missed punches." He had no language problem "except when I talked too fast-and anyway it's basically the language of the hands," he says, clenching his fists. Apart from teaching them boxing, he also made them realize the importance of staying physically fit. "I teach the boys about hygiene, their bodies; how to live, how not to live .... I use a lot of psychology." And later as the conversation shifts to Muhammad Ali and that disastrous fight with Leon Spinks, Hickman talks again about training. "There's something wrong. in our training system. We teach them how to fight, how to win, but not how to lose, how to live. They want the limelight one more time and one more time ... they don't know what to do after they stop fighting." Would taking to coaching be the answer? No, says Hickman, good boxers don't always make good coaches, and vice versa. Like Frazier-and Ali too-many boxers open coaching gymnasiums. Ali doesn't coach, Frazier does. Smokin' Joe Frazier's Amateur Boxing Club gets about 100 students a day. The amateurs have to pay a very nominal fee"something like $5 a month." It is the professionals' fees and the money collected from exhibition bouts with other clubs that help maintain the gym. Joe Frazier's club has 10 coaches-all of them, like Hickman, are volunteers. "We're amateurs. We don't get paid, we don't want to get paid." Careerwise, Hickman has been a chemist and glazier but after years of cramming his day-as other coaches do today-with eight hours of career and sometimes as many of coaching, he arranged his life so that he could retire early and devote all his time to coaching. "I dabble in real estate, I have some property and that's what keeps my head above water." These international assignments do get him a fee, "but it's usually basically just for the costs you incur per day." He says he's had offers to turn pro and become a trainer, but he's not interested. "I do this for the love of boxing. Besides, I find coaching young amateurs and molding them so much more challenging than training professionals." The roll call of boxers who have trained at the club-some under Hickman-reads like a "who is" and "who was" who of international and American boxing: Sugar Ray Leonard, Leon Spinks, Michael Spinks, Roberto Duran, George Foreman, Floyd Patterson, Duane Bobick, Ken Norton and, of course, Joe Frazier. The list of national American champions is naturally much longer. Smokin' Joe's club has earned a name for itself as a training ground for amateurs and professionals. "They've got somebody up there who knows boxing and how to train boxers," said former American champion Clinton Jackson (who himself runs a gym) in an article in The. Philadelphia Inquirer a couple of years ago. "Sam Hickman's teaching the boys right." 0
CLEVER CHOREOGRAPHY SPEED QUEEN NATIONAL NEWSPAPER SHOPPERS' PAL
Indian dancers, an Indian classic, and an American choreographer: it was yet another East-West experiment for Mrinalini Sarabhai's Darpana Academy of Performing Arts, Ahmedabad. Ritu Samhara, Kalidasa's classic poem, became The Six Seasons under the choreography of Anna Nassif, a professor of dance at the University ofWisconsin. At a lecture-demonstration in Ahmedabad, Bharat Natyam and Kathakali performers danced to the' tune of Nassif who was in the city to conduct a workshop for Darpana. "My work in India was a difficult challenge because of the theme and also because the dancers here are trained in the most stylized dance forms. But it was a great experience," said Nassif, who has been teaching dance for 25 years. Her last visit to Darpana was as a student on a year's scholarship in 1966.
