December 1986

WASHINGTON: A CAPITAL CITY

Pilgrimage to Livermore

Even for Americans familiar with the sights of India brought to them courtesy of the Festival of India, this was a special surprise. A brightly-caparisoned elephant headed 2,000 devotee-participants during the recent consecration of a new ShivaVishnu temple in Livermore, California.

The cluster of temples will be a cultural and religious center "nourishing everyone" in the community, said Malti Prasad, president of the board of directors.

Ten priests were flown in from India to perform the opening puja which culminated ten years of planning, two years of construction and five days of rituals and prayers. The $1.5 million brick, marble and granite temple is patterned after temples in the northern and southern regions of India, according to fund-raising chairman G.S. Satya. The celebrations blended the old with the new.

Several women, dressed in their best for the occasion, carried silver containers filled with Gangajal. A helicopter showered rose petals on the shrines. "We're westernized Indians, so it's kind of appropriate," said Uma Memula to the Livermore Herald, which frontpaged the event. Memula had brought along two American friends, fellow students at the University of California, Berkeley.

"It's a cultural event that brings the different sects together, so it's neat," they were quoted as saying. "It is more than just a religious function or ritual."

Devotees chanted hymns as the procession moved toward the biggest of the buildings that form the temple complex. Four men carrying kodai (large fringed umbrellas) escorted Akili, the nine-year-old African elephant covered with a red-and-gold decorative blanket. As the ceremonies at the temple began the priests installed containers of holy water, burnt camphor, made offerings to the shrines and recited mantras.

Speaking on the occasion, California's Lt. Governor, Leo McCarthy, described the center as a symbol of the state's ethnic diversity. "You are now a part of the fabric of California," he said to the assembled 2,500 Indians and Indian-Americans. "In this temple, a community will be united .... I hope that this community and the classrooms will produce another Mahatma Gandhi in the American setting."

December 1986

SPAN 2 Woman According to Hollywood

by Anna Sujatha Mathai

7 At Boston Latin Triumph of Tradition

by Robert Wernick

13 Disarmament-A

Step Forward

by George Shultz

16 Advantage India

by Sabita Radhakrishna

20 Viruses-A

Matter of Life and Death

24 From My American Album

by A vinash Pasricha

28 Along Washington's Mall

31 On the Lighter Side

32

America's First Poet Laureate Robert Penn Warren

34 Poetry Is Life

37 Deregulation Is Good Business

by B. Robert Okun

40 Enter the Intrapreneur

by Gifford Pinchot 3d

43 An American Traveler in 19th-Century India byA.G. Noorani

46 The Painted Raj

Publisher Editor

James A. McGinley Warren W. McCurdy

Managing Editor

Himadri Dhanda

Assistant Managing Editor

Krishan Gabrani

Senior Editor

Aruna Dasgupta

Copy Editor

Nirmal Sharma

Editorial Assistant

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

Y.P. Pandhi

,Photographic Service

USIS Photographic Services Unit

Photographs: Front cover-copyright © Harlan Hambright and Associates. Inside front cover left-Norbert von der Groeben, Valley Times staff photographer; right-Gordon Clark, The Herald, Dublin, California (2) 1-Avinash Pasricha. 2 top-20th Century Fox; bottomMemory Shop Inc. 3 top left-© 1982 Universal City Studios Inc.; right-Sygma; bottom-Columbia Pictures. 4-Museum of Modern ArtlFilm Stills Archive. 8-courtesy Boston Latin. 9-Richard Howard.

11 top right-Martha Kaplan; Cotton Mather photo courtesy Library of Congress. 12 left-courtesy Boston Latin; right-Richard Howard'.

17-19-George Francis/Scorp ·News. 20-Alfred Pasieka, Taurus Photo. 21 left-courtesy National Cancer Institute; right-© U.S. News & World Report, May 12, 1986. 24-27-Avinash Pasricha. 28-Barry Fitzgerald. 29 (clockwise frqm top left)-Bill McCurdy; Barry Fitzgerald (3); Carol Hightower; copyright © Harlan Hambright and Associates.

All rights reserved. 30-Barry Fitzgerald. 32-Avinash Pasricha.

37-Bill RosslWest Light; Ransome Airlines; MCI Communications Corp. 43-45-courtesy British Council's India Collection housed at the India International Centre, New Delhi. 46-47-courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Inside back cover and back cover-Kevin Horan, National Geographic Society.

The copyright credit for the excerpts from The Golden Gate published in the November 1986 SPAN is: Reponted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. From The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse by Vikram Seth.

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 U.S. Government. Printed at Thomson press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications isencouraged. except when copyrighted. For permission write t~"the Editor. Price of magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs. 25; single copy.

Rs. 4. For c'hange of address send 30 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: The expansive interior of the new National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., is in Italian Renaissance style. Housed in a century-old building, the museum is the latest addition to the historical landmarks that line the Washington Mall. See also pages 28-30.

Back cover: Leaping over a trampolette, Marcus Peterson, 18, somersaults over 11 other members of the Jesse White Tumbling Team of Chicago, Illinois. See also inside back cover.

I doubt there is a person alive who would not like to see the nuclear genie crawl back into its bottle and disappear forevennore.

HoweveJ:,as Daniel Boorstin, the historian who heads the American Library of CollJress, pointed out in last month's issue, the htunan imperative requires us to move only forward, exterrlillJ the frontiers in an eternal quest for the urrliscovered.

So, though it will never be possible to return to a prenuclear existence by unlearnillJ what we now knowof nuclear physics, perhaps we can work toward a world that is at least free of nuclear weapons.

In this issue, we feature an article by Secretary of State George Shultz, discussillJ that most important subject.

Even for those who follow United States arrl Soviet anns control negotiations closely, the subject can be vexatiously complicated and fraught with seemingly insoluble dilemmas. However, positions on the two sides have moved substantially closer as a result of recent contacts, and it is now possible to delineate positions a little more clearly.

Following is a brief summaryof the major American views on anns control: The United States seeks, as an interim measure, a 50 percent reduction in strategic offensive intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). ICBMsare huge, deadly accurate weapons that leave Earth's atmosphere to travel at great speeds to targets anywhere on Earth--within ten to 30 minutes--arrl cannot be recalled once launched. They are considered to be offensive weapons because their speed and trajectory would allow an enemy so little time to respond in a surprise attack.

Thus, they are the most threatening weapons psychologically and politically; a world without them would be a place from which a prircipal instrument of surprise nuclear attack or nuclear blackmail had been eliminated.

The United States also favors the total elimination of the longer-range intermediate nuclear force (LRINF)missiles in Europe and Asia. As a step toward achievement of this goal, the United States would agree to interim reductions giving each side equal ntunbers of missiles.

Elimination of nuclear weapons would require extensive and intrusive on-site inspections to preclude deception.

Yet so far, even limited inspection arrangement!:;have not been agreed to. That is where President Reagan's;;Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) comes in. The idea of defenses has begun movillJ the debate off dead center and into an area where American and Soviet negotiators. have been thinking in new ways about arms control and national securi ty in general.

One result is that the Reykjavik meeting has brought the world to an important crossroads, perhaps revealing the path that leads to a world free of nuclear weapons. As secretary Shultz concludes in his article, "Wehave a clear sense of how the United States and the Soviet Union might be able to move toward greater strategic stability.

We are ready to move quickly to that end, but are also prepared to be patient."

On a lighter note, we also feature in this issue a tribute to the first American Poet Laureate, Robert Penn Warren, who, at 80 and still in the midst of a distillJuished career? was the unanimous choice of everyone but himself.

"The idea of an official poet goes against our system," he said when he learned of his new title.

"Wearen't English.

Over there, the laureate becomes a memberof the government. OVer here, I will just be an employee of the Library of Congress."

The elevation of the Library's Office of Consultant in Poetry to the regal title of Poet Laureate has been the project of Hawaiian Senator, arrl sometime poet, Spark Matsunaga since he entered Congress in 1963. Uponfinally succeeding last year, he said, "The Poet Laureate of the United States will raise the prestige and respect of the poet to the point where youngsters will aspire to become poets, just as politically minded youngsters aspire to the presidercy."

Warren, of course, disagreed.

"I started writing because it was what I wanted to do. I didn't need ercouragement." To capture the craggy Warren physiognomy, SPANconunissioned RameshBisht to sculpt a clay-relief portrait of him, appearing here in progress and inside as a finished work. Bisht, a lecturer at the College of Art in Delhi, has won a national award for his work and has executed a number of statue portraits on pennanent public display around India.

ager feet tap-tapping, longing to join in the dance to be part of life, refusing to be still and set aside-even though the feet are of a young widow. That is my most vivid and lasting memory and cinematic image of American woman-or any woman for that matter. The feet were those of Scarlett O'Hara, that tempestuous heroine of the American Civil War, in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1940).

Vivien Leigh dazzled me as the willful O'Hara when I was in my teens. And even recently, when I saw the film again, I was struck by her vibrant personality. Olivia de Havilland as Melanie was enchanting in her own way-the ideal, gentle and good woman-loved, loving, unselfish. But it is O'Hara who, in all the critical situations, steps out of her constricted role as woman (the tight corsets were metaphorical of the stifling concepts of femininity that prevailed in the deep South and elsewhere at the time) and shows just how strong and capable a woman can be. Whether it is helping Melanie deliver her baby in a wagon as they flee the burning city, or digging and cultivating the devastated land, or dressing up to win an important man over-all for the sake of her beloved home, Tara-O'Hara is really a character on the grand scale, an elemental and complex heroine. Her greatest mistake seems to be her undying love for the dreamy, romantic and poetic Ashley, and her inability to see that her husband, Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) is of the very same stuff as herself. Abandoned and alone at the end, O'Hara is not defeated. "Tomorrow is another day," she says defiantly.

It may be because the author of Gone With the Wind was a woman that the character of O'Hara is so many-dimensional and multifaceted. Yet she shares the fate of nearly all women who have dared to be rebellious and different. Such women are generally punished at the end by being humbled in one way or another, usually by being left without a man.

Seeing Leigh as O'Hara, I remembered another unforgettable portrayal by her-in Kathleen Anne Porter's A Ship of Fools. She is an aging woman on a luxury cruise. On the shadowy deck, a young man, mistaking her for a pretty young thing he wants to date, makes an assignation with her. Leigh waits for the young man in her cabin. As he comes in, the light falls across her face, and he recoils in embarrassment, saying "Sorry, Ma'am,"-and turns to leave. Her desire turned to violent anger and humiliation, Leigh takes off her stiletto heels and slashes the young man across the face, revealing the savagery hidden beneath the surface of many sexual encounters in Hollywood films.

Hollywood has tended to present movies portraying women as seen through men's eyes. The desirable woman, the good woman, the self-sacrificing wife and mother, the eternal virgin, the selfish woman who dares to live for herself and is always punished-all these are the archetypal fantasies of Hollywood's patriarchs and Mughals. Hollywood has created many stars who have encapsulated the dreams and fantasies of the time. These have swung between the femme fatale and the more realistic depictions of women in contemporary film. In his book, The Stars (1960), Edgar Morin discusses this "elemental dichotomy of virgin and vamp," but he suggests that a further archetype, the goddess, brings together the purity of the virgin and the allure and mystery of the femme fatale. Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape (1974) mentions the "age-old dualism between body and soul, virgin and whore," which she associates

E

Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn with the orphan boy whom she adopts but has no time to look after in The Woman of the Year.

especially with the 1950s. Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman embodied the romantic and ethereal within themselves-the very stuff of which dreams are made. Then are-the legendary goddesses of love: there were-and Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Russell, Raquel Welch, Catherine Deneuve, who combined a sizzling sexuality with romanticism. Mae West's famous "Come on up and see me sometime," or Monroe's "What was I wearing? Perfume ... " encapsulate their devastating sexual allure. Some of these actresses carried as well some of the intensity and power of the earlier Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Marilyn Monroe became the embodiment of the male dream of woman-her physical perfection, her seductive movements and ways; the hint of parody and humor in the littl.e-girl talk is often missed. If in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), her one goal is to get a rich man, in The Seven Year Itch and Some Like it Hot, she displayed a great sense of comedy. Intelligence also comes through in that remarkable film with Laurence Olivier, The Prince and the Showgirl. The waif-like little showgirl almost steals the scene from Olivier, the magnificent and rather pompous prince.

Elizabeth Taylor's spectacular beauty (best shown off in Cleopatra, 1963) was combined with a genuine capacity to convey power in her acting. She and Vivien Leigh charged many of Tennessee Williams's great roles for women with electricity. Williams created bizarre and startling women crushed by the very power that emanates from within them. In Suddenly, Last Summer; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire both Leigh and Taylor revealed the great range of their acting powers.

The tendency to punish strong, independent and successful women can be seen as far back as Mildred Pierce (1945) with Joan Crawford. Strong women were seen as threats to the family and society, disturbers of the status quo. Deviation from mainstream values was seen as dangerous, to be punished, as hubris was ahvays punished by the gods in Greek tragedy. In Woman of the Year (1942) with Katherine Hepburn, this

tendency can be seen, though with a gentler, more humorous touch. The argument seems to be that it is unwomanly (and heaven knows we still fear being labeled unfeminine) to want any kind of life of one's own that does not spring from husband, father or son. Hepburn, in Woman of the Year, is a brilliant and remarkable person who goes from success to success. She adopts a child, but neglects it as she can't think of giving up her exciting career for full-time mothering. Spencer Tracy, as her husband, plays parent to the child. Finally, the Woman of the Year is seen to be an utter flop in the kitchen and at home, which, of course, is "where a woman's place ought to be."

Even films made by women have not always portrayed woman in a better light. Women's perceptions of themselves in a male-dominated society, sadly, seem often to be selfdenigrating. The Women (1939), made from a stinging script by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, based on the play by Clare Boothe Luce and directed by the generally sympathetic George Cukor, could also have been titled "Games Women Play" to keep their husbands or partners.

Women are shown as cats ready to scratch their rivals' eyes out. And, as marriage was seen to be absolutely central to a woman's life-her only real option-it was perfectly natural to use the laws of the jungle to keep one's lion (or lion's share) to oneself. This film had a galaxy of stars, including Joan Fontaine, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, Paulette Goddard and lovely Norma Shearer in the lead. Since the 1930s and 1940s we have come a long way. Or so we've been told. Sexual freedom and the right to choose are certainly important. But the age of permissiveness seemed only to move the woman's locale from the kitchen to the bedroom. Woman became an object, split into various physical parts, with not much hint of the heart or soul that might be making the sex-doll tick.

But where were the women filmmakers and how were they faring? Could they present the "real woman"-the ordinary yet extraordinary woman-her hopes, fears, difficulties, involvements? Could they recreate the myths that had become stereotypes? Claire Johnston" in Woman's Cinema as Countercinema (1974), says that "the fact that there is a far greater differentiation of men's roles than of women's roles in the history of the cinema relates to sexist ideology itself, and the basic opposition that places man inside history, and woman as ahistoric and eternal."

Were women directors able to breathe life into the static images of women? The first feminist filmmaker was Germaine Dulac of France. In 1922 she made The Smiling Madame Beudet. According to William Van Wert, it is "one of the few experimental films of the decade in which women are not fragmented, shown as sexual freaks, stripped in close-ups or through editing to reveal a bleeding mouth, bared breasts, or buttocks. It is one of the few films of the decade in which a woman is [the 1 main character."

In 1928, Dulac made The Seashell and the Clergyman, with a script by Antonin Artaud, the first truly surrealist film. In this film she exploits the Freudian symbolism of her male colleagues to expose male fantasies. It has been described as the best film of the 1920s.

In the United State,s there was Lois Weber, around World War I, who handled women's issues such as child labor, divorce, birth control and abortion. She directed Anna Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916). She was earning huge amounts and was highly successful, but was eased out after her

last film White Heat (1934), and died in penury.

Dorothy Arzner was a woman director who made a strong impact. She made Christopher Strong (1933)-scripted

by Zoe Akins with Katherine Hepburn in the lead-based on the life of aviatrix, Amy Lowell, who killed herself because she was going to have a baby by the married man she loved. Arzner's Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) dealt with the "coming of age" theme, showing a young woman's rise to maturity and independence.

Actress Ida Lupino turned to film direction and made Outrage in 1950, the story of a rape victim. In her roles she preferred "strong characters.

I don't mean women who have masculine qualities about them, but something that has intestinal fortitude, some guts to it."

American cinema began to move away from the female stereotype in the 1960s. Joanne Woodward, Rachel in Rachel, Rachel (1968), creates a brilliant and sensitive, indeed haunting, image of a spinster schoolteacher, trapped in lonely small town life. Everything about her is awkward. her clumsy walk, her painful shyness. Completely dominated by a demanding, invalid mother, she lives mostly through 'her memories which seem to center around the graveyard and a childhood death in the family. A revival meeting she attends arouses suppressed, yet intense, emotions within her. Like a butterfly trapped within a chrysalis, she seems cut off from life. It is only in the classroom that she is effective-in communicating with children who need understanding.

She has a whole world of love within her, and no one to share it with. She meets an old schoolmate who has come back to town, and takes a chance on love-most hesitantly. The affair seems to throw open for her the very doors of life, filling her with rapture. However, the young man leaves town soon after. Rachel is a braver woman now, able to deal more firmly with her mother, and she leaves for a bigger city, full of hope. There are few films that have looked so tenderly and keenly into the very depths of a woman's soul as this one, made by Paul Newman (who is Joanne Woodward's real-life husband). Even for a woman to look at herself from within is not easy-as we are constantly estranged from ow true inner selves by ideas that are rooted in patriarchal society. So Paul Newman's inwardly experienced and projected image is a reflection of his closeness and sensitivity to woman (possibly his wife).

A great many American films in the 1970s and 1980s gave woman a central role. With the thrust of the feminist movement cinema became an arena in which this awareness could be revealed and debated. From the dreary, suicidally depressed housewives trapped in lifeless marriages, such as Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957) and Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) or Ordinary People (1980), we turn to women who are vitaL involved, questioning and strong, or at least in the process of discovering their strength.

In Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1975), which stars Ellen Burstyn and Kris Kristofferson, directed by Martin Scorsese, Alice, who was a terrified housewife to start with. becomes widowed.

She takes charge of her young son, discovers she can sing, and gets herself a job and a new man.

Life begins when you're on your own, the film seems to say.

Norma Rae (1970) showed a woman (Sally Field) as a labor union organizer. Silkwood had a fine performance

by Meryl Streep as the woman who gradually begins to rebel against an inequitous and dangerous system in which her fellow workers'

lives are at risk. An ordinary woman, she emerges as a leader, though in the process she loses her lover, her job and, possibly, her life.

Julia (1977), with Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, highlights the lasting friendship and trust between two women, and is based on Lillian Hellman's book Pentimento. Unlike the characters in The Women, Fonda and Redgrave demonstrate the lasting friendship and loyalty that is possible between women. Both these actresses, in their personal lives, typify the socially conscious woman, deeply involved in life at every level, with concerns much wider than home and immediate family.

Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman (1978) is shocked when the husband she depends on, and takes for granted in the best sense of the word, suddenly informs her he is in love with someone else, and is moving out. Her world literally falls to pieces-there seems nothing left to live for. Instead of collapsing, however, she gradually begins to rely upon her own strength, and finds it considerable.

When her husband, whose affair has fallen through, hints that he'd like to come back, she is able to turn him down firmly. Later, she does fall in love with a painter, Alan Bates, and is happy again. However, when the painter tells her he'd like her to marry him and move with him to New England, she realizes she has made a life for herself, and is unwilling to give it all up to follow a man on the doubtful trail of matrimony. If the film was somehow disappointing, that, it seemed to me, was because it trivialized Clayburgh's conflict about trust and remarriage.

