The Washington Post National Weekly - February 26, 2017

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2017

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

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Steadfast, with surprises Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch refuses to be pigeon-holed.

PAGE 12

Politics McMaster is no ‘yes’ man 4

Movies Fame is easier if you’re rich 17

5 Myths Treason 23

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POLITICS

Trump, by the numbers

by Philip Bump

F

rom the moment Donald Trump was sworn in as the nation’s 45th president until noon this past Monday, precisely one month had passed. A total of 744 hours. Here’s how he spent each one.

In D.C.: The president spent a little under three-quarters of his time in and around Washington. A little less than half of that was time during which he was officially working — as measured by the time between when the media was told to show up in the morning (known as “call time”) until the media was dismissed in the evening (known as “the lid”). This is an imprecise measure of when a president is working, of course; he might take meetings after hours or review documents pertinent to his job.

That difference is impossible to measure, though, so, in our calculus it blends together with obvious downtime, like when he is asleep.

Much of Trump’s work time fell into a few basic categories. The estimates below are based on pool reports. Most events were assumed to be an hour, unless the schedule made obvious that the length was shorter or longer.

Intelligence briefings: 6 hours News conferences: 4 hours Signing bills or executive orders: 6 hours Calls/meeting foreign leaders: 21 hours Listening to various groups: 14 hours Trump spent 182 hours between call time and the lid with other events that were listed on his public calendar, though not every hour was accounted for during that time. Not captured in those categories are a few special events: the inauguration, the National Prayer Breakfast and the two hours his family spent watching “Finding Dory” in the White House. (His press secretary says that Trump didn’t join in.)

Twitter: On not infrequent occasion, Trump will tweet a string of thoughts over multiple tweets or delete and reissue a thought on Twitter. To figure out how long it took him to

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THE WASHINGTON POST

draft a tweet, I averaged how much time usually elapsed between those tweets since Jan. 20.

On average? Eight minutes and 20 seconds.

Using data from the Trump Twitter Archive, I then looked at each tweet sent from an Android device — the best indicator when it’s Trump himself tweeting — and calculated how much time in total was spent on those tweets, assuming each was given an eight-minute window.

In short: He spent an estimated 13 hours on tweets in D.C. and another five hours in Florida.

Trump’s time in Florida: About a quarter of Trump’s time since he took office has been spent in Florida — mostly at his Mar-a-Lago resort but also on the golf course. Most of the

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 20

other work that Trump has done in Florida has been meetings or calls with foreign leaders.

Trump’s time everywhere else: Trump has spent about 16 hours traveling on Air Force One and Marine One. That’s mostly to and from Palm Beach. But it includes trips to Philadelphia (for a GOP retreat); Dover, Del., (to attend the homecoming of a soldier killed in action); and South Carolina (to tour a Boeing factory).

Trump spent about 10 hours everywhere except D.C. and Palm Beach.

As someone on Twitter noted, Trump’s a month into his term — equal to one minute in an NBA game. Still time for these stats to shift. n ©The Washington Post

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY WORKFORCE BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Neil Gorsuch, seen Feb. 1, was nominated by President Trump to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court. Photograph by DREW ANGERER, Getty Images.

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POLITICS

For key adviser, Trump taps a soldier who can say ‘No, sir’ JAMES E. FOEHL VIA EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

“Whether he can be as effective and candid as we all hope is the big question.”

Stephen Biddle, political scientist

BY G REG J AFFE AND J OSHUA P ARTLOW

M

ore than any other officer of his generation, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster’s military career has been defined by a willingness to dissent — often forcefully.

In “Dereliction of Duty,” the book he wrote in the 1990s, McMaster blasted the nation’s top generals for their unwillingness to tell a domineering president that his war strategy in Vietnam could not work.

More than a decade later, as the

commander of a 5,000-soldier regiment in Iraq, McMaster essentially ignored the U.S. military’s prevailing plan for stabilizing the country, which he concluded was failing badly.

President Trump has chosen McMaster as his national security adviser, replacing the ousted Michael Flynn. McMaster’s surprising rise has his supporters and critics asking the same question: How will a soldier known for his sharp mind and even sharper opinions get along with a president who does not like being told that he is wrong?

“I have tremendous respect for H.R. as a military professional,” said Stephen Biddle, a political scientist who has worked closely with the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Whether he can be as effective and candid as we all hope is the big question.”

In his many successes and his most notable failure — leading an anti-corruption task force in Afghanistan — McMaster has displayed the same traits: a fierce intellect, dogged determination and a penchant for conflict that has produced loyal supporters and, in some cases, determined

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster has been selected to be national security adviser by President Trump. McMaster, who is known for his sharp mind and even sharper opinions, is replacing the ousted Michael Flynn.

foes.

McMaster comes to the job of leading the White House’s National Security Council with some significant disadvantages relative to his predecessors. The most effective national security advisers have close personal relationships with the president. It’s not clear whether McMaster had even met Trump before interviewing for the job.

McMaster, a three-star general, will be coordinating and helping to oversee a Cabinet that includes retired Marine Gens. Jim Mattis and John F. Kelly, both of whom

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POLITICS outranked him when they were in uniform and could view him as a subordinate or someone they can bypass.

Finally, McMaster’s decision to stay on active duty as he serves in the Trump White House could make it harder for him to disagree forcefully with the president or other senior administration officials. “It is a lot easier to say ‘Screw this job’ or ‘I am not doing that’ as a civilian,” said a friend of McMaster’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly. “It is the ethos of the military to do what you are told, whether or not you like the mission or the chain of command.”

The ethos of uncritically following orders is one that has never come easily to McMaster. He wrote about the Vietnam War at a moment when most of the Army was more interested in forgetting about it. “The emotions connected with sacrifices made in a lost war ran too deep to permit veterans of that conflict to dwell on their experiences,” he wrote in the book’s introduction.

When the book was published in 1997, the Army’s top brass still blamed the loss on what they saw as a micromanaging president and a disloyal, left-leaning press that undermined support for the war at home. McMaster instead shifted the blame to some of the Army’s most storied generals, whom he faulted for their passivity and willingness to support a policy of gradual escalation that they knew was doomed to failure.

In 2005, McMaster’s armored cavalry regiment deployed to Iraq at a moment when U.S. fatalities were climbing and Iraq was slipping into an all-out civil war. In Baghdad, senior commanders were telling their field commanders to consolidate U.S. forces on large, secure bases, where they would be less vulnerable to enemy attack, and focus on training beleaguered Iraqi troops.

McMaster, then a colonel, was among a small group of officers who ignored that guidance. He moved his troops off a large, secure air base outside the northern city of Tal Afar and established 29 combat outposts throughout the city. Instead of training Iraqis, his troops focused on stopping the ethnic and sectarian killing in the city.

McMaster’s approach caught the attention of Philip Zelikow, a

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KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

senior aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Both Zelikow and Rice then fought for it back in Washington.

“I talked to other generals who had mixed things to say about H.R. as a commander . . . and personally,” Zelikow said. “My view was that this is a guy who is really trying to do something, and he’s breaking some [bureaucratic] crockery in the process.”

Journalists, academics and officials from Washington think tanks flocked to Tal Afar, often at McMaster’s invitation, to study his approach. A 2006 New Yorker article, which received widespread attention in Washington, described McMaster and his men as “rebels against an incoherent strategy.”

Despite public praise from President George W. Bush, McMaster was twice passed over for promotion to one-star general upon returning from Iraq. To Zelikow, the Army’s failure to elevate one of its smartest officers was a sign of anti-intellectualism in the ranks and “very serious institutional rot.”

“Iraq was not the Army’s finest hour,” he said.

Others in the Army said the decision reflected McMaster’s impatience with underperforming subordinates, his temper and his tendency to clash with superiors.

Sometimes, McMaster’s passion and intellect worked against him on the battlefield — especially

in Afghanistan, where he was chosen in 2010 to lead an anti-corruption task force.

McMaster landed at an inauspicious moment in the countercorruption effort. Hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars were being siphoned from ministries by Afghan officials and flown out of the country to buy beachfront real estate in Dubai.

McMaster’s unit was an eclectic mix of soldiers and civilians from various NATO countries and included former fighter pilots, Rhodes scholars, counterintelligence officers, Treasury Department officials and FBI agents.

His brash style alienated many of his American civilian colleagues at the U.S. Embassy and angered his partners in the Afghan government. But even those who hated his management style tended to recognize his brilliance.

“He’s not a bull in a china shop,” Paul Rexton Kan, a professor who spent a month in Kabul on McMaster’s team to help write the anti-corruption strategy, said in an interview for a book on Afghanistan. “He’s a bull who picks up the china shop and just smashes it.”

With an uncooperative Afghan government, and an Obama administration unwilling to cut off aid money, McMaster’s team had little to show for its work after months of effort. His own team called itself the “Fix the Impossible Task Force” and the “Anti-

President Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida with his national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, left, and Keith Kellogg, who was acting adviser and will now be chief of staff of the National Security Council.

Gravity Task Force.” Several team members described the work environment as “toxic.”

In one episode, McMaster demanded that U.S. Justice Department advisers hand over the corruption files kept by the Afghan attorney general and then berated the officials and knocked over a chair when they refused.

That outburst caused a stir back in Washington. People in the meeting were asked to give affidavits about what happened, according to those familiar with the situation. Eric H. Holder Jr., then the U.S. attorney general, demanded an apology from McMaster.

Trump has demonstrated something of a split personality when selecting his senior staff and Cabinet. In Mattis, Kelly and McMaster, Trump has chosen brash leaders who speak plainly and frankly. He has also proved quick to fire aides who question his judgment, and he has blackballed senior Republican foreign policy officials who criticized him during his presidential campaign.

In “Dereliction of Duty,” McMaster wrote critically of generals who chose not to air their differences with President Lyndon B. Johnson. “Their silence helped to impel the very strategic concept they opposed,” McMaster wrote.

Soon he will be sitting at the same Situation Room table, deciding what to say. n

©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

They love what they see in Trump

BY J ENNA J OHNSON AND D AVID W EIGEL

Melbourne, Fla.

M

any of President Trump’s most dedicated supporters — the sort who would wait for hours in the hot sun to attend a post-inauguration rally — say their lives changed on election night. Suddenly they felt like their views were actually respected and in the majority.

But one month into Trump’s term, many supporters say they once again feel under attack — perhaps even more so than before.

Those who journeyed to Trump’s rally last weekend on Florida’s Space Coast said that since the election, they have unfriended some of their liberal relatives or friends on Facebook. They don’t understand why major media outlets don’t see the same successful administration they have been cheering on. And they’re increasingly frustrated that Democrats — and some Republicans — are too slow to approve some of the president’s nominees and too quick to protest his every utterance.

“They’re stonewalling everything that he’s doing because they’re just being babies about it,” said Patricia Melani, 56, a New Jersey native now living in Florida.

“All the loudmouths? They need to let it go. Let it go. Shut their mouths and let the man do what he’s got to do. We all shut our mouths when Obama got in the second time around, okay? So that’s what really needs to be done.”

She blames the media for circulating “fake” stories about the president — like when she believed he was “very cool, wasn’t yelling” at a recent news conference, yet a CNN anchor described his behavior as “unhinged.”

“There’s such hatred for the man,” she said. “I just don’t get it.”

It was a common sentiment at the rally attended by about 9,000 people. There were chants of “CNN sucks!” and “Tell the truth!”

Rally attendees panned coverage of chaos within his administration, the cost of security for his family and the president’s nowhalted executive order that briefly

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

Supporters, feeling under attack, talk about lost friends, ‘fake’ news and ‘all the loudmouths’ banned refugees and residents of seven Muslim-majority countries.

Many acknowledged that the president’s first month could have been smoother, especially with the rollout of the travel ban, but they said the media has overblown those hiccups — and they’re glad to see the president fight back and label the media “the enemy of the American People!”