The American public is known to have a voracious ~~ appetite for news, particularly in the terse, capsulized .form provided by television. Hoping to inform the public-and to attract a circulation of more than 2.3 million-America's largest newspaper chain has launched USA Today, a national newspaper published Monday through Friday each week. Aimed at travelers, businessmen and people living in suburbs and small towns with inadequate newspapers, USA Today has no comic strips, classified ads, obituaries, national columnists, crossword puzzles nor astrology guides. Daily newspapers in the United States have been in declil,le. The last successful large general-interest daily was Long Island's Newsday, launched in 1940. USA Today is owned by Gannett, which has 88 dailies, mostly in small towns, seven television stations and the country's largest outdoor advertising business. USA Today will use some of the most sophisticated technology for simultaneous printing around the nation; news copy will be transmitted by earth satellites to Gannett's existing printing plants located in a number of American states. The paper will also do away with costly home delivery systems. USA Today will be sold through .10,000 streetcorner vending machines and news kiosks. What
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Mary Decker Tabb is a compulsive record-breaker. This year, she broke seven world and five American records to ea~n a place in the world record books as the top female middle-distance runner. Tabb, 23, has been running since she was 11. By age 15 she was the best female half-miler in the United States, eligible to enter races against the top women in the country. At that time she ran the mile in 4 minutes and 37.4 seconds. Last July in Paris, Tabb ran the mile in 4 minutes and 18.06 seconds, breaking the women's world record by almost three seconds. A few days before that, she set an American record of 8:29.71 in women's 3,000 meters during a meet in Oslo, Norway, narrowly missing the world record of 8:27.12, held by Lyudmila Bragina of the Soviet Union. Following wins in Paris and Oslo, Tabb entered an All-Comers Meet in the United States, and set a 1O,000-meter track world record of 31:35.3, knocking 42 seconds off the existing record. In September 1981, Mary Decker married Ron Tabb, a world class marathon runner. She now trains under the guidance of her husband with the help of coach Dick Brown. Both men stress consistency and caution, and Ron predicts that if she stays healthy (she has frequently been dogged by illness and injuries), she has an excellent chance to win the 3,000 meters-the longest race on the track for women-in the 1984 Olympics at Los Angeles, Asked if she could break the four-minute mile barrier, which has eluded women runners so far, Mary Tabb said: "I'm the kind of person who is not going to say anything is impossible. If I were, I probably wouldn't be running today. A sub-four-minute mile would be my ultimate dream." -Joanne Nix
COMPUTER CODE FOR CONSUMERS
One hundred students from 48 countries around the world have begun two years of study at Montezuma in New Mexico on the first U.S. campus of the World College. Among the countries represented in the first class are India, Nepal, Egypt, Israel, Brazil, Indonesia, Senegal, Zambia, Britain, France, Poland, China, the Soviet Union and the United States. The brainchild of the late Lord Louis Mountbatten of Great Britain, the World College movement began 20 years ago as an effort to build peace through education and understanding by bringing together students from around the world in a common academic and living environment. Other World College campuses are located in England, Singapore, Canada, Swaziland and Italy. Prince Charles, who succeeded his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, as president of the International Council of the United World Colleges, was scheduled to dedicate the U.S. campus on October 28. The college is located in a former resort hotel in a Rocky Mountains region rich in American Indian and Spanish traditions. The buildings and 44-hectare campus were acquired and furnished through a $6 million gift from Dr. Armand Hammer, chairman of the board of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation. In honor of the internationally known philanthropist and art collector, the college is called The Armand Hammer United World College of the American West. Dr. Theodore Lockwood, chairman of the board of trustees of the U.S. college, said the students-many of whom are on scholarships-were chosen for academic merit and leadership potential. World College committees in countries throughout the world selected many of the students, who range in age from 16 to 19. "Our hope is that they will return to their countries and enter public service," says Dr. Lockwood. Another 100 students will begin the program in September 1983.
American supermarkets have long sought to offer the widest variety of food selection to consumers, along with efficient operating procedures. Now the customer checkout system is becoming even more streamlined. Supermarkets all over the United States have installed electronic scanner checkout (ESe) systems, a type of computerized cash register. Customers used to wait in long checkout lines while clerks looked up prices of items and entered the amounts by punching cash register keys. With the ESC system, a supermarket checkout' clerk simply passes each of a customer's purchases over a glass-encased laser beam scanner that electronically "reads" the uriiversal product code-a pattern of bars printed on product labels by manufacturers. The store's computer instantly
identifies the product and the price, displays both on a terminal screen at the checkout counter and prints a complete list on a receipt tape for the customer. The systems are expected to save stores one-half penny per sales dollar, primarily by reducing labor costs. Customers benefit from faster checkouts, no clerical errors, lower prices passed on from supermarket savings and a detailed printout of items and their prices on the register receipt. The computers also make it much easier for large stores to inventory their stock, since each sale is registered in the store's master computer. The ESC systems are already in use in 20 percent of America's 25,000 supermarkets and are being installed in more than 200 stores across the United States each month.