Vanessa Redgrave (left) in the title role, and Jane Fonda, as the young playwright Lillian Hellman, stroll through Oxford in Julia, afilm about friendship wrenched apart by fascism in the 1930s.

Actually, the myth of the deserted woman has haunted the imagination ever since Medea who, abandoned by her husband, kills her children as an act of revenge. This myth was powerfully probed in Jules Dassin's A Dream of Passion (1978) with Melina Mercouri and Ellen Burstyn. Burstyn plays the American wife living in Greece whose husband leaves her for someone else. So intense is her love and need for her husband that she kills her children, as Medea had done. Such an elemental act of passion hardly seems possible anymore-the situation has lost its tragic connotations.

Today's woman has other possibilities of self-expression.

On the other hand, a man (Dustin Hoffman) left by his wife to care for a young son, as well as manage a job, finds how difficult it is, in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979).

Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979), Interiors (1978) and Annie Hall (1977) explore the man-woman relationship in great detail, all of them with Diane Keaton in the lead opposite himself. Interiors, if a little precious, is extremely introspective.

In it, the mother, Geraldine Page, commits suicide when her husband leaves her for another woman. In Manhattan, Allen wavers between Diane Keaton and Mariel Hemingway.

In Annie Hall Allen and Keaton are good friends and lovers, have great fun together, but are still parted in the end. Allen concludes the film with the bittersweet joke that he and Annie "and all of us go on submitting to the pain of relationships, because we need their comforts and rewards."

Says Diane Jacobs: "What Annie Hall says-and it's the one truly radical statement of a recent American film-is that people who've' shared their most profound, most intense moments, may not end up together. They may spend the better part of their lives with people they'll never know so well or so deeply."

In Sophie's Choice (1982) and The French Lieutenant's.

Woman (1981), Meryl Streep, that astonishingly chameleonlike beauty, is a phantom woman, who leads her lovers on to glory as well as destruction.

In Sophie's Choice, she is "alternately Stingo's muse, the instrument of his awakening to suffering and death, a ministering angel of sex, a surrogate mother, a martyr, a beauty who dies rather than face the reality of old age and possible rejection on a Virginia farm."

When Dustin Hoffman was forced to take a woman's role in Tootsie (1982), there was a sensitive awakening of awareness of what it really feels like to be a woman. Women at work, or with men in social situations often find themselves in ridiculously tight situations. Men tend to be rather complacent in making assumptions about what women enjoy. By assuming a disguise Hoffman as Tootsie is forced to look inward and see things afresh. The barriers of sex break down. As he lies in bed with the woman he loves (she of course thinks he's an unde¡rstanding older woman) there is a tender sharing of childhood memories which only those in love can give to one another. Could that metaphor contain the important truth that it's the sharing of your humanity that counts most in the end?

Ultimately as more and more women become directors and writers, and as women's perceptions of themselves become clearer, there will be truer, less distorted images of woman.

0 About the Author: Anna Sujatha Mathai is a poet and free-lance writer who has acted in and directed several plays. She has been editor for the Journal of the First International Forum of Women's Cinema and associate editor of Indian Cinema 1982-83.

AT

BOSTON LATIN TRIUMPH OF

America's oldest public school still insists on the old diet for its students: high grades, discipline, Latin. With a renewed stress on excellence in education, Americans are looking to the Boston Latin School, founded in 1635, for inspiration.

For once, upon a raw and gusty day, The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores, Caesar said to me, 'Dar'st thou, Cassius, now Leap in with me into this angry flood, And swim to yonder point?'

It was a raw and gusty day in midAtlantic as the QE II heaved and hunched its way through an equinoctial storm. The lines seemed appropriate for me to recite to the few stalwart passengers huddled in the bar. There was a lady sitting nearby, and without hesitation she joined the iambic swell, declaiming: ... Accoutred as I was, I plunged in And bade him follow; so indeed he did.

The torrent roar'd, and we did buffet it With lusty sinews, throwing it aside And stemming it with hearts of controversy: But ere we could arrive the point propos'd, Caesar cried, 'Help me, Cassius, or I sink. ' Measure by measure we followed the bard. What the other passengers made of this, I do not know. But for me and my fellow student of Julius Caesar-she was Mary McGrory, the Washington columnist-it was the most natural thing in the world. I had spent six years at the Boston

Latin School (BLS), and she six at its sister school, Girls' Latin, where they had started us memorizing hunks of Shakespeare before we were 12 years old. And whatever you learn at Boston Latin is supposed to stay with you, available for use, all the years of your life.

That is the way it has been for 351 years.

Boston Latin, founded in April 1635, is the oldest public school in the United States-it is probably the oldest surviving educational institution in the Americas. It has moved half a dozen times around the city of Boston, from the living room of its first master's house to its present dingy red-brick fortress built in the Fenway in 1921. There were 12 pupils in 1635; there are 2,300 today. But the educational standards and approach have remained remarkably constant. If a Bostonian of 1635 came back to Earth today, he'd find that one of the few things remotely familiar would be the Boston Latin School.

The Puritan colonists had been barely five years in Massachusetts, hic in silvestribus et incultis locis hacking a toehold of farmland and pasture out of the primeval forest, when they turned their minds to educating their youth: "One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity," as it says in New Englands First Fruits, published in 1643.

At a general meeting on February 11, 1635, the infant town of Boston voted "that

our brother Philemon Pormort, shall be intreated to become scholemaster, for the teaching and nourtering of children with us." By April he had his books ready, and the first scholars were parsing Latin sentences in his home.

The kind of school it was going to be was settled very quickly, in the stormy wake of the colony's first great religious controversy.

Like Sir Henry Vane, the Governor, and many leading citizens of Boston, Brother Pormort was a visitor in the parlor of Anne Hutchinson, a woman of "a nimble wit and voluble tongue," a prophetess favored with revelations that enabled her to settle in a moment such vexed theological questions as: Is sanctification evidence of salvation?

"Come along with me," said one of Hutchinson's disciples to an orthodox believer named Edward Johnson, "I'le bring you to a Woman tl1at Preaches better Gospelle than any of your blackecoates that have been at the Ninneversity ... one that speakes from the meere motion of the spirit, without any study at all."

For orthodox believers, that way led to anarchy and madness. If any quick-tongued housewife could get wisdom directly from God, what was the use of the learning they had painfully acquired? How could order and decency and right doctrine be maintained if the winds of inspiration were allowed to blow where they willed? On November 2, 1637, Anne Hutchinson was declared by the Great and General Court to

be "a woman not fit for our society," and she had to depart into the wilderness of Rhode Island. Philemon Pormort departed, too. As historian Samuel Eliot Morison says, there was nothing unusual about such proceedings in the 17th century, except in the failure of the authorities to put anyone to death. If the Hutchinsonians had triumphed, they would have been just as intolerant as their opponents. Their banishment, says Admiral Morison in tight-lipped Bostonian prose, spared Massachusetts "an era of frontier revivalism and hotgospelling."

That was not Boston's way. From 1637 Boston's way was irrevocably set: black coats, tight lips, hard heads, selfrighteousness and, above all, traditional learning. Boston Latin was to provide the training for it. Following Pormort's departure the school was put under the direction of a Daniel Maude, "a good man, of a serious spirit," and under him began the traditions of discipline, application, con-

stant study, constant emulation, which have continued to this day. Cotton Mather, who entered in 1669, noted that when scholars were admitted to Harvard, those- from Boston Latin were "generally the most unexceptionable," and ever since, the school has prided itself on its college admissions.

There is a common misconception that the Boston Latin School, like Harvard College (which, according to BLS chauvinists, was opened three years after BLS to take care of its graduates), was a sectarian divinity school for producing literate preachers. In fact, the Puritans insisted on a learned clergy, but the clergy got its theological learning in advanced professional schools, just as lawyers did. Before acquiring professional training, before becoming a responsible member of the community, a young man had to learn how to think and how to express his thoughts, and for that he had to be taught how to read and understand what he was reading. That is why the core of the curriculum at the new school in Boston (as in any reputable school in England or Europe of the period) was Latin.

A BLS classroom in 1901 with sophomores posing in the required tie and jacket (left) and today's more casually dressed desegregated students. What remain unchanged are the high academic standards.

Latin was not just the international language of learning that enabled scholars from Poland, Spain or Connecticut to communicate. It was a remarkable pedagogical tool.

The Latin taught in schools was an administrative language, designed by the legalistic and highly efficient Roman mind to clarify and reduce to order all the chaos of-information pouring into a city that was then devouring most of the world.

The complexity of Latin syntax and the suppleness of Latin sentence structure made it ideal for organizing observation and thought. At least, so old Boston Latin believed and so it still believes. Today, whether you take the six-year course or the four-year course, you are required to study Latin, to parse and scan and conjugate and decline, to read and memorize, all the way up through four books of Virgil, every

school day through junior year. (Senioryear Latin, a college-grade course, is optional.)

The curriculum gradually broadened as century followed century, to include mathematics (1814), English (1826) and modern languages (1852), history ancient and modern, and a smattering of the natural sciences (1876). But the principles remain.

Latin School teaching has always depended heavily on rote, on memorizing of rules and lines, on orderly progression, on drill and repetition. In short, upon all those things that distress progressive educationists.

Rules were and are taken quite seriously. I can well remember Mr. Russo in Class IV (ninth grade) laying down the laws of English prosody and setting us to write verses in iambic tetrameter. About the third stanza I began to be bored with the steady thump and tried sneaking a couple of trochees or anapests. "Stop right there," said Mr. Russo. "That is poetic license.

When you get to be a poet, I will give you a license. In the meanwhile, you will write the way I tell you."

Latin School style was largely set by an early headmaster, Ezekiel Cheever, who spent 70 years teaching, many of them using an Accidence (Latin grammar) he compiled himself, which became the standard text of the day. Cheever has been described as a sober chiliast, meaning that he expected the end of the world at any moment, but in the meantime went about his business conscientiously and on schedule. "He wore a long white beard, terminating in a point," said one of his students, "and when he stroked his beard to the point it was a sign of the boys to stand clear."

In three and a half centuries, recollections of old graduates have tended to focus on discipline and disciplinarians. A favorite subject was John Lovell, the headmaster who cried Deponite libros/-Put down your books!-when the Redcoats [British soldiers] marched past the school building on their way to Lexington [where the colonists had taken up arms against the British Crown] on April 19, 1775. Also Lovell's son James, who taught with his father. The two Lovells used to harangue the classroom, one

from the northeast corner, one from the southwest, John urging loyalty to the Crown, James preaching rebellion.

Even today when old graduates reminisce, you will rarely hear them say of any teacher, "He really understood me." They are more apt to say, "He certainly taught me trigonometry and the ablative absolute."

For the boys of my generation, a strong memory remains of a Latin teacher named Mr. Cray-an aloof sharp-tongued man with a gift for putting hapless students in their intellectual place. The tale is told that one day he poked his nose out of his homeroom, No. 106, which is catercorner from the statue known as Alma Mater at the school entrance, and saw what he recognized as a former pupil come back to visit the old place. "And what have you made of your life?" he asked. "I am the president of Princeton University," said the grad.

"Princeton must have lowered its standards," said Mr. Cray.

I have seen flourishing Boston lawyers and physicians turn a little pale under their Florida tans when the name of this old master comes up. But they are quick to add: "When you learned irregular verbs from that so-and-so, they stay learned forever."

There is so much that stays with you forever: you will always be able to recognize an anacoluthon in a presidential press conference. You will always remember Cicero's "How Long 0 Catiline" speech: Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? and never forget which seven French nouns ending in ou form their plurals in x (bijou, caillou, chou, genou, hibou, (joujou, pou).

That this is the best method for instructing the youth of the land is by no means a unanimous opinion. Boston Latin has always had its enemies. As early as 1711 there was grumbling among the citizens that the school was not helping their boys to become better merchants or sea captains or slave traders when they grew up, and a petition was drawn up demanding if "some more easie and delightful methods" of acquiring learning might not be found. The answer was quite crisp: there were no such methods. Back to the gerundive and the ablative absolute.

Repeatedly, the spiritual heirs of Anne Hutchinson-Transcendentalists, NewThinkers, hippies, progressive educationists, et id omne genus-have returned to the charge. They have accused the school of being rigid and soulless, of stifling creativity and turning out generations of greasy grinds. Or, taking another (and somewhat

more recent) tack, they have accused it of being undemocratic, un-American, elitist.

To get into the school at all you have to get high grades in an entrance examination.

Such a system, critics say, siphons off all the bright young minds in the Boston school system. It guarantees that BLS will get the best teachers, too: they naturally gravitate toward a school where the students enjoy studying and where disciplinary problems are comparatively manageable. Since World War II, Boston, like other American cities, has seen its public school system deteriorate. The general opinion around town is that, except for Boston Latin, its high schools are still struggling and BLS is somewhat in the position of a cathedral rising out of a swamp. One type of mind has a neat prescription for such a landscape: tear down the cathedral and use the stones to pave the swamp.

Thus far the school, using a mixture of high principle and guile, has managed to shrug off or fight off such assaults. There was a close call in the late 1950s when, in the panic following Russia's Sputnik launch, many people were convinced that America was drowning in the humanities and needed a good dose of practical science and engineering. The Boston School Committee voted to make Latin an elective subject at the Latin School. "They want to turn us into a school for plumbers," said one old grad. A call went out to then Archbishop John Wright, class of 1927, and he came up from Pittsburgh to make a major and wellpublicized address defending the eminent state and dignity of the "dead" language.

Contemporary Boston still takes Archbishops seriously. Theological and electoral considerations probably played an equal part in making the committee change its mind. Cicero (Roman statesman, actor and author) and Virgil remained compulsory.

In the 1960s when academic standards were being submerged all over America, Boston Latin stood against the tide. "We wore our hair long to frighten our parents," says Philip Haberstroh, 1966, now registrar of the school, "but we had to pass our exams just the same." Discipline and Latin have come back into fashion. These days pilgrims arrive from all over the country to visit Dr. Joe Desmond, head of the BLS classics department, to see how he does it.

Graduates like John Wright (who became Cardinal in 1969) have always been ready to rally to the school's defense.

Whatever resentments they may have had against their alma mater, whatever anger and frustration they may have felt when

they were in her massive arms, they <illseem to get progressively fonder of her as they grow older. Since the 17th century they have been coming forward to testify that whatever success they have achieved in life is owing to the stern training they received at the Boston Latin School.

Whatever the reason, there has been success in plenty. Latin School graduates have been the leaders of Boston from the start, and many have gone on to national or international fame. In the early days, the school provided the men who shaped and guided the Puritan commonwealth: divines like Cotton Mather, presidents of Harvard, governors of Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the 18th century, it bred many of the great names of the American Revolution: Benjamin Franklin (class of 1720), Samuel Adams (1736), John Hancock (1752). In the early 19th century when Boston liked to think it was the Athens of America, and with some justice, as well as the hub of the Universe ("Why should I travel?" asked the legendary lady in her house on the river side of Beacon Street, "I am already here"), the school instructed Ralph Waldo Emerson (class of 1819) and a legion of men with rolling three-pronged names who helped set the standards for the young Republic: Charles Francis Adams (1822), the diplomat; John Lothrop Motley (1829), the historian; Samuel Pierpont Langley (1851), the aviation pioneer and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; Henry Lee Higginson, the banker; plus senators, governors, mayors, merchants, judges, architects, professors, philanthropists, abolitionists, generals, archbishops. There was also Samuel Francis Smith, 1825, who wrote the hymn, America.

In the early centuries, of course, the students were mainly of Anglo-Saxon stock, Yankees. But by the late 19th century, the Yankees began fleeing to the suburbs as Boston was turned into what is now called opprobriously an inner city, occupied by noisy swarms of immigrants; first Irish Catholics, then Italians, Jews, Greeks, Poles, Armenians. By the 1920s a Yankee name was a rarity on the list of students in the school catalog. In the second half of the 20th century the former immigrants have been heading for the suburbs in their turn, and new waves have come in: blacks from the rural South, Hispanics, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cape Verdeans.

Boston Latin did not adjust to the immigrants-the immigrants adjusted to it.

For the past 80 years the school has been a great gateway for the aspiring poor through

which children of first- and secondgeneration American families, living in ethnic enclaves, in poverty or at least in modest circumstances, could march down the broad highways of American culture, politics, society. The school's chief function has always been to turn out those professionals, businessmen and civil servants who rise to the middle levels where the wheels of society are kept turning.

Most graduates are content to remain Bostonians. Some go on into the outer world where they have achieved considerable renown. Five of the best-known graduates of the past century or so, all in their very different ways, fit into the standard category. They came from immigrant families, they took the school as a challenge that sharpened their wits for the struggles ahead: George Santayana (1882), the philosopher and aesthetician; Bernard Berenson (18g7), the expositor of Renaissance painting; Joseph P. Kennedy (1908), financier, ambassador and patriarch; Theodore H. White (1932), old China hand and chronicler of John F. Kennedy's Camelot; and Leonard Bernstein (1935), the man for all musIcs. Here is Santayana, writing for the school's 300th anniversary: "In spite of all revolutions and all the pressure of business and all the powerful influences inclining America to live in contemptuous ignorance of the rest of the world, and especially of the past, the Latin School. .. has kept the embers of traditional learning alive." Joseph Kennedy used more down-to-earth terms: the place, he said, "somehow seemed to make us all feel that if we could stick it out at the Latin School, we were made of just a little better stuff than the rest of the fellows of our own age."

Intellectual breadth, said the philosopher. Intellectual pride, said the businessman. Between the two they sum up the Boston Latin tradition.

A tradition, of course, is only as good as what the last graduating class makes of it.

What of Latin School today? I had not so much as seen the place in 50 years when I went back for a look last winter, and there were plenty of foreboding voices, old friends, laudatores temporis acti, to tell me everything had gone to hell since our day.

"What can you expect," asked one of my old teachers, "in a world where secondary-school teachers rank lower in publicopinion polls than sanitary workers and make smaller salaries? In a world where people will tell you in all seriousness that it is the constitutional right of every American

Nat Hentoff (1941) At BLS he was an apostle of jazz, went on to work for Down Beat and become a New Yorker writer. He graduated to concern for civil rights, was a director of the American Civil Liberties Union, now is a columnist preoccupied with threats to constitutional freedoms.

Ben Franklin (1720) The school's most famous Old Boy, Franklin spent only one year at BLS before going to work at age ten. He soon made his fortune as a printer, scientist (electricity), diplomat (in London, Paris), architect of freedom and ubiquitous American sage.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1819) Despite his grounding in classics at BLS, Harvard and Divinity School, Emerson urged Americans to cast off the bonds of Old World culture. Then as a revered poet and essayist, he preached self-reliance and a philosophy known as Transcendentalism.

Theodore H. White (1932) A celebrated journalist, White played trumpet at school, got a summa at Har"Vard in history, was a foreign correspondent in China before becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning (1962) and bestselling author of the five-volume The Making of (he President.

Sam Adams (1736) Though Adams was noted for his conviviality at BLS, he won renown by throwing the Boston Tea Party.

A natural politician, agitator and Son of Liberty, he later signed the Declaration of Independence (below his fellow BLS graduate lohn Hancock, who was the first person to put signature on the Declaration of Independence).

Leonard' Bernstein (1935) America's man for all musics, Bernstein played piano in school assembly, brought glory to BLS as conductor, composer for ballet (Fancy Free), opera (Candide), as well as that star-crossed blend of street gangs and Shakespeare (West Side Story).