“It was hilarious to see him give it to the media,” said Tony Lopez, 28, a car dealer who drove to the rally from Orlando. “The media’s problem is that they keep wanting to make up stories so that he looks bad. It doesn’t work. He’s talking right through you guys.”

Several people said they would have liked to see more coverage of a measure Trump signed the other week that rolled back a last-minute Obama regulation that would have restricted coal mines from dumping debris in nearby streams. At the signing, Trump was joined by coal miners in hard hats.

“If he hadn’t gotten into office, 70,000 miners would have been

put out of work,” Patricia Nana, a 42-year-old naturalized citizen from Cameroon. “I saw the ceremony where he signed that bill, giving them their jobs back, and he had miners with their hard hats and everything — you could see how happy they were.”

The regulation actually would have cost relatively few mining jobs and would have created nearly as many new jobs on the regulatory side, according to a government report — an example of the frequent distance between Trump rhetoric, which many of his supporters wholeheartedly believe, and verifiable facts.

Melani, for example, gets most of her news from talk radio — “I listen to Herman Cain on my way into work, I have Sean [Hannity] on my way home,” she said — and Fox News.

She and her husband were wellversed on holdups with the president’s Cabinet nominees and legal arguments for the now-frozen travel ban. But they didn’t know much about the resignation of

Supporters crowd President Trump’s rally in an airplane hangar in Melbourne, Fla., last weekend. Just over one month into Trump’s term, many of his supporters say they once again feel that their positions are under attack — perhaps even more so than before.

Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn amid accusations that he improperly discussed U.S. sanctions with the Russian ambassador — and then withheld that information from Vice President Pence and other top officials.

“See, don’t question me on that because I haven’t really been watching and listening too much on it,” Melani said. “I think he kind of did it just to step away, a trust kind of a thing. And now, of course, they want to pull a big investigation and all of this stuff. And to be honest with you, I really think it’s only because of the way the haters are out there. That’s what I really think it is.”

The division that has consumed the country was on display outside Trump’s Florida rally.

On one side of the street: thousands of his supporters wearing campaign gear and vendors selling anti-Hillary Clinton merchandise and T-shirts showing a map of the 2016 election by county, with most of the country colored Trump-red and the legend: “We the Deplorable.”

On the other side of the street: hundreds of protesters gathered in a “free speech zone” behind mesh fencing. Several wore pink knit hats, some carried signs that focused on Trump’s alleged connections to Russia: “Impeach that puppet” and “I can see Russia.”

On the supporter side was Tammy Mussler — a 48-year-old whose family runs a local mobile home and RV park and who said one of her guests was hesitant to tell others he was coming to the rally.

“He goes: ‘Well, I’m nervous because people are so nasty about it that you’re afraid to admit that you’re doing something.’ ” Mussler said the women in her family are especially divided right now. She supports Trump, while they do not.

Can this nation ever be united?

“I hope so,” Mussler said with a shake of her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. It would be nice, and I think if — I don’t know, I don’t know. I think the only thing that’s going to reunite us is maybe the Lord coming back.” n

©The Washington Post

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Something’s missing at Camp David M ICHAEL S . R OSENWALD Thurmont, Md. BY

D

wayne Snurr, a janitor and lifelong resident of this rural, working-class town 60 miles from the White House, was eating chicken wings in a cafe off Main Street the other week when he began chewing over a locally important subject: President Trump’s taste in vacations.

“I guess he’s got that place down in Florida,” Snurr said, referring to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach resort. “When you have a place like that, I have to assume you prefer the beach and nice weather.”

Trump’s Florida compound and his other gold-laden properties have been top of mind lately in Thurmont, where just a few miles up a winding mountain road presidents have vacationed and cajoled world leaders at Camp David — deep in the woods, in cozy cabins, a total anathema to Trump.

“Camp David is very rustic, it’s nice, you’d like it,” Trump said in an interview with a European journalist just before taking office.

“You know how long you’d like it?

For about 30 minutes.”

White House officials have not said whether Trump plans to use Camp David or, if not, whether he would close the Navy-run facility, which in recent years has cost taxpayers about $8 million a year to operate. Although local officials hope he will visit, they have been given no signals he will, raising concern about the financial and symbolic costs of the president’s getaway tastes.

Just a month into Trump’s presidency, the Secret Service is struggling to protect Mar-a-Lago and his other properties, which don’t have built-in security like Camp David. For Thurmont residents, Camp David has been a source of pride, putting the town on the world map, attracting foreign journalists and diplomatic staff with expense accounts.

And historians worry that Trump’s preference for more highprofile retreats will mark a decline in Camp David as a symbol of simple American values and delib-

NATIONAL ARCHIVES/NEWSMAKERS/GETTY IMAGES

Town officials hope Trump will make use of the rustic retreat, but so far Palm Beach is his choice erative diplomacy. This month, Trump hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-aLago, where the two leaders were photographed responding to a North Korean missile test in an ornate dining area at the club.

Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said, “When you have a president who owns exclusive resorts, it’s hard to believe Camp David will be used.”

The risk is that, over time, “Camp David will no longer be this great getaway for presidents or a diplomatic hub for important matters,” Brinkley said. “It’s in a holding pattern right now.”

Camp David was originally a New Deal project, a getaway for federal workers and their families.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt turned it into a presidential retreat in 1942 and named the camp Shangri-La after a mythical paradise in the novel “Lost Horizon.”

He hosted Winston Churchill there in 1943.

Camp David got its lasting name from President Dwight D.

Eisenhower, who renamed it after his father and grandson. Eisenhower had great affinity for the retreat. He convalesced there after a heart attack. For a few days in 1959, he hosted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev for talks. Khrushchev asked to see the bowling alley.

They also watched movies.

Like Eisenhower, some presidents came to love Camp David, both as a respite from Washington and a place to entertain allies and sway adversaries. President Ronald Reagan went there more than 150 times, riding his horse and playing host to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. President Harry S. Truman hated it, telling friends that it was boring.

For President Jimmy Carter, Camp David’s seclusion and privacy was a major factor in the peace deal he struck there in 1978 between Egypt and Israel. Without the news media around, there were few leaks and no television cameras to posture in front of.

President George H.W. Bush hosted Soviet President Mikhail

President Richard Nixon is seen at Camp David in 1972.

The getaway has been a symbol of simple American values and deliberative diplomacy, but Trump has avoided it. “Camp David is very rustic, it’s nice, you’d like it,” Trump said to a European journalist just before taking office. “You know how long you’d like it? For about 30 minutes.”

Gorbachev for a round of summit talks, played tennis and zipped around in golf carts. President Bill Clinton hosted a failed summit between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in 2000. President George W. Bush decamped there 149 times, according to statistics kept

by CBS News reporter Mark Knoller. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Bush was photographed there with his national security team wearing a fleece naval jacket while looking over maps of Afghanistan.

As history goes, President Barack Obama’s use of Camp David could mark a turning point. Although he hosted a Group of Eight summit there, Obama visited the retreat just 39 times. If future presidents skew like Obama or Trump — younger and urbane, or older and rich — Camp David could be used less and less.

“It’s so rustic and remote that people used to staying at the Four Seasons really don’t find comfort there,” Brinkley said. “Obama had Hawaii and Chicago. He liked golf resorts. Trump has Mar-a-Lago. It simply becomes just a property of the U.S. government.”

Even as Trump made the third trip of his presidency to Mar-aLago last weekend, residents and town officials here refuse to concede that Trump will pass them by.

Soon enough, they say, he will want to take a quick helicopter ride to escape the White House and walk in the woods with Melania. He will have a financial reason to show up — the mounting security bills at his other getaways.

They even compare him (quietly) to President John F. Kennedy, noting that the young president and his wife, Jacqueline, initially preferred Camelot’s other locales before coming to savor the nearby tranquility of the cabins in the woods.

“He’s going to figure out it’s a great getaway,” said Frederick County Sheriff Chuck Jenkins. “It’s a mountaintop retreat — walking paths, in a wooded area, totally peaceful. It’s unbelievable. If I was in the White House, that would be my White House.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

‘California is a nation, not a state’ K ATIE Z EZIMA San Francisco BY

A

bout 15 people huddled in a luxury apartment building, munching on danishes as they plotted out their plan to have California secede from the United States.

“I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of an independent California,” Geoff Lewis said as he stood in a glass-walled conference room adorned with California’s grizzlybear flag and a sign reading “California is a nation, not a state.”

Sweaty onlookers from the gym across the hall peered in curiously.

Bolstered by the election of President Trump, the group, Yes California, is collecting the 585,407 signatures necessary to place a secessionist question on the 2018 ballot. Its goal is to have California become its own country, separate and apart from the United States.

The group is advertising at protests and hosting meetups throughout California. Its leaders say the organization has ballooned to 53 chapters, each of which has meetings like the one here to plot out strategy and recruit volunteers.

“Basically, what we’re witnessing is the birth of a nation,” said Tim Vollmer, 57, an academic consultant from San Francisco. “We can lead what’s left of the free world.”

Their recruiting pitch goes something like this: California — the most populous state, with nearly 40 million residents — subsidizes other states at a loss, is burdened by a national trade system, doesn’t get a fair say in presidential elections, is diverse and disagrees with much of the rest of the country on immigration, is far ahead of other states on environmental policy and, for the most part, is diametrically opposed to Trump’s positions.

Therefore, the argument goes, conditions are perfect for the Golden State to secede.

Yes California primarily advertises through its Facebook page, which has about 39,000 likes and about the same number of follow-

SANDY HUFFAKER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Small group aims to use Trump’s win as momentum for seceding from the United States ers; a graphic reads “divorce due to irreconcilable differences,” with a split, jagged heart depicting California on one side and the rest of the country on the other.

“California is different from America,” said Marcus Ruiz Evans, one of the movement’s cofounders, as he sat on the patio of a Starbucks in Fresno. “California is hated. It’s not liked. It’s seen as weird.”

Evans published a 540-page tome in 2012 on why California should secede and is using his indefatigable ability to talk about it to spread that message as far as possible, mostly through Facebook and media appearances.

He has crusaded for California independence for years — he also protested the Obama administration — and said he thinks of himself “as Galileo, Copernicus,” a man whose theories were so revolutionary that they were dismissed until proved true.

Evans is the main point of contact for the chapter leaders, and he handed out purple Yes California T-shirts to attendees of the meet-

ing here. He would occasionally interject with a long, impassioned speech about the importance of California independence or to let the group know it was partnering with an environmentally friendly printer in Culver City.

Clare Hedin, a musician and sound healer, ticked through a set of slides to help people set up their own chapters. Yes California T-shirts should be plentiful and handed out to all attendees (wearing them in meetings is encouraged). A sense of community should be fostered, and people should be asked why they came to the meeting and how they can contribute so they feel personally invested. Each chapter leader should take a different tack; San Franciscans tend to be more touchy-feely than San Diegans, for example.

They debated how California should handle the military. Maybe their new nation should be neutral, such as Switzerland, they mulled. Where should it get its water? Most of it, they reasoned, comes from the Sierra Nevada and

Michael Boightwood speaks at a meeting of Yes California in San Diego last month. The group is collecting the 585,407 signatures necessary to place a secessionist question on the state’s 2018 ballot.

the Colorado River, which are in the state. California, Evans said, is the world’s sixth-largest economy and already has money, so that will be fine. The secessionists likened their cause to the legalization of marijuana and same-sex marriage: things that seemed implausible a decade ago but are now the law here.

Yes California doesn’t have any policy positions. Its members don’t know how the new nation’s government would be set up. The group’s goal is to first have the state secede and then figure out how it should run.

The group’s biggest effort is focused on collecting signatures for the initiative. It will ask voters if they want to repeal a section of the state constitution declaring that California is an “inseparable part of the United States of America” and hold a referendum on independence on March 5, 2019. The group started collecting signatures in late January and has six months to complete the task.

For supporters, Trump’s election, the desire of some Californians to lead the resistance to his presidency and the group’s growing volunteer base has given the group a semblance of credibility it has long desired.