The Temple at Malibu Southern California will soon have a new Hindu temple-the Shri Venkateswara Temple, named after the Hindu deity venerated for the blessings of wealth. A group of India-born Americans paid $210,000 for the 2-hectare plot of land in the hills north of Malibu, a prosperous community near Los Angeles, and donated it to the Hindu Temple Society of Southern California. The main temple and part of the basement will open next year; the entire $1. 7-million complex, including a 19-meter-tall entry tower, is expected to be completed by 1985. Sun Valley cardiologist S.K. Duraira j, board chairman of the Shri Venkateswara Temple, estimates that about 5,000 Asian Indian families reside in greater Los Angeles, the Antelope Valley and Ventura County-=-the areas the temple will serve. An outdoor shrine dedicated
to Shri Ganesha is already open for daily prayers and offerings at the conStruction site. This project is a part of a national temple-building movement, according to C.V. Narasimhan, a former United Nations executive. Narasimhan, a 67-year-old New Yorker, was a key figure in establishing Hindu temples in Flushing, New York, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the mid-1970s. He has also been an adviser to temple projects in Houston and Los Angeles. In June, the Hindu Temple Society of Houston dedicated its $420,000 temple in suburban Pearland to Shri Meenakshi. Three towers, or vimanas were built in brick by artisans from ' India. The Shri Meenakshi Temple gives the 16,000 Indian families in Houston "the first opportunity to assemble in a large group and pray according to the Hindu tradition practiced in India," says Narasimhan.
sharing of telecommunications technology between developed and developing countries can be substantially increasedover the next decade. In addition to continuing support of the ITU as a strong and vital organization, the United States is committed to maintaining and extending global cooperation in telecommunications, and coordinating the rational use of telecommunications around the world. To fulfill its mandate, the ITU must be vigilant through the leaders we elect over the next few weeks, to constantly seek new ways to be more efficient and effective with its resources. This clearly is the way to increase the ITU's provision of vital services to developing nations without increasing the already heavy budget burden. The ITU, at a minimum, must adopt the fundamental budgetary practices that realistically marry goals with adequate resources to fulfill these goals. Without this means of balancing priorities, the ITU will continue to exceed its spending abilities and necessarily compromise the high technical standards that have distinguished the organization. As professionals in telecommunications, we are responsible in our respective countries for management, oversight and operation of communications. We all share a common reality of having to carry out our responsibilities within financial constraints exacerbated by today's world economy. The situation facing us collectively at this conference is a reflection of the broader financial context. The United States believes that much more can be done with the resources that the ITU already receives from its members. To this end, the United States will work unceasingly to introduce modern management techniques and help the Union become responsive to the needs and purposes for which it was established. This can be done effectively if we undertake our work at this conference with a clear understanding of the financial implications of each and every proposal. We must work together to establish priorities and to institute sound management and fiscal procedures. Too often decisions are made without due consideration of the full cost implications. The end result of such actions is either decisions that cannot be implemented or a requirement for additional financial resources, which may not be available.