Samuel P. Langley (1851) Like Franklin, Langley stayed briefly at BLS but the school laid its mark on him. As scientist he pioneered in aircraft design, astronomy, the study of solar radiation, and served (1887-1906) as innovative secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

Bernard Berenson (1885) An immigrant Lithuanian boy, Berenson excelled at Harvard and then emigrated to Italy where he became America's first great art historian and master of the Italian Renaissance.

Cotton Mather (1673) he entered Precocious and high-strung, Harvard at age 11, became a minister despi te a deep interest in science and medicine. His most notable work is the Magnalia Christi Americana, an 850page church history of New England.

Robert Coles (1946) Author, teacher and child psychiatrist, Dr. Coles won the classical prize and many other honors at BLS, later put high professional and reportorial skills to the service of social conscience. His most celebrated work is the five-volume study, Children of Crisis (1964-80).

adolescent to get a high school degree?" (It has not yet been claimed, however, that there is an equal right to a football letter.)

On the spot, things did not look quite so ominous. The physical plant has not changed perceptibly in half a century. The three-story brick building with its towering Corinthian columns in the Fenway looks as solid and as shabby and as crowded as ever.

There is still not quite enough room for an enrollment in six grades of 2,300. There never has been enough equipment. The science labs had to be cannibalized from another school being torn down. The gymnasium would hardly be adequate in a country grade school, and physical education is apt to consist of a leisurely jog around the ground-floor corridors. The recreation yard still doubles as the faculty parking lot.

The most striking change is that the school has been integrated, sexually integrated, for 13 years. In the old days of Girls' Latin, girls had to wear dresses, and boys jackets, but those days are gone. Discipline is a little looser, classrooms are not as oppressively silent as they used to be, the curriculum has been widened to take in such things as art and music and computer A Boston Latin physics lab at the turn of the century (left) and now. The emphasis on science has increased in recent years, but BLS stillfirmly believes that it is the classics that foster the very skills-in logic, analysis and persuasion-that are prerequisites for scientists.

programming. And grade inflation-the idea that students will be encouraged if they get higher marks than they deserve-has taken its toll. Jacqueline Tibbetts, an assistant headmaster, agreed that something had gone out of the institution when grade scores were reduced to the abbreviated letter scale, A to F, from the old one to 100.

She was leafing through old records the other day and she came across a boy who had achieved a score of 12 in Latin. "You can get an F these days and say it was just tough luck," she says. "You may have been just one percentage point below passing.

When you had a 12 staring you in the face, there was no doubt that you had to do something about it if you wanted to stay in the school."

Even with the more tenderhearted modern methods, not everyone can make it in the school. There are tutorial programs and efforts to give individual help to boys and girls having difficulty adjusting. But if they don't adjust, out they go: more than a quarter of each entering class does not make it to graduation.

"Tough but not insensitive" is how the current headmaster, Michael Contompasis (1957), likes to describe the school's current style. "We want to maintain the old standards of self-discipline but we don't have to go about it in quite as inhuman a way." On the fundamental question, however, he is inflexible: "We can, and must, provide

equality of opportunity, but we cannot guarantee equality of results-the results are up to the individual student." If you want to get through Boston Latin, if you want to qualify for some kind of financial aid in going on to college (less than ten percent of Latin School families have the financial resources to send their children to college unaided), you have to work. Work means up to seven courses a day and at least three hours of homework.

Tibbetts rounded up for me a random group of six seniors she picked out of the corridors between classes. There were only two native-born Americans among them: one of Italian ancestry, one a rara avis descended from Governor Bradford, the Pilgrim Father. One boy had been born in Rome, another in the Dominican Republic.

One black girl came from Shropshire and a black boy from the Cape Verde Islands.

They were all quite pleased with this "United Nations" note. "It's more like real life," said one of them. "1 had admissions to St. Paul's and Milton Academy, but what would I have been doing in one of those ghettos, surrounded by nothing but preppies?"

What did they'\ think, children of the 1980s, of following an ancient curriculum, spending a good part of their youth learning a dead language, toting home several kilos of books every afternoon to spend hours with trigonometry, ancient history and those eternal irregular verbs? "You look at the kids from the other schools," said one boy in language that Joseph Kennedy would have admired, "and sure, they aren't working, and they're having fun, but what do they have to talk about? They don't know what's going on."

History may be on the side of Boston Latin. "We like it," said the admissions officer of an Ivy League college. "It's a school where upward mobility is an absolute religion. BLS students work hard and achieve." The school still sends about 20 graduates a year to Harvard and some to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For there are signs of revival in the old faith that rhetoric and the classics foster the very skills in logic, analysis and persuasion necessary to topflight lawyers, physicians and scientists. No wonder bumper stickers distributed to alumni for the 350th birthday read, in the BLS colors, purple on white: SUMUS PRIMI. We're Number 1.

0 About the Author: Robert Wernick is a frequent contributor to Smithsonian, writing on subjects as disparate as goats, pepper, art and travel.

DISARMAMENT A Step Forward Addressing students at the University of Chicago last month, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz envisioned a world freed from fear of nuclear devastation. Excerpts from the speech follow.

Forty-four years ago, and about 200 yards from where I am now standing, mankind generated its first self-sustained and controlled nuclear chain reaction.

Enrico Fermi's crude atomic pile was the prototype for all that followed-both reactors to generate energy for peaceful uses and weapons of ever-increasing destructiveness. Seldom are we able to mark the beginning of a new era in human affairs so precisely.

I'm not here tonight to announce the end of that era. But I will suggest that we may be on the verge of important changes in our approach to the role of nuclear weapons in our defense. New technologies are compelling us to think in new ways about how to ensure our security and protect our freedoms. [The summit meeting between President Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev in] Reykjavik served as a catalyst in this process. The President has led us to think seriously about both the possible benefits-and the costs-of a safer strategic environment involving progressively less reliance on nuclear weapons.

Much will now depend on whether we are far-sighted enough to proceed toward such a goal in a realistic way that enhances our and our allies' security.

It may be that we have arrived at a true turning point. The nuclear age cannot be undone or abolished; it is a permanent reality. But we can glimpse now, for the first time, a world freed from the incessant and pervasive fear of nuclear devastation. The threat of nuclear conflict can never be wholly banished, but it can be vastly diminished-by careful but drastic reductions in the offensive nuclear arsenals each side possesses.

Such reductions would add far greater

stability to the U.S.-Soviet nuclear rela- dent and General Secretary Gorbachev tionship. Their achievement should make agreed on in their joint statement at other diplomatic solutions obtainable, Geneva a year ago. and perhaps lessen the distrust and suspiThus, it came to be accepted in the cion that have stimulated the felt need West that a major role of nuclear for such weapons. Many problems will weapons was to deter their use by accompany drastic reductions: problems others-as well as to deter major convenof deployment, conventional balances, tional attacks-by the threat of their use verification, multiple warheads and che- in response to aggression. mical weapons. The task ahead is great but At the same time, we also accepted a worth the greatest of efforts. certain inevitability about our own naLet me start by reviewing how our tion's vulnerability to nuclear-armed balthinking has evolved about the role of listic missiles. When nuclear weapons nuclear weapons in our national security. were delivered by manned bombers, we In the years immediately after Fermi's maintained air defenses. But as the ballisfirst chain-reaction, our approach was tic missile emerged as the basic nuclear relatively simple. The atomic bomb was delivery system, we virtually abandoned created in the midst of a truly desperate the effort to build defenses. After a struggle to preserve civilization against spirited debate over antiballistic missile fascist aggression in Europe and Asia. systems in the late 1960s, we concluded There was a compelling rationale for its that-on the basis of technologies now 20 development and use. years old-such defenses would not be But since 1945-and particularly effective. So our security from nuclear since America lost its monopoly of such attack came to rest on the threat of weapons a few years later-we have had retaliation and a state of mutual vulnerto adapt our thinking to less clearcut ability. circumstances. We have been faced with In the West, many assumed that the the challenges and the ambiguities of a Soviets would logically see things this way protracted global competition with the as well. It was thought that once both Soviet Union. Nuclear weapons have sides believed that a state of mutual shaped, and at times restrained, that vulnerability had been achieved, there competition; but they have not enabled would be shared restraint on the further either side to achieve a decisive advan- growth of our respective nuclear arsenals. tage.

The ABM Treaty of 1972 reflected that Because of their awesome destrucassumption. It was seen by some as tiveness, nuclear weapons have kept in elevating mutual vulnerability from techcheck a direct U.S.-Soviet clash. With nical fact to the status of international the advent in the late 1950s of law. That treaty established strict limitaintercontinental-range ballistic missilestions on the deployment of defenses a delivery system for large numbers of against ballistic missiles. Its companion nuclear weapons at great speed and with interim agreement on strategic offensive increasing accuracy-both the United arms was far more modest. SALT I was States and the Soviet Union came to conceived of as an intermediate step possess the ability to mount a devastating toward more substantial future limits on attack on each other within minutes. offensive nuclear forces. It established The disastrous implications of such only a cap on the further growth in the massive attacks led us to realize, in the numbers of ballistic missile launchers words of President Kennedy, that "total then operational and under construction. war makes no sense." And as President The most important measures of the Reagan has reiterated many times: "A two sides' nuclear arsenals-numbers nuclear war cannot be won and must of actual warheads and missile thrownever be fought" -words that the Presi- weight-were not restricted.

"A vigorous research program will give us the options we need for a world with far fewer nuclear weapons-a safer world with more stable balance."

But controlling the number of launchers without limiting warheads actually encouraged deployment of multiple warheads-called MIRVs-on a single launcher. This eventually led to an erosion of strategic stability as the Sovietsby proliferating MIRVs-became able to threaten all of our intercontinental ballistic missiles with only a fraction of their own. Such an imbalance makes a decision to strike first seem more profitable.

During this postwar period, the United States and its allies hoped that American nuclear weapons would serve as a comparatively cheap offset to Soviet conventional military strength. The Soviet Union, through its geographic position and its massive mobilized conventional forces, has powerful advantages it can bring to bear against Western Europe, the Mideast and East Asia-assets useful for political intimidation as well as for potential military aggression. The West's success or failure in countering these Soviet advantages has been, and will continue to be, one of the keys to stability in our postwar world.

The United States and its allies will have to continue to rely upon nuclear weapons for deterrence far, far into the future. That fact, in turn, requires that we maintain credible and effective nuclear deterrent forces.

But a defense strategy that rests on the threat of escalation to a strategic nuclear conflict is, at best, an unwelcome solution to ensuring our national security. Nuclear weapons, when applied to the problem of preventing either a nuclear or conventional attack, present us with a major dilemma. They may appear a bargain, but a dangerous one. They make the outbreak of a Soviet-American war most unlikely; but they also ensure that should deterrence fail, the resulting conflict would be vastly more destructive-not just for our two countries, but for mankind as a whole.

Moreover, the United States cannot assume that the stability of the present nuclear balance will continue indefinitely.

It can deteriorate and it has. We have

come to realize that the Soviet Union does not share all of our assumptions about strategic stability. Soviet military doctrine stresses warfighting and survival in a nuclear environment, the importance of numerical superiority, the contribution of active defense and the advantages of pre-emption.

Over the past 15 years, the growth of Soviet strategic forces has continued unabated-and far beyond any reasonable assessment of what might be required for rough equivalency with U.S. forces. As a result, the Soviet Union has acquired a capability to put at risk the fixed land-based missiles of the U.S. strategic triad-as well as portions of our bomber and in-port submarine force and command and control systems-with only a fraction of their force, leaving many warheads to deter any retaliation.

To date, arms control agreements along traditional lines-such as SALT I and II-have failed to halt these destabilizing trends. They have not brought about significant reductions in offensive forces, particularly those systems that are the most threatening to stability. By the most important measure of destructive capability-ballistic missile warheadsSoviet strategic forces have grown by a factor of four since the SALT I interim agreement was signed. This problem has been exacerbated by a Soviet practice of stretching their implementation of such agreements to the edge of violation-and sometimes, beyond. The evidence of Soviet actions contrary to SALT II, the ABM Treaty and various other arms control agreements is clear.

At the same time, technology has not stood still. Research and technological innovation of the past decade now raise questions about whether the primacy of strategic offense over defense will continue indefinitely. For their part, the Soviets have never neglected strategic defenses. They developed and deployed them even when offensive systems seemed to have overwhelming advantages over any defense. As permitted by the ABM Treaty of 1972, the Soviets constructed around Moscow the world's only operational system of ballistic missile defense. Soviet military planners apparently find that the modest benefits of this system justify its considerable cost, even though it would provide only a marginal level of protection against our overall strategic force. It could be a base

for future expansion of their defenses.

For well over a decade-long before President Reagan announced three years ago the American Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)-the Soviet Union has been actively investigating much more advanced defense technologies, including directed energy systems. If the United States were to abandon this field of advanced defensive research to the Soviet Union, the results ten years hence could be disastrous for the West.

President Reagan believes we can do better. He believes that the United States can reverse the ever-increasing numbers and potency of nuclear weapons that are eroding stability. He believes that the United States can, and should, find ways to keep the peace without basing our security so heavily on the threat of nuclear escalation. To those ends, he has set in motion a series of policies which have already brought major results.

First, the U.S. Administration has taken much-needed steps to reverse dangerous trends in the military balance by strengthening the country's conventional and nuclear deterrent forces. We have gone forward with their necessary modernization.

Second, the United States has sought ambitious arms control measures. In 1981, the President proposed the global elimination of all Soviet and American longer-range INF nuclear missiles. .

The following year, the President proposed major reductions in strategic offensive forces, calling for cuts by one-third to a level of 5,000 ballistic missile warheads on each side.

Again, this was a major departure from previous negotiating approaches-both in the importance of the weapons to be reduced and in the magnitude of their reduction. Critics claimed he was unrealistic, that it showed he was not really interested in arms control. But the President's call for dramatic reductions in nuclear warheads on the most destabilizing delivery systems has been at the core of our negotiating efforts. The Soviets have finally begun to respond to the President's approach, and are now making similar proposals.

Finally, President Reagan also set out to explore whether it would be possible to develop an effective defense against ballistic missiles, the central element of current strategic offensive arsenals.

To find that answer, he initiated in

1983 the SDI program-a broad-based research effort to explore the defensive implications of new technologies. It is a program that is consistent with our obligations under the ABM Treaty.

Since then, the United States has been seeking both to negotiate deep reductions in the numbers of those missiles, as well as to develop the knowledge necessary to construct a strategic defense against them. It is the President's particular innovation to seek to use these parallel efforts in a reinforcing way-to reduce the threat while exploring the potential for defense.

All of these efforts will take time to develop, but we are already seeing their first fruits. Some became apparent at Reykjavik.

Previously, the prospect of 30, let alone 50, percent reductions in Soviet

"The threat of nuclear conflict can never be wholly banished, but it can be vastly diminished .... " and American offensive nuclear arsenals was considered an overly ambitious goal.

At Reykjavik, President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev reached the basis for an agreement on a first step of 50 percent reductions in Soviet and American strategic nuclear offensive forces over a five-year period.

For INF nuclear missiles, we reached the basis for agreement on even more drastic reductions, down from a current Soviet total of over 1,400 warheads to only 100 on longer-range INF missiles worldwide on each side.

Right there is the basis for an arms control agreement that doesn't just limit the future growth of Soviet and American nuclear arsenals, but which actually makes deep and early cuts in existing force levels. These cuts would reduce the numbers of heavy, accurate, multiplewarhead missiles that are the most threatening and the most destabilizing.

At Reykjavik, the President and the General Secretary went on to discuss possible further steps toward enhanced stability. The President proposed to eliminate all ballistic missiles over the subsequent five years. Mr. Gorbachev proposed to eliminate all strategic offensive forces. They talked about these and other ideas, including the eventual elimination

of all nuclear weapons. The very scope of world with far fewer nuclear weapons-a their discussion was significant. The Pres- world with a safer arid more stable straident and the General Secretary set a new tegic balance, one no longer dependent arms control agenda at Reykjavik, one upon the threat of mutual qnnihilation. that will shape our discussions with the In the short-term, our task is to follow Soviets about matters of nuclear security up on the progress arising out of the for years to come.

Reykjavik discussions. For our part, we The prospect of effective defenses and are energetically seeking to do so. Our the United States' determined force negotiators in Geneva have instructions modernization program have given the to pick up where the two leaders' exSoviet Union an important incentive to . changes left off. We have formally tabled agree to cui back and eventually elimi- our proposals, based on progress at nate ballistic missiles. Within the SDI Reykjavik, and are ready to discuss program, we judge defenses to be desir- them. able only if they are survivable and To give additional impetus to that procost-effective at the margin. Defenses cess, I met with Soviet Foreign Minister that meet these criteria-those which Shevardnadze in Vienna [last month] to cannot be easily destroyed or over- continue our exchanges-not just on whelmed-are precisely the sort which arms control, but on the full agenda of would lead Soviet military planners to con- U.S.-Soviet issues, including those resider reducing, rather than continuing gional and human rights problems which to expand, their offensive missile force. are so critical to building trust and con- .

But only a dynamic and ongoing re- fidence between our two nations. search program can play this role.- There Our negotiating efforts-and the Presiwere major differences over strategic de- dent's own discussions with the Soviet fenses at Reykjavik. President Reagan General Secretary-have been based on responded to Soviet concerns by propos- years of analysis of these issues and on ing that, for ten years, both sides would our frequent exchanges with the Soviets. not exercise their existing right of with- The Reykjavik meeting, for instance, was drawal from the ABM Treaty and would preceded by extensive preliminary discusconfine their strategic defense programs sions with the Soviets at the expert-level to research, development and testing in Geneva, Moscow and Washington. activities permitted by the ABM Treaty.

So we have been well prepared to This commitment would be in the context move. But whether America can achieve of reductions of strategic offensive forces concrete results now depends on the by ~O percent in the first five years and Soviets. General Secretary Gorbachev elimination of the remaining ballistic mis- has spoken positively of the need to siles in the second five years, and with.the capitalize on the "new situation" created understanding that at the end of this by Reykjavik. But at Vienna a few weeks ten-year period, either side would have ago, the Soviets seemed primarily inthe right to deploy advanced defenses, terested in trying to characterize SDI in unless agreed otherwise. the public mind as the sole obstacle to But at Reykjavik, the Soviet Union agreement. Mr. Shevardnadze was quick wanted to change existing ABM Treaty to accuse us of backsliding from the provisions to restrict research in a way Reykjavik results, and to label our Vienthat would cripple the American SDI na meeting "a failure" because of our program. This we cannot accept. unwillingness to accede to their demands Even after the elimination of all ballis- to cripple SDI. We will doubtless hear tic missiles, America will need insurance more such accusations over the coming policies to hedge against cheating or weeks. other contingencies. We don't know now So all of this will take time to work out. what form this will take. An agreed-upon But that's to be expected in negotiating retention of a small nuclear ballistic mis- with the Soviets. The United States is sile force could be part of that insurance. serious about its objectives, and it is What we do know is that President determined to hold firmly to them. We Reagan's program for defenses against have a clear sense of how the United ballistic missiles can be a key part of our States and the Soviet Union might be insurance. A vigorous research program able to move toward greater strategic will give the United States and its allies stability. We are ready to move quickly, the options we will need to approach a but are also prepared to be patient. 0

Advantage India An innovative Indo-American project, conceived by Vijay Amritraj, is helping produce international-level tennis talent in India.