The group points to Silicon Valley billionaires — including Peter Thiel, who backs Trump and recently said he supports secession, and Shervin Pishevar, who tweeted after the election that he would fund a campaign for California to become its own nation.

The state legislature hired former Obama attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. to battle the Trump administration on issues such as immigration. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) vowed that California will continue to push measures to combat climate change and ensure Californians have health insurance coverage regardless of national policy decisions. San Francisco sued the Trump administration over sanctuary cities. But these and other elected officials have not endorsed secession. Some, including Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, said they oppose it.

“Ballot measures are very tough

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NATION to pass when they’re understandable and you have a relative idea what the consequences are,” said Bill Carrick, Garcetti’s political consultant. “Something like this is a rabbit pulled out of a hat; there’s not a chance in the world it will pass.”

Evans and his co-founder, Louis Marinelli, are unlikely saviors of the left.

Both men have been registered Republicans. Evans is a former conservative radio host and Marinelli once staunchly opposed same-sex marriage. (He had a change of heart in 2011, embarking on a nationwide tour to persuade conservatives to support same-sex unions.)

Marinelli — a Buffalo native who said he so prefers California that he doesn’t like visiting his mother in New York — now lives in Yekaterinburg, Russia. He said he voted for Trump because he thought it would be good for the California secessionist cause.

He said in an interview that he wants to return to San Diego but is working there while his Russianborn wife sorts out visa issues in the United States. His wife’s hurdles with the U.S. immigration system and frustration with gridlock in Washington led him to embrace secession. He says he also was inspired by the Scottish secessionist movement.

But Yes California has had to fend off a torrent of questions about Russian influence. In September, Marinelli represented the group at a Moscow conference hosted by the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia; 30 percent of conference funding came from the Russian government, but none went to Yes California, according to its organizer. Yes California opened a “cultural center” at the movement’s Moscow headquarters in December. Marinelli has compared California independence to the annexation of Crimea, and Yes California has received a flurry of news coverage from the government-funded RT. Marinelli said Yes California is not affiliated in any way with the Russian government.

At the San Francisco meetup, most acknowledged the chances were slim. But they’re willing to try, as many times as it takes.

“Our whole point is not to get this initiative passed,” Evans said.

“It’s to get it in the minds of 40 million people.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

As execution drugs dwindle, Arizona says bring your own BY

C LEVE R . W OOTSON J R.

J

oseph Wood was supposed to die about 10 minutes after his jailers released a combination of midazolam and hydromorphone into his bloodstream.

Instead, for nearly two hours, the death row inmate snorted and gasped, breathing like a “fish gulping for air.” An hour into the execution, his attorneys were on the phone with the Supreme Court, unsuccessfully pleading for an emergency stay.

Wood’s 2014 death prompted a review of execution procedures in Arizona and underscored a problem death penalty states have faced for a half-decade: It’s getting harder to put people to death in the United States.

Companies that manufacture the most common lethal injection drugs have stopped shipping them to death penalty states, distancing themselves from a practice many view as barbaric.

Some medical professionals have taken a similar stance, saying their duty is to save lives, not end them.

So death penalty states have improvised, taking a closer look at firing squads and other, older execution methods. They’ve used compounded cocktails of deadly drugs or ones that are less effective, experts say. But instead of sending inmates to a peaceful end, the drugs have occasionally led to horror stories of agonizing executions that further soured public opinion.

Now Arizona has responded with a new — and some say bizarre — solution to this quandary: Death row inmates can bring their own execution drugs.

The state’s manual for execution procedures, which was revised last month, says attorneys of death row inmates, or others acting on their behalf, can obtain pentobarbital or sodium Pentothal and give them to the state to ensure a smooth execution.

legal method of executing people “I’m flabbergasted,” said Dale in Arizona, which has 126 people Baich, one of Wood’s attorneys, on death row, according to the who is still embroiled in a death Death Penalty Information Cenpenalty lawsuit against the state. ter.

“I can’t comprehend why the The state has executed 141 Arizona Department of Correcpeople in total, although no exetions did what it did and what it cutions are scheduled. was thinking.”

Wood’s was the most recent, The department did not reand his execution — and other spond to requests to detail the problematic, drawn-out lethal rationale of its new policy or say injections in Oklahoma whether it was the reand Ohio — have sult of criticism after sparked criticism and Wood’s death. launched court battles, But Baich said it’s unspecifically about the tenable to think that an drug midazolam. attorney who spent As The Washington years fighting for a cliPost’s Mark Berman reent’s life would help kill ported, last year was the him. first year since 1994 that “What the state is doOklahoma did not carry ing is it’s passing on its out an execution, a stopobligation to the conpage that contributed to demned prisoner or his a modern low in execulawyer,” Baich said. “If tions. the state wants to have Lethal injections are the death penalty, it has on hold there after authe duty to figure out thorities used the wrong how to do it constituJoseph Wood, drug in an execution tionally.” top, and last year and then alRobert Dunham, exClayton most used the wrong ecutive director of the Lockett both drug months later, acDeath Penalty Informahad botched cording to Berman. tion Center, said the executions — Oklahoma’s most new protocol raises Wood’s in high-profile botched exmore questions about Arizona and ecution drew criticism whether states can huLockett’s in from President Barack manely execute people.

Oklahoma.

Obama and the United “This protocol has a Nations. feel of desperation to it, that After midazolam was injected rather than looking for a reasoninto Clayton Lockett, the Oklaable alternative . . . Arizona inhoma inmate lived for 43 minstead is attempting to enlist the utes — convulsing, writhing and prisoner and his lawyer to do the calling out from the gurney — state’s job,” he said. “It’s not the before ultimately dying of a heart type of proposal that instills attack. confidence in the trustworthiZiva Branstetter chronicled ness of the state.”

Lockett’s final moments in the It’s also, technically, illegal, Tulsa World: Dunham said. Only doctors and Nine minutes after the drugs pharmacists can obtain the deadwere administered, “the inmate’s ly drugs needed for executions. body starts writhing and bucking Even if a lawyer could get his and it looks like he’s trying to get hands on sodium Pentothal or up. . . . He utters another unintelpentobarbital, transferring the ligible statement. drugs to someone else — even the “Defense Attorney Dean Sandstate — would be a felony.

For people convicted after erford is quietly crying in the observation area.” n 1992, lethal injection is the only

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Brazil’s troubling export: Corruption

BY M ARINA L OPES AND N ICK M IROFF

Brasilia

S

ome of the world’s most iconic companies cast themselves as emblems of their nation’s values — all-American Coca-Cola, for instance, or quintessentially Japanese Toyota.

And for a while, that was also true of the Brazilian construction behemoth Odebrecht. In a good way.

Odebrecht was on a cloud during the first decade of the millennium, when Brazil won hosting rights to the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, affirming its status as a rising star. With the charismatic President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva touting Odebrecht abroad, the company secured lucrative foreign contracts to build highways, transportation systems, stadiums and power plants.

But Odebrecht’s other export was Brazilian-scale corruption, undermining countries it was supposed to be building up. The company is today at the core of Brazil’s biggest-ever graft scandal, a $2 billion kickback scheme in which nearly 100 executives and politicians have been imprisoned.

The fallout is spreading across the region, creating a test for other countries tainted by Odebrecht’s dirty money. Prosecutors in Brazil, the United States and elsewhere have unearthed evidence that could implicate current and former presidents across the Americas in criminal conduct.

The case, known as “Car Wash,” has been a breakthrough for judicial independence in Brazil, garnering broad public support.

Whether it will lead to cleanups or coverups elsewhere has become a barometer of good governance across Latin America. So far, there have been few arrests outside Brazil, but prosecutors in several countries in the region are pressing for more information from Brazilian investigators and former company executives.

“The scale of what Odebrecht did was unique, but it’s not like the Lula government or Odebrecht invented corruption in Latin America,” said Brazil expert Brian Winter, editor of

RODRIGO ARANGUA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The fall of construction giant Odebrecht has sparked hopes for a regionwide cleanup the Americas Quarterly journal.

“What was unique about Odebrecht was that they got caught.”

In December, Odebrecht agreed to pay $3.5 billion in global penalties, the largest foreign bribery settlement in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice, which, together with Swiss and Brazilian prosecutors, uncovered an $800 million web of graft spanning at least 12 countries in Latin America and Africa.

The company had a secret branch, the “Structured Operations Division,” which managed payments through accounts in the British Virgin Islands and hidden servers in Switzerland, functioning “as a stand-alone bribe department,” prosecutors said.

Marcelo Odebrecht, the company’s former chief executive, has been sentenced to 19 years in prison, and so far, nearly 80 Odebrecht executives have accepted plea deals in exchange for more-lenient sentencing.

Odebrecht remains in business, but it has shed nearly a third of its

180,000 employees since the scandal erupted, and its revenue has plunged 50 percent. It has signed plea agreements in the United States, Switzerland and the Dominican Republic and is negotiating deals with Peru, Colombia and Panama.

Although it may seem counterintuitive, Winter said, the countries most shaken by the scandal so far are the ones whose judiciaries are strong enough to act. In Peru, former president Alejandro Toledo is accused of taking over $20 million in bribes from the company, and Peru’s government thinks he’s on the lam in the United States.

Just as fury in Brazil over the Car Wash scandal contributed to last year’s impeachment of Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, Latin Americans elsewhere also appear fed up. Anti-corruption protesters marched in the streets last month in the Dominican Republic, where Odebrecht allegedly paid $92 million in bribes but where no charges have been filed.

Colombia’s top prosecutor made

Protesters in Panama City on Feb. 16 decry corruption linked to the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht.

The U.S. Department of Justice, together with Swiss and Brazilian prosecutors, uncovered an $800 million web of graft spanning at least 12 countries in Latin America and Africa.

an explosive allegation this month: that Odebrecht channeled $1 million in illegal donations into President Juan Manuel Santos’s 2012 reelection campaign. But the jailed ex-senator who allegedly made the claim denied it a week later.

In Panama, 17 business executives and former officials have been charged, and one former Odebrecht executive has said he paid bribes to the sons of former president Ricardo Martinelli. The sons deny it. Prosecutors investigating the Odebrecht case have also raided the offices of Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the heart of the “Panama Papers” leak.

Then there are countries such as Venezuela, where Odebrecht has left bridges to nowhere rusting in the jungle. The late Hugo Chávez gave the company $11 billion in contracts, and Odebrecht paid an estimated $98 million in bribes, according to the Justice Department. Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, said the government will investigate, but the only arrests it has made so far are of journalists and activists trying to rake through the muck.

And in Ecuador, where leftist Lula ally Rafael Correa is not running for reelection, his party’s loss in an upcoming runoff vote could open the books on $116 million worth of deals allegedly greased with $34 million in bribes.

One reason the sums of money are so staggering, according to analyst Michael Shifter, is that cutthroat political campaigns in the region have become more and more expensive. “Corruption is deeply entrenched, and it will take an enormous, sustained effort over a long period of time to cleanse that,” said Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank in Washington.

“What’s happening in Brazil’s judiciary is very heartening,” he said, “but whether that can be sustained and produce change on a significant scale is still a big question.”

Odebrecht made a humble start in Brazil’s muggy northeast, where in 1944, founder Norberto Odebrecht launched a neighborhood construction firm with global ambitions.

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WORLD “He believed in a model based on trusting people,” said one former Odebrecht executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation. “He said, ‘If I choose them well, the sky’s the limit.’ ” Corruption has been endemic in Brazilian politics for centuries, but in the construction sector, it was all but written into the rules of the game. During a building boom under the military dictatorship of the 1970s, companies negotiated directly with generals, according to Pedro Campos, author of a book about the era.

“They had unfettered access to the country’s military rulers,” Campos said.