In an unprecedented joint venture, the United States Government and American telecommunications companies have set up an institute to share American know-how in telecommunications with developing nations. The initiative, known as the U.S. Telecommunications Training Institute, will offer free instruction to more than 300 students from Third World countries during 1983. The institute's initial curriculum, decided upon after discussions with representatives of developing nations, includes 14 courses that range from one week to two months, covering such areas as switching systems, basic telegraphy, satellite communications management, broadcast management and spectrum management. The courses will be held at existing training facilities of the participating firms-such telecommunications Rather than face such hard fiscal decisions after-the-fact, we propose that this conference conduct its work within established financial-resource limits. Let us make the hard decisions here and now. Let us set priorities and fashion mechanisms for their implementation without increasing the financial burden upon the membership. Without forthright and enlightened leadership tied to a spirit of Harambee, the ITU runs the risk of losing its ability to provide the technical framework within which we can progress through advances in telecommunications. In our deliberations here at the ITU plenipotentiary, we must have vision to see beyond today's parochial concerns and fashion a global network that will better serve mankind. The members of the Union must cultivate our institution's skills for management of the natural resources of the geostationary orbit and the radiofrequency spectrum, and of the manmade resources of telecommunications networks and services. Yet, at the center of all this activity must be the same sense of freedom and spontaneity that I sensed in Kenya's game preserves. If caged or fettered, Kenya's animal life would lose its wonder. And, similarly, if the human spirit is
giants as American Telephone and Telegraph, Communications Satellite Corporation, General Telephone and Electronics, MCI, Hughes Aircraft, TRW Telecommunications, SCS Telecom, Harris Corporation Broadcasting Division, IBM, Western Union Telegraph, International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, Rockwell International and RCA Globecom. Most of the intensive courses are identical to those offered by the participating companies to their own engineers and managers. In announcing the training institute, Ambassador Michael R. Gardner, chairman of the U.S. delegation to the International Telecommunication Union plenipotentiary conference, said that the United States is eager to continue to "share U.S.-initiated telecommunications advances with the people of developing nations."
too tightly regulated or controlled, it too loses its vitality and creativity. Human intellect, applied to telecommunications, is producing prospects for worldwide advancement that have no discernible limits. Realization of this potential ultimately depends upon an atmosphere of good will and trust, in which man's creative impulse ultimately dominates the urge to control. Despite the world's troublesome political and economic difficulties, I am confident that the members of the Union can devise the means to accelerate progress toward our common goals in telecommunications. If we fail to confront this challenge, we will not only ill-serve this illustrious Union, but we also will limit advances for generations that follow in ways that none of us can envision. That promise of what's to come through telecommunications for all of us and our children's children must be the special resource that we at the ITU nurture. We must work hard and collectively to nurture the resources of telecommunications just as carefully and wisely as Kenya has nurtured the exquisite natural resources that God bestowed on her thousands of years ago-long before any of us dialed a telephone or shuttled through outer space. 0
Emerson-A
Hundred Years Later
A century after his death, the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on American and Indian thought is still strong. C.D. Narasimhaiah traces the Vedic sources of some of Emerson's poems and essays, Jacob Sloan talks about his Journals and Amritjit Singh conducts an interview with the Sage of Concord in Heaven.
- A Manhattan Melody New York sets his pen dancing, says noted writer T.K. Mahadevan-and so his pen proceeds to pirouette through the metropolis. A vinash Pasricha presents another unique view of the city in his color portfolio.
Changing Framework of the American Family As women find satisfaction in merging home and career, men are discovering-at last without embarrassment-the joys offatherhood, of bringing up children. And children are discovering the delight of having two active parents.
The Polyhedral Arthur Loeb Arthur Loeb is introducing the world to fascinating new shapes that are as attractive as they arefunctional. This multifaceted personality-musician, mathematician, dancer, physicist-teaches threedimensional drawing to architects, artists, crystallographers and choreographers, giving them a common visual language.
SPANoffers you two brilliant color posters
Give yourself or someone you love a full year's subscription to SPAN and choose either of these two full color wall posters. This offer is valid till December 31, 1982 Shiva, the Supreme Guru, as Lord of Music (1.8"x 12")
Twilight in the Wilderness by Fredrick Edwin Church (12"x 18")
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