It is a particularly sultry afternoon at the Madras Christian College High School in Madras. But the four boys, scampering across the tennis court and hitting the ball aggressively, seem oblivious to the oppressive heat. They serve, volley and lob with a professionalism born of months of intense training and discipline. The concentration of four other boys who are participant-spectators does not vacillate for a moment, as they absorb every action of their teammates on the court.

From the sidelines, the two American coaches, Fred Roecker and Ted Murray, coax the boys to produce punchier strokes, peppering their instructions with praise. The Indian coach and liaison man Chandrasekhar and the eight young charges have been hard at work ever since the BritanniaAmritraj Tennis Foundation (BAT) program was initiated in May 1985.

What is BAT and how did it start?

Vijay Amritraj has always worried about who would replace him, his brother Anand and Ramesh Krishnan when they leave the international tennis circuit. India has had very few players of the caliber of former national champion Ramanathan Krishnan and Vijay, mainly because of a lack of good training facilities. An exchange of ideas along these lines with Rajan Pillay, chairman of Britannia Industries, led to this sponsorship

by Britannia and its U.S.-based parent company, Nabisco, which is a major sponsor of sports in America. Nabisco spends $25 million as prize money for the Nabisco Grand Prix, a professional tennis championship spread across 70 tournaments around the world through the year. BAT's objective is to produce players of international standards who can participate in events like the Davis Cup. BAT is the only project of its kind in India where young (under 15) tennis players are given free coaching and comfortable live-in facilities. Apart from accommodation, food, clothing and all incidental expenses, the boys are also admitted into a good school for their education. Supported by private sponsorship, BAT is a seven-year program with a reported outlay of Rs. 20 million.

Britannia pays for all the local expenses, while Nabisco is responsible for international travel, expenses of the American coaches, arranging for top players to visit India, despatching equipment and providing for other related facilities. The Amritraj brothers are the decisionmakers and coordinate with Britannia.

Nabisco Vice-President P.L. Redding remarked during a recent visit to Madras, "I am delighted at the shape BAT is

. taking, and so happy the Amritraj brothers are in charge. They are marvelous people. Apart from the facilities offered and the coaching, I am greatly impressed with the boys, not only their performance on court, but their attitudes, their dedication at such an early age and the respect they show others."

American coaches Roecker and Murray, both in their early 30s, have been with BAT for a year; Roecker is returning to the United States and has been replaced by David O'Meara. "The boys are the greatest ever," says Roecker. "It is their upbringing. Culturally they have this respect for their teachers, parents and people of influence. It has been a fantastic experience for me to be in the thick of things when tennis is growing in India. The boys have this rare kind of application which is unbelievable; they play even when they are tired! We have been putting them into various game situations and watched them react."

Once the BAT program was finalized, the Amritraj brothers began their scouting for young talent all over India and made an initial selection of 30 boys. "We needed some kind of a guideline to begin with," explains Vijay, "but it was the potential, not so much the ranking, that counted. We got the feel of the game they played and decided on the talent they had.

My parents, who are keen tennis enthusiasts and played a major role in molding us, would also observe the matches and report to us. Through the feedback and pooling of our findings, we narrowed down the selection to eight boys, all aged 13 or 14 at the time." The boys were achievers in the subjunior and junior levels in the country, and some of them had traveled abroad to play in international tournaments. It was the first time, though, that they had come under the umbrella of a top-notch in-house training scheme.

The boys' parents welcomed the BAT program because, here, education is not sacrificed in the name of tennis. Rohit Rajpal and K.P. Balraj have passed their tenth standard with 85 percent marks and distinctions. Clement Felix, principal of Madras Christian College High School, accommodated the eight boys from different schools and cities, despite some initial reservations. The boys are granted leave whenever they have to play tournaments; the BAT tennis courts are conveniently located in the sprawling campus of the school. P.L. Reddy, secretary of the All-India Lawn Tennis Association and part of the BAT nucleus, says that the scheme would never have succeeded if Felix had not been so considerate.

The daily routine is rigid and tough. The day begins with a workout at 5:45 a.m. that includes stretching and warming-up The legendary Rod Laver visited the Britannia-Amritraj Tennis Foundation camp in Madras last year to play with the boys and give them tips (right). Later he assessed their performance as Vijay and Anand Amritraj listened attentively (above).

exercises followed by sprints and working on strokes. At 7:20 the boys shower, breakfast and get set for school at 8:30. The afternoon tennis schedule begins immediately after school at 3:30 and lasts till 6:30 when the boys are taken to their "home," an apartment in the posh Poes Gardens locality. They relax, bathe, settle down to do homework, chat or watch tennis on video before dinner. Then there is that compulsory glass of milk at bedtime.

The boys have three courts to practice on. One is for fitness practice and general stroke improvement.

On the instruction court, specific strokes are mastered and polished.

At the game-situation court, each player is sized up and pitted against various strokes like the lob and volley, and his individual style and potential assessed. There are also aerobic exercises to build up stamina, reflexes and court strategies.

"Watching the kids over 15 months, I feel they have become 'stronger and tougher and their physical abilities have improved," says Vijay Amritraj. "It's not a question of merely making strokes. When you get stronger, the staying power is pronounced, the legs and the shoulders get stronger, so you have the arm strength to serve hard in the third or fourth set.

We have made it clear to the boys' parents that if any of them does not make the grade he will have to be dropped. We have to be a little ruthless, as this is a professional course. We will try to get the dropped boy admitted into another school or help him to continue here at Madras Christian. And he would still have had a year's wonderful coaching experience with BAT and will remain a fairly good player."

BAT has a contract with Peter Burwash International (PBI), acknowledged as the world's first and largest international company of tennis teaching professionals. PBI, which has its headquarters in Woodlands, Texas, about 30 kilometers north of Houston, provides tennis facilities for hotels and resorts worldwide. At anytime, 65 PBI coaches are training tennis hopefuls in around 50 places all over the world. Peter Burwash, himself, is one of the world's top tennis coaches and a former Canadian Davis Cup player and champion. Burwash and Vijay played together at a time when tennis was not as professional as it is today. Burwash has played in 74 countries, winning 19 international singles and doubles titles. Having coached in nearly 100 countries he continues to head major workshops and conferences.

PBI coaches teach individuals, not systems. Says coach Ted Murray, "Where BAT is concerned, the first six months the boys just learned to understand the game. It is only during the next stage that they got down seriously to strokes.

Each individual has his own style. For instance, Balraj earlier used both his hands for hitting, whereas now he volleys with one hand, realizing that his stroke is limited the other way. The boys have acquired mobility and quickness, and know how to act during an emergency." .

There is no great hurry to push the boys into the international arena. Explains Reddy, "It would be demoralizing for them to lose out to an under-18 player at the international level at such an early stage. Instead they should be pushed into the Asian circuit, where they can easily participate in under-18 and even men's events." Reddy thinks it would be unrealistic to expect BAT to produce "a crop of young boys knocking at the doors of the Davis Cup. If BAT can produce a Davis Cup team of two, it would be quite an achievement."

Four of the BA T boys practice their forehand returns under the supervision of American coach Fred Roecker.

K.P. Balraj, Tamil Nadu: "Best thing that could've happened to me! I've become stronger, tougher, faster on court. The coaches are super, and whenever 1 see Vijay 1 feel so inspired."

Raft Farooqui, Andhra Pradesh: "It is up to you to make the grade. They give you all the facilities, and you have to work for results."

Sridhar Bhabalia, Maharashtra: "My volley and serve are better now. I've learned to 'attack' and confuse my opponent. I've also learned to eat a lot of vegetables."

Gaurav Natekar, Maharashtra: "Great program and I am so happy here. You do miss your family but then you get used to it."

Rohit Rajpal, Delhi: "I've acquired mental toughness and my game is improving. My ambition is to win at least one major title in the world."

Prashanth Vasu, Tamil Nadu: "We don't neglect our studies and get the same food as we do at home. My game has already improved."

Leander Paes, Calcutta: "It is a good camp, a tight schedule, but you still get spare time to do what you like."

Rohit Reddy, Tamil Nadu: "I was so keen to come here. I'm really lucky to have got this opportunity."

As things stand now, Rohit Rajpal, K.P. Balraj and Rafi Farooqui show great promise. Earlier this year, Rajpal won the under-18 finals in the South Western India championship, the under-16 and under-18 events in the South India championship held at Coimbatore; and the under-18 finals in the Tamil Nadu championship.

Balraj won the under-16 finals in the Tamil Nadu championship.

Rajpal was in the three-member Indian team that went to Hong Kong in September 1986 for the qualifying rounds of the World Youth Tennis Cup. India won their first three matches, but then had to withdraw because of injuries and illness.

Talking about the boys' strengths and weaknesses when they first came to BAT, Anand Amritraj says, "Though their intuition and stroke production were excellent, their endurance and physical strength were nil. We had problems with their heights; we virtually stretched them with exercise and diet! In our time it did not matter so much, but with the crop of tall youngsters today, these boys would be psychologically crushed.

This is the reason the diet is so carefully monitored. We have a dietician and a doctor coming in for them. The boys are weighed every morning and checked for physical fitness. My mother has taken on herself the responsibility for their well-being and progress. In fact what she did for us some 20 years ago, she's now doing for the BAT boys."

Margaret Amritraj is more than a mother figure to the boys; she is friend, counselor and overseer of the program. Impeccably dressed and cheerful any time of the day, Mrs. Amritraj admits to running the BAT household at Poes Gardens as if it were her own home. Apart from seeing to the upkeep of the apartment, instructing the servants, monitoring the diet, controlling expenses and looking after general administration, she also spends long hours with the boys every day, watching them play and develop. She records their progress meticulously and sends in a monthly report of their fitness and performance on court to the chairman of Britannia Industries, London, and

to the firm's managing director in Madras.

Since the trainees are only allowed to meet their parents or local guardians once a week, Mrs. Amritraj tries to fill the slot with her personal rapport. "In a home all children are dissimilar in their tastes and behavior. Why, my own sons were so unlike one another, and we had to treat each one of them differently," says Mrs. Amritraj. "To a certain extent, I try to get them used to the ideal diet essential for a sportsman, but I do give in to their preferences."

The BAT program may be compared with the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy or Harry Hopman's International Center in Florida-but there is one major difference. While for the BAT trainee~ all facilities are free, the boys in the American tennis schools have to pay between $1,000 and $1,700 a month and about $125 extra for the weekend if they want to spend it playing and practicing and gaining more confidence.

To sustain the boys' interest and to relieve them of the monotony of daily routine, one of the three America-based Amritraj brothers is usually in Madras to play with them. And in response to Vijay Amritraj's invitation, Rod Laver recently came to Madras to play with the boys. "We hope to bring in more such players," say the Amritraj brothers.

"It has been a great experience for me working with BAT," says Chandrasekhar, the Indian coach who is with the Indian Railways and is on deputation to BAT. "I find the scheme novel and different and have picked up invaluable tips from the American coaches."

Whether they are learning from Chandrasekhar or Fred Roecker, playing with each other or with Rod Laver, the BAT boys are closer every day to championship form. Says Reddy: "BAT is the best thing that happened to Indian tennis."

0 About the Author: Sf/bita Radhakrishna is the Madras correspondent of Eve's Weekly and a free-lance writer. A textile designer by profession, she also writes scripts and directs radio and television programs.

VIRUSES

A Matter of Life and Death

THE BODY UNDER SIEGE ~ "

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Poliovirus Killer lymphocytes Antibody Chemical messengers Viral genes Human genes

Stage 1 Invasion. A typical virus touches down on the surface of a human celfand releases its cargo of genetic material into the cell.

Stage 2 Hijacking the cell. The viral genes take over the genetic code of fheh~man cell, turning it into a factory for manufacturing new viruses.

~ Stage 3 Replication. Some of the manufactured viruses migrate to the cell's su'rface where they may be detected by the body's first line of defense-"killer" lymphocytes. These specialized white blood cells are capable of destroying infected celis before many viruses break out.

Stage 4 Escape. Despite the lymphocytes, some infected cells invariably rupture, releasing a new generation of viruses to wreak destruction.

Scientists have discovered that some viruses act very slowly, eating away at body tissues for years before symptoms of disease show. This knowledge has opened the way for using the viruses to unravel the dynamics of some of today's most dreaded diseases: chronic disorders such as certain cancers and neurological problems.

Left: Viruses, like this one for influenza, are about 1/10,000 the size of a pinhead and are visible only through an electron microscope. Above: One of America's top virologists, Dr. Robert Gallo discovered in 1980 HTLV-l, a virus that causes a rare leukemia. In 1984, he isolated the AIDS virus.

Stage 5 Waging battle. Antibodies-missilelike components of the immune sysiem':'-rush to the enemy. Because of complementary "key lock" structures, the antibody is able to attach itself to the virus, prohibiting the invader from doing more damage. Meanwhile, infected cells send out chemical messengers such as interferon and interleukin.2 (arrows), which alert healthy cells nearby to mount defenses against the impending attack.

Stage 6 Victory. If the warning come'Sin time, neighboring cells are able to repel viruses from their surfaces, thereby containing the infection. Steps to repair the cell are set in motion. Health is restored.

Defeat. Should the body's defense be broken-if antibodies are de, played too slowly or in insufficient numbers-the virus may dominate.

The result is massive cell hemorrhaging and death.

I

used t to be that scientists thought of viruses as aggressive foot soldiers of death and disease. They were quick and nasty. Some could change their skins like chameleons and trick their way past the se.ntries of the body's immune system-spreading infection in a matter of days.

These agents are still as nasty as ever.

But now, a new type of virus is causing major changes in the way doctors look at a wide range of diseases. What scientists have found is that some viruses can act very slowly. Unlike the infectious warriors responsible for flu and smallpox, these newly discovered "slow viruses" cause no immediate symptoms but eat slowly away at body tissues for years before signs of disease become apparent.

This has opened the way for using the viruses to unravel the dynamics of some of the major diseases of modern timeschronic disorders such as certain cancers and neurological problems.

"We are seeing associations of viruses with cancers, neurological diseases and immune disorders," says Dr. Joseph McCormick of the virology lab at the Centers for Disease Control. "Right now, this is one of the most exciting areas in science."

The international focus on acquiredimmune-deficiency syndrome (AIDS) has stimulated new research on slow viruses in the United States and elsewhere.

Scientists believe that research on these viruses will ultimately lead beyond viral diseases to other disorders that involve the slow degeneration of the body. To many, viral studies are emerging as a Rosetta stone of modern illness because they reveal the inner workings of the body's immune system. A lot is already known about how viruses work. And for diseases where there is a viral connection, research holds out the promise of finding better tools for diagnosis and even prevention through a vaccine.

A decade ago, virology seemed to be a backwater in scientific research.

The major viral infections of the past-smallpox, polio, mumps and measles-had been virtually wiped out as a result of the development of vaccines.

Since the turn of the century, scientists have looked futilely for viruses as a cause of cancer, but the search for a viralcancer connection was all but abandoned by the mid-1970s. Now that's changing.

With the focus on viruses, the pace of research is so rapid that a new scientific

group, the American Society of Virology, was formed to keep up with developments. It currently has 1,312 members and meets yearly.

Viruses are about 1110,000 the size of a pinhead and are visible only through an electron microscope.

Where they come from is not known. Scientists believe they predate the formation of animal cells and exist in a twilight zone between mammalian cells and primal molecules.

A virus itself consists of an outer coat protecting a molecule of genetic material.

On the coat are proteins that act as antigens, which trigger a body's immune response to fight off incoming foreign substances. However, some viral antigens are constantly changing to outsmart suspicious immune cells. Once inside, the virus hijacks a normal cell's genetic material, then reprograms the gene to produce viruses. And so the disease process begins.

Doctors point out that there are thousands of relatively harmless viruses around that cause mild reactions requiring no treatment.

Most people are infected by viruses all the time but don't know it. In faq, every American has an estimated two to six viral infections a year-and can expect 200 viral infections in a lifetime.

Just why some viruses are mild and others are malevolent is a mystery. The most baffling question is why some people succumb to a terrible illness while others exposed to the same virus scarcely have a symptom.

The evidence is mounting that¡ viruses also contribute in a major way to the development of several human cancers.

Doctors emphasize that it is hard to "get" cancer. The causes are complex and involve environmental pollutants, chemical toxins, genetic flaws and defects in the immune system. Yet the case for a viral connection is strong.

In 1980, Dr. Robert Gallo of the U.S. National Cancer Institute identified a virus as the cause of an uncommon leukemia found on the Caribbean islands and in parts of Japan and Africa. The virus, HTLV-I, which belongs to a class of agents called retroviruses, turns the immune system's defense cells, known as T-helper lymphocytes, into virulent leukemia cells.

Earlier this year, scientists at a meeting of tumor virologists estimated that in some parts of the world as many as half of

all cancers of the liver, cervix and lymph system are associated with viruses.

By far the most prevalent is liver cancer.

About 250,000 cases a year worldwide can be traced to the hepatitisB virus. Areas in China, Southeast Asia and Africa, where that virus is endemic, have the highest liver-cancer rates. A nine-year study of 22,707 Taiwanese men

by Dr. R. Palmer Beasley of the University of Washington in Seattle shows that people who are infected with the hepatitis-B virus have more than 215 times the risk of developing liver cancer than those who have never been exposed to the virus.

In what may be the first anticancerimmunization program ever tried, more than a million people in Taiwan and China have been vaccinated against hepatitis-B in hopes of reducing liver cancer decades from now.

Doctors are also linking cancer to a family of more than 40 viruses, called human papilloma viruses (HPV). HPV infections can be as harmless as plantar warts. But roughly five of these viruses are implicated in cancers of the cervix and other genital areas. The virus leaves telltale genetic signs that can be detected in 80 percent of the cases of cervical cancers. Fortunately, Pap smears have led to ¡the early detection and treatment of cervical cancer.

0ther suspected cancer agent is the common Epstein-Barr virus, linked to a slow-growing tumor in the nose and throat. Worldwide, this cancer strikes over 50,000 people a year.

The same virus is also found in patients with Burkitt's lymphoma, a rare cancer that primarily strikes children in Kenya and Uganda.

Scientists point out that this virus is a very common agent, usually associated with mononucleosis.

Research is now centering on just why some people recover from the virus while others get tumors.

The main factors, they say, seem to involve diet, heredity and whether a person is suffering from chronic malaria.

In 1976, Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) won a Nobel Prize for identifying the virus that causes kuru, a fatal neurological ailment found in New Guinea and transmitted by cannibalism.

This opened the door to finding other slow-acting viruses responsible for chron-

l'

ic deterioration of the brain. The list now includes Gerstmann-Straussler syndrome and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

How these neurological diseases are spread is not well known. Researchers think they are transmitted by close contact with body fluids. Contaminated medical instruments and corneal transplants, however, are proven methods of transmission.

The viruses multiply slowly, destroying nerve cells throughout the body without inducing blood changes or fever, according to Dr. Clarence Gibbs, a colleague of Gajdusek's.

Neurologists are struck by the fact that some brain damage that occurs in kuru, Gerstmann-Straussler syndrome and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is similar to that found in patients with Alzheimer's disease, leading to speculation that a virus is involved in the genesis of Alzheimer's, which affects two million Americans.

"We're dealing with a disease that results from a repression of something in the body," says Gibbs. "We all have what causes it, but 99 percent of the people keep it under control."

Schizophrenia is another brain disorder in which a virus may playa role. Ordinary viral infections are more prevalent between January and April. Studies of schizophrenics show that they tend to be born during that period. Doctors speculate that a virus could affect a near-term fetus or a newborn, leading to the disease years later.