Soon a “pay to play” system developed, where bribes were a prerequisite for winning government contracts. By the time the country returned to democracy in 1985, the construction companies were skilled at greasing palms in Congress and financing campaigns to try to influence public policy, Campos said. “The company would decide that instead of a hospital, an airport should be built in a rural corner of the country.

Instead of universal health care, a new stadium was needed.”

Odebrecht professionalized the exchange of money for influence and exported that model around the world, according to the Justice Department investigation. In an effort to reduce the impact of Brazil’s chronic booms and busts, the company expanded its operations abroad in 1979, first in Latin America, then to Angola in 1984, and eventually to the United States. All the while, the Odebrecht family remained in control but estab-

WEEKLY

Eagles vs. drones: A screeching halt

lished a decentralized structure that gave regional leaders autonomy over their domain.

This decentralized structure facilitated the proliferation of the corruption abroad and was particularly effective in places with weak institutions, according to former executives.

Odebrecht’s golden era came with the rise of Lula, a former trade unionist, and his Brazilian Workers’ Party, as they presided over a commodity boom and a surge in government spending.

The two giants developed a symbiotic relationship, often fed by corruption.

“The idea was to create twin dynasties — political power that would last for 50 to 100 years and an economic powerhouse that would become one of the greatest in the world,” said a second former Odebrecht executive, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because so many of his former colleagues are under investigation.

Lula is also under indictment in the Car Wash probe but insists that he is innocent.

Under the Workers’ Party, the Brazilian government used Odebrecht as a tool of soft power to curry favor in countries with shared ideological leanings. Lula pushed Odebrecht to take on specific projects, such as building the Mariel port in Cuba, according to former executives.

This close relationship to the government gave the company the illusion that it would always be protected.

“That was their strategic error,” the second former executive said.

“They thought they were untouchable.” n

BY

A VI S ELK

U

In Lima, Peru, the base of a replica of Rio de Janeiro’s famous Christ statue is seen last month defaced with a spray-painted message that reads in Spanish: “Odebrecht get out of the country.” The $1 million statue was donated to Peru by Odebrecht.

RODRIGO ABD/ASSOCIATED PRESS

KLMNO

nder French military supervision, four golden eagle chicks hatched last year atop drones — born into a world of terrorism and machines they would be bred to destroy.

The eagles — named d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis — grew up with their nemeses.

They chased drones through green grass that summer, pecking futilely at composite shells as seen in Sky News footage. They were rewarded with meat, which they ate off the backs of the drones.

This month, when the eagles were ready, d’Artagnan launched screeching from a military control tower across a field, Agence France-Presse reported.

The bird covered over 200 yards in 20 seconds, slamming into a drone, then diving with the wreckage into the tall grass.

“The eagles are making good progress,” said the French air force’s commander, referring to a program that adapts the ancient art of falconry to the threats of unmanned flight.

Weeks earlier, on the other side of the world, Iraqi soldiers fired their guns wildly into the sky after a small drone dropped a bomb on them. Terrorists have been modifying devices that can be bought in toy stores into weapons and radiocontrolled spies, the Associated Press reported.

The French have been particularly concerned about drones since early 2015, when drones flew over the presidential palace and a restricted military site, according to AFP. No one was harmed. But terrorist attacks later that year, including the November massacre in Paris, inspired military officials to creative prevention.

They wanted a way to take down drones without shooting at them — a potential disaster if one went rogue in a crowded area.

REUTERS

The French Air Force is training eagles from a young age to snatch drones out of the sky.

A solution presented itself in an experiment by Dutch police, who last year used a trained eagle to pluck a DJI Phantom drone out of the air, according to a Washington Post report.

With unmatched speed and sight, and bone-crushing talons, birds of prey have been trained to hunt for hundreds of years — for other animals, of course.

But a wild eagle demonstrated natural hostility to a drone in Australia — as the doomed machine’s final footage revealed on CNN. Thus, in France, four eggs “were placed before birth on top of drones while still inside the eggshell and, after hatching, kept them there during their early feeding period,” Reuters reported in November.

The eagles were named after characters in “The Three Musketeers,” and by February proved capable of intercepting drones in lightning-fast horizontal chases.

“Soon they will be casting off from peaks in the nearby Pyrenees Mountains,” Agence FrancePresse reported.

The military has already ordered a second brood of eagles, according to the outlet.

Meanwhile, d’Artagnan and his siblings will be outfitted with high technology to carry on their war against machines.

“The military is designing mittens of leather and Kevlar, an anti-blast material, to protect their talons,” AFP reported. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

I

Reliably right but not predictable

BY K IMBERLY K INDY, S ARI H ORWITZ AND W ILLIAM W AN IN DENVER

t was a horrific case. A female student had been gang-raped by football players being recruited by the University of Colorado. Now, her lawyers were trying to hold the university partly responsible, arguing it had created a hostile environment for women.

A lower court had already rejected their civil rights argument. As her lawyers prepared to appeal in 2007, they had an overarching concern: a federal appellate judge named Neil Gorsuch.

Newly appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, Gorsuch was known as a fierce conservative whose writings skewered his liberal adversaries. His fellow conservative judges had shown little appetite in previous cases to hold institutions, such as universities, responsible for the conduct of individuals.

“It was crushing news to learn Gorsuch was on the panel,” said Baine Kerr, a lead attorney for the rape victim in the case 10 years ago.

Kerr spent weeks preparing for Gorsuch, staging extensive mock hearings to simulate the aggressive interrogation they expected from him.

But on the day of the hearing when Kerr stepped up to the lectern, anticipating Gorsuch to cut him off immediately with questions, the judge stayed silent instead, listening intently. Fifteen minutes into Kerr’s argument, a red light went off

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), left, and Vice President Pence, right, meet with Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, on Feb. 1.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2017

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COVER STORY signaling that Kerr’s time was up. Gorsuch waved Kerr on.

Over the next hour, Gorsuch steered the conversation with pointed comments — sympathetic for Kerr, barbed for the university’s lawyer.

Lawyers on both sides recalled later that they were dumbfounded.

The appeals court would go on to decide in favor of the victim, sending the case back to a lower court for trial. And the lawsuit was ultimately settled with the university paying her $2.5 million.

In the weeks since President Trump nominated Gorsuch to fill the Supreme Court vacancy, debate over him has split along predictably partisan lines, with praise from the right and anxious condemnation from the left.

But Gorsuch himself is perhaps not so predictable. An examination of his development from gifted Colorado schoolboy to college firebrand and then staunchly conservative jurist reveals that he is quite capable of surprise.

He grew up in a high-profile Republican family and became infamous in Columbia University’s liberal circles for penning fierce attacks on campus protesters. On the bench, he has subscribed to the same judicial philosophy as the late Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon whom Gorsuch would replace on the court. And Gorsuch’s recent rulings — including a major decision finding that companies could deny employees government-mandated contraceptive coverage on religious grounds — have won him plaudits from the right.

But Gorsuch has also established deep and enduring relationships with liberals he has known since his school days — in some cases the very targets of his pointed attacks. He has won endorsements from gay friends and hired law clerks from the opposite end of the political spectrum. He has argued that the court system shortchanges low-income people and called for making legal services cheaper and courts more accessible. Even the simple writing style of his opinions, which have won wide attention in legal circles, reflects his conviction that the law should be understandable to everyone, lest it favor only the wealthy and well educated.

In his writings, he has denounced liberals for using court decisions to advance “their social agenda.”

But Gorsuch has also refused to be pigeonholed himself, saying, “People do unexpected things. Pigeonholes ignore gray areas in the law.”

G

orsuch’s parents, Anne and David, were lawyers, and they raised their three children on the art of verbal sparring.

The impromptu debates could happen at any time — over dinner in their home in Denver, listening to NPR on the way to school, or while watching the Sunday morning political talk shows. Gorsuch’s younger brother, J.J., said their parents would press them to see

different sides of the story, to gain empathy for opponents and refine their own arguments.

“When you expose, at an early age, children to ‘The McLaughlin Group,’ you see people debating, using their critical reasoning,” Gorsuch’s brother said. “You come to the realization that there isn’t just one side or the other that is right. The truth is often in the middle.”

In grade school, Gorsuch stood out because of this skill at quickly taking positions and backing them up.

“Other kids were not able to do this,” said classmate Gina Carbone, whose mother shared carpooling duties with Gorsuch’s mother. “He was definitely more mature than the rest of us, better informed and more advanced.”

At the small private school Gorsuch attended, Christ the King Roman Catholic School teachers drilled into their students the values of character, duty and service. While many students brushed off the moral lessons, Gorsuch seemed to internalize them.

Jonathan Brody, one of his closest childhood friends, said one incident in particular has stayed with him. When they were about 12 years old, Gorsuch borrowed a sleeping bag, and it got damaged or dirty in his care. He grew distraught.

“He was very concerned and upset that his honor and his integrity would be questioned,” recounted Brody, who is now a state district court judge in Idaho. “I remember thinking, ‘Maybe I’m missing something. Do I not take this sort of thing seriously enough? Maybe I should.’ ” During grade school, Gorsuch saw his family’s political involvement grow after local Republicans visited their home to recruit his father as a candidate. “You have the wrong Gorsuch,” his mother told them. Soon, at age 9, he was going door to door with his mother as she successfully campaigned for the Colorado state legislature. Suddenly, family debates over politics were no longer abstract.

A

nne Gorsuch was a striking politician with jet-black hair and perfect manicures. She wore fur coats and smoked two packs of Marlboros a day — and rarely, if ever, shied away from political combat. The Rocky Mountain News described her this way: “She could kick a bear to death with her bare feet.” She quickly earned the honor of “Outstanding Freshman Legislator” from her colleagues and the capitol press corps.

Her conservative politics put her in a group of state lawmakers dubbed the “House Crazies” by critics because of their determination to kill environmental bills, dramatically downsize government and advocate for states’ rights. Her efforts brought her to the attention of the newly elected president, Ronald Reagan. In 1981, he appointed her the first female administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

With her marriage already heading toward

divorce, she left her husband in Colorado, packed up the kids and moved to Washington, D.C. She enrolled Gorsuch, a teenager at the time, in a boarding school. At Georgetown Preparatory School in Rockville, he swapped the polo shirt, khakis and cowboy boots he wore in Colorado for the school-mandated jacket, tie and dress shoes. Those frequent dinnertime debates with his family were replaced with dining hall meals taken with fellow dormitory boarders.

“It was a little lonely,” said Michael Trent, who relocated from California after Reagan named his father as deputy transportation secretary. “We spent a lot of time talking about how different our lives had become and what our parents were doing.” Trent would become one of Gorsuch’s closest friends, later serving as best man at his wedding. “We became soul mates because we understood what the other was going through.”

Gorsuch’s conservative values brought him to the center of political debates at the high school. He was known as an especially fierce champion of Reagan and the Republican agenda. An entry in Gorsuch’s high school yearbook listed him as founder of the “Fascism Forever Club.”

Stephen J. Ochs, who was faculty adviser to the student government, said the fascism club was a fabrication, merely an extension of the playful goading between conservative and liberal students on the debate team.

“They would use hyperbole,” Ochs said. “ ‘You’re such a conservative fascist! and ‘You lefty radicals!’ . . . It was good-natured. This was a reference to that. An insider joke.”

A

s the new head of EPA, Anne Gorsuch wasted no time acting on her ideas for slashing big government and reducing regulations.

To the howls of environmental groups and Democrats, she cut the agency’s budget by 22 percent, dramatically decreased cases and actions against polluters, relaxed Clean Air Act regulations and started hiring staff from the industries the EPA was supposed to regulate.

The confrontation over her stewardship of the EPA escalated when Congress launched an investigation into her agency’s mishandling of the $1.6 billion toxic waste Superfund program. Lawmakers demanded she turn over records, which she refused to do, citing executive privilege. As a result, she became the first agency director in U.S. history to be cited for contempt of Congress.

Just 22 months into her tenure, Anne Gorsuch resigned.

It was her son’s sophomore year at Georgetown Prep, and all his schoolmates knew what was happening.