Two proteins associated with viral diseases were recently found in the spinal fluid of 17 of 54 hDspitalized schizophrenics at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Scientists believe they may be on to something but have much more research to do. "We certainly have circumstantial evidence," says Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who collaborates with researchers at NIMH. For years, doctors have looked for a viral cause of multiple sclerosis (MS), a cel)1ral-nervous-system disease that affects 250,000 Americans.

"It's highly probable that MS is an acute viral disease triggered by one or many viruses infecting individuals early in life," says Dr. Byron Waksman of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

But which virus, or viruses, is, or are, very controversial?

In a study published last year in the British journal Nature,

scientists from the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia and the U.S. National Cancer Institute described special antibodies-similar to those produced against AIDS-like viruses-in 60 percent of 52 MS patients. Studies in the British medical journal Lancet have bolstered the viral evidence. They show that MS flare-ups are sometimes linked to bouts of mild viral infections such as the common cold and flu.

At Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, doctors have isolated an unusual virus, dubbed SMON, found in the spinal fluid of a third of 60 MS patients.

"Here's a virus that hasn't been seen before, but we haven't pinned it down yet," says Baylor's Dr. Joseph Melnick.

Scientists are also looking for a potential viral link to diabetes. They know a virus can cause diabetes in animals-and this form of animal diabetes can also be prevented by a vaccine, says Dr. Abner Notkins of NIH. Still, the cause in most cases remains unclear and scientists suspect that a virus may be a factor only in a small number of patients. though the most dangerous infections caused by "fast" viruses have largely been brought under control, this type of virus still causes many problems.

Influenza, which has caused 41 epidemics between 1934 and 1986 in the United States, remains the most troublesome because it is constantly changing and therefore eludes the effect of a vaccine. The drug amantadine is now recommended to prevent and treat all type-A flu infections. Scientists are using geneticengineering techniques to make a vaccine that may be able to guard against several flu strains at once. .

Herpes simplex, neglected in the rush to conquer AIDS, is a sexually transmitted disease that afflicts a large number of people. The virus belongs to a family of agents that can cause a range of disorders from inflammation of the brain to shingles. The drug acyclovir, taken orally, can lessen symptoms of genital herpes.

Dr. Lawrence Corey of the University of Washington is optimistic that a vaccine can be developed to prevent it.

Polio is no longer a widespread public-health problem in the United States, but several thousand American patients who developed the disease in the 1940s and 1950s have recently come down with "re-

/4

current polio"-new symptoms of muscle and joint pain. The problem is caused by the long-term effects of living with impaired nerves, muscles and bones. Some 100 new clinics have opened across the country to help relieve the psychological and physical problems associated with this recurrent, or late, polio. "It has been difficult to deal with because it's so unexpected and unknown," says Dr. Lauro Halstead, a rehabilitation specialist who has late polio symptoms himself.

Hepatitis is another viral problem.

Caused by a family of viruses that includes hepatitis A, Band non-A-non-B, it can be spread in contaminated blood products.

Despite a vaccine, there are 250,000 cases and 4,000 deaths from yearly hepatitis-B alone in the United States.

While the virus gaining the most notoriety today is the one causing AIDS, it also provides an invaluable clue to how slow viruses operate.

Doctors know that the AIDS virus can fester for six months to five years before symptoms are spotted. Some people exposed to it never get sick. Others get a milder form of the disease known as AIDS-related complex.

AIDS is so efficient ~n the way it navigates through the body's immune system to individual cells that researchers are trying to harness the "genius" of the AIDS virus.

Eventually scientists hope to manipulate viruses into being a weapon to cure disorders instead of cause them.

Within the next two years, doctors hope to conduct the first experiment in gene therapy. They will use a virus as a messenger by hijacking its genetic code and inserting a gene that can counteract a rare immune disorder known as ADA deficiency. After extracting the patient's bone marrow, they will infect it with the altered virus and then inject the marrow back into the patient in the hope that the corrective gene will conquer the disorder-.

"We've now got the tools to look at viruses at the cellular level and get them to work for us," says Dr. Stephen Straus of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

And so, in the attack and counterattack way of the war against disease, the balance of power may be shifting from 0 the virus to the scientist.

About the Author: Joseph Carey is an associaie editor with U.S. News & World Report.

From My American Album Almost 25 years ago I made my first trip to America. Memories of that voyage of discovery are hazy today, but I do remember that my most enjoyable experience was the time I spent with three American families in different cities. So, during my recent trip to the United States I decided to re-live that experienceand capture it with my camera.

A colleague in Washington, D.C., made all the necessary arrangements.

A small town, a small family: I couldn't have made a better choice myself. The Petersons-Diane, David and their two sons, Eric, age eight, and Aaron, five-live in Fredericksburg, Virginia. A small historic town on the banks of the Rappahannock River and about 80 kilometers

from Washington, D.C., Fredericksburg is dotted with graceful centuries-old buildings (most of them no higher than two stories) and narrow paved roads. Life here has an unhurried and leisurely pace.

I arrived in Fredericksburg by a Greyhound bus. It was soon after lunchtime and, as arranged, I went to see my host at his office, a law firm in which he is a partner. David greeted me warmly and we almost immediately left for his home. On the

way he explained that he keeps fairly flexible working hours so that he can be home when the boys return from school, since Diane is out working then; she is a clinical social worker, counseling clients at a community mental health center.

We stopped by at the supe~market where David bought some fruits and other provisions. Eric and Aaron were waiting at the house to greet us.

I was touched to learn that in anticipation of my arrival they had been

1. The Peterson boys on afishing expedition. 2. David walks Eric, Aaron and their friends to the school bus stop. 3. Diane chats with another young mother at the church baseball game. 4. David shops for the family.

5. A quick breakfast at the kitchen table. 6. David lunches with the students of an elementary school where he has a voluntary reading assignment once a fortnight. 7. The Petersons at the Festival of India's "Aditi" exhibit.

1. Diane and Aaron share a private given a quick India course. There were books on India and some Indian moment. 2. Diane at her counseling job. objects lying around their room. The , 3. David in his law office. 4. David house itself was more than two cen- discusses a book on India in his turies old; in fact, it was two houses reading class. 5. Playtime for David and Aaron. 6, 7. David and Diane joined together, one built in 1790and discuss the boys' school reports with the other in 1835. the teacher. 8. The Petersons Excited as they were about this walk down Fredericksburg's main street. unknown guest from far off India, right then the boys were more keen to leave for a fishing expedition that mISSIon and was impressed by the David had promised them. intimate interaction between parents After an hour of fishing (and and teachers. throwing the fish back into the river!)

The next day after a quick family on the banks of Motts Run, the city breakfast around the kitchen table, reservoir, we returned home to find David walked the boys to the school Diane already there. She accepted a bus stop. Later in the morning I went gift I had brought from India with with him to the elementary school typically American effervescence. where David takes a voluntary readWe spent the early evening chat- ing class once every two weeks. That ting-mostly about India. Later, we day he had chosen to read from a all accompanied David to the church book on India. After class, we shared baseball game. While he played, Eric a snack with the children in the happily emulated him by swinging school cafeteria. We then picked up one of the big bats. Aaron sat in Diane and the boys and drove to Diane's lap as she talked with Washington to see the Festival of friends.

India's "Aditi" exhibition. They had David and Diane obviously enjoy intended to spend just half an hour smalltown living. Even though law there but were so thrilled and fascipractice in a big city like Washington, nated by the myriad colorful objects D.C., would increase David's in- and the performances by the Indian come, commuting would take away a artists that they stayed on for well lot of time that he would rather over two hours, with Diane carrying spend with his family. Diane's job is a tired Aaron in her arms toward the part-time; it leaves her enough time end of the evening. That was my last for ¡the family. I was struck by the glimpse of the Petersons ... a small, strong family feeling in the young warm American family that believes couple. David doesn't want to miss in doing things together. out on horsing around with the boys As a parting gift, the Petersons while they are still young and playfuL presented me with a color book on The Petersons also make it a point to Fredericksburg. "Dear Avinash," said visit their children's school and dis- a note on the opening page, "Come cuss their progress with the teachers. back someday....

Your friends: I accompanied them on one such David, Diane, Eric and Aaron." 0

Along Washington's Mall It starts off from the nation's memorial to Abraham Lincoln and stretches upto the Capitol. In the span of these three kilometers, Washington's Mall comes alive with museums and parks, festivals and concerts, picnics and demonstrations.

It is the heart of the American capital. ,

At the west end of the Mall is the Lincoln Memorial with the majestic marble statue of the 16th President of the United States.

Martin Luther King, Jr., made his famous HI Have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Memorial.

Two giant columns of the Lincoln Memorial frame the Washington Monument. The Mall is lined withseveral historic monuments.

Early morning joggers and tourists against the backdrop of the domed U. S. Capitol that sits on the east end of the Mall.

A group from India chooses a favored spot for a keepsake photograph-with the Smithsonian "castle" in the background.

Building Museum

Quadrangle Complex

Just two blocks from the Mall, continuing its avenue of museums, is the old Pension Building, builtin the 1880s and restored and reopened recently as theNational Building Museum.

In 1987 the Mall will get a new museum-the Quadrangle near the Smithsonian headquarters (right center). Three stories of the complex will be underground.

Above-ground entrance pavilions will be graceful structures suggesting traditional buildings of Asia and Africa.

At the Festival of American folklife, an annual event on the Mall, an Indian participant explains how plants are used to make perfumes and cosmetics.

or most of the day, and often far into the night, the National Mall in Washington, D.C., is rife with people-nearby office workers on a lunch break, families on a special vacation, early morning joggers, demonstrators with a particular point of view and visitors from around the globe. It boasts festivals, fireworks and concerts; monuments, memorials and a mind-boggling collection of museums. A narrow strip, little more than three kilometers long and less than half a kilometer wide, and stretching from the U.S. Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, the Mall provides a welcome parklike open space amid a sea of huge buildings.

Almost from the moment the site along the Potomac River was chosen by George Washington for the capital of a new nation, plans for the city included a mall. Thomas Jefferson prepared a sketch of the new federal city providing for expansive parklike "public walks" west of the Capitol; these public walks became the genesis of the great Mall that was part of the grand plan for the city of Washington designed by Pierre Charles L'Enfant in 1791.

For most of its first 50 years, following the "removal of the government" to Washington in 1800 from its temporary capital in Philadelphia, the Mall was virtually ignored. Less than charitably referred to as a "cow pasture," it was used as grazing and agricultural land.

Around 1850 construction was started on the Washington Monument and on the Smithsonian Institution Building on the Mall. Around the same time, America's pioneer "landscape gardener," Andrew Jackson Downing, was invited by President Millard Fillmore to design the grounds on the Mall.

But soon the clouds of conflict between North and South burst open and the city was at war. The Mall became a cattle depot for the quartermaster's corps, soldiers drilled near the unfinished Washington Monument, troops were billeted in the Capitol rotunda and a hospital was established near the Smithsonian Building. Railroad tracks crossed the Mall below the Capitol.

Following the conclusion of the Civil War, a new city gradually emerged. As the 20th century dawned and Washington marked its

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Amid the bustle of city life, Constitutional Gardens is an idyllic place for contemplation and solitude. It comprises a 30-hectare lake, extensive parks, bike trails and over 5,000 trees.

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centenary anniversary as the nation's capital, there was a renewed interest in L'Enfant's grand design for the Mall.

The prestigious McMillan Commission presented an extensive new plan calling for the extension of the Mall on the reclaimed land west of the Monument, the creation of a majestic Lincoln Memorial at its end, the unification of all the scattered smaller parks in the area into a long cohesive one, elaborate formal additions at the foot of the Washington Monument, walks lined only with museums, all set appropriately back from the center axis to provide an unimpeded vista, reflecting pools and rows of stately elms. The plan also called for removal of the railroad and construction of a tunnel to take tracks under the Mall area, and moving the Botanic Garden from its position almost directly below the west front of the Capitol to a position at the side. It was another quarter century before the National Capitol Park and Planning Commission was formally established and instructed to implement the McMillan Plan.

The Smithsonian, which had added its Arts and Industries Building next to the castle in 1881, opened the mammoth domed National Museum of Natural History across the Mall in 1910. The Mall was slowly becoming lined with the great cultural institutions long envisioned.

Construction is now moving apace on the new Quadrangle complex. Scheduled to open in 1987, it will house the Smithsonian's new Center for African, Near Eastern and Asian Cultures.

The Mall is far more than buildings, plans and gardens, of course. It is a great fluid national space, attracting people from across the country and for all sorts of reasons. Each Fourth of July, for instance, as the United States celebrates its Independence Day, the Mall is host to a giant national birthday party with concerts, picnics, fireworks and lots of red, white and blue. There are other occasions, solemn and fun-filled. The Mall has festivals celebrating kites and frisbees or a cultural heritage-last year it was the venue of the Indian mela, part of the Festival of India. People gather here for demonstrations, for theater presentations in summer and iceskating in winter. It's a place for all seasons.

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visitor reads the title

(Songs) of a bronze by Hugo Robus in the Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden which was created in 1974.

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"Hard work and more hard work got me where I am today, Barlow. Not my hard work, of course .... " Reprinted with permission from The Saturday Evening Post Society, a division of BFL and MS, Inc. © 1985.

Robert Penn Warren As a Virginian, I was a recent participant in a symposium on Southern identity. In the South, azaleas, dogwood and daffodils are now rising in glory. Like them, each spring we poke our heads up and ask who we are. Southerners are historically slow learners. This year one historian identified us by what we eat.

Suddenly I realize there are no grit trees in New York, where I stand to account for Robert Penn Warren's presence among younger poets. Recognizing how inadequate I am for this task, I'd like to say, as Marianne Moore once said of Shakespeare, he is our father, and let it go at that.

He begins and ends as a writer to whom nothing is so sacred or orthodox it cannot be tested, remeasured. Warren's first book, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr, appeared in 1929.

He was 25 and had already published distinguished poems.

Consider this: if you are 25 and lucky enough to publish one book annually for the next 55 years, your shelf will match his.

But it will have to include history, biography, short stories, plays, novels, anthologies, criticism and poems. It must win all the American prizes, including three Pulitzers, and bring you the recognition of presidents, Hollywood and foreign envoys who leave bad wine in your mailbox. You'll need also to be a teacher, husband, father, swimmer, editor, raconteur and, as Malcolm Cowley has written, "a somewhat legendary character." Please note the precision in that somewhat.

His energy, imagination and vision make Warren a hero to younger poets. His poem is not reality's mirror but its body, whether gorgeous or grotesque. Nobody was ever more fecund or compelling. He celebrates dignity and possibility; he rejects cynicism and ignorance. Asking "Have I learned how to live?" his poems dream large and well. They teach us to ask, "For what is man without magnificence?" Surely this is what Emerson meant when he said, "The world is upheld by the veracity of good men; they make the Earth wholesome."

One figure is central to Warren's poetry. It is the boy at the foot of the grandfather whose memory is full of passionate sparks. In Warren's early poem "Court-Martial," the grandfather draws Civil War campaigns in the summer dust, and the boy learns that "life is only a story" which he calls "the done and the to-be-done. " Warren has spent more than 60 years attending to what rises out of that dust, the story of what happens and why, and younger poets have paid their attentions to him.

But who is this younger poet? At Warren's age, every poet is younger. Let me remind you that Thomas Hardy lived while Warren was writing his first published poems. The Waste Land was fresh rubble; the New Yorker was four years old. Yeats hadn't written about Crazy Jane. Auden was 16, Stravinsky was 31. Wyatt Earp was 81. Most younger poets were not yet hormones in their parents. The younger poet is, of course, an abstraction, not an individual man or woman. How can I assert About the Author: Dave Smith is a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. His latest book, The Roundhouse Voices: Selectedand New Poems, was published last year.

Warren's influence on an abstraction's attention?

Nevertheless, Robert Penn Warren has been a force in the life of every li.ving American poet. In 1938 he and Cleanth Brooks, young instructors at Louisiana State University, in the best American can-do fashion, composed a homemade manual to teach students how to read poetry. Understanding Poetry, that book, has been in print almost 50 years. Where there is a poetry workshop or a review there is Warren and the kind of attention he taught us to pay to a poem, a sort of New Deal that enfranchised generations of readers.

And we could, certainly, cite names of poets he has influenced. But who is really interested in the echoers of the man Allen Tate called "the most gifted person I have ever known"? What do we learn knowing that both Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell were his students? And what effect did he have on Bill Matthews, another student, the new president of the Poetry Society of America? I do not propose to follow out that sort of literary gumshoeing which could conclude only with a list of helpless suspects, which is another abstraction.

Warren's effect, his presence, is his poems, and in them the gift of continuity, of a tradition that civilizes the life of a people and insists on the radiant wildness of each individual heart. This is the writer's tradition, one well described by his wife, the novelist Eleanor Clark, who says: There are after'all only two requirements for being a decent writer: one is to have a total passion-meaning a readiness to give up anything for it, rather than expecting to get anything out of it; the other is to spend your life at it, working like hell.

Because he has worked like hell, he can be read by tobacco farmers and aest~eticians alike. No one makes a hag in the woods, a masturbating novelist, the eye of hawk or mullet, or an old mule cart full of junk so interesting as he does. When he speaks of stars grinding or a mad woman, "legs spread, each ankle/ shackled to the cot-frame" or scares us with Dragon Country's unkillable beast, we can hear the awful breathing of the world. Yet bursting forth like life itself is that voice saying: But let us note, too, how glory, like gasoline spilled On the cement in a garage, may flare, of a sudden, up, In a blinding blaze, from the filth of the world's flare.

He throbs with desire for the big look at life that each heart and each moment can yield. That's what he pleads for in the American masterpiece, Audubon: A Vision, when he says, "Tell me a story of deep delight."

Emerson said of Goethe that he "strikes the harp with a hero's -strength and grace." I don't know a better way to proclaim what Warren's presence is. This harp-striking is a man's struggle to imagine and pursue fullness of spirit with courage and humility, to complete himself. In an early poem Warren wrote, "Past silence, sound insinuates/ Past ear into the inner brain." Well, we all know some sound does that and some

does not. Why is Warren's sound so unmistakably his and so compelling? I suspect it is the broken ballad form and the Anglo-Saxon stress energy, those calls to action that hover adventurously in each of his poems. It is also the mannerly, gentlemanly tale of counsel that bears the flesh and feel of one life in one place. Yet there is something more, something harder to name. This is, I think, the rhythmic pressure and plain honesty of humility and conviction that proceeds from a fundamental belief that each of us has worth, is capable of worth. Writing to his then infant son, Warren wrote: I cannot interpret for you this collocation Of memories. You will live your own life, and contrive The language of your own heart, but let that conversation, In the last analysis, be always of what truth you would live.

Perhaps what is most remarkable about Warren as poet, as an architect of New Criticism, is his idea that the urgent experience of language is meaning. The poem embodies both truth to be sought and the truth as it is lived. Though he has loved as much as anyone the verbal and technical pretties of poetry, he has by main force wrestled into the poem what he once called the world of prose and imperfection-warts, wens, politics, infidelities, Times Square, Iwo lima, telephone screech, solitary walks. His language has been as unpredictable and immediate as the life in and of the vision, hence the whipsawing suspensions of sentence, razoring phrases and cadences so intimate with the heart they shock. He has refused the poem of approximate speech and tried continuously to say the thing itself straight and right. He has been a skeptic, a hunger artist denying abstraction, anonymity and the narcosis of relativism whose end is ''I'm O.K., you're O.K."