“I remember asking Neil, ‘How’s your mom doing?’ He smiled and said, ‘She’s doing fine, continues on next page

KLMNO WEEKLY

“When you expose, at an early age, children to ‘The McLaughlin Group,’ you see people debating, using their critical reasoning. You come to the realization that there isn’t just one side or the other that is right. The truth is often in the middle.”

Gorsuch’s younger brother, J.J., talking about their upbringing.

Their parents, who were both lawyers, encouraged their children to debate and examine all sides of an argument.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY made him shrewder and more determined.

At the end of his junior year, he set his sights on becoming student body president. Gorsuch picked a running mate who could deliver the jock vote and assembled a team of 10 students to turn up at his speeches and debates and applaud him on cue, according to his running mate John Caldwell. “He was incredibly strategic.”

I

PHOTOS FROM GORSUCH FAMILY

Undated photos show Neil Gorsuch with his mother, Anne, top, and with his wife and children, above.

from previous page

thank you,’ ” said Thad Ficarra, a fellow boarder. “It wasn’t a brushoff. I said, ‘Just so you know, your mom is in my prayers.’ He said, ‘I really appreciate that.’ . . . He was grateful for the support, but he didn’t wallow in it.”

Whatever Gorsuch suppressed at school, he expressed at home.

In her memoir “Are You Tough Enough?,” his mother wrote about how upset the episode had made her son. “Half-way through Georgetown Prep, and smart as a whip, Neil knew from the beginning the seriousness of my problems.”

She recalled him saying, “You should never have resigned. You didn’t do anything wrong.

You only did what the President ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?”

But the traumatic experience didn’t derail Gorsuch. He became a national champion in debating. And it didn’t sour him on politics. It

n 1985, when Gorsuch arrived at Columbia University in New York, the campus was a hotbed of liberal activism and protest.

It didn’t take long for him to turn his journalistic ire on the targets all around him.

In one column for the student newspaper the Spectator, Gorsuch mocked the “muddled thinking” of protesters who seemed to “have a monopoly on righteousness.” In another news story, he criticized their efforts to block the eviction of a tenant from an apartment owned

by Columbia, dismissing the protesters as publicity hounds.

As a freshman, he and three other students established a conservative newspaper, the Fed, named in honor of Federalist Paper authors and Columbia alumni Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. In the first issue, Gorsuch and his co-founders explained their mission: “Our voice will be an aggressive but considered one, one that may make you think or may just make you angry. But it will be heard, and it will not be shouted down.”

Gorsuch also promoted his conservative ideas by running for Columbia’s student senate.

That year, the student newspaper asked every candidate whether the U.S. Marine Corps should be allowed to recruit on campus.

While most candidates brought up the military’s discrimination against gays as a problem, Gorsuch cited the Marine recruiters’ First Amendment right to free speech.

“The question here is not whether ‘the Marines should be allowed to recruit on campus’ but whether a University and its community . . . has the right or obligation to determine who may speak on campus or what may be said,” Gorsuch wrote.

At Columbia, and in the years that followed at Harvard Law School and Oxford University, Gorsuch enjoyed engaging on the hot-button issues of the day.

One issue in particular became a kind of laboratory for his conservative explorations: the sanctity of life and how to define it. At the time, Michigan doctor Jack Kevorkian was making national headlines by championing the right to die for terminal patients through physician-assisted suicide. This and similar controversies made a deep impression on Gorsuch. He was eager to debate assisted suicide with fellow law students at Harvard, and it became the subject of his PhD thesis after he won a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford.

In his dissertation, later published as a book titled “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia,” he makes his legal case against

assisted suicide and argues for the “inviolability” of human life.

It is the closest Gorsuch has ever come to revealing his thoughts on abortion, in his academic writings as well as in his judicial opinions. But with abortion continuing to be one of the marquee issues confronting the Supreme Court, the book has been cited by Gorsuch’s conservative backers as reason to rally behind him, and by abortion rights advocates as the basis of their worst fears.

M

any of those who knew Gorsuch during his student days noted that he was as affable in person as he was fierce in his writings.

As a member of a Harvard social club called Lincoln’s Inn Society, Gorsuch met a classmate named Phil Berg, sparking a friendship that has lasted 30 years.

A few years after they met, Berg decided to come out as gay, and Gorsuch was one of the first friends he told.

“It was a time that was very fraught and difficult for me,” Berg said, recalling his conversation with Gorsuch at a dinner gathering in the early 1990s. “He — in a very sincere way, without skipping a beat — was supportive and has been since then. . . . I remember how much of a relief it was that it was not an issue.”

When Berg and his boyfriend, Ronald Riqueros, got married in 2012, Gorsuch sent them a note telling them to consider his house their house if they are ever in Colorado.

Berg said Gorsuch was constantly establishing such connections with others, regardless of their political philosophy.

“He would have a real conversation with people from the top professors to waiters and waitresses at a restaurant. He sort of put himself in their shoes,” he said. “He made you feel like you were the only person in the room when he was talking to you.”

Classmates and acquaintances — from his time in college, law school and Oxford — uniformly describe him in such effusive terms.

“There are a whole lot of people at Harvard Law School who are interested in talking and want you to think that they’re the most important person in the room,” said Ken Mehlman, his Harvard housemate who later became chairman of the Republican National Committee.

“But Neil was very curious about other people and learning what they had to say.”

Mehlman, like Berg, would later come out to Gorsuch as gay and also recalled the sensitive way he took the news.

“I would be surprised if any of our classmates had an unkind word to say about him,” said Norm Eisen, a classmate who would later become a high-ranking official in the Obama administration.

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orsuch returned in 1995 from Oxford with several surprises in store.

While in England, he met his future wife, Louise, a champion equestrian on the Oxford riding team. A year and a half after their first date, they were married.

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COVER STORY Gorsuch clerked with Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony M. Kennedy.

With his impressive credentials, Gorsuch decided against the predictable route of joining a prestigious law firm and instead opted for the excitement of a legal start-up. He signed on with the boutique Washington firm of Kellogg, Huber, Hansen & Todd.

Once on board, Gorsuch had to decide exactly what kind of lawyer he wanted to be.

He could focus on appellate law, funneling his energy into writing legal briefs, or go the academic route and counsel clients on policy matters. But Gorsuch chose instead to apprentice under one of the partners, Mark Hansen, a trial lawyer who spent his days in the courtroom crucible of litigation.

“It was a risk for someone like Neil, from the establishment life, who wasn’t necessarily a swashbuckler. He looked like he had never walked against a Don’t Walk sign,” said Hansen. “Not everyone likes the confrontation that comes with litigation. Some people used to winning their whole lives don’t like the risk of losing. You could tell it made him uncomfortable. He pushed himself.”

The same empathetic, affable manner that had endeared Gorsuch to liberal classmates despite his firebrand conservatism now helped him put clients at ease. His plain, Midwestern way of talking came across to juries as down-to-earth.

In his first case as a lead attorney, Gorsuch represented a property owner suing a construction company for stealing gravel, Hansen recalled.

“It’s not complicated. Here’s what they did to my poor client,” Gorsuch told the jury in closing arguments. He reached into his pants pockets and turned them inside out. “They picked his pocket.”

A jury member ran up to Gorsuch after the trial, Hansen said, and compared him to Perry Mason.

For a decade he worked under and with Hansen. Then, over beers one evening after an especially tough day in court, he told Hansen that he wanted to accept an offer to work in Bush’s Justice Department. “At the time, I thought he would do it for a couple of years and come back,” Hansen said.

But after just a year and half, Bush tapped Gorsuch to become a federal appellate court judge.

A

s a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit based in Denver, Gorsuch has won a following in legal circles for his clear, often entertaining style of writing opinions.

Gorsuch’s signature move is to open his opinions with yarn-spinning summaries of the case that draw the reader in.

“If a seventh grader starts trading fake burps for laughs in gym class, what’s a teacher to do? Order extra laps? Detention? A trip to the principal’s office?” he began one decision about a 13-year-old who was arrested. “Maybe.

But then again, maybe that’s too old school.

Maybe today you call a police officer.”

A few years into his tenure, Gorsuch started using contractions, like “would’ve” and “could’ve.” His clerks teased him about it, trying to find precedents for such informal language. Former clerks say that Gorsuch’s insistence on clear writing reflects his convictions about making the law accessible and understandable to everyone.

He has hired clerks from both liberal and conservative backgrounds and recently all of them — except two currently clerking at the Supreme Court — signed a bipartisan letter praising his independence.

In speeches, Gorsuch has criticized the complexity of the American legal code, arguing that there are so many criminal laws and they are so complicated that it can be hard for people to understand what is and isn’t a crime. In an article titled “Access to Affordable Justice” published by the Duke Law Center, he called on bar associations and educators to make legal services cheaper and courts more accessible to low-income litigants by ceding more work to non-lawyers with legal training.

In 2007, after sitting on a panel in which he believed a prisoner’s lawyer had missed arguments critical to his clients, Gorsuch helped launch an effort to improve the representation of low-income prisoners in death penalty cases. He and another judge traveled to Oklahoma, where many death penalty cases were arising, to persuade lawyers with good track records to take such cases and convened a tutorial on how such cases should be presented before an appellate court.

I

n the weeks since Gorsuch was nominated for the Supreme Court, his judicial philosophy has been widely compared to Scalia’s.

Like Scalia, Gorsuch is a proponent of originalism — a belief that judges should try to interpret the Constitution’s words as they were understood by its authors. But more importantly when it comes to laws, Gorsuch, like Scalia, is a textualist, who believes that only the actual words written in a statute matter — not legislators’ intent or any potential consequences of a judge’s decisions.

Gorsuch spelled out his philosophy in his colorful conclusion on the case of the 13-yearold fake burper.

“Often enough the law can be ‘a ass — a idiot,’ ” he wrote, quoting Charles Dickens.

“And there is little we judges can do about it, for it is (or should be) emphatically our job to apply, not rewrite, the law enacted by the people’s representatives. Indeed, a judge who likes every result he reaches is very likely a bad judge, reaching for results he prefers rather than those the law compels.”

That approach has drawn its share of detractors, especially among liberals.

“The argument of originalists like Gorsuch is always ‘Well, I’m just following the law.’ But it’s intellectually dishonest to pretend you can somehow divine the original founders’ intent,” said Ayesha Khan, a former longtime

KLMNO WEEKLY

GLENN SUMMERS VIA THE GORSUCH FAMILY

legal director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State who has written many amicus briefs in cases ruled on by Gorsuch.

“It’s also a notable coincidence that the originalist, textualist philosophy always paves the way for religious messages by government or strikes down efforts to protect women’s reproductive rights,” Khan said. “It’s a way of rationalizing activist tendencies.”

Put more succinctly, Nan Aron of the liberal Alliance for Justice said, “In spite of what the White House would like to have us believe, he’s a dangerous choice.”

By contrast, Gorsuch has been aggressively vetted for the court by conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation, and they have backed him enthusiastically. These groups even scrutinized his attendance at St. John’s Episcopal Church — which draws from the largely liberal population in Boulder, Colo., calls itself a largely liberal congregation and advertised on its website for the Women’s March in Washington last month — and concluded it was not a strike against him.

For their part, the church’s leaders alluded in a recent newsletter and Sunday sermon to the political divide between most of its parishioners and Gorsuch. But they added that Gorsuch’s views are not as narrow or predictable as some might think — or fear.

“I am privileged to have spent enough time with the family to come to know Neil as a broad-thinking man, one eager to listen and learn, and one thoughtful in speaking,” wrote the Rev. Susan W. Springer. “Those foundational qualities are ones I would pray that all public servants in any leadership role in our country might possess.” n

Antonin Scalia and Neil Gorsuch are seen in October 2014 on the upper Colorado River near Kremmling, Colo.