Behind Warren's language is another compulsion, the dream of freedom. In and out of poetry, he believes, freedom exists in human acts attentively scrutinized in the witness of a man who stands somewhere, believes in something and willingly pays with his life the costs of that existence. Let me recall the image of the boy and his grandfather. That world drawn in the dust is a dream, but it is also the enactment of generations of truth, not truth as homily but as experienced, felt, comprehended as "the human scheme of values." Encompassing this story is love: the boy loves without knowledge, the grandfather loves in spite of knowledge. That world in the dust is inevitable, flawed, but by both it is forgiven, accepted because that is the only way to live with purpose. The man or woman who lives with purpose is already free. We honor Robert Penn Warren because his tales of heroism, his stories of deep delight may yet shake us to know that-if only that.

Robert Lowell recognizes this in a poem about Warren that speaks of "an old master still engaging the dazzled disciples."

And another younger poet, lames.Dickey, says, "He gives you the sense of poetry as a thing of final importance to life: as a way or form of life."

Few are given to live long and few are given to write well.

We know how rare is the one who writes grandly "though in years"-a Whitman, a Yeats. No one disputes the brilliance, the great and responsible dream of freedom in Robert Penn Warren's last decade. He has, like our Southern flowers, poked his head up, higher and more dangerously, to take hold of the air and the sun. His effect on the younger poet has been to prove the possibility of that life. Let me read a poem from his recently-published New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985. It is that boy remembering that grandfather:

Reprinted from U.S. News & World Report.

June 23. 1986. published at Washington. D.C.

Poetry is Life Poetry was a part of my life growing up. My father, a smalltown businessman who ran a local bank in a Kentucky village, always read poetry aloud to the children. My mother did, too. And my maternal grandfather used to quote poetry to me when I spent summers with him. Our house was full of books.

One day I found pressed against the wall in a bookcase a strange-looking black bound book. I took it out. It was called The Poets of America. I opened it to a page and there was my father's picture. He was a young man in the picture, about 22.

There were several poems by him on that page. I couldn't wait for him to get home. I showed it to him. He took it from me, made some remark like, "Give me that," and then just walked away with it. I never saw it again. He had put away entirely a period in his life when he had studied law and Greek and had written poems. .

He never talked to me about poetry. But once he criticized a poem I'd done in some magazine. I had signed it "Penn

Warren." He said it wasn't my full name. He asked: "Don't you like the name Robert?" I never signed a poem "Penn Warren" again.

In his very old age-oh, he must have been in his 80s-1 got in a modern business envelope a sheet of yellow typing paper of the kind that had been used in the 1890s with some oldfashioned purple ink. The paper was flaking apart. On it there was a little poem in three quatrains that my father had written when he was a young man. It was signed in the old-fashioned print of the typewriter, "RFW"-his name was Robert Franklin Warren. Below the old man had scribbled, "No answer, please."

I had no idea of being a poet. I was mad to be a military man as my grandfathers had been in the Civil War (1861-65). I was going to Annapolis, Maryland, to be a naval officer. Of course.

Why not? Our congressman promised to appoint me. Then by pure accident a stone tossed aimlessly over a high hedge struck me in the left eye, and I could no longer pass the necessary

What a strange feeling all the years to carry It in your head! Once-say almost A hundred and sixty-odd years ago, and Miles away-a young woman carried it In her belly and smiled. It was Not lonely there. It did not see Her smile, but knew itself part of the world It lived in. Do you remember a place like that?

How strange now to feel it-that presence, lonely But not alone, locked in my head.

Are those strange noises All night in my skull But fingers fumbling to get out?

He knows few others there or what they talk about.

More lonely than ever he must feel with the new, strange voices.

I hear in dream the insane colloquy and wrangling.

Is that his croak demanding explanation Of the totally illegal seizure? Then tussle and tangling.

But whence the choked weeping, manic laughter, lips moving in prayer?

It's a mob scene of some sort, and then Zip and whish, like bat wings in dark air, That sometimes fill the great dome my shoulders bear.

But sometimes silence; and I seem to see How out of the jail of my head he comes free.

And in twilight, His lips move without sound, his hands stretch out to me there.

But his face fades from my sight.

Then sometimes I wake, and I know what will wake me.

It's again the fingernails clawing to get out, To get out and tell me a thousand things to make me Aware of what life's obligation is. Nails dig ata skull-seam.

They are stronger and sharper each year. Or is that a dream?

Each year more claw-like-as I watch hair go thin and pate gleam.

I strain to hear him speak, but words come too low From that distance inside my skull, And there's nothing to do but feel my heart full Of what was true more than three-score years ago.

Some night, not far off, I'll sleep with no such recollectionNot even his old-fashioned lingo and at dinner the ritual grace, Or the scratched-in-dust map -of Shiloh and Bloody Pond, Or the notion a man's word should equal his bond, And the use of a word like honor as no comic disgrace.

And in our last communal trance, when the past has left no trace, He'll not feel the world's contempt, or condescending smile, For there'll be nobody left, in that after-while, To love him-or recognize his kind. Certainly not his face.

1 have come far to celebrate this wonderful poet at the advent of his 81st year. It seems to me that honor is the exact and necessary word when such a man stands among us. It is the only name for his influence on younger American poets and it is the name we must be keen to keep and pass on.

0

physical. So 1 entered Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, the training, a lieutenant came up and said: "I hear you have been to college and have written something." 1 guess 1 was the Tennessee.

At the time, there was an awakening in the South. Soldiers only person he'd seen in his command who'd ever been to were coming home from World War 1. This was a real period of college. Anyway, this guy said: "We publish a magazine at the ferment. Vanderbilt happened to have an English department end of the season called Mess Kit. And we have a poem in it with several people of extraordinary qualities like John Crowe - every time. Will you write the poem?" I said I'd try. It ended up being about the vacant parade ground after drill.

Ransom, who was my freshman English teacher, and some Every time I'm asked where my ideas for poems come from, students of extraordinary quality like Allen Tate.

I try to think it through again. I don't come up with the same There was a questioning of all sorts of attitudes, new and answer every time, either. old, in the South, and there certainly wasn't always agreement Sometimes you see some actual event that somehow starts a on answers. But the world of the South was changing in that generation. It woke up in many ways and discovered its past in line. I drove my mother once to a funeral. I've got that scene in my mind; it was so strange to me that she would go miles into many, sometimes fallacious, ways, but ways that generally the country for the service of a woman whom she scarcely involved real issues. answer to that My tirst poem was published when I was 17. I was at knew. But years later the event was a poem-the question.

Vanderbilt and had joined the Citizens Military Training Corps.

Another time I saw a cock pheasant booming past my At Camp Knox, Kentucky, we fought sham battles and spent hours a day on the rifle range. I had a great time. At the end of shoulder when I was passing on a snowy path. I looked back

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and saw the bird explode into the sunset. That became a poem, just right on the spot. I outlined it then and worked on it for some weeks afterward.

Sometimes, you just pick a certain phrase. You don't know what it means. For instance, "A great boulder in a stream by a house in Vermont." No poem: just an object. I'd seen it a thousand times, but one day the boulder gave me a first line as I was lying on it drying off after swimming. It could be as accidental as that.

I get many ideas while on long swims. I sort of half-dream.

It's a numbing, bemusing experience. And a thousand ideas drift into the head. There's rhythm and blankness, and you feel detached from yourself. It opens the head to suggestion.

Almost all poems are fragmentary autobiography. Sometimes I can trace an idea back to some fragment of memory. But I couldn't start making sense out of the events that gave rise to the fragment. It has to make its own sense, years later. A line or two may exist in your head and suddenly it goes somewhere.

Something makes it click again.

Every poem is in one sense a symbol. Its meaning is always more than it says to you-the writer-and more than it specifies directly to the reader. Otherwise, it doesn't exist as a poem. It's just a statement of some kind which provokes the reader into his own poem.

I stopped writing poetry for a long period of time and wrote fiction, in the 1940s and early 1950s. except for one poem, "Brother to Dragons." Then I got married. We spent a lot of

Though Robert Penn Warren has loved the "verbal pretties of poetry," he has wrestled into the poem the world of "prose and imperfection."

our time in Italy. My wife had somehow gotten hold of an enormous ruined 17th-century fortress over the sea where we spent a lot of time. Life was full of very pleasant things. One year we were there when our daughter was just a year old. I tried to write a poem about the place, not knowing what kind of impulse was there. And suddenly I saw this little girl standing there on old, once blood-soaked stones. Within a day, I wrote the poem "Sirocco." It started out to be a sonnet, and suddenly when I broke the sonnet line the poem came like a dream. Since that time, I've published, my God, something like 15 books of poems. Poetry started with that moment.

A poem you don't feel to your toes is not a very good one.

But it also takes a person who knows how to feel to his toes to read a poem. Take a rhyme from Alexander Pope. He said the accused get convicted and hanged because -the jurymen won't sit through another afternoon of dullness; they want to eat lunch. The line goes: "And wretches hang that jurymen may dine." That line has a spitting motion. The physical feeling in the line is the meaning of the line. There are other kinds of experiences that go into poetry, images and so forth. But it's the basic physicality that you have to become aware of. A lot of people don't understand that; they think poetry is just something pretty. Pretty, hell! It's life; it's a vital experience.

The trick in understanding poetry is to read a poem to

yourself so that you hear it while you read it. You don't necessarily say the words; the muscles make the total movement of the words. I want to see how it tastes, how the muscular play is right to the toes. The language is not supposed to be simply signs on a paper. It's supposed to be heard-but heard as sound that's physically realized-and visualized. That's why it's important to memorize and recite poems.

When I was in school we were graded on memorization and on whether we had gotten the feel of a poem. At Vanderbilt in the freshman English course, I had to memorize at least 500 lines a term. Today, young people aren't asked to do that.

When I taught at Yale University, I used to ask students in a seminar which of them could quote a poem all the way through.

Only once did I ever get a person who could do so. Modern youngsters never have a chance to learn anything about poetry.

It's the practicality of a world in which education no longer teaches you how to live, just how to learn to make a living. A whole side of the self is gone.

By a bill Congress has passed, the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress is now called the poet laureate. The consultantship is a job I also had in 1944 and 1945 when I was the second person to hold the post.

People have asked me whether establishment of a poet laureate does something for poetry. I don't know that it does.

You can't by such an action change the nature of American society. The title doesn't make it any more obvious or probable that taste in poetry is going to change or that poetry is going to be more important. The issue is deeper seated than that-at the root of society.

There's probably more reading of poetry now than ever. It's published all the time in endowed publications. Somebody is buying those books, and somebody is reading them. But what are they reading? There's an awful lot of bad poetry being written and praised, along with the good or fine work of such writers as James Dickey, Richard Eberhart, Richard Wilbur and a young poet named Edward Hirsch whom I've just read.

But there's no central revolutionary drive in the poetry of our time like there was earlier in the century when Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot transformed poetry. Poets then suddenly saw the world differently from their predecessors. I don't happen to agree with the general points of view of either Eliot or Pound.

But I agree with their basic feel for the relationship between society and language.

And don't forget Edward Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost. They are powerful poets. Robinson was really the nearest thing we ever had to a literal poet laureate. When Teddy Roosevelt was President [1901-08] his son Kermit found an old, scarcely read book on the shelves of the prep-school library. It was an early volume of poems by Robinson. Kermit liked them so much he told his father to read it. Dad did and thought they were fine. He said, "Find out about this guy."

Well, the guy was starving and drinking himself to death and had published only a few volumes. Roosevelt asked that the guy be brought to him. He told Robinson: "Unfortunately, America is behind England, where they have a 'civillist'-they find worthy citizens and give them a pension for life to go on being worthy. In a civilized country I'd put you on that list. I can't do that, but I can give you a post in customs. You'll be working for the U.S. Government, but for heaven's sake, if it comes down to a pinch, shortchange the government and stick to poetry." 0

Deregulation Is Good Business

by B. ROBERT OKUN

Contrary to the critics' dire predictions, the deregulation revolution has led to greater efficiency and competition in U.S. industries, benefiting the consumer with lower prices and improved services.

A product of deregulation, Ransome Airlines (above) is one of some 200 new air "commuter" lines that mushroomed between 1980 and 1985-a period in which more than 15,000 new truck companies were also set up (above, left). In the field of communications, divestiture of the giant A T & T opened the way for service and equipment "challengers" s;uchas MeI (left).

he United States is now entering the second decade of a public policy revolution that is contributing substantially to the nation's current prosperity. In a total reversal of corporatist policies dating to the New Deal in the 1930s, and in the case of railroad regulation to the 1880s, the U.S. Government has been getting out of the business of sanctioning and enforcing cartels in such industries as airlines, trucking, railroads, telecommunications and energy. The result of this deregulation has been to lower prices, improve customer service and choice, hasten technological change in the previously cartelized industries and bolster the competitiveness and efficiency of the American economy as a whole.

The deregulation revolution began under President Gerald Ford, accelerated under President Jimmy Carter and is continuing under President Ronald Reagan. It has been truly bipartisan in sponsorship, and it has been supported by three Administrations and five Congresses. The academic ground-

work was prepared by economists spanning the political spectrum-from the Harvard Law School and the University of Enterprise Institute and the Chicago, from the American Brookings Institution alike.

One of the first experiments in deregulation came in 1968, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowed limited competition against the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) in the sale of terminal equipment.

The FCC continued to open up more and more telecommunications services to competition during the mid- to late 1970s. And in 1980, it permitted AT&T, through a separate subsidiary, to market enhanced services, such as its advanced communications system, on an unregulated basis.

The most significant transportation deregulation took place during the Carter Administration, when the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) began to repeal the rules that set prices, allocated markets and

T

The spectacular benefits of deregulation show that progress can restricted the entry of new competitors into the airline, trucking and railroad industries. In 1977, the CAB allowed the first certification of a new airline for interstate travel since the 1940s; it had previously blocked entry by 79 straight applicants. By 1985, the CAB was totally out of business. Today, airline entry, fares and route structure are almost completely unrestricted, although airline safety and access to airport gates are still tightly regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration.

During the Reagan Administration, the FCC has substantially deregulated television and radio broadcasting and computer-related telecommunications services. It has also taken steps necessary to implement the divestiture of AT&T ordered by Federal District Judge Harold Greene in 1982. One of President Reagan's first steps in office was to lift the oil price controls and allocation quotas that had been instituted by President Nixon and were gradually being phased out under President Carter. And in the face of congressional opposition, he has been steadily whittling away at the convoluted regulatory apparatus governing the pricing and distribution of natural gas.

The industries experiencing this deregulation have been thoroughly shaken up, with the result that their efficiency and ability to respond quickly to changing technologies and customer preferences have substantially improved. Brash new competitors have revolutionized the transportation and communications industries-from People Express and New York Air in airlines, to Overnite Transportation Company and A-P-A Transport in trucking, to MCI and General Telephone & Electronics in long-distance calling and Rolm in telephone switchboards.

Obsolete plants and equipment, such as inefficient oil refineries, have had to be dosed.

And labor productivity has soared, particularly in transportation, as downward cost pressures have forced changes in inefficient work rules and inflexible labor contracts.

The process has been painful for many established companies that depended on regulation for guaranteed markets.

Some business giants in air transportation have gone bankrupt or near bankrupt. Dozens of trucking companies have gone out of business. But deregulation has been a golden opportunity both for imaginative entrepreneurs and for their customers.

The entire U.S. economy has benefited from lower costs of freight, communications and energy.

Dire predictions that costs would rise after deregulation have been refuted in industry after industry. In 1977, for example, then Senator George McGovern entered into the Congressional Record a statement by Donald Moran, vicepresident for sales and traffic at North Central Airlines: "Competition would prompt reduced fares at first, but then fares would return to what they are now because cut-rate competition will have put everyone else out of business. Small carriers will. disappear.

Big airlines will get bigger. There wouldn't be more competition.

There would be less."

What happened was just the opposite. Between 1980 and 1985, 76 major new carriers and 203 commuter lines such as Ransome and Henson entered the industry. Other local service carriers such as US Air and Piedmont were suddenly free to extend their networks. The result was more competition than

ever before, with fare wars and massive discounting often initiated by the new entrants. Major carriers and new competitors alike could survive only by carrying fewer empty seats, making more efficient use of their airplanes and boosting worker productivity. United Airlines and Western Airlines, for example, use their planes 10.5 hours per day, compared with 8.5 hours before deregulation.

Airline pilots have had to give up their insistence on three pilots in cockpits designed for two, and the average size of crews per aircraft has declined since 1979 without any sacrifice in service.

Thanks to competition, these improvements in efficiency have been translated into savings for consumers. As of 1984, according to the CAB, American travelers had saved $3,500 million on air fares since deregulation.

Although short-haul fares between smaller cities rose considerably, the declines in long-distance fares between large cities were even greater.

Today travelers can fly from coast to coast for $79. Thomas Moore, currently a' member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, calculates that the average per-kilometer airline fare fell 8.5 percent in real terms between 1976 and 1982, even though the inflation-adjusted costs of air travel (primarily fuel and capital) rose 15 percent in the same period.

Critics of deregulation were also wrong in energy markets.

When President Reagan decontrolled prices for crude oil and refined petroleum products in January 1981, Edwin Rothschild, director of the Energy Action Education Foundation, predicted that rising oil prices would add one percentage point to the rate of inflation.

Fortunately for American consumers, this prediction proved false. Prices did rise initially. But the average price per liter of leaded gasoline has fallen from 35 cents in 1981 to 29 cents today. The price of crude oil has fallen 28 percent in real terms and continues to decline. The reason is simple. The removal of allocation q}lotas and the lifting of strict price controls on oil produced by "older" wells led to an increase in domestic oil exploration and production. Meanwhile, higher prices throughout the world had led both to energy conservation and new oil discoveries, and hence to a worldwide glut that progressively lowered prices. After deregulation, U.S. energy producers and consumers were, for the first time, able to respond quickly to changing market conditions around the world.

The partial decontrol of natural gas, limited to about half of domestic gas supplies, has similarly led to lower prices in defiance of alarmist prophecies. In July 1984, the Citizen{Labor Energy Coalition predicted that real gas prices at the wellhead would rise by five percent in 1985 as a result of the lifting of controls on some gas in January 1985. The Interstate Natural Gas Association of America made a comparable forecast in December 1984.

By March 1985, however, the price paid to producers by interstate pipelines had fallen seven percent in real terms from 1984 levels, and it is expected to fall another five percent this year. In February 1986, the American Gas Association estimated that increased competition among producers and pipelines would reduce wellhead gas prices this year by 25 percent from 1985 levels.

come from reducing government's role, rather than enlarging it.

Some of the most dramatic savings from deregulation have come in trucking, where tariffs must still be filed with the ICC but substantial discounts are now permitted and truckers have much greater route flexibility for most commodities. In many instances, trucking companies need no longer return from their destinations with empty trailers. No longer must a hauler prove that it will not harm existing firms when it wants to serve a new route. New competitors-the ICC has authorized 15,000 new carriers over the past five years-are taking full advantage of technologies that are dramatically lowering distribution costs: containers that fit on the back of flatbed trucks, fuel-efficient engines and on-board computers.

Thanks to these changes, the average shippers' discount in trucking since 1980 has been 20 percent off tariff, and discounts are frequently as high as 40 percent. Lever Brothers, the giant consumer goods firm, estimates that its shipping costs have declined by ten percent in real terms since 1980. And the Intermodal Transportation Association estimates that the U.S. economy is saving between $40,000 million and $50,000 million a year in logistics and distribution costs as the result of deregulation, as well as improvements in handling inventory.

Communications costs, which had already been falling as the result of advances in microwave, satellite and digital switching technology, fell even more rapidly after deregulation.

AT&T lowered its long-distance telephone rates by six percent in 1984, its largest decrease in 14 years. Another 5.7 percent reduction followed in June 1985, and yet another substantial rate cut was announced in 1986. Price pressure is coming from competitors such as MCI, Sprint, Allnet and lIT. Prices for local phone service have been rising as a result of the delayed impact of the inflation of the late 1970s and several pre-divestiture rulings by the FCC, which were designed to move the United States toward a more cost-based telephone service. However, the residential telephone flat rate for local service still averages $14 a month in urban areas and $10 a month in the suburbs. And for the U.S. economy as a whole, the advantages of competition in long-distance calling and switchboard equipment are dramatic. Americans today can buy wireless telephones or can obtain such features as customized dialing, call holding and call conferencing.

According to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the communications costs for a major New York City bank, Irving Trust Company, have risen less than three percent annually in the last two years, compared with 15 percent before deregulation.

Railroads are the one deregulated industry where prices have risen. Indeed, without the flexibility to charge higher rates that was granted by the Staggers Rail Act of 1980, a number of railroads probably would have gone bankrupt. But even here, though there are claims of unfairness by some coal shippers and electric utilities, railroads have not raised their prices dramatically. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicate that rail rate increases, adjusted for inflation, averaged 0.5 percent per year from 1980 to 1984, after deregulation, compared with 3.3 percent from 1976 to 1980. Clearly, competition from other modes of transportation-trucks, air freight and pipelines-

diminishes the possibility of monopoly practices by railroads in transporting most commodities.

The decontrol of prices and market entry is consistent with strict enforcement of safety standards, and in fact the safety performance of deregulated industries has been impressive.

From 1979 through 1984, 138 Americans died in commercial airline crashes, compared with 206 fatalities from 1974 through 1978, prior to deregulation.

Using total accidents per 100,000 departures as a standard measure of safety, 1980 and 1984 were the safest years for scheduled airline travel over the past 14 years. In 1985, commuter airlines experienced the lowest number of accidents since they began domestic air travel.

Alarms have been raised, however, about the tragic increase in domestic air traffic accidents in 1985, and the Transportation Secretary is planning to add nearly 1,000 inspectors and air traffic controllers over the next several years in an effort to make sure that the tragedies of 1985 are not repeated.

There is no indication that deregulation of the trucking industry has led to more accidents, either. The number of accidents was lower during the four years after deregulation than in the pre-deregulation years of 1978 and 1979.-(There was a large increase in accidents in 1984, however.) According to the ICC, the percentage of total accidents accounted for by ICC-authorized carriage has remained at approximately the same percentage for the nine-year period 1976-85.

Decartelization is also consistent with the goal of universal service. More than ten ICC studies over the past three years indicate that truck service to small communities is at least as extensive as before deregulation.

"Lifeline" telephone service at reduced rates has been made available for eligible lowincome households.

Before divestiture, over 90 percent of American households enjoyed telephone service; the percentage is slightly higher today. And though major airlines have dropped service to 74 communities since deregulation, the total number of departures from these communities rose by 26 percent by 1984 as regional and commuter airlines came in to take advantage of market opportunities.

Economic deregulation is the first major victory of free market economics in American public policy, and it sets an important precedent. Since the New Deal, economic advances in the United States have been equated with bold government initiatives. The spectacular benefits of deregulation have shown the progress that can come from reducing government's role rather than enlarging it. By liberating price controls and permitting competition, the deregulation revolution has allowed entrepreneurs to find the most profitable ways of serving customers.

Tax cuts have been given much of the credit for the Reagan economic boom that has led to ten million new jobs for Americans over the last three years. But much of the credit also belongs to a quieter ten-year-old revolution known as deregulation.

D About the Author: B. Robert Okun is executive director of the Republican Research Committee for the U. S. House of Representatives.

He formerly directed the House Task Force on Regulatory Reform.

Companies that want to innovate must provide for a variety of funding channels to ensure that good ideas with long-term potential are not systematically turned down.

Enter

the Intrapreneur Intrapreneuring is the term I coined for internal entrepreneurs who, while employed in a corporate job, are nevertheless given the freedom and incentive by their companies to create and market their own ideas for their own and the company's profit. The intrapreneur's job is to create a vision of a new business reality and to make it happen. The primary problem in big organizations is not blocking the vision-many companies do their best to encourage new ideas-but, rather, blocking the action of the intrapreneur. The solution lies in letting the intrapreneur act.

Probably nothing is more annoying to intrapreneurs than control systems that weren't designed with them in mind. In some cases, control systems are more than annoying; they can keep intrapreneurs from the timely execution of acts that are important to the survival of the intraprise.

At one time when Bernie Loomis, the intrapreneur behind Hot Wheels, Star Wars toys, Strawberry Shortcake dolls and more, was in charge of Kenner Toys Division of General Mills, an important customer, Toys "'jf" Us, was on the ropes. Suppliers, sensing impending trouble, were starting to put a hold on their credit. Toys "'j{" Us needed some good news to offset the growing panic. At a meeting of the American toy-industry credit managers, Loomis announced the much needed good news-General Mills was extending a $ 5 million line of credit to Toys ")J" Us. Although General Mills was aware of Loomis's proposal to extend Toys ••,. •• Us the line of credit, Loomis does not recall receiving an official okay to do what he did; What he did have was

the confidence and support of his sponsors-Don Swanson, his boss, and Bob Kinney, the chief executive officerand a track record with General Mills that allowed him to express his typical intrapreneurial independence.

To its great credit, General Mills backed Loomis up, and Toys "J{" Us survived and flourished.

Nothing slows innovation more decisively than sitting around and waiting for permission. Many large organizations, hoping to improve fiscal responsibility and control, have placed the authority to approve innovative acts many levels above the people who innovate.

As a young consultant, I found that often my job was to help clients prepare a series of presentations, each at a higher level, asking for permission to proceed with an intrapreneurial project. Months would pass between presentations while exalted managers found time in their busy schedules to listen to the plea for funds. But when the presentation was successful, all that happened was that, after the obligatory modification, the request was approved not for action but for presentation at a yet higher level.

The farther from direct contact with the hands-on intrapreneur a decision is made, the less understanding will go into it. The ultimate foolishness is a system in which people more than a level apart are not supposed to talk to one another. So the intrapreneur tells his boss, who tells his boss's boss, and so on until the ultimate decision-maker is reached. The result is much like the childhood game of "telephone" wherein the message, after passing from person to person down the line, emerges as nonsense. Not only is all

the detailed vision of the concept lost in the multilevel approval process, but the ultimate decision-maker has no way to judge the commitment and quality of the intrapreneurial team, which is the most important predictor of success or failure of an intraprise. The solution is to avoid multilevel approvals whenever possible.

Let the doer decide.

For those few things that do require higher-level approval, what is needed is a direct relationship between the doer and the approver. If innovation is to proceed rapidly, intrapreneurs must be able to get face-to-face with decision-makers. They need rapid access and adequate time to explain the intuitive rationale that often lies behind high-potential ideas.

Approving the routine takes little time, but understanding something really new is very time-consuming. It's not just a matter of projecting and adjusting the past. To judge a potential innovation, one must grasp a chain of logic so ephemeral that it has eluded the competitors. Most innovations are only obvious afterward. Practically speaking, top managers don't have the time to hear out all their intrapreneurs-there aren't that many hours in a day. If these decisions are pushed to the top of the organization, presentations will be brief and decisionmakers will rightly feel they don't know enough to decide. They will call for more study and, hence, more delay. Numerous innovations will only occur if more people, especially at lower levels, are empowered to give the go-ahead.

A new business is buffeted by surprises. Often there is neither enough time nor enough information to make a rational decision. Thus, the person to make the best decision is the intrapreneur, who has the most information and the most direct experience of the realities of the business.

It will be argued that, though close to the facts, intrapreneurs are not objective.

Good intrapreneurs are surprisingly open to feedback and perfectly willing to make

Intrapreneurs are better off in companies that pump discretionary time, money and head counts into the system and tell managers to tolerate some underground activity. changes when something isn't working.

That they care deeply about the venture's success is a virtue. Rather than seeing each setback as evidence of a failure, dedicated intrapreneurs begin trying another way. This experimental persistence is how businesses get built.

Ponderous planning systems may be unable to effect changes until next year's budget, but the entrepreneurial competition just does it-now. No matter how strategically wise or strong a boxer is, if he has to call New York to clear each punch during his fight in Las Vegas, he is doomed. Silly though this sounds, many newbusinesses in large firms face control systems nearly as unworkable. To make intrapreneuring work, intrapreneurs need the power to take action.

One intrapreneurial group puts it quite simplyas a policy: "If it's my ass and my commitment, I control it." That philosophy has gotten them thousands of millions'of dollars of new products.

When all corporate resources are committed to what is planned, nothing is left for trying the unplannable. Yet innovation is inherently unplannable. Companies that innovate successfully empower their employees to use corporate resources in ways that cannot always be predicted or justified.

The most basic form of corporate slack is the freedom to use a portion of one's time exploring new ideas without knowingwhere they will lead. Many American organizations, including IBM, Tektronix, Ore-Ida, 3M and Du Pont, permit people to spend five to 15 percent of their time exploring ideas that interest them. When I asked Stephanie Kwolek (then a bench chemist at Du Pont) who had approved the research that led to the discovery of the superstrong fiber Kevlar, she said she had. She worked on it without telling her boss, even after she made her first fibers-until she was certain she could make them repeatedly. When asked why she did so, she said: "It was my job to spend some of my time exploring new ideas on my own. I didn't need anyone's permission."

Without discretionary time, new ideas' remain just that: ideas. And ideas without action die. In their early stages, most new ideas appear unworkable. The creative individual needs time to prove them true or false without showing them to others and being forced to raise expectations that are likely to be dashed.

It is easy to publish a policy that allows people some discretionary time to work on their own projects. It is harder to implement that policy if managers are under duress to move the official projects along faster. The concept of planned woolgathering and random exploration time is common for technologists. But every job needs innovation, and time to think and try new things.

When the products of discretionary time prove interesting, the next step in developing them usually costs real money, not just fiddling around with time and a few inexpensive parts or travel vouchers. This means that discretionary funds must be available to continue the increasingly promising exploration. Unfortunately, in an effort to save money, many controllers seek to find and eliminate discretionary funds. The result is not economy; it is an enormous waste of human energy and cash alike.

Minds that are denied the ability to explore and test are being wasted. At today's salaries that is itself quite expensive. Worse, individuals not trusted to handle money become indifferent to it and, in fact, may even enjoy waste. They pack their budgets full of waste to hide money that can be diverted to useful purposes if the need arises, but must be spent in any case to preserve the budget line for the next year. They select the safe and expensive way rather than try something inexpensive and risk failure without backup funds to try again. The resulting brute-force solutions not only cost more to develop, but later cost more to produce.

When discretionary funds are scarce, people give up innovating and become resigned or bitter. Rather than beg for funds, they take their creativity home and become deadwood at work.

It is better to have fewer people, each empowered to act, than to have too many, all of whom sit on their hands waiting for permission to do something.

The actions needed are clear: • Increase the proportion of unplanned discretionary funds in every budget.

Earmark some for exploring new ideas.

• Push discretionary spen.ding authority down toward and to the people who do the work. Even a few hundred dollars of annual discretionary budget conveys dignity and the right to try things.

• Create multiple pots of discretionary monies for intrapreneurs to draw from.

The fellows program at Ore-Ida is a good example of how to make multiplepot discretionary funding work. Every two years Ore-Ida names five fellows, each of whom is given a $50,000 annual budget to fund other employees in the exploration of new ideas. The results have been impressive: • A new computerized scale system funded by a $15,000 fellows grant has already saved the company $2 million.

• A $10,000 fellows grant supported engineers in developing a novel heatrecovery system that has already saved $170,000 in one year.

• A researcher had a gut feeling that frozen potato skins would sell, but his superiors were unwilling to back him. He got funding from a fellow to move the concept along until it could be approved through other channels.

Bartley N. Wankier was the vegetableproducts researcher who believed in frozen potato skins. His superiors had good points to counter his enthusiasm.

Ore- Ida had no way to produce the frozen skins in quantity, nor was there proof that a market existed. But those kinds of reasons just form the starting blocks for the intrapreneur.

Fortunately for Wankier and Ore-Ida, one fellow agreed to put up $2,000 to explore ways to get the skin off the potato. With $2,000 and determination he made enough progress to attract conventional product-development funding for a full-time engineer.

Wankier's solution went against the Ore-Ida grain, so it needed something special to get it moving. Everyone was used to blanching potatoes with water to remove the skins, but Wankier did it the. same way you and I do-baking the potatoes first and scooping the potato out of the skin. The only difference is that he built a machine to do it fast. With the biggest production hurdle out of the way and successful market tests accomplished, Ore-Ida now expects frozen potato skins to be one of the "biggestselling items ever." Without discretionary seed money, the idea would have died.

At Texas Instruments (TI), managers have three distinct funding options for

new R&D projects. If their proposal is rejected by the centralized Strategic Planning System because it is not expected to yield acceptable economic gains, intrapreneurs can seek a "wild-hare" grant. The wild-hare program was instituted by Patrick Haggerty, while he was TI's chairman, to ensure that good ideas with long-term potential were not systematically turned down. Alternatively, if the project is outside the mainstream of strategic piaoning, managers or engineers can contact one of dozens of individuals who hold IDEA grant purse strings (the acronym is for Identify, Develop, Expose, Act), and can authorize up to $25,000 for prototype development. The briefness of the one-page application form expresses both a commitment not to become bureaucratically slow and a high level of trust in the people they have hired. It was an IDEA grant that resulted in TI's highly successful Speak n Spell learning aid.

Gene Frantz was the intrapreneur for

The most basic form of corporate slack is the freedom to use a portion of one's time exploring new ideas without knowing where they will lead. the idea he was widely, credited for inventing, a low-cost speech synthesizer built on one tiny new chip with a voice quality equal to that of the telephone system. Frantz, who stayed with the Speak n Spell product for six years before moving on to a new intraprise, credits his boss on the project, Paul Breedlove, as the source of the idea, and two others with key technology. When they failed to get funding in the normal strategicplanning channels, they applied for a wild-hare grant and were turned down, Frantz says, "because we were too wild!"

But, he continues, "We never ran out of alternatives for funding." They applied for an IDEA grant and got it.

Before they had spent $10,000 of the possible $25,000, Frantz and a group of about 35 part-time volunteers got to the "proof-of-concept" phase and could go on normal Texas Instruments development funding. Frantz says his role, in addition to designing the printed circuit, was as "mother" of the project-he had to go back to the "corporate fathers" every quarter to make a presentation of

progress for the next block of>funding.

A company that provides a variety of funding channels encourages the pursuit of alternative approaches, particularly during the early stages of a new idea's development. In fact, no activity should be without discretionary funds.

At Matsushita, the so-called GE of Japan, all divisions are allowed to keep 40 percent of their profit for "selfrenewal." No portfolio analysis judges a division incapable of innovation.

Venture capitalists are tight about total budgets but loose about changes in plan that substitute one expense for another.

This same flexibility is necessary for the success of an intrapreneurial venture, and it has been employed in some large corporations with excellent results. For example, when IBM decided to get into the personal computer line, it ~asked Philip D. Estridge, a division director, how long it would take and how much it would cost to get into the market. He reportedly said, "One year and $20 million if you do it my way."

His way included the discretion to create a separate organization well outside the context of IBM's traditional way of doing business. The intraprise was located in Boca Raton, Florida, where IBM's small systems are developed. This gave Estridge the skill base "and expertise he needed for his project. The group had simple, straightforward objectives. It had to produce a product that would measure up to IBM's rigorous demands for quality, would be easy to use and would maintain the company's usual h.igh level of customer satisfaction.

Estridge had almost total discretion about how to spend his project's funding.

He had a complete functional team whose members reported to him but who were responsible for their own organizations, such as marketing and manufacturing. He used marketing methods considered unorthodox for IBM, selling through retail dealers and third-party retailers as well as through IBM's own marketing organization and Product Centers. In an unprecedented move, Estridge persuaded Armonk to set aside a 70-yearold tradition and let retailers service a product under IBM warranty. He contracted out much of the hardware development and nearly all the software, and brought the computer to market in nine months and under budget.

Within a year and a half he had 12 percent of the market share and was

rapidly becoming the dominant vendor of personal computers. The unit became a full-fledged IBM division, with Estridge as its president, in 1983. Its success helped pave the way for IBM's continuing intrapreneurship.

Many intrapreneurs find it easier to get money than to get the people they need.

Their current bosses refuse to release people who want to join an intraprise, not only because they are needed now but in case they are needed later. These problems get worse as companies control expenses by limiting the number of people each division can have instead of just most common are the the funds-the so-called "head-count" controls.

Economists know that rationing rarely produces good allocation, and headcount restrictions are no exception. They are a powerful force for the status quo because when head counts are frozen, existing activities generally keep their people, and new or growing ones do without. If innovation is to happen where head count is tightly controlled, there must be a discretionary head-count system to rapidly feed human resources to deserving intrapreneurs.

We now know that most corporate innovation begins in a kind of underground economy beneath the scrutiny of the ponderous official systems. The size of this underground economy can be stupendous. "In the old days, we had 70 people working on one hidden project," says an intrapreneur.

Another intrapreneur bootlegged $10 million of time and expense money developing a new weapons system. He tested the prototypes using army personnel and equipment. The first news that top management had of their $10 million investment came when he showed them the test reports. Several thousands of million dollars in sales later, they may have forgiven him.

Management can try to make the official systems of the company as easy to use as the underground, thus obviating the need for sub-rosa intrapreneuring.

But unless the whole company is built around intrapreneurial teams, the official system is unlikely to be sufficiently intrapreneur-friendly. Intrapreneurs are better off in companies that pump discretionary time, money and head counts into the system and tell managers to tolerate some underground activity. Enough slack to permit the early stages of intrapreneuring is an important element in building an (Text continued on page 48)

An American Traveler in 19th Century India "We may try to see things as objectively as we please. Nonetheless, we can never see them with any eyes except our own."

What that sage among judges, Benjamin N. Cardozo, said of judicial perceptions is evtOn more true of foreign perceptions of a country. Every visitor's appreciation is shaped by his own country's heritage, culture and ethos. This rich diversity in perceptions of a country such as India, which itself is so diverse in its scenic beauty, has never been fully documented.

Understandably, British writings on India predominate, although German and French writings have won recognition for their quality. What is surprising is the almost total neglect of the writings of American travelers in India in the last century. .

However, it was not by conscious research, but by mere serendipity, known to frequenters of rare-book shops, that I was introduced in the last few years to three works by Americans who reported on India in the mid-19th century.

They came from altogether different walks of life, one being a j~urnalist, another a lawyer and the third a clergyman.

Bayard Taylor was the first American foreign correspondent to "do India." He arrived in Bombay almost on the eve of New Year's Day 1853, and for two months traveled in the north. His book A Visit to India, China and Japan in the Year 1853 was published in 1855. It was such a bestseller that by 1859 it had appeared in 16 editions (SPAN, July 1982).

Probably the First Indian War of Independence in 1857 contributed to the sales. It certainly prompted the Wall Street lawyer, John B. Ireland, to write a book, Wall Street to Cashmere, published in 1859 (SPAN, September 1984).

A third book, The Land of the Veda: Personal Reminiscences of India by the Reverend William Butler, provides very interesting points of comparison and contrast.

The author arrived in India in 1856 and was a witness to the 1857 upheavals.