Gorsuch’s judicial philosophy has been widely compared to Scalia’s, and if confirmed, Gorsuch would replace the late justice on the Supreme Court.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORKPLACE

Want to work from home more often? This data could help convince your boss.

ISTOCKPHOTO

BY

J ENA M C G REGOR

E

mployees who have tried to negotiate a remote work arrangement often ask to spend one day working from home. But new data from a big workplace study suggests they might be better off asking for three or four.

As part of its massive “State of the American Workplace” report released this month, Gallup asked more than 7,000 U.S. workers during 2016 about how many days a week they worked from home, as well as questions about how “engaged” they are at work — how much they feel enthusiastic and committed to their jobs.

The survey found that those happiest with their jobs weren’t people who spent the majority of the week in the office collaborating with their colleagues and one day a week skipping the commute. Nor were they the people who spent the entire week working from home.

Instead, the report showed that the most engaged workers

were those who spent 60 to 80 percent of their week, or three to four days, working from home, and a minority of their time in the office. Those who spent more or less time working remotely were less enthusiastic about their work, with the lowest numbers occurring among those who spent either all of their time either in the office or at home.

In other words, after untold dollars spent by companies to get workers more committed to their jobs, and study after study suggesting a link between employee engagement and the bottom line, working from home three to four days a week doesn’t just make things better for employees. It could also make things better for their boss.

Unsurprisingly, people feel most plugged in to their jobs when they have some balance — a little bit of face time and camaraderie at work, and plenty of time to hunker down and get work done from home while avoiding the headaches of going in to the office. What may bewil-

der many managers, however — particularly those at companies like Yahoo or Bank of America that scaled back on telecommuting programs in recent years — is the extent to which that balance is tipped toward working remotely.

Just four years ago, after all, Gallup found that the “optimal engagement boost” happened for those who worked remotely less than 20 percent of time, a third of where it is now. The 2012 data showed that those who spent more than half their time away from the office were only about as engaged as those who never worked remotely.

Four years on, something has changed dramatically.

Improvements in technology — better mobile phones, faster home Internet service, better videoconferencing — may play some role, though these technologies were also well in place in 2012. Greater numbers of people working from home — and therefore, more acceptance that could lead employees to feel more com-

The report showed that the most engaged workers were those who spent three to four days working from home.

fortable with doing it more — could also help explain the boost, but the jump isn’t profound.

Gallup found that in 2016, 43 percent of employees worked remotely at least some of the time, compared with 39 percent in 2012.

Rather, says Jim Harter, chief scientist for workplace management at Gallup, the primary explanation may be that companies are doing more to help remote workers get it right. From handing out technology kits to get people up and running at home to training managers to be clear about job descriptions to building in systems that improve collaboration between those outside the office, he says, companies have been responding to the shift toward remote work with ways to help the work-fromhome crowd work. “I think organizations are more intentional about putting resources around it,” he said.

While Harter was surprised to see the ideal range for remote working shift so much in four years, he wasn’t shocked to see a strong link between employee enthusiasm and working from home. The best predictor for employee engagement, he says, is when workers say they have a “significant amount of time where they get absorbed in their work and time passes quickly,” he said. “And when you work remotely, you certainly have more of a chance to get absorbed in your work.”

While flexibility and remote work arrangements were particularly influential on how enthusiastic workers are in their jobs, Gallup’s report reminds us there are plenty of other factors, including the struggles those who do have to work in the office cope with every day. In a work world plagued with open office plans, employees who can shut a door on their workspace are 1.3 times more likely to be engaged than other workers, Gallup reports, while those who say they have privacy when they need it are 1.7 times more likely to be engaged.

Some would even leave their jobs to get those things: About 40 percent of workers would change jobs for a personal office, Gallup found, while one-third said they would leave even for a thermostat set at a comfortable temperature. n

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MOVIES

KLMNO WEEKLY

For entertainers, ‘a class ceiling’ BY

S TEPHANIE M ERRY

T

here have been a slew of studies about how hard it is for women and people of color to break into the entertainment industry, and a recent British Academy of Film and Television Arts report reinforces those notions with the help of British actors. “Rogue One” star Riz Ahmed, for example, explains that he nearly couldn’t go to drama school, because he didn’t have the money.

And “Moonlight’s” Oscar-nominated Naomie Harris credits colorblind casting for supplying her big break in “28 Days Later.”

But the report briefly mentions one other interesting variable — the “class ceiling” that holds back strivers who weren’t born at the right level on the social hierarchy.

One anonymous industry influencer put it this way in the report: “In film, you have to know the people who make the decisions (about film funding) and speak their language, but it really helps if you have family money and backing. Being BAME [Black, Asian or minority ethnic] is not the issue, it’s being working class and not having contacts or money to smooth your way.”

The study doesn’t ultimately rule on the complicated race vs. class issue and to what extent they’re connected.

Possible discrimination against working-class actors has been a recurring conversation across the pond for some time, especially as posh British private-school kids, such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Thomas Hiddleston, Eddie Redmayne and Emily Blunt, have shot to fame.

Actors from working-class backgrounds who have been vocal include James McAvoy, Ian McShane and Oscar nominee Julie Walters. In past interviews, all three assure that they have nothing against the prepsters who are raking it in, but they worry that arts funding has dried up, making it nearly impossible for newcomers who don’t have the resources to go to drama school.

Walters credits a grant to study

HOPPER STONE/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

In addition to gender and race, working-class backgrounds can be a barrier to a showbiz career English and drama that helped her break into acting. But those grants aren’t available anymore.

“It’s shocking how that flow of talent has just stopped,” she told Radio Times in 2015. “It will change the population of actors, which is terrible, really. It won’t be representative of society.”

McAvoy, meanwhile, worked at a bakery to pay his way through drama school. He aired his concerns about the new privileged class of actors to the Herald of Scotland.

“That’s a frightening world to live in,” he said in an interview, “because as soon as you get one tiny pocket of society creating all the arts, our culture starts to become representative not of everybody but of one tiny part, and that’s not fair to begin with, but it’s also damaging for society.”

This is a particularly stubborn issue in a land that still glorifies its princes and duchesses. Superficially, this British problem becomes an American problem in an era when American characters are

often played by Brits.

But it’s also an American problem because inequality is an American problem — increasingly so.

Research shows the gap in income and wealth between the haves and have-nots is at historic levels. And so is the lack of social mobility. According to one report, fewer than 10 percent of those born into the bottom fifth of wealth distribution will make it into the top fifth, and 20 percent of people in the middle fifth rise to the top tier.

And a recent push for more racial diversity in entertainment in the United States may not necessarily help the class gap. Shonda Rhimes, for example, had to overcome a lot as a female black showrunner, and she’s credited for changing the face of television with “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal” and “How to Get Away With Murder.” It doesn’t diminish these accomplishments to say that Rhimes had a middle-class upbringing.

She’s the daughter of a professor and has an Ivy League education.

JORDAN STRAUSS/INVISION/AP

“Rogue One” actor Riz Ahmed, above, almost couldn’t go to drama school because he lacked the money. Octavia Spencer, who is nominated for an Oscar for“Hidden Figures,” in which she is seen at top, achieved success in Hollywood despite growing up as the daughter of a maid.

The same goes for other trailblazers, such as Mindy Kaling, whose parents were an architect and a doctor, and Jenji Kohan, the “Orange Is the New Black” creator who grew up in Beverly Hills, the daughter of an Emmy-winning television writer.

The pattern has often gone unnoticed in entertainment, though sometimes it appears egregious enough to cause a sensation.

“Girls” came under fire when viewers realized that all four of the main actresses are the daughters of prominent artists, musicians, writers and newscasters.

Of course, there have been some stories of class mobility. Steve McQueen was abandoned by his parents, then sent to a boys school for troubled kids; Gene Hackman left Iowa to enlist in the Marines at 16; Harrison Ford was a carpenter and stagehand before he was Han Solo; and Tommy Lee Jones made it to Harvard — but only with the help of a need-based scholarship.

This year’s Oscar nominees show a somewhat mixed assortment of backgrounds. Supporting-actress contender Octavia Spencer grew up as the daughter of a maid in Alabama, and a recent New Yorker profile of nominee Viola Davis revealed that she grew up destitute. But supporting-actor nominees Jeff Bridges and Lucas Hedges probably made their way to acting more easily; Bridges is the son of two actors, and Hedges’s father is the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of “About a Boy.” The class discrepancy in the United States did get some attention recently. During a heated conversation at a Sundance Film Festival luncheon, Salma Hayek and “Daily Show” alum Jessica Williams got into a debate about the difficulty of making it in Hollywood as a black woman. Hayek got on the wrong side of Twitter with the way she seemed to invalidate Williams’s point of view.

Hayek no doubt had obstacles on her way to success. But her critics were also quick to mention that she had one advantage. She grew up wealthy in Mexico, the daughter of an opera singer and an oil-company executive. n

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BOOKS

A villain, a prophet and two huge start-ups N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

A NTONIO G ARCIA- M ARTINEZ

S THE UPSTARTS How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

By Brad Stone Little, Brown.

372 pp. $30.

THE AIRBNB STORY How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

By Leigh Gallagher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

236 pp. $28.

ilicon Valley encourages an odd form of meritocracy that inspires the ambitious to succeed and disregards whatever happens to the rest — it’s a winner-take-all and loser-getnothing world. In his new book, “The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World,” Brad Stone reveals the workings of this brutal tech-world battlefield. He amply illustrates that for every tech champion, there is a forgotten crowd of decapitated competitors, angry investors, defenestrated founders and unrewarded early employees. The Silicon Valley meritocracy rewards some for good luck and destroys others for a bad twist of fate.

Consider the different outcomes for two early Uber employees. Matthew Kochman was a charismatic and ambitious Cornell grad hired to lead Uber’s assault on the New York market.

Relying on his considerable charm, he cut deals with the city’s recalcitrant limo drivers to use the newfangled mobile app. But after his relationship with Uber’s chief executive and founder, Travis Kalanick, soured, Kochman bailed on the company only nine months into his tenure, walking away from his unvested equity stake. In a vindictive pique, he consulted for competitors, bad-mouthed Uber to potential investors and founded another transport start-up that went nowhere. Right now, the Uber shares he abandoned are worth more than $100 million.

By contrast, Oscar Salazar happened to know an Uber founder and ended up heading the Mexican development team that coded the original Uber app. Since he was officially in the United States as a student, he couldn’t accept payment in cash. Instead, he took equity in the fledgling start-up.

His stake is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. “It’s way more than I deserved,” Salazar admits. “It’s more than any human deserves.”

FROM LEFT: WILL OLIVER/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY; DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Travis Kalanick, left, founded ride-hailing service Uber, Brian Chesky, right, founded lodging service Airbnb.

While ill fate and chance play their role, true merit also drives some competitors to the top. Uber founder Kalanick demonstrated his swift reaction time in dealing with an incursion by a London company in the U.S. market. When Hailo, a mobile app matching passengers and taxis in London, announced that it planned to set up operations in Chicago, Kalanick raced into the city with Uber. By the time Hailo finally arrived on the scene five months later, it was too late — the company would never carve out an American beachhead.

Airbnb founder Brian Chesky also has a claim on entrepreneurial genius, anchored by a muchretold story about his company’s origins. Airbnb got its start when penniless industrial-design students began offering lodgers air mattresses in their apartment to pay for their rent (hence the “air” in Airbnb). Early on, the company struggled. Short on cash, the students used their design skills to produce cereal boxes featuring caricatured faces of the 2008 presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain. They then sold the $4 boxes for $40 at the Democratic National Convention and saved their foundering start-up with the cash earned.

While Uber and Airbnb are the twin showpieces of new entrepre-

neurship, the leaders of these two companies could not be more different. Each embodies one of the two chief-executive archetypes in vogue. Uber’s Kalanick is start-up CEO as textbook sociopath: glib, charming, manipulative, calculating, sometimes reckless and content to treat people as mere means to personal ends.

On the other side of the start-up playbook, Airbnb’s Chesky is CEO as prophet of a new start-up religion, motivated as much by a mission as by money. Its mission: to bring the world together via shared experiences and cheap lodgings. The company held yearly powwows — elaborately staged in grand venues with A-list entertainment — for all of its hosts, while Chesky evangelized to the converted in revival-tent style.

The Silicon Valley carnival of characters and oddities doesn’t attract nearly enough serious, longform reporting. Leigh Gallagher, an assistant managing editor at Fortune, offers another muchneeded perspective in her new book, “The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy.”

Gallagher describes how the cando passion and prophetic vision of Airbnb’s founders overcame all obstacles on the way to redemptive success. The take is more cor-

porate and dry than Stone’s account, and the tale is told in more linear fashion (and somewhat conventionally) from creation, to growth, to surmounting challenges, to eventual success. What Gallagher lacks in snark she makes up for in business perspective, including a long competitive analysis with thoughts from industry leaders that assesses how Airbnb fits into the conventional hostelry business.

By contrast, where Stone really succeeds is in providing the reader with the visceral experience of the start-up enterprise, something lost in typical rah-rah tech journalism.

We are spectators of capitalism as theater staged inside progressively more sumptuous offices, all paid for by escalating rounds of venture capital financing that is dizzying even by Silicon Valley standards: Uber and Airbnb have collectively raised around $12 billion. If everything in our lives eventually becomes shared, booked and optimized via software, then Uber and Airbnb will have been the beginning of that epochal transformation. n Garcia-Martinez is a former Facebook product manager, Twitter adviser, and is author of “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley.”

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19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A stand-up comic spirals into crisis

Behind the scenes of an iconic movie

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

A

l

REVIEWED BY

K EN K ALFUS

snail walks into a police station and says, “Two turtles attacked me!” The desk sergeant opens a file and says, “Tell me exactly what they did to you.” The snail says, “I don’t remember, it all happened so fast.”

This is easily the best inoffensive joke in Israeli writer David Grossman’s brilliant, blistering new novel. “A Horse Walks into a Bar” comprises a single disastrous performance by the stand-up comic Dovaleh G in a nightclub in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv. Although never letting up on the crude sex jokes, some of which made me laugh, Dovaleh lampoons Palestinians, West Bank settlers and what he calls “God’s whole Holocaust initiative.” His father was the survivor of an extended family that was exterminated at Auschwitz after passing through the laboratory of Nazi researcher Josef Mengele. “You could say, in fact, that in his own special way he was like our family doctor.”

I kind of laughed at that one, too.

The main purpose of Dovaleh’s act is to review the highlights of his miserable 57-year-old existence — his unhappy parents, his outcast childhood, his divorces, his loneliness — as he lacerates himself and mocks individual members of the audience, some abhorrently. There are several good jokes, but the performance is mostly unfunny.

He’s heckled. The nightclub gradually empties out. Those left are giving in to “the temptation to look into another man’s hell.”

One guest is his childhood friend Avishai, a retired district judge who hadn’t seen Dovaleh since summer camp. Tending to his own loneliness, still mourning his wife’s early death, he demurred. Dovaleh pleaded for him to come. Avishai hates the show at first, but in the course of the evening a fresh connection is forged between him and the man on stage. He stays to the very end.

Grossman masterfully weaves several complex strands of narrative. First there are Dovaleh’s sto-

ries, particularly a single story that takes most of the book to unfold and aims at the heart of his self-loathing. The comedian interrupts this anecdote to tell other stories, to insult guests demanding more humor, to pacify them with a few jokes and then to further insult them. Translator Jessica Cohen turns the performance into fluent, American-style patter, bad-a-bing bad-a-boom.

Meanwhile, in the spaces between Dovaleh’s riffs, the retired judge recalls his late wife and his brief childhood friendship with the comedian. Avishai sees in advance that he tangentially figures in the principal story, the traumatic event that has haunted Dovaleh’s life.

It’s a shameful incident, but really a small one within the greater scheme of a man’s life. Part of adulthood is forgiving your adolescent self for your ignorance, bad judgment and wrong thoughts.

Dovaleh can’t do it.

Something transactional is at work in this artistry. Avishai observes between comic and audience a “murky sense of partnership that prickles deep in our gut and stirs up a sticky, messy pleasure both sickening and alluring.” The relation also holds true between a literary author who reveals the darker elements of human nature and the reader who enjoys the disclosure. We laugh at least at some of Dovaleh’s ugly comments. After a lifetime of writing, Grossman is acknowledging that by entertaining his readers, he, too, has implicated them in his conceits, his failings and his cruelties.

“A Horse Walks into a Bar” is a concise novel, quick reading. With Dovaleh, Grossman has created a character who’s captivating and horrific and a stand-up routine that’s disgusting and authentically human. I can hardly say how the book achieves its bewitching effects. It all happened so fast. n Kalfus’s most recent book is a collection: “Coup de Foudre: A Novella and Stories.”

T A HORSE WALKS INTO A BAR

By David Grossman Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen Knopf. 194 pp. $25.95.

HIGH NOON The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic

By Glenn Frankel Bloomsbury.

377 pp. $28.

l

REVIEWED BY

J OHN D OMINI

wo-thirds of the way into “High Noon,” Glenn Frankel’s aromatic blend of politics, personalities and showbiz, the book arrives at its most fascinating mash-up. This comes in the fall of 1951 at the mansion of Hollywood composer Dimitri Tiomkin. The maestro owes his success to Westerns like “Red River,” though — like many of the movie folks who populate this teeming read — his roots go back to European Jewry. Tiomkin had his bar mitzvah in pre-Soviet Russia, and he still tends to massacre English. Yet his latest assignment calls for a cowboy song.

The right music, the producers believe, might salvage a Western that the head of Columbia Pictures regards as “a piece of crap.” Before long, Tiomkin manages to come up with a fresh tune, and the song gets its first run-through in a “Russian accent contorted into a tortured Texas Panhandle drawl” that knocks everyone “out of their chairs.” Then Tex Ritter comes in and works up a treatment no less than devastating. “Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin’ ” becomes an essential ingredient for “High Noon,” a movie still ranked among the very best, and — more than that — a metaphor for “good and evil in a showdown.”

The combustion that occurred in Tiomkin’s music room that day was just part of what “made everything fizz,” according to producer Stanley Kramer. Kramer too belongs in the Hollywood pantheon, and he had a hand in every part of the process. In particular, he risked giving the marshal role to Gary Cooper, thought by many to be over the hill. Yet Kramer admitted eventually that he couldn’t figure out the secret to his 1952 hit, at once a compelling story and a haunting vision: “I can’t tell you why, and that’s as honest as I can be.” For a fuller answer, best to pick up this latest effort from the Pulitzer-winning Frankel. I doubt anyone can come closer to the heat of creative ferment.

Frankel’s fresh understanding, to be sure, owes a lot to plain old digging. A former Washington Post reporter, he unearthed Kramer’s confession of helplessness, for instance, in a taped conversation that had languished for decades.

The provenance is clarified in one of the text’s many hundreds of endnotes — and his bibliography is equally exhaustive.

The heaps of research, however, never snuff out what’s entertaining about scenes like the culture clash around the émigré’s piano.

Frankel’s grasp of cinema’s “collaborative effort” leads to a juggling act, switching points of view among the film’s chief contributors. In time, screenwriter Carl Foreman emerges as the story’s hero, but everyone enjoys sensitive handling, while also helping to build unusual suspense.

The movie started out as “the ugliest duckling of them all . . . shot on a shoestring budget.” Its neglect damaged the fruitful partnership of Kramer and Foreman and created risks even for its aging star — the first of the major players Frankel examines. That is, he starts with the fun stuff: the Hollywood gossip.

Before long, however, gloomier business looms — the worst threat to “High Noon” or any creative fusion. In 1947, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee decamps in Los Angeles, intent on rooting out “commies” in the film industry. Foreman makes a fascinating case study. Summoned before the committee in the middle of the film shoot, he invites not just pity, but also respect.

Though Frankel began this sumptuous history long before the latest election, he ends up reminding us that 2016 was far from the first time that politicians trafficked in lies and fear, and showing us how, nonetheless, people of integrity came together to do exemplary work. n Domini wrote the novel “Movieola!” in 2016.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Leaks are as American as apple pie and presidents MARK FELDSTEIN, a media historian, is the Eaton Chair of Journalism at the University of Maryland and author of “Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture.”

When confronted with media revelations about his staff’s contacts with the Russian government, President Trump blamed the messenger. He denounced “low-life leakers,” directed the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation and vowed revenge: “They will be caught!”

The leaks, he declared, were “Very un-American!”

Actually, leaking is as American as Fourth of July fireworks. And just as old and venerable.

America’s grand tradition of revealing secret information about national security matters began in the winter of 1777, when the country’s first whistleblowers exposed a U.S. Navy commander for torturing British prisoners of war. The sailors who disclosed these human rights violations weren’t vilified by their commander in chief. Instead, they received the full support of Congress.

A few years later, President George Washington endured press leaks of what today would be considered classified national security documents: confidential Cabinet minutes, private letters between diplomats, even the verbatim text of a secret treaty with England. Although Washington was “much inflamed,” he didn’t attack the revelations as anti-American, let alone plot vengeance.

During Washington’s presidency, as in those that would follow, the ship of state leaked primarily from the top. Perhaps the most important “low-life leaker” of the day was Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson; he and his allies pushed their policy agenda by publicizing national security secrets in the press.

Jefferson’s rivals responded in kind, slipping confidential diplomatic letters to other newspapers. It became an escalating war of leaks, setting the stage for administrations to come.

By the end of his presidency, even Washington had turned into a leaker.

So it would continue for the next two centuries.

Administrations complained about national security leaks but generally accepted them as a fact of political life. The press had become a kind of back channel used by government rivals to communicate and compete.

In the 1840s, when President James K. Polk’s official correspondence and secret diplomatic plans were published in the press, he vented in his diary about the “treasonable” disclosures. But instead of facing criminal charges, the leaker (Secretary of State James Buchanan) was elected president.

Washington, D.C., became a sanctuary city for leakers. And with good reason: Leaks are healthy in a democracy. They are an important check on abuse of power, a safety valve that can prevent disasters. At its best, leaking can be a supreme act of patriotism.

Trump complains that “illegal classified” secrets are being passed out “like candy” and wants these “criminal leaks” to be prosecuted. But Washington’s most important — even heroic — leaks have technically run afoul of the law. FBI deputy director Mark Felt’s Watergate disclosures helped expose criminality in the Nixon White House. Daniel Ellsberg’s revelation of the topsecret Pentagon Papers helped end the Vietnam War. And whatever you think about Edward

THE GUARDIAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Edward Snowden leaked information on government data collection.

Snowden and Chelsea Manning, their publicizing of mass government collection of Americans’ phone “metadata” and military killings of civilians raised vital moral issues that deserved public debate.

Of course, some leaks — such as pending troop movements in wartime — can pose legitimate threats to national security. But political security — the covering-up of blunders and crimes by our leaders — has too often been the real reason for condemning leakers.

Paradoxically, leaking has become both systemic and criminalized. America’s transformation during the Cold War into a national-security state produced millions of classified documents and criminal sanctions for exposing them. At the same time, the government’s increasing public-relations sophistication led to a routinized culture in which news reporters were regularly given confidential intelligence to advance the official agenda.

The bizarre result: a government that leaks with one hand and punishes leakers with the other.

Top officials in President George W. Bush’s White House leaked the identity of a CIA operative and classified intelligence indicating that Iraq possessed (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction — but prosecuted a handful of low-level leakers who caused far less harm with their disclosures. Similarly, the Obama administration launched a crackdown on

whistleblowers Manning and Snowden even as it leaked a highly sensitive but self-serving election-year story about its successful cyber-sabotage of Iran’s budding nuclear operations.