He returned to the United States in 1864, completing the book seven years later. The language barrier made all three visitors dependent on British help and interpretations.

Like John Ireland before him, Butler had read the Irishpoet Thomas Moore's epic poem Lalla Rookh and he sought after the sights and sounds it had so graphically described. If the journalist was more daring in his travels, and the lawyer more meticulous in describing the mechanics of a tour of the subcontinent in those times, the clergyman was, as one might expect, single-minded about his mission, yet extraordinarily responsive to the beauties of the land.

Butler took up his post at the Methodist Episcopal Church Mission in Bareilly, in Uttar Pradesh, in January 1857, having

arrived in Calcutta on September 23, 1856, from Boston after stopping in England. He discovered to his chagrin that few in Bareilly had ever heard of America. That had not been the experience of Taylor and Ireland, who found that in Bombay and in the south, educated people spoke knowledgeably of the United States. "Usually English people ignore all knowledge of our country," Ireland had written. "In India we are generally very well understood."

Butler soon became familiar with the customs and cuisine of India. He learned how much pomp and ceremony mattered.

During the visit of one of Queen Victoria's sons, the Duke of Edinburgh, to India, "a part of the pageant was the procession of elephants. These animals, 170 in number, and the finest in size and appearance in India, were each decorated in the richest housings and ridden by the Nawabs and Rajahs who owned them, each trying hard to outvie the other. Perhaps the Maharajah of Putteallah carried off the palm. The housings of his immense elephant were of such extraordinary richness that they were covered with gold and jewels. The Maharajah, who rode on him, wore a robe of black satin embroidered with pearls and emeralds.

The howdah-seat on the elephant's back-in which the Rajah of Kappoorthullah sat, was roofed with a triple dome made of solid silver."

He found that all limits to expenses were crossed at wedding ceremonies, and disapprovingly recorded that the costs to the family of the bride were always much greater than those of the bridegroom.

"They are obliged to entertain, at their own expense, all the bridegroom's guests which go with him for his bride, as well as their own, as long as they remain."

He was much impressed by "the rich variety of fruits and vegetables" but it is the curry that earned his tribute as "the king of all dishes." The praise was showered in delightful prose: "If it was not the 'savory meat' that Isaac loved, the latter was probably very like it; but the dish itself is never equal, in piquancy and aroma, out of India to what you receive there.

The eating is done without the aid of knives or forks, the fingers alone being used. This is the mode for all, no matter how high 'or wealthy. The writer saw the Emperor of Delhi take his food in this way. When they have finished, a servant lays down a brass basin before them and pours water on their hands, and. presents a towel to wipe them, reminding one of Elisha [in the Bible] 'pouring water on the hands of Elijah,' a<yting as his attendant in honor of the man of God." The Reverend's comments on Indian m.onuments are as eloquent. He saw the Diwan-e-Khas in the Red Fort in Delhi twice, before and after the First War of Independence when it was "given over to the spoiler's hand, rifled by the English

soldiers of its last ornaments, and ruined forever!"

When he first visited the fort in the autumn of 1856, the Diwan "was still the center of state and pageantry, and its imperial master living in Oriental style on his salary of 18 lakhs of rupees in gold per annum." A year later he witnessed the trial of the Emperor in the fort and visited again the Diwan-e-Khas. "I found it despoiled of its glory, its marble halls

pounds sterling. This wondrous work of art was ascended by steps of silver, at the summit of which rose a massive seat of pure gold, with a canopy of the same metal inlaid with jewels. The chief feature of the design was a peacock with his tail spread, the natural colors being represented by pure gems. A vine also was introduced into the design, the leaves and fruit of which were of precious stones, whose rays were reflected from mirrors set in large pearls.

The Taj Mahal inspires the author to another effort at purple prose:

and columns whitewashed and the whole turned into a hospital for sick soldiers." Yet, it was once "the most gorgeous audience hall in the East. .. gorgeous accessory of the Palace of Delhi."

In precision and attention to detail, the description he pens will easily rank among the abler on the Diwan ever written: This imperial hall was a gorgeous accessory of the Palace of Delhi. The front opened on a large quadrangle, and the whole stood in what was once a garden, extremely rich and beautiful. This unique pavilion rested on an elevated terrace, and was formed entirely of white marble. It was 150 feet long, and 40 in breadth, having a graceful cupola at each angle. The roof was supported on colonnades of marble pillars. The solid and polished marble has been worked into its forms with as much delicacy as though it had been wax, and its whole surface, pillars, walls, arches and roof, and even the pavement, was inlaid with the richest, most profuse and exquisite designs in foliage and alabesque; the fruits and flowers being represented in sections of gems, such as amethysts, carnelian, bloodstone, garnet, top a lapis lazuli, green serpentine and various colored crystals. A bordering ran around the walls and columns similarly decorated, inlaid with inscriptions in Arabic from the Koran. The whole had the appearance of some rich work from the loom, in which a brilliant pattern is woven on a pure white ground, the tracery of rare and cunning artists. Purdahs (curtains) of all colors and designs hung from the crenellated arches 0/1 the outside to exclude the glare and heat.

In the center of the hall stood the Takt Taous, or Peacock Throne, of Shah lehan, on the erection of which Price's History tells us he expended 30 million

The effect is wonderful! The long-anticipated pleasure of beholding earth's most beautiful shrine is now within ... reach, and the gratified and delighted sight rests upon this first view of its harmony of parts, its faultless congregation of architectural beauties, with a kind of ecstasy. Of the thousands who have traveled far to gaze upon it, it may safely be asserted that not one of the number has been disappointed in the examination of its wondrous beauty. The Queen of Sheba would probably have admitted, had she seen it, that the "half had not been told her."

We first look at it from the north side, on the river bank, where the scene is fully presented. The building to the right of the Taj is a Mosque for religious services, and that to the left is a Travelers' Rest House, where visitors can be accommodated. We next go around to th-e gate of entrance on the other side. The central avenue runs from the gate to the Taj, as shown in the steel engraving, with a system of fountains, 84 in number, the entire length, having a marble reservoir in the middle about 40 feet square, in which are five additional fountains, one in the center, and one at each corner. On either side of this beautiful sheet of water, into which are falling the silvery jets of spray from the founta.ins, are rows of dark Italian cypress, significant of the great design of the shrine. The river lumna flows mildly by, as the garden is on its banks, and the birds, encouraged by the delicious coolness and shade of the place, forget their usual lassitude, and pour forth their

songs, while the odor of roses, and of the orange, and lemon, and tamarind trees, perfume the air. Amid all this loveliness the Taj rises before your view ....

Butler devotes additional pages to the Taj, replete with quotations and pointed comments on architectural details. But it is a brief paragraph that best reveals how deeply it moved him: "Let us imagine, if we can, the effect produced here when the funeral dirge was chanted over the tomb of the lovely Empress, and the answering echoes, in the pauses of the strains, would seem to fall like the responses of angel choirs in paradise!"

He finds the mausoleum of Jahangir's father-in-law, Itmadud-Dowlah (Pillar of State) in Agra, second only to the Taj:

The photograph of this building, when examined by a good glass, brings out its singular loveliness as no mere engraving can present it. Each slab of white marble is wrought in rich tracery in the most delicate manner, pierced through and through so as to be the same when seen from either side; the pattern of each slab differs from the next one, and the rich variety, as well as beauty of the designs, fixes the attention of the beholder in amazement at the taste and patient skill that could originate and execute this vision of beauty, which seems like an imagination rising before the fancy, and then, by some wondrous wand of power, transmuted into a solid form forever, to be touched, and examined, and admired. Standing within the shrine, it seems as though it was covered with a rich veil, wrought in curious needle-work, every ray of light that enters coming through the various patterns. You approach and touch it, and find it is of white marble, two inches in thickness! What mind but that of a lady could have suggested a design so unique and feminine?

Butler cites the Qutub Minar as "one more evidence" of taste and skill in architecture. It ranks among the towers of the Earth what the Taj is among the tombs, "something unique of its kind, that must ever stand alone in the recollection of him who has gazed upon its beautiful proportions, its chaste embellishments, and exquisite finish."

He climbed the stairs to the summit of the Qutub and was enthralled by the spectacle of "modern Delhi, with its white and glittering mosques and palaces, the silvery Jumna gently pouring along, the feudal towers of Selimghur, and the mausoleums of Humayun and Sufter Jung, all in the soft light of the Indian sunset, but what must that view have been when imperial splendors, and cultivation, like earthly paradises, or 'the gardens of God,' combined all their wealth of beauty beneath its shadow, and then away as far as the eye could reach on every side!"

The brief calm of the early period of Butler's sojourn in Bareilly was rudely disturbed on May 14, 1857, by news that the Indian troops in Meerut had risen in revolt that was spreading to Delhi and other places. A few days later came news that the revolutionaries had entered Delhi. He decided to move with his family to a safer place under cover of the night.

Butler could not have made a happier choice in the place of his refuge than Naini Tal: "As soon as day broke the view was sublime-something of the Swiss scenery in its appearance, but more majestic ... what a prospect! .... All looked so peaceful and felt so delightfully cool. After some searching, I was fortunate enough to find a little furnished house of four rooms still unengaged, which I gladly hired for $225 for 'the season.'"

In August came orders from the military that the family move on to Almora for safety since Naini Tal was likely to be attacked. There they remained till the trouble was over.

When Butler came down to the plains he decided to see the imperial city of Delhi. It had been captured only ten weeks earlier and presented a picture of sheer desolation. Chandni Chowk was "still as death; indeed the silence was dreadful."

Delhi was like an "open grave." He visited the Jama Masjid and went atop its minarets. The Jain Temple "reminded of the description of Solomon's Temple, it was so rich and elegant," he rhapsodized.

Always enterprising, the Reverend managed to get written permission to see the Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, in captivity: "His dress was rich, his vest being cloth of gold, with beautiful coat of Cashmere, and a turban of the same material.

The figure of the old man was slight; his physiognomy very marked; his face small, with an aquiline nose; his eyes dark and deeply sunk, with something of the hawk aspect about them; his beard was gray and scanty, running down to a point .... My mind went back 240 years, to the time when England's Ambassador humbly sought, in the splendid city of Jehangeer, afoothold for the East India Company. How different the scene before us from what Tavernier saw when he beheld Shah Jehan in that magnificent court, seated on his jeweled 'Peacock Throne!' Here was his lineal descendant a prisoner, while two English soldiers with fixed bayonets, stood guard over him."

At the end of 1864, Butler returned to the United States.

But it was not till 1871 that he sat down to write the book.

Evidently, he had made detailed notes and preserved them well. The three books by Bayard Taylor, John Ireland and William Butler ill deserved the obscurity to which they were consigned. Each in its own way has fine insights to offer.

Together they represent American perceptions of India at a 0 momentous phase in its history.

About the Author: A. G. Noorani, a frequent contributor to SPAN, is a Bombay-based lawyer, constitutional expert and bibliophile.

A Festival of India exhibition entitled "From Merchants to Emperors: British Artists in India 1757-1930," currently showing in Los Angeles after a successful run in New York, has put the spotlight on a hitherto little-known aspect of American interest in India. Some American museums, particularly the Yale Center for British Art, have sizable holdings of drawings, watercolors and paintings of colonial India made by British landscape artists. The works shown on these pages are from the Yale Center and were selected by Jagmohan Mahajan on a recent visit to the United States. Mahajan, who is engaged in a study of British landscape artists in India, has published two books and several articles on the subject in Indian and foreign journals.

1. Thomas Daniell,

1749-1840,

North-East View of the lama Masjid, Delhi, 1811, oil on canvas,

101.5 x 137 em.

2. Sir Charles

d'Oyly,

1781-1845,

View of a Street in the City of Patna, 1825, oil on canvas,

24 x 32 em.

3. George Chinnery,

1774-1852,

View in South India with a Soldier Outside his Hut, circa 1802-25, oil on canvas,

21.5 x 30.5 em.

4. William Daniell, 1769-1837, attributed to (possibly by Sir Charles d'Oyly), The Banks of the Ganges, circa 1820-30, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 73.5 em.

5. William Simpson,

1823-99,

The Dilkoosha with Lucknow in the Distance, 1866, watercolor over pencil with bodycolor, pen and ink and gum arabic, 35 x 43.5 em.

4

s

47

environment for innovation.

Many large organizations approach innovation with huge success as their only goal. Their leaders reason that if a new idea cannot be projected to reach from $50 million to $500 million in sales within ten years, it cannot have a significant effect on growth or earnings per share.

They forget that several medium successes can equal one large one. Thus, they pursue innovation with criteria like these: â&#x20AC;˘ The new business must have a projected volume of several hundred million dollars ten years from today. â&#x20AC;˘ The business must not be risky. It must be based on proven technology and well-understood markets. â&#x20AC;˘ There must be no significant potential competition in the market (meaning "nobody else has seen this obvious and huge opportunity").

There are very few accurately projectable $100 million businesses based on existing technology that no one else has thought of. That is not a reason to despair, however. There is a strategy even for large corporations that provides a high probability of creating businesses that will have a significant effect on earnings per share.

The highest return will come from starting many initially small intrapreneurial thrusts, each of which has some shortterm promise and a variety of future possibilities. Some of these will provide great opportunities for informed, highreturn, second- and third-stage investments of major proportions-the very home runs the corporation would love to hit. Others will evolve into smaller but highly profitable businesses, which can be either left alone or sold at a handsome profit. Some will fail, but since little was invested little will be lost.

In the early stages of innovation one makes mistakes. The "billion-or-bust" philosophy tends to generate billiondollar mistakes. Demand for high volume right away pushes intrapreneurs prematurely into mass markets where profit margins are slim and margins for error are even slimmer. To complicate this precarious situation, huge adventures put senior management at risk and thus lead to meddling and concern, which slow response time and endanger the intrapreneur's ability to run the business.

Rather than lowering risk, this excess top management concern increases both the cost and the probability of failure. Worst

of all, premature attempts to be big require large capital expenditures that then freeze the venture in its original plans.

This prevents the successful pattern of innovation-blundering through to success on a wave of corrected mistakes while small, and then expanding rapidly once success is proved.

One of the great difficulties Exxon faced with its office-systems business was that it invested too much too soon.

Spending on the early stages was so lavish that intrapreneurs thought they were already a success; They forgot to think small in order to grow big. Eventually they had invested so much that they could project a high return only by shooting for

When discretionary funds are scarce, people give up innovating and become resigned or bitter. Rather than beg for funds, they take their ideas and creativity home and become deadwood at work.

sell them to the U.S. Navy and a lens manufacturer. They took a few orders and made the products right in their lab on a little paper-making machine.

For four years they ran their little business out of the lab, with total sales of under $15,000. There just wasn't much need for a better, lint-free lens wiper, and nothing else they tried was very successful.

But Boese could not afford to be deterred. "I am not a college man," he explained. "A trained technical person always has another place to go, but I wouldn't have had a career at all if I hadn't succeeded. Out of sheer fright I had to get something out in the market."

So with a little more time and money from the company, Boese's group continued to explore new uses for the material, determined to make it a commercial success. Finally they began to hit on some products. They had a modest success with nonwoven ribbon, which has since evolved into the now familiar shiny package ties. Through Boese's perseverance more uses for nonwoven materials were found, until a major new industry for 3M began to grow up. Nonwoven bra cups that didn't succeed became dust masks that did. Combined with abrasives, nonwovens became scouring pads and polishing wheels. Today, in the United States and elsewhere nonwovens are used in the un tear able envelopes the courier services use, and in mats to wipe one's feet. And, 40 years after that first effort, we have nonwoven backings for electrical tape.

Looking back, it would have been impossible to foresee all the products based on nonwoven technology that eventually made new businesses and new divisions for 3M. One could imagine many potential applications for the new material, but no single opportunity loomed on the horizon. 3M responded to this ambiguous situation by giving a few flexible and determined people a meager budget and the freedom to 'pursue the technology through several product failures. The result was a new industry at very little cost.

Starting small does not mean that something cannot evolve into a wide diversity of businesses. And if all else fails, one can switch to another small something and begin again.

0

the moon and promising to beat IBM on its home turf. That, it turned out, was not a low-risk strategy.

A classic example of creating a new industry using small first steps is the development of 3M's nonwoven business.

During World War II, Al Boese and a few other researchers, working on a shoestring budget, were exploring the prospects of making a paper-like. product out of the new synthetic fibers that were just then becoming available. They called this new material "nonwovens" for nonwoven cloth.

Their first idea for an application of the new material came in response to a war shortage. A noncorrosive backing was needed for electrical tape, because cloth was hard to get during the war, and most paper contained residual sulfuric acid, which corrodes electrical wires. They tried to back the tape with the nyWfiber, but failed to make it work. In the process, however, Boese began to notice some interesting properties of the new synthetic cloth. He found that it made a good len~ wiper. Ordinary cloth tends to leave lint on the lens, but because nonwovens were made with long synthetic fibers, they were lint-free. Having found a use, About the Author: Gifford Pinchot 3d is the Boese and his friends in the lab made founder of the School for Intrapreneurs in New some sample lens wipers and went out to York and a consultant to major corporations.

An American. Artist's India Hubert Stowitts first visited India in the early years of this century as Anna Pavlova's dancing partner, shortly before discarding his ballet shoes and taking up the pallete.

Returning to India in the 1920s, he immortalized what he saw in paintings that were featured in an enormously popular exhibition, "Vanishing India," at the Los Angeles Museum in 1931. Fiftyfive years later, the Stowitts show returned to Los Angeles as part of the Festivalof India.

James Madison and the American Constitution As America celebrates the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1987, SPAN inaugurates a series of articles with' a tribute to James Madison, the Founding Father who is considered to have most shaped the nation's constitutional system of government.

The noted Indian writer/poet deftly weaves Tate's verses in and around this alluring personal narrative. Moraes was introduced to Tate's verse as an adolescent in Bombay and to the poet himself at Oxford University. Among other things, this memoir records how Tate had Oxford rescind its expulsion orders against Moraes.

Recently voted the Most Admired Person in America, Bill Cosby finds his way into millions of American homes and hearts every week with The Bill Cosby Show. Cosby is creator, writer, star and producer of this popular TV sitcom depicting the joys, triumphs and tribulations of an average American family. He also has had 20 comedy albums, four other television series, ten films and several awards to his name.

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TOPS IN TUMBLING Vernon Mitchell somersaults over a three-meter tall human pyramid (right).

It's all part of an ordinary day's work for him and other members of the Jesse White Tumbling Team of Chicago, Illinois, which gives about 300 shows a year.

White (helping 13-year-old Everett Moore take his place in a pyramid, below left) is a physical education teacher who formed his team 27 years ago. Today it has 62 members, ages ten to 26. All live in or near the housing project where they practice their thrilling sport.

Tumbling requires skill, self-confidence, coaching and practice. Like other gymnasts, tumblers must practice various body positions and movements separately before they perform them in sequence. "I stress safety and attitude along with skills," says White. "Tumblers have to act right and keep up their grades to stay on the team," he adds.

It is hard work but the youngsters, many of whom have become local heroes, love it. The human pyramid and the human chain (back cover) are special favorites with the crowds. The chain increases as each tumbler who somersaults over it joins it. The last tumbler may sail over as many as 24 others.

At far right, Vernon Mitchell sails over seven team members in a pyramid.

To become airborne, he jumps from a trampolette. Coach White stands nearby.

"If I see that a tumbler is in trouble, I can quickly step in and break his fall," he explains. But Mitchell needed no help and landed safely to loud cheers. "It feels like you're flying," he says. "I just love to tumble!"