To be sure, the facts in these cases vary considerably. But in all of them, punishment fell disproportionately on those who leaked from the bottom of the ship rather than the top. Control, not lawbreaking, seemed to be the No. 1 concern.

Trump’s double standard on this issue has been even more glaring. Since the 1970s, he has mastered the art of the leak, personally calling tabloids and hiding behind pseudonyms to plant self-serving stories about his business and personal life.

More recently, he praised publication of Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails and encouraged the Russian government to hack into the account she used when she was secretary of state.

Yet this month, Trump accused U.S. intelligence agencies of acting “just like Russia” by leaking compromising information about his administration. The hypocrisy seemed lost on him.

So Trump had better get used to media leaks. In a democracy, the people are the true sovereigns.

The leakers he denounces as unAmerican don’t work for him; they work for the American people.

To suggest otherwise is what’s truly un-American. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2017

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Time is running out on pensions GEORGE F. WILL is a Pulitzer Prize–winning conservative political commentator.

Some American disasters come as bolts from the blue — the stock market crash of October 1929, Pearl Harbor, the designated hitter, 9/11.

Others are predictable because they arise from arithmetic that is neither hidden nor arcane. Now comes the tsunami of pension problems that will wash over many cities and states.

Dallas has the fastest-growing economy of America’s 13 largest cities but in spite of its glistening commercial towers it represents the skull beneath the skin of American prosperity. According to its mayor, the city is “walking into the fan blades” of pension promises: The fund for retired police and firefighters is $5 billion underfunded. Prompted by projections that the fund will be exhausted within 20 years, retirees last year withdrew $230 million from it in a six-week span. In the entire year, the fund paid out $283 million and the city put in just $115 million. In November, the New York Times reported that the police and fire fund sought a $1.1 billion infusion, a sum “roughly equal to Dallas’s entire general fund budget but not even close to what the pension fund needs to be fully funded.”

Nowadays, America’s most persistent public dishonesties are the wildly optimistic but politically convenient expectations for returns on pension fund investments. Last year, when Illinois reduced its expected return on its teachers’ retirement fund from 7.5 percent to 7 percent, this meant a $400 million to $500 million addition to the taxes needed annually for the fund. And expecting 7 percent

is probably imprudent. Add to the Illinois example the problems of the 49 other states that have pension debt of at least $19,000 per household and numerous municipalities, and you will understand why many jurisdictions will be considering buyouts, whereby government workers are offered a lump sum in exchange for smaller pension benefits. Last September, in the seventh year of the recovery from the Great Recession, the vice chair of the agency in charge of Oregon’s government workers’ pension system wept when speaking about the state’s unfunded pension promises passing $22 billion.

The Manhattan Institute’s Josh B. McGee reports that teachers’ pension plans, which cover more people than all other state and local plans combined, have at least a $500 billion problem. This is the gap between promised benefits and money set aside to fund them.

A clear and present consequence is, McGee says, pension cost “crowd out.” Because pensions are consuming a larger share of education spending, 29 states spent less per pupil on instructional supplies in 2013 than in 2000, and during that period teacher salaries per pupil were essentially flat.

Pensions, including those of private companies, are being buffeted by a perfect storm of challenging events: People are living longer. Economic growth is persistently sluggish. Bond yields have declined dramatically during seven years of near-zero interest rates, which produce higher valuations of equities, lowering the future returns that can be realistically expected. As of last August, the Financial Times reported that pensions run by companies in the S&P 1500 index were underfunded by $562 billion — up $160 billion in just seven months.

The generic problem in the public sector is the moral hazard

at the weakly beating heart of what Walter Russell Mead calls the “blue model” of governance — the perverse incentives in the alliance of state and local elected Democrats with public employees’ unions. The former purchase the latter’s support with extravagant promises, the unrealism of which will become apparent years hence, when the promise-makers will have moved on. The latter expect that when the future arrives, the government that made the promises can be compelled by law or political pressure to extract the promised money from the public.

This game, a degradation of democracy, could be disrupted by laws requiring more realistic expectations about returns on pension fund investments, or even by congressional hearings to highlight the problem. But too much of the political class has skin in the game.

The problems of state and local pensions are cumulatively huge.

The problems of Social Security and Medicare are each huge, but in 2016 neither candidate addressed them, and today’s White House chief of staff vows that the administration will not “meddle” with either program.

Demography, however, is destiny for entitlements, so arithmetic will do the meddling. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2017

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY CLAY BENNETT FOR THE CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS

‘Fresh’ food? Freeze that thought TAMAR HASPEL writes about food and science and farms oysters on Cape Cod.

Cutting waste is one of the food world’s top priorities. Up to 40 percent of all the food we produce ends up in the trash, and there are programs up and down the supply chain to try to pare that down.

But there’s a simple step we can take to cut waste: Rethink “fresh.”

It’s a word we associate with food that’s wholesome and good-tasting.

And there’s no argument about a just-picked tomato or a just-caught striped bass; those are the tastes that drive me to grow tomatoes and catch fish. But most tomatoes and fish don’t come to us just-picked or just-caught. They come to us after having been picked or caught, packed and shipped, warehoused and displayed.

Because “fresh” signifies “perishable,” especially when it comes to produce and seafood, there’s a lot of waste in the system.

According to JoAnne Berkenkamp, senior advocate for the food and agriculture program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, freezing and canning can cut back significantly on produce waste — a huge problem, since slightly more than half of our fruits and vegetables go uneaten.

The savings start within hours of picking. “The vegetables are typically shipped straight from the farm to processing facilities and frozen or canned within hours, and then stabilized for months or years,” she says.

The logistics are closely managed. Farmers contract to grow the produce, and planting dates are coordinated with

processing plant availability, so when the peas are ready to harvest, the processor is ready to receive. With fresh, Berkenkamp says, “you could be moving from farm to packing shed to warehouse to truck to distribution facility to supermarket.” Each step has the potential for loss.

But the biggest loss is our own fault. “About 43 percent of all food waste occurs in consumers’ homes,” says Berkenkamp. “It’s the largest single contributor to food waste, and much of that will be fresh product.”

Freezing and canning cut down on waste in another way, too.

Because the processing generally involves chopping and blanching, it doesn’t matter if some of the produce isn’t picture-perfect. The

BY SACK FOR THE STAR TRIBUNE

imperfect specimens go right in with the perfect ones, without the need to establish a separate chain for selling the rejects. Eat frozen, eat ugly.

Produce isn’t the only food we waste, of course, and there’s an argument that the problem of throwaway seafood is even more acute, given that seafood is a more limited resource. Among all the food categories, seafood comes in second only to produce in the amount we waste — about half of it, according to Berkenkamp, with much of waste coming at the retail level.

Some retail waste comes from a downright ridiculous practice that exists solely because of our prejudice against frozen food: thawing it at the fish counter.

You’ve undoubtedly seen it. You go to the fish market, or the fish department at the supermarket, and the fish are spread out on ice in the case. Some of the fish are labeled “fresh.” Others are marked “previously frozen.”

Now why on earth would the fish market take a frozen product that is only moderately perishable and turn it into one that is extremely perishable, thereby dramatically raising the probability that it will go to waste, either at the market or once you take it home? Because, and only because, consumers don’t like the

idea of frozen fish. Even if our rational brain knows it used to be frozen, our reptile brain still thinks it’s more appealing in its thawed state.

So what do we do about all this waste?

I’m not going to plug canned vegetables, because, other than tomatoes, which are a kitchen staple, I find very few that I’m willing to put on my table. But I’m a big fan of frozen vegetables and fruit, and not just because they reduce food waste.

One of the biggest problems with frozen, though, is simply that it isn’t fresh. I talked with Sean Cash, an economist who studies consumer behavior when it comes to nutrition, and asked him about the allure of “fresh.”

“It’s the closest thing to our ideal of what food should be, and rightfully so,” he said. “We love the taste. We love the smell. If it’s fresh, we can connect with it, in the absence of growing it or buying it from someone who grows it.” But it can turn into something “emblematic of some ideal picture of the food system,” which can, in turn, become a “tendency to look at anything that isn’t ‘fresh’ as inferior.”

It’s that pesky reptile brain again, getting in the way. Show it who’s boss. Fight food waste and visit the freezer aisle. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Treason BY

C ARLTON F . W . L ARSON

The political (and social media) landscape is littered these days with accusations of treason, not just against Trump administration offi­ cials such as Michael Flynn, the recently ousted national security ad­ viser, but against all kinds of others as well — Hillary Clinton, Mitch McConnell, even the state of California. Treason is an ancient con­ cept, but it’s shrouded in misconceptions.

MYTH NO. 1 Disloyalty or policies that harm the United States are treason.

The framers of the Constitution took deliberate steps to ensure that treason trials would not be used as political weapons against opponents. Article 3, Section 3 defines the crime very narrowly: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” Speaking against the government, undermining political opponents, supporting harmful policies or even placing the interests of another nation ahead of those of the United States are not acts of treason under the Constitution.

MYTH NO. 2 Aiding Russia is treason against the United States.

It is, in fact, treasonable to aid the “enemies” of the United States. But enemies are defined very precisely under American treason law. An enemy is a nation or an organization with which the United States is in a declared or open war. Nations with whom we are formally at peace, such as Russia, are not enemies. (Indeed, a treason prosecution naming Russia as an enemy would be tantamount to a declaration of war.) Russia is a strategic adversary whose interests are frequently at odds with those of the United States, but for purposes of treason law it is no different than Canada or France or even the American Red Cross.

The details of the alleged

connections between Russia and Trump officials are therefore irrelevant to treason law.

This was true even in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg handed over nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, they were tried and executed for espionage, not treason.

So who are the current enemies of the United States? North Korea is a possible enemy, since the Korean War was never formally concluded. Certain nonstate actors can also count as enemies, and terrorist groups such as alQaeda and the Islamic State probably fit the definition.

MYTH NO. 3 Leaking classified material or handling it sloppily is treason.

Shortly before Election Day in November, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Mike McCaul, claimed that Clinton had committed treason by mishandling classified email.

Edward Snowden has been denounced as a traitor for leaking classified documents, as have the intelligence officials who may have leaked damaging material about Flynn.

But none of these actions amounts to levying war against the United States, as that offense requires some use of force in an attempt to overthrow the government. No such force or intent is present in any of these scenarios. Nor do the actions constitute aiding the enemy.

Leaking information to newspapers is not providing aid

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Accusations of treason followed reports of former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador.

to “enemies.” This newspaper and others, whatever Trump might think of them, are not enemies of the United States. As with aid to Russia, such leaks might violate other provisions of federal law, but they are not treason.

MYTH NO. 4 Only U.S. citizens can commit treason against the U.S. The offense of treason can be committed by any person who owes allegiance to the United States, and this can include noncitizens. Treason law recognizes two kinds of allegiance: permanent and temporary. U.S. citizens owe permanent allegiance to the United States, and this duty carries with them wherever they go in the world. By contrast, noncitizens in the United States (other than ambassadors and their staffs) owe a duty of temporary allegiance, the Supreme Court found in an 1872 case. While they are within the United States and receiving protection from it, noncitizens are governed by American treason law. If a person on a green card or a student or tourist visa, for example, wages war against the United States or provides aid

and comfort to our enemies, he cannot escape a treason prosecution simply by asserting his foreign citizenship.

MYTH NO. 5 Very few Americans have committed treason.

During the American Revolution, the rebelling Americans were all committing treason against Britain. Similarly, the thousands of Americans who actively aided the British committed treason against the United States. In the Civil War, the hundreds of thousands of men who fought for the Confederacy all levied war against the United States, as did the people who aided and abetted the rebellion.

Neither the American Revolution nor the Civil War led to mass executions. At the end of the day, the spirit of reconciliation prevailed, and the victors allowed the vanquished to return home peacefully. But it remains the case that many Americans have a traitor lurking somewhere in their family tree. n Larson is a professor of law at the University of California at Davis and is writing a book about treason and the American Revolution.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2017

24

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